EASY BABIES | BECK | THE LINCOLN OBSESSION
THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE
DECEMBER 9, 2012
COPS AND THE PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
A RADICAL EXPERIMENT IN POLICING
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12.09.12 #26 CONTENTS
Enter POINTERS: The Royal Baby, Sandy Money, Serial Killer Homework MOVING IMAGE: The Week in Photos LIVE Q&A: Alan Cumming
Voices LISA BELKIN: Please Stop Saying Your Baby Is ‘Easy’
TOP TO BOTTOM: ANTONIO BOLFO/GETTY IMAGES REPORTAGE; AP PHOTO/MARK LENNIHAN
ALLAN BRAWLEY: Does ‘Capitalism With a Conscience’ Work?
OUT OF TOWN COPS BY JOHN RUDOLF
NIKOLAS BADMINTON: Who’s in Charge of Social Media Privacy? QUOTED
Exit MUSIC: Dan Deacon and Beck in Conversation CULTURE: The Greatest Lincoln Since Lincoln GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK: Lauren Luckey TFU
COMING OUT AT THE TIMES BY MICHELANGELO SIGNORILE
FROM THE EDITOR: Policing the Streets and Policing The Times ON THE COVER: Photograph by
Antonio Bolfo for Huffington.
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
Policing the Streets and Policing The Times N THIS WEEK’S Huffington, John Rudolf examines a plan that would revamp the police force in Camden, New Jersey, a crime-ridden city that routinely tops the FBI’s list of most dangerous places. Residents and city officials agree that Camden needs a big change: in addition to suffering from widespread crime that terrorizes the population and demoralizes the police officers who try to contain it, Camden is the most
ART STREIBER
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impoverished city in the country. Forty-two percent of residents live below the poverty line. To reverse these trends, local leaders — including the city council and Gov. Chris Christie — have proposed a radical and controversial plan. Rather than improve the existing Camden Police Department, they want to replace it entirely — an approach that entails firing the existing police force. Opposition is fierce, though unlikely to stop the creation of a new force, which will be called the Camden Metro Division. Camden’s cops feel embittered
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
and abandoned by the community they’ve been trying to protect. “We risk our lives every day,” one cop tells Rudolf. “And this is what you get in return. See you later and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” And while Camden’s cops will be able to apply for the new force, many say the approach is flawed, since the Metro Division plans to hire cops — at much lower salaries — from outside New Jersey, which could enflame tensions in already-simmering neighborhoods. As James Harris, president of the New Jersey NAACP, put it: “Do not eliminate the Camden Police Department. Find ways of improving it, but do not eliminate it.” Elsewhere in the issue Michelangelo Signorile looks back at an article he wrote 20 years ago for The Advocate, “Out at The New York Times: Gays, Lesbians, AIDS and Homophobia Inside America’s Newspaper of Record.” It began with Signorile’s interview with the paper’s assistant national editor Jeff Schmalz, the first Times staffer to come out as gay and reveal that he had AIDS. Then Arthur Suzlberger, Jr. and top editors including Max Frankel and Joseph Lelyveld
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
spoke on the record, ending the paper’s culture of silence on gay issues and confronting its inadequate AIDS coverage. This shift had reverberations far beyond the paper’s offices. As Signorile writes in his new in-
‘We risk our lives every day,’ one cop tells Rudolf. ‘And this is what you get in return. See you later and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.’” troduction to the original article, the paper’s “negligence on AIDS early on had a detrimental effect on bringing in-depth, life-saving attention to an epidemic that had been callously ignored by political leaders and sensationalized by other media.” And confronting gay issues actually helped propel the paper to a new level of journalistic integrity: “The Times became a leader on coverage of LGBT issues as well as a leader among media companies.”
ARIANNA
POINTERS
AP PHOTO/RICK RYCROFT
Enter
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
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DUCHESS OF CAMBRIDGE STEALS HEADLINES
The media erupted into a frenzy this week upon hearing the news that Kate Middleton is pregnant. It instantaneously made front-page headlines and experts began predicting which name the couple would choose — some suggested Alice or Caroline for a girl, and Arthur or Frederick for a boy. Twitter enthusiasts even created parody accounts for Middleton’s fetus, with one remarking, “The Pope joined Twitter? Way to steal my thunder. #RoyalBaby.”
Enter
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FROM TOP: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE; AP PHOTO/ERIK SCHELZIG
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POINTERS
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OBAMA TO ASSAD: ‘THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES’
Obama gave a stern warning to Syrian President Bashar Assad not to use his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, after U.S. intelligence reported the Assad regime may be preparing the weapons for action. “Today I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad and those under his command: The world is watching,” Obama said. “And if you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons, there will be consequences.”
CUOMO REQUESTS BILLIONS FOR SANDY CLEANUP
In the midst of battles in Washington over the “fiscal cliff,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo asked the federal government for nearly $42 billion to help with Sandy relief efforts. Cuomo wants $32.8 billion for storm cleanup and $9 billion to help NYC prepare for future storms. He released a joint statement with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is requesting more than $35 billion in aid. “We need the full funding for our aid to arrive, hopefully before the end of the year,” they said.
CONGRESSMAN’S FUNDRAISING ABILITY TAKES A BEATING
Rep. Scott DesJarlais, a Tennessee Republican and doctor, managed to win reelection despite reports that he had an affair with one of his patients and pushed the woman to terminate her pregnancy. But at least six political action committees affiliated with the medical industry are now turning their backs on the congressman, saying he should not count on their donations in 2014. The groups contributed $71,000 to his campaign.
Enter
5
POINTERS
COULD ASHLEY JUDD RUN FOR SENATE?
Ashley Judd is reportedly considering a campaign against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The chairman of the Kentucky Democratic Party said he heard that Judd, who has deep Kentucky roots, is “seriously” weighing a challenge, Politico reported. But Judd’s grandma recently said she doesn’t “think there’s any possibility of that happening.”
STUDENTS TASKED WITH DRAWING ‘SERIAL KILLER’S DREAM HOUSE’ A ninth-grade teacher in Australia gave
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FROM TOP: PAUL MORIGI/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; DAVID LOHR
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students an assignment that required them to complete 10 activities related to serial killers, such as drawing “a cartoon panel about how your serial killer murdered someone” and drawing “a floor plan of what you think a serial killer’s dream house looks like.” The school principal promptly canceled it and offered counseling to the students.
THAT’S VIRAL THIS NYPD COP WILL WARM YOUR HEART
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
HARVARD GETS A BDSM CLUB
HOW TO SCARE ANYONE
SINKHOLE DEVOURS FOUR FOOTBALL FIELDS OF LAND
FIGHTING OBAMACARE COST PAPA JOHN’S ITS REPUTATION
Enter
The Week in Photos From Australia to Syria, ahead find our selections of this week’s most compelling images.
ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
Washington D.C. 11.30.2012 Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner arrives at a news conference to respond to President Obama about the fiscal cliff. “There is a stalemate,” he said. “Let’s not kid ourselves.” PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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CHINAFOTOPRESS/CHINAFOTOPRESS VIA GETTY IMAGES
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Chongqing, China 11.27.2012 Thousands of students apply for jobs during a three-day fair at the Chongqing Exhibition Center, which hosts nearly 1,000 firms offering more than 10,000 jobs altogether. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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AP PHOTO/MOHAMMED BALLAS
West Bank, Palestinian Territories 11.30.2012 A Christian Palestinian youth hangs a flag on a cross at St. George Melkite Greek Catholic Church after the Palestinian Authority was upgraded to a nonmember observer state by the UN General Assembly. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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ALAN CROWHURST/GETTY IMAGES
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Newbury, England 11.29.2012 Runners at Newbury Racecourse take the water jump in The Burges Salmon Novices’ Limited Handicap Steeple Chase. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Enter Salisbury, England 12.1.2012
MATT CARDY/GETTY IMAGES
This combination of two images is shot using multiple long exposure of the Salisbury Cathedral during the “darkness to light” Advent Procession. The interior of the cathedral starts off in total darkness until the Advent candle is lit, kicking off the Christmas season.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Sydney, Australia 11.30.2012 A man dives off of Manly Wharf in Sydney, where summer is in full swing. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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GIANLUIGI GUERCIA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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Cairo, Egypt 11.30.2012 A man delivers a speech as people gather in Tahrir Square to protest a decree by President Morsi granting himself powers that shield his decisions from judicial review. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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ULET IFANSASTI/GETTY IMAGES
Yogyakarta, Indonesia 12.1.2012 Papuan protesters wear traditional costumes as they display the Morning Star flag, demanding recognition of West Papua as an independent nation by Indonesia and the global community. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Nanjing, China 11.29.2012
CHINAFOTOPRESS VIA GETTY IMAGES
A bus sits trapped in a huge hole after a cave-in on East Zhongshan Road, where a subway station is under construction.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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ATISHAPAULSON.COM
New York, New York 11.27.2012 A view of Yvette Mattern’s threeday laser light installation, “Global Rainbow, After the Storm” from atop the Standard Hotel. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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JAMIE SQUIRE/GETTY IMAGES
Kansas City, Missouri 12.2.2012 Players huddle in prayer following the Kansas City Chiefs 27-21 victory over the Carolina Panthers, a day after Chiefs’ linebacker Jovan Belcher murdered his girlfriend and committed suicide. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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AP PHOTO/NARCISO CONTRERAS
Aleppo. Syria 11.29.2012 Night falls on Sa’ar street, a Syrian rebelcontrolled area. Airstrikes targeted the area last week, killing dozens and destroying buildings, including Dar Al-Shifa hospital (pictured). PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Q&A
FROM TOP: DONATO SARDELLA/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF MUSIC BOX FILMS.
Enter
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
Alan Cumming on the Obstacles to Adopting as a Gay Couple “There’s just prejudice against gay people, it’s still going on. We think we have made great strides, but we are second-class citizens.”
Above: Cumming in October 2012. Below: Garret Dillahunt (left) and Cumming (right) star as a gay couple fighting to get custody of a mentally disabled teen in Any Day Now.
FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE
Voices
LISA BELKIN
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
JEMAL COUNTESS/GETTY IMAGES FOR TIME INC.
Please Stop Saying Your Baby Is ‘Easy’ DEAR MARISSA MAYER, So, your “baby’s been easy”? That’s what you said last month while being honored as one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, right? “The baby’s been way easier than everyone made it out to be.” Please stop saying things like that. We are happy for you. Really, we are. Two-month-old Macallister is adorable, and your fellow members of the new-mom club wish you nothing but the best. And we are rooting for you. Truly. Working mothers everywhere understand that you’re breaking ceilings as the first to give birth while heading a Fortune 500 company. We want you to prove that pregnan-
cy and childbirth are not incompatible with, ya know, thought. But we admit to mixed feelings. Putting “baby” and “easy” in the same sentence turns you into one of those mothers we don’t like very much. When you do, it makes us feel (more) inadequate; starts us wondering (again) what we are doing wrong. We believe you when you say your baby is easy. Some babies are easy. (Or so we are told.) Sometimes easy babies stay that way even after their mothers dare to tempt fate and talk about their easiness aloud. But sometimes these easy babies go to bed like angels and wake up like demons who can’t be soothed unless you
Lisa Belkin is The Huffington Post’s senior columnist on life, work and family. ABOVE: Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer.
Voices sing Barry Manilow nonstop while bouncing on one foot while your hip is pressed against the dryer. (Hypothetically.) That sometimes happens at about two months. How old is Macallister again? We are not saying this will happen to you. We don’t wish you any problems, just as we don’t really wish bad things for the woman in Mommy and Me whose jeans are a size smaller than before she gave birth. It would be petty of us to hold that against anyone. It’s not your fault you are one of the lucky ones. You already knew that about yourself — that’s why you were so sure you could work through a maternity leave so short that many other new mothers wouldn’t have enough time to take a shower. After all, being extraordinary is what got you where you are. That worries those of us who are just ordinary, because it’s not just the women for whom work and motherhood is “easy” who should have a shot at the top. It’s the women for whom it is messy, and daunting, and hard. Women who need more than two weeks of maternity leave. Who are dynamite at what they do, but who don’t necessarily take the rocket-powered route
LISA BELKIN
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
toward doing it, because they work for companies who understand that careers don’t have to be linear. Yes, we understand this is partly our fault. You didn’t ask us to watch your every move. You never declared yourself the standard in working mommydom. It’s just that we don’t have a lot of other pregnant Fortune 500 superstars to look to, so we held you up as a role model, and now
Putting ‘baby’ and ‘easy’ in the same sentence makes us feel (more) inadequate; starts us wondering (again) what we are doing wrong.” we worry that you’re modeling the wrong thing. When there are dozens more of you, we will probably stop paying attention. Until then, you said you’ve decided to stop telling us quite so much. “I haven’t been talking,” you said, of how you juggle life and work, “and I’m going to go back to not talking.” That will probably be best. But should that boy get colicky, we would be more than happy to give you some advice.
