Originally published in Chronogram magazine
March, 2007
http://www.Chronogram.com
The 1990s belonged to the drag queen. RuPaul became a media star and two drag films, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, grabbed heartland America by the short hairs. Their plots are similar: A trio of transvestites ventures into a rural area and shakes up country folk who never saw a man tottering on high heels. By the final scene, the interlopers have provided not only makeup tips, but also a lesson in compassion. Roll credits.
Pure Hollywood fiction? Guess again. Four decades before Patrick Swayze donned a wig and eyeliner in To Wong Foo, rural Greene County was home to a sorority of male cross-dressers.
Silver Springs was a vacation colony located in tiny Jewett, five miles south of Hunter. It attracted urbanites seeking respite from punishing city summers in the era before air conditioning. Sited on a picturesque but isolated 150-acre patch of land, it offered snug, unheated bungalows that stood adjacent to a barn and main house. When the property changed hands in the mid-1950s, it was renamed Casa Susanna and repurposed drastically: as a refuge for men eager to make contact with their inner woman.
For $25 per weekend, visitors—mostly Manhattan businessmen—were fed three squares and taught the finer points of “passing”; that is, developing a feminine masquerade that escaped detection. This included navigating a sidewalk in pumps, grasping a cigarette between polished nails, and applying foundation to obscure a five o’clock shadow.
The headmaster of this finishing school was Tito Valenti. A New York court translator, he preferred the name Susanna when wearing wigs and evening frocks, which did little to soften his gangster-like mug. While director Ed Wood was wrapping himself in angora, Valenti was at the vanguard of an underground American cross-dressing movement. He penned a regular column for a tranny magazine and offered charm lessons for the novice in his city apartment, which he shared with his wife Marie, the proprietor of a Fifth Avenue wig shop. As his clientele grew, Valenti needed more room. Marie purchased the acreage with her wig-store profits and the place thrived as both a safe harbor and a playground for more than a decade.
The selection of this remote Catskills location was not merely a matter of discretion; it was an act of preservation. Numerous cities considered cross-dressing a perversion, and transvestitism earned you a jail cell. (In New York state, the laws were more abstruse—men were allowed to wear female street clothes if deception was not the goal. When questioned by a police officer, you were obliged to admit your true gender.) Still, homosexuality was illegal nationwide, and hypervigilant cops in the McCarthy era made no distinction between cross-dressing heterosexuals and cross-dressing homosexuals.
The colony in the woods of Greene County was a hidden world. And an open secret. A number of local citizens knew about it. Cross-dressers spoke of it with respect. And it proved a fascinating locus for study by social scientists. (A protégé of sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey once spent a weekend.) But the teardrop veil of secrecy surrounding the place was finally and fully teased away two years ago with the publication of a coffee table book titled Casa Susanna by Michel Hurst and Robert Swope (PowerHouse Books, 2005).
“It is not a simple case of a gay story,” said Hurst, in a recent interview.
“Or about drag queens,” added Swope, speaking on the extension from their weekend home in rural Pennsylvania.
Swope, a habitué of Manhattan’s 26th Street flea market, made the discovery on a routine Saturday excursion. Rooting around in a box, he unearthed snapshots from the Jewett hideaway. There were 400 photographs in all. Glued to the inside cover of one photo album was Susanna’s business card, listing her occupation as a female impersonator.
Save for a foreword by Swope, Casa Susanna is a textless compilation of 120 color and black-and-white snapshot images. The eye is initially drawn to the vintage detail: tiled floors, mid-century furniture covered in plastic, kitchen bric-a-brac. Then you consider the mostly unremarkable women with ill-fitting wigs, overreaching for prim, white-gloved, Eisenhower-era glamour. But a closer look reveals more: the vulnerability in each face as they stare down a camera they pray will capture their intended femininity. Hurst and Swope emphasize that most visitors to Casa Susanna were married and considered themselves heterosexual. It was a time before transgender manifestos and gender reassignment. These men simply lived with their contradictions.
“They are trying to escape the gender role they have been made prisoner of,” Hurst said. “There is a part of all of us that wants to escape the narrow reality we are living in.” (Hurst and Swope are in touch with several surviving members of the colony, and collected some of their correspondence, but refused to provide contact information for this article, citing concerns for privacy.)
