How The Times Gave ‘Gay’ Its Own Voice (Again) (original) (raw)

U.S.|How The Times Gave ‘Gay’ Its Own Voice (Again)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/us/gay-pride-lgbtq-new-york-times.html

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Pride 2017

The Times stylebook has undergone numerous revisions over the years, as this example shows.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

June 19, 2017

I’m gay.

I could not have written those words in The New York Times 30 years ago.

Not out of fear. My family, friends and colleagues had known for quite a while.

No, I could not have written those words because our Manual of Style and Usage prohibited it:

gay. Do not use as a synonym for homosexual unless it appears in the formal, capitalized name of an organization or in quoted matter.

Liberation arrived on June 15, 1987, in a note to the staff from Allan M. Siegal, who was then an assistant managing editor. “Starting immediately,” he stated, “we will accept the word gay as an adjective meaning homosexual.”

By saying “gay” in its own voice, the newspaper that set the standard for press coverage throughout the country was acknowledging the existence of a community and a movement far broader and richer than “homosexual” — clinical, confining and imposed by others — could possibly convey.

In conventional histories, therefore, 1987 is a milestone.

But there is a longer and more complicated story about the acceptance, banishment and subsequent reappearance of the word “gay” in these pages.

More than a half-century ago, The Times reviewed John Rechy’s novel “City of Night,” a graphic account of a gay hustler’s transgressive travels through America. “The excitement of this ‘gay’ world, as Rechy paints it, consists so much in its illegality, in its furtive, on-the-lam quality,” the reviewer, Peter Buitenhuis, wrote in 1963.

In 1969, an essay in the Arts & Leisure section made plain that outlaw sex was only one facet of gay life. The piece appeared four months before the violent and history-making demonstration by gays at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. In the article, a gay man, who was writing pseudonymously, expressed his yearning to be depicted in popular culture as something other than a tragic, doomed sociopath. “Unless art has no effect on those it portrays, the American Gay Boy and Lesbian must certainly view themselves, at least subconsciously, as second-class citizens,” he wrote.

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