By Paul Varnell

Recently I was invited to give a short talk to Prime Timers, an organization mostly of older gay men. It was an invitation I was happy to accept since this is a demographic I am a part of. Much of the publicly visible gay community consists of younger men, so it is always a pleasure to spend time with one’s own age group, men whom time has mellowed and who share common historical memories and popular culture reference points.

Perhaps fearing that someone whose trade is words might run on garrulously, they gently but firmly suggested that I talk for not more than 15 minutes, then give people a chance to comment and ask questions. I did, they did, and I think it was an enjoyable time for everyone; at least it was for me. Since it gets them a free mention, I’m sure they won’t mind if I expand a portion of my comments for Chicago Free Press readers.

Looking back, it seems as if I have been intermittently involved in media for most of my life. In 1952, when I was 11, I was fascinated by the national election (Eisenhower vs. Stevenson, you recall) and decided to put out a newspaper about it. Using a hectograph, a kind of primitive mimeograph, I printed up maybe 10 copies and sold subscriptions for four issues to my peers for something like a dime.

For content I combined information shamelessly borrowed from Time and U.S. News & World Report (which had excellent charts and graphs) with my own painstaking analysis of state voting patterns over the previous half century. I threw myself wholeheartedly into this project and recall being deeply offended when the mother of one of the children commented in surprise as I handed her the second issue, “We didn’t think we would get anything for our money.”

In high school, I think I wrote one article for the school newspaper and one for the literary magazine. In college I wrote a piece for the campus humor magazine (a satire on steady state cosmology; it wasn’t very funny), and in graduate school a music review for the campus alternative paper. Intermittent indeed! I am unable to account now for this string of single appearances (or failure to recall others). Perhaps I didn’t find it rewarding, or perhaps I just wanted to prove that I could do it. Or maybe I didn’t have more to say. That was all a very long time ago.

In college I did become deeply involved in the campus radio station, a student-owned FM classical music station. After a couple of years there I was put in charge of the music programming with the heady responsibility of selecting what thousands of area listeners would hear day after day. I even ended up briefly with a weekly program where I could play my personal favorites. We had one announcer, an engineering student, who had the best deep booming voice and we all tried to imitate him, none successfully.

Skipping ahead many years, when I moved to Chicago in 1982 I threw myself into gay and AIDS activism under the auspices of the Illinois Gay and Lesbian Task Force, then headed by the saintly Al Wardell, a deeply committed activist for whom the Task Force was a full-time, if volunteer, second job.

My own efforts tended to focus—you’ll not be surprised to hear—on the media. I scoured the local papers and watched local TV news programs for items about gays, or that should have included gays, and called reporters or editors with factual correction or comments about omissions or misemphases.

Since AIDS was then new and I knew something about it, it was not too hard to get taken seriously as a source of information. Occasionally I was able to generate a story by suggesting an interesting or useful topic. The point was not to get my name in the paper—and I usually suggested other quotable sources—but to use the mainstream media to help promote the acceptance of gays by familiarizing Chicagoans with gay people, gay issues and gay lives. Did it have any effect? Did it help? I’ll never know. But it was something I could do so I did it.

I came to have a good deal of respect for newspaper reporters, almost all of whom are genuinely decent people who really do want to get the story right and are open to new input. I confess, however, that I never did learn to talk in pithy soundbites and pull quotes. It must have distressed many a reporter under the pressure of deadline when I would begin the answer to a question with “Well, let’s talk about that a bit…” or “It’s a bit complicated, but…” or “There are several different views about that,” or even, “My own view is X, but a number of other people believe Y.” But, for better or worse that is the way I think—and it is what accuracy requires.

(to be continued)

Some of Paul Varnell’s previous columns are posted at the Independent Gay Forum (www.indegayforum.org). His e-mail address is pvarnell@aol.com.