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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE August 21, 1992

Editorial

Hiding in Plain sight

Jan LaRosa confessed to murdering her lover. Not her business partner, not her roommate. Her lover. As of today you only know that because a lesbian and gay newspaper told you. However, we aren't the only newspaper that knew this.

The Plain Dealer knew about Jan LaRosa and Tressa Tonni's relationship. They knew about the note which says that LaRosa's twisted and bizarre motivation for the murder came from two and a half years of harassment by Tonni's daughters and father. They chose not to print it. Why?

When we asked them why, they assured us there was no internal negative force at

called the note 'long and rambling' and said it was the product of an unstable mind."

No lesbians here. No harassing family. No lover--just a roommate.

If LaRosa and Tonni had been a heterosexual couple, LaRosa's motive for the murder would have not been kept quiet. We think the motive ended up on The

There are countless stories which are not

work. That is hard for us to believe. They about our community,

printed Tonni's daughter Loren's speculation about the motive ("My mother mentioned moving out because they argued a

lot. They just weren't getting along.

[LaRosa] just began going off on the family

and my mother fought back.") but they

won't print what LaRosa herself has said.

We think this is homophobia of the worst kind. Not only does homophobia give LaRosa a twisted motive to commit horrible acts, but homophobia keeps her screams for help silent.

Tim Heider, the PD reporter who did an interview about the LaRosa case with Bob Downing and Martha Pontoni, says he couldn't run the story because he thought they recanted. He interpreted a phone message about a detail as a recantation, without checking with the persons involved. Either he is a poor reporter or he is so nervous about this "sensitive" issue that he jumps when a pin is dropped.

There was no recanting. He had two strong witnesses here at the Chronicle who attested to the harassment of the two women while LaRosa was working here. He has sources at the Euclid police department who confirmed that the note pointed to the harassment as the motive, yet he chose to write:

"Detective Robert Pestak said a letter found after the killing mentioned recent problems between the two women. He

but which involve our people. They all get printed--but you'd never know it.

Desk at the PD. The desk where the "gay angle" in a story often ends up. The same desk where Aaron Kittle's real motive for suicide wound up last June. The same desk that hides the motive behind all of those "motiveless" three-on-one assaults near West 117th. All of those "victim knew his assailant" in-home murders a few years back.

There are countless stories which are not about our community, but which involve our people. They all get printed--but you'd never know it. The "gay angle" is either ignored--as in general stories about teen suicide--or it is deliberately omitted, such as it was here, in a crime story.

No matter how large or important to the story it is, if the story isn't specifically about gays, the "gay angle" always lands on The Desk. Whose desk? Publisher Alex Machaskee's desk? Editorial page director Brent Larkin's?

Guest Opinion

It is hard to comprehend that a newspa-

per of the PD's size feels it can insult the intelligence of at least ten percent of its readership. Do they think we won't notice? Do they think we'll be satisfied with the occasional positive opinion piece, and wire service articles about "homosexuals" in other cities?

For the Plain Dealer (and much of the rest of the mainstream media) we'll spell it out: There is no shame in being a lesbian or a gay man. It is not defamatory, or something to be kept out of a story it is part of. It is as important a part of our lives as your love lives and marriages are to you. There is nothing to protect us or the rest of the population from.

We're tired of being invisible. We're tired of having to "read between the lines" about our lives. When someone gets bashed because they're gay, say so. When homophobia drives a teen to suicide, tell your readers. Stop hiding us!

Violence can be avoided

One of the sad things about the LaRosa case is that is might have been prevented, if she or her lover had called for help. Getting out of an abusive situation is hard, as many battered women and men can attest. Recently we heard of a woman who did all the "right" things to get away from her abusive husband. The man hunted her down and shot her anyway. The cycle of abuse, whether between lovers or within families, needs outside help to be broken.

For lesbians and gay men that help is here at the Lesbian-Gay Community Service Center's Maryann Finegan Project. Last year they helped several men leave abusive relationships. They know how to work within the system to get victims the help they need.

As a community we have resources to help ourselves, even when society at large can't or won't help us. Now we just need people to learn about the services and have

gay people's

HRONICLE

Vol. 8, Issue 2

1992.

