Journalist, CEO, Contributor
What or who inspired you to become a journalist?
OK gotta come back to this only because it’s complex.
What is your favorite story that you have written?
Oh god, I can’t even tell you about my very favorite. I’ll tell you a few that stuck with me for whatever reason.
–In 1997, after we had launched Girlfriends magazine, I kept telling my team that we had to talk to this girl from Hackers that nobody had heard of. I kept saying I knew she’d be big. Finally she lands the film Gia, playing a queer model who died from AIDS complications, and people start to notice. I landed a cover interview with her and I think I just had a gut feeling she was one of us. And she came out in the interview and I just was like, wow, I love when queer people reveal themselves to me. I want to do more of that. I read it now in retrospect and just cringe because it’s not a great interview and you can tell i was nervous (I was in my 20s at the time, not a skilled celebrity interviewer yet, and you can tell—I asked too many “sexy” questions and I’m completely unresponsive when I should be delving further, but you learn how to do that as you do more of these types of interviews). Still, it was for me an interview of discovery, proof my gaydar was right, her first LGBTQ+ media interview, and a conversation that i enjoyed. I felt the same way when I finally got to interview comedian Jerrod Carmichael for OUT. He had just come out but I had been saying for 2 years he had something special going on. https://www.out.com/print/2022/10/28/out100-comedian-jerrod-carmichael-coming-out-laughing-matter
–on a completely different tack, I wrote for The Advocate, this true crime article in 2013, Remembering the Worst Mass Killing of LGBT People in U.S. History.
https://www.advocate.com/crime/2013/11/15/remembering-worst-mass-killing-lgbt-people-us-history
It was before the Pulse massacre and it’s a horrendous story I first heard while a student at Tulane in New Orleans. The details are so vivid in my head, as the arson fire raged people trying to climb through bars on windows, gay men (one with his mom), spouses before it was legal, just hanging out at a bar that had served as a theater, place of worship, and community center as well, all wrapped in an inferno and dying with the exits blocked. One man, George Mitchell, dropped the kids off to watch a movie while he and his partner (who kids knew as his friend and “roommate”) Horace ran down to the lounge for an hour. George escaped the fire at first but went back to rescue Horace. They were found charred and clinging to each other and later nobody knew how to tell his sons their funny, divorced father had been burned alive trying to escape the worst mass killing of gays in American history. Every little detail about the setting stays with me (that the dead were lined up on the sidewalk, nobody claimed some of them and they went to unmarked paupers graves, while churches refused to do their memorial services and some funeral homes refused to do their burials. This was 1973 and I was 5 at the time. So not ancient history.
-And at Curve, I did a fellowship feature on Native American lesbians, on the reservation and off. I was nervous to write about the subject since I am mixed race Native American but raised by a white-identifying family. I was still trying to figure out why public records like the Dawes Rolls and private accounts didn’t match up and i felt very inauthentic and vulnerable as a white-passing Indigenous woman. But talking with other Native queer women changed a lot of that, and it was a good experience personally even if I was talking about how hard it was on all these women in my story. I don’t read it now and think, oh great work of journalism; but the feeling the experience gave me lingers.
Do you feel like you have a dual responsibility for being queer and a journalist?
Absolutely. When I first came into the workforce in the 1980s, I was told repeatedly that you couldn’t be an out queer person and be a journalist. I had great experiences in mainstream media (newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines). But I also came out at the height of the AIDS epidemic and my gay friends were all dying and it felt ridiculous to keep who i loved a secret (I did, for 2 years, it was brutal) and to try to cloak myself in a veneer of objectivity when often that meant showing two opposing sides (even if there were a 1,200 experts on one side and 300 religious bigots on the other side). Fortunately, journalism as we know it has evolved (sometimes for worse, but in this case for the better) and increasingly journalists better understand the problems with “both side-ism” when it’s used to prop up disinformation and discrimination. But leaving mainstream media for LGBTQ+ media allowed me to tell stories the mainstream media wasn’t covering for the first 25 years of my career and I’ve never regretted that. But it comes with a responsibility for me, surely, to continue to find and tell the stories that the mainstream is bungling or ignoring altogether. Other (younger) journalists are doing a lot of that work now too, giving me less of an urgency that i felt for many years (like literally i could not sleep, my head would spin with ideas all night if it tried so i would just work through the night or nap under my desk when it got to be the third consecutive day without sleep, but in my 50s, I’m sleeping 8 hours!) [I’m grinning at that new development.]
