by Mark Segal
The ACLU representative wanted to know if PGN would be interested in being a plaintiff in the case and help sue the US government. She explained that this had inherent danger, like being found guilty and carted off to prison for example. For me, it was an easy decision. Salon and PGN were among the plaintiffs. As expected, the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs were invited to be present while our attorney argued her points and then took questions from the justices. The night before, all the plaintiffs were in DC for a planning meeting, or rather we were told what was expected of us, which was very little. As plaintiffs this was the end of the trail for us. We were instructed to sit respectfully in the court and listen.
The following morning, just going into the elegant Supreme Court building was intimidating. Truthfully, there was very little to be worried about since by this point we had won all three lower court rulings on the First Amendment rights. Indeed, the US Supreme Court eventually ruled that legislation, which was signed into law by President Clinton, unconstitutional.
* * *
On another occasion I had an encounter of a different kind with President Bill Clinton. He was in town to deliver a speech to the party faithful at the Warwick Hotel. Several months before I was unable to accept an invitation to the White House due to a trip to China. I asked Ed Rendell, who had then become chairman of the Democratic National Committee, if he’d arrange a photo of me with the president. Once again Ed and I began to act like children. He said, “You bring the camera and I’ll take the picture.” This was before cell phone cameras. Somehow I got through security with the camera in my coat breast pocket and made it to the front where there was a red velvet rope separating us from the podium. Standing next to me was the city’s district attorney, Lynne Abraham, with a Secret Service agent directly in front.
President Clinton’s party entered the room to thunderous applause. They took their places onstage; Ed stood directly behind the president. As Clinton finished his remarks, Ed put his hands to his face like he was taking a picture and mouthed, Do you have the camera? I nodded. People began to stare at us. The president’s speech ended to more thunderous applause. Enter the Marx Brothers, Ed and Mark. The president tried to leave by the left side of the stage but Ed steered him to the right where I was waiting. Clinton climbed down the stairs and Ed, who was directly behind the president, shouted, “Toss me the camera!” Without thinking I reached in my pocket, pulled out the camera, and tossed it over Clinton’s head. Ed caught it, then told the president he wanted to get a few pictures, and we began to pose with him. It is amazing that I didn’t get shot. The president started laughing and the crowd was stunned.
In my weekly column of November 10, 1994, titled “Presidential Charmer,” I told the story. I sent a copy to the White House with the following note on my three-by-five stationary pad with the Philadelphia Gay News logo.
Mr. President,
If you’d sign and send this back to me it will be the highlight of my life . . . Okay, ONLY ONE of the highlights.
Thanks,
Mark
A few weeks later a brown envelope from the White House arrived at my office. Inside was a large piece of white cardboard and in the middle was that three-by-five stationary. Scrawled over my writing were the words, To Mark, Warm Appreciation, Bill Clinton. The picture that Ed took is now on my office wall; it shows Clinton and me with the surprised crowd looking on with open mouths.
* * *
Most Communist countries have had trouble dealing with LGBT issues. In 1991, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Patsy Lynch, then a photographer for the Associated Press, was covering what is now known as “Soviet Stonewall,” a phrase coined by journalist Rex Wockner. It was the first LGBT conference tour in Russia. The organizers chose a wide range of speakers from around the world to showcase gay activism. Bob Ross of San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter and I were representing LGBT media. The tour had two stops, St. Petersburg and Moscow. Thanks to President Mikhail Gorbachev, there was new freedom in the air that spring and people wondered how far they could take things. Our conference was a test. The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) had gotten us invited to Russia on a ruse from a medical institution. We didn’t know what to expect.
During a break in the proceedings in St. Petersburg, after taking a photo of me on the throne of Peter the Great, Patsy wanted to go shopping. We found ourselves on Nevsky Prospect, one of the main streets in the city. Walking along we noticed that most shop windows and shelves were bare. The streets on the other hand were filled with peddlers hawking their goods on carpets and cloth. These wares were mostly knickknacks, tattered old clothes, family mementos, and Soviet memorabilia. Everywhere you walked, if they knew you were from the West, people would just take things out of their pockets to sell you. A pack of cigarettes would get you a car ride to any destination in the city. People were poor, and the country was on the edge of political and financial collapse.
Patsy had only one shopping item in mind: a watch from the Soviet navy. While tensions in Russia had eased up a little, there still was some restrictive protocol, and military items were not to be sold. A man came up to Patsy at some point and showed her a Lenin pin and a Stalin pin, but she just brushed him off. She started to move on but then turned around and asked him if he had a watch, and lo and behold, her dream item appeared. She haggled for a moment and as the watch and currency changed hands, a black car screeched to a stop in front of us, just like in the movies. Two men in black trench coats grabbed the guy, threw him in the backseat, and made a quick exit.
I looked at Patsy incredulously. “We could have been arrested as spies by the KGB,” I said.
“But at least I have my watch,” she replied. She still has it today.
