Out journalists and writers Deb Price and Joyce Murdoch will deliver the keynote address at Lambda Legal Defense's Bon Foster Memorial Civil Rights Address & Dinner in Chicago Oct. 25 ( 312-663-4413 ) .
Price, a Washington bureau columnist for the Detroit News, and Murdoch, a magazine editor, met when they were both editors at the Washington Post and have been in a relationship for 17 years. They have collaborated on two acclaimed books, And Say Hi to Joyce: America's First Gay Column Comes Out and Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court.
Windy City Times will begin carrying Deb Price's syndicated column this month.
Gregg Shapiro: There are many LGBT writers working in mainstream journalism, but just a few LGBT voices. What does it mean to you to be the writer providing that perspective, that voice?
Deb Price: It's an enormous honor and a huge challenge. I take this as a wonderful responsibility. I wish there were more gay and lesbian voices in the mainstream media. The fact that there aren't, I think, puts an even bigger burden on you, in terms of what you are trying to accomplish and how you try to go about making sure that you are representing as many voices and as many issues as you possibly can.
GS: Do you think that if there were more queer journalists writing about LGBT issues in newspapers that there would no longer be a need for a gay press?
DP: Oh no, not at all. I think that there will always be a need for the gay press. That's true of any specialty. It's like scuba diving. The mainstream press might do one story on scuba diving a year. Somebody's killed or something like that. There's definitely ( still ) a need for Scuba Magazine. It's the same thing with any kind of specialty news. There will always be a need for gay media. It can do a certain kind of work that simply can't be done in the mainstream media for a variety of reasons.
GS: Please say something about the genesis of the book Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court.
Joyce Murdoch: Deb and I have been Washington journalists for a very long time and we're both interested in the courts and, of course, in the progress of the gay-rights movement. But we knew very little about what happened with the gay-rights movement and the Supreme Court. Because, in fact, it hadn't been written about. Books about the Supreme Court basically ignore gay cases, even the most significant ones. Books about the gay-rights movement basically ignore the Court ( laughs ) . Because of Deb's column, we were very closely following the progress of the movement. We saw in 1995, the Court handed down a decision, that even though it was widely interpreted as an anti-gay decision—it was in the case involving whether gay people could march as a group, carrying a banner, in the Boston St. Patrick's Day Parade. The court said that no, the group could not. But what we saw in reading the decision was that the language was remarkably ( pauses ) modern ( laughs ) , up-to-date, bordering on gay-friendly. They're using words like "gay," "identity," "sexual orientation." We could tell that the language was a real break from the past. Then the Court went ahead and accepted the Colorado Amendment 2 case. Those two things—seeing the new language and that they were going to accept this really important case—made us feel like we wanted to go back and understand how the Court had gotten to that place. What the Court's history, in dealing with gay people, was.
GS: As a member of the LGBT community, what kind of effect did writing about legal matters, in regards to the community, have on each of you?
JM: It was really nice to come in close contact with many of the people who are the unsung heroes of our movement. Both rank and file gay people and also some of the justices themselves. The ones who tried to be as inclusive as they knew how to be and tried to treat us fairly. Lots of times there were big limits to their understanding, but there were limits to the understandings of gay people themselves during that time.
