Get Used to It: Ep. 90, "Voices of Our Lives: Karen Ocamb"

coming up next on get used to it we're going to talk to our favorite journalist member of the la press club karen okum don't miss it [Applause] [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila cuell your host or hostess as you like to say and today we have one in our sometimes series of voices of our lives i think we call it today our guest is karen okam who for almost 20 years has been a freelance journalist and independent producer uh much of her work has related to issues and people of interest in the gay lesbian bisexual transgender community she is currently on the board of the los angeles press club her interests and her writings of course go way beyond our community but uh you can't go to an event in los angeles and a number of other cities without running into karen oakland with that ubiquitous little pad on which she takes note after note and you think later oh my god what did i say welcome karen thank you very much very happy to have you thank you for having me i appreciate it i love your show well thank you actually we don't usually get you on the other side of an interview yeah i'm very grateful that you agreed to this because i know um you're not only uh you know one of the most highly ethical journalists i know which means you're very careful about mixing uh sort of your work and your own kind of opinions but also um a private person i uh in many ways and so i really appreciate this thank you very much but inquiring mind i want to know about karen okam and so maybe um chronological since i'm not as inventive as you might help the viewers know kind of who you are uh tell me a little bit about your family and where you grew up well actually i have a very interesting uh historical perspective my my father was the 12th or 13th i don't even know uh child in a in a very very poor kansas junction city kansas farming family and he i he had an inquiring mind and he really wanted to be a journalist ironically so he wound up on the kansas city star and he moonlighted as a big band leader so i love all those big bad men you know glenn miller et cetera um and he could see that world war ii was coming long before anybody else and so he he became one of the first americans in the royal air force the raf and he flew over to uh to england and he was assigned to egypt where rommel the desert fox you know the very famous nazi general was creating havoc that's where he met my mother who was her father was the dutch ambassador to egypt and her mother was french and she had a little brother and uh when her father died when the ambassador died her mother spent all the money which meant that my mother had to go to work and she wound up in british intelligence wow so that's how the two of them met was you know essentially they couldn't tell each other what they were doing but they could tell by their dog tags that they were both in intelligence at fighting rommel the desert fox and uh after the war she was smuggled over to this country as a matter of fact and they wound up marrying at a little church around the corner in new york city he was assigned my father was assigned to the pentagon for a while and then he decided that instead of pursuing journalism maybe in the blood he wanted to pursue a career in the military so he went down to montgomery alabama maxwell air force base for the air war college and that's where i was born maxwell air force base montgomery alabama i only lived there five months and he was reassigned to the pentagon and and after that i was essentially an air force brat we lived two years here two years there um and it was it was actually kind of difficult because i was always the new kid on the block never really had i didn't really have any connection with my family either because my father was always gone and my mother didn't like me very much because she was european i was supposed to be a boy first born as i was supposed to be a boy of course so she actually risked her life to have my brother four years later anyway um one some of those travels really helped form who i was travels as a child you mean yeah in terms of your father well my father was being stationed yes but it does occur to me that um i won't say that as a journalist you have an outsider status but you you do have um this sort of demeanor of the observer and i wonder if uh part of what you've been describing sort of fits with that in a way that if one doesn't feel one is ever a part of you know a place or uh even a well i guess a time you would think well what i am as an observer well that's very you know astute of you actually because part of what my survival skills were about my internal survival skills was looking at what was expected of me and becoming that on the outside on the inside i'm i was very shy actually and very frightened uh but that was not you know we were not really allowed to show our feelings and uh you know whatever my behavior was had to conform to wherever we were but yeah observing where we were and the customs of the people around me as well as whatever groups we moved into were essential to my sort of internal survival skills and were there experiences then early on that kind of led you to um sort of your politic or your ethic about civil rights about i mean you're quite passionate not just about the gay and lesbian community but in a variety of ways about people's individual right to be who they are yes at a very early age well actually i think i was either four or five uh my father was stationed in japan tatchiko air force base and i was bussed off the base to go to school at that time americans even today but americans were not their presence in japan was not exactly you know heartily applauded and as a matter of