To say that the Russians were not prepared for the freethinking American gay people is an understatement. AIDS was just beginning to rear its ugly head in the former Soviet Union and the organizers of the conference had smuggled in thousands of condoms. We handed them out to people at the conference who rushed to grab them. When we asked one guy why he wanted American condoms, he replied, “Soviet condoms taste like machine in factory.” So we all grabbed bags of condoms and went back to the main street to give them out. Amazingly, even the police began to assist. Patsy took a great photo of me handing condoms to a peasant woman, who kept coming back for more. I believe she wanted to sell them on the black market. At least they’d find a user.
Though you couldn’t even buy a bottle of soda that wasn’t rusty, one evening Robin Tyler, the comedian and activist from Los Angeles, was somehow able to rent a white Cadillac limo, complete with a sunroof. She and I and another couple took off to a casino, which turned out to be a dingy little place without much gambling going on. Disappointed, we returned to our dilapidated hotel, but not before getting a bit drunk. We stood up and out of the sunroof and shouted at the tops of our lungs. Nobody seemed to notice these Americans on the prowl in their city.
Tyler went on to Moscow and performed her out lesbian humor for an audience of eight hundred astonished Russians. Earlier in her career she’d paired with her partner as the first lesbian comedy duo, Harrison and Tyler. Back in 1970 they had joined Jane Fonda’s Free the Army tour at a time when Fonda was being labeled Hanoi Jane, and after their first appearance Fonda canned them. “I don’t remember Jane yelling anything,” Robin explained to me. “I do remember that she came over to our apartment in Hollywood and told Patty and me that we could no longer be in the FTA show because we had showed that kind of open affection onstage. In the 1980s she apologized. But when I met her almost a decade after that she pretended that she didn’t know anything about the incident. Very strange. By then I believed her to be a born-again Christian or something like that.”
When it was my turn to speak at the conference, I was awestruck looking out at gay and lesbian Russians. They were just beginning to find their sea legs in activism and it made me think of the humble start of LGBT media
in the US, not only in our struggle for equality, but in building community. I tossed my prepared remarks aside and spoke from the heart.
Through an interpreter I explained how oppression leads to activism and how important communication is to any movement. I knew they cared deeply about these issues because they took a major risk by being present. We hoped that they’d use what they learned at the conference to foster an active Russian LGBT community. Never would I have expected that years later the “democratic” government of Vladimir Putin would oppress the LGBT community to the point where people were comparing it to the country’s historic subjugation of Jews. The homophobia of the Putin government reached its pinnacle in 2014, as Russia geared up to host the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Through my involvement with Comcast and NBCUniversal’s Joint Diversity Council, I had a front-row seat watching the company mitigate the issue of homophobia at the Sochi Olympic Games. The company was getting flack for broadcasting an event from a country with an egregious civil rights record. But it was difficult to advise what steps could be taken to pressure Russia since our television contract was with the International Olympic Committee, not with the country of Russia. Strategically, the company made a brilliant move when they chose an openly gay man, Thomas Roberts, to host the Miss Universe pageant from Moscow, just weeks before the games. It was Comcast telling Putin and the world that it stood with the LGBT community. Roberts bravely took on the task and spoke openly about being gay and the restrictive laws in Russia, thereby sending a message to Putin: You better not touch anyone during the Olympics. To make the message even clearer, NBC sent numerous LGBT staffers to cover the various sports, including one flamingly out gay man, retired figure skater Johnny Weir. If he had been a Russian citizen, I believe he would have been arrested without question. He, like all other non-Russian citizens, was left untouched and the games went off with minimal issues. Brian Roberts, David L. Cohen, and the entire Comcast-NBCUniversal team were brave and brilliant, and made me proud.
The LGBT community applauded NBC for pushing the boundaries, yet noted that after the games, when the cameras were off, the oppressive homophobia inside Russia tightened. Putin and his team were taking Russia back to the days of the Soviet Union, with massive restrictions on the press and the alleged murder and imprisonment of many journalists. The opening we saw as a group in the nineties had long gone. I hope that the LGBT Russian community will someday regain a foothold in their country to advance their civil liberties.
* * *
At the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Philadelphia Gay News covered the events for many of the LGBT publications that were unable to send their own reporters. Each day we had a preproduced interview to be posted. Before we even boarded the plane we had interviews with Barney Frank, Tammy Baldwin, Howard Dean, and a host of others. We tweeted from many of the LGBT events and meetings, including the roll call of delegates, where the number of LGBT delegates was proudly shouted out for each state. We took polls on gay marriage from people at the convention, including notables like Spike Lee and Maria Shriver. We knew before all the other media about the “secret” set being built for Obama to accept the nomination at Invesco Field. But there was something else I knew and didn’t report.
I wasn’t surprised when in 2012 Vice President Biden made a very public gaffe preempting the president in support of marriage equality. Why did he do this then? I’d suspected his position for four years already. The morning after Joe Biden was nominated as Obama’s vice president in 2008, his first speaking engagement was with the Pennsylvania delegation. It was fitting since he grew up in Scranton and spent his formative years in Pennsylvania.
