-
A look into George Tooker (DC Moore Gallery, NYC)
By Steve Barnes Part of an artistic circle that included Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes and Lincoln Kirstein, George Tooker, who died in March at 90, would endure as a figure of interest for sociological reasons alone. But as “Reality Returns as a Dream,” a show of his work that is up through August 5 at the DC Moore Gallery (535 West 25th Street) proves, the reasons why we should still pay attention to Tooker and his work go far beyond who his mentors, friends and lovers were. Tooker was born in Brooklyn in 1920, studying in the early 1940s at the Art Students League in New York. It was there that he first met Paul Cadmus, an artist who brought a sure draftsman’s hand and colorist’s eye to works that often exhibited a bawdy and forthright homoeroticism. The power that Cadmus’s sexuality had to ruffle the feathers of American society was perhaps most famously exhibited in The Fleet’s In, a painting showing sailors on shore leave. Pulled from a 1934 exhibition of WPA art at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, the work was not seen in public again until 1982. While Tooker can in many ways be seen as one of Cadmus’s followers, a look at two paintings both called Coney Island, one painted by Cadmus in 1934, the other painted by Tooker in 1948, shows how Tooker followed in Cadmus’s footsteps while marking out his own distinctive path. Both of the pictures showcase a Rubenseqsue physicality—voluptuous bodies (both male and female) aggressively on display in public. But while Cadmus throws those bodies into a dynamic, every-man-for-himself free-for-all, Tooker shows a much greater sense of decorum. Despite all the bare flesh on display, Tooker’s beachgoers seem almost prim, obediently posing for the artist. In the background, a group of young men appear to be playing football on the beach, but there’s very little sense of motion. In the foreground, a woman tends to an unconscious man, the positions of their bodies strongly bringing a pieta to mind. We are presented with a world that holds its people in, even when they’re at their most exposed.
That sense of people being trapped by their environments, almost as if they were insects under glass, is a thread that runs through the 26 paintings and sketches that are up DC Moore. In the show’s first image, Tree (1965), a woman gazes at us from behind a tree, not acknowledging the man staring at her. Landscape with Figures (1965–66) is something of an office worker’s nightmare, a sea of anxious faces peering up from a forbidding series of cubicles with no exit. And in Tooker’s most well-known image, 1950’s Subway, an apprehensive woman walks down an antiseptic subway corridor in which a series of vaguely threatening characters lurk. Tooker’s pristine compositions take on an even greater sense of formality due to his use of egg tempera, a medium that gives off a glowing, soft tone. At first glance, some of these works, with their classical compositions and muted colors, could be mistaken for ones from hundreds of years ago. But a far more modern sensibility is at work as well. In 1959’s Laundress, a series of clotheslines turn the sky into a patchwork of abstracted shapes while the women’s faces are split into two fractured halves. For me, however, the most striking feature that shows up constantly in this show are the tortured eyes of the people that Tooker depicts. The same anguished eyes of the woman in Subway can be seen in a nearby self-portrait (in which a skeleton lurks behind the artist’s image) painted in 1996. That anguish shows up in the affectless shoppers who wander through a store of faceless items in 1972’s Supermarket, as well as in Corporate Decision (1983), with its poor family in the foreground cowering before a series of suited men in black-and-white passing judgement in the far background. It’s a testament to the helplessness that many of us feel at the hands of a world that does not quite understand us, and it’s the central achievement of Tooker’s art. Also up in a side gallery at DC Moore is “An Intimate Circle,” with paintings and photographs by Tooker, Cadmus, Lynes, and Jared and Margaret French. A kind of scrapbook of the world in which Tooker lived, it provides a nice background to the main show.]]> -
lgbTravel: Bethany Beach & Rehoboth, DE
By Mark McNease
We just got back from what has become an annual 4th of July visit to friends in Delaware. The shoreline there is beautiful, and that part of the state is dotted with towns that host a swarm of vacationers every summer. Dewey Beach, Bethany Beach, Rehoboth, and of course Ocean City, just across the way in Maryland. Getting there from Manhattan takes some time, all told about eight hours of traveling. The last two years we broke it up with a stop for a night in Atlantic City. This year we saved AC for the ride back and drove straight through. The road trip is nicely balanced with a ride on the Cape May-Lewes ferry, that gets you from New Jersey to Delaware. It’s a favorite part of the trip for me, just driving onto the ferry and settling in for 90 minutes across the water. A lot of people find benches on the deck, but I’m not a sun guy so I end up inside, reading and eating ferry food (pretzels, coffee, microwaved sandwiches). Once you’re in Lewes, it’s just about 45 minutes to Bethany Beach. The boardwalk on Bethany Beach is modest, not like the more heavily trafficked, family-frenzied Ocean City. We’ve watched the fireworks on Bethany Beach the last two years, but this time they got rained out (we stayed at friend Kathi’s house and had the obligatory crabs, something no trip to Delaware or Maryland is complete without). Our first night included dinner at DiFebo’s Bistro at Bear Trap Dunes, a local golf club. The restaurant is a major dining attraction, for good reason. The menu’s not particularly unique, but the food is excellent, the environment’s inviting, and the staff are very friendly. They also have a bar area with live entertainment. That night there was a man singing and playing saxophones (he had three: alto, tenor and soprano). He was outstanding, and he spent some time at the table talking to us and taking requests.
