ju s t o u t ▼ S e p te m b e r 20 , 1996 ▼ 9
national news
Press in the flesh
NLGJA convention draws more than 500 gay and lesbian journalists to Miami;
Linda Ellerbee declared an honorary lesbian and Gresham paper lauded
by Richard Shumate
oday, Anita Bryant is but an unem­
ployed lounge singer in the Midwest,
and the NLGJA convention is here in
Miami.”
Nearly 20 years after Bryant made
Miami the ugly flash point in the battle for gay
rights, the 1996 convention of the National Les­
bian and Gay Journalists Association kicked off
here Sept. 5 with that retort by convention chair­
man Jeffrey Newman. The three-day event drew
more than 500 journalists, including contingents
from Canada, England and Germany.
NLGJA also honored news organizations for
excellence in coverage of gay and lesbian issues,
and Oregon's own Gresham Outlook was cited
for a feature on the 37-year relationship between
two gay men.
Speaking to the assembled journalists, NLGJ A
president Roy Aarons said
that “NLGJA has never
been stronger and posi­
tioned as well as we are at
this point.”
In just its sixth year of
existence, NLGJA has more
than 900 members in the
United States, and—at a
m eeting in M iam i— its
board formally approved an
affiliation agreement with
NLGJA/Canada, bringing
the total North American
membership to nearly l ,200. Gay journalists rep­
resenting fledgling organizations in England and
Germany also came to Miami as observers.
This year, NLGJA also hired its first full-time
executive director, MikeFrederickson, and moved
its headquarters from California to Washington,
DC.
The big-name draw at this convention was
television journalist and producer Linda Ellerbee,
who was declared an “honorary lesbian” for the
event. Ellerbee talked about her own iconoclastic
life in a business awash in conformity, saying, “[I]f
you believe you are right, do it your own way.”
Speaking about the fight for gay equality,
Ellerbee says her years observing both the Afri­
can American civil rights movement and the
feminist movement have convinced her that
change in this country only occurs as the result of
pressure.
“You are right to keep the pressure on the
people in power,” she said.
Also addressing the convention was Ray
Suarez, host of the popular Talk o f the Nation
program on National Public Radio, which has
been lauded for its coverage of gay and lesbian
issues. Suarez says he continues to be surprised at
how, when talking about gay issues, “otherwise
clear-headed people become capable of saying
the wildest things.”
National Public Radio has long been the target
of conservative critics, who accuse it of politi­
cally liberal bias and made an unsuccessful at­
tempt to delete its funding in 1995. However,
Suarez said he does not be­
lieve that the pressure on
NPR from the right has
,
caused it to back away from
covering gay and lesbian
issues.
“Life has changed sur­
prisingly little inside the
walls since the days when
we were fighting for our
lives,” he said.
At the two previous
NLGJA conventions, the
”
Clinton administration sent
high-profile representatives to speak—former
Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders and presiden­
tial adviser George Stephanopoulos. This year,
despite the fact that the president himself was in
Florida during the convention, the administration
did not send a senior official to address the con­
vention, though openly gay Clinton advisor Bob
Hattoy was on hand. The Dole campaign also
declined an invitation to participate.
During the convention, the NLGJA also pre­
sented awards for distinguished coverage of gay
and lesbian issues, and the two top honors went to
the TV program In the Life, for a report on two gay
male lovers persecuted in Romania, and to na­
tionally syndicated columnist Deb Price, who
broke the story on Bob Dole’s waffling over
whether to accept a contribution from a gay Re­
publican group.
The Gresham Outlook was also cited for “No
Less a Family,” Sharon Nesbit’s feature on Jack
Abele and Warren James. The couple lived to­
gether in Gresham for more than 37 years until
Abele’sdeathin 1995 at age 85. Nesbit chronicled
their life story and James’ mourning process after
his partner’s death, which included completing
growers, marked the beginning of the anti-gay
push by the religious right as we know it today.
Among the panelists was Ruth Shack, the
former Dade County commissioner who spon­
sored the amendment and pushed it through the
commission, only to see it overturned in a referen­
dum. At the time, her husband was Anita Bryant’s
agent. Ironically, Shack attributed much of the
blame for the debacle to some leaders in the gay
community who, she says, insisted on making
Speaking to the as­
sembled journalists
NLGJA president Roy
Aarons said that
“NLGJA has never been
stronger and positioned
as well as we are
at this point.