ALLAN BRAWLEY
Voices
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
Does ‘Capitalism With a Conscience’ Work?
A
S WE NEAR the end of 2012, which corporate enterprises are the most profitable — those that relentlessly chase ever higher quarterly stock growth and reward their top executives lavishly for doing so? Apparently not. It turns out that bottom-line driven entities lag way behind many well-known and highly respected companies that operate on an entirely different model. We are not talking about community cooperatives, farmers’ markets, or mom-and-pop small businesses. We are talking about Whole Foods Markets, Wegmans, New Balance and the ubiquitous — and everyone’s favorite neighborhood gathering spot — Starbucks. ¶ None of these enterprises invests in huge advertising campaigns — you won’t see multi-million dollar spots on primetime TV or elsewhere for that matter.
Allan Brawley is professor emeritus of social work at Arizona State University
KEVIN LEE/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Voices However, they have generated exceptionally high customer loyalty, as well as remarkable stockholder return on investment that substantially exceeds that produced by those corporate entities that are focused exclusively on shortterm growth and profit. So, what is going on here? Well, it turns out that they are engaged in a type of capitalism that is not obsessed with ever increasing stock prices above and beyond everything else. Of course, they want to be profitable and reward their stockholders accordingly. But that is not the be-all and endall of their existence. Stockholders are only one set of stakeholders, as these companies see it. Employees, at all levels, are also important stakeholders, as are the specific communities in which they operate. This is not simply a calculated strategy to make employees and other stakeholders feel good about the company, but a deliberate decision to act contrary to the prevailing practices of modern corporate capitalism. For example, they pay their workers more than their competitors and empower them by inviting their contribution to company decision-making. The insights gathered at the checkout
ALLAN BRAWLEY
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
counter, stockroom, and everywhere else are actively solicited. And, they devote as much attention to the needs of the communities in which they are located as they do to the interests of their stockholders. Are Starbucks and the rest some kind of cooperative, employee-owned enterprise, as many They of the Silicon Valpay their ley start-ups were in workers more their early days? Not than their really, although they competitors share some imporand empower tant characteristics, them by such as a relatively inviting their flat organizational contribution chart, peer-driven to company decision-making and decisionan equitable reward system. However, like making.� their more traditional competitors, they are owned by their stockholders. And how have their stockholders fared relative to their competitors? Very well, it turns out. As science writer and media theorist Steven Johnson reports in “Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age,� these stakeholder-driven companies outperformed their competition to an astonishing degree over a
Voices recent 10-year period: “The public stakeholder firms... generated a 1,026 percent return for their investors, compared with the S&P 500’s 122 percent return. By refusing to focus on maximizing shareholder value, they... created eight times more value for their shareholders.” And how did they manage this? First of all, they rejected the extremely hierarchical organizational model that characterizes the typical large corporation today where CEOs and other senior officials behave like latter-day royalty whose word is law and who require obscene amounts of money and larger and larger private jets, yachts and the like to meet their insatiable need for affirmation. Incidentally, the stockholders of these companies are not the ones feeding this unending greed — it is the result of a deliberately created system of interlocking company directorships whose members reward each other regardless of the merit of such actions. This behavior, accompanied by raceto-the-bottom wages for most everyone else, and the ability of these corporate entities to rig the tax system to their advantage, has played a major role in the wealth
ALLAN BRAWLEY
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
and income gaps that have grown so dramatically — and dangerously — over the last couple of decades. The alternative model — which Whole Foods CEO John Mackey calls “conscious capitalism” — rejects all the trappings of No one corporate excess, inat Whole cluding extravagant Foods earns compensation packmore than ages for top execu19 times the tives, private jets and amount paid the rest. Instead, it the average embraces a philosophy of fairness in worker, in compensation for all contrast with employees, includthe 400-toing complete trans1 ratio that’s parency about what developed everyone earns. As a for the U.S. consequence, no one as a whole.” at Whole Foods earns more than 19 times the amount paid to the average worker. This is in marked contrast with the 400-to-1 ratio that has developed in recent years for the U. S. as a whole. It turns out that doing the right thing for your employees, your community, and other stakeholders not only demonstrates capitalism with a conscience; it is also good for business.
Voices
NIKOLAS BADMINTON
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
Who’s in Charge of Social Media Privacy? IT WAS ANOTHER QUIET DAY in social media. The Instagram photo birds were chirping with their songs of plated food and epic sunsets, Twitter was twittering, MySpace was sleeping, YouTube was bouncing with self-promotion and Facebook was humming with
ILLUSTRATION BY MARTIN GEE
the statuses of the world. Then, KAPOW! Shock horror, Facebook privacy concerns. My feed was filled with frantic reposting of a status: “In response to the new Facebook guidelines, I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to
Nikolas Badminton is a digital strategist in Vancouver
Voices all of my personal details, illustrations, comics, paintings, professional photos and videos, etc. (as a result of the Berner Convention). For commercial use of the above my written consent is needed at all times!” Oh no, what do I do? How do I react? Should I repost? Wait a minute. When in my life have I ever managed to adjust a contract I go into with any company with a ham-fisted status update? So I waited, and it became obvious that it was a fake. The collective eggs on faces were wiped away and the social universe was back to its dull hum of activity. But I began pondering, who is really in charge of privacy on the Internet? Is it the social networks? A lot of people think so, but I have arrived at a slightly different perspective on this. So many of us are willingly sharing images, videos, text updates and geo-locations that I personally think the responsibility lives with all of us. Imagine if we were all to stop. Imagine if we wiped our profiles clean and just went back to plain old email. “That’s so 2004!” I hear you cry. Well, yes it is. But isn’t it a much more private life? Okay, back to today. Parents,
NIKOLAS BADMINTON
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
I set you a task. Take a picture of your family and kids, write an email with details about the pictures, add the email addresses of all the people in the pictures and email 300 of your friends, work colleagues, people you went to school with years ago and those random folk you can’t quite place, attach the images and then send them. How do you feel? Does it
Imagine if we wiped our profiles clean and went back to plain old email. ‘That’s so 2004’ you cry. But isn’t it a much more private life?” feel right? Would you do it? If the answer is no then you need to seriously reconsider your social media habits. In 2012, we have all fallen victim to viral mimetic behaviors that popular social networks have groomed us to undertake. We upload content so often that we do not consider the implications, invaded privacy and exploitation of data. All of your data will be used as a business advantage to allow for advertising to be targeted at you. Okay, let’s delete everything,
Voices that should stop the craziness. Well, that may not help. About 12 months ago an Austrian student named Max Schrems asked Facebook for a record of all personal data they held on him. He received 1,222 pages of it on DVDs, and much of it was information that he thought he had deleted. Austria and much of Europe’s data storage laws are very tight about historical data and ownership. He thought that data should be deleted when he deleted it. So do many other people these days. Jaron Lanier, an Internet pioneer from the early 1990s, talks about a “social contract” where the new “open data culture” and thinking that “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising. This is what we have become, and we are responsible for stopping it. If we choose to partake then we
NIKOLAS BADMINTON
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
need to stop complaining and get into bed with every large brand that markets relentlessly to us. I have written this piece with full knowledge that my contributions to my social network have an impact on me and those around me. I know I will be targeted with ads on social networks and I learn much about myself
Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising. This is what we have become, and we are responsible for stopping it.” from that (mostly that targeting is pretty useless). I implore you to ask yourself, “am I fully aware of what my actions mean?” and if not then please try and make sense of the terms and conditions of the numerous social networks you belong to. One should choose wisely what one shares and accept the fate one has chosen. If you take the higher ground and choose more traditional methods of communication then I applaud you and support you in your digital detox.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; ED JONES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/NASSER NASSER
Voices
QUOTED
“ It’s as though the ‘War on Christmas’ has become a rote observance, devoid of all its original spiritual meaning.” —Jon Stewart,
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“ This is the greatest part of free speech. To be able to write something so ridiculously absurd and have a corrupt, third-world dictator’s flack pick it up as something to cheer, THAT my friend, is pure gold.”
—Huffpost commenter A_1_Percenter,
on a Chinese newspaper believing an Onion article naming Kim Jong Un “Sexiest Man Alive”
on FOX News’ annual defense of the holiday
“ Freedom or we die.” — the Egyptian people, chanting in unison as they marched to the presidential palace to protest President Morsi’s latest decrees, giving himself nearly unrestricted powers
“ FINALLY, a scientific reason not to like my in-laws. It’s for the SAKE of my marriage.”
—Huffpost commenter quelago, on a study gauging how in-laws can affect a marriage’s success
Voices
QUOTED
Unlike tobacco, marijuana is easy to grow and thus hard to tax. Hence governments will always balk at legalization.
—Huffpost commenter Ramseytwo on the Illinois medical marijuana vote
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
“ Two and a Half Men is terrible, chauvinistic and poorly written. So is the bible.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP/GETTYIMAGES; JASON LAVERIS/FILMMAGIC/GETTY IMAGES; WILLIAM B. PLOWMAN/NBC/NBC NEWSWIRE VIA GETTY IMAGES; GARY GERSHOFF/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES
—Huffpost commenter yourgodcantsaveyou, on Two And A Half Men star Angus T. Jones calling the show ‘filth’ and urging viewers to stop watching
“ I still feel the stress over ‘Am I thin enough? Am I too thin? Is my body the right shape?’... It’s an ongoing source of shame for me.” — Anne Hathaway to Glamour
“ Tea Party Two is going to dwarf Tea Party One if Obama pushes us off the cliff.”
– Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, during a Sunday roundtable discussion on NBC’s Meet The Press
ANTONIO BOLFO/GETTY IMAGES REPORTAGE
12.09.12 #26 FEATURES OUT OF TOWN COPS
COMING OUT AT THE TIMES
THE PRICE OF URBAN SAFETY
O
A Camden police officer inspects an abandoned building looking for squatters, prostitutes and drug dealers.
CAMDEN, N.J.
GETTY IMAGES REPORTAGE
ON A COLD AUTUMN NIGHT, Darran Johnson, 22, stands by the police tape strung between two trees in the housing complex where he lives with his mom and siblings. On a walkway 20 feet away, a middle-aged man lies dead, shot in the throat and head, sprawled on his back beside a battered 10-speed bicycle. His face is masked in blood that gleams bright red in the crime scene photographer’s flash. ¶ Johnson watches tight-lipped as investigators comb the grass for shell casings. “Kids play out here. Average people live here,” he says. “I’m shaking. It’s getting too close.” ¶ Gunfire rings out often in the neighborhood, he says, a regular remind-
By JOHN RUDOLF Photographs by ANTONIO BOLFO
er of the crime wave that has this city of 77,000 on pace to double its homicides in just three years, and has already shattered a nearly 20-year record for killings. With 64 homicides so far this year, the murder rate is on par with levels seen in Haiti in the chaotic aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. “A bullet has no name. If somebody shoots and I’m walking, I could be hit,” Johnson says. “People are afraid right now. You can see it in their faces.” The crime surge coincides with
new census data identifying Camden, long battered by vanishing industry, as the most impoverished city in the U.S., with 42 percent of residents under the poverty line, and an average family income of $21,191. If trends persist, Camden may soon hold the grim title of both the country’s poorest and most dangerous city. As residents decry the violence, local leaders are readying a radical plan that they call the only practical solution at hand to calm the streets: the dismantling of the Camden Police Department and the outsourcing of policing to a new, cheaper force run by the county
Rows of rundown, abandoned buildings and houses in Camden.
OUT OF TOWN COPS
government, to be called the Camden Metro Division. They say the closure of the 141-year-old department and the creation of a new agency is necessary because the existing union-negotiated police contract is no longer sustainable in a time of deep budget deficits. The plan was sold to Camden residents as a security fix: by firing the existing police force, they were told, millions of savings would be redirected into hiring about 130 new uniformed officers — a 50 percent increase over current staffing.
HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
“ A BULLET HAS NO NAME. IF SOMEBODY SHOOTS AND I’M WALKING, I COULD BE HIT.” “It’s time to reject the status quo and ramp this police department up to a level that it needs,” Louis Capelli, director of the Camden County Board of Freeholders, which would control the metro agency, tells The Huffington Post. City and county leaders approved the plan last year, and it
Camden was recently identified as the most impoverished city in the U.S.