After making a triumphant entrance at the 2008 convention, VP nominee Biden made his way to the platform to deliver a few remarks to an excited crowd. Jill Biden was standing on the side near us, and we spoke for a while. She knew I was from Philadelphia Gay News and I asked her a few questions, including one about gay marriage. She thought for a moment and then said, “Of course I support it.”
Jill Biden is a delightful, personable, and brilliant woman, but I didn’t do my job as a journalist and instead dispensed some advice: “Since Joe is the nominee, the two of you might want to mirror Obama’s position.” It was her first day on the job and I didn’t want to taint it. I didn’t ask the vice presidential nominee the same question. Was this a missed opportunity? I’m happy to say I have no regrets.
The second conversation I had that morning was with MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews, who was considering a run against Senator Arlen Specter, and that conversation was reported in the LGBT press. Here’s the exchange:
Mark Segal: You’re running for Senate in Pennsylvania. As you know, there are some very important issues going on. We have a Republican in that seat, Specter, who voted two ways on the Defense of Marriage Act. So what would you be doing?
Chris Matthews: Well, first, I’m not going to answer it that way. I always start with freedom. That’s where I start on every issue, whether it’s reproductive rights or it’s crime. There’s a constitutional right that starts with freedom and inherent rights, exclusive rights to the Constitution. But I really do believe that we always as Americans start with that. Then we work our way through things. Do you understand? It’s very important. Individual freedom has always been the way we start. First governments, sequestered governments like in England, always start with state power. This country has always started with individual freedom as the basis to work at what you allow the state to do. But obviously, this is an evolving thing; my thinking now is different from what it was ten years ago. [For] a lot of people it’s been evolving, and for a lot of gay people it’s been evolving. A lot of gay people didn’t think marriage was going to be the issue. A lot of friends of mine didn’t think it was going to be an issue, because it was too far out. A lot of people are changing on these issues. I think a lot of people are going to work our way through these things.
MS: Well, where are you on the issue?
CM: I have an open heart. I’ll have to live with it.
MS: In other words, you won’t answer the question.
CM: I can answer it the way I have, which is any fucking way I want. I can answer in my way even if it isn’t your way.
What’s interesting here is the irritation Matthews had with the question. I’d like to believe he was in that “evolution” mode. Again, no regrets. Watching Matthews show his support of marriage equality now sometimes amazes me. He completely understands the history of the issue, and could give other pundits lessons in the proper journalistic approach to describing marriage equality. He has become passionate in his support of civil rights.
Chapter 11
Bringing Up Baby
In 1996, my nephew Jeffrey called me after years of my trying to reach him. He’s one of three children born to my older brother. He and his two sisters, Jennifer and Stephanie, hadn’t lived with their father since early childhood. My brother is not the most nurturing person alive and we’ve been estranged for many years. But his children are my parents’ grandchildren, of course, and that led me to seek them out. At first their mother allowed both Jennifer and Stephanie to visit with my partner and me. That was usually around holidays or during the summer. The first time they arrived at the airport from Florida, I immediately saw how beautiful they were.
When I’d ask about their brother there was always a different story. I couldn’t find out much about him. This game kept going for years. Once in a while, when I called their mother and asked, Jeffrey was put on the phone, but he spoke only briefly and with trepidation. When I got the call in 1996, he began with the words, “Uncle Mark, may I come to see you?” This time, his mother allowed him to visit for a weekend, or so I thought.
The minute he got off the plane I could see the family resemblance. We did touristy things around the city, and I treated him to dinner, but it took him awhile to warm up to us. As I’d say later, he came to us broken. By the end of the weekend he was tryin
g to either con us (something which I found charming and amusing) or get us to adopt him. (It turned out that he was a ward of the Florida court.) The last night of that weekend visit, my partner went to sleep early to allow Jeffrey and me to have a heart-to-heart—though we had already decided to take him. After all, how hard could it be to have a teenage son?
That night Jeffrey told me his story. We both cried a lot. I’m sure that some of it was embellished to spur me to action, but regardless of what I thought at the time, I soon learned from the court that much of what Jeffrey said was true and much of it was not his doing. I promised then that we’d get him out of Florida. A promise I had no idea how I’d keep.
I also knew we had to act quickly. I called some political friends involved in the judiciary and requested that they contact their colleagues in the Florida court system to see what they could do to help me. Within two weeks I was on a plane to Florida to be interviewed by the court guardian, during which time Jeffrey was placed in a group home. The guardian, almost on sight of me, opened up about Jeffrey. She adored him and wanted him out of reach of his family. I spent two days in Florida, returned home, and almost overnight I had somehow been approved to be his new guardian. I don’t believe his mother had any idea this was happening, and since I was never in any court in Florida, I don’t even know how this was legally possible. Regardless, my teenage nephew-turned-adopted-son was about to arrive.
Our first thought of parenthood was to give him everything he had been denied. He went from being a rural, hardworking child laborer and ward of the state to a child of a successful gay publisher in an urban setting. My friends in the media were kind enough to ignore all the hijinks with Jeffrey, since many of them were parents and knew very well that I had taken on a challenge. They preferred to sit back and enjoy the show rather than report on it.