As its own former ombudsman Daniel Okrent observed, on many gay issues, especially gay marriage, the Times’ position amounts to “cheerleading.” On a topic that has produced “one of the defining debates of our time,” Okrent wrote, “Times editors have failed to provide the three-dimensional perspective balanced journalism requires.” An internal report, to which Okrent contributed, expanded on the problem: “By consistently framing the issue as a civil rights matter i.e.—gays fighting for the right to be treated like everyone else—we failed to convey how disturbing the issue is in many corners of American social, cultural and religious life.”
Homosexual sex itself has repeatedly been cheered, even when a more sober response would have better served the subject. A profile of Kevin Brentley, the author of Let’s Shut Out the World (2005), was headlined “For the Fun of It, Remember?” The book, wrote Guy Trebay, explored the “libertinism” of San Francisco during the “innocent time before AIDS.” Trebay failed to acknowledge the role of that very libertinism in causing the devastation.
Another somewhat myopic piece reveling in the more outré aspects of gay sex appeared in September 2005 under the headline “A Sex Stop on the Way Home.” Filed by Corey Kilgannon, it focused on a narrow parking lot in Cunningham Park in Queens, set between playing fields for adult softball and youth soccer and baseball. “At one end of the lot, retirees arrive to practice their golf and mothers in minivans gather to wait for their Little Leaguers,” Kilgannon wrote. “The other end is popular with another set with a much lower profile in this suburban setting: gay men cruising for sex. Their playing field is the parking lot itself and the goal is a sexual encounter, usually quick and anonymous.” Kilgannon scrupulously described the mating rituals that are popular here, “like a chess game.” He also noted that the parking lot’s two very different camps were not spatially far apart. “One recent evening, a half-dozen mothers stood chatting, waiting for their children to finish soccer,” Kilgannon wrote. “A stone’s throw away, a group of gay men stood narrating the attempt of a man trolling the lot in a tan sedan to woo the cute man parked in the black SUV. . . . ‘Woop, there he goes,’ the narrator said [as the man in the sedan hopped into the SUV]. ‘You go, girl.’”
Heather Mac Donald remarked in her City Journal blog that the point of the story was not to shame the vice squad into cleaning up the parking lot, but to report enthusiastically how many married men patronized the cruising grounds. “I can’t tell you how many guys I’ve had here who were wearing wedding bands, with baby seats in the car and all kinds of kids’ toys on the floor,” one source told Kilgannon. “It’s on their way home and they don’t have to get involved in a relationship or any gay lifestyle or social circles. They don’t even have to buy anyone a drink or be seen in a gay bar. They just tell the wife, ‘Honey, I’ll be home an hour late tonight.’”
The married man with a gay appetite made the story appealing for the Times’ “anti-bourgeois staff,” Mac Donald wrote, because “it allows them to throw mud for the ten-millionth time on the Leave-it-to-Beaver ‘normalcy’ . . . of the white-bread suburbs.” In a time of terrorism, Mac Donald closed, when New York leaders face the prospect of evacuating millions from Manhattan in an emergency, “the Times’s preference for the insignificant trivia of the gay lifestyle defies comprehension. Either the Times is even more clueless about the narrowness of its worldview than previously thought, or it knows how out of the mainstream it is and hopes to shock the leaden bourgeoisie with its sexual obsessions.”
The Times’ ever-expanding coverage of gay fashion has included congenial reporting on cross-dressing and “transgendering.” A news report in 2004 by Sarah Kershaw examined gay homecomings at a number of colleges and high schools across the country. Under the headline “Gay Students Force New Look at Homecoming Traditions,” the article had a pull quote saying that this debate is “in many ways a mirror of the national debate over same-sex marriage.” Kershaw wrote about a gay male student at Vanderbilt University who ran for homecoming queen and did not win the crown but was elected to the homecoming court. He appeared at the football game “wearing a black dress with an empire waist and elbow-length red gloves, accentuated by the yellow sash draped over each of the 11 homecoming court students.” On his New York Times website blog, Stephen Dubner lauded a drag queen named Ryan Allen who was chosen as homecoming queen at George Mason University. “I don’t care if G.M.U. professors win 50 Nobel Prizes; if its athletes win 50 Gold Medals; if its researchers win 50 cancer patents,” Dubner declared, “20 years from now, I will still remember the tale of Ms. Ryan Allen.”