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cleared major legal hurdles this summer, opening the way for full implementation. Applications are being accepted for the new force, and training for the first group of hires will begin in November, according to Dan Keashen, a county spokesman. As early as next March, the old police department will be shut down for good. Other Camden County cities have been invited to join the new department, but none have shown interest yet. On the surface, the shift to a county-run force resembles efforts in other cities around the
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country to save money by merging departments and regionalizing police services. But several experts say there are few specific parallels with the Camden plan, which involves a densely populated, high-crime city, and will not include any actual merger
A woman is arrested for buying and possessing crack cocaine.
OUT OF TOWN COPS
between police departments. “I don’t know that this has been done before,” says Louis Tuthill, a criminal justice professor at Rutgers University. “I have never heard of it.” Some see the move to shut down the Camden Police Depart-
“ EVERY COP IN AMERICA SHOULD WORRY ABOUT WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CAMDEN.” ment and shift to a cheaper county-run model as a frontal attack on public safety unions. They warn the same strategy may soon be used to extract concessions from cops and firefighters across New Jersey, and ultimately the country. “This is not a policing strategy. This is something more sinister,” says Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “Every cop
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in America should worry about what’s happening in Camden.” Backing the plan are Camden’s mayor and six of seven city council members — all Democrats — together with the Democraticcontrolled Camden County Board of Freeholders, which represents the county’s 400,000 residents. Those involved say New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie has also been a crucial force behind the proposal. In interviews and town hall meetings over the past two years, Christie has repeatedly denounced the Camden police contract as “obscene” and described the county police plan as a common-sense measure to bring down public safety costs during tough economic times. “The taxpayers of New Jersey aren’t going pay any more for Camden’s excesses,” Christie said in a 2011 interview on MSNBC, as the police plan began gathering steam. Christie has unique leverage to drive the plan, as the city of Camden relies on roughly $60 million in emergency state aid every year to close deep structural budget deficits and provide basic city services. According to local leaders, Christie threatened to slash this aid in the absence of major reforms. Since Christie has veto power over much of Camden’s budget, the threat carried
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weight. Chief among the governor’s concerns was the structure of the policing contract, says Ian Leonard, a member of the Board of Freeholders. “The governor’s saying this is too expensive,” Leonard says. “And when someone else is writing the checks to you, you know, he or she — as my mother used to say — who holds the pen holds the power.” To drive the plan forward, its
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backers have gone on the offensive, depicting the existing police contract as laden with extravagant perks negotiated by the union in better days and out of step with the current hard times. They say they have identified between $14 million to $16 million in savings to be had by cutting out wasteful “fringe” pay from $60 million in annual police spending in the city. “Previous administrations, they gave the store away,” Capelli says. Keashen, the Camden County spokesman, provided HuffPost
An officer makes the rounds, checking for any illegal activity in one the city’s many deserted residences.
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with a one-page email briefly outlining how the $14 million to $16 million in savings would be achieved. According to the outline, fringe pay — which includes pension and health care benefits — will cost the county roughly $25 million in 2012. Under the new county plan, nearly 65 percent of this spending will be eliminated. The outline did not break down the specific spending categories that would be targeted for savings, however. And further detail on the finances of the plan is not avail-
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able to the public, Keashen says. Under the terms of the plan, the city of Camden’s remaining cops will all receive layoff notices within the next few weeks. At the same time, they have the option to apply for a new job with the county-run force, though they have no guarantee of employment. And under the city and county’s interpretation of state labor law, only 49 percent of current officers will be eligible for hire with the new force. It is a harsh calculus for a department that already suffered sweeping layoffs in 2010 as a result of a steep budget deficit. But city leaders say it is the only way forward.
An officer in the K-9 unit uses his dog to search for drugs.
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“We’ve been encouraging officers to move over, get ready for the new paradigm,” Camden Mayor Dana Redd tells HuffPost. “This is the way we’re going.”
‘THE NUMBERS DON’T ADD UP’
Even as city and county leaders call the metro agency a done deal, it faces a growing outcry from critics who assail it as a harsh experiment in public sector unionbusting and say it’s being forced on New Jersey’s most economically vulnerable population by state power brokers with little interest in Camden’s well-being. They say the plan was crafted in secrecy and that basic information about the current police department’s finances, and budgeting for the new agency, have never been provided to the public. Other critics focus on the county’s plan to replace seasoned officers with new recruits, with some community activists warning that an influx of young officers from outside the city could spark unrest on the streets. The perception that older cops are being discarded as a cost-saving maneuver has also deeply em-
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bittered many in the department’s ranks, officers say. “I might not have a job in a couple of months, after risking my life for years,” says one veteran cop, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears retaliation by his superiors. Brian Coleman, the only Camden councilman to oppose the metro plan, says he has tried to get a full accounting of the police department’s current spending from city
“WOULD YOU BUY A CAR SIGHT UNSEEN? THIS DEAL IS NOT BEING CONDUCTED OUT IN THE OPEN.” hall, but he’s had no success. The finances of the new police agency have never been provided to the public or discussed in detail by the city council, Coleman says. “I’ve asked for an explanation and requested documents, but they haven’t turned them over,” he says. “The numbers don’t add up. That’s why they don’t release them.” Brendan O’Flaherty, a Columbia University economics professor who specializes in urban finance, reviewed the one-page
Brian Coleman, the only Camden councilman to oppose the metro plan, is seen at City Hall.
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financial summary provided by the county to HuffPost and calls it “incomprehensible.” “I don’t see how anybody could have made an intelligent decision on this based on the information they’ve shared,” he says. “It’s a serious breach of normal standards of transparency.” Without a detailed financial breakdown of current spending or of the budgeting of the new metro agency, it is impossible to verify even the most basic claims being made about the proposal, says O’Donnell.
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“They’re doing this under cover of darkness,” he says. “It’s beyond belief. This can’t be anything less than a scandal.” Kevin Roberts, a spokesman for Christie, says the governor “fully supports” the policing plan. He declined to comment on questions about the plan’s finances or on issues of transparency. “Those specific questions about the savings estimates and breakdown are best directed to the county and/or city,” Roberts said in an email. At a press conference in September, Christie praised the Camden plan and called it a model for the rest of the state, according to
Crosses honor the memory of those who were murdered in Camden this past year.
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a transcript of comments provided by the governor’s office. “I think this should be a wave of the future in places that are challenged like this, and so we’re certainly going to be full partners in it,” Christie said. According to Keashen, the county spokesman, the governor’s office is currently in negotiations to provide about $5 million in start-up funds for the new metro agency. Those negotiations are in
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their final stages, he says. As the plan grows nearer to reality, any chance for a smooth transition between the two agencies appears increasingly dim. The Camden Fraternal Order of Police, the city’s police union, is fiercely resisting the creation of the metro agency. Its president, John Williamson, continues to blast city and county leaders for what he calls a shameless attempt to crush the union and strip away rights earned through decades of collective bargaining. “Would you buy a car sight un-
John Williamson, president of the Camden Fraternal Order of Police, meets with community leaders and the NAACP.
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seen?” Williamson asks. “This deal is not being conducted out in the open. And the math just doesn’t add up.” County officials reject the allegation that the plan’s finances are shaky, and maintain that the metro agency’s budget is simply not ready for public consumption. “We’re not going to go live with a budget until it’s completely done,” Keashen says. “You’ll see at the end of the day that the numbers add up.” Efforts to block the county plan have all faltered, including a drive in 2011 to place the new police plan up to public vote. Petitioners gathered enough signatures to put the initiative on the ballot, but the city sued to have it thrown out and prevailed in state court. Opponents of the metro police plan continue to fight, however, with a new focus on building public pressure to force the city back to the negotiating table, and to forge a compromise that will save the old department. They gained a major ally in this battle in late October, when James Harris, president of the New Jersey NAACP, appeared at a press conference called by the Camden police union.
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In brief remarks, Harris denounced the plan to disband the Camden Police Department as “wrong” and “unjust,” and pledged his organization’s full support. “The NAACP will use all of our resources to stay on this issue and to bring national attention to the disrespect and the unreasonable approach to bringing about police reform in the city of Camden,” Harris said. “Do not eliminate the Camden Police Department. Find
The police union in Camden is against the creation of the Metro Division.
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ways of improving it, but do not eliminate it,” he said.
‘A WAR ZONE’
At the heart of the battle over the policing plan are Camden’s 267 cops, who face the imminent loss of their jobs, even as they contend with a city that seems to some to be spinning out of control. Times were not always so tough in Camden, which sits on the banks of the Delaware River, across the water from Philadelphia. As recently as the 1960s, the city was an industrial powerhouse, with dozens of major factories employing thousands of residents. With a population nearly 70 percent higher than today, crime was just a fraction of its current rate. But in 1971, long-simmering racial strife exploded into riots, accelerating the flow of middleclass whites to the suburbs. Factories closed down, taking with them about 60,000 manufacturing jobs, part of a wave of deindustrialization that hollowed out the economic heart of cities across the county. As the economy tanked, crime soared. It has remained that way for decades, making Camden among the toughest beats in all of lo-
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cal law enforcement, often topping the FBI’s annual list of most dangerous cities. Today, thousands of abandoned homes blight the streets, their porches often doubling as tombstones, with spray-painted tributes to murder victims. Across broad quarters of the city, drug
“ SOME PARTS OF THIS PLACE ARE A WAR ZONE. MY FRIEND OPENED UP A FREEZER AND SAW A KID’S HEAD LOOKING BACK AT HIM.” dealers and prostitutes roost on stoops and street corners, scattering only for a moment at the approach of a police cruiser. The intensity of police work in Camden can reach almost unimaginable levels. Just this September, officers handled two grisly crimes involving children that made national news. In one, a mother high on PCP decapitated her 2-year-old son, then called police to report the crime. Weeks later, a young man, also high on PCP, broke into a Camden home and stabbed a 6-year-old boy to death and sav-
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“ WE’VE BEEN ENCOURAGING OFFICERS TO MOVE OVER, GET READY FOR THE NEW PARADIGM.” agely assaulted his 12-year-old sister. Uniformed police apprehended the killer after an intensive manhunt. Several current Camden officers spoke about their situation with HuffPost on condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation by their superiors. They describe a department crumbling from within, whose demoralized officers feel abandoned by the city they pledged to protect. Bitterness runs deep over what they feel is a long-running campaign by city and county officials to paint Camden’s cops as ineffective, unreliable and over-compensated. “Camden is not a joke. Some parts of this place are a war zone,” says one officer. “My friend opened up a freezer and saw a kid’s head looking back at him. He’s got to live with that the rest of his life.” “We risk our lives every day. And this is what you get in return,” he says. “See you later and
don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” Another veteran officer warns that replacing seasoned Camden cops with large numbers of inexperienced, lower-paid recruits — as the metro plan envisions — is a recipe for disaster. He scoffs at a recent comment by Capelli, the Board of Freeholders director, announcing that the new agency had received more than 1,000 applications, including some from states as distant as Alabama. “They’re going to be thrown to the wolves,” he says. “If some outsider from Alabama comes in and shoots a kid, it’s a potential for some civil unrest.” In August, county leaders announced that Camden police Chief Scott Thomson would lead the metro agency once the existing force was disbanded. For months, Thomson has spoken out in favor of the new agency — while leveling harsh criticism at members of his current force, saying it is plagued by absenteeism. Many within the department see his role in pushing the plan as
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a betrayal, officers say. But they add that the sense of betrayal and abandonment extends far past Thomson, from city hall to the governor’s mansion. “It’s a feeling of being unappreciated by your boss, by your mayor, by your government,” says a long-serving officer.
‘PEOPLE ARE AFRAID’
In an interview with HuffPost, Thomson, the Camden police chief, did not dispute that officer morale is abysmal. He says spirits are understandably low given the challenges facing officers, from soaring crime on the streets to the looming closure of the department. “It is tough. And nobody has it tougher than these guys on the front lines,” he says. But he also says the department faces a crisis of absenteeism, a claim the police union calls exaggerated. According to Thomson, the department’s daily call-out rate is 30 percent — far above the average in other cities. “There are some days when half the platoon calls in sick,” Thomson says. Redd, the Camden mayor, regularly cites the absentee rate as a crucial reason for creating the
county metro force. “Given the recent spike in homicides and an absentee rate of nearly 30 percent within the Camden Police Department, I recently announced that the city is aggressively moving towards joining the Camden Metro Division,” Redd said in a statement in August. Thomson, however, says the absentee problem is primarily due
Workers install surveillance cameras to keep watch on the city, a new tool in the war on crime.
