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An article was done about a singer from the thirties and forties named Gladys Bentley, and she was a lesbian. She was an act of lesbian And this article, though, was all about how Gladys Bentley was repenting her sinful life, and it was really horrifying. It denigrated everything about being a lesbian, and I was devastated. I was devastated by reading that article, and I felt like, she, of course has every right to change her mind, but the coverage itself was really.
Horrific.
It was like, I read that and I thought, Oh, what is the point of going on if that's what life is going to mean?
As I get older.
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South, I thought being gay was the worst thing I could ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn that by seeking out our history, and what I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love. In this episode, we'll meet Juel Gomez, one of the founders of the queer media watchdog organization GLAD. We'll learn how and why GLAD was founded and how gone unchecked the media can drive our opinions about the world around
us and ourselves. From my heart podcast, I'm Jordan Go and Solves and this is what we loved. Last year, at the height of the Beyonce Craze, I went to the Renaissance tour and oh my god, it was incredible, like sixty thousand people jumping and singing and sweating, and in between Beyonce songs when she was doing costume changes, she created these video interludes to play on stage, and one of them struck a darker tone in giant letters.
A Jim Morrison quote appeared on a JumboTron. Whoever controls the media controls the mind, it said, and it stayed with me because I sort of disagreed with it. I mean, today there's so much media out there that I feel like I control my media diet. I pick what I'm consuming. So I thought support from Business Insider actually found that ninety percent of American media content is controlled by just
six companies. And when I thought about it, almost all of the shows that I watched this year, and a lot of my election coverage all came from within those six companies. It made me think about how much power they have, how easy it is to skirt accountability for bias and misinformation, especially when it comes to representing queer people. Thankfully, there are organizations that exist specifically to hold these companies accountable.
GLAD is one of them. Since its inception, GLAD has held countless media organizations responsible for bad coverage of LGBTQ people. My next guest, Juel Gomez, was one of the founders of GLAD. She graduated from Columbia Journalism School in the early seventies and became a famous writer and activist. She's well known for her queer class novel The guilda Stories that came out in nineteen ninety one. It follows a black lesbian vampire from eighteen hundreds of America all the
way into the twenty first century. Even from a young age, Jewle understood that those who control the media also control the mind. You grew up in Boston, Massachusetts in the fifties and sixties, and I'm wondering if you could tell me what was it like growing up as a lesbian at that time in that place in America.
I was raised in Boston by my great grandmother and her daughter, who's my grandmother. And I was also very close to my father who lived nearby us and Bostonians were very specific and they had a hard time believing that people of color were actually born in Boston. Now, as a lesbian, everything was very kind of on the down low in a way, because there wasn't much representation anywhere. But I did have the good fortune. As I said, my grandmother was very close to me and helped raise me.
She'd been on the stage in the forties and the thirties, so she knew every kind of person in the world. She used to go to Cape Cod every summer with her friend Scotti and his boyfriend and stay in their cottage. So I grew up understanding there were gay people. I knew I was one, and I knew it was going to be okay because my grandmother was okay. Same with my father. He was a bartender. He had queer people
in his bark, men who were drag Queen's. I got a lot of my best high school clothes from Queen's miss Case, specifically because she was my size.
You know, she was a little chubby.
I was a little chubby, So I got all these great suits and dresses from her, So I knew it was gonna be okay, but I knew in the moment it was not gonna be something I could actually talk about.
Well, Jewel, that is so timely, because I won't wonder what is the story of the moment that you knew you were gay?
I knew I was gay around eight years old. There was a house across the street. There was a young woman who was my age, maybe she was ten, but she used to climb the tree in her front yard all the time. And let me just say, I knew when I looked out of the window, I was in love.
I just was in love.
It was just really athletic and gorgeous. And I didn't have a word for it, of course, but I knew I was in love with Diane.
That was her name.
I never did get to know her, but I knew when she came out to play, because that's when I could go to my front window and watch her.
You have really become hugely influential as a lesbian feminist through the literature and poetry that you've written. Was there sort of a moment in your childhood or your early life that influenced you to become an activist.
Growing up during the Civil Rights movement.
Every day people in our community were talking about what was going on with sit ins, with bussing.
I mean, it was a very.
Active You grew up in the Civil rights era, yes, exactly. The Civil rights movement, which was seemed to be centered more in the South, I was actually trying to make inroads into northern communities because racism in the North was as bad, perhaps not as obvious, but certainly as bad as it was in the South.
And the fact that schools that were predominantly black were poor, only got second hand books, did not have strong programs preparing students for college. There was a big controversy about that. Specifically, when I was in high school in Boston. I went to a fairly poor school in a black neighborhood, and one year the civil rights activists decreed Black Day, and they invited young black students in high school to just
stay home. So the protests were really to make the school system aware of how it was short changing it's students of color. And when they first did that, I did not stay home because I was one of those who all I really cared about was having a perfect attendance record.
