Follow-up to "Little Black Book" story- local non-starter, national issue

[Ian David]

Tracking the story
Little Black Book barely made a splash in Boston, but it's big news on right-wing Web sites

By Laura Kiritsy
Published: Thursday, May 26, 2005

It's no coincidence that the Article 8 Alliance, an anti-gay organization battling against marriage equality in Massachusetts, chose May 17 to begin flogging the appearance of the Little Black Book at the April 30 GLSEN conference at Brookline High School. Copies of the pamphlet, a guide targeting gay men over age 18 that contains explicit safer sex information, were made available at the conference, whose main participants were middle and high school students. What better way to counter the innocuous, and abundant, media images of happily married same-sex couples celebrating the one-year anniversary of Goodridge's implementation than by raising the ugly specter of gay adults recruiting children into a life of homosexual depravity?

It's a strategy rooted in the late-1970s heyday of former Florida Orange Juice spokeswoman and devout Southern Baptist Anita Bryant, who whipped up a wave of anti-gay hysteria by claiming that gay people needed to recruit children "to freshen their ranks" because they could not reproduce. Bryant's fear-mongering resulted in a successful referendum to overturn a Miami-Dade ordinance prohibiting anti-gay discrimination, as well as Florida's ban on adoptions by same-sex couples and a national crusade to squash the burgeoning gay rights movement. It took 25 years to make another nondiscrimination ordinance in Miami-Dade stick; the adoption ban, however, remains on the books.

But it's unlikely that Article 8 leader Brian Camenker, the Bay State's very own Anita Bryant, will succeed in rolling back marriage rights for same-sex couples in Massachusetts by perpetuating the myth that gay people are lecherous predators looking to recruit innocent children. Never mind that Camenker's alleged concern for the welfare of kids is undercut by the fact that he sat on allegedly "deadly health misinformation" for a whole two weeks before bringing the Little Black Book to the public's attention; the local press didn't bite on his purported exposé of "shocking information about how 'gay marriage' has harmed our state." The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald both gave the story short shrift. The Herald devoted just 321 words to the story on May 18, presenting Article 8's allegations that the booklet was distributed at the conference, along with a denial from GLSEN and AIDS Action Committee, which produced the brochure, that the material was handed out at the conference. A 155-word follow-up the next day simply reported that the Little Black Book was in fact made available - mistakenly - by an employee of the Fenway Community Health Center. The story, which included a public apology from Fenway health, did not even include comment from Camenker. The Globe made passing reference to the booklet and Camenker's press conference in a larger story about the anniversary of the implementation of Goodridge on May 18. The following day, it devoted 485 words primarily to Fenway's apology and GLSEN's explanation of how the pamphlet wound up at the conference without their knowledge. Ironically, a week later, there's even no trace of the story on the MassNews, a right-wing Web site that served as Camenker's biggest cheerleader when he went after GLSEN in 2000, after a member of his Parents Rights Coalition, another of his startups that oppose "the gay agenda" illegally taped a confidential workshop for teens that included frank sexual discussions - a story that created a local and national firestorm.

The only locals to tackle the downside of the pamphlet's appearance at the GLSEN conference were Herald columnists Beverly Beckham and Margery Eagan and Bay Windows, in an editorial published last week. Writing in a May 19 column, Eagan, however lightheartedly, rightly observed that the Little Black Book gave anti-gay crusaders "enough fresh ammunition to broadbrush all gays - on the very anniversary of their boring, middle-class, Talbots and Brooks Brothers weddings - as sex fiends in black leather and studs." Bay Windows called for the firing of the Fenway employee who brought the book to the conference. And Beckham excoriated AIDS Action for the booklet's very existence in an op-ed published May 20. "Gay bashers will use this nasty little publication, which is all over the Web," she predicted, "to thwart gay rights and to denounce all gays."

More:
http://www.baywindows.com/media/paper328/news/2005/05/26/News/Tracking.The.Story-954241.shtml&mkey=1588314



See prior thread:
GLSEN says distribution of explicit health book to youth was accidental
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=221x12028