Gray Lady Down (27 page)

A lot of these lifestyle features deal with sex, often in a way that’s purposefully transgressive, even vulgar. In a feature on sex between clients and contractors in places like the Hamptons, “The
Allure of the Toolbelt,” Joyce Wadler described one local as saying that the client-contractor affairs are relatively safe: there is no need to worry when the contractor’s car is seen in a woman’s driveway in the middle of the afternoon. And client-contractor love, from what he’s seen, rarely threatens marriages because when the job is over, the affair is over.

A report on an upscale S&M store in Manhattan was headlined “My Other Riding Crop Is for My Horse.” The store, explained Alex Kuscinski, offered “leather restraints with lace insets, cupless bras (delicately renamed the ‘frame bra’ here), embossed leather paddles, braided leather whips, riding crops, silk bondage ropes and, of course, modernity’s most significant addition to the bedroom, the Sony DVD camcorder and lightweight tripod.” Many products were designed to “stimulate an extremely personal part of the body”; they were made from tempered glass, obsidian glass and titanium, and sold at prices ranging up to $1,750. These could be displayed on a coffee table as sculptural objects, Kuscinksi added helpfully, “but it would be difficult to explain when your mother came over for coffee.”

The queen of dubious trend stories on sex and romance is Stephanie Rosenbloom, author of a series of lifestyle features centered on
au courant
female sexuality. One was about “girl crushes,” referring to “that fervent infatuation that one heterosexual woman develops for another woman who may seem impossibly sophisticated, gifted, beautiful or accomplished.” Rosenbloom also wrote about “The Taming of the Slur,” on the increasing mainstream use of the word “slut,” a report that had all the gravitas of
Beverly Hills, 90210.
Perhaps her most absurd piece involved the etymology she produced for the word “vajayjay,” a slang term for vagina that originated on the television show
Grey’s Anatomy
and found its way to
Oprah
and
Jimmy Kimmel,
as well as the Web. According to Rosenbloom, the word’s emergence marked a certain feminist moment. She quoted an actress from
Grey’s Anatomy
saying, “It’s a word I use, a word my female friends use, a word I’ve heard women in the grocery store use. I don’t even think about where it came from anymore. It doesn’t belong to me or anyone at the show. It belongs to all women.”

For some, the vulgarity and desperate hipness have been too much. As Joseph Epstein put it in the
Weekly Standard
in 2010, the
New York Times’
traditional sobriquet, “the Gray Lady of American newspapers . . . implied a certain stateliness, a sense of responsibility, the possession of high virtue. But the Gray Lady is far from the
grande dame
she once was. For years now she has been going heavy on the rouge, lipstick, and eyeliner, using a push-up bra, and gadding about in stiletto heels. She’s become a bit—perhaps more than a bit—of a slut, whoring after youth through pretending to be with-it. I’ve had it with the old broad; after nearly 50 years together, I’ve determined to cut her loose.”

I
f some of the
Times’
lifestyle reporting seems almost tongue in cheek, its coverage of the gay world is in earnest. Whether it’s gay travel, gay entertainment, gay film, gay sex, gay adoption and parenting, or the ultimate
cause célèbre,
gay marriage, the
Times
brings a crusading voice to what it considers the civil rights movement of the day. Gay-themed stories appear in the paper routinely, sometimes three or four in a day. As Andrew Solomon, a gay author whose wedding was written up for the
Times
“Vows” column, put it, “The love that dared not speak its name is now broadcasting.”

Historically, the crusade is an outgrowth of what has been called the paper’s “Lavender Enlightenment,” which was
described back in 1992 in a lengthy piece by Michelangelo Signorile, a prominent gay columnist. The feature noted that it had been more than five years since the retirement of Abe Rosenthal, an editor “who ran his empire not unlike recent European despots.” Signorile charged that Rosenthal’s banning of the word “gay,” which he had considered overtly political, had held back the social movement. Rosenthal’s renowned homophobia also left gay men and women at the
Times
“immensely frightened and frustrated,” most of them remaining deep in the closet, barely acknowledging each other much less openly socializing. Those who were suspected of being gay often suffered in their careers, sent to unimportant dead-end bureaus and desks or even recalled from foreign postings if word of their sexual orientation leaked out.