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to abuse of a state family medical leave program overseen by the city, not any provision in the police union’s contract. He calls it peripheral to Camden’s overall public safety crisis. “You fix the 30 percent issue, that doesn’t change our situation,” he says. “We’re still at 1962 staffing levels.” He says he has no comment on the $14 million to $16 million in fringe spending that county officials say they will eliminate by liquidating the current police force. “I’m not intimately involved in the finance end of this. My primary focus is keeping the public safe,” he says. “I’m not bean counting in the back room.” Thomson adds that he cannot agree with Christie’s assessment that Camden’s current police contract is “obscene” — or even say whether it is more or less generous than the average police contract in New Jersey. “I don’t know. I don’t have a baseline of comparison,” he says. “Without knowing what the other contracts are, that’s a difficult comparison.” Nevertheless, Thomson calls the current police contract unsustainable, given Camden’s dire economic situation. Switching to the metro
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agency will not solve all of Camden’s problems, but will boost the number of cops on the street and help bring crime to a more manageable level, he says. “I don’t think there’s any other
“ THEY’RE EXPERIMENTING WITH... LIVES... THEY’RE USING THE CITY AS A GUINEA PIG.” option,” he says. “The status quo cannot remain.” Out on the streets, Camden residents call the city’s crime rate intolerable, and condemn the economic calculus by the city and state that forced deep cuts to policing even in the face of soaring violence. A few welcome the creation of the metro police force and the promised surge of cops on the beat. For many others, the move represents a worrying leap into the unknown. “They’re experimenting with the lives of the people,” says Rev. David King, a local activist and a pastor at Community Baptist Church. “They’re using the city as a guinea pig.” “People are afraid,” he says. “They don’t know what’s going to happen.”
COMING OUT AT THE A STORY OF COURAGE, GAY RIGHTS, AND THE PAPER OF RECORD
By MICHAELANGELO SIGNORILE
“Out at The New York Times: Gays, Lesbians, AIDS and Homophobia Inside America’s Newspaper of Record”
AP PHOTO/MARK LENNIHAN
is an article I wrote for The Advocate 20 years ago, which began as an interview with a man who chose to speak out. The New York Times’ assistant national editor Jeff Schmalz bravely decided to tell me about being gay and about living with AIDS, recounting a dramatic health event that occurred in the newsroom, which led to the revelation that he was gay and appeared to contribute to setting the paper of record on a new course on gay rights. ¶ In 1992, no one as high-level as 38-year-old Schmalz, who’d been at The Times for 20 years, had come out as gay at the paper, even privately, let alone come out as a person with AIDS. Such a revelation would certainly get attention. But as it progressed the story snowballed into something much bigger: an admission that the paper had been negligent in its reporting on gays and
The New York Times headquarters on Eighth Avenue.
AIDS and may have hindered a social movement. The curtain was pulled back on a discreet and powerful media organization, in a story that would garner headlines from other media, including The Washington Post. The new, young publisher of The Times, Arthur Suzlberger Jr., who was a personal friend of Schmalz’s and whose family helmed The Times for generations, had decided to give me an interview for the article,
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OUT AT THE TIMES
discussing his friendship with Schmalz, his views on gays and his agenda for the paper moving forward on the issue of diversity. Then the top editors of the paper, including Max Frankel and Joseph Lelyveld, spoke with me about Schmalz, the paper’s coverage on gay issues past and present, and their own shifts on gay rights, as did popular columnists, such as Anna Quindlen. The word seemed to have traveled: No need to hold back. Reporters, editors, photographers and others, several coming out as gay or lesbian for the first time, spoke frankly with me about their own experiences and about what they described as the antigay reign of terror of Abe Rosenthal, The Times’ former executive editor, still with the paper as an op-ed columnist at that time. According to current and former Times staffers as well as gay activ-
ists quoted in the story, Rosenthal had assigned pieces that seemed to demonize homosexuality and discouraged positive pieces about gays. He was described as a man who used his power to negatively affect the careers of current and former employees he believed to be gay and who wouldn’t even allow the word gay to be used in the paper — preferring the more clinical homosexual. Rosenthal practically ignored the AIDS epidemic in the early years, though activists such as playwright Larry Kramer railed against him and The Times for the catastrophic lack of coverage. As the most influential media organization in the country, The Times’ refusal until the late 80s to use the word gay arguably slowed the gay rights movement’s fight for legitimacy. Its negligence on AIDS early on had a detrimental effect on bringing in-depth, life-saving
attention to an epidemic that had been callously ignored by political leaders and sensationalized by other media. Rosenthal had heard that people were speaking with me about his tenure and about his views on gay rights, and he decided to give me an interview to defend himself. His explanations and responses to the criticisms were nothing short of fascinating, as was his own turnaround on gay rights and AIDS, suddenly seeing the issues as important in his role as an op-ed columnist, particularly after Schmalz came out. The progress at The Times after Rosenthal stepped down as executive editor, and certainly after the arrival of the new publisher and the coming out of Schmalz, was dramatic enough to be measurable — a scan of Nexis’ database of searchable news articles at the time showed how The Times appeared to
“ I regret that I wasn’t more out all along. I regret that I didn’t do more talking about being gay.”
— Jeff Schmalz
embrace gay rights at a sudden pace. What some had called the Lavender Enlightenment at The New York Times continued at the paper and other media outlets. The Times became a leader on coverage of LGBT issues as well as a leader among media companies. Last week, 20 years after the article was first published, I moderated a discussion at The New York Times about the article and its impact, with a panel that included The Times’ openly gay op-ed columnist, Frank Bruni, as well as two of the interview subjects in the 1992 story, photographer Sarah Krulwich, and former editor Richard Meislin. Even two decades later, the fear that Rosenthal, who died six years ago, had instilled seemed
palpable. Panelists and audience members described a newsroom in the 1980s punctuated often by yelling and screaming, and a workplace that was hostile to women and minorities, including gays and lesbians. Krulwich said it was not uncommon to find women weeping in the ladies room. She often had to drive female colleagues around the block, taking a break with a box of tissues in the car. One member of the audience, a gay man who’d been with the paper for several decades, described how Rosenthal queried him on whether or not he was married, while interviewing him for the job. When the man said no, Rosenthal, said, “But you are going to get married, right?” He knew that if he said no, he wouldn’t get the job, and so he
lied. It took him years after Rosenthal stepped down as executive editor to finally come out. For many others in the room, particularly younger people now working at The Times, the event was an eye-opening look back at a very different New York Times, nothing like the gay-supportive, enlightened environment they work in today. The invitation for the event describes the article, which had grown from a short interview into a two-part series (presented here in full), as having changed the lives of LGBT employees at The Times. But that credit truly goes back to one man, Jeff Schmalz, whose personal experience, and whose courage and dignity, made the story possible.
OUT AT THE TIMES
The cover of The Advocate when this article was first published in 1992.
COURTESY OF THE ADVOCATE
IT WAS AN AFTERNOON DURING THE PERSIAN GULF WAR.
The editors of The New York Times were gathered in the conference room adjacent to executive editor Max Frankel’s office for a daily event: the page 1 meeting. As usual, people sat on chairs lining the room’s walls. An inner circle sat around a long, narrow table, while Frankel and managing editor Joseph Lelyveld sat at the head of the table. With the paper’s Washington, D.C., bureau staff participating in the meeting with the help of speakers and a microphone hidden somewhere in the room, editors from each of the paper’s departments described the articles they had in the works for the
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next day’s paper and suggested what should be on page 1. On that particular day, there were at least five gay people in the room. When it came time for foreign news editor Bernard Gwertzman to deliver his report, he decided to relay a story. One of his reporters had written about the elaborate display of multicolored tents that stretched across the Saudi Arabian desert where U.S. troops were stationed. Something about the way the description was worded had irked Gwertzrman. “I told the reporter to change it,” Gwertzrman explained to the group, laughing, “because he made the soldiers look like a bunch of faggots.” A cold silence came over the room for several seconds. Then the meeting continued, although in a tense man-
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ner. Later, a couple of the gay individuals who had been present privately told Gwertzman what they thought of his comment. But more significant, in what some say was a first, Frankel and Lelyveld took Gwertzman to task, letting him know that from then on gay slurs would not be tolerated at The New York Times. “They came down on him hard — tore him out a new asshole,” quips Times deputy news editor Russell King, who is gay. Several months later, Philip Gefter, who’d just been hired as a Times picture editor, was sitting at the picture desk when he overheard a straight male editor retelling an event to a group of people. In his account, the male editor said the word “fruits” to describe gay men. A straight female editor who was present became incensed. She told the male editor his words were hurtful.
Gefter, empowered by the woman, reeled around, looked the male editor in he face, and said, ‘’Yeah. You never know when there might be a gay person around.” The male editor mumbled an apology and loped off. In January, two weeks after becoming the new Times publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. held a meeting with the editorial staff in the newsroom. It was a new year and a new Times. He told the staff that from then on “diversity” would be a priority at the paper, and eventually he blurted out the phrase “sexual orientation.” “We almost fell off our chairs,” recalls photographer Sara Krulwich, a lesbian who’s been with The Times for 13 years. “It was the first time any top executive at The Times had ever used those words.” And just a few weeks ago, in an unprecedented appearance, Lely-
veld spoke to the newly formed National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association at New York’s Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. He gave several reasons for appearing before the crowd of 250, including his desire “to show solidarity with my gay colleagues at The Times.” While what some have dubbed the Lavender Enlightenment was occurring behind the scenes at The Times in the last year or so, it seemed like all manner of gay and lesbian news was suddenly fit to print on the paper’s pages as well. There were stories about suburban gays, Jewish gays in search of a rabbi, powerful lesbians in the gay and lesbian civil rights movement, the paucity of gay and lesbian characters on television and even a travel piece — with recommendations from a New York hotel concierge — on things for gay couples from Los Angeles to do while visiting
ELLEN B. NEIPRIS
Jeff Schmalz, assisant national editor at The Times, whose coming out as a gay man with AIDS affected the way the paper covered news about the gay community and the AIDS epidemic.
the Big Apple. One Times headline asked, WAS ST. PAUL GAY?, while another queried, IS SCHUBERT GAY? But the eyebrow raiser of 1991 had to be MIL!TANTS BACK “QUEER,” SHOVING “GAY” THE WAY OF “NEGRO.” Throughout 1991 and into 1992, page 1 of The Times addressed such subjects as a battle between Irish-American gays and the organizers of New York City’s St.
Patrick’s Day parade, the outcome of a gay-bashing murder trial in Queens, children growing up in gay households, a controversy over banning military recruiters from college campuses in New York State because of the Pentagon’s ban on enlistment of gays and lesbians, the mainstreaming of the gay press and a Bronx hospital giving spousal benefits to gay employees. The editorial page was lit up. President George Bush received a severe lashing on more than one occasion for his fumbling
of the AIDS crisis — with The Times actually nominating Earvin “Magic” Johnson for president the day after he revealed he tested positive for antibodies to HIV, the suspected AIDS virus. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney was urged to end the Pentagon’s ban on enlisting gays and lesbians in the military in a lengthy editorial complete with a chart showing that the public was in favor of ending the ban.
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The Times went after the New York State legislature on several issues, not only demanding passage of a hate-crimes bill stalled by antigay Republicans in the state senate but also calling for something far more radical: complete civil rights for lesbians and gay men. The behavior of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the organizers of the St. Patrick’s Day parade, was “deplorable,” according to The Times. And Marvel Comics was given a pat on the back for breaking ground in having one of its superheroes, Northstar, come out of the closet. Said The Times: “Mainstream culture will one day make its peace with gay Americans. When that time comes, Northstar’s revelation will be seen for what it is: a welcome indicator of social change.” Op-ed page columnist Anna Quindlen, who’s always been out-front on gay and AIDS issues,
seemed more personally moved by the AIDS crisis, writing, “This is what AIDS looks like — good people, lovable people, people you want to hug.” Even op-ed columnist and former Times executive editor A.M. “Abe’’ Rosenthal, long reviled by many gays and lesbians as the most homophobic force at The Times, went through a surprising transformation. As executive editor during the early and mid ‘80s, Rosenthal had The Times virtually ignore the AIDS crisis. “The lack of coverage in the early years of the epidemic was just criminal,” notes Ste-
phen Miller, a spokesman for the New York chapter of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). But in 1991 Rosenthal wrote a column assailing Bush for remaining “silent” on the epidemic. ln yet another column last year, the man who some say tyrannized gays and lesbians at The Times for many years and who wouldn’t even allow the word gay to be used in the paper, declared that “harassment and assault of gay men and lesbians is an illness in our society.” To the the astute lesbian and gay reader, it was all very clear: Something had happened at The New York Times.