fact a number of uh college students japanese college students would rally outside the base and scream and yell with all these signs and this hatred and this anger and they'd and they'd scream at the buses and here i am four or five years old looking out the window at these people who were yelling at me yankee go home yankee go home and my father was like a deputy base commander or base commander or something like that so the base had provided us with uh or provided him the family with two people who helped raise me essentially reeson and suzy-san so when i got back from both japanese women when i get back from school i said why do they hate me so much what have i done to make them hate me and she explained to me about how we were unwelcome guests in their country etc but the bottom line to that is that when we eventually were transferred back to the mainland to the united states and i saw on television what was happening to these little black students these little black girls who were trying to go to school i felt it viscerally in my marrow bone and i was a kid but that connection stayed with me and then of course as i grew older and started to understand it more you know philosophy says erasmus or sir thomas moore this whole business about being a citizen of the world really started making sense and i think that it stems from that very visceral experience as a young child understanding that some people are going to hate me and i might not know why right but that you know that there is this kind of commonality i ironically uh when i finally went to work for cbs news much later of course one of the people i wound up working with a japanese correspondent from the tokyo broadcasting system was one of the guys who was outside yelling at me it was hysterical we were at this japanese piano bars you know drinking after work and uh i told him this story and he said wait i did that well it gives you meaning to what goes around yeah absolutely so before we get to cbs which of course you you know you've dropped a nice trail of crumbs there to uh to follow cbs dan rather um you did you came back to the states to and finished your education did you go to college here yeah um well there were some other you know stops along the way but yes eventually most of the rest of his tour before he did this sort of military-industrial complex thing my father that is and retired and went to work for avco like homing which of course was in 1964 and he was for barry goldwater and and i meanwhile was hooking up with all these folks singing hippie wannabes and i was for lyndon johnson therefore and so i have sort of a classic kind of hippie life if you will and i wound up going to school in saratoga springs place called skidmore college which at that time was all women and i graduated from a prep school and that's a whole other story trust me that's a whole other story but when i got to skidmark it was 1968. and we seriously thought there was going to be a revolution the students were rebelling in in paris as you remember and mao was the big thing in in china and there was so much turmoil going on in the united states that we brought that i was involved in the student movement we brought that to the different campuses and so i helped organize you know the first women's studies and the first black studies and got drinking on campus you know things like things like important things like that not necessarily in that order yes well were you a journalist then a student journalist or had you started to develop that as your sort of primary means of expression uh no actually i had no idea what i wanted to do i i so thoroughly enjoyed being a student because being a student meant that i didn't have to know anything i got to learn and i really didn't know where i wanted to go i dabbled if you will in everything from philosophy i loved philosophy and history and literature was my mainstay and art and art history and i mean i that was the freedom of being at college is that i could i could taste all these things i could have all these different experiences was that the issue with sexuality as well well thanks to the sexual revolution because that was about the time as i recall yes that's right my my family was rather sexually repressed if you will and so therefore anything to do with sex was um dirty so it was about you know staying a virgin until i got married you know that was just always assumed that it was going to be that way thanks to the sexual liberation and my political experiences um you know i started experimenting um i had an inkling that i might be different but i couldn't go there i really couldn't go there i mean i was also i'm a suicide survivor after i got clean and sober in 1980 i you know you have to do all these inventories and look at your life etc right and i started realizing that i was uh you know i was suicidal as a teenager through a much much of my life and and in fact made various attempts the attempts got very serious when i had the proverbial dropping out of college for a year i in fact landed in a mental institution for six months wow locked mental institutions so you know it is possible to recover from insanity you know but not totally not totally but um so i i did that that whole thing but i didn't know that i wanted to be a journalist i didn't know who i was i didn't know about my sexuality i just know i didn't want to go there being in orgies you know where threesomes enabled me to experience that but frankly to tell you the truth it wasn't really even about the sex it was about this kind of existential loneliness sometimes given where i came from from my family uh you know the sex was difficult because it felt dirty and i just want it was something to endure to get to the other side of it which was