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Magazines
 | Questions for a President Everyone seems to have a personal story about Bill Clinton. Mine starts in 1991, just about a week into Clinton's bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee. He was making his first trip to New Hampshire when I walked with him through some woods near Concord. He was appearing at a Sierra Club event and you could already feel the buzz surrounding the guy. I covered him first for The Washington Times, trailing him on the campaign trail through 1992 and following him as president through 1995. I left the Times to join The Advocate that year and went to work securing the first interview a sitting president would give on gay topics. The White House agreed to the request early in 2006, months before Clinton would face Bob Dole at the polls. But instead of the sit-down interview I was after, Clinton (or probably more likely, his advisers) agreed only to answer a series of written questions. The answers came back devoid of much emotion and lacking in any real news save for the fact the interview happened at all. I was disappointed at first, both in the Clinton White House and with the magazine, which pretended the interview was done in person. I didn't really appreciate the piece until several years later, long after I'd left Washington, when a new friend told me how important that cover story was to a young gay man who felt empowered because the president of the United States was talking to him. My friend still had a copy of the magazine. Read the story here by downloading the pdf. |
 | Not That There's Anything Wrong With It The most difficult story I ever did was the "outing" of three U.S. congressmen who voted in 1996 for the Defense of Marriage Act, the first piece of federal legislation that sought specifically to counter the push for gay relationship rights. It was tough because although I felt it was a necessary story to do, I knew I was directly impacting the lives of men who were trying to keep private a crucial part of them. One of them, Jim Kolbe, decided to disclose his homosexuality before the magazine hit the streets and found himself pleasantly surprised by the generally positive response he got. Another one of them, Mark Foley, pointedly refused to discuss his sexual orientation and successfully kept most reporters from following my reporting. I left Washington and political reporting soon after I wrote this story. I ended up in New York where I shifted from reporting to editing and worked for television news sites. One of them was ABCNews.com, the site that ten years after my story in The Advocate, reported on lewd Internet communications Foley had with male congressional pages. A friend at ABC asked me to write a column that reflected back on my original story and put it into context with Foley's current problems. I wrote a story, which ABCNews.com posted for a weekend and which got a number of favorable comments in blogosphere. But then the editors of ABCNews.com pulled my column down for unknown reasons and that led to another run of blog items. Read the original story here by downloading the pdf. Check out the column that originally appeared on ABCNews.com here. And check out what some of the blogs had to say. |
 | The Honorable Woman From Texas The story about the closeted gay congressman wasn't the first time I poked around the private life of someone who wanted to keep a part of them away from the public eye. The first time was the posthumous outing of Rep. Barbara Jordan, the legendary congresswoman from Texas. When Jordan died in 1996, I came up with a rationale that influenced the future of my work. I asked myself a question: is a piece of information relevant to the story at hand? If it is, it's fair game. In death, how a notable person lived her life is definitely open for coverage. But nearly every obit of Jordan talked about her historic run as a black politician or her struggle with multiple sclerosis, not her lesbianism. Some saw the story as an intrusion, a violation of the way Jordan lived her own life. Others took from it the discovery of a new role model. I looked at it as an honest exploration of a pivotal political figure’s life. Read the story here by downloading the pdf. |
 | What Will They Want Next? When gay marriage burst onto the nation’s consciousness a decade ago, most reporters focused on guys marrying other guys or girls taking vows with other girls. I wanted to go deeper and check into what happened when gays acquired children to raise. In 1997, states were already scrambling to be first to get laws on the books to ensure gays wouldn’t be able to marry. But lawmakers, namely those opposed to gay rights, barely had the chance to respond to the bigger picture of a gay family. I pitched this story to Out magazine so I could talk to men and women who were trying either to adopt children or become foster parents for kids. Why, I wondered, did they want all the responsibilities that come with being a parent? And to what ends would their opponents take to prevent that from happening? Read the story here by downloading the pdf. |