JEFF SCHMALZ HAS SPENT MORE THAN HALF OF HIS LIFE AT THE TIMES. He began there 20 years
ago, at the age of 18, as a copyboy, and worked his way up to the position of deputy national editor. His path from there would be easy to predict: He’d probably become national editor in a short time, after current national editor Soma Golden retired or moved on. “I’d have gone to work abroad for a year or two first before taking over the national editor
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spot,” he says. And that would most likely have occurred after the 1992 elections; Schmalz was slated to oversee all the election coverage. But on Dec. 21, 1990, it became evident that his life would change dramatically. Schmalz came back from lunch that day, sat down at his computer terminal and began editing a news
relax. But the twitching didn’t stop. And now the words on the screen were getting blurry as he tried to edit. Suddenly, he got very dizzy. He stood up and took a few steps. Then he blacked out. Schmalz was having a grand mal seizure in the middle of the newsroom
man, from the science desk, was summoned downstairs, and soon a team of paramedics arrived. The entire newsroom was shaken, and reporters, editors and photographers stood dumbstruck and watched Schmalz come to. “As I was waking up, a crowd was gathered around me, and Max [Frankel] was hold-
“ This is what AIDS looks like — good people, lovable people, people you want to hug.”
— Anna Quindlen
story on the computer screen. For weeks he’d had vision problems, and his left eye had been twitching. Assuming that he was overworked he had taken off ten days and gone to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands to
at The New York Times. He fell to the floor and immediately went into violent convulsions. “It was absolutely frightening,” recalls one observer. “Everyone was horrified. It’s of those situations where you just don’t know what to do. You’re helpless.” Dr. Lawrence Alt-
ing my hand,” Schmalz remembers. “He was quite wonderful. He was just right there.” It wasn’t until a month later that Schmalz found out what was happening to his body. But the newsroom grapevine had al-
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ready surmised the truth. “I’d wondered about it,” says Frankel. “Previously, I didn’t know he was gay. But there was speculation that it was AIDS and that he was gay.” Schmalz tested HIVpositive. His T-helper cell count — a key measure of immune-system health — was zero. There was a fear that his vision problems and the convulsions stemmed from toxoplasmosis, a deadly opportunistic infection in the brain. But when a spinal tap indicated no presence of toxoplasmosis, Schmalz’s doctors decided they wanted to do exploratory brain surgery to find out what was going on. “I had to tell the paper at that point — I’d spent my whole life exploring the truth and reporting the truth,” he says. “I just went in and told them I had AIDS.” “It was a sad moment,” recounts Frankel, with a
rasp in his voice. Frankel has been at the paper for 42 years. He watched Schmalz grow up there. And since Frankel took over as executive editor in 1986, their relationship has become closer. Schmalz also has a warm friendship with Lelyveld, who’s been at The Times since 1962 and who also began there as a copyboy. “Max [Frankel] cried,” Schmalz recalls. Lelyveld cried. They were just deeply and genuinely moved. They told me that The Times would do anything it could. Historically, The Times has always rallied around employees who are sick and has always treated people exceptionally well, including people with AIDS.” Throughout the ’80s there were several people at the paper, mostly on the business side and therefore with no day-today contact with the editors, who’d quietly died of complications from
AIDS. In 1988, 33-yearold Robert Barrios, a copy editor, became the first person in the editorial department who was known to have died of complications from AIDS. Barrios was close with a few newsroom staffers, and his death certainly had an impact. But he’d been at the paper for only a little over a year. He hadn’t become an intimate friend of the top editors and executives of The Times. Larry Josephs, a former Times staffer who became well-known for two harrowing articles he wrote for the New York Times Magazine chronicling his battle with AIDS, also died of the disease, in 1991. In the mid-80s he’d worked as a news assistant on the editorial page. “I hired him, and I thought probably he was gay, but I didn’t care,” says editorial page editor Jack Rosenthal. “But I later realized that I should
JONATHAN TORGOVNIK/GETTY IMAGES
A view of the newsroom at The New York Times in 2008.
have cared, in an affirmative way. I realized afterward that he was able to correct people who were being thoughtless because he had the experience of being gay and thus was more sensitive to the AIDS epidemic.” Josephs’s death was a big blow to many at the paper, but Josephs, like Barrios, was not a major force in the newsroom; he’d been with the pa-
per on and off throughout the early and mid ‘80s and hadn’t worked in The Times offices since 1987. Schmalz, on the other hand, had a violent seizure right under everyone’s nose. And though he’s now stepped down as deputy national editor, he’s working at The Times every day in the position of assistant national editor in charge of projects, providing the top brass with front-row seats to the most hor-
rific epidemic in America. He’s someone they know well, who’s been in the newsroom of The Times for 20 years — a wonder boy, admired by many of the executives. “He’s a tremendously talented journalist and a very good friend,” says current publisher Sulzberger. For several years Schmalz has socialized with Sulzberger and his wife — regularly tak-
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ing a gay date along for evenings out with the couple or spending much time at their home. Quindlen, another close friend of Schmalz’s, noticed the impact his getting sick had at the paper. “People were really affected by it,” she says. “This is probably the most vivid case of someone at The Times having AIDS. A lot of us knew Larry Josephs, but with Jeff actually being here, well, he’s just so much a part of the place.” “I think things were already changing, but my illness couldn’t do anything but make them more aware of AIDS,” Schmalz says. He now also sees his homosexuality from a different perspective. “I regret that I wasn’t more out all along,” he adds. “I regret that I didn’t do more talking about being gay, overall. It’s important for people to know that the deputy national editor of The New York
Times can be gay — people both on the outside and at the paper.” Frankel shrugs off the notion that the awareness of Schmalz’s illness might have influenced coverage. “I can’t say that I’ve noticed a change,” he says. “It’s hard to measure change. It’s evolutionary.” But one Times staffer,
who wishes to remain anonymous, is adamant about the significance of Schmalz’s experience: “There have always been gay people here at the Times, and I’m sure that Frankel and Lelyveld have always known gay people, but there’s never been anyone that high up, that close to them in the newsroom, who is so so well-liked. His coming out has had a profound effect.”
OF COURSE, ONE MAN’S PROFOUND IS ANOTHER’S INCREMENTAL.
“I’ve noticed an improvement,” says Robert Bray, communications director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a political group. “But it’s episodic. I don’t want any more articles about gays specifically. I’d rather see our visibility permeate the paper at all levels. I want to see the gay rodeo on the sports pages. I want to see gays included in the stories about Valentine’s Day.” If the Lavender Enlightenment is underway in the Manhattan newsroom, it has yet to reach the foreign bureaus or even the Washington and Los Angeles bureaus. GLAAD’s Miller, who has met with Times management on several occasions, says that the organization “praises The Times for the progress” but still has problems with much of the coverage.
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“Their political and Washington reporters don’t ask the presidential candidates — or even the President — about gay civil rights, about gays in the military, or even about AIDS,” he says. “The international coverage of gays is woeful. Their foreign correspondents are ignorant and not educated on gay issues. The pieces on China’s repression, for example, never talk about the rounding up of homosexuals. The articles on skinhead violence in Germany never recount the horrible antigay attacks.” If you read only The Times for coverage of California’s protests and rioting over Gov. Pete Wilson’s veto of a measure that would have banned antigay employment discrimination, you didn’t find out until six weeks after the demonstrations began that the daily protests by lesbians and
gays marked a turning point in the gay civil rights movement. Actually, you didn’t even know they occurred until a week after they began, when The Times finally decided to run an Associated Press photo and a blurb. The Times’s Los Angeles correspondent, Robert Reinhold, after writing one piece at the outset about the politics behind the veto (which landed on page A16), seemed to fall asleep at the wheel. “I don’t really cover demonstrations,” Reinhold explains. “As I recall, I did tell them to pick it up on the wires. The [broad story that was written six weeks later] would have been done earlier had I not gotten involved in other things. We’re spread pretty thin here. But I think there was some advantage to the delay, to see whether the anger that had been stirred by the veto was more
enduring and more substantive than just a few protests.” By contrast, starting the day after the protests began, USA Today had the story on page 1A, 2A or 3A every day for a full week as well as on the editorial and op-ed pages. When it comes to physical contact between homosexuals, The Times is still squeamish. Last year, assistant managing editor Allan M. Siegal removed from an article a photo of two women kissing on the television series L.A. Law. (Ironically, it was to accompany an article by television critic John J. O’Connor about how television makes gays invisible.) Siegal, The Times’s resident monitor of taste, also caused an uproar among gays at the paper last year when he pulled a photo of a Connecticut lawmaker kissing his male lover (as a public act of coming out) during a session of the
ELLEN B. NEIPRIS
Nancy Lee was deputy photo editor when Max Frankel took control of the paper, a time when the atmosphere in the newsroom became more open and accepting of gay and lesbian colleagues. “Previously, everyone was terrified,” she said.
legislature. The implication seems to be that kissing between men and woman, certainly something The Times has shown before, is OK, while same-sex kissing is in some way distasteful or even prurient. And coverage of the AIDS crisis, while it has improved substantially, has never been up to its potential. “The Times is slow on
AIDS,” observes Peter Millones, a former metropolitan editor and former assistant managing editor at the paper, now an assistant professor at Columbia University School of Journalism. “Back then [in the beginning of the epidemic], it didn’t click, it didn’t register.” Some even say that the coverage of the AIDS crisis, while it has improved somewhat from six years ago, may have actually declined again in the last two years, par-
ticularly around the issues of drug treatment and development. Two years ago the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a direct-action group, waged a campaign against The Times and later against one person specifically: science reporter Gina Kolata. She was charged with having “an unquestioning acceptance of the Establishment point of view
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of how to do research,” according to Mark Harrington of the New York chapter of ACT UP. After a blistering article attacking Kolata’s reporting appeared in the Village Voice (Kolata calls it “the nastiest article I have ever seen in my life”), some activists noticed she was taken off the beat for a while.
ing the country’s other largest newspapers: the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. A comparison of the major dailies during the period from 1990 to 1992 using Nexis, a computer information service that catalogs numerous newspapers, showed that the LA
sy. “In a way, our attacks on her weren’t a success,” he says, “because it didn’t result in their improving the coverage but rather in their taking her off the beat without replacing her and then throwing the drug-development stories onto the
“ The lack of coverage in the early years of the epidemic was just criminal.”
— Stephen Miller
Not true, says Kolata. “I had letters and memos from top management telling me not to stop what I was doing.” But there certainly are fewer stories now regarding drug research. Harrington thinks The Times pulled Kolata back a bit because of the controver-
business pages.” The reason that The Times has been so carefully scrutinized is simply because it is the most influential, most important news organization in America — not because it’s worse than any other newspaper. ln actuality, The New York Times is better on gay and AIDS issues than most metropolitan dailies, includ-
Times, because it is a substantially larger paper than most, had significantly more stories about gays than any of the other three papers and almost double that of The New York Times. The Los Angeles Times’s Victor Zonana, who is gay, has done
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some of the most incisive AIDS reporting in the country and has written noteworthy pieces about the gay community. “As a member of an embattled community and a survivor of the AIDS epidemic, I feel a profound sense of responsibility to bear witness,” he says. “But I use the same professional standards and ethics when I write about AIDS as when I write about the stock exchange. I’m critical of the community’s organizations because I believe they are a public trust, and I hold them to very high standards.” The paper’s media and television critic, Howard Rosenberg, has also done some exceptional work on gay issues. But a closer look at the Los Angeles Times shows that the stories about lesbians and gays turn up predominantly in the View, Calendar and Metro sections of the paper and rarely in the national news sec-
tion. While the Los Angeles Times had twice as many stories as The New York Times, The New York Times was twice as likely to put stories about gays and lesbians on the front page. Compared to The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune both had pitifully little coverage on gay issues for the two-year period, each with half the number of stories The New York Times had and with very few on page A1. On AIDS issues alone, The New York Times beat out all three other papers, with
20% more stories that the Los Angeles Times, 50% more than the Washington Post, and 75% more than the Chicago Tribune. But perhaps the most telling figures are the percentage increase of stories about the gay community from 1990 to 1991. The Los Angeles Times had 40% more stories in 1991 than in the previous year (but this includes last fall’s protests, which occurred in the paper’s own backyard). The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune each had an increase of less than 10%. But The New York Times showed a whopping increase of 65%.
