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Transcript of Keynote Address at
CPCSM's Annual Fall Membership Meeting
(10/22/02), Presented By DeAnna Miller

DeAnna Miller, Publisher of Queue Press,
giving keynote address to CPCSM members.

Introduction
Hello. Thank you for inviting me.

Tonight I'm going to talk a little about the mainstream media and how they
cover GLBT issues. I'll talk a little about the history of the GLBT press,
specifically how the GLBT press covers religious and spirituality issues.
Over and through and after all this, I'm going to tell you about me, and
about starting Queue Press.

Many people think of a vocational call as a question of whether they will
enter ordained ministry, or become a lay employee of a religious
organization, and that's how I thought of it. I know that I am not called to
be a parish priest, and I am certainly not called to a seminary experience
. . . so for me to have a vocational call, I must be called to serve others in a different way.

A few years ago I thought, "Maybe I'm called to be a chaplain." I know a
few chaplains, all with different educational backgrounds, and their work
is meaningful. To me, it looks like they do a lot of hanging out either in a
school, on campus, in a hospital, wherever. I'm pretty good at hanging out, so I thought, "Yeah, I could do that." St. Kate's offers the master's and a pastoral ministry certificate, and I thought, "Maybe this is the first step toward that." It was in my first semester here that I discovered Parker Palmer, who said, "Vocation is when our deepest desire meets the world's great need."

"World's great need" is perhaps overstating the importance of Queue
Press. But it is my "deepest desire" to create a publication for my GLBT
brothers and sisters. What kind of publication? I want something that will
take a cradle-to-grave approach for the community. I want a publication
that has the courage to engage in responsible advocacy journalism. It's a
tough thing to do, and I'll talk more about that in a bit. The third thing I
want is a publication that challenges what I call the "prevailing aesthetic"
in so many GLBT publications across the country.

What do I want? A publication that will act as a chaplaincy for this wildly
diverse community. What does Queue Press have to do with religion?
Very little. What does Queue Press have to do with my relationship with
God, and my neighbor, and myself? Everything.

Personal Journey
I grew up in Yankton, South Dakota, a blue-collar town of about 12,000. I have a twin sister we are night and day and a brother who's two years
younger. My father was a police officer and my mother had a series of jobs that never revealed her gifts. She waited tables; she worked in a clothing store; she was a bank teller. After my parents divorced, she went back to school, and now she does something very complicated with business and computers. (Y2K was very exciting for her.)

Growing up, I had no idea what homosexuality was. I knew what a
"faggot" was it was a bitterly mean thing to call someone. And even
when it sort of dawned on me in high school that men could have same- sex relationships, I never made the cognitive leap to ". . . and so can
women." The only sex ed I ever got was The Filmstrip in 4th grade, and
thank God for that; I remember reading a Judy Blume book in third grade
and thinking, "What do they mean, a girl has a 'period'?"

After high school I went to the University of South Dakota in Vermillion,
easily the most liberal town in the entire state, and I still didn't get it. The
summer that I was 19 is when it started to make sense. I remember
thinking in June of that year, "Wow, wouldn't it be great if (this other
woman) and I could . . . I don't know . . . be roommates forever." This was before Will and Grace, before Ellen, before Elton John came out.

This is what I mean by cradle-to-grave. Many GLBT publications tend to
focus on one group and often that is white, middle-class people (more men than women) aged 18 or 21 - 35. I want a publication that can speak
to the same-sex couples with newborn babies, to the gay teen just coming
out, to the militant college kid, to middle-aged homeowners, to GLBT
seniors. Most kids coming out are not well-served by most GLBT
publications. That doesn't mean that making a publication appropriate for
minors is the highest value in publishing; I mean that serving them
is part of my mission statement.

After I started to figure out that I was gay, my world got pretty big. I no
longer assumed I would just graduate and go back to Yankton and teach
high-school English . . . because, well, there may be spinsters and
confirmed bachelors in Yankton, but there certainly weren't any gay
people there, so clearly it was not the place for me.

I got involved in the college newspaper, and then in the campus Gay,
Lesbian, Bisexual Alliance (there was one? My entire first year I didn't
even know). I spent the next couple summers in Shakopee, working at
Valleyfair. ("I don't care if kids throw up on me -- just get me out of South Dakota for twelve weeks.")

My first visit to a gay bar was to the Club Metro in St. Paul one of those
summers. There I found a copy of Equal Time, the wonderful Twin Cities
GLBT biweekly newspaper that ceased publication in 1994. I didn't like
the bar itself -- I didn't know anyone, obviously, because somehow I didn't think my Valleyfair buddies would want to tag along. But I drove the 60-mile round-trip every two weeks to get the new issue.