In the morning we had breakfast at The Cafe on 26 in Ocean View. They specialize in gluten free food, although I can’t tell you what the difference was. I just know it’s a warm and friendly place and the food was excellent. I wanted to find some jewelry, the not-too expensive kind, so we went to Rehoboth for several hours. Rehoboth is larger and hipper than Bethany Beach. From the looks of things as I was taking pictures (and paying more attention) it’s also a gay magnet. There’s even a Rehoboth LGBT Center, which, along with the rainbow flags, helped explain all the gay men and lesbians I saw walking around. I finally found a bracelet at Out Sports, appropriately enough. Finally we ended the trip at Kathi’s house with crabs, crab cakes, hot corn in the husks, potato salad, and key lime pie. We can’t go to Delaware or Maryland and not have crabs. Not just because it’s something everybody there eats (even if like me they get crab cakes instead of the shelled ones you have to beat with a mallet), but also because Frank is a crab nut. He will eat a half dozen easy, sitting at a table for an hour pounding crabs and finding every last piece of crab meat. Yesterday we hugged, said our goodbyes, and headed to the Tropicana Casino in Atlantic City. Every family has their traditions, even if it’s a family of two, with four cats waiting at home. Another good trip to the shore, good friends, good food, and back to the hot and steamy City.]]> -
Joyce DeWitt steps into Eve Plumb role on New York stage
I saw a headline about Joyce DeWitt, of ‘Thee’s Company’ fame, making her theater debut and I was going to start out with a line about having seen Eve Plumb in a play a few months ago. It turns out it’s the same role. Best wishes and virtual flowers to Joyce.
From the Detroit News:
New York— It has taken a long time, but Joyce DeWitt is finally doing what she always wanted to do: Make her stage debut in New York.
“I know, isn’t it a hoot?” the former “Three’s Company” star asks with glee a few hours before hitting the boards one recent afternoon. “This is where I was headed, and then I got sidetracked in Holly-weird and one thing happened after another.”
Her theater is modest: It’s off-Broadway, underneath a restaurant, beside a bar, and the audience sits on folded seats. But it’s near Times Square and she’s the star. Plus, DeWitt is still making people laugh.
“I’m just a late bloomer,” says the 62-year-old actress, though she retains an impish adorableness and is prone to say “gee-willikers” or “wow-ski” rather than swear. “It took me a long time to have confidence in my work.”
DeWitt has stepped into the title role of “Miss Abigail’s Guide to Dating, Mating & Marriage!” — a 90-minute comedy being staged at Sofia’s Downstairs Theater. ]]> -
Pakistan moves into first place in homophobia sweepstakes
How quickly fortunes change. It seems just yesterday Jamaica led the world in virulent homophobia. Maybe the prison term for Grammy-winning drug trafficker Buju Banton has thrown them off their game.
Just in the last few days we’ve seen lgbt people referred to by respectable Pakistani authorities and religious figures as ‘social garbage’ and ‘cultural terrorists.’ I know where I won’t be spending my next vacation!