The ladies’ incessant photographing of themselves bordered on the obsessive. One snapshot in the book offers a field day for Sontagian deconstructionists. Five cross-dressers crowd a bungalow room. Three of them, crouching, have trained their old Kodaks on one standing, who also holds a camera. The remaining queen is playfully snapping the unseen photographer of this scene.
“Photography was essential to them,” said Michel Hurst. “Photography was proof that they existed.”
Casa Susanna inevitably prompted chatter among local folk. In private, people regarded the camp with varying degrees of curiosity, puzzlement, and sneers. If asked publicly, they’d likely display the feigned indifference of the rural denizen. A phone call to the Hunter town historian, Justine Hommell, leads to people who remember the bungalow colony tucked back in the woods.
At the age of 90, Hunter resident Orville Slutzsky is cheerfully cantankerous. Slutzsky, general manager at Hunter Mountain since 1959, certainly remembers the cross-dressers. There is little he hasn’t seen or heard, even if he “never got more than one-and-a-half miles from where I was born,” he brags. Neighbors also knew about the camp, but without rancor. “They laughed it off or passed it on,” he shrugs.
Wilma Harty, 81, allows herself a girlish giggle in recalling the ladies. During the 1960s, Harty stocked shelves and waited on customers at the Victory Store, a market in Hunter’s lower village. She worked there for 10 years and effortlessly describes the small store, leading the listener through the entrance door on the right, past the produce stand and the large meat case straight ahead, ending at the sole cash register by the exit.
The first Saturday summer morning the women glided in for shopping, Harty was a bit shaken by the sight. “They were to the hilt, you know—all out. The hair was all done neatly. Wigs, jewelry. They were overdressed for the market. They were dressed as city people—if you can use this expression—more than country people.” For a few weekends, Harty would smother her laughs until the ladies exited, and then trade notes with coworkers on what they wore and what they bought. But eventually, the drag queens were looked upon as regular shoppers. “They were pleasant and they didn’t bother anybody,” she said. “They brought in business.”
When lifetime Hunter resident Rafael “Rafey” Klein, 79, explains Casa Susanna, you’d think he was a gender studies professor. “In the Forties, we never knew what the word ‘gay’ meant. But they weren’t gay. They were cross-dressers, as we understand it.”
“Good lord; you wanna dig, you’d be surprised at what you’d find,” murmurs John Ham, 72, citing Casa Susanna, but also Catskills lore in general. Local history had its colorful side. Gangster Legs Diamond lived in nearby Haines Falls. A nudist camp flourished briefly nearby in the 1930s, but inhabitants tended to avoid mingling. “They didn’t come naked into town,” Ham said. “That’s a fact.” The summer resort Villa Maria featured female impersonators as evening entertainment, “but that place was straight as a die.”
Ham remembers the exact location of Casa Susanna, but never visited. “I would bet you fun money or marbles, that is when I was in the Army back in the Fifties.” Still, he recalls the stray comments from townspeople, some patently unkind. “There were names applied to it, and I won’t get into that now,” he says diplomatically, but admits that after some drink, people spoke more freely. “You would hear the local barroom stuff. That it was wrong. That somebody would not be disappointed if the place burned up.”
Was there no local sheriff who objected to Casa Susanna, citing some arcane law about public decency to justify running them out of town on their high heels? Ham chuckles at the notion. “There was no ordinance. There was no ordinances at all until city people came up here.”
The saga of Tito Valenti and his drag colony may eventually join Priscilla and To Wong Foo in the canon of drag cinema. When the New York Times ran an article about the Casa Susanna book last September, a Hollywood studio immediately rang the authors. Hurst and Swope were asked to write a treatment—in film lingo, a brief summary of the proposed screenplay—and signed a contract to serve as consultants for a proposed film.
In the meantime, they wait. “These things move very slowly,” Hurst said. He and Swope continue to gather photographs and personal accounts from veterans of Casa Susanna. Hurst added that the pair have playfully assembled their dream cast, including Tom Hanks, Paul Giammatti, and Jack Nicholson.
The Catskills still draw colorful, eccentric souls that seek the seclusion of rural life. A modern successor to Casa Susanna is Gallae Central House on Route 23A in Palenville. Its web site features photos of men wearing dresses and makeup who belong to a religious cult called the Maetreum of Cybele, Magna Mater. Devoted to the worship of a Greek goddess, the group celebrates “a belief in the divine feminine principle of the universe.”
