Family Law

A Window Slams Shut

by Jennifer Vanasco
First published in the Chicago Free Press, November 18, 2009

I came out in the 1990s at the tail of the glory days of gay culture. There were gay bookstores then in most major cities, and a mix of gay social clubs, where you could gather to bowl, two step, play cards or organize for LGBT rights.

Most important, there was a gay paper in every city that could sustain one.

At the time, the mainstream media didn't cover gay issues often or well. The New York Times called us homosexuals and didn't cover our unions in their social pages. It was tough to find articles about our rights that didn't have an obligatory quote from a religious conservative explaining that being gay is immoral, wrong and in many places illegal.

Before the internet, the gay press was the only place where you could find reliable, objective information about LGBT issues. It was the only place you could learn about vigils, bars specials, group gatherings, protests.

And now it is disappearing.

The demise this week of the Washington Blade (40 years old), Southern Voice (20 years) and other publications owned by Window Media hit me hard. Like many young gay writers who came out in the 80s and 90s, my first job was at a gay paper. I learned how to interview politicians, how to report on events, how to copy edit and assign stories and crop photos and layout pages. And I gathered deep knowledge about gay and lesbian history, icons, politics, culture.

Gay papers are our community's treasure. The stories there are more local and gay-specific than the mainstream media, more reflective and better reported than what often appears on the internet. Gay reporters who work at gay papers take politicians to task and hold them to their promises. And gay papers themselves — since they are staffed by a small group not by individuals working remotely — pass along knowledge, skills and expertise to the next generation of gay reporters.

Blogs are wonderful, of course. We all read them. They can disseminate a lot of information quickly. But they also get things wrong; and in the constant churn of information, important stories — stories that dominate front pages for a week — can be lost under other, less significant posts.

And don't forget that few blogs actually report news — most only link to and comment on news that has already been reported by other sites.

Newspapers as a class are being killed by many things besides blogs. The rise of free and convenient information and news on the web. The loss of classified advertising to sites like Craigslist. The expense of paper.

And the gay press is further hurt by the rise of gay reporting in the mainstream media.

But don't be fooled. Just like chain bookstores reduced their gay and lesbian section to barely an aisle after forcing local gay and feminist bookstores out of business, the mainstream media reports only on stories about the gay community that are of mainsteam — not LGBT — interest.

Gay papers and gay reporters are important. We need to support and nurture the ones we have. Perhaps, too, we need a new model — something like Pro Publica, the non-profit organization devoted to investigative news gathering. If we were able to gather the best LGBT reporters from around the country and give them the resources to investigate important local stories, we could provide fuel to activists and bloggers everywhere.

I mourn the Washington Blade and all the other gay papers now gone that both built a community and explained it to itself.

But I celebrate the papers we have left. And I admire the reporters who staff them, providing the information to our community we just can't get anywhere else.

Full post as published by Independent Gay Forum on November 18, 2009 (boomark / email).