DP: What it did in terms of effecting me personally was reinforce in my mind that we have an incredible community of heroes. In this particular work, we had to interview so many people—a 50-year history. Unfortunately, most of us don't know our history, and we haven't celebrated people who fought for the rights that we take for granted today—or just the ability to be out. We often don't know who those heroes were. Many of these people were very far ahead of and incredibly brave for their times. People lost enormous things. That's one of the things that I think the book does best is explain and show how many brave people lost their kids, not just their jobs, but entire careers and professions, and lost the love of their family. But they did it because they had personal integrity and they couldn't have lived with themselves otherwise. That's one phrase that we heard over and over in the process of doing interviews for the book. The phrase was, "I just couldn't live with myself if I hadn't fought." Frank Kameny, one of the most important civil-rights leaders in our movement, talked about it in terms of ( being ) a "burning sense of injustice." That phrase, "burning sense of injustice," defines, better than anything, what motivated people to fight back against incredible odds. Most people lost. Most people's cases were never heard. Just because they were never heard doesn't change the fact that the Supreme Court didn't do something. Most of those people had lost at a lower level, so they had burnt up incredible numbers of career years and had spent phenomenal amounts of money. We were interviewing people who, 20 and 30 years after their case had gone up to the Supreme Court were still paying off legal fees. Fifty dollars a month here and there. Courting Justice is a story of an incredible group of people and we have an incredible community. I hope that at some point one of our many talented documentary filmmakers will see that this book would make a terrific documentary. I wish somebody would do it soon, because, unfortunately, many of the people just in the past few years in doing the book, have died. We would track down somebody who was 80 years old and he would have just died. There is a whole generation of people in their late 70s and early 80s that are dying out. Just like Courting Justice couldn't be written today because a lot of those people don't exist, the possibility of doing the same kind of documentary won't exist in five years. Many of the people will be around, but a lot of the most interesting people who have an incredible story won't.
GS: The book is a collaborative effort. How would you describe your collaboration process?
JM: ( laughs ) Deb and I have always worked together, in one way or another, ever since we first met. We enjoy working together. Deb tried to track down the gay people and I tried to figure out what had gone on inside the Court itself. I dealt with the documents. I tried to track down former clerk, justices, family members, the justices' papers. She tried to find these people who had filed court cases 30, 40 and 50 years ago. Occasionally, we would swap sides. If one of us ran into a brick wall, the other one might try to knock it down. In terms of the writing, I did most of the writing because it was my full-time job at the time, and she was still doing her full-time job.
GS: You are in a 17-year relationship, and I wanted to know if have had any sort of ceremony honoring your commitment ?
JM: Yes. We have a Vermont Civil Union, which we got the second day they were legal in Vermont, in July of 2000. We live in Takoma Park, Maryland, and before that ( Vermont ) we had been the first recognized domestic partners in Takoma Park, which ( laughs ) meant something to us but didn't mean anything in terms of law.
GS: You will be the keynote speakers at the Bon Foster Address & Dinner.
JM: We are always delighted to be able to share what we were able to find. We think that the Supreme Court's history in dealing with gay people in incredibly important. Far more important than most gay people realize. We think it's tremendously important for gay people and the friends of gay people to understand this history, so that we can go from here. People need to understand the importance of the Supreme Court in gay lives and how the Supreme Court has been a huge drag on our movement's progress.
DP: It's always an honor to publicly speak. You have to figure out what your message is and what you want to accomplish. I think that Joyce and I have a very strong message, which is to empower and uplift other gay people. To give people a sense of their history and the significance and importance of their civil-rights movement. We're at an incredible time in our history. And an organization like Lambda is doing incredibly important legal work.
GS: Do you have advice for budding journalists?
JM: Find a place to work where you can be out. There are more of those places than you think there might be. If you don't feel like you can be out where you, whether it's a city or organization—a ) try to change it or b ) leave. There's no excuse, these days, for people to be lending their talents to places where they don't feel free to be themselves.
DP: The advice I would give to any person interested in journalism, and particularly a young person, because they sometimes have options that those of us, once we get a mortgage and other things they don't have, is to move around a lot in jobs. Don't go to a newspaper and stay. It's very easy to do; try different things, wear different hats. Try to be an editor, try to be a reporter or a columnist. Layout the pages. It's a really fun profession, but very often ( laughs ) you get into one part of it and you like it and then you don't get the exposure. ... It's a difficult, demanding, stressful profession, but it's enormously rewarding because you're part of the news.
GS: Have you started your next book project?
DP: We've kind of been dabbling in doing some fiction, but I'm not quite sure how it's going to work. It's really been fun to see you could possibly write a novel as a couple. There actually are novelists who are couples, both gay and straight. I don't know that we'll end up deciding to be fiction writers. Probably as journalists we'll always be more inclined to write non-fiction. But it's been really exciting to explore one another doing something that creative and different.