Back at USD, I increased my involvement with both the paper and GLBA. Working at the paper brought me such joy -- I loved the other people in that world, and I loved the work. And I loved working with GLBA -- I loved being part of creating this community that existed solely for community. We tried to raise awareness and tolerance on campus, but
none of us really expected that to go anywhere; it was, after all, South
Dakota.

Somewhere in there, I remember having the thought, "Wouldn't it be
fantastic to work at Equal Time."

I moved to the Loring Park neighborhood in Minneapolis after college and did some temp work because, strangely, the Star Tribune didn't see my talent quite the way I did, and I needed to pay the rent.

At that time, the Twin Cities had three GLBT publications: Lavender, a
biweekly; focusPOINT, a weekly; and Q Monthly, a monthly. Q Monthly
shut down in 1998. focusPOINT shut down in 2000, but it was an
entertaining run while it lasted. focusPOINT and Lavender, which still
exists, always had a feud of some sort. They were constantly sniping at
each other, and I'm sort of joking about it being an entertaining run, but
sort of not. The resources and energy focusPOINT and Lavender put into
attacking each other were astonishing.

One round went something like this: focusPOINT wrote a story suggesting that Lavender was involved in some sketchy accounting for one of the Pride block parties. The story was set up so that it was Lavender versus a bar called the Gay '90s. And it was clear that focusPOINT believed that Lavender had at least engaged in financial impropriety if not outright theft.

So Lavender, after trashing focusPOINT inside -- on the pages of -- their
next issue, ran an ad on their own back page explaining that from now on,
they would no longer cover anything at the '90s news, charity events,
anything, nothing. You will never see the '90s in Lavender again. Then, I
think, focusPOINT turned around and started beating up on Lavender's ad sales manager. It was really, really ugly. And personal.

A few months after I moved up here, focusPOINT announced that it was
looking for more free-lance writers. I managed to get through the door, and I started writing a story or two every week. I had moved up here all by myself. I didn't know anyone. I was "temping," which meant I didn't have any regular co-workers. I was trying to get involved with my church, but that was difficult.

focusPOINT suddenly offered me instant access to everything that was
going on. I got free tickets -- and people to go with -- to everything. I was happy because I got to interview and write about interesting people. I got VIP passes to fun events. A stranger at a party would tell me she liked the approach I took on a certain story, and then I would figure out she was the press secretary for the state attorney general. For me, a tiny little fish in a great big pond, this was pretty cool stuff.

But I knew it wasn't all good. That whole focusPOINT/Lavender/Gay 90s thing -- that happened while I was at focusPOINT. I didn't get it; I could hardly stand to read the stories, and I didn't see how the evidence was so conclusive, and I didn't get why this seemed all so personal. But I didn't really care, because I was happy . . . mostly. I never got paid on time, and I thought I was being taken for granted, but overall, it was worth it.

I'd been attending St. Mark's, the Episcopal church on Loring Park, for
about a year, but it wasn't a good fit. On a friend's recommendation I went to St. John the Baptist, an Episcopal church in Linden Hills in
Minneapolis. Very soon after I met Karyn, my partner. And you know
how it is when you're in love. You evaluate everything through the lens of
"How much time does this require me to be away from my sweetheart, and is it worth it?"

The cost-benefit analysis for my work at focusPOINT suddenly went south in a hurry. I wasn't getting paid well or regularly, I wasn't feeling
appreciated, and after living in Minneapolis for a while, I no longer relied
on that situation for the bulk of my social life. I quit focusPOINT in the
summer of 1999, and I wrote very little for publication after that.

So that's me. Let's talk about mainstream press and how they cover GLBT issues. I'll talk very broadly about the history of GLBT coverage in this country, and then I'll talk a little about two recent examples.

History of the Mainstream Press' Coverage of GLBT Issues:
A General Overview
In most mainstream press in this country, GLBT people barely existed
before the 1960s. There is a weekly newspaper in the Netherlands that in
1900 was running lesbian personal ads. (Love those Dutch.) In
turn-of-the-century U.S., though, gay bars were regularly raided by the
cops, and men found guilty of sodomy could expect prison sentences of up to 20 years.

Accordingly, news reporting on GLBT issues tended to focus on bar raids
and coverage of sensational crimes committed by or against GLBT people. The earliest example that anyone can seem to find of the word lesbian appearing in mainstream press is in 1892 in the New York Times. The article was entitled, "Lesbian Love and Murder." Headlines during the
1924 murder trial of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold in Chicago
screamed about "sexual perversity."

I'm going to use a radio example in a few minutes, but what concerns me
most and really lights my fire is how print media have covered GLBT
issues. In 1964, Life magazine ran a cover story called "Homosexuality in
America." The article featured photos taken at a leather bar in San
Francisco. While that may have broadened the horizons of most of Life
magazine's readership, I'm not sure that was the most accurate way to
illustrate a story called "Homosexuality in America."