the hug i just wanted to be held and um you know that's that's the bottom line there i mean so was the um again you know the the trail of crumbs and i i would feel like i hadn't learned anything from you if i didn't follow up obviously on the things but do you want to expand a little bit on the um the issue of the mental health um part of it had to do with i think now and again a lot of this is on reflection i didn't know it at the time part of it had to do with the fact that i just felt so it was so hard living in a cruel world and everywhere i turned there was cruelty and plus coming from having traveled around in this family that appeared to be a family to everybody else but to me wasn't i had nobody to talk to and you know you know how rough it is being a new kid all the time you're always having to adapt so i'm not kidding when i talk about this existential isolation and alienation and loneliness and plus what i also just discovered when i became clean and sober i was i was an alcoholic waiting to happen so there was that kind of loneliness but i was ashamed of being lonely because again to the outside world i appeared to be very popular which was a cover and something i couldn't believe in so that shame the shame of the loneliness the shame of suspecting i was a lesbian suspecting i was gay and not knowing that and not wanting to go there and therefore rather you know choosing to kill myself in order to kill the pain sure because i didn't know who the self was that i was trying to kill right um that's what sometimes led me into a lot of trouble i mean i was raped several times i was actually even kidnapped in the streets of new york i have an interesting story i certainly do i can hardly wait to read the book yeah i was the 13th witch in a witch's coven i lived on a maoist com collective for a while uh you know i it was at the time it was called an identity crisis and i had one after another after another just as soon as i discovered an identity you know i sort of took it to myself and found what served me and then what didn't and discarded it and tried to find something else i think that at the core of me was this sense of wanting to be of service though in some way shape or form because even as a kid when we traveled around i was always deposited in some sunday school class so if i had anybody to carry around with me as a friend it was you know the sense of jesus and being of service that kind of thing uh but then as uh you know as the war happened as my friends started dying as this loneliness and alienation took over religion no longer served me and yet you know with the age of aquarius and i'm an aquarian i had this sense of connection uh and then when i started dropping acid and doing dope and you know all that i felt connected to something larger the universe in some way shape or form i'd hug trees and they'd hug me back you know things like that so there was this common ground this commonality and there's always this sense of wanting to to to share or to serve in some way and that's really you know contingent continues with me today well you have a very interesting eye on the world and a very very interesting and different voice a fearless voice but also a respectful voice and i know that you mentioned that you had worked with dan rather not that i think he's the very very very finest but there are some instincts that he has what when were you working at cbs with um after i finally graduated from college because after i dropped out and did the communion collective you know which thing mental you know mental warfare jack london went through a lot of the different stuff but the same kind of wandering about and and i'm still here that's true and i bring it all with me right and uh i finally graduated in 1973 and then my actually my mother wanted me to go into sports she knew she was a real estate broker in westport connecticut so she knew brett musberger and all these people and she wanted me to become the first sports producer at cbs sports and i thought i don't i love sports but what do they have to say what am i going to ask them about i don't care what they think you know i shouldn't say that but you know that was why you're only reflecting your old self there okay yeah so what wound up happening was that i went to i i got a job on the assignment desk as a desk assistant which is the equivalent of a like a copy boy at a newspaper and it was 1973. it was the you know nixon had just stopped the draft but had done the cambodian christmas bombing uh you know watergate was starting to unravel and i looked around it was one of the most exciting places to be in my life uh dan rather well first of all it was i did work on walter cronkite show as well as a clerk i clicked on his show periodically and he had been at upi in in kansas and knew my father from the kansas city star so there was a connection that was developed there i wound up working on dan rather's weekend news show and he was the white house correspondent during this time during watergate right and i just i adored the guy i mean what people you know they listen to is dan ratherism's you know his hokey texas stuff he is one of the most humble uh i mean he's got his own ego but he he really is a man who has not forgotten where he came from his father was a ditch digger his mother was a waitress he worked his way through law school uh i mean and he was willing to to mentor me i mean i'd ask him tons of questions about watergate about anything whatever and i mean the night after you know uh richard nixon you remember the very famous uh thing down in texas where the religious broadcasters and nixon was being all you know proud of himself and and dan rather got up to ask a question and uh so president nixon goes huh are you