A call to a contact number yields a more complicated story. In a teary, rambling half-hour conversation, a person who requested anonymity explains her tale of woe: An intersexed person—that is, born with male and female genitalia—she was the founder of Gallae, a cooperative intended as “a refuge for women in need,” she said. “Trans women were welcome but they were not the focus.” Last summer, her housemates mutinied, declaring their desire to strip away the religious elements and transform Gallae into a commune for transvestites and transsexuals. The founder was, she claims, physically abused and driven from her own property. She plans legal action. “It was a horrible situation and it stinks.”
One can only imagine the ladies of Casa Susanna reacting to this modern tale of identity politics—a far cry from the joys of simple cross-dressing. No doubt they would momentarily look up from their tea and cigarettes, nod sympathetically if blankly, and then return happily to their Scrabble game.
All photographs from Michael Hurst’s and Robert Swope’s book, Casa Susanna.
This photograph from 1991 depicts me holding the factsheet I created for the July, 1989, protest against The New York Times. That summer, ACT UP held a march and protest which challenged the Newspaper of Record for its chronic record of inaccurate and spotty AIDS coverage during the first years of the epidemic. Little did I know this act of civil disobedience would catch up to me 15 years later and cause the Times to dismiss me as a freelancer. (Credit: Bill Bytsura)
]]>Since you wrote a most evenhanded piece (for The Nation) about my January dismissal from The New York Times, I wanted to share this epilogue. Granted, it's more of a whimper than a scream, but it is nonetheless telling. Get ready for journalistic ethics, New York Times style.
First, some backstory. When I was dumped from the Times, I wasn't the only one shocked. So was a longtime friend of mine. Because, like me, he was a former ACT UP spokesperson. Like me, he had been flacking merely as an extension of his gay and AIDS activism and had repped several organizations. Like me, he had started as a journalist and ached to return to the field. And, like me, he was now writing for The Times.
When I was ejected in January, I immediately alerted this friend. He begged me not to go public with my story, because he felt it would cost him his longtime freelancer gig. I still contacted the media. But in all interviews, I refused to finger him. (My friend, fearful of guilt through association, subsequently distanced himself from me.)
Here's the coda: At a Thanksgiving dinner last month, I ran into a Times editor, for whom my former friend now writes. This editor was aware of my dismissal and informed me that my former ACT UP comrade was indeed called on the carpet in the wake of my ejection. Apparently, five years of freelancing for the City and Escapes sections means something; the powers-that-be decided my friend should not be shown the door. So much for a uniform NYT editorial policy.
Regards,
Jay Blotcher
When the New York Times fired freelance reporter Jay Blotcher over his past affiliation with AIDS group ACT UP, he says he felt wronged since he saw no conflict of interest with the work he did more than a decade ago and his non-AIDS related work for the Times.
But last month when the National Lesbian & Gay Journalism Association removed Blotcher from serving on a panel at the group’s national convention this summer, he says he felt betrayed again.
“You expect injustice against gays and lesbians in this world — you don’t expect to see it in your own community,” Blotcher said.
NLGJA has apologized to Blotcher, but won’t reinstate him on the panel, said Eric Hegedus, vice president of print and new media for NLGJA.
“The convention planners found some individuals who were better suited,” Hegedus said.
Blotcher, a former NLGJA member, was originally asked to speak on a panel discussing ethical guidelines for gay reporters covering gay issues. But once convention planners fleshed out the session — a 90-minute forum on whether a gay reporter can objectively report on issues such as gay marriage — they selected journalists that work in mainstream newsrooms, instead of freelancers like Blotcher, Hegedus said.
Several plenary sessions are included in the NLGJA’s convention in New York, scheduled for June 24-27.
The session coordinator contacted Blotcher to serve on the panel, but NLGJA “powers that be” said they would “prefer Jay not be on the panel,” said Kelly McBride, the session moderator and an ethics faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in Florida.
“I’m assuming that NLGJA leadership is acting in good faith,” McBride said.
BLOTCHER ASKED NLGJA for a written explanation for being removed from the panel, but had not received one at press time, he said. Blotcher did receive an apologetic telephone call after the Washington Blade made inquiries about the matter at NLGJA, he said.
