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It's a smart take that tracks the gay movement as it came into its own power in the '80s and the way that personality sometimes trumped even politics:
"I wonder if Jeff was one of the last of the spectacularly self-destructive gay men," says Mark Schoofs, the paper's editor in the late 1980s who went on to work for The Village Voice in New York, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Now living in Los Angeles, Schoofs is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. "He was definitely a gay publishing visionary," Schoofs says. "The gay community was coming into its own in those years, and Jeff was one of the people who recognized that gays were part of mainstream America. He understood that gays were like Jews and blacks and Puerto Ricans and Irish people -- another tile in the mosaic of America. He was incredibly flawed to the extent that he himself could not be part of that mainstream. But he was one of the people who made it happen."
This is the kind of great reporting that's as much about how our gay lives have changed in nearly 30 years as it is a specific group of people or newspaper. You get a gold star in modern gay history just for reading it!
> Need more evidence how times have changed? The best headline I've read all week was in Time Out/Chicago: Da Rufus on Fire reviews the singer's performance at summer-long music festival Ravinia.
> And check out NPR's story from today about trans singer Lucas Silveira of The Cliks. Silveira talks about the downsides to testosterone (it screws with your voice) but is amusingly reassured by Renee Montagne that even in his cover of "Cry Me a River" he's got a deeper pitch than Justin Timberlake. I am pretty sure if someone had tried to tell Jeff McCourt that one day NPR would be running casually positive puff pieces about trans folks that he would have laughed in your face. Or maybe died a little happier. [Thanks N]
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