From the International Business Times:
Conservative religious activists in Pakistan have condemned and protested a gay rights event last week sponsored by the US embassy in Islamabad.
At the “gay=pride” event at the embassy, the US deputy ambassador to Pakistan, Richard Hoagland, said Washington was committed to gay rights in the country.
“I want to be clear: the US embassy is here to support you and stand by your side every step of the way,” the embassy said in a statement. “This gathering demonstrated continued US Embassy support for human rights, including LGBT rights, in Pakistan at a time when those rights are increasingly under attack from extremist elements throughout Pakistani society.” Members of Pakistan’s largest Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) described the event as a form of “cultural terrorism.” “Such people [homosexuals] are the curse of society and social garbage,” JI said.
“They don’t deserve to be Muslim or Pakistani, and the support and protection announced by the US administration for them is the worst social and cultural terrorism against Pakistan.”]]> -
Parton, Welch and Faithfull: new music this summer from three veteran divas
Editor’s note: we’re happy to welcome Steve Barnes to the mix here at lgbtSr. Steve is a freelance writer based in New York City. His work has appeared in such publications as ARTnews and the Wall Street Journal.
Steve Barnes Summer may normally be the time for music that makes a good backdrop for a strong, cold drink or a night of outdoor, beachside dancing. But while the shadows cast by recent releases from Lady Gaga and Adele are still to be felt in mid-July, three other divas have brought out new CDs that should appeal to listeners looking for stories and sounds that go a little beyond shaking your booty on the dance floor. The last week of June saw strong new releases from the longtime queen of country music (Dolly Parton), one of alt-country’s most respected figures (Gillian Welch) and the equal parts Mick Jagger and Lotte Lenya cocktail that is Marianne Faithfull. The wait for all of them to bring out new work has been a long one (more than two years for Faithfull, three for Parton and eight for Welch), but in all cases the wait has been more than justified by the end result.
“Drop this doomsday attitude and let the spirit flow,” Dolly sings in “In the Meantime,” the opener on “Better Day” (Dolly Records). Dolly doesn’t break new ground here, but she puts enough energy and humor into her well-established formula to please any but the most persnickety listener. In terms of its sound, “Better Day” serves up the countrypolitan Dolly who made her comeback on 2008’s “Backwoods Barbie,” with a crack Nashville session band and backup singers who include Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris. Her bid for airplay on country-music radio stations is strongest on “Together You and I,” the first single from the CD (check it out ). But while the stripped-down bluegrass roots that emerged in full force on such releases as 1999’s “The Grass is Blue” and 2001’s “Little Sparrow” are obscured a bit by the high-gloss treatment Dolly’s songs get here, she is—as you’d expect—at pains to emphasize how down-home she still is. “Country Is as Country Does,” which she wrote with Mac Davis, tells us that she’s “country-fied and country fed” and will be that way until she’s “country dead.” But with Dolly, nothing, not even the religious faith that permeates a lot of these songs, is as simple as it seems. “I’m country,” she tells us with a wink that’s all but visible, “but now that don’t mean I can’t go to town.”
Gillian Welch came to Nashville after attending Boston’s Berklee School of Music, and her music is just about completely free of the gleeful show-biz that is such a big part of Dolly’s work. From her first album, 1996’s “Revival,” Welch, in tandem with fellow singer and guitarist Dave Rawlings, has recorded plain-spoken songs that feel as if they’ve been unearthed from some secret cache deep in an Appalachian valley. “The Harrow and the Harvest” (Acony Records) keeps that trend going. Welch attributes the eight-year gap between this CD and 2003’s “Soul Journey” to dissatisfaction with the songs she’d written during that time. While I’m no position to speak on the material that she discarded, I can say that the songs that she and Rawlings perform here are among her best. (One highlight, “A Dark Turn of Mind,” can be heard here. Unlike Dolly’s songs, the few spots of humor to be found here are dryly mordant. “That’s the way the cornbread crumbles,” she wistfully sings in the CD’s closer, “That’s the Way the Whole Thing Ends,” and the listener isn’t sure about whether to laugh or cry. Just about all of the songs tell tales of loss and desolation, but they are delivered with such beautiful singing and guitar work (Welch’s and Rawlings’s voices and guitars are the only instruments on the CD) that none of it feels depressing. Anyone who has an interest in traditional American music should give “The Harrow and the Harvest” a listen.