Founded by Charles Callender

1928-1986

Published by KWIR Publications

Publisher:

Martha J. Pontoni Business Manager

Patti Harris Managing Editor:

Kevin Beaney Production Manager: Brian De Witt Associate Editor:

Scott C. Hare Reporters and Writers:

Martha J. Pontoni, Dora Forbes, Marne Harris Kevin Beaney, Douglas Braun, Gary Hemphill Editorial Cartoonist:

E.J. Farbarik Artist:

Christine Hahn Sales Manager:

Patti Harris Editorial Board:

Martha J. Pontoni, Patti Harris, Kevin Beaney, Brian De Witt, Scott Hare

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faith that those services can help.

If you are being harassed by anyone because you are lesbian or gay, even by members of your own family, let the Center help you. Give them a call at 522-1999-and maybe avoid becoming a statistic.

If you are blessed enough to not live with daily physical, spiritual or emotional harassment, please help those who are. Tell people about the Maryann Finegan Project and then send the Center a check, specifically for the Project. Send a check in honor of Tressa Tonni, who died alone, without the help of her community; send it in honor of Jan LaRosa, who really believes she did what she had to do; send it honor of yourself, that you may never have to live through what those two women did.

Why Cleveland lesbians and gays are invisible in the PD

by Aubrey Wertheim

I don't buy the Plain Dealer. With the money I saved from cancelling my subscription, I can buy the New York Times every third day. In one daily Times, you get five times the amount of news, fifty times the amount of journalisitic integrity, and their queer coverage--local, national and global--is usually a daily, engaging, and top-notch phenomenon.

I still scan the PD daily to make sure it's still not doing its job, but I don't have to buy it to do that. You may have noticed: there's always a copy lying around. The eminent

disposability of the paper guarantees a

ready current copy at work, in restaurants, on public transport, etc.

It seems to me only fair play. The paper deems my issues and news hardly worth a nod, so why invest in what renders me invisible?

The Plain Dealer, to be fair, is pressed for space. Some items must be sacrified for the hard-hitting, hard-copy, vital headlines. Like that big pet pig that snarfed up troughs of print issue after issue. You'd think that was on a news par with the BosniaHercegovina crisis by the columns it got. But, of course, gays and lesbians in families, in neighborhoods, in communities all over northeastern Ohio just don't provoke the eyebrows and sound bites that

a sensational, homegrown pet porker does. Right.

It wasn't always thus.

The paper was making very chartable progress in the late '80s: editorials were positive, news stories were attempting to be inclusive--and an ongoing dialogue between the community and various departments often produced results.

Then, when Alex Machaskee took over as president and publisher, it soon became

"Even when we kill

ourselves, they won't listen to us.

clear that the dawning era of PD consciousness had come to an abrupt end.

Brent Larkin replaced Mary Anne Sharkey as the head of the editorial page, and, though surely a capable journalist, he's played the queer-content hatchet man like it was in the job description.

My two interactions with Larkin were similar enough to tip me off that severe right-face had been barked to his department. A 1991 Pride piece and, months later, an op-ed piece about Jeffery Dahmer met with very positive responses initially and

commitments to run them, but then word came back that there was trouble each time. The Pride piece was found "too upbeat.' The Dahmer piece was pulled because it might upset the families of the victims. (It identified most as gay.) This from a paper that fixated on the deaths and tortures of these men and boys for weeks on end. Other reasons for pulling it were pretty clear. A recent request by another community member to address lesbian-gay youth suicide in the aftermath of the Aaron Kittle death was met with extreme hostility by another editorial staffer. (Kittle killed himself on the grave of a schoolmate who died in a car crash a year earlier, leaving a rose and a note that said, "I love you, Kevin. I love life and everyone in it. But not as much as I miss you.") Other attempts to get a gay angle at least explored in this front page story were met with indifference, runarounds or spasms of supposed journalistic integrity ("We can't speculate.")

The handling of that story by all of the media was most articulately summed up by a local gay youth who said, "Even when we kill ourselves, they won't listen to us.' Since the beginning of the year, not counting stories reprinted from other papers or originated from calls or press releases, the Plain Dealer has come up with two pieces on their own: The folding and reopening of the Chronicle. Occasionally, á lesbian-gay movie, book or cultural prod-

uct will be covered, but queer culture as a national or international expression is always an outside (reprint) job.

Hundreds of compelling and newsworthy lesbian-gay stories can be gleaned from this town every year. Three same-sex couples went to an inner-city high school prom this year. Where was that story? All the Metroparks rangers went through les-

Continued on Page 7

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