“WE HAVE A LONG WAY TO GO BUT I THINK THE TIMES IS MOVING IN THAT DIRECTION,”
says Sulzberger, regarding his ambitious master plan to make the paper more representative of different cultures. “I believe fundamentally that diversity is the single most important issue that this newspaper faces — corning to terms with the diversity of its work force. I want to create a workplace where all
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people — black, female, gay, disabled — are comfortable and can succeed. Diversity of the workplace is also important because we reach a diverse audience. I’m more interested in how the coverage is viewed, and it has to be influenced by my people who are gay.” In mid January of this year, 40-year-old Sulzberger became the fifth publisher of The New York Times since his greatgrandfather, Adolph S. Ochs, bought the newspaper in 1896. Sulzberger succeeded his father, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, when the elder Sulzberger retired at age 65 after running the paper since 1963. The younger Sulzberger has been described in the media as “brash” and even as an activist. Currently, he serves on a committee of the Newspaper Publishers Association aimed at combating racism and sexism in
the workplace. He made sure that sexual orientation was part of the program of a recent conference on diversity that he held at The Times for newspaper publishers from around the country. It was under Sulzberger’s supervision that Gerald Boyd, an AfricanAmerican, was brought in as metropolitan editor. “Boyd has a genuine interest in the disenfranchised,” observes a Times staffer. “When Boyd was told about the importance to the gay community of the Julio Rivera murder trial [in which the victim, a Queens man, was gaybashed], he made sure that it was given the same prominence that the Howard Beach racial murder trial was given.” And it was under Sulzberger’s supervision that openly gay and outspoken Adam Moss, the former editor of the now-defunct New York weekly 7 Days, was
brought in under contract as a consultant at The Times. While it is unclear what future The Times and Moss have together, some say that Moss, who has Lelyveld’s ear, has been very vocal and has had an effect on the newsroom regarding gay issues. Sulzberger has worked in various departments of the paper since 1978 and has gotten to know much of the staff. About seven years ago, he separately approached a number of staff members whom he knew to be gay. Anticipating his eventual role as publisher, he wanted to discuss the problems they faced as gay people at The Times. “Actually, he took me to lunch and asked, ‘So when are you going to tell me that you’re gay?’” laughs Schmalz. “He was genuinely interested in what I had to say.” Of course, first and foremost, Sulzberger is a businessman. He is said
RON GALELLA, LTD./WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Sr., left, with Abe Rosenthal at a charity event at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1991.
to scrupulously study market research. Having worked much of the time on the business side of the paper, he knows that diversity does more than serve humanity: It’s also the only commerciallyviable way to go now. He’s taking over The Times during the biggest slump in the newspaper industry in history. Nationally, USA Today has taken center stage,
becoming the largestcirculation newspaper in the country; much of its success can be attributed to the fact that it’s the most culturally diverse news organization in America. Locally, the bulk of The Times’s straight, white, uppermiddle-class readership is increasingly fleeing the city and turning to The Times less and less. “New York Newsday has made no secret of the fact that it is intensely covering gay
and lesbian issues,” notes Stuart Elliott, The Times’s popular advertising columnist, regarding the tabloid competition whose circulation is steadily increasing. “It’s clear that Newsday is prominently placing these stories so that gays will turn to it.” Elliott, a gay man, spent three years at USA Today, which he describes as, “the gorgeous
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mosaic. They’re in the forefront on gay issues. It’s about wanting to be inclusive of gays, but it’s also a dollars-and-cents issue. We’re a target audience that they would like to reach.” Sulzberger has made his mark on the paper in recent years, and now, as a full-fledged publisher, he will no doubt make a much stronger impression. However, it’s myopic if not unfair to suggest that the changes at The Times are occurring only because of the new publisher or even solely because of the impact of Schmalz’s illness. In actuality, The Times has been subtly changing for the past six years, battling institutionalized homophobia that was embedded in the very fiber of the paper by an editor who ran his empire not unlike recent Eastern European despots. And, like them, he would live to see his monuments toppled.
IN 1963 ABE ROSENTHAL ARRIVED BACK IN NEW YORK.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who began his career at The Times in 1946 had been away for nine years. He’d spent those years as a correspondent in India, Poland, Switzerland and Japan and wrote from many other countries in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. He was now the paper’s metropolitan editor. His focus would be on New York City. Shortly after settling in, Rosenthal noticed something while walking down Riverside Drive. New York had dramatically changed while he was gone: There was a thriving male homosexual subculture emerging. Men were meeting on the streets and touching on the streets. To Rosenthal, this was alarming. The next day he raced into the office and assigned reporter Robert Doty a story that would forever take a place in the paper’s history. On Dec. 16, 1963, a headline blared from the front page: GROWTH OF OVERT HOMOSEXUALITY IN CITY PROVOKES WIDE CONCERN. “The overt homo-
sexual — and those who are identifiable probably represent no more than half of the total — has become such an obtrusive part of the New York scene that the phenomenon needs public discussion,” the story read. At the time of the article’s appearance many other media organizations were beginning to break the silence on homosexuality. Noted historian John D’Emilio observed in his book
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Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in United States that in their articles, “the Washington Post and Life acknowledged a range of opinions, including those of homophile leaders and mental health professionals who took issue with the sickness theory [of homosexuality].” But The Times story, he pointed out, “emphasized the stance of vice squad officers and the segment of the medical professional that categorized homosexuals as ‘crippled psychically.’” In 1969 author Gay Talese, a close friend of Rosenthal’s and a former Times reporter, wrote in The Kingdom and the Power, his book about The Times, that “it seemed to Rosenthal that homosexuals were more obvious on city streets...and this led to a superb article that was, by old-time standards, quite revolutionary.” Shortly after he arrived at The Times in
1972, Jeff Schmalz, who began working as a copyboy, remembers hearing “much screaming and yelling over various articles” about gays. The modern gay rights movement had come into being with the Stonewall riots, a series of demonstrations in New York City in 1969, the same year Rosenthal was named the paper’s managing editor. Many
writers and editors at The Times were eager to cover the burgeoning movement and report on the gay and lesbian community. “We’d done a piece about a gay cruise on the cover of the travel section,” Schmalz recalls. “There was a lot of shouting about it. Abe thought that it was a total mistake and that we never should have done it. And we’d used the word gay. He said we could never use that word again.”
“ We’d done a piece about a gay cruise on the cover of the travel section. There was a lot of shouting about it. Abe thought that it was a total mistake …”
— Jeff Schmalz
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Throughout the ’70s and into the ’80s, most gay men and lesbians who worked at The Times were deeply closeted. “There was some sleeping around among people in the newsroom,” Schmalz says, “but we didn’t even nod or wink at each other while in the office.” Gay people at The Times say that they were immensely frightened and frustrated under Rosenthal, who moved into the top position of executive editor in 1977. They couldn’t complain because to do so they’d have to come out. But they felt they couldn’t come out because it would definitely jeopardize their jobs. Times assistant news editor Russell King remembers writing a firstperson piece in the early ‘80s about AIDS that he was going to submit to the New York Times Magazine. “I showed it to a friend at The Times
who said, ‘You can’t [submit] this. Everyone will know you’re gay,’” King recalls. “I then showed it to my editor. He was a good person, knew I was gay, and accepted it but agreed that it would be trouble for me if it was printed, that it would hurt me.” Charles Kaiser is the author of 1968 in America and is a former staffer at both The Times and The Wall Street Journal. In 1982, having worked as a news clerk for Rosenthal at The Times, he was the media critic at Newsweek. He wrote a column criticizing The Times and Rosenthal specifically, saying that Rosenthal had used the paper to reward his friends and punish his enemies. Rosenthal, never able to stomach criticism, flew into a frenzy. Though years later, in 1991, he would opine that “the outing of gays who want to keep their sex lives private” is a form
of “sexual harassment,” Rosenthal revealed Kaiser’s homosexuality to people throughout the media industry, Kaiser asserts. “Within days Rosenthal was telling everyone he knew that I’d written this article about him because I’m gay,” Kaiser says. “I assume that what he meant was that because he had a reputation for being homophobic, I was doing this to retaliate against him, which was a complete non sequitur. I was a media critic, and I was doing my job.” At the time, Kaiser was completely closeted and hadn’t ever discussed his homosexuality with Rosenthal. “He outed me,” Kaiser asserts. “I kept hearing it from people in Washington [D.C.], people in New York. It was very uncomfortable.” Rosenthal denies the entire scenario, claiming to only vaguely remember the attack in Newsweek. “He’s a fantasizer,”
ELLEN B. NEIPRIS
When Arthur Sulzberger became publisher of The Times in 1992, he brought Adam Moss — the openly gay former editor of the weekly 7 Days — in as a consultant regarding gay issues. Moss is currently the editor-in-chief of New York magazine.
he says of Kaiser. “He obviously fantasized about The New York Times, and he fantasized about my attitude toward him. He has a grievance against this paper. It comes from his inability to be successful.” In the mid ’80s, Times reporter Richard Meislin, who had a plum spot as the bureau chief in Mexico City, got sick while abroad. There was
speculation that it was AIDS (it wasn’t). When news of his illness got back to Rosenthal — who was then informed that Meislin was gay — he blew his stack. Staffers say he chastised two editors for not telling him previously that Meislin was a homosexual. Rosenthal apparently decided that Meislin, as a homosexual, shouldn’t represent The Times in Mexico and eventually pulled him back, though Meislin was doing what
some editors considered to be exemplary work. Meislin was not assigned another foreign post or sent to Washington, D.C., which would be a usual next step. Instead, he was brought back to the New York newsroom to do a job he hated. “What kept me from leaving the paper,” says Meislin, “was that one of the [other] editors took me in his office and
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said, ‘We know you’ve been screwed, but don’t do anything rash. You have a long career ahead of you, and Rosenthal will be leaving soon.’” Peter Millones, an assistant professor at Columbia University School of Journalism, was at that time an assistant managing editor at The Times. He recalls hiring Meislin. “It didn’t occur to me to tell Rosenthal or anyone else that [Meislin] was gay,” he says. “I don’t recall why the decision was made to bring him back, but it would make sense [that it was because he was gay]. Abe was a tyrannical executive.” Rosenthal says the entire incident “never happened,” claiming that “this is the first time I’ve ever heard of that.” He also comments that “people who are used to being discriminated against will sometimes take certain acts as being discriminatory when they’re not.’’
NO MATTER HOW MUCH ACTIVISTS PROTESTED, ROSENTHAL REFUSED TO LET THE WORD GAY BE USED IN THE PAPER
— even after 15 years of pressure — except in names of organizations or in quotes. Dudley Clendinen, who recently stepped down from a position as a managing editor at the Baltimore Sun, was a reporter at The Times in the early ’80s. “Abe had a dinner party at his home on Central Park West for me and [theater critic] Frank Rich when we joined The Times in 1980,” he recalls. “Part of the conversation that night was about The Times policy with regard to the use of
the word homosexual instead of gay. I argued that homosexual was a clinical word that robbed people of their humanity. Abe didn’t agree. His attitude was that the general culture only saw the subject scientifically. The conversation went nowhere.” Rosenthal now says that he banned the word gay in the early ’70s because he “felt at that time that The Times should not use a word for political purposes until that word has become accepted as part of the language,” as if The Times is merely a barometer of public opinion and not also a powerful catalyst for change. How could the word be “accepted as part of the language” if The Times refused to acknowledge it? And wasn’t it equally “political” to not use the word? By not using gay, The Times held back a social movement, refusing to give it legitimacy. Rosenthal admits,
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“It may be quite possible that I should have approved of the word gay earlier.” But perhaps the most devastating of Rosenthal’s misdeeds was his callous indifference to the AIDS crisis early on in the epidemic, a catastrophic ignorance on his part, the outcome of which can never be re-
medical establishment and the rest of the media switch into emergency mode. Within days, the nation’s resources and attention were focused on what came to be called Legionnaires’ disease, an illness that killed 29 people.
the way he was treating the AIDS epidemic wasn’t much different from the way that news organizations treated the Holocaust early on. When asked about this failure, Rosenthal becomes defensive. “I’m not going to talk about all that,” he says. “I’m not going back to then. Look, it’s quite true that
“ Punch, you’re going to have to swallow hard on this one: We’re going to start using the word gay.”