Marianne Faithfull is neither American nor traditional, but “Horses and High Heels” (naïve records) is, like Welch’s CD, a high-water mark in her career. Her third collaboration with producer Hal Willner, it mixes ten well-chosen covers of songs from such composers as Carole King and Allen Toussaint (plus an incredible version of the a Shangri-Las tune, “Past Present Future”) with four of Faithfull’s own compositions. Faithfull’s voice is, as it has always been, a matter of personal taste. To some, her weathered near-tenor is not a musical instrument. But to others (myself included) she is a great interpretive singer on the level of an Edith Piaf or Marlene Dietrich. Listen to her sing Lesley Duncan’s “Love Song,” which you might remember from Elton John’s “Tumbleweed Connection” album, and see what you think. So while Dolly’s CD is likely the only one of these that is almost sure to make the margaritas go down easier as you sit on whatever warm-weather back porch you happen to be frequenting, all three of them are rewarding listens and will make you feel far more sophisticated than the adolescent partiers putting Lady Gaga’s “Judas” through its paces yet one more time.]]> -
Trangender Miami candidate clarifies her position on same-sex marriage
Donna Milo, a transgender woman running for office in Miami, is clarifying – sort of – her position on marriage equality. It serves as an example that even lgbt people are a diverse group. For all I know she doesn’t like being included in that acronym; I suspect not, but she has taken issue with being labled anti-equality. She just thinks marriages are for opposite sex couples, but as long as the government is doing the licensing we should all be able to get one. Does that clear things up?
From Gay South Florida:
Miami City Commission candidate Donna Milo — a conservative Republican, Cuban-American, transgender woman — got herself into hot water last year during a run for Congress when gay SiriusXM radio journalist Michelangelo Signorile asked her position on marriage equality.
“I view marriage as a religious sacrament,” Milo told Signorile during his May 21, 2010, program. “I believe that marriage, at this time, the way my definition, marriage is a man and a woman, but I support domestic partnerships for all consenting adults.
[SNIP}
Now Milo would like to clarify her position on same-sex marriages: She’s against the government performing weddings for anyone, male or female, straight or gay.
Religious bodies should perform all marriages, she said.
“If however, the government is going to remain in the marriage business, then NO ONE should be excluded because of gender or sexuality,” Milo wrote in a statement Friday to The Miami Herald.
Signorile said Friday that Milo is “clearly shifting her position and that is a good thing.”]]> -
Men still outnumber women in NYC bike lanes
Personally I’ll never ride a bike in Manhattan. I’m nervous enough on the rural country road outside our house in New Jersey – dogs could leap out from anywhere along the forested lanes and Cujo my legs to shreds, or so I imagine. In the City? Forget about it. Driving is nerve-wracking enough, I fear instant death if I ever set off on a two-wheeler in Gotham. I’m not alone in my safety concerns.
From the New York Times:
When Julie Hirschfeld opened a bicycle boutique for women, she envisioned fashion-obsessed customers with a disdain for spandex flooding in to buy bikes and accessories they would model along New York City’s paved catwalks: miles and miles of new bicycle paths. She lined her shop downtown with vintage-inspired bikes, many with Brooks saddle seats; partnered with Kate Spade to sell a $1,100 bicycle the color of freshly cut grass; and sold helmets that would pass more for fashionable hats.
One year later, Ms. Hirschfeld has conceded that it takes more than fashion to get women on bikes.
“Women want to feel safe,” said Ms. Hirschfeld, who has expanded her Reade Street boutique, Adeline Adeline, to also cater to male cyclists. She said that if the perception of danger dissipates, “women then will ride, and ride more than men.”
