Gays, Lesbians Working in Media Focus of Study : Press: The survey of 205 journalists is called a landmark event, but secrecy on sexual orientation is seen as hampering their cause.

WASHINGTON —  The American Society of Newspaper Editors today will publish a study that many consider a landmark event for the gay community, the first formal recognition of gays and lesbians working in the American media.

Based on a voluntary survey of 205 gay and lesbian journalists nationwide, the study suggests that the press in general does a poor job of covering gay issues, and that a major reason is that most gay and lesbian journalists are unwilling to be open about their sexual orientation.

This, the survey indicates, has made them largely useless as resources who could sensitize their editors to the concerns of the gay community.

“My existence is being acknowledged today for the first time by my profession,” said one gay journalist, who asked to remain nameless in this article but who is becoming open about his homosexuality at his newspaper for the first time in connection with trying to promote the report.

“Gay men and women living typical lives are virtually invisible” in their communities and in their newsrooms, said Ron Boyd, a lifestyle reporter at the Dallas Times Herald.

America’s newspapers must share some of the blame for the invisibility of the gay community, wrote Michael O’Loughlin, a lifestyle writer with the San Francisco Examiner. But “much of the problem is rooted in the gay community’s own fears and complacency. . . . They’re not helping the cause by not speaking up when homophobic stories are published, not suggesting articles that cover the gay community, not educating gay co-workers.”

Wrote Charles Stalnaker, features copy editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “My ‘out’ presence makes others a bit more careful about gay issues, and may help get others out of the closet.”

More than half of the 205 respondents, 59%, describe themselves as open with their colleagues about their sexuality.

But since the survey was voluntary, and those most likely to fill it out were those who were open about their sexual orientation, survey organizers said they believe the majority of gay and lesbian journalists remain covert.

“There are 1,500 people working in this place, so I would guess that 150 are gay, if not more,” says Jim Dickey, an openly gay reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News. “But I am the only one who is out of the closet.”

The report, which is accompanied by a series of essays about gay journalists, offers no concrete answers about why gays remain secretive, but it does offer possibilities.

One, according to many who answered the survey, is that gays’ careers are harmed by their becoming public about their homosexuality. For instance, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts, who wrote one essay in the study, quoted a gay reporter on a Southern newspaper as saying that a series of promotions stopped after he came out of the closet.

Another possibility is that becoming public about being gay is a political act, which violates the journalistic canon of neutrality and marks the journalist as no longer objective.

Other minorities have faced a similar dilemma. Should reporters who are black specialize in covering black issues, for example, and become labeled as black reporters in all senses of the word?

If, on the other hand, minorities fail to bring their special knowledge of their community to bear on coverage, the media suffer.

When minorities do exercise their knowledge on coverage, the effect can be dramatic. The Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize after Latino reporters suggested and produced a series on the Latino culture in Southern California.

The invisible nature of gays, in newsrooms and elsewhere apparently has slowed this process of cultural integration.

The report comes about 20 years after the famous Stonewall incident at which gays in New York fought with police trying to raid a gay bar. And the report suggests that AIDS to a degree legitimized the gay community in the rest of the culture, particularly after the death of actor Rock Hudson, by leading more gays to become open and forcing the rest of the society to face the existence of the gay community.