November 27, 2024 • 35 mins
Jewelle Gomez co-founded GLAAD, the premier queer media watchdog organization, in 1985. She realized early that media was a tool that could prevent homophobia — or perpetuate it. She recounts why GLAAD was founded and why it's still needed today.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
the Outspoken podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
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,
(00:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Horrific.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
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?
Speaker 3 (00:58):
As I get older.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
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
(01:29):
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,
(02:13):
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
(02:34):
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.
(02:58):
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
(03:20):
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
(03:41):
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
(04:02):
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
(04:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
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,
(05:01):
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.
(05:22):
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
(05:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
You know, she was a little chubby.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Well, Jewel, that is so timely, because I won't wonder
what is the story of the moment that you knew
you were gay?
Speaker 2 (06:33):
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
(06:55):
when I looked out of the window, I was in love.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
I just was in love.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
That was her name.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
Growing up during the Civil Rights movement.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Every day people in our community were talking about what
was going on with sit ins, with bussing.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
I mean, it was a very.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
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,
(08:33):
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
(08:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
I was really kind of a nerd.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
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
(09:43):
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
(10:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
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
(10:48):
where you felt like the portrayal of queer people negatively
impacted you.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
There is one specific thing that happened.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
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
(11:18):
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
(11:43):
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
(12:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Horrific.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
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?
Speaker 1 (12:36):
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
(12:59):
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
(13:23):
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.
(13:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
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
(14:25):
the newspapers demonized, primarily demonized gay men, I was not
surprised at all.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Drug users who inject themselves with needles.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
So I was horrified.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
What is one piece of media that you remember recall
at that point, sort of being horrified, we.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
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
(16:01):
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.
Speaker 6 (16:16):
There is not one case of age own record in
this country, or as far as I know, anywhere else that.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Did not have its origin asodomy.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
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
(16:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
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
(17:23):
were getting ill.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
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
(17:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
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
(18:29):
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
(18:54):
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
(19:14):
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
(19:35):
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,
(19:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
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
(20:49):
you wanted to look at like a particular kind of
gay man. Blonde, blue eyes, dimples, those gold rim glasses,
very size, very.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Desirable.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
You should join us.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
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,
(21:41):
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
(22:02):
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
(22:22):
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.
Speaker 6 (22:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
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?
(23:16):
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
(23:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Well, what were.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Some of the early victories that you had with Glad.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
I had read that.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Glad had in those early meetings convinced the New York
Times to stop using the word homosexual.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Number one.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
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
(24:28):
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
(24:52):
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
(25:16):
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,
(25:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
It was really huge.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
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
(26:09):
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
(26:31):
me about that.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Actually, it's kind of funny because you know Ellen, I
knew she was a lesbian before she had her show.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
I watched her.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
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,
(27:01):
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
(27:23):
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
(27:45):
bandages were ripped open. I was really thrilled because she
went on to do what she does, which is be
an incredibly funny person.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
How did you feel when that show got canceled after
she came out?
Speaker 2 (27:59):
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
(28:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
They were really not ready.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
To do a comedy about lesbians. I mean lesbians was
still if they appeared in something, they had to die
at the end.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
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
(29:15):
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
(29:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Mmmm, well, I I feel like we're not.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Finished. There is so much more that needs to happen.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
See, aren't we perfect. We can't do that. What we
still have to do is.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
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
(30:56):
to be accountable for what they produce and what they write.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
And I don't think that's true.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
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.
(31:23):
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?
Speaker 2 (31:36):
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,
(31:56):
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
(32:17):
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,
(32:39):
and I want all of my writing to be able
to do that.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
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
(33:04):
is actually a queer show on a large media network.
In America. There are LGBTQ people in writers' rooms.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
I had a young student say to me once, I
don't know about you baby boomers.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
You did a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
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
(33:43):
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
(34:05):
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
(34:25):
at night.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
How to Make the World Better.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
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
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(34:55):
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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
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(35:17):
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But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
the Outspoken podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
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,
(00:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Horrific.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
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?
Speaker 3 (00:58):
As I get older.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
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
(01:29):
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,
(02:13):
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
(02:34):
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.
(02:58):
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
(03:20):
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
(03:41):
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
(04:02):
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
(04:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
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,
(05:01):
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.
(05:22):
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
(05:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
You know, she was a little chubby.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Well, Jewel, that is so timely, because I won't wonder
what is the story of the moment that you knew
you were gay?
Speaker 2 (06:33):
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
(06:55):
when I looked out of the window, I was in love.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
I just was in love.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
That was her name.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
Growing up during the Civil Rights movement.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Every day people in our community were talking about what
was going on with sit ins, with bussing.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
I mean, it was a very.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
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,
(08:33):
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
(08:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
I was really kind of a nerd.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
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
(09:43):
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
(10:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
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
(10:48):
where you felt like the portrayal of queer people negatively
impacted you.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
There is one specific thing that happened.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
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
(11:18):
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
(11:43):
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
(12:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Horrific.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
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?
Speaker 1 (12:36):
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
(12:59):
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
(13:23):
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.
(13:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
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
(14:25):
the newspapers demonized, primarily demonized gay men, I was not
surprised at all.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Drug users who inject themselves with needles.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
So I was horrified.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
What is one piece of media that you remember recall
at that point, sort of being horrified, we.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
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
(16:01):
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.
Speaker 6 (16:16):
There is not one case of age own record in
this country, or as far as I know, anywhere else that.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Did not have its origin asodomy.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
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
(16:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
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
(17:23):
were getting ill.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
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
(17:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
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
(18:29):
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
(18:54):
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
(19:14):
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
(19:35):
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,
(19:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
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
(20:49):
you wanted to look at like a particular kind of
gay man. Blonde, blue eyes, dimples, those gold rim glasses,
very size, very.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Desirable.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
You should join us.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
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,
(21:41):
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
(22:02):
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
(22:22):
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.
Speaker 6 (22:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
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?
(23:16):
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
(23:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Well, what were.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Some of the early victories that you had with Glad.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
I had read that.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Glad had in those early meetings convinced the New York
Times to stop using the word homosexual.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Number one.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
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
(24:28):
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
(24:52):
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
(25:16):
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,
(25:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
It was really huge.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
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
(26:09):
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
(26:31):
me about that.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Actually, it's kind of funny because you know Ellen, I
knew she was a lesbian before she had her show.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
I watched her.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
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,
(27:01):
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
(27:23):
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
(27:45):
bandages were ripped open. I was really thrilled because she
went on to do what she does, which is be
an incredibly funny person.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
How did you feel when that show got canceled after
she came out?
Speaker 2 (27:59):
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
(28:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
They were really not ready.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
To do a comedy about lesbians. I mean lesbians was
still if they appeared in something, they had to die
at the end.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
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
(29:15):
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
(29:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Mmmm, well, I I feel like we're not.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Finished. There is so much more that needs to happen.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
See, aren't we perfect. We can't do that. What we
still have to do is.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
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
(30:56):
to be accountable for what they produce and what they write.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
And I don't think that's true.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
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.
(31:23):
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?
Speaker 2 (31:36):
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,
(31:56):
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
(32:17):
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,
(32:39):
and I want all of my writing to be able
to do that.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
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
(33:04):
is actually a queer show on a large media network.
In America. There are LGBTQ people in writers' rooms.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
I had a young student say to me once, I
don't know about you baby boomers.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
You did a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
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
(33:43):
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
(34:05):
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
(34:25):
at night.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
How to Make the World Better.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
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
(34:55):
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
(35:17):
a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify,
and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.
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