Gay Today: Historian's Travels

Satan Does Dallas:
Lesbian & Gay Journalists Meet

By James T. Sears, Ph.D.

"James T. Sears is the Satan of the University"
Pat Robertson

Over three hundred queer journalists met for their annual convention this past week in Dallas.

Historian James T. Sears speaks at the National Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association 2001 Convention

Outside the Fairmount Hotel and across Akard Street was a handful of godly-possessed adults and children holding signs of condemnation. Inside, among the dozens of workshops and panels at the eleventh annual National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, was a controversial panel, "Are We Guilty of Bias in Covering Critics of Gay Rights?" Apparently, neither Jesus nor the Spirit of Waco had informed protesters that allies were inside the four star hotel.

This panel, scheduled by the Association and sponsored by American Airlines, was organized by the homophobic director of the Americans for Truth Project of Kerusso Ministries, Peter LaBarbera (who is a member of the Association as a former reporter of the right-wing Washington Times).

Inside the Regency Ballroom he joined two other conservative critics to condemn the "liberal media" for "cruelly" stereotyping religious conservatives and "distorting" their viewpoints. I was to learn later that LaBarbera, who had published the anti-gay Lambda Report, carefully monitors queer life including meticulous mapping of backroom bars of Satan's Sodom and placement of leather swings (I didn't have a chance to ask LaBarbarera his opinion of the scientific penile study linking high-grade homophobes to repressed homosexuality).

Defending this session (which has come under criticism from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), NLGJA President Robert Dodge asserted, "We believe it will create a forum to discuss important issues about coverage. And as an organization that promotes fair and accurate journalism, it is important to listen to both sides of the story even when they are people we may find disagreeable." This Andy Rooney defense (whose autographed book was part of the convention's silent auction) seemed to be accepted by most in attendance.

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As one of the invited speakers to the Author's Café (my reading of Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones didn't generate such controversy), I was struck by this simple-minded Judy Collins-like notion of "both sides now."

It would appear that NLGJA members share with heterosexual journalists the erroneous notion that fairness means "both" positions should be heard (although there were none representing a counter position on this panel) regardless of their fairness or accuracy (The Right Wing is notorious for systematic distortion of facts and others' positions-see Jack Nichols' The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists). This dangerous principle of "both sides" also has been brandished by the mainstream (and the corporate "gay" press) to silence other more critical positions articulated by a range of feminists, libertarians, socialists, and others.

Homophobes picket the convention

NLBJA organizers and anti-gay conservatives comfortably live in a dualistic world neatly divided into right/wrong, conservative/liberal, gay/straight. In this world according to NLBJA there are no sessions on (or individuals identified as) transgender or bisexual. But, in this land of black and white one does find "old-chestnuts" like teen sex and pederasty. On the panel about "young queer voices" there were no high-school youth to respond to ageist comments about "protecting" sex-less adolescents or "giving" kids voice within responsible "ethical guidelines."

Few of the attendees, of course, realized the irony that just two generations ago and a few blocks down Akard Street men and teens used to cruise one another around the old 29-story Magnolia Petroleum Building beneath a revolving red Pegasus (known as Maggie's Corner) or that an hour down the road in Waco Texas Rangers had stormed a wedding, arresting sixty-seven mostly Dallas men wearing rouge and lipstick and dressed in high heels and spring hats.

The Religious Right and Mainstream Gays, in fact, are far from strange bedfellows. As I also highlight in my book, when the Houston Gay Political Caucus was founded during the mid-seventies, it developed an extensive mailing list (eventually GPC would bring the margin of victory to the mayoral campaign of Kathy Whitmire).

Terry Dolan, who used to cruise the ship channel basin, joined GPC and worked on its computerized operation. He later met Richard Viguerie of the National Conservative Conference on a flight to Dallas and sold the software that formed the basis of Viguerie's soon-to-be-powerful mass mailing operation.

Although a number of session descriptions at this year's convention including the phrase "LGBT Community," the community represented was decidedly skewed to middle-class professionals; no drags or femmes, sex workers or leather boys, lesbian separatists or backcountry faeries need attend (or at least those personas were padlocked inside corporate closets).

Little, it seems, has changed from the late seventies when white-bread, middle-class men like David Goodstein of The Advocate and Bruce Voeller of NGTF employed the rhetoric of "community" to mobilize diverse queer groups, imposing an imagined unity that promoted their mainstream agenda and masked inequalities in voice and privilege.

A panel discussion during the gay journalists' convention

But this Our Town notion of a "gay [now GLBT] community" that arose from a Stonewall spirit and was energized by Hurricane Anita a generation ago exists only as a fanciful creation of mainstream activists, entrepreneurs, and the media. This imagined "community" is part of the homosexual agenda marrying the marketplace to the ballot box. From marketing thirteen-inch Gay Bob doll (with a penis) in the late seventies to this convention's sponsorship by corporations such as American Express that proclaimed "Committed Partners. Long-Term Relationships," the Stonewall spirit of sexual freedom and diversity has long been exorcised from the Movement. Perhaps the protesters marching along Akard Street sensed this demonic presence?

James T. Sears, Ph.D. is the author of the acclaimed history, Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South, published in July by Rutgers University Press. He is a visiting professor at Harvard University.