Fifteen years ago (!) I went through the experience of coming out in the workplace and campaigning for domestic partners insurance at a time when such benefits were rare, the concept of gay rights were little understood, and AIDS was still about the only thing most people knew about gays. During a critical time for the gay rights movement, I got to play a little part in the history of changing things.
As part of all this, for a brief period I wrote a column for a Bay Area periodical called OutNOW. The columns are relics now, but I thought they'd be interesting to provide as an insight into where things were at the time, so I've created a side box listing the columns, and also link to them in this post.
Below is a write-up I did for my first-ever website (I was trying to do a sort of blog long before this blogging thing existed). I was going to modernize it and make it this post, but it seems fine to just pass it along as I wrote it at the time.
It strikes me now that teenagers today might find the workplace issues I was documenting in these columns as incomprehensible and alien to the modern world. And I can think of no greater tribute to the success of the work we did back then.
These are some columns I wrote for a Bay Area paper, OutNOW, a couple of years ago. They tell stories of being gay in the work world, including my experiences campaigning for domestic partners insurance coverage at Oracle.
They started out as as "plug tab A into slot B" journalism: The details of coming out at work and getting domestic partners insurance. How to be a practical gay person. This is what the paper wanted, and I was just happy to have a column, so it's what I set out to write. Later I realized I was after something different. Nonetheless, here are my first three columns, published under the banner "Out on the Job".
I'm a writer, not a journalist. So while I had a lot of interest in educating people, I had a lot more interest in having an emotional impact on them. Many people have complemented the first three columns, finding them useful instructional pieces, but I found them lacking. I wanted to accomplish more. I pushed myself, but with each column I just wasn't getting any closer to where I wanted to go.
Finally, for The Inherited Closet I did a lot of soul searching. And then a lot of rewriting. I wanted to communicate a person and her story, not a set of bulleted steps about "coming out in the workplace". This was the first writing I can recall ever writing and rewriting and rewriting. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to give a picture of this person I had so much respect for. It was work. But finally I reached something that maybe, just maybe, was getting to where I wanted to go.
Looking back on it now, The Inherited Closet seems like a pretty typical piece of feature article journalism. But it was an important step to the next two columns, which are the ones I'm most proud of.
I had come out at work in the first place because I needed domestic partners insurance, in a time when it was almost unheard of. I joined our gay/lesbian/bisexual group because I needed the insurance, and therefore needed to campaign for it, and I agreed to co-chair the group for the same reason. This led to many things in my life, one of them being the "Out on the Job" column. In the middle of my short tenure at OutNOW!, the benefits finally came through. A year and a half of my life was justified. This was the result.
The Journey's the Thing, They Say
Now I was rolling. Now I had written something that I felt strongly about. I felt that it really communicated my experience and the feelings I went through on that roller-coaster. Now it was time to reach that height with someone else's story.
This next column means more to me than I can say.
I didn't create a single word of it. Every word came from things Amy Lapidow said to me on the phone, from email she sent me, and from her personal journals. Rather than use a typical interview format ("How did that make you feel, Amy?"), I decided to take her words and her sentences and fit them together to tell her story. Her voice was so unique that I didn't want to get in the way.
It starts with Sophie, her partner, her wife, already dead. And it ends with her alive and on a note of hope.
This is what I came up with. I hope you still like it, Amy.
Are You Getting Another Roommate?
That column took its toll. It was the hardest thing I ever wrote, going through many many revisions, and many late nights of tearing my hair out. I wanted every word to be perfect, and at the same time I wanted to communicate years of a person's life in a few hundred words. That was all stressful enough, but after I turned it in, the publisher demanded changes on the day of publication. He wanted to remove the italics. They didn't work in the newspaper format, he said. I felt the italics were essential to the passages from Amy's journal. Without italics much of the column would make no sense. He wanted to try a different font instead of italics. I didn't think that would help. We went back and forth on it.
He was generally suspicious of the column. "What does it have to do with being out on the job?", he asked. True enough, but that wasn't my agenda. I countered with the fact that she did mention something about her workplace.
Then he wanted to replace shit -- as in "Dead is, they're gone, you don't want them to be, and all their shit is your shit, and you can't call them up, they're gone." -- with stuff. Stuff. I went through the roof. That paragraph was the heart of everything. Amy's words were better than anything spoken in any fiction. She was talking about everything that a relationship and death means, and he wanted her to be talking about stuff, not shit.
The advertisers.
I couldn't talk him out of that one. We went back and forth on it, with only a couple of hours to press. I was furious. I told him I wouldn't do it without Amy's approval -- if she didn't approve, they'd have to pull the column. So I made some frantic calls to Amy (on another coast), and she accepted the change.
The column went to press, with some things changed and some things not. Shit was now crap.
After that, the publisher made some agreements with me. With each of my columns, they would choose to publish it verbatim, with absolutely no changes, or they would not publish it. In turn, I would give them enough lead time to make that decision. Really, this showed the publisher's good faith. He wasn't trying to stomp on my artistic desires so much as run a paper; if my columns weren't always going to be about being "out on the job", maybe they should be run as some kind of feature instead. He was happy to accommodate me, he just didn't want to spend so damn much time arguing about a single page of the paper.
So technically I had everything I wanted. But it was too late. Something about that experience just burned me out. I couldn't put myself out that much for a column and then have to go through the fight for its integrity.
I only did one column after that.
It's been a couple of years, and these days I'm concentrating on writing fiction. But I think sometime I'd like to try a column again.