N ew S tudies L ink
H omophobia to B ad H ealth
Life deep in the closet can be detrimental to
more than just the spirit and the psyche—it may
also contribute to more frequent illnesses.
At a panel at the National Lesbian and Gay
Journalists Association convention on Sept. 6,
Dr. Gregory Herek, a research psychologist at
the University of Califomia-Davis. discussed
the results of two recent studies that looked at
possible links between the health of gay men and
lesbians and the effects of homophobia. One of
those studies, by researchers at UCLA, showed
a direct correlation between the closet and the
level of non-HIV-related illness.
The researchers looked at a group of 220
HIV-negative men. They were queried to deter-
mi ne how they rated on a scale of “closetedness,”
from completely out to completely closeted.
Then their medical histories were scrutinized to
look at the number of times they had suffered
from an upper respiratory illnesses in the last
five yea«.
“People who are mostly or completely in
the closet were showing a much higher inci­
dence of illness,” said Herek. He said a similar
study now under way looking at the link be­
tween the closet and skin cancer is showing
similar results.
Herek has also been conducting a study in­
volving 2,300 lesbians and gay men in the Sac­
ramento, Calif., area, looking at the effects of
hate crimes motivated by anti-gay bias on de­
pression.
The people in this study were asked about
whether they had been a victim of a hate crime,
a violent crime not related to their sexual iden­
tity or both types of attack, as well as how long
ago those crimes occurred. A general and ex­
pected pattern emerged: People tend to suffer
from depression after they have been the victim
of a crime, regardless of whether it was moti­
vated by anti-gay bias, and their depression
lessens over time.
However, Herek says that those who were
victims of bias-related crimes tended to have
more severe depressions than those who were
victims of a nonbias crime, and the study also
showed that hate crime victims take longer to
recover. People who had been the victim of both
The Gresham Outlook was honored fo r an article about Warren James (left) and Jack Abele
graphic statements about sex that turned off voters
the coming out process.
who might otherwise have been sympathetic.
The event also featured a panel discussion
The NLGJA board, meeting during the Miami
entitled, “What the Orange Juice Lady Did,”
convention, voted to hold its 1997 gathering in
where panelists recalled and analyzed the brutal
Chicago. The group also agreed to participate in a
campaign in 1977 to overturn an amendment to a
study at San Francisco State University that will
human rights ordinance in Dade County, where
evaluate
the quality of the media’s coverage of
Miami is located, that would have extended pro­
minority groups, including gay men and lesbians.
tection against discrimination to gay men and
The
study is being funded by agrant from the Ford
lesbians. That backlash, led by Anita Bryant, who
Foundation.
was then a spokeswoman for Florida’s orange
a hate crime and a violent crime not related to
anti-gay bias suffered from the most depression
and took the longest to recover.
“All crimes have a psychological event on
the victim, but it looks like hate crimes have
more of an impact, psychologically,” Herek
said.
Based on his research, he theorizes that the
difference lies in the belief of victims that “the
world is out to get them because o f their sexual
orientation,” which is a factor they can neither
control nor change.
As for the effect of homophobia on the fight
against AIDS, Herek discussed another set of
public opinion surveys showing that most of the
stigma generated among the public toward people
with AIDS stems not from fear of catching the
HIV virus but from cultural and religious disap­
proval of homosexuality.
In one revealing study cited by Herek, people
were asked about the likelihood that people
could contract HIV under certain scenarios.
Almost 10 percent said they believed two HIV­
negative men having sex together while using a
condom were at risk for infection, which is
theoretically impossible, and 12 percent said
they thought two women having sex with each
other were likely to get HIV, which is consid­
ered highly unlikely.
“AIDS provides a proxy for many of these
people to express anti-gay prejudice.” says
Herek.
Also discussed during the NLGJ A panel was
a report by the Public Media Center in San
Francisco, which has been studying the effects
of AIDS stigma on the United States’ ability to
cope with the HIV pandemic.
AIDS activist Timothy Sweeney, a consult­
ant to the center on the issues surrounding AIDS
stigma, said the center is pushing a multi-pronged
campaign to “deconstruct” the links between
homophobia and attitudes about AIDS. Accord­
ing to Sweeney, strategies in that campaign will
include enlisting family members of those who
have died of AIDS to speak out about the sexual
identities o f their loved ones, as well as trying to
bring sympathetic segments of the religious
community into the debate, especially those
institutions that already sponsor AIDS care ser­
vices.
Richard Shwnate