A couple years later Time magazine ran a seven-page article entitled "The
Homosexual: Newly Visible, Newly Understood." It wasn't all good; gay
activists demonstrated in front of Time's offices to protest the article
because it included negative comments by mental-health experts. The
frustration of the activists is understandable; you see, in 1963, the
American Psychiatric Association upgraded homosexuality to a mere
"sexual deviation" or "non-psychotic mental disorder." But evidently not
all mental-health experts got the memo.

The 1960s is when things really got rolling. The mainstream press
continued to spend the bulk of its GLBT coverage on crime and other
activities that portrayed the community negatively, but the GLBT
community started holding the mainstream press accountable.

For example, the rioting outside the Stonewall Inn (a New York City gay
bar) in 1969 was a turning point in the gay-rights movement. Police came
to raid the bar, but the crowd fought back against police brutality, and for
three days, the neighborhood streets were a dangerous, riotous mess. That whole thing cops barricading themselves inside the bar, calling for help as the drag queens pelted them with beer bottles – got three mentions in the New York Times.

But a few miles away, there was a local park that was popular as a gay
male cruising area. So a vigilante group cut down all the trees and bushes.
That story – the sad story of losing all that greenery because some gay men can't control themselves and spurred a vigilante group to desperate
measures – resulted in nine separate articles.

Also in 1969, gay activists protested homophobic language in the San
Francisco Examiner. The newspaper employees' response? They dumped
purple ink all over the protesters. It resulted in a riot.

So it was probably no surprise, then, when the New York Times ran a
front-page article in 1970 called "Homosexuals in Revolt." The article
reported "a new mood now taking hold among the nation's homosexuals.
In growing numbers," the article said, "they are publicly identifying
themselves as homosexuals, taking a measure of pride in that identity and
seeking militantly to end what they see as society's persecution of them."

I don't think anyone really blames the media for the cultural
misunderstandings of homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identity.
Everyone from Sigmund Freud (and his "Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality" in 1905) to endocrinology researchers in the '40s to well-
meaning theologians in the '60s were trying to figure out whether
homosexuality is innate, whether homosexual people are as well-adjusted
as heterosexual people, and what "disturbances in development" cause
people to become homosexual.

In this respect, the media act as a mirror. They reflect an image and say,
"This is how the world is." Historically, media tend not to say, "This is
how the world should be." Even investigative reporters tend not to
question the underlying assumptions of the establishments they investigate.

A perfect example is the mainstream coverage of AIDS in the very early
1980s. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was first called GRID,
which stood for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, and before it had that
name, it was known simply as "gay cancer." Reporters didn't question the
word "gay" in the disease.

The Centers for Disease Control epidemiologists who studied the first
cases figured that this disease probably wasn't caused by a virus or bacteria, because of the 41 cases they studied (all of them gay men), none
knew each other. So surely it wasn't viral or bacterial.

The New York Times' first story about AIDS appeared in July, 1981. The headline said "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals." It quoted CDC spokesman Dr. James Curran as saying there was no apparent danger to non-homosexuals. "The best evidence against contagion," he said, "is that no cases have been reported to date outside the homosexual community or in women."

I get that it was a completely different world 21 years ago. This was before doctors and dentists wore gloves for routine procedures. The world – and the study of disease – was different.

But, the Times article said, in that first study of 41 men, the reporting doctors noted "that most cases had involved homosexual men who have had multiple and frequent sexual encounters with different partners, as many as 10 sexual encounters each night up to four times a week." And, the Times article said, "Many of the patients have also been treated
for viral infections such as herpes, cytomegalovirus and hepatitis B."

I will grant the doctors academic blindness. I will grant that they are unable to think creatively and outside the bounds of empiricism to explain this mysterious disease.

But the reporter? And don't tell me that it's not a reporter's job to solve epidemiological puzzles. Solving puzzles is a reporter's job. Reporters have busted open everything from Watergate to the International Olympic Committee bribery scandal. It is the responsibility of a good journalist to publicize information about wrongdoing that affects the public interest.

Where's the wrongdoing that affects the public interest in that first AIDS
story? It's when a myopic governmental office can stand there and say,
"Here is a mysterious disease in 41 men, many of whom had sexually
transmitted diseases, and most of whom were extremely sexually active,
but we don't think this disease is infectious. We think it's gay-related. The
rest of you are safe."

What reporter -- what news outlet -- doesn't question that? What reporter can, with any integrity, hold a mirror up to that? I had this whole section about how it was rooted in homophobia, and how the mainstream press never held Reagan's administration responsible for not addressing AIDS, which was also incredibly homophobic, but I realized you guys probably want to get home before midnight.