Do you believe you have a role to play in helping preserve LGBTQ+ history and culture in your work?
I absolutely feel like I have an amazing role to play in helping preserve LGBTQ+ history and culture in my work. My work exists in at least 6 LGBTQ+ archives and has been taught at at least two dozen colleges or universities so I know it’s being passed down to the leaders of the future and/or preserved in some way for future generations. I hope that it’s much like when I read newspaper accounts of the killings of gay men in the 1940s and ’50s—they’ll look back at it with raised eyebrows and disbelief at how much farther society has come around acceptance and rights for LGBTQ+ people. (Or, I guess it could look like Germany’s Weimar Republic, depending on how our political choices go this year.) Either way, I did my best to capture the depth and breadth of LGBTQ+ people’s lives, arts, culture, and politics for over 3 decades (so far), most of it at a time when other media was, at best, ignoring us, and at worst, perpetuating some of the worst myths and stereotypes about us.
What advice would you have for those wanting to become a journalist?
Make sure you really want to be a journalist. A lot of younger people seek my career advice (well people of all ages, but it’s most critical for our youth) and they say, “I am studying journalism or communications. Should I do media or public relations?” And I say PR every time. Why? Because if you’re debating between options, you aren’t dying to be a journalist, then don’t do it. Journalism isn’t a job, it’s a lifestyle. I don’t have any good advice on work-life balance. I have been married 32 years now BUT my family has always had to take a backseat to my job (and my spouse basically joined the same field so we could work together). A friend once said planning a 30 min chat with me was like trying to schedule a military strike. The higher I moved up the fewer hobbies I had. And every time I leave a job I’m convinced my life is over. All that has made me a good journalist and a great editor but probably not a very well-rounded person.
When I was 18 and working at a daily newspaper in Oregon, the lifestyle editor had a family emergency and left suddenly. I was given the job of lifestyle editor pro tem. I loved it. It was the summer after high school and while i had already been accepted to Tulane University, I had a moment where I thought, wait, this is it, it’s what I love to do—i’m already an editor, that quickly. Maybe I skip school and save myself the student loans. So I asked the only other female in the newsroom, a reporter named Ann Crosby, if maybe I should just stay. She asked me if I would ever like to make more than $12,000 a year. I said, ‘yes, of course.’ She said, ‘Then go to college.”
I did, but since I worked full time all but 2 semesters of it, it took $100K in student loans and 10 years to complete. By the time I finished I was already editor in chief of my first magazine. And, honestly, after I switched to LGBTQ+ media, I had plenty of $12,000 years (and a year of homelessness while I was an editor at On Our Backs magazine in the early ’90s). So journalism in the big cities might pay more than rural newspapers did back in the day but it’s sure not a given (especially today as we’re being replaced by AI and automatic reporting tools).
But the deal is, I never gave up because being a journalist (a writer and an editor) is so entrenched in me that I couldn’t offer a viable backup plan if forced. Storytelling is really all I do. I tried radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, books, digital, and experiential — most forms of media — to find my niche. And I did sooooo many shit jobs to support myself (cocktail waitressing in rural Idaho, selling fake designer perfume out of the trunk of my car in California, a Macy’s shopper in New York, staffing graveyard shift at a lingerie store on Bourbon street in New Orleans, and so on). And I could never stop my commitment to journalism no matter how unappealing life and work got. LOL. My family didn’t understand what I was doing even after I launched Girlfriends magazine, so they’d call and tell me about cousins who got good jobs with the Sears catalog or cable company. (Who had the last laugh there?)
So you have to want it and you’re weighing the choice between journalism and something else (especially something with decent benefits, retirement packages, long paid leaves, etc) take the something else. If you can’t live without being a journalist, that’s when I offer some real advice, starting with “college is great but you don’t need a degree to excel in this field.” Start writing, listen to criticism and feedback and respond, read everything you can—not just stuff you like, but literally everything to see what is out there, what people hear and say, what turns of phrases literally ignite you. Sometimes I’ll read a paragraph or a headline or a one-liner so brilliant, so on-the-nose, that I call someone to read it aloud. Learn to love language and people, without either there is no journalism. Remember adages that help you contextualize your job.
