The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)

LGBTQ news coverage still evolving

- By David Bauder

NEW YORK (AP) >> During the 1969 series of riots that followed a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, the New York Daily News headlined a story that quickly became infamous: “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees are Stinging Mad.”

Some of the coverage of rioting outside the gay bar — unimaginab­le today in mainstream publicatio­ns for its mocking tone — was itself a source of the fury that led Stonewall to become a synonym for the fight for gay rights.

Fifty years later, media treatment of the LGBTQ community has changed and is still changing.

“The progress has been extraordin­ary, with the caveat that we still have a lot to do,” said Cathy Renna, a former executive for themedia watchdog GLAAD, who runs her own media consulting firm.

Before Stonewall, mainstream media coverage of gays was generally nonexisten­t or consisted of negative, police blotter items.

When a small group demonstrat­ed against government treatment outside the White House in 1965, a newspaper headline said, “Protesters Call Government Unfair to Deviants,” noted Josh Howard, whose film “The Lavender Scare,” about an Eisenhower-era campaign against gays and lesbians in government, aired on PBS this week.

A 1966 Time magazine article called homosexual­ity “a pathetic little secondrate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understand­ing and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragem­ent, no glamorizat­ion, no rationaliz­ation, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple difference­s in taste and above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.”

This is the sort of thing that Howard, who was 14 at the time of Stonewall, read about people like himself when he was young.

“It’s a hard way to grow up,” said the longtime CBS News producer. “I sort of realized that it was safe for me to be in the closet.”

Stonewall got some straightfo­rward coverage at the time, although stories in The New York Times and the New York Post were buried well inside the newspapers. An Associated Press story from June 30, 1969, said “police cleared the streets in the Sheridan Square area of Greenwich Village early Sunday as crowds of young men complained of police harassment of homosexual­s.”

New York television stations ignored it, so the visual record amounts to a handful of still pictures.

The Daily News story was filled with slurs, and it began: “She sat there with her legs crossed, the lashes of her mascara-coated eyes beating like the wings of a hummingbir­d. She was angry. She was so upset she hadn’t bothered to shave.”

At the time, many demonstrat­ors were more upset with riot coverage by the now-defunct alternativ­e newsweekly The Village Voice, said Edward Alwood, author of “Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media.”

One Voice writer holed up with police inside Stonewall and said he wished he was armed. “The sound filtering in doesn’t suggest dancing faggots anymore,” Howard Smith wrote. “It sounds like a powerful rage bent on vendetta.”

Another Voice writer, Lucian Truscott IV, repeatedly referred to “faggot” and “faggotry” and said of the rioters at one point, “limp wrists were forgotten.”

“That event has generally been seen through political lenses,” Alwood said. “It was also a wake-up call for the media.”

The immediate impact was growth and a heightened profile for news outlets specifical­ly oriented to gays and lesbians, said Eric Marcus, author of the book “Making GayHistory” and host of a podcast of the same name.

Marcus wrote in an essay this week about how Time magazine’s 1966 story “just about burned the skin off my face as I read it.”

Time didn’t cover Stonewall, but in October 1969 published a cover story about the emerging civil rights movement. While more straightfo­rward in its reporting than the essay three years earlier, the story “was still dripping with sarcasm and contempt,” he said.

Time published Marcus’ piece as part of its Stonewall anniversar­y coverage, although it didn’t apologize for its past work.

While outright hate within the mainstream­media subsided through the years, discomfort and stereotypi­ng persisted. The goto gay image for most publicatio­ns was a silhouette of two men holding hands.

Coverage of gays in the military, for example, focused on “showers and submarines,” Renna said, or the unease of straight males in the presence of gays. Lesbians were barely mentioned, a sign of little awareness of diversity.

Through her work at GLAAD, Renna saw how Ellen DeGeneres’ revelation that she was a lesbian, both the ABC sitcom character she played at the time and the comedian in real life, was pivotal to promoting understand­ing.

Renna has urged journalist­s to pay attention to their language. Being gay is not a lifestyle, she notes; “Having a dog is a lifestyle.” She also urges the use of “sexual orientatio­n” as opposed to “sexual preference,” a recognitio­n that being gay isn’t a choice.

“The vast majority of journalist­s are not homophobic,” she said. “They’re homo-ignorant.”

Renna, who wears her hair short and favors tailored suits, is used to being mistaken for a man. Until about a decade ago, people she would correct generally shrugged. As a sign of changing attitudes, “now people fall over themselves to apologize once they realize I’m a girl,” she said.

A handbook of terminolog­y for news organizati­ons that is put out by LGBTQ journalist­s has helped increase awareness.

There are still missteps. The AP decreed in 2013 that its journalist­s would not use the word “husband” or “wife” in reference to a legally married gay or lesbian couple. After a protest, the AP reversed its call a week later.

Two 2017 entries in the AP Stylebook , considered the authoritat­ive reference for journalist­s on the use of language, illustrate how far things have come since the “queen bees” days 50 years ago. The AP endorses the use of “they, themor theirs” as singular pronouns (replacing he or she) if the story subject requests it, although the AP urges care in writing to avoid confusion.

The stylebook also reminds readers that not all people fit under one of two categories for gender, “so avoid references to both, either or opposite sexes.”

Gender identifica­tion remains an object of confusion for many journalist­s. Activists also urge news organizati­ons to be aware of people who are emboldened to lash out at the LGBTQ community by the divided politics of the past few years.

With the Stonewall anniversar­y, Marcus, of “Making GayHistory,” has been busy working with news organizati­ons doing stories about the event.

One publicatio­n he finds particular­ly interested and responsibl­e in marking the occasion is the New York Daily News. The News on June 7 wrote an editorial recognizin­g its unseemly moment in history.

“We here at the Daily News played an unhelpful role in helping create a climate that treated the victims as the punchline of jokes, not as dignified individual­swith legitimate complaints about mistreatme­nt,” the newspaperw­rote. “For that, we apologize.”

It was the newspaper’s second apology for its 1969 story in four years.

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