This is what I mean when I say I want a publication that engages in
responsible advocacy journalism. I want a magazine -- I want reporters --
whose journalistic framework isn't just "get the facts," but "get facts that
make sense to our community, and call everyone to account for their assumptions about our community."

So that's a little history of mainstream press. Let's look now at two recent
examples: National Public Radio and the Star Tribune.

History of the Mainstream Press' Coverage of GLBT Issues:
Two Recent Examples
I love National Public Radio. When I think of NPR, I think of the calm,
rational, thoughtful voices of Ray Suarez and Neal Conan. I think of their
in-depth coverage, how they never, ever seem to miss a nuance in any
story. They hold guests and callers equally accountable, and they always
say the exact thing that I would have thought of (three days later).

And I think of the very respectful approach of everyone who has ever
hosted Talk of the Nation or All Things Considered. Even when the caller
is an unhinged lunatic who is spouting off on how the hippies ruined the
country, the host is always remarkably hospitable and fair. Your call got through, so your ideas get a hearing, just like the fifteen previous socialist tree-huggers.

I love NPR. But last February, I was ready to throw my radio through the
window. Talk of the Nation (with Neal Conan) featured the topic "Growing Up with Gay Parents" on Tuesday, February 26. His guests
included Abigail Garner, a Minneapolis woman whose father is gay. He
came out when she was five. Abigail now makes her living as a speaker
and writer; her website familieslikemine.com is dedicated to decreasing
isolation for people who have GLBT parents, and bringing voice to the
experiences of these families. Right now she's in the middle of writing
a book. I know Abigail fairly well. She does really important work.

Another guest was a man raised by two mothers. Another guest was a
psychology professor from Stanford who has studied the effects of gay
parents on children. Another guest was Noelle Howey, a woman whose
father came out as a woman when Noelle was a teenager. Noelle lived in
St. Paul for a little while this year.

And the fifth guest was Jakii Edwards, a woman who wrote a book called
Like Mother, Like Daughter?: The Effects of Growing Up in a
Homosexual Home. The book was published last year by Xulon Press, and it is available on amazon.com. In fact, amazon will give you one of
their "Great Buy!" specials if you buy it with The Final Days: The Last,
Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House by Barbara Olson. So that might tell you a little about which way this book leans.

Oh, you say you've never heard of Xulon Press? That would be the
"publishing house" of Exodus Ministries, the international organization
that promotes the message of "freedom from homosexuality through the
power of Jesus Christ."

You see, at age five, Jakii was taken from a foster home and returned to
her birth mother, an abusive, mentally ill woman who happened to be a
lesbian. And Jakii was terrified that she would grow up like her. She
channeled this fear and rage into the most logical option for her, which
was to work to help people "out of the homosexual lifestyle."

This is a woman who deserves my compassion and understanding. She is
wounded, unhappy, and confused. She needs therapy and unconditional
love. Lots of it.

Instead, NPR gave her just as much air time as the three well-adjusted grown children and the incredibly well-credentialed psychology professor. Why?

Last spring I interviewed Noelle, the guest with the transgender father, for
a Queue Press article about her new book called Dress Codes: Of Three
Girlhoods My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine. I asked Noelle about
that show, and she said that someone had referred the show's producers to her because two years ago she co-edited Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents.

Noelle said she got the feeling the producers were looking for someone
"who hit the age of nine and said, 'Oh my God, this is disgusting,' and
never changed their opinion. . . . They were looking for someone who would talk about their tragic upbringing. I said, I don't know if I can help you there.' I ended up giving them the what for on their voicemail." She didn't expect to hear anything back. "I thought this is really going to piss them off, but they invited me on anyway."

So NPR went off looking for someone else who would take the "oh my
God, this is disgusting" point of view. And they found Jakii Edwards.
Clearly the producers were not trying to stack the deck with anti-GLBT
opinion; they had four other guests who spoke very positively on the issue
of gay parents. In fact, this idea of trying to achieve a sense of balance, of
trying to give voice to all points of view, is quite noble, but the modern
mainstream media continue to botch its execution. NPR thought, "Well,
we need balance, we need equal time, so that means we have to have
someone with the opposite ideas."

It's ridiculous. Would NPR host an hour on the space program and invite
Charles K. Johnson, the president of the International Flat Earth Research
Society? the man who, in 1980, said, "You can't orbit a flat earth. The
space shuttle is a joke – and a very ludicrous joke." Would NPR's website then post a copy of this man's map, which shows the known world as a big phonograph record with the North Pole in the center?

