Leroy Aarons: The leadership
behind NLGJA

By Aissatou Sidime-David
Special to chipsquinn.org

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In April 1990, Leroy Aarons, then executive editor of The Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, did a radical thing: While delivering results of the first survey of gays and lesbians in mainstream newspaper newsrooms, he came out as a homosexual to a room full of mostly white, mostly male and mostly straight newspaper executives.

Aarons, an editor and writer who had worked for The Washington Post, Time, People and other publications, was 56 at the time. The response to his revelation, he says now, was “a bombshell.” The Associated Press and The New York Times called it “the most emotional moment” of that year’s meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

His secret spilled, he started a revolution in American newsrooms. It marked the beginnings of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA). Now 13 years old with 1,200 members and chapters nationwide, the organization is having its annual convention this week in Los Angeles.

Aarons grew up in a working-class Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, went on to a national career in journalism and was a founding member with Robert C. Maynard of what is now called the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

Today Aarons is the director of a program on gays and the media at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles. He also is an author, a playwright and a librettist. I interviewed Aarons, now 70, at the Sonoma County, Calif., hilltop home he shares with Josh Boneh, his partner of 22 years.  

Aissatou Sidime-David: How did you go about finding gay journalists for that first ASNE survey?

Leroy Aarons: There were formal and informal networks. The informal networks were places like San Francisco, where I found out that gay journalists were quietly meeting socially once a month at some guy's house. I started there. ASNE put its full clout behind it. We posted notices all over the country, every newsroom. And so we started getting responses. Gay and lesbian journalists were fascinated: “What? The ASNE wants to know about gay people? What's going on here?”

Q: Did you get negative reactions?

A: We got some letters, and there was a right-wing columnist who wrote about it.

Q. Describe your “coming out” at ASNE.

A: The results showed that the majority of gays and lesbians in the newsroom were closeted and that the majority of them believed that the coverage of gay issues was poor to mediocre. Loren Ghiglione (then ASNE president) asked me to present the findings at the opening plenary session. I had no idea what was bubbling up here. I got there a day or so before, and I got a call from some guy from the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force.

“Roy Aarons?” he asked. I didn't know him from Adam. I was never an activist. I'm a nobody. I never marched in a gay parade on Gay Pride Day. I'd gone to see it, but never marched. “Roy Aarons,” he said, “do you know what you've done? My God, this is momentous.”  

I struggled with that and asked people for advice. I woke up the next morning and said, “I can't do something, be something, that I’m not.”

So I penciled into my report: “I'm proud -- as an editor and as a gay man -- proud of the ASNE for having done this.” And with that clutched in my hand, I went to the podium. And I did it. I said it. It was a bombshell. The Associated Press and The New York Times said it was the most emotional moment of the convention. Headlines around the country said: “Top Editor Comes Out as Gay.”

Q: What kind of response did you get from other gay journalists?

A: A lot of people sent me letters and cards saying, “What do we do now? Can we get together? Do you know anybody else gay at my paper?” They were asking me to tell them who was gay at their paper, because they didn't even know. I knew a gay guy at The Washington Post. I ran into him at a bar. He ran in the opposite direction. So, out of that, it became apparent to me that we couldn't stop.

Q: And that was the beginning of NLGJA?

A: Yes. Using the model of the Maynard Institute, NABJ, AAJA, NAHJ, I pulled five people together in my dining room and we created an organization with the ambitious name of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. What we didn't realize was that gay and lesbian journalists -- closeted journalists -- were coming to the conclusion that they no longer could afford invisibility. That AIDS was something that meant death to their friends, their lovers, themselves. We could no longer afford silence.

Q: Were you ever thinking advocacy journalism?

A: For the first four or five years, we debated the line between advocacy and journalism. Should there be more advocacy, or less? Can we afford to be advocates? Eventually, you realize that we are the advocates for better journalism. I had the benefit of the other organizations -- I was learning my stuff at the Maynard Institute and through close association with the people-of-color journalism associations. They had credibility in the industry. They were talking about better journalism -- not civil rights for people of color.

Q: Do you think that NLGJA has had an impact on coverage of gays and gay issues?