running for something mr rather and everybody like this thing rather goes no sir mr president are you and well you know he came back to new york and we went out to dinner the next night and he asked me my opinion as a desk assistant about whether that was the right thing to do you know he he was he is still a very genuine man who remembers where he came from and conveyed that kind of humility and sense of public service and public responsibility and in fact the nobility of the profession to me so that's what i cling to i mean i got my training i learned by doing and i got my training in and what they used to say was the house that edward r murrow built so it wasn't about journalists trying to be stars such as it is today i think too much or where journalists overwhelmed the story uh cronkite actually used to talk about that a lot where it became difficult when he became larger than the story he wanted to go cover well of course he's the man when we were all watching at the moon landing who summed it up for the entire united states by saying wow yeah and i mean that really and jfk's death i mean it illustrates it very well well it's interesting to me karen most of us uh many of us watching know your byline probably primarily in terms of the work you've done in publications though they cover broader issues but associated with gay and lesbian community and i mean that in the largest sense national international issues where's the through line between the woman who thought she might be a lesbian but didn't want to go there unquote and the developing journalist and the woman that you've become in terms of the areas and i don't want to prescribe them because they're larger than that but let's say areas primarily for our community that have sort of fascinated and challenged you over a number of years well what happened was that in 1983 first of all i got sober cbs got me sober very important point uh in 1980 on the employee assistance program and unfortunately so many of them are so many corporations are now ending those programs saved my life but in 1983 i turned 33 years old and i once again even though clean and sober i had suicidal thoughts and i'm going you know who am i what am i doing do i want to pursue this because i if i had stayed at cbs i would be uh working on rather show right now i mean i jesus didn't live beyond that yeah well that was the thing it was 33 i don't know get crucified or get off the cross that's what it came to and i had this sort of like little mini revelation i went away to uh to write a book actually and i and i stood atop sort of a very virginia wool thing i stood on top of this i went down to ocean city maryland and i walked in along the beach and i found this thing you know that stops the waves i've forgotten what it's called but anyway i stood atop this brick divider and the waves were crashing and all this and i thought oh this is terrific i could just dive off into the waves and it's dark and nobody would know and the you know waves would crash my body and i'd be an anonymous death and i don't know and then i said thank you god then i went what did you just say thank you god you don't believe in god anymore and then i realized that i that my will to live was stronger than my desire to die and then i had to take a look at the whole scope of my life and i saw where i would go which i knew i'd wind up on on rather's evening news show at some point as a producer i could see my life and i chose to find out who i was and discover myself at a deeper level so i love cbs and i came out here and truthfully i came out here with a lover at that time but i came out here to come out i mean i traveled 5 000 plus miles to come out and uh i landed here i did the 1984 olympic coverage for cbs it was my last big producing gig for them and after that i started exploring the arts so i wanted to be able you know a playwright studied acting with salome jens and then what started happening was that my friends started dying from aids it was 1984 1984-85 and i started seeing people being outed by aids people who just never wanted to come out to their family and i wasn't out to mine to my mother and it became a matter of moral and ethical crisis for me because i could no longer stay in the closet when aids was adding my friends so that's really what prompted me to come out and then you know i stood at the bedsides of so many people as we have so many wonderful ordinary people who became extraordinary you know we all became extraordinary in a very simple but profound and spiritual way and uh and i said what can i do what can i do so i looked at my skills and the only thing i knew how to do was be a journalist so i i met a man named bob craig who's at the time the publisher of well publisher frontiers news magazine and when another friend of mine from a 12-step program weighing carr went on a hunger strike i went to bob craig and i said i really want to cover this and i said this is the way i can give back because i you know i'm not jesus i couldn't lay my hands on and heal people and boy that hurt me a lot that i was that kind of powerless losing friend after friend after friend especially in these 12-step programs i mean i had a newcomer asked me one time you know because i was producing the memorials is that what you do for a living and it was just well you remember these times well i do i remember having this conversation with denise edgar you know rabbi edgar who is so wonderful at funerals and why she had so much practice yeah i mean everyone wanted her to do the memorial service for their lover or partner or whatever who had died and it was it was like that i mean you you just got to a point where we just knew how to do this too well yeah you know we knew our way through a hospital