Blotcher criticized NLGJA for not backing him after the New York Times fired him. He said his ouster from the newspaper is retribution, in part, for ACT UP’s outspoken criticism of the Times’ coverage of AIDS in the 1980s.
“NLGJA does not have a record of being courageous or have a high profile of taking a stand on any issues,” he said.
But Blotcher’s case was too ambiguous for NLGJA to become involved, Hegedus said.
“We initially offered him some advice and suggested an employment lawyer,” Hegedus said. “It was a personnel matter, and we couldn’t understand all circumstances.”
The Times dismissed Blotcher in January, not over his membership in ACT UP, but “because of his work as a press spokesman and a public relations consultant,” Arthur Sulzberger, chair of the New York Times Co., said at a shareholders meeting April 13, according to meeting transcripts obtained by Blotcher.
Blotcher served as media coordinator for ACT UP from April 1989 to January 1990.
Ann Northrop, one of the original members of NLGJA, said she was “appalled” by NLGJA’s refusal to take a stand against the New York Times decision and for “kicking him off the plenary session.”
“NLGJA should be up in arms about it and instead they’d rather hold expensive fund-raising dinners where they cozy up to establishment media bigwigs rather than challenge the policies and practices of those mainstream media,” Northrop said.
Northrop, a former journalist with CBS News and ABC, now anchors the national cable television show “Gay USA” on the Dish network.
NLGJA officers declined comment on the criticism.
This photograph from 1991 depicts me holding the factsheet I created for the July, 1989, protest against The New York Times. That summer, ACT UP held a march and protest which challenged the Newspaper of Record for its chronic record of inaccurate and spotty AIDS coverage during the first years of the epidemic. Little did I know this act of civil disobedience would catch up to me 15 years later and cause the Times to dismiss me as a freelancer. (Credit: Bill Bytsura)
The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association has barred me from appearing at their Plenary on Journalistic Objectivity, scheduled at the June Convention in NYC.
The plenary session was created and organized by CNN journalist Rose Arce.
A month ago, Rose invited me to sit on this panel. She felt my case strongly reflected the current debate over journalistic objectivity. She plans to have the two SF Chronicle lesbian journalists on the panel, who were reassigned from the gay marriage beat after becoming hitched.
However, when Rose gave her list of panelists to NLGJA's Executive Committee, she was told I could not sit on the panel.
Why? NLGJA felt my problem with the NY Times was a "personnel matter" between employer and employee ... and NOT an issue of journalistic ethics. This was the same reasoning they gave me in March, when they refused to support my case.
(I had been in touch with them since my January 12 dismissal, and for two months they suggested they would help me. In the end, they decided not to. Please note that NLGJA Board President Stephen Petrow spoke out against the reassignment of the SF Chron reporters at the time it happened.)
NLGJA member and NBC-TV producer Barbara Raab asked NLGJA officials several times for an official reason why they would not take my case. So did journalist Michelangelo Signorile. Both were told that NLGJA would release a statement explaining their decision. However, they never did.
I received a telephone machine message from NLGJA's President Pamela Strother on April 17, saying they wished to talk to me about my "concerns" about NLGJA. (Passive-aggressive or what?) I replied by e-mail, asking for a written explanation for censoring me. I have not received it. Perhaps they are savvy enough to know they should not commit any incriminating information to paper.
jbb
]]>San Francisco AIDS activist Michael Petrelis, a shareholder of stock in the New York Times, attended the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting April 13 to challenge the paper’s conflicts of interest policy. Petrelis was motivated by the Times’ firing of stringer Jay Blotcher earlier this year after Times editors discovered Blotcher had been a spokesperson for ACT UP fifteen years ago. Petrelis has documented numerous conflicts by Times writers and executives in terms of outside activities and political contributions.
Petrelis especially focused on Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, the paper’s chief medical writer, who writes about the Centers for Disease Control and other health agencies but is also affiliated with the CDC, the Institute of Medicine, and NYU Medical Center among other such groups. The Times says that Altman’s work with these groups was cleared with his editors, but Petrelis says that’s not good enough. “His readers need to know about his associations,” he said. He also criticized Altman for often failing to quote critics of the CDC and its methods in his stories.