— Max Frankel
versed. In 1976, when a mysterious illness struck several American Legion convention attendees in Philadelphia, The Times immediately ran the story on the front page (where it stayed for months), ensuring that the government, the
But as the number of AIDS-related deaths of gay men rose steadily into the hundreds and later the thousands, The Times coverage of the disease amounted mostly to minuscule reports buried in the B and C sections. Ironically, Rosenthal, who attacks anti-Semitism in the media, never realized that
we should have or could have had more stories about AIDS, but then again, there wasn’t much known about it.” But isn’t it The Times’s job to explore that? “Well, yes,” he responds. “It is The Times’s job to explore that, but, well, I
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guess we all should have done more.” “The way The Times worked under Rosenthal,” explains Kaiser, “was that everyone below him spent all of their time trying to figure out what to do to cater to his prejudices. One of those widely perceived prejudices was Abe’s homophobia. So editors throughout the paper would keep stories concerning gays out of the paper.” As soon as Rosenthal retired in 1986 to become a twice-weekly op-ed columnist at the paper and Max Frankel took over as executive editor, the walls of repression came tumbling down, staffers say. “I knew they had a hard time,” recalls Frankel, “and I knew they weren’t comfortable identifying themselves as gay.” Almost immediately Frankel let it be known that things were going to be different. One way
was in quickly allowing the use of the word gay in the paper. A former staffer recalls seeing a memo that Frankel sent to then publisher Punch Sulzberger soon after taking over: “Punch, you’re going to have to swallow hard on this one: We’re going to start using the word gay.” Photographer Sara Krulwich, a lesbian, says Frankel was immediately “a positive force” that helped her and others to relax. Agrees Schmalz: “Things changed completely with Max.” “Previously, everyone was terrified,” notes deputy photo editor Nancy Lee, a lesbian. “I was away when Max took over. When I came back the entire newsroom had changed. There was a general loosening up. The next year I organized a bunch of people for the [gay pride] parade, and we marched holding hands. We haven’t
marched since, but every year now we have a party. Last year we had about 60 people. I now have pictures of my partner under the glass on my desk. Everyone on my staff knows, and I take Marie to any Times function that she cares to go to. I didn’t do that under Abe.” Lee, who has been with the paper for 11 years, feels that her being out of the closet has changed attitudes at the paper. “On my staff, which is photographers, editors and lab personnel, I was the first person many of them ever knew was a lesbian,” she says. “I’m sure they were grossed out at first. You got the sense that they disapproved. But because they know me, they like me, and so it helps them to accept not just me but other gay people and homosexuality in general.” The combination of the departure of Rosenthal, the efforts by Frankel to
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dismantle ingrained homophobia, the attempts by the new publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., to achieve diversity, and, perhaps most importantly, the coming out of people like Lee, Schmalz, and many others has created a general feeling in recent months among gay staffers at The Times that they can speak up about
even complained that the paper’s health plan would not be adequate for him when and if he is unable to work. While the editors may not always follow the advice of gays and lesbians in the newsroom, gay staffers say they are now
was a case of hypocrisy.” The Times, still smarting from the controversy around having named the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of raping her, decided against naming Williams in a story that referred to his outing. But Schmalz thought it was significant that he was brought into the discussion.
“ By not using gay, The Times held back a social movement, refusing to give it legitimacy.” their experiences. “People are now very vocal when they need to be,” says Lee. In January, Times business reporter Kim Foltz wrote a piece in The New York Times Magazine in which he revealed his HIV-positive status, discussed his gay relationship, and
asked their opinions about sensitive issues. Regarding the decision on whether to out Assistant Secretary of Defense Pete Williams last August, Schmalz says, “I argued that we should have outed him. He was publicly defending the Pentagon’s policy excluding homosexuals. I argued that it was a case that fit into the guidelines, that it
“The changes regarding gays at The Times are a little bit commensurate with the situation with women here,” says Times op-ed columnist Anna Quindlen. “There was a period when women had to pass. When you’re passing, you can’t really come to the of-
DARIO CANTATORE/GETTY IMAGES
“The changes regarding gays at The Times are a little bit commensurate with the situation with women here,” said Anna Quindlen, a regular columnist for the paper’s op-ed page at the time. She is now a full-time novelist, pictured here in April of 2011.
fice with your particular life concerns. You don’t want to draw attention to the fact that you’re female. But when you don’t have to pass any longer, you can come in with your life stories and say, ‘At least half of our readers are interested in this story, and I know about it because it’s part of my experience.’” Quindlen has noticed that gay people
at The Times are now much more at ease socially. “My gay friends now talk openly with me, out loud in the newsroom, about their dates,” she says. Philip Gefter, who is training to become a picture editor, says that even longtime gay staffers are amazed at how many gays and lesbians there are at the paper whom they previously didn’t know about. “Every time I want a ‘proclivity check’ on a man I
find attractive,” he says, “I’ll ask a gay man who’s been here a long time and that person will say, ‘No, he’s not gay,’ but then I’ll find out later that the person in question is, in fact, gay.” One observer who’s worked at several New York papers is astonished: “The closet doors are just flying off their hinges up there and everyone has been talking about it.”
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The Lavender Enlightenment’s effect on Rosenthal, who wrote gay-positive columns last year, is probably the most interesting of all. “All this time people have assumed I had certain attitudes, but they weren’t really true,” he claims. “They say that I’m suddenly interested in gays and AIDS and that I’m now writing about these issues. But I’m interested in it because I’ve always had an interest in it; I just never had occasion to write about it.” “It’s like the guy who yells ‘nigger, nigger, nigger!’ and then goes into work one day and sees that everyone is black,” says one staffer. “What happened was that Abe realized that some of his own clerks and some of the people he’s worked with for years are gay because they are suddenly more open. These were like his spiritual sons. And
it just blew him away.” Meislin, who was pulled back from Mexico City’s foreign desk by Rosenthal, is now back on track and content in his position as graphics editor at The Times. “You can’t live in the past when the present is much improved,” he says. But others don’t forget so easily. Shortly
after Schmalz had his seizure in the newsroom and subsequently revealed that he had AIDS, Rosenthal began asking about him. “He told somebody that he wanted to hear from me, that he wanted me to call him.” Schmalz says. “I never called. It was just too late. You can’t wait until somebody’s dying and then decide to be there. Where was he all those years?”
ON A FRIDAY EVENING TWO WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS 1991, several hundred les-
bians and gay men were crammed in an upper East Side townhouse for a joint Christmas party of the Publishing Triangle, an organization of gays and lesbians in the book publishing field, and the newly formed New York chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. Everyone was there — a who’s who of queer writers, editors, photographers, reporters, publicists and literary agents. They came from Time and Newsweek, Reuters and the Associated Press,
Random House and Simon and Schuster, People and Entertainment Weekly, New York Newsday and the New
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OUT AT THE TIMES
York Post, ABC and CBS and many more media outlets. The party went on far longer than expected, as people commented about the unstoppable energy in the room. This was all very new, and power was what they were all getting off on — the collective power that they all realized could be har-
there were at least 15 people from The Times, some of whom didn’t even know each other or know about each other’s sexuality. “That was important,” says Gefter. “I think that as people at The Times become more and more
vid Dunlap. “We have talked about the possibility of sitting down with some editors and managers. There is no specific agenda of which I’m aware, though there certainly are issues we want to raise in time, like spousal benefits.” Other staffers talk about asking for a fulltime reporter to cover gay
“ I have a voice that needs to to get out now. AIDS is not just a disease. It is a revolution in your life.”
— Jeff Schmalz
nessed if they worked together. The first meeting of the New York chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association had occurred just six weeks before. At that meeting, attended by 60 people,
visible to each other, there are more informal avenues of dialogue that create a kind of advocacy block.” That advocacy block is only just beginning to form at The Times. “There is now a loose, informal social network of gay men and women here at The Times.” says real estate reporter Da-
issues and the gay movement, arguing that during the black civil rights movement there were reporters whose beat was solely that movement as it was crystallizing. Still other staffers have agendas ranging from adding commitment ceremony
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Stuart Elliott, The Times’ advertising columnist, saw the success that came with other publications’ extensive coverage of the gay community.
ELLEN B. NEIPRIS
announcements to changing obituaries (currently The Times will not use the word lover and will not say the deceased is “survived by” his or her companion). In almost all cases, gay Times editors, reporters and photographers are guarded, in that New York Times way, about sounding too much
like what they call advocates because they are, after all, “journalists.” But at least one, propelled by forces beyond his control, has comfortably crossed that line. “Sometimes greatness is thrust upon you,” says Schmalz, grinning. “Having AIDS has changed my poli-
tics. The paper trains you to be apolitical. I grew up at the paper and have been apolitical. Now I’m having a political awakening.” Schmalz has been in and out of the hospital six times in the last year and a half, has had brain surgery, survived pneumonia, and outlasted a rare and immediately fatal brain infection, progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. He’s lived far longer than his doctors had hoped for, looks great, and has tremendous energy. He’s now pondering what direction he’d like to go in, what kind of of meaningful writing about his experience he’d like to do for the paper. “I have a voice that needs to to get out now,” he says, beaming with the glow of activist. “AIDS is not just a disease. It is a revolution in your life.”
Jeff Schmalz died at the age of 39 of complications from AIDS in November of 1993, 18 months after this article appeared. This article first appeared in the May 5, 1992 edition of The Advocate. Copyright Michelangelo Signorile 2012.
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DAN DEACON AND BECK IN CONVERSATION
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HUFFINGTON 12.09.12
Is the Future of Music Behind Us? ILLUSTRATION BY JOE CIARDIELLO
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HE FUTURE OF MUSIC FASCINATES ME — mainly how technology is causing it to drift away from the 20th-century model of music as a physical commodity. While the shift may be moving at a glacial pace, I get excited thinking about music, specifically pop music, regaining some of its earliest strengths and traits. Mainly existing in multiple forms, interpretive as an idea, not merely a product set in sonic stone. ¶ I recently had the pleasure of talking with someone of great influence to me and my generation, Beck, about his upcoming Song Reader project — 20 never-before-recorded songs that will be released only in notated form. When I first heard about it I was very intrigued. In my mind, this work will help to continue this emerging evolution of music’s new form by taking up a format long antiquated to the pop audience: sheet music. — Dan Deacon COURTESY OF MCSWEENEY’S PUBLISHING (SONG READER); SERGIO MEMBRILLAS (DO WE? WE DO.)
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DEACON: I went to school for music and studied composition and just kept thinking, I am basically writing Sanskrit. No one gives a crap about notation. I’m wondering what your connection to sheet music and notation and songbooks is. BECK: Once I got into playing music, I was drawn to folk music and rural blues music. Recordings of that music were really hard to come by, so certain songs that I had heard about, the only way I could see what the music was like was in notated form. I think about music I recorded in the last 10, 15 years, and I can tell you there’s a lot of music that’s lost forever because it was on a hard drive. We have musical manuscripts from 400 or 500 years ago, so they may be things that last longer.
How long have you been thinking about doing a release like this? Well this idea came in the early 90s when I was putting out my first records, and Hal Leonard sent a songbook version of the record. I was looking at it, and it just seemed so abstract and weird. And it didn’t make sense because the record was much more about sonic ideas and experimenting with recording and sounds, and
Beck’s Song Reader — out Dec. 7 — is a collection of 20 neverbefore-heard songs by the artist that will only be released in sheet music form. If you want to hear them, you either have to play them yourself, find someone who can, or wait for home recordings to appear on YouTube.
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those things really didn’t translate to piano transcription. Since I haven’t seen the notation of the pieces, my mind’s been racing — are these for particular ensembles or is it for piano notation and people can go and orchestrate them on their own? I am just wondering what you’re looking forward to being the interaction between the music and your audience. I tried to make the songs as simple as possible. I would write something different for myself than if I had the idea that someone else was going to be able to play these songs. I started to think about these kinds of songs that were
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songs in the American songbook — you know, these perennial kinds of songs that work in different eras and remain classics. Not that I was — it would be pretentious of me to think that I’d be making a bunch of, quote, classics. When I think about one of those songs, I think about how you’ll hear a standard from the repertoire, and while it’s a standard — and maybe this is what you’re saying — it takes on a new life because it’s almost like the composer deliberately left it open and free. While the pitch is there and the rhythm is there, it’s still devised with a simplicity that makes it so open for that individual style to be implanted into it time and time again. Yeah, and it’s funny, cause for every one of the
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Beck performs at the LA Weekly Detour Music Festival in October of 2006. His most recent album, Modern Guilt, came out in 2008.
Exit songs that winds up being a classic there’s probably a thousand that don’t make it. A lot of these songs tend to be simple and universal, but they somehow transcend becoming just mere platitude or cliche. It’s a treacherous line, I think. The ones who get really close to that edge but don’t go over become classics. The Beatles managed to do that time and again and a lot of the great songwriters: Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and on and on. So all of these pieces were written specifically for this collection. Well, I had a bunch of songs lying around, but I would say about half of them were, and then the other half were just things that seemed to fit. I started working on this with McSweeney’s in 2004, so it took me a long time to reconcile with the fact that the project probably wouldn’t be as good as the idea (laughs). I think that’s why I put it off for so many years. Like, no, I’ve gotta wait until there are some really good songs, songs that are worthy of asking people to play. But then I realized that wasn’t going to happen, and the value in the project is the idea I guess, and hopefully a couple of the songs find themselves in the
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I think about music I recorded in the last 10, 15 years, and I can tell you there’s a lot of music that’s lost forever because it was on a hard drive. But we have musical manuscripts from 400 or 500 years ago, so they may be things that last longer.” —Beck hands of somebody who can do something good with them. My favorite thing about sheet music is that when someone learns the piece, it’s actually ingrained in how they both think about music and play it. When I think about how you said you started working on this in 2004, I think if it came out then it wouldn’t nearly have had the same impact. Because there are going to be thousands of representations of this that people can go and see with YouTube. Yeah I know what you mean. There was a time when the song didn’t exist off of a piece of paper until somebody learned to play it. I read about 10 years ago that Bing Crosby had a hit in the 30s, and playing music in the home was so popular at that point it had sold 54 million copies of sheet music. At the time there were about 130 million people in America. So that was just an indicator to me of how common that was.