we knew how to see people when visiting hours were over we knew too much about this so i really understand so that's what i would do in my sort of private life and in my public life in seeking some way to serve that's why i turned i got back into journalism and thank heavens for being you know a leftover hippie because gay journalism does not pay so it was about you know being comfortable um enough with very little but having trying to have uh the integrity to sort of raise the standards of gay journalism and be able to treat us the way we deserve to be treated with respect and you know i had to use this term but it's true fair and balanced reporting um which and and that's been really very very important to me that kind of having that reputation of being fair because you know i i think that i've gotten to a point where where the career nationals respect me and trust me and so do pro-life log cabin republicans very conservative uh gay republicans because it's not about my agenda it's trying to tell their story accurately um you know at the same time asking hard questions of both the queer nationals and the like cabin you know the conservative library well you are the queen of the follow-up question i mean there's no question about it i i admire it very much but it also has baffled me not because it's you but it's not it's so foreign to me to be to have an approach when you're part of a community and your own personal feelings are very passionate about civil justice to essentially so fairly present people's point of views while still being a critic across the board but not a bitter critic not a vitriolic you know critic it's literally not about you i mean there's very little reporting that i see going on i i could be a little prejudiced but you know it's hard to tell the front page from the editorial section and i know the right wing thinks the left wing's in charge of the papers and the left wing thinks the right wing's in charge but in any event you could only have to read the first three paragraphs of heart almost anything on the first second or third pages and you just know where the writer is going with this um but your work is not like that i hope that's a compliment it is very much so i thank you very much again it's it's learning from people like cronkite and rather to distinguish between good storytelling and commentary because you know i have had a column in genre magazine i have done commentaries and where it's clearly labeled this is what i think but apart from that it's about telling an engaging story um and trying to do it in such a way as to uh you know without fear or favor is is the way the story goes now of course i'm you know i have had fear and favor upon occasion i mean there were times when i was very much afraid of standing up in front of daryl gates and asking him a question while he's you know sending darts at me or or other other times going so so-called undercover at lou sheldon's uh heterosexual symposium you know things there were times when i seriously thought that i'd be assassinated uh you know when i was doing some right-wing reporting uh reporting on the right wing i should say um back in the days when the white aryan resistance was very visible but and there have been times when it's been difficult when i know in my heart of hearts that i favor somebody and have helped them um out of a tangle of their own words when i could see that they had just said something that would land them in a whole lot of trouble and if i printed it that way there'd be trouble even though that wasn't the intent of what they meant to say so i've wrestled with that well but you don't play gotcha which is also distinguishes you from you know a number of other writers but gotcha is all about the person who's playing gotcha it's not about who you're getting i mean you know the truth will out i mean the the story is compelling enough for me to become part of the story or for the story to somehow forget about who it is i'm talking about but become about me that's not journalism well what do you think have been some of the large thematic issues in in our community before we talk about the connection maybe to other um i guess other people would say larger issues but for the gay and lesbian community in your experience what do you think have been the large thematic kind of stories for us well um i think one of the most intense and again it goes back to my personal uh caring about this but the way that we have started dealing with shame because you know for so long until act up until we had enough deaths you know until we said enough is enough and we had to take care of our own uh shame we bought into that shame and how we've taken that and turned that around i'm sorry is very very moving to me and i feel very privileged to have been able to tell not only that story in a large thematic way but you know the individual stories of people who otherwise would never have made the front page the story behind rob roberts um you know or or wayne carr or corey roberts or connie norman who i know you know so well um we i have just had the privilege of encountering and getting to report on and tell the stories of so many extraordinary people who are ordinary but have said you know i'm standing up to this and this is standing up not just for myself but for my people well it's it is the greatest value um you know i in some instances i'm not a big fan of the first amendment when we were doing sexual harassment work for instance and everyone just said well it's just speech i'm just and it's complementary speech and it took us years to explain it was demeaning in its usage and it was just speech that speech is powerful that words are very powerful but the ability to tell the stories of the disfavored as you