I was really kind of a nerd.
I didn't stay home even when I had cramped so bad I could barely walk. But the guidance counselor, when I was in my freshman year, convinced my great grandmother I shouldn't be in the college program because I was never going to be able to afford to go to college. And the next year I understood, Oh, this is something
that's bigger than my attendance record. I need to be present by being absent, I need to make my voice part of this voice demanding that the school system and the city pay attention to the needs of people of color in this community. So from that moment on, I
understood I was meant to participate. And by the time the next year rolled around, civil rights actions had gotten us a new administration in the high school, and this time the guidance counselor called my great grandma and said, no, no, no, she needs to be in a college program. She will go to college.
So Jule you would go on to co found GLAD in the eighties, which became an organization focused on holding the media accountable to betraying gay people in a fair way. Was there a piece of media for you growing up where you felt like the portrayal of queer people negatively impacted you.
There is one specific thing that happened.
I probably was a teenager, and I of course knew I was a lesbian. I had a lover in high school at the age of fourteen. But in this magazine, I think it was either Ebony or Jet magazine, an article was done about a singer from the thirties and forties named Gladys Bentley. Now, Gladys Bentley was very, very popular. She always dressed in men's clothes and a top hat. She had a particular club she sang in every week, and she was a lesbian. She was an act of lesbian.
And this article, though, was all about how Gladys Bentley was repenting her sinful life, and it was really horrifying. It was it really dismissed everything about the culture that she'd been a part of in the thirties and forties. It then agreed everything about being a lesbian and basically said she was saved and going to go to heaven because she had decided to get married to a man.
And I was devastated. I was devastated by reading that article and I felt like, she, of course has every right to change her mind, but the coverage itself was really.
Horrific.
It was like, I read that and I thought, Oh, what is the point of going on if that's what life is going to mean as I get older?
When we come back, Jewel transforms her frustration into activism and becomes one of the founders of glad It's the late nineteen eighties. By this point, Jewel had been a published author for several years, and she began working for the New York State Council on the Arts. Her personal and professional see were starting to be filled with other queer writers, particularly gay men, who at the same time
were in an existential battle for their lives. They were dying of AIDS, and the media coverage was not good. Having lived through the Civil Rights movement and the anti Vietnam War protests, Jewell understood that the way people were covered by the news directly impacted the way they were treated in real life. You're now in your thirties and already becoming quite a prolific poet. At this point, you AIDS is raging and killing tens of thousands of Americans.
By nineteen eighty five, I wonder had the media portrayal of queer people changed at that point from when you were fourteen and reading this article in Ebony magazine. Had it changed by the eighties when AIDS was raging.
Now, keeping in mind that I had gone to Columbia journalism school, I was very familiar with the way that media worked, and I wasn't cynical, but I was aware. So by the eighties when there was this pandemic and the newspapers demonized, primarily demonized gay men, I was not surprised at all.
A mystery disease known as the gay plague has become an epidemic unprecedented in the history of American medicine that today from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Topping the list of likely victims are male homosexuals who have many partners and.
Drug users who inject themselves with needles.
I felt like, Oh, okay, this is just an extension of how the media can number one sell papers and use people's fears against gay people.
So I was horrified.
What is one piece of media that you remember recall at that point, sort of being horrified, we.
Put together these t shirts from headlines and one of them was something like about sending gay men to an island. Some right wing person decided that queer people should just go be sent to an island.
The AIDS crisis came about during a time of religious resurgence in America, and coincidentally, it was a virus that intersected with some of society's deepest taboos, drugs, sex, and homosexuality. It would famously take President Ronald Reagan more than four
years to publicly acknowledge the disease. One US Senator from North Carolina, who voted against AIDS research in nineteen eighty eight, testified saying, quote, nothing positive was likely to happen to America if our people succumbed to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.
There is not one case of age own record in this country, or as far as I know, anywhere else that.
Did not have its origin asodomy.
A significant amount of Americans also believed that AIDS was God's punishment. Jewel knew that the media could either help combat this disdain for gay people or perpetuate it, but sadly AIDS coverage was toxic. In a twenty eighteen retroactive analysis of their own AIDS coverage. The New York Times admitted their AIDS reporting was quote scant, judgmental, and distressingly vague. Jewele's friends were dying and it angered her that the met wasn't taking it seriously.
And there were all kinds of headlines that indicated whoever got aged deserved it. It was simple deviousness on the part of journalists to write headlines that blamed people who were getting ill.