Petrelis formally proposed a Reporter’s Disclosure Page for the Times’ website as part of a ten-point reform program, especially as it relates to HIV/AIDS reporting. He also requested that the paper allow its AIDS stories to be archived at AEGIS.com, The AIDS Education Global Information System. The Times requires fees for Internet recovery of stories more than seven days old. The Wall Street Journal and many other publications waive these fees for AEGIS.
Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. acknowledged getting Petrelis’s demands and promised to get back to him, but did not respond publicly to the proposals.
Gay City News asked Sulzberger what guidance he would give to young people about what affiliations they had better avoid if they aspire to write for the Times someday, given the fate of Blotcher. He started by relating the “misery” the Times went through after the Jason Blair scandal, then, reading from notes, insisted that Blotcher was not fired because he was a member of ACT UP, but because he was a spokesperson for it. He said the same policy would apply to someone who had been a spokesperson for AARP.
When told that all ACT UP members are considered spokespersons for the egalitarian group, Sulzberger said, “Perhaps you ought to consider changing that policy.”
Petrelis said, “I imagine the Times will reject my proposals,” but felt it was important to raise them because the paper “has so much influence.”
Photograph depicts me holding the factsheet created for the July, 1989, protest against The New York Times. We challenged the Newspaper of Record for its chronic record of inaccurate and spotty AIDS coverage during the first years of the epidemic. (Credit: Bill Bytsura)
Gay fireworks
Local journalist dismissed as New York Times stringer
by Andrea Barrist Stern
High Falls journalist Jay Blotcher is used to seeing his name in the
bylines of articles he has written for publications as diverse as Ulster
Publishing's Alm@nac, The New York Times, Chronogram, and Gay City News,
among others. More recently, however, Blotcher has found himself the
subject of media stories in The Washington Post, The Village Voice, The
Nation, and The Daily News as well as other papers and numerous Internet
blogs.
After filing three-bylined articles and contributing to several others for
The New York Times during past few years, Blotcher was notified by his
editor at the paper's Metropolitan desk, Lew Serviss, that The Times would
no longer use his services as a stringer because of his past association
with ACT UP, a gay rights organization founded in 1987 in New York City.
After pressing the paper's editors, Blotcher says he was told that he was
being dismissed because he had served as a spokesperson for ACT UP from
April 1989 to January 1990. (In 1997, he also did a press release for the
organization for its tenth anniversary.) His services for ACT UP were in a
volunteer capacity as was the similar public relations work he did for
another gay organization, Queer Nation, from April 1990 to January 1991.
(For about five years, beginning in 1995, Blotcher was also a paid
publicist for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, AmFAR.)
Blotcher does not dispute his past association with these organizations,
but he and national leaders of the gay community, who have rallied to his
defense, are questioning why the writer's past gay activism precludes his
writing for other departments at The New York Times, where Blotcher can no
longer contribute pieces either.
"As someone who has been an activist in the past and does know his civil
rights, I thought there was something chilling about this," he says of his
initial reaction after being informed by Serviss that The Times no longer
planned to used him. "A friend of mine there used to go door to door
campaigning for a City Council member who was running for state senator
while he was writing for The Times. Another guy I know had worked as a
[spokesperson] for several civil rights organizations at the same time
that I represented ACT UP."
In an e-mailed response to the Woodstock Times on Tuesday, Catherine Mathis,
vice president of corporate communication for The New York Times Company,
wrote, "While Blotcher's formal involvement with ACT UP ended some ten years
ago, he continued - by his own account and by the evidence of Nexis - to
assume a role as advocate and spokesperson. He has written very little for
The Times, but at least one of his pieces was about a gay issue."
Mathis is referring to a March 12, 2000, bylined piece that the journalist
filed with the newspaper about a new publication at the time that was
geared to elderly gay and lesbian readers. (His other bylined articles
were for the Metropolitan desk: a December 12, 2003, piece about a
Sullivan County resident accused of killing three of her infants, and a
November 10, 2003, article about vandalism at Sullivan County Community
College.)
