November 6, 2007.
I believe that C-SPAN has failed to give adequate coverage to homosexuality, considering that it has been a major topic for years and hit the top ten with the Senator Craig arrest and the fight over ENDA with Rep. Barney Frank.
Only on rare cases have you covered the journalists, for instance, who cover the homosexual community and homosexual issues. When have you had the excellent editors/publishers of gay/lesbian newspapers and magazines. I can give you several that you need to have on either separately or as a group to discuss what is important currently to their readers.
To give balance, what about someone from Los Angeles, say Karen Ocamb, who writes for two local publications. Then for Mid-America there is editor/publisher Tracy Baim of Chicago’s Windy City Times and other media things. And in Philadelphia we have not just a publisher of the newspaper, Philadelphia Gay News, but activist Mark Segal, who can hold his own in any discussion. Certainly there are journalists who are heard elsewhere, such as Deb Price, in her column in the Detroit News.
And why not a show on gay/lesbian archives/libraries, with people from Chicago’s Gerber Hart Library and the Homosexual Information Center’s C. Todd White not only got his Ph.D. covering the history of the early movement, he has a book coming out soon from he university of Illinois Press, titled, Pre-Gay L.A. and has worked with the library at California State University, Northridge, to preserve our historic material, partly in the Vern and Bonnie Bullough Human Sexuality Collection there.
Each year there are conventions of gay/lesbian professional organizations, and certainly there could be some coverage of the Lesbian/Gay Journalists Assn.
Please try to get informed on the serious aspects of homosexual issues so that your viewers will have adequate information to judge the “sexy” issues such as Senator Craig, etc.