Of course not! NPR couldn't pull that off with enough irony to avoid it
turning into a national joke. Some things are just wrong. Flat Earth
"research" is just wrong. It's not even bad science – it's anti-science. It's
"Whatever NASA says is automatically wrong."

Oh, but what if that man really believes in his map, with all his heart?
What if he bases his entire moral structure on the foundation of a flat
planet, and he gets his deeply held beliefs right out of the Bible? Does that make it any less wrong, and any more deserving of serious consideration by intelligent people?

I don't pretend to understand any of the possible physiological causes of
anyone's sexuality one way or another. But I have yet to hear from a
serious student of sexuality that anyone's orientation might possibly be
affected by the power of Jesus Christ. But NPR went out and got the
anti-gay-parent equivalent of a Flat Earth map-maker.

And they not only post her Flat Earth map on the NPR website, but they
refused to give it even the cursory inspection they gave the Ph. D. from
Stanford. The NPR website listed the publisher of Jakii Edward's book as
"unknown," but I figured it out in forty seconds with a web browser.
Xulon Press -> Exodus Ministries -> Being gay is morally wrong. How
does anyone with that resume count as "equal time" in a discussion of gay
parenthood?

Oh my God! First of all, I don't know a single person who didn't have
identity issues growing up racial identity, religious identity, gender- identity, political identity. Everyone has issues, so why does Jakii get away with assuming that gender-identity issues are bad?

Second, my father was a police officer, and my mother is very good at
applied math. I would NEVER consider law enforcement as a career. And I need a three-day weekend to balance my checkbook.

Third, Jakii's entire construct is preposterous. My parents were straight,
and that didn't affect my identity. In fact, I don't know a single GLBT
person who has a GLBT parent.

But the host never calls her on it. Under the guise of "equal time" and
"balance," journalists who mean well enough keep giving air time to
theocratic, homophobic agendas. Too few media outlets have the courage
today to say no to the Flat Earth society.

The second recent example I'll talk about is the Star Tribune. The Strib has an active GLBT employees group, and it is delightful to see how the Strib has "mainstreamed" GLBT people. You might open the Taste section and see a very matter-of-fact review of Oddfellows, which mentions in the course of describing the restaurant's upscale clientele, that on any given evening about 30% are gay. Same-sex couples are routinely featured in stories on housing and gardening, and I was mostly not disappointed with the paper's coverage of the state-employee union's drive to get domestic-partner benefits last winter and spring.

That doesn't mean the Strib is doing everything right. One thing that Ken
Darling, a vice president of the local chapter of the National Lesbian and
Gay Journalists' Association, bumped up against a few months ago was
how the Strib can so "normalize" a person's orientation that they don't even mention it when it's relevant. Ken wrote about this in a column for
Lavender last week.

I simply cannot improve upon the way Ken approached this, so I will read you the introduction of his column:

Ken goes on to say that "no one who consumes the major Twin Cities
news media – the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Minnesota Public Radio, or any of the TV newscasts – ever learned that Schmidt was gay. Reporters covering the story either did not pick up on this angle of the story, or, if they knew Schmidt was gay, did not think it was relevant.

"I'm not looking for a headline proclaiming 'Gay cop killed,'" Ken wrote.
"But telling readers that Schmidt was gay would have made her story
complete. "

As an out gay cop killed in the line of duty, Schmidt was a symbol of heroism and service for a community that too often is told it has no heroes. Learning Schmidt was gay would have forced people who espouse antigay beliefs to acknowledge that a cop who died protecting them from danger, whose death was being mourned across Minnesota, was a person they regularly condemn."

Amen. Enough of the mainstream press. Let's talk about the history of
GLBT press, and specifically how the gay press has handled religious and
spiritual issues.

GLBT Press: History and Treatment of Religious and Spiritual Issues
The earliest GLBT publications were often carbon-copied handouts --
information passed around that kept members of the GLBT community
updated on their rather secret world. That usually meant a lot of
information on which bars were getting raided, which drag queens or
GLBT musicians were performing where, and in which parks the police
had set up sting operations. The GLBT press was enormously important in decreasing isolation and creating community.

In 1950 Senator McCarthy turned his energy toward rooting out gay
people from government employment, and in many places it was illegal
and "subversive" to produce or possess any material like this.

The Advocate, the first and only national gay and lesbian news magazine, grew out of a 1968 Los Angeles 12-page community newsletter that was laid out on a typewriter. It had a press run of 500 copies each issue and was printed on 8-1/2 x 11-inch stock. By 1974 they were circulating 40,000 copies nationally.

In the early days of AIDS, gay publications were certainly the best source
of information on the disease, drug trials, and where to go for help.
Historically the gay press has never had much money. That financial
instability usually results in enormous turmoil. Locally in less than ten
years we've seen focusPOINT, Q Monthly, UpMagazine, InQ, and Siren
all start up . . . and all shut down. Equal Time, as I mentioned earlier, ceased publication in 1994, but it was around a relatively long time before that.

