As gay journalists come out of the closet in their workplaces, they compel the news industry to answer a number of questions. Some -- Should gay reporters be excluded from covering gay issues because of their presumed bias? -- are only the latest version of questions about bias raised by the presence of women, African-Americans, and other minority groups in the newsroom. Others are more complicated. If a news organization allows gay reporters to cover gay issues, should it also require reporters to disclose their sexual orientation when they cover those issues? How far -- if at all -- should gay reporters distance themselves from events staged by or of special significance to their community, such as last April's march in Washington?

In response to the question of whether a gay reporter should be assigned to cover a gay issue, many editors say they wouldn't hesitate to do so. In fact, some editors say they prefer to assign gays to such stories out of a belief that they bring an insight to gay issues much as blacks are thought to do when covering civil rights, and women when covering breast cancer.

"Being gay and covering a gay story to me are never inconsistent -- never," says Justin Gillis, urban affairs editor at The Miami Herald. "Having a gay reporter cover a gay issue in a sophisticated way is, as a rule, a good thing. That person brings a skill and an ability at dialogue with the people being covered, and sources and knowledge of the community.

The real issue for a journalist isn't his objectivity, because "no one comes at anything with pure, unvarnished objectivity," Gillis adds. "The question to me is, how fair-minded are you and is your vision broad enough to take in the points of view of people you might really disagree with? We've had gay journalists go up and do the stories on the rampant homophobes in north Florida and, conversely, we've had gay journalists do stories on gay civil rights issues."

James Fallows, Washington editor of The Atlantic Monthly, holds that simply checking the copy of a gay reporter writing about "rampant homophobes" to ensure fairness and balance isn't enough. Gay reporters who regularly cover gay issues, Fallows believes, should either disclose their homosexuality to their editors, sources, readers, listeners, and viewers, or they should write about other issues.

Fallows acknowledges that such a policy could force gay reporters to disclose their sexuality to their editors whether they accept assignments about gay issues or turn them down. But he says that "being involved in journalism -- which to a large degree involves making judgments about other people, intruding on their privacy in various ways, asking readers to take certain things on trust from you -- involves some sacrifices that might not be necessary in other lines of work."

Last March, The Atlantic published a 9,000-word cover story on the biological roots of homosexuality that was widely acclaimed in the gay community. True to the policy outlined by Fallows, the story, written by Chandler Burr, included this sentence: "Many of the scientists who have been studying homosexuality are gay, as am I." (And as am I.)

Fallows doesn't single out gays for this type of newsroom candor: all reporters have an obligation to disclose relevant facts about themselves. "Editors and reporters might not think that various identities -- gender, race, political views, sex -- have bearing," Fallows says. "But the readers may not agree, and in that respect one should let readers know to a reasonable degree. I think I can be completely detached in judging Bill Clinton's strengths and weaknesses. But if a reader later found out that I worked for a Democratic administration, that reader might feel he'd been deceived in some way." Disclosure should not be a written rule, Fallows adds, but an "understood professional obligation." (Fallos was chief speechwriter for former President Jimmy Carter.)

But gay journalists may find that coming out on the job is a risky business. Editors at The Houston Post provided evidence of that in August 1991 when they fired columnist Juan Palomo during a dispute over a column about a fatal gay-bashing in Houston in which Palomo attempted to come out. Editors ordered him to remove references to his own homosexuality from the column, then fired him a month later for talking to other news organizations about the internal disagreement over the column at the paper. After a week of public protest, Palomo, who had worked at the paper for thirteen years, was hired back.

The openly gay journalists often finds himself under a special kind of pressure -- from within the gay community itself. In a December 20, 1992, Week In Review piece titled "Covering AIDS and Living It: A Reporter's Testimony," Jeffrey Schmalz, who covered gay issues for The New York Times until his death last November, described an exchange at the funeral of a man who had died of AIDS.

"Are you here as a reporter or as a gay man with AIDS?" Schmalz said he was asked at the funeral. When he responded that he was there as a reporter, Schmalz wrote, "Some shook their heads in disgust, all but shouting 'Uncle Tom!' They wanted an advocate, not a reporter."

Outside the newsroom, the line between professional duties and private lives seems to shift with the issue. For example:

The board of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) voted early in 1992 that members would not march as an organized group in April's march in Washington because it was an overtly political event intended to influence government policy. (Many of the nation's leading news organizations apparently agreed. The Associated Press, ABC News, and The Washington Post, among others, prohibited their editorial staffs from participating in the march.)

Late that summer the NLGJA board voted not to support Sandy Nelson, an education reporter for the Tacoma, Washington, News Tribune, who had sued the paper after she was reassigned to the copy desk because she was working for a local gay rights initiative. The NLGJA board concluded that the issue in the dispute was not discrimination against a gay journalist, but whether journalists should be involved in any political campaign.