have and others have the individual stories not just sort of the issue stories um has been enormously important i think not only to us because we get to read about it but to other people who say i never met one or i can't understand them because you can read in private no one has to know you're reading this thing um and i think that the power of that has been extraordinary you talk about connie norman the the sort of the issue that we deal with in our community now is our relationship to transgender folks you know how are we going to relate because many gay people don't see the connection you know they're not gay they've changed their gender we didn't change our gender we're all about you know orientation or preference or whatever and to see make the connection that it's all about gender roles and you know rigidity of stereotype and that so much shame comes out of that but it goes beyond that do you remember um or or deeper in a way do you remember that movie in and out sure uh with kevin kline well at the end of it you know all these townspeople stood up and said i'm gay well i know him and he i was in his class i'm gay i must be gay well i when i had a column with genre magazine i did exactly the same thing regarding the transgender movement and a lot of that had to do with connie norman and i stood up and i said likewise i'm transgender now does that mean that i want to have a you know sex reassignment no does that mean that you know i qualify under all of the categories or however the definitions keep shifting not necessarily but you know what in my heart i stand with the transgender community and i think it's along those lines how our community needs to relate is when we keep talking about our allies and how they're willing to stand with us even though somebody might look at them and go i never knew he was gay it's the same thing we need to stand with people who've been out of you know who have been oppressed and continuous issue of shame i guess that's why we adopt the word pride and of course we're not the first community to do that yes the notion is beyond no i shouldn't be ashamed but as a matter of fact you know screw you i'm going to be proud of who i am and when i think about it it sort of makes me laugh like i'm going to be proud that i sleep with women instead of men okay this is not the greatest source of my pride let me just say but damn it i'm going to be proud if you're going to try to make me be ashamed and i can't get used to it and get used to it that's really been the transformation and i guess it's that aspect of your writing as well that connects outside of our community i mean when i talk about these larger themes you were talking about aids and our needing to grapple with the issue of untimely early death of suffering of things that usually our grandparents were going through where you expect it you know you're going to lose your friends although it did give us i think a new respect for that generation losing all their friends and an understanding of what the mother in south central los angeles feels like having lost three of her children to drive by shootings i mean when the black community says the black man is an endangered species i mean we have some sort of an understanding of what that's about but our community doesn't always respond that way no i mean we've been very insular in some ways that's right and i think that part of it has to do with you know just as people are afraid of us as an unknown i think we're afraid of other minorities and stepping on people's toes and you know we haven't quite established what the boundaries are well is it all right if i show up to your organizational meeting even though i'm white i mean i'm a member of the black journalists association of southern california because i'm a journalist and they're open to people like me and i want to know you know where are our allegiance you know where is our commonality as a matter of fact i'm as on the board of the la press club one of the things that i'm doing is this uh i've helped organize something called the los angeles sunshine coalition which is about the first amendment and trying to have better access to public records and uh open government deliberations and the people ask me well here you do all your work over here and you do this over here how do you where do you find the energy and how how is it that you can be sort of a leader on this and i go you got to be a dyke going through menopause so here are all these straight people who are very respectful of me you know who crack up when i say this is the truth about who i am and and i have a lot of this energy that i don't know exactly what to do with so i'll channel it here you know one of the things you said earlier uh about raising the level of gay journalism there was an enormous amount of criticism i think for the sloppy nature of gay journalism in the days in which we were almost in the well we didn't have mimeograph machines but you know almost in the the broadside aspect of it and the hot off the press two-page newspapers and underground was sort of the word for what we had we couldn't have an overground paper uh when frontier started there was more of an attempt to you know to do some journalism but people have criticized many of the publications in our community as being more like playboy you know where the ads themselves are so sort of sexual in nature and omnipresent how can you do journalism in you know in such places who reads these things well i mean in order and this was a question i put to bob craig actually in 1989 when i first met him and i had a talk show on city channel actually right and i interviewed him and asked him the same thing and you know he was straight up about it he said those ads pay for the