Despite the city’s efforts to become more bike friendly, male cyclists in New York continue to outnumber female cyclists three to one, just as they have steadily over the past two decades. Data tracked by the city and private groups shows the gap between male and female cyclists is even wider in areas where vehicular traffic is more concentrated. These figures lag not only far behind those in most major global capitals like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, where women make up the majority of cyclists, but also behind American cities like Portland, Ore., that have narrowed the gender gap. ]]> -
Kjoy's Life in the Sr Lane: Saved by 'Star Wars' – surviving work and coming out with Princess Leia
A group of coworkers coordinated a showing of the ORIGINAL no enhancements version of “Star Wars” tonight. It was a geekfest of the best kind. Booing at Darth Vader, cheering for Hans Solo, being torn over my lust for Princess Leia Organa, and of course the cuteness of the whining, youthful Luke Skywalker, not to mention the awesome Chewbacca! We ate homemade kettlecorn and popcorn, and for a few hours, the workplace was transformed into a cinmaaplex and didn’t feel like a life-trap, but a fun place to be. SHOCKING!
People talked of where they were when the saw the original release in mid-May 1977, and who they were with. For some reason I don’t remember who I saw it with, but that was my graduation year, and the year my feelings for girls, not just Princess Leia, were about to burst out of my open heart like the creature in “Alien,” but that film hadn’t come out yet.
In 1977 I was about to graduate high school and was struggling over my love of Patti P., and my faith… Anyway, the psychiatrist my mother sent me to when I told her I was having a crisis, said my feelings for girls was “Senioritis”- I’m not kidding – and that I was just suffering separation anxiety. After a pep-talk, he gave me body-and-mind relaxation tapes and sent us away. Of course I knew it was more than that, but I didn’t have the guts yet to tell my mom or Patti P., or challenge God on the issue, so the tapes held me together through graduation.
So tonight sitting there watching Princess Leia’s breasts bounce in her flowing outfit and her kicking ass everywhere, I was taken back. Back to time when I fanaticized of owning the Millennium Falcon ship and thrusting it into warp speed with Princess Leia (who was Patti P. in my script) and how the two of us burst into the cosmos. Out there I hoped we’d escape the inevitable coming out fiasco by landing on Planet Lesbos, and once there we’d be far from God’s striking distance when we uttered out-loud, “We’re gay” then lived happily ever after. Yeah, that was a great night’s sleep.
Now a 52 SR and having survived the coming-out saga, several lovers past Patti P. to the arms of my Corinne, and the realization that God/esses love us no matter what, seeing “Star Wars” took on a playful zest. I had survived many attacks of the “Dark Force” over the years and had come out smiling, secure, happy, and semi-successful. Not bad.
“May the force be with you,” is still one of the most powerful lines in film.
As we all walked out through the office we seemed a bit stronger and taller as we left the rows of computers and headsets that defined us during the day. I thought: “Tonight we have defeated you. Come 9:30 am you will have your powers back again, but not tonight, now we are Jedi Knights,” and walked out the doors.]]> -
Transgender woman touring Kansas in awareness effort this 4th of July weekend
It’s Manhattan . . . Kansas, where Stephanie Mott on Friday started a statewide tour to raise awareness of transgender issues.
From KTA.com:
Topeka — In an effort to raise awareness about transgender issues, a kick-off rally was held in Manhattan Friday morning. The Kansas Transgender Education Project executive director Stephanie Mott will be traveling throughout Kansas to spread the word about transgender and sexual orientation issues. In particular, Mott will address some misunderstandings people have about lesbians, gays, bisexuals and the transgendered. “This is wrong. It is wrong to terminate somebody’s employment because they happen to be LGBT. It’s wrong to deny somebody housing because they are LGBT. It’s wrong to say someone can’t come in this place just because they’re LGBT. There’s nothing about who I am that has anything to do with whether or not that I can do a good job or whether or not I’ll be a good tenant or whether or not I’ll come into a place and be an inappropriate customer,” says Mott. From the group’s Facebook page (it may be archived by the time you read this): My name is Stephanie Mott. My dream came true today. Interested persons from the across Kansas gathered to birth the Kansas Statewide Transgender Education Project (K-STEP) What is K-STEP? It is a group of transgender people, their families, all supporters, and interested professionals (psychotherapy, human resources, education, the faith community) who are dedicated to providing transgender education across Kansas. Thanks to all have supported K-STEP to this point in any way. Get ready, here we come. And last but not (to me) least, see a separate article about Stephanie “finding her way back to Christ” at the Topeka MCC. I repeatedly maintain that one of the greatest harms done to lgbt youth and adults is the lie that our lives are not compatible with faith. That’s not an advertisement – it’s probably easier being gay than being an atheist in a lot of places – but many churches welcome us with loving arms. And don’t you let anyone tell you otherwise!]]> -
Duluth group kicks off fight against Minnesota marriage amendment
I used to go to Minneapolis every year to visit a friend I’d known since high school. He permanently unfriended me seven years ago with no explanation (there’s a blog post in there somewhere – and the guy’s not even on Facebook). So it was with some despair I saw that Minnesota, and Indiana, where I grew up, are still going retro with the anti-gay, hostile, Republican-led charges to scar their state constitutions with marriage amendments. One group in Duluth is leading the push for a different outcome.