Exit Well, it had a different value to them. It didn’t exist in the same saturation. Nowadays it’s difficult to escape music, and to think there were people who, if they didn’t play it themselves or weren’t in earshot of people playing it, never heard it. Yeah. They didn’t have portable radios until 50 years ago or so. And there’s something different that happens to the song when you learn it, it’s not the same song that you listen to passively on a record. It changes. And it becomes a part of you. And it’s not like many other things. It’s not like playing a sport, or knowing a code in a video game or something. I feel like it’s one of those few things that is unique to the art of making music. It’s true. One other thing I would say about the book is that putting [it] together we knew that most people weren’t going to be able to play these, but there’s a pretty substantial visual element to the book, too. I think a lot of what people will take from it is the visual element. I don’t know, I think you’re underestimating the population of people who are going to be psyched to play and interpret and arrange these songs. You go back and you think about how the Stones used to play Beatles songs, and you’d never go to shows and see that, but now you could
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go to a show and have somebody be like, “Hey, this is one of those new Beck songs. You haven’t heard it.” I would love that. And one of the things I thought about was the fact that some songs over the years have been written in completely different eras and didn’t find their definite version until much later. There’s a song called “Lovesick Blues” by Hank Williams that I learned as a teenager, and I found out later it had been written in the 20s as sort of a Tin Pan Alley song. But he turned it into this classic country version. He really made it his own, and I think that’s happened over and over. I think that’s what you were saying before about making the music your own, but still leaving it open enough so that when someone does add their own style, it doesn’t impede that interpretation. Yeah, and people are getting much more direct access to songs, so there’s less of an ability to be able to have a song be an extension of a pop personality. People are gravitating to a song whether it’s by Adele or a country artist or Deerhunter. I find, more and more, younger people just care about the song. The song will prevail as time goes on.
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CULTURE
The Greatest Lincoln Since Lincoln BY MALLIKA RAO
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N HER BIOGRAPHY, Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin recounts an anecdote that at first seems impossible to link to a man who never left the United States. In 1908, Leo Tolstoy, by then a famous writer, traveled to what he called a “wild and remote” part of the North Caucasus, a tribal region in Russia between the Caspian and Baltic Seas. On the request of a local chief, Tolstoy told a gathered group there stories of the
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Exit great men of history. As he wound to a close, the chief demanded that he not forget the “greatest general and greatest ruler of the world,” Abraham Lincoln. Taken aback, Tolstoy obliged, and for his efforts was presented with the gift of an Arabian horse, as well as another request: could he find them a photograph of Lincoln? “This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become,” the Russian novelist later told a writer for New York World, a now defunct newspaper. “We are still too near to his greatness, but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do.” Tolstoy, no surprise, was onto something. In 2012, a man gone more than a century seemed to be everywhere, and up to every task — whether it was slaying the undead in Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, arguing with Mary Todd on Saturday Night Live, hawking the sleep medication Rozerem, or gazing out from the October cover of Newsweek. Why the sudden return? James Cornelius, who curates the collection at the Abraham Lincoln
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ABOVE: Benjamin Walker in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. LEFT: Louis C.K. plays Lincoln in an SNL sketch.
Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., points out that our 16th president never actually went away. Lincoln’s reputation for what Cornelius calls “largely good things: courage, determination, standing up for what’s right,” as well as his “tremendous ability to look like this ambling, slow-talking, maybe even slow-witted guy,” caught the eye of marketers as soon as he took office. Today, no country in the world makes more Lincoln books and tchotchkes than China, where the president’s
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Exit anti-secessionist views align well with the government’s policy on Tibet. The steady stream of Lincoln paraphernalia grows to flood levels around the times of anniversaries, such as the 150th of the Gettysburg Address, which falls next year. (Because, as Cornelius puts it, “everyone loves round numbers.”) This year, there is the added momentum of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, which, for its reach and biographical faithfulness, could be considered the president’s most popular public appearance. As of its November opening day, more people watched the movie’s London-born star, Daniel DayLewis, play Lincoln, than saw or heard the real Lincoln in his lifetime. This week, Disney announced a rush order of additional prints to meet what the Associated Press called “unexpected demands” in Alaska. History lessons taught in movie theaters don’t usually impress academics, but Spielberg’s vision is “all anybody in Lincoln scholarship is talking about,” according to Harold Holzer, a Lincoln expert whom Tony Kushner consulted with for the Lincoln script. Holzer distills his colleagues’ reactions to
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CULTURE
LINCOLN MOMENTS Historian Richard Norton Smith names four “Lincolns” that have occupied our cultural consciousness. 1984:
2000:
Since the Vietnam War, libertarians have tarred Lincoln as the first American overreacher, but Gore Vidal was the first to memorably brand the president an “absolute dictator,” in his 1984 historical novel Lincoln.
African-American historian and longtime Ebony editor Lerone Bennett, Jr. accused the Great Emancipator of instead being a white supremacist, in his controversial book, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream.
1999:
2006:
At a conference in Wisconsin, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright and gay rights activist Larry Kramer made headlines with the claim that he could prove Lincoln was “a totally gay man.”
Writer Joshua Wolf Shenk’s splashy debut, Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, marks the first, but not last, time Lincoln’s moods have been filtered through the paradigm of modern depression.
DICTATOR LINCOLN
BROKEBACK LINCOLN
RACIST LINCOLN
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Exit a pair of questions: “Did you like it, or did you love it?” Goodwin, who brought Holzer to Spielberg’s attention after her book prompted the director to make the film, enthused to The Huffington Post that watching Day-Lewis in the title role was akin to “seeing this man I lived with for 10 years wander around in front of everyone.” By choosing to telescope onto the president’s maneuvering of the 13th amendment, which outlawed slavery on U.S. soil., the movie redirects Lincoln’s saintly mythology closer to reality, says historian Richard Norton Smith. “It illustrates Lincoln’s genius as a politician, both as the great public advocate and as a behind-thescenes wire puller who was perfectly willing to trail his garments in the dust if that’s what it takes to get what he knows to be right,” Norton Smith told The Huffington Post in a phone interview. Holzer sets this “teachable moment” apart from other “round number” occasions, aided as it is by a blockbuster hit. For the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, in 2009, publishers sent a bounty of books to market, and mostly only scholars noticed. This year, the crop includes offerings for kids, by
CULTURE
authors as diverse in inclination as Holzer himself (whom Disney commissioned to write a young adult companion book to the movie) and right-wing hot-head Bill O’Reilly. Adult offerings also range, from fictional thrillers such as the period mystery The Lincoln Conspiracy, by The Huffington Post’s own Timothy L. O’Brien, to nonfiction titles with the basic catholic pitch of “Lincoln Plus Anything Else” (for instance, Lincoln And Medicine, and Lincoln’s Forgotten Friend Leonard Swett, both released the same month as the movie). Norton Smith rattles off a list of past Lincolns who’ve captured the public imagination: “Racist Lincoln,” “Dictator Lincoln” (both sprung from scholarship on the president’s changing views toward slavery), “Brokeback Lincoln” and “Prozac Lincoln.” As for naming Day-Lewis’, he has a grander title: “the Lincoln for our generation.” “I can’t tell you how many depictions I’ve seen. No one has ever communicated as Daniel DayLewis did a sense after seeing him for two-and-a-half hours that this is what it would have been like to be in the presence of Abraham Lincoln.”
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I honestly think anyone could have done what I did. I was just given the opportunity.�
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GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
Lauren Luckey
Empowering Women in Afghanistan
BY EMMA DIAB
WHEN 24-YEAR-OLD Lt. Lauren Luckey was stationed in a rural village with her unit, the 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry regiment of the U.S. Army, her Lieutenant Colonel gave her free rein to design and lead a project focused exclusively on community building and social engagement among the Afghan women. With women being the heart of a household in PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMIE HOPPER
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GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
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COURTESY OF LT. LAUREN LUCKEY; JAMIE HOPPER (TATTOO)
Afghanistan, rearing the children of the country’s future, Luckey hoped to impart the influence that comes with being a woman in a position of power, a foreign concept to some. “I wanted them to see a strong woman — [that] there is something else out there,” Luckey tells Huffington. “If you never see it you never know what’s out there. They’ve never seen a female officer before me.” Luckey chats candidly about her experiences and goals in a way that makes it simple to understand her success in leading a Female Engagement Team in Northern Kunar in Afghanistan, bringing the women of the village into her confidence.
FEMALE ENGAGEMENT “At first they’re very hesitant,” she recalls of the women. “There’s this stigma if they’re seen with an American, seen talking to us, they’re going to get killed.” Luckey worked on gaining their trust, meeting them frequently at clinics and schools to teach them about healthcare and personal hygiene. But when she saw a chance to empower them within their households, to “have some-
thing over” their husbands, Luckey did not hesitate. Enter the unlikely characters in Luckey’s story — two ex-pro surfers from California who founded an organization called Waves For Water, which makes small water
ABOVE: Luckey holds a child at a clinic. CENTER: Getting water from the river. BELOW: Luckey’s tattoo.
Exit filters and delivers them to impoverished areas and at disaster relief efforts. Luckey learned of the organization when a peer was reading a surfing magazine and pointed out the ad. Soon after she contacted them, the duo traveled to Afghanistan with suitcases full of water filters. Lt. Luckey made a point to only teach the women how to use the filters, emboldening wives and mothers to take back some control of their households with the task of providing safe drinking water for their families. Mindful of the wary looks and the thinning crowd of women at the meeting she organized, she attempted to get the remaining women to trust her judgment. “I said I’m going to drink this because I’m going to show you this filter works. I went to the river with one of them, and it just blew [her] mind,” she says. “I went to take that sip and in my head I was like ‘Oh God. If this thing doesn’t work, I’m going to feel pretty sick.’” Not only did Luckey survive the sip of filtered river water, she was able to gain the trust of the village women, which helped secure their cooperation during future endeavors she planned. The women who
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stayed behind to learn about the filters in turn spread the word to their friends and neighbors, and the water filter plan grew throughout the community. After getting in the good graces of the town’s governor, Luckey orchestrated a small female governmental committee to address the grievances of the women, such as the length of work days in the
I said I’m going to drink this because I’m going to show you this filter works. I went to the river with one of them, and it just blew [her] mind.” field or the ostracization of widows. It was the first movement of its kind in the rural, far flung Northern Kunar Province and the first time any women had even been admitted in the governor’s compound, let alone for the purpose of representing themselves. “It was this crazy thing that happened. The governor was even shocked. He was like, ‘women don’t come here,’” Luckey says. “‘No? Well they’re going to come here today.’”
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STATESIDE Currently stationed in Hawaii, Luckey is preparing for another tour in Afghanistan, and compiling her business school applications, as she is a year away from meeting the required four years of active duty for a commissioned officer. Her options — and there are many — are up in the air at this point. Perhaps even literally, as Luckey is considering aviation as her next military venture, or looking into the Special Forces cultural
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support team, similar to her work leading the female engagement team. But business school is a definite down the line, she assures. “I’ll be lying if I said Harvard wasn’t my number one,” Luckey says. “The worst thing anyone is ever going to say to you is no. No one is going to shoot you here.” Which is a notion in stark contrast with daily life in Afghanistan, where Luckey hopes some positive change will come after the troops are long gone. “I honestly think anyone could have done what I did,” she says. “I was just given the opportunity.”
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Luckey spends time with her dog in the backyard of her family home in Alpharetta, Ga.
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AP PHOTO/EVAN VUCCI (SCHAPIRO); BRUCE BENNETT/GETTY IMAGES (9/11 MISTAKES); DAVID MCNEW/GETTY IMAGES (NUCLEAR PLANT); CHELSEA LAUREN/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES (WILLIAMS); GETTY IMAGES (TROOPER)
SEC Chair Delays Major Rule for Her Personal Gain
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9/11 Mistakes Repeated in Sandy Cleanup
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NUCLEAR PLANT SABOTAGE?
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Katt Williams Slaps Target Employee
State Trooper Accused of Stealing From Crash Victim
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Harvard Finals Club: ‘No
F***ing Jews Allowed’
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MAGICIAN’S HEAD (REALLY) SET ON FIRE ON TV SHOW
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Creepily Realistic White-Chocolate Baby Heads
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Boys Foam at the Mouth After Taking LSD They Found on the Way to Elementary School
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‘Sex in a Box’ Comes to Switzerland
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