Blind Dateline: in two major stories, NBC news hides the fact that the main subjects were openly gay. Why cover up the truth?

In 2001, Tampa, Fla., police officer Lois Marrero was gunned down when she and fellow officers responded to a botched bank robbery. She became one of the first openly gay or lesbian police officers in the country to be killed in the line of duty.

Marrero and her partner, fellow officer Mickie Mashburn, had celebrated 10 years together just weeks before the shooting. But since their relationship was not legally recognized, Mashburn was not entitled to any survivor pension benefits, which were awarded to Marrero's parents instead after a protracted legal battle.

All of this would seem to make for a gripping tale. But when Dateline NBC recently aired its story on Marrero's murder and the controversial trial of accused bank robber Paula Gutierrez that followed, there was no mention that Marrero was a lesbian or that she had a partner. In fact, the family spokesperson was Marrero's sister Brenda.

Coincidentally, just two weeks earlier, Dateline aired a story about Katie Dallam, the first female professional boxer severely injured during a fight; some believe she was the inspiration for the Oscar-winning movie Million Dollar Baby. In that piece Dateline again didn't mention that the subject is a lesbian or that she had a partner. And again, the spokesperson for the family was not the partner but Dallam's sister Stephanie.

So is the whitewashing of these women's lesbian relationships a conscious decision on the part of reporters and editors? NBC says no.

"Dateline is not--in any way, shape, or form--consciously trying to avoid mentioning these women's relationships," a Dateline spokesperson tells The Advocate. "As with all Dateline/Court TV exclusives, the person being profiled in this story was the person on trial--Paula Gutierrez. Our editorial decisions are based on many factors, and we feel that we covered this story appropriately."

With the success of Million Dollar Baby, there has been renewed interest in Katie Dallam. And with their recent reports, The New York Times and Dateline were only the latest media outlets to focus attention on her story.

Those reports detail the fight that led to Dallam's brain damage, and they give generous attention to her sister Stephanie, who is her primary caretaker, and to Dallam's current passion as an artist. But there's one aspect of Dallam's life that has not been reported--her five-year relationship with Diane McAlpin and the life they shared, including raising McAlpin's two children. In fact, McAlpin tells a harrowing yet all too familiar story of how a family who previously supported their relationship turned on her--leaving her out of decisions about Dallam's care, removing Dallam from the house the couple shared, and ultimately forcing McAlpin to move out of her Columbia, Mo., home.

For the record, both Dateline and the Times say they didn't report on this part of Dallam's story because it never came up during interviews with Dallam and her sister.

Dallam says she has not previously mentioned the fact that she is a lesbian or talked about her relationship with McAlpin because the two women were in the middle of a contentious breakup at the time of her life-altering fight.

"I am proud of my identity as a traumatic brain injury survivor, as an artist, as a recovering alcoholic, as a gay woman, and as a former psychologist," Dallam tells The Advocate. "However, I view my story as being about my struggle to survive a life-threatening injury and finding a reason to continue to live after losing everything. The relationship in question was falling apart long before the boxing incident, and things ended for me when she suggested I move out a few days after I returned home from the hospital. My options were very limited, as I could not take care of myself. If my sister had not taken me in, I would have ended up in a nursing home. My family has always been supportive of my lifestyle and my wishes. I am eternally grateful to them for being there for me."

But McAlpin tells a very different tale about her life with Dallam and about the family who she feels turned against her.

"I worked in the hospital attached to the rehab center [where Katie was recuperating] and I would visit Katie quite often. One day I went there but Katie was not in her room. Someone who worked there told me that Katie was down the hall because the family was having a family conference," McAlpin remembers.

"I was very upset that no one had told me. When I got there, Katie's sisters and father were discussing treatment plans without me. They all knew about our relationship and were very accepting--her sister Stephanie, who is also gay, is even the one who introduced us. But when push came to shove, they did not consider me part of the family. I didn't count. Our relationship didn't count. And the most painful thing for me was that I had no legal recourse."

McAlpin also insists that a week after Dallam returned home with her, Dallam's family moved her out of the house without McAlpin's knowledge.

"I came home from work and Katie was gone," she recalls. "My son, who was a teenager at the time, said that Stephanie came and took Katie back to her house two hours away in Kansas. Later that evening I called Stephanie and I talked to Katie. She seemed very confused and unaware of what was going on. She told me, 'You said you'd be better off without me.' I never said that. And that was the last time I was allowed to talk to Katie."

Two weeks later, McAlpin says, Stephanie Dallam came to the house with some of her friends to move Katie Dallam out for good. "They were going through our things and deciding what was mine and what was Katie's as if I wasn't even there."

McAlpin has turned her experience into a crusade on behalf of legal protection for same-sex couples. "I'm still not over what happened," she says. "But I did learn something. I'm in a relationship again, and we have medical power of attorney and we have made our wishes very clear to our families. Of course, if Katie and I had been allowed to marry, we would have been married, and Katie and I would still be together."

McAlpin says that media outlets such as Dateline and The New York Times have had a hand in "taking away my place in Katie's history. I've been erased."

Given the odd timing of the other Dateline piece in which another partnered out lesbian was unceremoniously recloseted by NBC News, the question needs to be asked: Is this a trend in today's media?

Howard Kurtz, media commentator for The Washington Post and host of CNN's Reliable Sources, says reporters and editors are actually becoming much more comfortable reporting on gays.

"I think the media are far more open today than they were 15 years ago regarding reporting on gay families and all the issues they grapple with," he says. "We certainly saw that last year with all the marriages in San Francisco."

At the same time, however, Kurtz adds that some media outlets might still be reluctant to include mention of homosexuality or same-sex partners when the story is primarily about something else, such as the case in the two Dateline pieces.

"It also depends upon whether or not the subject wants to talk about her homosexuality or wants to have their domestic partner included," Kurtz notes. Of course, in the case of Katie Dallam, she wasn't always able to speak for herself after the accident. And Lois Marrero was silenced by the bullet that ended her life.

But is media coverage of gays really getting better? "Beyond dispute," says Kurtz. "There is far more everyday coverage of gay families, not just when there's a gay marriage controversy."

Kuhr is editor at large of the Boston-based GLBT newspaper In Newsweekly.