Well, tell me about that. Why was it important for you to draw the connection between media representation and combating homophobia? Because when I think about it, there's so many different avenues that you could have taken to address homophobia. There's healthcare in the eighties, there's politics. What was it about media that drew your interest and sort of made you think this is an avenue that we could really affect change and really combat homophobia.
As someone who had trained to be a journalist, I was interested in media. I had studied it. I was dedicated to its usage for justice, and I grew up watching the news during the Civil rights movement and the
war in Vietnam. I learned so much about what was wrong with things that were happening by what I saw in the media, and it was very clear pretty early on that media was being utilized to first make the population in favor of the war in Vietnam, and the scariest thing one could do was protest against it, because then you would be portrayed as a trader. And that
was with the media's support. As a kid watching demonstrators be hosed and watching dogs being sick on young people by white southern sheriffs, I was really clear the media had an effect that turned the tide in many people's minds about what was important, and what was important was protecting our younger people and getting the right to vote
and defeating these racist sheriffs. So that was a situation in which the media actually worked to our advantage because it showed us perfect you know, pictures worth a thousand words. It showed us exactly what was going on. So I was aware, you know, from an early age, that media could depict queer people and gay men specifically as horrific predators, and that's what it seemed to be doing. And if we did not change that, we were going to watch more and more and more of our young people dying.
Well, you ended up co founding Glad Glad is now very well known across America for essentially acting as a watchdog for fair queer media representation. What was that story of how you co founded GLAD.
I worked at that time for the New York State Council and the Arts in the Literature program, and my boss was Gregory Coolovacas, who was a gay man, and you know, he'd gone to an Ivy League school, and he was every example of what you would portray if you wanted to look at like a particular kind of gay man. Blonde, blue eyes, dimples, those gold rim glasses, very size, very.
Desirable.
He was very outgoing and smart, and we became dear, dear friends, and it was totally amazing to me when he said to me, some guys and I are starting to get together to try to figure out what to do about meatia coverage.
You should join us.
I was just starting to work on my novel, The Guild of Stories, which is the first black lesbian vampire novel, and it's still in print decades later, so I wasn't sure how much time I was going to be able to devote. But I bumped into Vito Russo, the writer about film and really strong activists and he said, no, Juel, you have to join us. This is this is the moment, it's happening right now. So that's how I ended up
going to GLAD meetings. And it started very simple, and we started keeping articles that we cut out that were that were, you know, damaging, we thought of as damaging.
And one of the first things that we did was insist on meeting with the editorial boards of the New York Times, the Daily News, and Newsday, the three major papers in New York City, to really talk with them about how screwed up their coverage was and that they should expect demonstrations if they were not willing to meet with us and if they were not able to reconsider
their editorial position in their headlines. And it was the first meeting of a queer organization with the major newspapers in New York.
What was some of the coverage, like the big thing was closed down the bathhouses and because this feeling was aids would be transmitted in bath houses where gay men had anonymous sex.
That was an aspect of some of that, but it really was and getting to the point of how is it transmitted and how do you get men gay men men having sex with men who didn't necessarily identify as gay, how did you get them to understand how to be safe? And there was no sense of being safe. It was all about you all have to stop having sex. You
all have to stay in your homes. You cannot be in the public eye, you know, sweeps through Central Park where gay men would have sex at night, And it was suddenly like the fifties where gay men were afraid to walk through Central Park, much less have sex, because their pictures would then be in the daily news. So it was a very specific editorial attitude.
Well, what were.
Some of the early victories that you had with Glad.
I had read that.
Glad had in those early meetings convinced the New York Times to stop using the word homosexual.
Number one.
Having a meeting with the major editorial boards of New York was a huge success. One of the things that we counted as a success was that the number of people at each demonstration we had grew exponentially. First it might be twenty people, and then it might be one hundred people. Keeping in mind that there was no internet, there was no email. We had what we called a phone tree. You know, I called one person and that person called two people, and those two people called two
more people. Before that, if you can imagine, people were afraid to be seen. People were afraid to have their picture taken coming out of a gay bar. People were nervous about being known. So if you could have a demonstration in the nineteen eighties and get one hundred people to show up, not wearing masks, not hiding it, it was pretty stunning. It was pretty stunning, and that I think shifted things for a lot of gay people because
we were able to be ourselves in daylight. And once you can do that, you can pretty much protest anything, change anything, come out wherever you feel like you want to. And that was I think the personal success of appearing in public was huge.
It was really huge.
I am wondering, as Glad is accomplishing all of this and people are finally becoming visible. There's a face to the gay rights movement, and people are understanding it's it's not just those people, but it's my neighbors, it's my family members, perhaps even my son or daughter. You're making a ton of strides in that movement. But on the other hand, was there a time where you also felt like the efforts felt futile. I wonder if you remember
Ellen and that show being canceled. Yeah, yeah, yeah, tell me about that.