To some, the NLGJA's decision in these cases seemed at odds with its decision a few months later, in December 1992, to ask the National Hispanic Journalists Association to move its convention from Denver as part of the campaign to boycott Colorado after voters there approved a measure invalidating local laws protecting gays from discrimination. Leroy Aarons, former executive editor of The Oakland Tribune and president of the NLGJA, explains that the board acted in the latter case because the Colorado law "potentially affected journalists and their right to work."

Palomo of The Houston Post, who has served on the NLGJA board, says that making such distinctions has put the organization "on the road to becoming a gay social club. We're talking about the rights of reporters, and the NLGJA shouldn't sit back and let these reporters be trampled on," he says, referring to the association's refusal to support Nelson in her dispute with The News Tribune. "What's the organization for it it's not going to do anything for its members?"

Off-duty activism can be more than just an ethical issue for journalists. Pressure by conservative groups that complain that recent coverage of gay issues had legitimized and glamorized homosexuality can shift the focus of debate from ethics to the bottom line. Asked how he might respond to a campaign to remove an openly gay reporter, Bruno Cohen, vice-president and news director of WNBC-TV in New York City, replied, "The pressure to be successful in a commercial environment means that if anyone has an attribute that has a negative impact on ratings, their job security is certainly affected by it."

Broadcast journalists can be especially vulnerable to pressure from the right because on-the-air reporters and anchors are living-room celebrities, unshielded by the anonymity of print. "It's our face, our personality," says Steve Gendel, chief science and medicine correspondent for CNBC, who declared his homosexuality to a live audience of 175,000 households in July while covering a report about the genetic roots of homosexuality. "It's more than just a byline, because we're identified with a story."

Lesbians working in television can be even more vulnerable, because, as Barbara Raab, a producer at NBC's Dateline, explains, the "aura of availability" that surrounds women reporters and anchors can be shattered if their audiences know they are gay. "There are lesbians on the air, but there are no open lesbians on the air," Raab says. "Believe me, none of these women are going to talk to you [for this story]."

Among those bringing pressure on stations are conservative media watchdogs such as Accuracy in Media and a handful of smaller groups, including the Springs of Life Church, a Pentecostal church in Lancaster, California. The church produced "The Gay Agenda," a twenty-minute video that offers a brutally unflattering protrayal of gay life in America, and last year began publishing Lambda Report, a twelve-page monthly newsletter devoted to "monitoring the homosexual agenda in American politics and culture."

The newsletter's August edition included a story by Joseph Farah, formerly an editor at the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, about "the pernicius role of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association in media coverage of homosexual issues," Farah's story identified several reporters as "card-carrying members" of the gay journalists group, and was accompanied by a sidebar that listed nineteen other journalists who "are or have been active" with the group.

Lambda Report editor Peter LaBarbera says that a future newsletter may update the list of gay journalists published in the August issue. What service do such lists provide? "A lot of people feel there is an activism among reporters," LaBarbera replied. "They want to know if this person is an open gay, if he's proud of it, if he's attending meetings."

Gay journalists also are being challenged by other colleagues, including syndicated columnist Cal Thomas. In a column published a few days after the gay journalists association met in New York in September, Thomas scolded the news organizations that set up tables at a job fair that opened the convention. (Among the twenty organizations were The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Times, The Associated Press, National Public Radio, and ABC News.) In an interview after his column appeared, Thomas argued that joining a group like the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association is in itself a statement of political activism by journalists, which he called an "ethical outrage."

"Those of us in journalism have to understand that our stock in trade is our credibility with our consumers, our readers, viewed, listeners," Thomas said. "If they feel they're getting anything but the facts, then their trust level and our credibility will decline."

The NLGJA, for its part, is not about to urge its members to shrink back into the closet. The group is organizing task forces to establish parity in employee benefits, such as health care for the domestic partners of gay journalists, and to reach out to journalism majors on college campuses. And it recently completed a survey of working conditions for gays in broadcast newsrooms.

The NLGJA's Aarons says the association will also be working for parity in news coverage, to "mainsteam gay and lesbian information" in the media. As an example, he recounted a story conference he sat in on recently with editors at the Detroit Free Press at which editors discussed a story about new angles in refinancing homes.

"I spoke to a group of editors afterward and made the point that if you're refinancing as a heterosexual couple, or as an unmarried gay or lesbian couple, you're dealing with an entirely different world with regard to taxes, inheritance, a whole range of things," Aarons says. "I made the suggestion that that might stand on its own as a sidebar, its own story, or as a piece of the main story. Everyone was taken by surprise. That's the level where I think our organization can be useful in the future."

Aarons's view of the future indicates how much has changed in the decade since CJR reported ("Uptight on Gay News," CJR, March/April 1982) that the prevailing mood in newsrooms was "a compound of hostility and ignorance," resulting in stories that were "inadequate and uninformed."

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