By Michael Miner
“I don’t do interviews,” he said.
And what a year it was. First Bloomington and then Normal was split by a proposed gay-rights ordinance. The Pantagraph–which despite its motto “Independent in everything, neutral in nothing” knows when not to stick its head out (in 1994 it withheld as “religiously offensive for a family newspaper” a Doonesbury encounter between gay Mark Slackmeyer and a Christian fundamentalist)–was by Frazier and McCulley’s partisan measure honorably covering the passionate debate. The two of them emerged as leaders in the gay cause, while the Christian Coalition of Illinois–headquartered until very recently in Bloomington–led the opposition.
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But last March the comfortable relationship underwent a sea change. With the Bloomington vote already lost but the Normal vote ahead, Frazier and McCulley welcomed any publicity they could find. They began talking to Barbara Sandler, a Chicago-based reporter for People magazine, which had decided to do a long feature on gay families in America. Frazier and McCulley’s story no longer belonged just to the Pantagraph and Fergus. Obviously given new orders, says Frazier, “she went to work with a fervor that irritated us. She was being demanding and pushy.”
Frazier and McCulley went in to confront Kardon and Gleason. Frazier told me that Kardon “alluded to receiving a great deal of mail, and all of it, he said, was fervently against the Pantagraph printing any kind of news of any sort having to do with gay and lesbian issues. They were going to pull their subscriptions. The volume was tremendous.”
“I don’t think they were criticized for their coverage of the ordinance,” Curtin told me. “They were criticized for their coverage of other pieces on the homosexual issue. I do know they ran one first-page story on homosexuals living in Bloomington and their plight, with a color photograph and continued on another page. A lot of people canceled their subscriptions over that.”
“I’m very comfortable with the fact that most reporters are either moderate or liberal–moderate on the Democratic side or liberal on the Democratic side. That’s just the way it is and the way it will be. But the people I work with and the people living their lives and raising their families, it’s a little different.