Mathis referred the Woodstock Times to a recent e-mail that New York Times
executive editor Bill Keller had sent to Larry Kramer, the founder of ACT
UP and a well-known gay activist, in response to a letter from Kramer to
Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., about a month ago. "As you
undoubtedly know, this paper went through some misery last year that has
caused us to undertake a conscientious review of our standards and
practices," wrote Keller, referring to the Jason Blair scandal. "In
keeping with that, our new Metro editor began a review of our stringer
list to make sure our policies on conflicts of interest were in force. We
employ dozens of stringers at Metro - although 'employ' exaggerates the
nature of the relationship, since most of them work only occasionally. ...
In the review of the stringer list, Mr. Blotcher attracted attention not
because of his membership in anti-AIDS organizations, but because of his
work as a press spokesman and a public relations consultant. He was, for a
time, the public face of ACT UP. Although he is no longer in that role,
his work was recent enough that we worry he is identified in the public
mind as an advocate. (He is certainly remembered as such by editors and
reporters at The Times.) Please understand, I have no problem with Mr.
Blotcher working for ACT UP, and intend no suggestion that he is anything
but an honorable man. But we try to avoid employing people who are
identified with a cause, because it creates the possibility that readers
may wonder if their copy is written in pursuit of that cause. That would
be true if he had been a spokesman for the NRA, the NRDC, or the AARP..."
Nowhere in the recent responses of the editors and spokespersons at The
Times to questions posed by other publications and gay activist leaders
has the paper clarified why Blotcher's past association with a gay rights
organization would preclude him from covering other subjects for the
newspaper. At a time when the rights of gay and lesbian Americans are
making headlines in terms of same-sex marriage, Blotcher and his
supporters say they are at a loss to explain The Times' decision.
Even within The Times, Steve Reed, who heads the paper's Gay and Lesbian
Caucus, notes there is disagreement within the group that has about 50
members. "There is definitely a diversity of opinion over this," says
Reed, an editor for The New York Times Regional Newspaper Group, which has
its offices in the same building but on a different floor from the
newspaper. "Some people feel comfortable with what the editors did and
some don't." Reed says he has "not done a formal poll" and has only heard
from about ten percent of the caucus's members. Opinion appears to be
split 50/50, he notes. Is the paper's own code of ethics applied equally
across the board? "That's something I wouldn't want to go into," he says,
referring further questions to Mathis.
Blotcher and his supporters within the gay community have questioned
whether The Times' early coverage of the AIDS pandemic - coverage they say
came under criticism from ACT UP and other gay rights organizations for
being inadequate and spotty - could have been behind the newspaper's
decision to dismiss the journalist. Blotcher says Kramer's book, Reports
From the Holocaust: The Story of An AIDS Activist (St. Martin's Press)
documents how The Times gave the AIDS epidemic only a fraction of the
coverage it gave to legionnaire's disease during the early 1980s.
"The implications of The New York Times muffling this amounted to a life
or death crisis," says Blotcher. "Critical years were lost." He and other
gay activists agree, however, that the paper's more recent coverage of
both AIDS and gay issues has been exemplary.
"The Times, like every other news organization, was very much behind in
seeing the danger," says Virginia Apuzzo, a Kingston area resident and the
former assistant to President Bill Clinton for management and
administration. The highest ranking out gay member of Clinton's
administration, Apuzzo was the former head of the National Gay and Lesbian
Task Force (before "lesbian" was part of its name). As one of a small
group of vocal gay activists, she took on The New York Times and got the
paper to agree to begin using the term "gay." But even Apuzzo doubts the
recent decision has anything to do with still bruised feelings at The
Times regarding past criticism of their AIDS coverage.
Blotcher's story, as they say in the business, has had "legs," especially
after Eric Alterman, who writes the "Stop the Presses" media column for
The Nation did a piece in the first week of March. Michael Petrelis, a gay
activist known for his fiery tactics, posted a letter in support of
Blotcher on The New York Times' Internet forum (public@nytimes.com) but
the letter was reportedly taken off the forum a day later with Petrelis
receiving a reply from the paper saying it was investigating the matter.
The gay community has argued that Blotcher is being singled out for some
unknown reason and the paper is not applying its standards equally.