The Times has also been attentive to a more serious fashion statement: gender reassignment surgery. A news article in 2006 headlined ”The Trouble When Jane Becomes Jack,” by Paul Vitello, described the increasing number of lesbians who are “choosing to pursue life as a man.” This, Vitello claimed, “can provoke a deep resentment and almost existential anxiety, raising questions of gender loyalty and political identity, as well as debates about who is and who isn’t, and who never was, a real woman.” Vitello added: “The conflict has raged at some women’s colleges and has been explored in academic articles, in magazines for lesbians and in alternative publications, with some—oversimplifying the issue for effect—headlined with the question, ‘Is Lesbianism Dead?’”
Buckets of positive are poured on mainstream Hollywood films with gay themes, such as Brokeback Mountain, which received a glowing review and had three features pegged to it. In a long Sunday column, Frank Rich called it “all the more subversive for having no overt politics,” as well as “a rebuke and antidote to the sordid politics of gay-baiting that went on during the 2004 election.” Pronouncing the film “a landmark in the troubled history of America’s relationship to homosexuality,” Rich said that it “brings something different to the pop culture marketplace at just the pivotal moment to catch a wave.”
The Times was even more effusive about Milk (2008), which explored the life of San Francisco’s first openly gay city supervisor, Harvey Milk. In his first review, A. O. Scott wrote that Milk was “an intriguing, inspiring figure” and the film was “a marvel.” In his second review, Scott wrote that “though he may have seemed like a radical at the time, Milk places its hero squarely in the American grain. He is an optimist, an idealist, a true believer in the possibilities of American democracy.” Several pieces in the Times tied the film to the looming culture war over homosexual marriage.
Gay characters on television have drawn applause as well. Alessandra Stanley, the paper’s TV critic, reviewed a gay wedding episode of The Simpsons. “A few years ago,” she wrote, “the coming out of a prime-time character would probably not have caused much of a stir. But in the current climate, with the issue of gay rights spiking in the public discourse, the episode stood out.” It was “a tonic,” Stanley remarked, “at a moment when television seems increasingly humorless and tame—fearful of advertiser boycotts by the religious right and fines from the Federal Communications Commission.”
The Times routinely lionizes gay political activists. One example is Florent Morellet, a restaurant owner and AIDS activist who got a double bite of the apple: first a fawning “Public Lives” profile in 2006, and then a piece by the restaurant critic Frank Bruni when his restaurant closed in 2008. “Genre Bending Restaurant Takes Its Final Bow” amounted to an oral history of Florent’s restaurant and its place in New York’s gay community.
Another example is Daniel O’Donnell, a legislator in the New York State Assembly who received a “Public Lives” profile in 2007 after he got a gay marriage bill passed in the assembly. (The state senate did not take up the measure.) Robin Finn described O’Donnell as “a tennis-crazed former Legal Aid Society lawyer” and a Mets fan who “confesses to a very unrequited crush on the tennis star Andy Roddick, pals around with a soprano opera star, Ruth Ann Swenson, who, as he did, grew up on Long Island in unassuming Commack, and is the chronically embarrassed older brother of one of the planet’
s most opinionated celebrities, the entertainer/blogger/provocateur Rosie O’Donnell.” A second adoring feature on Daniel O’Donnell appeared in 2009, when another effort was made to legalize gay marriage in the state. Noting that O’Donnell had “emerged as a tenacious, ingratiating, playful and sometimes prickly leader of the effort to pass the legislation,” Jeremy Peters described his tactics as both persistent and humorous. O’Donnell asked the visiting parents of a Republican assemblyman to urge their son to support the bill, and he told the lawmaker himself that he was “the best looking guy in the Assembly, and he owed it to the gays to vote yes.”