Why the instability? There are only three ways to make a publication
work: 1) pay for it out of your own pocket, 2) charge for copies, or
3) pay for it with advertising. Members of an oppressed minority who could be fired just for being gay have tended not to have a lot of pocket change, which means few people had the ability to sustain a publication with their own money or even buy a copy to defray expenses. And it is only since the 1990s that mainstream advertisers have started aggressively pursuing the GLBT market.

Today there are a few national GLBT magazines, but almost all are local,
limited to a specific geographic area, usually a major metropolitan area.
Coverage of religious and spiritual issues tend to be grouped into three
categories: Reviews of books and movies, news from outside the
geographical area, and news from inside.

What I've noticed in the larger gay press is that most of the reviews of
religious and spiritual books and movies tend to fall into a couple categories. Any movie with a religious theme that has any gay characters,
especially if it involves clergy, gets a most predictable review. If it's an
uplifting tale of sexual liberation and the search for the authentic self, it
gets a thumbs-up. If it reinforces a stereotype or uses the gay character for laughs, the movie gets a thumbs-down. In movies with religious themes, it's pretty much that simple.

The kinds of books that get reviewed are gay people's personal stories, like Mel White's Stranger at the Gate, or books by new allies straight people who have crossed over from the Dark Side, like David Brock's Blinded by the Right. Not too many gay presses have the space to waste on people they violently disagree with, so I can't even think of the last time I read a review in the gay press of a book by someone who is antigay.

The largest category of any kind of book reviews is liberation theology, the "Jesus loves you, too" books. I've never read a lot of liberation theology, and frankly, it's because I don't have the patience. And I think that's bad, because for a lot of gay people, especially as they're coming out, or in times of crisis, they need to have as firm a base that they also get to participate in a fully realized experience of God. For whatever reason, it never occurred to me that I would be excluded from a church community because I'm gay. That is my handicap as I try to put together a publication that serves, as I said earlier, as a chaplaincy.

See . . . here's the thing. My church, as I said, is St. John's in Linden Hills. It's a phenomenal parish, filled with so many bright, fun, passionate people. Our rector is Mariann Budde, and our associate rector is Devon Anderson. In our church's directory, there are only four pages on which I could not find a gay person or couple or family. We have a lot of openly gay people there, but being gay is so normal. It's unremarkable.

Gay people teach in our Sunday school, and participate fully in the liturgy,
and are active in every single area of the church. It's as normal as being
left-handed. No one -- not the fourth-generation old-timers, not the
Southwest soccer moms, not the seventh-graders -- even notices.

There's a guy at my church named John. He's in his 40s, married, two kids. I really like John, and his wife Mary is a sweetheart. Over the past year John and I worked a little together, and we've bonded. Mightily. One Sunday at coffee hour, Mary came up to Karyn and me and wanted to ask us something but . . . didn't quite . . . want to. "Mary," we said. "Out with it."

She was so sweet. She wanted to invite us to a mystery party, but see,
everyone kind of plays a part . . . and she just realized that the invitations are divided according to couples.

"Mary," Karyn asked, "do you want one of us to pretend to be a boy?"

"Yes!" she said, visibly relieved. Mary is so sweet, and she struggled to
find a way to ask that without offending us. Of course neither of us were
offended. We were delighted that when planning the party, Mary didn't
even register us as anything other than "that nice couple DeAnna
and Karyn" It wasn't until she was ready to mail the invitation that she
realized we unbalanced her count of boys and girls.

It is no challenge at all to be gay at St. John's. St. John's has sent gay
parishioners off to seminary, performs commitment ceremonies, and
announces same-sex couples' anniversaries just like married folks. Karyn
and I had our commitment ceremony there a year ago June.

In fact, we even have a priest associate a very part-time priest who's
gay. She preaches once in a while and celebrates the Eucharist. But it
doesn't matter, not one bit, to the gay people of St. John's that we have a
gay, part-time priest. The entire community of St. John's lives and breathes for a progressive, inclusive ideal; I have not yet encountered a gay person at St. John's who gets their validation from having a gay person at the altar.

Much of this credit is supposed to go to the priest before our rector
Mariann, who was a gay man. But I give most of the credit to Mariann,
and Devon, who came aboard over a year ago. Mariann is known
throughout the diocese as a gifted preacher, and I've never heard her
preach a sermon without a strong, clear, ringing sense of social justice.

