National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) discussed broadcast news, Stonewall doc.
Click here for a previous article on the National Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association convention morning session at the Hyatt Recency Hotel in San Francisco.
In the afternoon, participants packed a luncheon plenary entitled “Don’t touch that Dial: LGBT Media on the Airways.”
The panel was emceed by San Francisco local drag personality extrodinaire Donna Shachet. The panelists include the “gay Terry Gross” Marilyn Pittman who hosts a show on PBS radio, Raymond Donald Hong, of Outlook Video, Tim Curran of Sirius XM Out Q radio, Michelle Kristel of the LGBT PBS show, “In the Life,” and Michelle Meow, founder and producers of Clear Channel’s Queerchannel.
Curran noted that his LGBT-oriented radio channel is particularly popular with people who might be closeted and reluctant to subscribe to a hard-copy LGBT publication. He explained that people don’t subscribe to his channel but to the Sirius XM service, which has a wide variety and mostly nongay channels.
Meow said that her job booking guests was made easy being based in San Francisco because of the large numbers of experts on LGBT topics who are available in the city.
Curran said Sirius was subscription, not advertising driven, so it can be more discriminating about which advertising to accept and reject. Curran said that Sirius would not carry advertising that would offend subscribers and ultimately cause some of the those subscribers to unsubscribe.
Pittman said her background as a standup comic has helped her conduct interviews even on serious topics.
Kristel said that more and more PBS stations are airing the show earlier than in the evening, rather than at 11 p.m. or later. But she also noted that many stations in smaller markets are still refusing to carry the show. Pittman, referred to “In the Life” as the “gay Frontline.”
The panelist were asked how the Internet has affected LGBT broadcast media.
Curran said that Sirius has been very cautions about putting free material on the Internet, with the exception of its newscasts, which are streammed on the Internet.
Pittman said the Internet made her program international and she welcomed the exposure over the web.
Sachet noted that it makes a huge difference to work with media who have a passion for reporting information that is important to the LGBT community. She noted that when she hosted KRON-TV's coverage of the San Francisco Pride Parade that the photographers and other behind-the-scenes folks weren't very interested in the event.
Curran said he felt fortunate to be in the job he is in.
“I cannot image a dream job that I would enjoy more than I enjoy the one I have now,” he said.
Documenting Stonewall
After the lunch session, the wonderful documentary, Stonewall Uprising was shown. If you think you knew everything about Stonewall, you don’t.
The fascinating documentary looks at the dark days in the 1960s before the 1969. The film used excerpts of educational films from the 1960s that painted gays as dangerous, mentally ill people who were often bent on molesting children.
The documentary noted that the California State Mental Institution Atascadero was often referred to as the “Dachau for gays” and often submitted gays to torture to attempt to render them heterosexual. One drug simulated drowning. Electric shocks were routinely used as a method of therapy. Gay men where showed nude men and given shocks. There was never any evidence that it worked, but that apparently didn’t stop the therapy
Excerpts of the 1967 CBS News documentary, The Homosexuals, was shown. The program interviewed one “expert,” a doctor, who said that it was not possible for a person to be homosexual and happy. A CBS News poll conducted at the time found that most people wanted consensual sexual contact between people of the same sex punished as a crime.
In its early days, Stonewall was run by the Mafia, who served over-priced watered-down drinks made with stolen alcohol. Gays sometimes resorted to meeting each other in trucks that were parked overnight, but they, like the Stonewall, were often raided by police.
One excerpt from a 1966 documentary produced by a Miami television station interviewed a member of the nation’s first gay rights group, the Mattachine Society. In an ironic twist, considering the debate now, the man assured the interviewer that gays were not pushing for laws that would allow them to get married or adopt children.
The popular gay bar, The Checkerboard, was raided just a week before the Stonewall bar was raided. The Stonewall was also raided a week before the infamous raid that sparked the Stonewall riots. Witnesses said the warm weather combined with an unusual late night raid combined to create a “perfect storm” that fueled the resistance.
Witnesses say a “tough lesbian” helped first spark the resistance by resisting arrest and subsequently being beaten by police. At first, the gays threw pennies at police mocking them because they were “coppers.” The crowed outside grew, fires were set in the street outside the bar.
The documentary included a fascinating interview with Seymour Pine, the police commander who was in charge of the police response to Stonewall. Concerned that police would overreact, he went to each individual officer telling them not to fire their gun until they were told by name to do so. Pine said that that the laws against gays were wrong.
The police were stunned that gays fought back.
The riots led to the first gay pride parade in 1970. The march started with fewer than 200 people but grew as more people joined in. Eventually more then 2000 showed up.
The documentary will air on April 2011 on PBS's American Experience. Executives were so impressed by the documentary, that they delayed its television debut in part to be able to air it in its 1:20 entirity instead of the usual hour that is allotted to most of its programs.
Lucan Truscott, one of the people interviewed in the documentary, was one of the panelists who discussed the film after its airing. He wrote about the riots as a 22-year-old reporter with the Village Voice.
“I didn’t associate gays with having rights,” said Truscott of the evolution of gay rights.
The panel discussion was moderated by documentary director Christine Herring.
Eric Marcus, author and associate producer and advisor on Stonewall Uprising noted that there are only about a half-dozen images of Stonewall riots and no archival film, so all the moving images were recreations of what happened or were films from other incidents.
Truscott said that although the film was recreated and archive material from other unrelated disturbances, it very much resembled what happened that night. He noted that that the riots garnered little news attention when it happened. No film footage has ever surfaced about the Stonewall riots.
Truscott said in those days, “Gay people didn’t matter.” He said that if black people caused a similar disturbance in Harlem, they would have been given massive press coverage.
Marcus said that the Stonewall riots did not end police raids on gay bars but that one of the major turning points came after the Snakepit bar was raided a year later. One of the men arrested was an illegal immigrant who jumped from the second floor window of a police station to escape and was impalled ona fence. He was critcally injured but survived.
Among the myths of Stonewall, Marcus noted is that it it was a riot of drag queens. Another likey myth is that it had to do with anger of the death of Judy Garland. Her funeral was held on the same Friday as the riots. Marcus said that Garland's death probably had little if any impact on the riots. He said he had wished that the documentary had at least made some mention of Garland's death, even if it were to dismiss it as an significant factor in sparking the riots.
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