From the Duluth News Tribune:
While many will celebrate Independence Day with fireworks and grilled food, one group in Duluth will kick off its fight against a Minnesota marriage amendment.
The event Monday is sponsored by Duluth United for All Families, a group formed after the Minnesota House voted 70-62 to put an amendment on next year’s ballot that would define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. The group is affiliated with Minnesotans United for All Families, a statewide coalition.
“Our event will galvanize critical support to defeat the marriage amendment in 2012,” said Gary Anderson, an event organizer. “This is just the beginning.”
After the New York Legislature’s legalization of gay marriage, Minnesota has become the newest front line in the national battle. Gay-
marriage supporters here will be working fervently to end a 31-state losing streak at the polls and defeat the proposed marriage amendment. “We want Minnesota to be the first to defeat the amendment, with Duluth leading the way,” Anderson said.
]]> -
Doctors see rise in number of transgender youth
Photograph by: Pierre Obendrauf, Postmedia News, Postmedia News The reality of being transgender wasn’t something that ever occurred to me growing up. I was dealing with being a self-aware gay child and the stresses of being openly gay as a teenager, so the fact there were kids going through something even more challenging wasn’t in my consciousness. I think it’s only been in the last decade or so that transgender and gender identity issues have come into the broader public consciousness, and we still have a long way to go. From the Vancouver Sun: At age five, Shamai was a boy in a little girl’s body. He remembers demanding a short haircut and when a lady on the street “mistook” him for a boy, turning to his mother and saying: “This lady knows better than you. She knows I’m a boy.” In her first recollection that something was wrong, Samantha had this vague sense it didn’t feel right to be in a boy’s body. “I didn’t know what it was. I prayed for a while for things to work out.” She was four years old. James was three years old -and a girl on the outside -when he blurted out to his family: “I was a boy before. What happened?” For years it was a family joke. They are transgender youth, all in their 20s now, from different backgrounds but with stories that are similar: moments of childhood clarity when they realized they weren’t who they appeared to be. [SNIP] National statistics are impossible to find, but counsellors and doctors say they’ve been seeing a steady increase over the last five years in the number of young people seeking advocacy groups, hormone therapy and finally surgery for maleto-female (MTF) or female-tomale (FTM) changes. That increase is attributed in part to greater awareness and support within the community, and better access to sex reassignment surgery. B.C., Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec and Newfoundland cover costs of the procedure, which is most often performed in Montreal at the Centre Metropolitain de Chirurgie Plastique. While some professionals continue to see gender identity issues as psychological, ongoing research is moving toward the hypothesis of biological changes that take place in the womb rather than environmental influences.
Continue reading]]> -
Interview: David Webb – The Rare Reporter
When I first launched lgbtSr.com I started looking around for contributors. The intention was to have a variety of voices and writers on the site. I was looking at different news items out there in the lgbt Intersphere (or blogiverse or webaxy or whatever you want to call it) and I saw some articles from a writer named David Webb (The Rare Reporter, as you’ll see). I reached out to David, we spoke on the phone that same day, and he’s been contributing since then. He’s a veteran reporter and I thought an interview would be a good way to get to know him better. I think you’ll agree.
David’s in Texas, by the way. I read his column in a Florida paper, called him from New York City, and here we are.
Why ‘The Rare Reporter’? Where did that come from?