publication pay for you know the ability to get the publication out and ironically the li weekly uh you know at one point put up their nose and said we would never do anything like that well i suggest you pick up an l.a weekly and you'll see that those ads are you know and the futon ads but those ads um you know pay for it and you know there are a number of people who also say not bob that i remember correctly but um who say you know guess what this is a sexual liberation movement so again it goes back to the shame in a way if people want to say you know i have this hunky body you know you interested why should we be disturbed by that and people you know have different responses to that i'm not crazy about the way some of the ads are displayed but nonetheless i don't have free speech i don't have to take a look at it i can turn the page so do you feel that your work has been taken as seriously in this context as it might have been no but i don't think that my work has been taken seriously because i'm identified as a gay journalist very interesting to be on the press club board i've had to prove myself over and over again to a number of the straight journalists who by the way some of whom are liberal who look at me as a gay activist and i say i'm a journalist why do you keep saying i'm a gay activist well because once i write for gay publications that automatically makes me an activist and i say an activist for what for equality i mean are you gonna say i'm gonna argue against that i don't think so do i tell lou sheldon's point of view of course i do you know do i have a response from somebody of course i do that's just good journalists both sides of the story but they also get you in in a kind of a trap by maintaining a fiction about the lack of bias in the non-gay press or what they call mainstream by saying that you can't have in minority journalism a lack of bias because clearly you must be for something you're a minority in the minority place without any recognition that their own bias in the mainstream press means that we don't get a voice anywhere except in our own publications that's why they're at first that's exactly right and that's why there are what the white house calls specialty publications because if we weren't doing it who would right now luckily more and more gay journalists are coming out at their papers the new york times the wall street journalists you know in the newsrooms albeit not necessarily on air yet which is a shame because i think that if more people could look at somebody on air and say oh that person's gay you know i think that had that been so during the aids crisis uh you know uh i i don't know that we would have lost as many people i think that you know there was a more association with the legionnaire than there were with gay people but it is it's a it's a it's a trap and i'm sure that i have not uh been accepted for a number of pitches i've made to uh so-called mainstream journalism because i'm coming at it with a gay angle to a story that you know just doesn't suit them in some way now you also indicated you early earlier you were an independent producer talk a little bit about that well my my background is as a broadcast journalist um and i i i actually even write with a visual eye sometimes uh part of my thing um has been to try to recreate an environment so that the the homebound person with aids can have the story read to them and visualize it in their mind and feel like you are there you know that kind of journalism uh but i just i love video i love television i've had my own show on adelphia the adelphia cable uh it was called vantage point it was uh featured in women journalism stories uh we covered and um and i you know i like to do that i like to to shoot i like to edit i like to produce i'm producing stuff for the the la press club all the time little video things that wind up on adelphia so i keep my double in that so karen there's only believe it or not a few minutes remaining i mean i the time goes really fast when you're having a good time and i have um so just one i think last question there are a number of people watching the show that i think probably at this moment are saying to themselves you know when i was younger i used to write stuff and i always thought i would be a writer what advice would you give those people saying you know maybe she could do that but i could never do that in terms of how both they might do it or not and what sort of what place the way they act and the way their sort of reputation plays in in how they approach their work well the first thing i would say is learn by doing practice practice practice these principles and all our affairs go out and look observe you know and write down what you see and how you feel about what you see and then start start little you know start at a local paper say oh did you know that this event is going on i'd love to try to cover it for you try to develop reputations from with editors as being teachable one of the one of the greatest things about journalism for me is that i get to be a perpetual student it helps when i know something going into an event but or a situation but even if i don't you listen you observe you take in and then you ask questions what greater perfection could there be as far as that is concerned i i wish i could do this for another hour this is absolutely fascinating and i really thank you for being my guest it's as i indicated at the beginning i know you've been a private person and you're always the person asking the questions and making the notes and it was very good of you to do this today and for those of you who've been watching i hope that you will take a spin at putting some words together looking at both sides of the angles and get used to it [Music] you