Gray Lady Down (28 page)

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.”