A: It's had an enormous effect. It’s been accepted in the same way as the other minority journalism organizations have. I don't think anybody would say that it’s perfect, because the NABJ, the NAJA, etc., are still striving to have their goals met.

Our second survey, which was part of our Year 2000 celebration, showed that there's a long way to go. You get a good deal of coverage when you have a story that's titillating, a story that involves a celebrity like (comedian and actress) Ellen DeGeneres, or murder or violence as with Matthew Shepard (a gay college student who was killed in Wyoming). But when you get down to day-to-day community coverage, it's still not happening in a satisfactory manner.

Q: You left The Oakland Tribune soon after starting NLGJA. Why?

A: One reason was that the NLGJA thing moved so fast. It required full-time attention. I was president -- it was like a one-person thing. And in late 1990, early 1991, The Tribune was in dire economic straits. They were laying people off. I was told I was going to have to lay somebody off on my management staff -- my managing editor or my deputy managing editor. I didn’t want to take out these key people. I was holding down a big salary. And so, the arrow started pointing to me. I proceeded to the work of being the volunteer president of NLGJA. It was great fun, building an organization. I was in that until 1997.  

During his retirement, Aarons has written and has had produced a docudrama, a libretto for an opera and the text for a song cycle about Sept. 11 to be premiered this month in Los Angeles. He wrote the widely acclaimed book Prayers for Bobby and created a pioneering course at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Journalism on how gays and lesbians have been portrayed through the media. The course, which has been adopted by other universities, analyzes how the media have helped shape public perception of gays and gay issues since the early 20th century. 

Q: Why is the course important?

A: One of the things I discovered in my NLGJA years is that journalism education pays little attention to the issue of sexual orientation. Why is that important? Because the story has proliferated to amazing levels. You pick up a paper or turn on the television. Rosie O'Donnell wants to adopt a child in Florida and comes out as a lesbian. The American Pediatric Society decides it's OK for gays to adopt kids. Of course, I'm looking for it, so, I tend to see it. But it’s amazing. The 9/11 event -- who would guess there would be a gay angle? A guy in the plane who helped fight off the terrorists in Pennsylvania was a gay man with wide popularity and community reputation.

The issues continue: What about survivors’ rights? The gay people who had partners, but didn’t have a legal marriage? You just can't make a turn here without seeing some of these issues. And they're not simple. They're very complex. And you cannot just go at it the way you would doing a shoot-and-run press conference about a new highway being built. The news industry has a way to go. And the next generation of journalists is coming out of school with little or no context or history of an increasingly complicated story.

Q: Tell us about your book.

A: The San Francisco Examiner did a 16-part series on gays in America. On one front page, they had this heart-wrenching story of a mother who lost her son because, as a fundamentalist Christian, she had put a lot of pressure on him to “cure himself” of being a homosexual. He committed suicide. As it happened, the boy kept a diary for four years. Over a period of time going through her grief, the mother, Mary Griffith -- Bobby Griffith was the boy’s name -- realized that she was partially responsible for her son's death because she didn't accept him, she didn’t see there was nothing wrong with Bobby.

If only she had had that understanding, a lot of trouble could have been saved. All that energy curing him could have gone into helping him make his life OK. He could have gone on to be a good journalist. He was a hell of a good writer.

What attracted me most to the story was the victory at the end -- that the mother went through an agonizing self-evaluation, changed through it and became a crusader to save other lives. She became a national figure. It was a great experience.

Q: It seems like the book wrapped up different pieces of your life.

A: It has. It actually opened the door for me. The reason I couldn't find a book to do earlier was, I was meant to do that kind of a book, but I was not ready to. I wasn’t ready within myself to tackle it.

I'll tell you one more thing. When I delivered the report at the ASNE meeting and at the very same time announced that I was gay, I actually heard an inner voice saying something to me as I said those words to the 900 peer editors, “I'm proud as an editor and a gay man.” I'll never forget what was going on inside of that statement. It was, “Here I am, world! All of me -- at last.”

Aissatou Sidime-David was a 1991 Scholar at The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee. Reach her at asidime@express-news.net

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