Meanwhile, conservative political activists or politicians who are perceived as hypocritically working against gay rights get entirely different treatment from the Times. After Mark Foley, a Republican congressman, was caught sending racy emails to young male interns in 2006, Frank Rich said that “a little creative googling will yield a long list of who else is gay, openly or not in the highest ranks of both the Bush administration and the Republican hierarchy.” He added, “The split between the Republicans’ outward homophobia and inner gayness isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s pathology.” Then he nastily cited a recent book alleging that Karl Rove’s “own (and beloved) adoptive father, Louis Rove, was openly gay in the years before his death in 2004. This will be a future case study for psychiatric clinicians as well as historians.”
By contrast to the outré edge that defines its coverage of other aspects of the gay “lifestyle,” the Times strains to produce evidence for the “normalization of gay life” when it comes to the subject of gay parenting. An analysis headlined “A Change of Life in the Gay Hamptons,” written by Corey Kilgannon in 2003, described how a formerly wild scene had gone “from beefcakes to cupcakes,” as a maturing gay population was turning its energy to “nesting” with their children. In 2004, Ginia Bellafante’s “Two Fathers, with One Happy to Stay Home” looked at the stay-at-home gay dad trend. “Sociologists, gender researchers and gay parents themselves say that because gay men are liberated from the cultural expectations and pressures that women face to balance work and family life, they may approach raising children with a greater sense of freedom and choice,” Bellafante claimed. She quoted one gay father from Minnesota: “If I were honest, I’d say that I want to do an excellent job at this because I know the world has me under a microscope.” Apparently Bellafante could not find any gay stay-at-home father who regretted the decision, although complaints by stay-at-home mothers have been a staple of feminist discourse since Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.
An extremely long and hard-to-follow Sunday magazine piece by John Bowe, “Gay Donor or Gay Dad,” explored what was referred to as the new “gayby boom.” Bowe focused on gay men who had become sperm donors so their lesbian friends could have children as a couple. The piece was built around two different scenarios: one where the sperm donor was eventually welcomed as a father figure for the child, the other where he was held at arm’s length and disappointed.
Writing about a mixed-race lesbian couple that had broken up, Bowe said, “The current family tree is a crazy circuit board: The black woman has a new female partner. The white woman is now living with a man, and the two have had their own child. So, as R. [one of the sperm donors] said, between the one child that R. has with the black mother, the twins borne by the white mother with a black donor and the newest, fourth, child born to her with her new male partner, all of whom have some sort of sibling relation to one another, things can be a little confusing.” R. told Bowe that they are “quite a little petri dish of a family.” Bowe explained: “The children go from the white mother, who lives in a SoHo loft, to their black mother, who lives in a nice, middle-class row house in Crown Heights. On weekends, they often visit the white mother’s family’s country estate.” The children were like those in divorced families, R. maintained. “They’ve got a family that split up; they go back and forth.”
Despite all this chaos, Bowe still put in a dig at the “hetero-active” by quoting one of the story’s subjects asking somewhat aggressively, “Why is this worth a story? It’s not even worth discussing. We’re just as American as our next-door neighbors. You see all these families with stepdads and stepmoms and half brothers and half sisters.... We want the same things that every other family wants! You know? We shop at Costco; we shop at Wal-Mart; we buy diapers. We’re just average. We’re downright boring!”
Occasionally, there is an acknowledgment that the question of gay parenting has two sides. While neither of them is conclusively supported by research, the Times favors the side of gay parents and their professional advocates, and tends to say that the research is “getting better” for that side, as the psychology reporter Benedict Carey wrote in 2005.