DW: About 10 years ago when I was a staff writer for the Dallas Voice a public relations representative for Razzle Dazzle, an LGBT charitable event, was particularly pleased about a story I did announcing the upcoming event. The former television reporter called me and said that she viewed me as a rare reporter. It was unusual for me to get such a compliment because I often wrote about controversial issues that displeased a lot of people in the community. The publisher of the Dallas Voice and my colleagues thought it was humorous because I had been called so many unfavorable things in the past and they nicknamed me The Rare Reporter. When I started writing a column I struggled for a long time to create a name for it. Suddenly it occurred to me my moniker was The Rare Reporter, and so I made it official.
I first noticed your writing at South Florida Gay News and I know you’ve been reporting in the LGBT media for a long time. How did you get started?
DW: I worked in the mainstream media after my graduation from the University of Texas with a degree in journalism. I covered just about every beat imaginable for several years. In 1981 when I first heard about the “gay cancer” afflicting men in San Francisco I became intrigued and started reading everything I could find on the subject. When it became obvious that a horrible epidemic was spreading through the country and that cases had been found in Texas, I started seeking out patients, interviewing them and writing about AIDS. The epidemic sparked unprecedented activism by gay men and lesbians, and I started writing about that as well. I saw a great need for information because most mainstream newspapers in Texas shied away from the subject at first. Even alternative publications in Texas preferred to limit coverage of gay issues to the occasional small report. I remember having some pretty horrific arguments with an editor about her belief that I was devoting too much of my time to gay issues. Today, she acknowledges that she was wrong, and that I was correct that the issue was of huge importance to both gay and straight people.
What’s changed in the media landscape over the last couple of decades, with the advent of digital media and the seeming death of print?
DW: Print publications no longer can compete effectively in the area of breaking news. The public wants to know what is happening immediately and they turn to television and the Internet to satisfy that curiosity. Younger people simply don’t like to sit down with a newspaper. As a result subscriptions are down and so is advertising revenue. That has forced newspapers to drastically cut editorial staffs. There is less investigative reporting and a lot of news in smaller areas simply goes unreported because newspapers have become more oriented toward pleasing the community and not stirring up controversy. Newspapers are now struggling to present coverage of breaking news on the Internet as quickly as it happens, much like you see with television reporting. It is requiring print publication editors and reporters to become adept at multi-media skills to accomplish that goal. Newspapers are also struggling to find ways to generate income from their Web sites through subscriptions and advertising revenue.
You live in Texas. Is there a difference, and do you have a preference, for local reporting versus what you might write for, say,lgbtSr.com?
DW: Reporting for an LGBT audience — even in a large metropolitan area — is much like writing for a small town newspaper. The readers are far more engaged with the staff of LGBT newspapers than the readers of mainstream publications. It is often difficult to convince these readers that the reporting of news that portrays certain LGBT people and groups in an unfavorable light is as important as good news. There is less interaction with readers when I write for national publications. I like and am committed to both types of coverage so I guess an even mix of both best suits me.
Is there any advice you could offer someone new in the journalism game, regardless of their age?
DW: I think reporters and editors should be multi-skilled. Today, it is necessary to be able to shoot videos, take pictures, write, edit and stay abreast of all technological developments in media. Beyond that, I think journalists should learn a little bit about all media beats, such as crime, politics, sports, entertainment, business, etc., before deciding to specialize in any one area of coverage. The business is getting really competitive so a journalist who can do it all is obviously more valuable than one who has limited abilities.
Is there any one particular story you’ve covered or incident in your reporting career that stands out?
DW: I wrote an investigative story a few years ago about the large number of unsolved murders of gay men in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. That story sort of haunted me because it appeared clear that all of these men were killed by someone whom they had met for an anonymous sexual encounter. It is sort of spooky to know there is a killer or several killers out there somewhere who lured gay men to their deaths and are likely still free to kill again.
This site is primarily aimed for those of us over 50. What’s the best thing about living long enough to be in that category?
DW: After having watched countless friends die during the AIDS epidemic, I’m just grateful to be alive today. I feel fortunate to be able to pursue the work I love and my other interests, such as travel, my friends, my family, my pets, nature, the arts and whatever else attracts my attention. I have a much greater appreciation for life today than I did 30 years ago.]]> -
Tired Old Queen at the Movies, #78 – ‘Lost Horizon’
