This diary is cross posted to my blog, where I've embedded the image from the book "Straight News" and the vid from Maddow's show on Friday. The update is also cross posted to my blog from today.
Earlier this week, I blogged on how the New York Times and every other mainstream news outlet ignored the closet that the late Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon occupied, and I faulted the straight media for ining him, forgetting about all the gays and lesbians who work in that world.
My Portland-living friend Wayne Harris, who was involved in that city's ACT UP chapter when it altered one of Hatfield's reelection billboards to more accurately tell the voters the truth about the senator. He talked about Rachel Maddow, an out MSNBC anchor, running a moving eulogy on Hatfield tonight, but she omitted anything about his closetry, outing efforts or his refusal to help defeat Oregon's dozens of anti-gay ballot measures.
Wayne asked if Rachel, as a lesbian with queer cred, could simply be unaware of the full life and times of Hatfield, and the harms he perpetrated against the gays. Something I doubt she would be ignorant of. Surely she does not depend only on the Gray Lady for all her background on Hatfield.
Just one of many print references to the outing of Hatfield. From Edward Alwood's book "Straight News":
I'm disappointed Rachel straightened Hatfield's closet. Wayne said he would reach out to her and see if she would be open to learning a more rounded and comprehensive history of the former Republican U.S. Senator she praised this evening. I've never had contact with her or her staff, and I hope other gay Oregonians join my friend and urge Rachel to re-examine Hatfield's legacy for the gays.
From her show Friday night:
Another item about the press keeping Hatfield in the closet in his obits. Jeff Mapes, the senior political editor for the Oregonian, omitted the gay aspect from his lengthy obit. It's one thing for the NY Times to keep this hidden, quite another for Hatfield's home state daily to do the same.
The mainstream press owes news consumers the gay truth about Hatfield. It's out there, if only the Times, the Oregonian and Rachel would look for it.
[UPDATE]
Out MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow, way before she got her high-profile and well-earned TV news perch, was an activist with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power in San Francisco. From an August 2008 profile of her in the Nation:
Maddow grew up in the Bay Area; she came out just before college in 1990 and became an AIDS activist at the epicenter of the epidemic. She earned a degree in public policy from Stanford before beginning work with ACT UP and the AIDS Legal Referral Panel. But Maddow had trouble breaking into treatment activism, which was then the rock-star world of AIDS policy. "It was boys' land," she says. "I knew like two women total who were doing treatment activism. And I didn't totally get it. I'm not like Barbie--'Math is hard!'--but it was a techie world, and I didn't feel like I could be all that helpful."
Given that at the time she was with ACT UP was when the outing campaign against Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield was receiving buckets of ink in the gay media and (obliquely) in the straight press, while also quite controversial among ACT UP chapters, how could she be ignorant of his closetry?
I'm finding it harder, as the days go by since she movingly eulogized Hatfield on her MSNBC program, to believe that she knew nothing about his gayness, how he harmed the gay community over the decades and why he was the subject of a sustained outing campaign.
On a separate matter, as someone who was on the ACT UP/NYC Treatment and Data Committee, I'm surprised she found treatment activism was something she couldn't wrap her brain around. An integral part of such activism was making all treatment issues - from development to the effect of drugs to the approval process - as easy as possible for non-brainiacs to understand and be involved with.
Maddow's 2008 comment about knowing only two women working on treatment issues reminds me of some of the women I worked with during those years. Let's name a few of them: Garance Franke-Ruta, Dr. Iris Long, Linda Dee, Dr. Joyce Wallace, Kate Krauss, Dr. Lori Kohler, Rebecca Pringle-Smith, and Linda Meredith.
I think Maddow would have made an excellent AIDS treatment advocate, if she had given herself more time on the subject and I'm sure she was a terrific prisoner advocate.