Audio Interview, Susan Jordan, October 25, 2012

EVELYN BAILEY: Today is October 24?

SUSAN JORDAN: I think it's the 25th but I'm not sure.

Tuesday was the 23rd so today is the 25th.

EVELYN BAILEY: And I'm here with Susan Jordan

going back in time.

Not to the very beginning of time but--

SUSAN JORDAN: It just feels that way.

EVELYN BAILEY: But back in time.

And so you began on the EC in 1979?

SUSAN JORDAN: No, I was hired in June 1989,

twenty-three years ago.

EVELYN BAILEY: Where were we then?

SUSAN JORDAN: Well, we were in the Monroe Avenue Co-op,

up in the sunken room.

And then the little EC office was off the sunken room.

EVELYN BAILEY: And when you began,

what was the production like?

I mean--

SUSAN JORDAN: Well, in those days, we used boards.

We had things printed out.

And we pasted everything in with paste.

So when we did lay out, we had the boards

and we would have printouts of the articles.

Then we would paste them onto the boards

and send that off to the printer.

EVELYN BAILEY: Do you remember who the printer was?

SUSAN JORDAN: No, we had several different printers

over the years.

EVELYN BAILEY: Yeah.

SUSAN JORDAN: Off and on, we had AdNet but it's a long story.

And at one point, they didn't want

to print the gay paper anymore.

We had another printer.

And then we went back to them years later.

And so forth and so on.

And then we had several more printers years after that.

But anyway, yeah it was 1989.

EVELYN BAILEY: And you had a light table?

SUSAN JORDAN: Yeah.

We had light tables.

So we had X-ACTO knives.

And we had benzene because of course,

if you wanted to salvage anything from last month's

issue like headings or whatever, you'd have

to scrape away the dead wax.

And you have to squirt benzene on it, which

of course was carcinogenic.

And you would hack away with your X-ACTO knife.

So around 1990, I thought it might be quite a good idea

to do this newfangled thing called desktop publishing.

And then much to my horror, I realized

that I could make things that are

just as homemade and sloppy with desktop publishing

as with wax and an X-ACTO knife.

So fortunately, I had some good volunteers.

Joan Baccino and Helen Mahaffey were the two people

that really knew how to do desktop publishing

and got me started doing that.

So that's been what we've been doing ever since.

No more wax.

No more X-ACTO knives.

EVELYN BAILEY: So with that, the files were digitized?

SUSAN JORDAN: Well, they became an electronic file basically

that you would put your-- when I started,

I had to do all the layout although I'm not

a graphic designer, but that was part of the job.

So I did lay out for the paper using an old program called

PageMaker.

And other people used Quark and so on.

Then gradually back in 2003 or so, we finally

hired a professional graphic designer

to do our layout, Don Alpert And he

started using InDesign, which is still

the software that we use today.

And our graphic designer is Jim Emerson who's really

one of the top professionals.

We're very fortunate that he's basically

volunteering to work with us.

EVELYN BAILEY: Over the course of the first ten years,

from 1989 to 1999, we went from the Co-op to Atlantic Avenue.

SUSAN JORDAN: Right.

Elton and Atlantic.

EVELYN BAILEY: And so then, you had your own office

and you didn't have the light table--

SUSAN JORDAN: I had, we still had the light table around

that we didn't use it that much.

And basically at first, I had two rooms.

I had a two room office with like four windows, four or five

windows or something.

And then gradually my second office,

which was our production room, got taken over

as the office for our new executive director.

So then I had a one room office.

Then we move over here to the auditorium theater,

I now have a cubicle.

So I'm sort of downwardly mobile, I guess.

EVELYN BAILEY: I know it's not--

you have covered a lot of news.

I mean, I can't even imagine thinking

about ten years of news but--

SUSAN JORDAN: Fortunately I've forgotten a lot of it.

EVELYN BAILEY: In that time, is there one or two news stories

about the gay community that really have grabbed your heart

and soul and catapulted you into an editorial stance

of whatever?

SUSAN JORDAN: Well, there have been a lot.

I mean every story does that in a sense.

It's a story about a kid who's being harassed at school.

The story about this, for instance,

Lance Neve who was gay bashed in a bar in Spencerport.

Every story can catapult you into a state

of rage or political commitment or whatever it is.

I think maybe the biggest stories we've covered,

one of the biggest stories, has been the whole trek

toward marriage equality.

Another has been the whole trek to get

SONDA of course the basic rights at all,

followed by marriage equality.

Another big issue has been bullying

and how we've developed our youth groups so that

hopefully we have prevented some kids from committing suicide.

I'd say that's pretty major.

But I wouldn't say there was one particular story that

made me politically committed because I was politically

committed long before I became editor of The Empty Closet.

But I have to say one of the most challenging things

was the first story I ever covered,

the first month I was hired.

And it was like, OK, my first issue is the August issue.

Nothing much happens in the summer.

I can kind of learn the ropes and just put out a basic thing.

And all of a sudden, a big news story

broke about Jackie Nudd and AIDS Rochester.

And without going into all that, all I can say,

it was a very heavy intense story.

I didn't know her.

I didn't know anyone involved.

And this was what I had to deal with my first day on the job.

At that point, I realized this wasn't going to be easy.

(laughter)

EVELYN BAILEY: Before you came to The Empty Closet,

you were involved with the New Women's Times.

SUSAN JORDAN: Yeah, I worked for the Feminist Review, which

was a review supplement to the New Women's Times which

is a women's newspaper published by grassroots women

here in Rochester from around, I guess, '76 or '77

till the whole thing collapsed around 1984.

And I also have done other newspaper work during my life,

but that was--

EVELYN BAILEY: And when you were involved at the New Women's

Times, Maxine Sobel

SUSAN JORDAN: Yeah, it was founded by Maxine

and also Martha Brown and Karen Hagberg.