Actually, it's kind of funny because you know Ellen, I knew she was a lesbian before she had her show.
I watched her.
She was a host on the I think the Oscar Awards once and she was interviewing people on the backstage and everything, and I thought, oh my god, that woman's a lesbian. Then the next and she was very, very funny. And so the next thing I know, she has this show, and I'm thinking, and then she also had done a movie and it didn't do well, and I thought, oh gosh, she's not gonna do well because they don't actually want her to be a lesbian on screen, and so they
don't know what to do with her. They keep kind of setting her up in these weird situations. And I was so relieved when it was decided that she would get to say she was a lesbian, because to me, it was like, here was this incredible talent being tied up like a mummy and unable to spread her wings and able to really use her humor because she was so tied tight to persona. And once those ties and
bandages were ripped open. I was really thrilled because she went on to do what she does, which is be an incredibly funny person.
How did you feel when that show got canceled after she came out?
I was sorry for her, because you know, she could feel like she'd failed, which I thought was absolutely not the case. I felt like it freed her to actually fulfill her destiny as a storyteller and as a human being in a way that she never would have been able to do if she stayed on TV like that. But I wasn't that surprised that Ellen's show was canceled after she came out, because where were they going to go? They were not going to do a show about lesbians.
They were really not ready.
To do a comedy about lesbians. I mean lesbians was still if they appeared in something, they had to die at the end.
By the early two thousands, GLAD had racked up several accomplishments. Their efforts on AIDS was largely successful, pushing media companies to report on science and not on the things that compounded stigma. GLAD would go on to seriously influence queer representation on TV, too, essentially becoming a consultant for major
networks wanting to portray queer characters. Their work is so powerful in the industry today that they've even managed to get some TV shows canceled for bad depictions of queer life. Their annual media awards draw wide attention for best in class representations of queer people. But Jules says, even though strides have been made, there's still a lot more to do.
What was the moment where you found that the tide was beginning to turn in your favor, that gay media representation was actually becoming meaningful.
Mmmm, well, I I feel like we're not.
Finished. There is so much more that needs to happen.
We can't have journalists look at a television coverage and say, oh, well, this show has five queer people on it, and this show has two lesbians on it.
See, aren't we perfect. We can't do that. What we still have to do is.
See that people involved in the media are looking at us through candid eyes, that looking at us, not through their own prejudices, and that takes a long time. We still need to get the producers, the directors, the writers to be accountable for what they produce and what they write.
And I don't think that's true.
How do you fit into this story, Juel, You were a part of this group glad that has championed fair depiction of queer people and really has changed the landscape of queer representation in the media, certainly in the United States. But you're also part of that group of queer people, and you are also a queer person in the media. So how are you impacted by all of this?
I would say I'm very grateful that I came along when I did through the activism of the sixties and seventies, the civil rights, anti war, lesbian feminist movements, because it's made activism such a part of my body. In my mind, I have that as part of who I am. Nobody has to tell me to do that, no one has to remind me to do that, and it helps me when I'm writing, so that I'm creating characters that I feel represent the philosophical underpinnings that have guided me all
of my life. I want people, when they read The Guild of Stories one hundred years from now to say, oh, yeah, I understand that character. That character means a lot to me, whether I'm queer or not, and the character is telling me some ways to be in the world that are honorable, and I want all of my writing to be able to do that.
The last question I have for you is sort of around passing things down for all of the young people listening. Why do you want queer people to continue fighting for representation in the media. It feels like right now almost every show has a queer character of some kind. This is actually a queer show on a large media network. In America. There are LGBTQ people in writers' rooms.
I had a young student say to me once, I don't know about you baby boomers.
You did a lot of stuff.
You got some civil rights movements, bills passed and stuff like that, and then you got old and you just stopped. Social change is not just a long distance race. Each of us could start out thinking we're going to change the world before we die, and we will change some part of the world before we die. But social change is a relay race. And my generation did what we could for our part of the track, and now it's the next generation's turn to do what they can with
their part of the track. People don't see and don't understand social change is something that you have to keep working at It doesn't just about a being about a bang. Everybody is nice to you. Social change is something we do one by one, and I'm still doing it, so I don't see an end. I keep thinking, this is what we do, This is what we do with our lives when we get up in the morning, and this is what we dream about when we go to bed at night.
How to Make the World Better.
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan go Andsolves. New episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in to tell your story, email us at but We Looved at gmail dot com, or you can send me a message on Instagram or TikTok at your underscore againsolvice. We are a production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger.
Our executive producers are me Maya Howard and Katrina Norville. Original music by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Bronson and Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.