HUFFINGTON
12.09.12
OUT AT THE TIMES
The Lavender Enlightenment’s effect on
Rosenthal, who wrote
gay-positive columns
last year, is probably
the most interesting
of all. “All this time
people have assumed I
had certain attitudes,
but they weren’t really
true,” he claims. “They
say that I’m suddenly
interested in gays and
AIDS and that I’m now
writing about these issues. But I’m interested
in it because I’ve always
had an interest in it; I
just never had occasion
to write about it.”
“It’s like the guy who
yells ‘nigger, nigger,
nigger!’ and then goes
into work one day and
sees that everyone is
black,” says one staffer.
“What happened was
that Abe realized that
some of his own clerks
and some of the people
he’s worked with for
years are gay because
they are suddenly more
open. These were like
his spiritual sons. And
it just blew him away.”
Meislin, who was
pulled back from Mexico City’s foreign desk
by Rosenthal, is now
back on track and content in his position as
graphics editor at The
Times. “You can’t live
in the past when the
present is much improved,” he says.
But others don’t forget so easily. Shortly
after Schmalz had his
seizure in the newsroom and subsequently
revealed that he had
AIDS, Rosenthal began
asking about him. “He
told somebody that he
wanted to hear from
me, that he wanted me
to call him.” Schmalz
says. “I never called.
It was just too late.
You can’t wait until
somebody’s dying
and then decide to
be there. Where was
he all those years?”
ON A FRIDAY EVENING
TWO WEEKS BEFORE
CHRISTMAS 1991, several hundred les-
bians and gay men were crammed in an upper East
Side townhouse for a joint Christmas party of the
Publishing Triangle, an organization of gays and
lesbians in the book publishing field, and the newly formed New York chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. Everyone was
there — a who’s who of
queer writers, editors,
photographers, reporters, publicists and
literary agents. They
came from Time and
Newsweek, Reuters and
the Associated Press,
Random House and
Simon and Schuster,
People and Entertainment Weekly, New York
Newsday and the New