Gays and Mike Royko share several of the same enemies. These include cement-headed thugs, fundamentalist bigots, officious hypocrites, and Mike Royko.
A reporter at one of the other big TV news operations told me the same thing. This reporter said Jack O’Malley’s people leak like the Titanic to serve O’Malley’s interests, and they’d shipped over a copy of Royko’s police report weeks ago. But the station didn’t consider Royko’s drunken ravings a news story.
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What we may be looking at then is a two-pronged attack on Royko’s public image. Prong one, directed at the mainstream media, struck silence. But prong two, aimed at gays and lesbians who didn’t like Royko to begin with, hit pay dirt. Among other reactions, Windy City Times ran a page-one story last week, and Rick Garcia issued a press release announcing that he was urging the publisher of the Tribune “to take the strongest possible action against Mr. Royko’s bigotry.” He meant firing him. Garcia’s announcement put Royko’s language on TV and in the Sun-Times, if not the Tribune. The Tribune let Royko cover his latest troubles.
In ’92 Royko weighed in on the Saint Patrick’s Day parade in Boston. “I suspect that the parade leaders are right: The gay marchers are more interested in advertising their gayness, and irritating devout straights, than they are in showing their love for the old sod. Other groups don’t wave signs that say they are proud to be Irish and heterosexual, or Irish and impotent, or Irish and subject to premature ejaculation.”
On May 16 Royko pleaded guilty to drunken driving and resisting arrest. He was fined $1,600, put on probation for two years, and ordered to perform 80 hours of community service. Three days later he produced a column mocking Jack O’Malley for “cracking down on men who have sex with underage females.” Here was O’Malley, fearlessly assailing Mel Reynolds though he had nothing to gain except headlines. “The same devotion to justice has led to the prosecution of the following men for statutory rape,” Royko continued. “Hmmmm, it seems I don’t have a list. O’Malley’s office couldn’t provide one. The problem is that this outburst of zeal to nail male seducers seems to have begun with Reynolds.”
Royko told me, “This was not some clerk sitting around. I think I know who it is.”
Coauthor of a book that savages the prosecution of the Dowaliby case, Warden’s a muckraking former editor of Chicago Lawyer and a onetime reporter at the old Chicago Daily News, where he was Royko’s colleague and friend.