In fact, let me interject my story again. When we left DeAnna in 1999, she had just stopped working at focusPOINT. I bounced around in the bliss of new love and barely noticed that focusPOINT managed to limp along just over a year without me. Last year I started getting quite agitated about only having one publication -- Lavender -- in town. I did not feel that Lavender was serving the entire community, and I knew there was room for at least one more. And I missed writing for the community. So
I started doing what a lot of people were doing, which is sitting around, drinking coffee, and complaining about how my needs weren't getting met.

And I was profoundly unhappy with my day job. I worked for a big
for-profit health-care company. It gnawed on my soul. One day I asked my manager, a delightful man, what a nice guy like him was doing in a
company like that. He said, "Oh, they're not so bad, once you realize
they're here to make money." I said, "Yeah, that's where I run into trouble. I thought we were here to help people."

The day before Mother's Day, 2001, I had just the barest spark of the idea that perhaps . . . maybe . . . I could be involved in starting up a new publication. Maybe. I probably dismissed it as soon as it popped into my head, because I don't remember any details of that thought.

And then Mother's Day. We went to church, and Mariann preached a
sermon that changed my life. The reading included a line from Leviticus:
"When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of
your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor
and the alien." Mariann said:

I'm not sure I can explain this, but I'll try. It was the confluence of those
three things: (1) my not feeling served by the local gay press, and knowing
that others felt the same way, (2) my unhappiness with for-profit
health-care, which reaps to the edges of the field, over the fence, into
the neighbors' fields, and then on down the road as far as you can see,
leaving nothing for the poor and the alien, and (3) this call to redefine
what kind of person I am, and what priorities I have.

I walked into church that morning with a vague sense of "hey, wouldn't it be cool to start up a new publication." I walked out of church that day knowing that I would start a publication. I'd started to write the mission statement on the back of the bulletin during the Eucharistic prayer.

It scared me, because I'd never ever sold an ad, I'd never ever done page
layout, I'd never talked to a printer or delivery driver, I didn't know many
other writers, and I knew that the treacherous sea of Twin Cities GLBT
press had claimed at least half a dozen victims in the past decade. I knew
that my learning curve would be more like a 90-degree angle, straight up. I knew that it would put a tremendous strain on our relationship [but
probably no worse than remodeling the kitchen :-) ].

But I have been blessed with the most understanding partner in the world.
Karyn wasn't happy when I would come home from my real job and go
right to the computer for six hours. That lasted about nine months, but she
knew it wouldn't last forever. And it didn't. I still work eight days a week,
but I do get to take a weekend evening off here and there.

My point is that I have it pretty good – a good church with great people,
clergy with ideas that make sense to me, and a partner who could not be
more caring or patient. I don't have time for liberation theology. And that's
something I need to work on, because it ignores a whole range of theology in the GLBT community.

The second major category of coverage of religious issues in the GLBT
press is news from outside the geographical area that the press serves. This shows up in many GLBT news outlets as reports of the indignities and injustices perpetrated on GLBT people by religious organizations, and rightly so.

You read about how in Egypt, men are imprisoned or executed for falsely interpreting the Koran and exploiting Islam to promote deviant ideas. You read about how some judge in Alabama posts the Ten Commandments in his courtroom or quotes the Bible before denying a lesbian custody of her own child. You read how a Vatican spokesperson is trying to blame gay people for the criminal behavior of dozens, hundreds, of priests.

Most local gay presses don't have the resources to cover those issues. They usually run wire reports, and sometimes they edit them toward a certain disgusted "Now look what's going on" slant, because the news on the wire is never very good. It is almost always about bad things happening to good people, in the name of God.

Local presses run these wire reports for different, complicated reasons.
One is that people want to honor the struggle of the worldwide and
national GLBT community. Another is that it may comfort us to think,
"Yes, my family disowned me when I came out, but at least they didn't
arrange for the village elders to topple a brick wall on top of me." Another
is, I suspect, to maintain a sense that we are a community under siege, and don't forget it. (Few GLBT people need that reminder, but thanks.)

Nationally, the Advocate has a strong history of good reporting on
religious issues. This summer they ran an enormously moving story about
closeted gay priests who live in fear of a witch hunt. For a while they had
an Episcopal man -- whose name now escapes me, but I want to say David or Bruce Bower -- in their columnist rotation. He covered national
religious topics. The national and international stories are too far away,
though, for financially strapped local presses to cover. So they rely on the
Associated Press as well as some newer gay wire services.

(That's a decision I had to make with Queue Press. Will we run national
and international news? And the answer is no, not usually. With any old
computer, anybody can get online and find excellent coverage of national
and international issues instantly. If it's important to the reader, they're not
going to wait around for Queue Press' monthly issue to tell them what's
going on in Guam, Nigeria, or Sweden.)

