Discovering Central Georgia's Gay Community   

Champions of newsroom diversity insist that the result of their mission will be newspapers that better inform readers. During the past two years at the Macon Telegraph in Georgia, they've been putting that theory through a wrenching real-life test.

Depending on their point of view, readers were either enlightened or disgusted by the Telegraph's four-day, 17-story series called "Gay in Macon," which took a look at what life is like for gays and lesbians in conservative central Georgia.

But this pioneering project was not the result of journalistic inspiration during a high-level editors' retreat. The impetus came from a staff revolt led in part by two lesbian staffers upset by the paper's decision not to run a comic strip with a homosexual theme.

In April 1993 Canadian cartoonist Lynn Johnston used her syndicated strip, "For Better or for Worse," to explore the challenges confronting gay and lesbian teens. A friend of one of the strip's main characters comes out as gay, and is at first harshly rejected by his parents.

Rick Thomas, the Telegraph's editor, says he and his managing editor made the decision in a hurry. In retrospect, he admits the issue should have been more carefully considered. "We would not make that same decision again," he says.

While reader response to the decision was relatively mild, some members of the staff were furious. The paper's only two openly gay staffers at the time, Tami Dennis and Susan Parker, say they were taken aback by the insensitivity of their editors.

"Pulling the comic made it seem like homosexuality was something not fit for a family newspaper," says Dennis, the Telegraph's copy desk chief at the time. "I was hurt. I was angry. I was shocked."

"There were several of us who were quite upset about it," says Eric Velasco, a court reporter for the paper. He says the shock was intensified by the fact that the Telegraph had in the past refused to pull controversial comics, including "Doonesbury" panels that had been pulled from other papers.

A staff meeting called to talk about the decision turned emotional as several staff members – including some who were very conservative and opposed to homosexuality – spoke out against the editors' actions. One argument advanced at the meeting was that the decision illustrated how out of touch with gay and lesbian readers the paper was. Thomas agreed.

"Obviously, we weren't plugged into that segment of our population," Thomas says, "and obviously a vast majority of our readers were not, either. I felt that we really needed to talk to the people who are part of that population to find out what they go through every day."

And so the idea for a series on "that population" was hatched...

Initially, the city's small gay community was skeptical of the proposed series, and the Telegraph had difficulty finding people willing to go on record. It overcame that obstacle by developing trust over time, but a number of the people quoted in the series wouldn't allow their names to be used.

Velasco, the lead writer of the series, says reporters discovered a number of good stories on issues they had overlooked, including several anti-gay hate crimes in the Macon area. One piece told the moving story of a gay man who spent two months in the hospital after being shot five times while standing in his front yard.

The Telegraph also
commissioned a poll that showed Macon was more tolerant toward homosexuals than conventional wisdom would have indicated.

"People whose minds were closed didn't change their minds," says Velasco, who transcribed 430 phone calls from a special line set up for readers to comment on the series. "But people whose minds were somewhat open started to think about these issues. People who were on the borderline or who might have snickered at a gay joke in the past may think again."

Another legacy of the series is that the reporters who worked on the story have developed sources in the gay community. Macon's gay leaders are now on a first-name basis with many of the paper's reporters and editors, and a lesbian has been included on the paper's diversity committee, which meets monthly to discuss coverage of minority issues.

"I think we have a better feel for the community and for the things we might do unknowingly that would reinforce stereotypes," says Thomas. "As I look back...it was very painful. But in a way, I'm glad it happened. If we had made the other decision, I don't think we would have learned as much."