Backlash Against Gay Profile p. 20

By: Tony Case

Florida paper receives more than 150 phone calls
and letters following an article about gay parents sp.

A PROFILE OF gay parents on the front page of the Jacksonville Florida Times-Union's Family section last month provoked more than 150 phone calls and letters to the newspaper.
Some readers praised the Times-Union for courageously illustrating the variety of lifestyles in the city, reader advocate Mike Clark said. But the lion's share of the feedback was critical of the story, which explored some of the challenges gay men and lesbians face in raising children from previous straight marriages.
Several readers complained that the piece was played too prominently, while others said the Family section should focus on the traditional family unit. One person said he wished the paper had never started the section, and a few threatened to cancel their subscriptions.
Many respondents took unapologetic aim at the article's subject matter, saying gay people would be better off returning to the closet.
Newspapers routinely publish letters from readers expressing displeasure about news coverage. However, the Times-Union did not run negative responses to the gay parenting story because most either contained profanity and were deemed unprintable or quoted Bible verses, "which doesn't exactly make for original reading," Clark said.
Jacksonville, like other large U.S. urban centers, has its share of racial strife. But in the biggest city and fourth-largest metropolitan area in the Sunshine State, anti-gay sentiment operates on a different level than black-white tensions, Clark related.
"People say things about gays they would never say about African-Americans. We can have blacks in the paper and people aren't going to protest. Even though some still complain about it, by and large we've gotten beyond that," he said.
"But if you do a story about gays and imply that they deserve coverage, you get the most extreme reaction from readers. The whole issue of homosexuality is a very powerful one in this town. Emotions kind of go off the chart."
In his regular weekly column the week after the controversial article appeared, Clark compared this flap to a backlash that resulted last year after the Times-Union ran a comic strip in which a teen-age character reveals he is gay.
Clark wrote that when it comes to covering gay life, editors have to consider readers' opposing viewpoints and ultimately decide whether to cover society as it exists.
"News and feature stories have to cover the real world," he maintained. "That includes families that differ from the traditional family unit."
Donald Suggs of the New York chapter of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which works to improve press coverage of gay issues, agreed that news organizations cannot censor reality.
"It's disturbing that people still want to pretend that gay men and lesbians are not parenting," he said. "It's vitally important that we be visible in our role as parents because it's an area in which gay men and lesbians have been invisible."
Many people are uncomfortable when the words "gay" and "children" are mentioned together, he observed, "only because people have never seen us in that role in the media."
Most journalists believe that news stories, unlike editorials, should not make endorsements, Clark contended.
But this is an "oversimplification," he said, because "the gay parent story did use precious time, color photos and space. It did represent a news decision that gay parents are here and ought to be covered.
"To the extent that editors decided to run the story in a prominent place, it represented an endorsement of its importance to the readers."
Clark cited in his column the Family section mission statement in response to those who suggested that by running the article, the Times-Union was not so much reporting the news as it was "contributing to a decline in morals."
The statement says the section "strives to be attentive to the needs of our families, whatever form they might take, to celebrate their successes, address their problems and nurture their futures. The Family section's goal is to be a reference and resource for ideas, insight and reflection on the most critical relationships we share."