My two favorites:
1. Journalism is literature in a hurry, which Matthew Arnold said, I think, as an insult (as in journalism is like failed literature)but in honesty it really reminds you that your work in journalism is no less extraordinary than great works of literature (except it will be read today and forgotten tomorrow in many cases). Even if most journalistic works are less interesting tomorrow than today (or the day they are published/printed/gone live) by the nature of news cycles, really great journalism can be life altering for readers.
2. Thomas Griffith in his book said, (I’m paraphrasing) that journalism is in fact history on the run (and usually the recording of history while the facts are not all in). But it’s history written in time to be acted upon, meaning journalists aren’t just recording events; at times, we are influencing them. For queer and trans journalists, that means that what we write can change the trajectory of our history, of our LGBTQ+ rights movement, of the lives of hundreds of thousands of future young people who might not even need to label themselves because our generation and that of our elders (and Millennials, too) have documented this history and influenced the future.
How has being a journalist impacted your personal life?
Oh gosh. Like I said earlier, life has often taken a backseat to work. My personal life is rich and rewarding but there’s little separating it from my professional life. I’m lucky to have a spouse (my co-pilot in life, transgender journalist Jacob Anderson-Minshall) who is happy to pick up the slack at home (and LOTS of the slack, since for many years I did zero dishes, garbage, and cleaning, though I do all finances).
I have largely lived away from my family of origin (not uncommon for Gen X queers anyway).
I’ve travelled the world. Just got home from Nepal, where I was the keynote speaker at their first Rainbow Tourism Conference in the country (speaking alongside ambassadors from the EU and New Zealand, a parliament member and someone from their Supreme Court). This job has afforded me opportunities like that I would not have had otherwise. Jacob and I have had plenty of perks together since we work together a LOT (like side by side in the same room, at the same company or freelance outlets, etc) and we travel together when we can (a little harder now that we are caretakers), and even co-author books together (4 together, each have 1 solo). But I can’t say that my career hasn’t had a lot of impact on our lives together (married 33 years this year!) like the time we moved cross country with $25 in the bank, a rental truck, a VW bus filled with animals, and an Amex card we maxed out getting there for a job that paid so poorly it left us essentially working while homeless for a whole year. We would camp at the beach in Half Moon Bay, Calif. at night then drive up this windy, rocky highway and park in the Castro in San Francisco during the day to work, taking turns going out hourly to check on the animals and move the car to a new parking spot so it didn’t get towed and the animals were safe. I feel like a lot of people wouldn’t have done that for their partner’s career and yet my spouse knew there was no other option.
So financially, I’m not where I’d be otherwise perhaps. But there are more upsides: I’d like to think that I would have weathered Jacob coming out as a trans man (after we had been a very public, married lesbian couple for 16 years) even if i wasn’t a journalist, but it helped because I just began to research everything like an article i was writing and that smoothed that awkward transition for us a bit.
I also feel like I personally know a significant chunk of the lgbtq+ population over 25 in America at this point. I’ve had a lot of wonderful, life altering experiences that I hope have made me a better person.
Do you have any future goals or projects you would like to share with us?
Jacob and I have something in the travel space in the works but we aren’t announcing it until later this year. I’m working on a few smaller projects as well: an LGBTQ+ true crime project I’ve had on the backburner too long (which grew out of research I did for this article: https://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/advocate-45/2012/05/07/12-crimes-changed-lgbt-world ); a substack newsletter TBA; a podcast about dating app crimes; and an authorized biography of lesbian comedian Robin Tyler (which i hope to finish while she’s alive, and, as she often reminds me she ain’t getting any younger at 82,l so i best get to work). Few people know that she and her partner, model Pat Harrison, had a TV show with ABC but it was canned because they refused to stay closeted or that that she began her career as a drag queen (a Judy Garland impersonator in New York) where a 1962 police raid inspired the headline COPS GRAB 44 MEN AND A REAL GIRL IN SLACKS (because Robin called a reporter instead of a lawyer). She cracks me up, the balls on that woman! A real inspiration.
I have a never-ending list of projects in the works. We’ll see if I live long enough to do them all!