A long Sunday magazine article of 2005, “Growing Up with Mom and Mom” by Susan Dominus, did not increase confidence in claims that kids raised in gay households suffer no ill effects. Dominus focused on Ry, a teenager in the West Village who was the “queerspawn” of “trail-blazing lesbians.” Ry spoke of her “sperm donor” instead of “dad” or “father,” words that were “loaded for children of lesbian mothers.” How do the children of gay parents turn out in comparison with those of straight parents in terms of eventual marital status, income, psychological well-being? Dominus asked. She cited research on both sides, then declared that there might be a third way, “one that argues passionately that there are differences” and embraces “the uniqueness of being raised in a same-sex household.”
What Dominus subsequently reported about her teenage subject made one wonder, though. In a diary, Ry had commented: “It took me a lot of struggle to realize that I really was attracted to men, yet now it is really hard for me to deal with men as human beings, let alone sexually.” She was intrigued but also “repulsed” by heterosexual relations, fearing the “soul-losing domain of oppression.” She couldn’t understand or relate to men because she was “so immersed in gay culture and unfamiliar with what it is to have a healthy straight relationship.” She considered it “cool” to be critical of the heterosexual world, which she called “sexist and gross.” And her parents were happy with what they had wrought. “It’s like our whole lives together have been this one, big, messy, incredible experiment,” said one of the mothers. Then, Dominus reported, the mother broke out into a broad smile, a look of pride mixed with amazement. “And it worked.”
Lesbian parenting got another ratification in A. O. Scott’s gushing review of the summer 2010 comedy The Kids Are All Right, starring Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. Coming close to declaring it the best American family comedy ever made, Scott, whose review was headlined “Meet the Sperm Donor: Modern Family Ties,” praised the film’s “unerring” dialogue and Moore’s “offbeat comic timing.” The film gave Scott “the thrilling, vertiginous sense of never having seen anything quite like it before.”
The subject of gay marriage is what has most galvanized the Times, so much so that Daniel Okrent as public editor went hard on the paper for its skewed coverage. In the Times, he had learned “where gay couples go to celebrate their marriages; I’ve met gay couples picking out bridal dresses; I’ve been introduced to couples who have been together for decades and have now sanctified their vows in Canada, couples who have successfully integrated the world of competitive ballroom dancing, couples whose lives are the platonic model of suburban stability.” While every one of these articles was legitimate, Okrent said, it was “disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading.”
For example, Clifford Krauss implicitly drew a parallel to racial integration when he reported in 2003 on the flow of gay couples to Canada to get married, following in the footsteps of escaped slaves. When gay marriage was legalized by court order in Massachusetts in 2004, Pam Belluck and Kate Zezima’s report summed up the excitement in the gay community: “With the failure of last-ditch efforts . . . to reverse a court order legalizing same-sex marri
age, starting on Monday (as early as 12.01 a.m. in Cambridge), thousands of gay couples will seal their relationships with a stamp of official recognition that many had never dreamed possible.”
Other localities that began to permit gay marriage in early 2004 received saturation coverage, and advocates were allowed to use the Times as megaphone, unfiltered and with minimal counterbalance. When Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco began issuing gay marriage licenses on February 12, 2004—in defiance of a California law passed by popular initiative in 2000—the ink flowed prodigally at the Times. Dean Murphy gave Newsom a spacious platform to explain, with considerable self-flattery, the genesis of his position. “Most politicians don’t get away with doing the right thing at a time when society is not necessarily unanimously ready for that,” Newsom said. “I did it because I thought it was right.” As for conservative critics, Newsom told Murphy that he wore their enmity as “a code of distinction.” He continued: “I have been befuddled by conservatives who talk about taking away rights, yet they claim to be conservatives. The hypocrisy to me is extraordinarily grand.” (Even some fellow Democrats, however, criticized Newsom for performing “spectacle weddings,” as Barney Frank put it.)
When the experiment was ended by order of the California Supreme Court on March 11, Murphy’s report dripped with pathos. Several couples waiting at City Hall for appointments to receive licenses were turned away, some of them in tears. “They were heartbroken,” said the county clerk, Nancy Alfaro. “It was very sudden.”
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