The famous gay riot in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn hardly received the coverage such a now-mythic event should have earned. In fact, when eyewitnesses or rioters called the
Times
newsroom to report developments and police brutality, they were often shrugged off the phone. Neither would the
Times
take ads for
The Homosexual Handbook,
even after it had sold out its second printing of 50,000 copies.

Once Rosenthal retired in 1986, “the walls of repression came tumbling down,” staffers told Signorile. Rosenthal’s successor, Max Frankel, confessed, “I knew they’d had a hard time, and I knew they weren’t comfortable identifying themselves as gay.” But, he added, “I never dreamed that so many homosexuals were hiding in newsroom closets, awaiting the trumpet call.”

Frankel sent a major signal that things were going to be different almost immediately. “Punch, you’re going to have to swallow hard on this one,” Frankel told Sulzberger Sr., in a peculiar choice of words. “We’re going to start using the word ‘gay.’” Frankel’s efforts were given a boost by symbolic statements and gestures on the part of the publisher-in-waiting, Sulzberger Jr. According to Charles Kaiser, a former Rosenthal news clerk who is gay, “When he came in, gays in the newsroom lived in terror, and Arthur met them and took each of them to lunch and said, ‘What is it like to be gay here? When I take over, it will no longer be a problem.’”

In January 1992, two weeks after becoming the new publisher, Sulzberger Jr. held a meeting with the editorial staff in the newsroom, Signorile reported, and told them that “diversity” would be a priority at the paper. Eventually he blurted out the phrase “sexual orientation.” Gay staff members later said they almost fell off their chairs, since it was the first time that phrase had ever been used by a top
Times
executive.

According to Kaiser, Sulzberger’s efforts and the signals sent by other editors who took his cue translated into remaking the paper “from the most homophobic institution in America to the most gay-friendly institution.” No more fag jokes, people were told, and newsroom staff members with partners felt free to put pictures of them on their desks. It was a period of “vaulting consciousness,” wrote Frankel.

Another turning point was Frankel’s decision to allow Jeffrey Schmaltz to report on AIDS. Schmaltz was an AIDS victim himself, as was first revealed when he suffered an AIDS-related seizure in the
Times
newsroom in January 1990. When Schmaltz returned to work, he asked Frankel to put him on the AIDS beat and allow him to write subjectively about his disease. Frankel had qualms about the built-in conflict of interest and worried that Schmaltz’s reporting could lapse “into partisanship and sentimentality.” But the green light was flashed and Schmaltz produced first-person stories for the Sunday magazine and for the Week in Review. “His scoops were the rarest kind,” Frankel wrote. “He was always as accurate, sharp and honest as we had a right to expect and obviously labored to restrain his emotions.” When Schmaltz died in 1993, Frankel told the obituary writer that he had left “a remarkable bequest to American journalism.” In his memoir, Frankel heralded Schmaltz as “the agent of our ultimate enlightenment.”

Frankel’s successor, Joseph Lelyveld, brought in an openly gay editor, Adam Moss, to consult on a variety of issues related to attracting a younger, hipper readership, with an emphasis on homosexuals. Moss took a leading role in creating and editing the first (and ill-fated) Sunday Style section, characterized by a
campy, ironic tone and an in-your-face gay candor. The paper also emphasized the hiring and promoting of openly gay reporters and editors. By 2000, the institutional hospitality to gay values had grown so warm that Richard Berke, then a Washington reporter, could tell members of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association that “literally, three-quarters of the people deciding what’s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals.” In 2002, Moss got up at a media panel discussion in Lower Manhattan and declared that he basically edited “a gay magazine,” at least in terms of its dominant sensibility. Some in New York media circles began referring to the
Times
as “The Pink Lady.”

The opening up of news space and editorials to previously slighted subjects related to homosexuality in America is to be applauded, as is the basic respect and career advancement afforded to gay journalists, who no longer have to fear being “out” or “outed” at the
Times.
But looking at the last twenty years of the
Times
in terms of integrity in the coverage of gay issues, there is less to be happy about. On almost every gay-related topic you can name, the
Times
has lost all pretense of objectivity, instead assuming a crusading stance and showing an impulse to deconstruct traditional morality and family structure.

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.”