Lawrence Altman, a medical correspondent for The New York Times is a
former employee of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
yet he regularly reports on that agency, according to a February 26 piece
in the Gay City News, which also notes that Altman sits on an advisory
board that administers a CDC fellowship program. (In her response to the
Woodstock Times, Mathis notes, "Larry Altman does not now hold and never
has held an advocacy position, and his professional/medical activities
have all been authorized by his editors. His current ones are consistent
with our January 2003 ethics rules.) Blotcher's supporters have also
pointed out that Bernard Weintraub covers Hollywood for the paper even
though his wife is a top executive at Sony Pictures.
"Even if one accepts the paper's argument that his only crime is a kind of
post-[Jason] Blair hyper-fastidiousness about appearances at the expense
of fairness to one of its stringers, the story cannot be allowed to die
there," wrote Alterman for The Nation, noting two editors at The Times
declined his "repeated invitations to delineate a consistent policy
regarding just which kinds of associations are allowed and which aren't."
Alterman further noted that, "...with the departure of Adam Moss to New
York magazine, The Times lacks a single person in a position of
significant editorial authority - or on the editorial board for that
matter - who is openly gay. As one longtime and loyal Times writer put it
to me, 'The problem is not homophobia; it's homo-ignorance.'"
Blotcher realizes "the door has shut" to him at The New York Times, but
the writer says, "I want to raise the issue so the paper has to answer for
its actions and not apply its code of ethics haphazardly."
Times’ firing of reporter with PR background
should alarm those seeking journalism jobs
All reporters are human beings. All human beings have opinions. Therefore, all reporters have opinions.
As a logical syllogism, that’s pretty much unassailable. But it’s not something media firms have learned to live with, if recent actions at The New York Times are any guide. The venerable Times has made some headlines -- thought not nearly as many as it should have made -- after it decided in its less than infinite wisdom to dismiss stringer Jay Blotcher because he once had provided public relations support to the AIDS advocacy group ACT-UP.
The Times isn't worried that Blotcher will be unable to provide balanced coverage of the issues because Blotcher had never covered a story involving gay rights or AIDS or anything remotely related, and it would have been a simple matter for an assignment editor to ensure that such stories were given to other reporters.
Susan Edgerley, the Times’ metropolitan editor, told gay media, “I am setting the bar high to protect against any appearance of conflict of interest that might result through the hiring of stringers and leg-people. My motivation is expediency, as well as ethics.”
Actually, as far as I can see, it’s just expediency -- and highly inconsistent expediency at that. As AIDS activist Larry Kramer points out in a letter to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, the paper still employs Larry Altman, who often writes about his former employers at the Centers for Disease Control, and it has made no move to dismiss Bernard Weinraub, who writes about Hollywood, where his wife is head of Columbia Pictures.
PR people should be concerned about the impact on their career choices. If you’re handling PR for an advocacy group while waiting for your big break in journalism, be warned that you might have disqualified yourself from one day working for the paper of record. If you’re doing some volunteer work for a cancer charity, understand that you’re on record as caring about an issue -- a fact that surely makes you unsuitable to write about it.
But PR people also should be concerned about the essential fraud being perpetrated by the Times. Because rest assured, firing reporters who have a record of activism will do nothing to eliminate bias. (Though Edgerley, to her credit, doesn't try to pretend it will: She talks only of eliminating “any appearance of conflict of interest.”) Because, as I said earlier, all reporters have opinions -- the only issue is whether you have a right to know what they are or whether they should keep them hidden.
Moves like this will only ensure reporters keep their opinions to themselves, making the media less transparent and its biases harder to discern. That does no service to readers.
Paul Holmes has spent the past 16 years writing about the PR business for publications including PRWeek, Inside PR, and Reputation Management. He is currently president of The Holmes Group and editor of www.holmesreport.com.
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I hereby offer this image as a t-shirt for all protestors at the GOP Convention in Manhattan this August. Any enterprising designer who wants to sell these to raise money for The Democratic Party should make contact with me now!
This image appeared in the form of a greeting card, which I sold in stores around the country. It seemed to sell especially well in Boston two years ago, just as the Catholic Archdiocese scandal broke. I was disappointed that no wayward priests called me -- either to complain or to thank me.
When my husband I were married in New Paltz on February 27, reporters teased me, asking, "Why do you want to get married? Don't you know that marriages don't work out?" My response is: the hundreds of same-sex couples rushing to the altar these past weeks have been together, in some cases, for many years. They've already navigated through the difficulties successfully, and deserve legal affirmation of their union.
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