A wrinkle in 'Time.' (magazine omits any mention of gays or lesbians in its 75th anniversary issue)(Column)

I SEE THAT GOOD OL' LARRY KRAMER FIRED OFF A LETTER TO Time magazine criticizing the fact that gays and lesbians were blotted out of its big self-congratulatory 75th-anniversary issue [March 91.] I quote: "It's a pretty good trick to publish a 200-page anniversary issue ... and to not once include any of the following words: gay, homosexual, lesbian, AIDS. Congratulations on yet again not representing the real world."

Larry made one error--the word gay was mentioned once. But he's right about Time's egregious oversight in ignoring one of the major civil rights movements and one of the deadliest epidemics in world history.

What could they have been thinking--or not thinking? Let's face it: From the perspective of three quarters of a century, Time Inc.'s record on covering gays has been less than honorable. For half that time we didn't. exist as far as Time and Life were concerned. (What else could one expect with founder Henry Luce, a Victorian-era type who never met a right-winger he didn't like, in charge?) The publications "discovered" gays in the mid 1960s, with a 14-page spread in Life's June 26, 1964, issue that oozed condescension and stereotyping. Time followed two years later with an essay that defined homosexuality as "a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality ... a pernicious sickness."

After the Stonewall riots, Time ran a cover story in October 1969 (my thanks to Edward Alwood's Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media for this history) that featured a drag ball whose "swirling belles" would find by morning that "dark stubble will sprout irrepressibly through their Pan-Cake Make-up." That prompted the newly formed Gay Liberation Front to picket the Time-Life Building. Luce died in 1967, and by 1975 the magazine was trying to catch up to the 20th century. It ran a cover featuring a glowing piece on Leonard Matlovich, the gay Air Force sergeant who was suing the military for expelling him.

Since then, gradually Time has come to give a reasonably good account of itself on gay issues. Its AIDS coverage, while shamefully late, as with all mainstream publications, has been respectable, including its selection of AIDS researcher David Ho as Man of the Year for 1996. I, for one, was impressed when it devoted a full page in its April 16, 1990, issue to the rising impact of gay and lesbian journalists in mainstream news. Following the merger with Warner Communications, the new business entity granted domestic-partner benefits to its gay and lesbian corporate employees. Bravo. And, of course, there is the Ellen "Yep, I'm Gay" DeGeneres cover last year that the magazine lists as one of its ten most-protested covers.

With Time definitely moving in the right direction, it was all the more distressing to see this blackout. The well-designed anniversary package will be a hardcover collector's item this fall, and hundreds of thousands of copies will be sold. It will also be a reference volume for libraries and schools. Shame on Time for allowing the gay experience once again to slip off the screen when it really counts.

How did it happen? An oversight, says an apologetic Barrett Seaman, one of two high-ranking editors who steered the project. At least one story and two photos on AIDS and the gay movement had made the cut, Seaman remembers, but were missing when the design editors' version came back. Somehow nobody noticed. "In the final juggling some things just didn't fit the jigsaw and for no other reason got left on the cutting-room floor," says Seaman. "We'd left out this whole area. It was pure oversight, and I regret that." Seaman promises the material will be restored in the upcoming book. We're grateful for that. Still, we can't help thinking about that defining moment when high-ranking editors passed the package on to production. Where, pray, was the gay or lesbian editor who most certainly would have spotted the omission? Time ought to be asking that question internally. At the end of the day its negligence in this episode goes to the larger question of sensitivity at the highest decision-making levels.