What Gay Media?: Equal rights in theory and practice.

When a nationwide manhunt ensued for a spree killer shortly after designer Gianni Versace was killed in 1997—during the height of the Clinton era, a time in which we were supposedly heralding the gay rights movement’s having arrived—Tom Brokaw, on NBC Nightly News, warned millions of people to be on the look-out for a "homicidal homosexual." Brokaw was talking about suspect Andrew Cunanan, who was gay, and he conjured up every dark Hollywood fabrication about murderous sexual deviants.

Could you imagine Brokaw saying "a homicidal Jew" was on the loose? Not likely in 1997, but it certainly was how, 70 or so years ago, the media in Europe and America would have described a murderer who happened to be Jewish. Brokaw’s words underscore how far the media have to go in dealing with gays and lesbians, Will & Grace and civil union announcements notwithstanding.

The media’s treatment of gay issues popped into my head recently as I read Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News. I wrote a column last week about What Liberal Media?, noting that the insightful and gutsy book skillfully destroys the liberal media myth. On the issue of media bias and gay rights, however, Alterman is off-base. It’s not a major flaw of the book, but it needs to be addressed.

Conceding that the right may be correct in at least some of its charges, Alterman claims that the "overall flavor of the elite media reporting favors…gay rights" in addition to other issues, such as "gun control" and the "environmental movement." Though he doesn’t "find this bias as overwhelming as some conservative critics do," he still believes it exists.

Just because reporters, editors and tv news producers in the media are finally covering the gay civil rights movement—after decades of blackout—doesn’t necessarily mean they favor gay rights. And coverage of gay issues seems to have dropped off in the past few years. Gays were the "flavor" alright—the flavor of the month.

Moreover, even if reporters and editors are more likely to be in favor of equal rights for gays, it doesn’t mean that they are comfortable with homosexuality. Alterman is careful not to include race among those few issues about which he concedes the media have a liberal bias, perhaps understanding that even if reporters might be supportive of civil rights for African-Americans, it doesn’t mean they deal very well with the highly charged issue of race.

"The nitty-gritty problem of how to handle race in the media remains one that can make even the smartest people look stupid," he rightly notes.

I’d argue it’s exactly the same with regard to the gay issue. Unlike "gun control," race, sexual orientation and gender are issues about which most people harbor conditioned, emotion-based biases even after they have intellectually embraced ideas that challenge those biases. And in times when quick decisions are necessary, it is those embedded biases that often have editors and reporters reverting back to base stereotypes, even if unconsciously. The case of Tom Brokaw and Andrew Cunanan is a stellar example. And it’s par for the course.

Usually, it’s around issues of physical intimacy that the media break down entirely in covering gays, as if sexual anxiety suddenly takes over and rational thought goes out the window. When Ellen DeGeneres and actress Ann Heche nuzzled one another in front of Bill Clinton in 1997, the New York Times—that bastion of the so-called liberal media—wasted precious space on its editorial page to criticize the duo for supposedly inappropriate behavior, as if we’ve not seen heterosexuals nuzzling and doing a lot more in public ad nauseum. (Just think Al and Tipper Gore).

More recently, sexual meltdowns ensued among sports writers when two blind items buried in a silly tabloid implied that Mike Piazza and Sandy Koufax are gay, resulting in heated overreactions, forced denials and lots of sanctimony when a simple clarification—or no response at all—was appropriate. And much of the media last year allowed the Catholic Church to blame its pedophile scandal on gay priests without strongly challenging this scapegoating.

In What Liberal Media?, as in past articles and blog entries, Alterman is quick to attack Andrew Sullivan for a 1999 article in which Sullivan questioned public figures who refused to acknowledge their sexual orientation at that time, like Rosie O’Donnell. Sullivan is a nasty, dishonest pundit—and Alterman is on-target about everything else he’s attacked Sullivan on—but that Times piece was actually one of the few critiques Sullivan made with which I and a great many gay leftists, liberals and moderates agreed. He offered a criticism of the closet as an institution, discussed how society keeps it in place and challenged some prominent individuals to come out. (Ten years ago, it should be noted, he attacked many of us on the gay left for making the same arguments and never acknowledged his change of heart.)

For Alterman, it is, understandably, all political, with Sullivan using the Times to "out as gay two Clinton Cabinet members and liberal Democrats like Rosie O’Donnell." But hey, I was hard on Rosie too, and I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. And some of the people Sullivan discussed, like former New York mayor Ed Koch, had been hostile toward the gay and AIDS movements and were outed years earlier, by that gay firebrand Larry Kramer. The gay movement in the 1990s redefined notions of privacy that had been ensconced in the larger left for decades. Even if you disagree with those new ideas, they should be acknowledged.

The left’s press—the true liberal media—has had a checkered past on gay issues (though, of course, not as bad as the right’s). The Nation’s coverage of AIDS as a political crisis was abysmal in the early years of the epidemic, as was the Village Voice’s, as noted in former CNN reporter Edward Alwood’s seminal 1995 book Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media. There are a lot of reasons for that, too numerous to go into now, and both publications have changed dramatically for the better over the years.

But one of the newest incarnations of the left’s media—Salon—has showcased gay columnists such as Camille Paglia, Norah Vincent and Andrew Sullivan, all of whom are vociferously hostile toward the gay rights movement and have championed conservative causes. The online publication has also run columnists such as David Horowitz, who has attacked gays and AIDS activists in bitter, offensive tirades. It’s akin to having three Clarence Thomases and a David Duke writing on racial issues, without having any well-known black liberal columnist—and this is supposed to be the actual liberal media!

So, Alterman got that one wrong. But What Liberal Media? is a triumph nonetheless.

Michelangelo Signorile can be reached at [www.signorile.com](http://www.signorile.com).