The third kind of coverage is local. Locally is where the gay press can
shine. Local coverage of religious and spiritual issues is often interviews
with out gay religious leaders, and people like you who are trying to
change policy or people's misunderstandings. There aren't a whole lot of
you. So mostly, local GLBT press coverage of religion is uneven and
sporadic, at best.

I'm going to use the Anita Hill story as an example. (Anita Hill is an
openly gay Lutheran woman in St. Paul who was ordained by her
congregation even though the national church told them not to do it.) I
deliberately did not go look up anyone's coverage of Anita Hill, so please
understand that this is just an example, and not a commentary on any
particular publication's coverage. It is an example. A good example, but
just an example.

A GLBT publication might write this story: St. Paul-Reformation Lutheran
Church right here is under censure by their national leadership for having
ordained an openly gay woman. And after they've interviewed Anita Hill
and a few parishioners and written about how wonderful this is . . . then
what? Oh, maybe a follow-up a year later to see if membership has
decreased, because if membership has not decreased, then the gay
community can claim victory over the people who think that ordination of
gay people will kill the church . . . . and then what?

Well, two women are completing a documentary about that whole
controversy, so maybe run an interview with them . . . and then what?
Wait for the next openly gay clergy member who causes a ruckus? Wait
for yet another church to be threatened with censure, or a clergy member
to be threatened with losing their collar, because they support GLBT
Christians?

The way GLBT press tends to cover stories like Anita Hill is, I think,
self-defeating. Yes, it's an inspiring story, and God bless those parishioners and the nine million clergy that showed up on her ordination day. But if the story is "Yea, one of ours got ordained -- in your face, national church!" then there's no potential for growth.

When we define ourselves as the Outsiders and the People Who Are Told "No" By the Powers That Be, then our very definition of ourselves is dependent upon what They tell Us, so that We can say "no, that's not us," and "yeah, we're playing by your rules, and ha ha, we won one." When the GLBT press insists on covering all religious stories as liberation-theology stories, our collective theology will only grow as their theology grows.

See, I don't see the Anita Hill story as a gay story; it's a religious story. It's an issue of moral authority within the ELCA national church. It's about leadership of a mainline denomination as it heads boldly into a swamp of anxiety misdirected at the GLBT community. It's about the leadership of a church struggling with its increasing irrelevance in a world that embraces Us and has less and less patience with church leadership hypocrisy.

That approach doesn't even mess with "Jesus loves us, too" apologetics.
And when we cover stories like that, heaven itself is the limit.

At Queue Press, we haven't had the opportunity yet to cover many stories
like that. We are still finding our groove and just keep trying to put out one issue at a time. But that is my pillar of fire: that is how I want us to
approach stories.

Right now, what Queue Press does that is -- so far as I can tell -- unique
among local GLBT presses is that we always have a religion and
spirituality section. Always. And people really respond to it. We were in
the Pride parade this summer, and you may remember that it was about
150 degrees. Toward the end of the parade, this dear man pulled me aside, off the parade route, and wanted to tell me how much he liked Queue Press – especially the spirituality stuff – because he considers himself "a very spiritual person but it's so hard to find stuff that speaks to" him, and then he gave me this hug and kissed me. We heard a lot of stories like that over Pride weekend, and most of the people didn't kiss me, but it was clear that people are responding.

The section isn't always Christian, though more times than not it has been,
and diversifying that is my priority. In our October issue, Joel Dossi wrote
a story about Corpus Christi, a play that features a gay Jesus figure.
Usually, though, I write the religion section, and usually it's this thing I
call "Soul Searching."

It's a total rip-off of "Seeker's Diary" from the Strib, but it's different.
Rather than being primarily concerned with how a first-time visitor might
experience the church or service or whatever, I try to approach it from
"how would a GLBT person experience this." I brought copies of our July
issue, which I think has a good example of this.

I'm going to wrap up tonight with a funny thing. I have a much easier time
coming out as a lesbian to people who identify themselves as Christian
than I do coming out as a Christian to people who identify themselves as
GLBT. I make no apologies for being gay, but I do tend to downplay the
importance of my faith. I minimize the importance of Karyn's and my
church in our lives. We go to church every week. I don't tell most GLBT
people that. And I don't tell many gay people that I'm in the graduate
theology program at St. Kate's. It would certainly, unnecessarily, put many people off.

And that's okay. I'm just fine with the irony – that I don't tell most gay
people that the reason I started Queue Press – with its regular religion
section that is surprisingly popular – is because God spoke to me through a sermon. It's taken me a while to make my peace with that, but I've realized that that's part of the deal: I need to live into the tension between my call to be authentic . . . and my call to serve the GLBT community. I need not to let my enthusiasm for my experience of God get in the way of the work God has called me to do.

Thank you.

 

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