And I forget who else might have been in right at the beginning.

But I know Maxine was one of the main people

that actually started it, if not the main person.

EVELYN BAILEY: Was Rosemary Cahill an editor of the--

SUSAN JORDAN: I don't think she was.

I don't remember her being around the new women's times

that much when I was, but she was

an editor of The Empty Closet.

EVELYN BAILEY: Who were the photographers that

took most of the pictures in the early days?

Was that Ellen?

SUSAN JORDAN: Oh Ellen Nahafi took a lot of excellent photos.

And there were a lot of people, most of whom

I'd forgotten their names long ago, you know.

But I've also had a lot of help with lay out which

to me is equally important.

Ellen Nahafi and Joan Baccino That later in the '90s,

we had this wonderful guy who was a grad student, I believe,

or at least a student at RIT in newspaper production, Victor

Cardoso who redesigned the paper in a professional manner.

And he could not be an intern and get college credit for this

because his department head was anti-gay.

At least that's the impression I got then.

So but he did all this because he just-- he

wanted to contribute to the gay community.

He loved redesigning newspapers.

After that I had major help from Brad [Keyes?] who then moved

to Arizona.

But as far as photographers, the one

who really stands out over the years

is Doug Mesler He was a wonderful photographer

and around the late '90s.

I guess, he moved to New York City.

He's now got an international career and so on.

So it was good for him to move and to really

get a big time career.

He should not have stayed in little Rochester.

But it was a big loss to the paper.

But you know, there are a lot of excellent photographers around.

And we get them to volunteer for us.

But we've never had a paid staff, so it's not

like I can say, oh you didn't do what

you said you were going to do.

Well, you're fired.

No more paycheck.

It was like, oh, OK.

Don't call that volunteer again but, you know.

So it's a whole different world from a world where

you have a paid staff of reporters, photographers,

editorial assistants, researchers, and so on.

We've never had any of that of course.

EVELYN BAILEY: Right.

So, what's the major challenge in working with volunteers

versus a paid staff in getting the newspaper out every month?

SUSAN JORDAN: Well, sometimes volunteers are wonderful.

They meet the deadlines.

They do beautiful work.

They give their time and energy for free.

And then other times volunteers don't work out.

I had some photographers who would say, yes,

I'll do such and such an event.

And then instead of calling me and saying, well,

it turns out I can't do it, they just wouldn't do it.

And then I would say, where are the photos?

Well, we couldn't do it.

We lost your phone number.

Why didn't you call?

Well, we lost your phone number.

Well, the Gay Alliance is in the phone book.

You know, so, but you can't really do anything

because you can't fire them.

You can't deprive them of their paycheck.

You know, and if you say anything

then you're the bad guy.

And you get the attitude from them, you know.

So it's difficult working with volunteers

but I have to say, we've been blessed

by so many wonderful volunteers, who have really

done great work for us and who have been responsible

and met their deadlines and you know,

even though they didn't get a cent for it.

But I do console myself that at least they got by-lines

and they got a photo credit or something for their resume.

Not that I guess you could show a gay credit on your resume

to every company that you apply to or whatever.

But hopefully it's been useful.

And we've given a lot of young writers

their first byline and so on.

So how great that was for them, I don't know.

But at least there was something in it for them.

EVELYN BAILEY: Have you-- has news

in The Empty Closet been picked up by a national news media?

SUSAN JORDAN: You mean articles that people--

EVELYN BAILEY: Articles or--

SUSAN JORDAN: Well sometimes.

And sometimes we get requests to reprint things.

But then I just say whether it's a photo or a column

or whatever, you need to contact the reporter

or the photographer because upon publication, all rights revert

to them.

And I don't know if the board is aware of this,

but we don't own the things that are published in the paper

once it's published.

I guess I own it between the time they turn it

and the time the paper comes back from the printer

but then as I've understood it all these years,

rights revert to them.

And I say, look here's the person's contact info.

Ask them.

But as far as getting stories picked up,

sometimes that happens.

You know it's happened occasionally over the years.

And part of the reason that I'm doing tweets now--

I'm putting stuff on Twitter--

is that I was hoping that the local media, which

I am following, would start getting some gay or at least

local gay information from the paper

and from the tweets and the web site and the Facebook page

that we have.

And that's not necessarily true.

I think City, somebody at City might be doing it.

There's a couple sort of, but the main-- the D&C

and the main news stations, as far as I know,

have no interest at all in monitoring our gay news.

And if there is a story that comes up, then

they will call the executive director

or whoever happens to be our spokesperson at the time,

will interview that person.

But they are not following our tweets,

not paying any attention to what we have to say.

EVELYN BAILEY: Is that pretty much been the case forever?

SUSAN JORDAN: Well, we've only been tweeting for a few months.

EVELYN BAILEY: Yes but I mean in terms of--

SUSAN JORDAN: I don't know.

I think-- I've talked to a few D&C reporters.

And they say, oh I read the paper.

And you're doing what we should be doing,

because probably these reporters are gay and closeted

or something.

But no, it's been minimal I think.

But I don't really know.

I mean, maybe there's editors are

on the TV stations or the D&C that pick it up and look at it.

If so, I don't know because they don't contact me.

I am not the spokesperson for the agency.

But one time something did happen where I deliberately

intervened.

There was one year where we were going

to have the day of silence, you know the youth protest

essentially, Youth Day of Action.

And the D&C ran an article like the week

before saying something with the headline

like, parents outraged over gay event.

And you read the article and you find out

that one school, a man and a wife, who are-- the man

is a Greek Orthodox priest or I didn't

know they could get married, but somehow he

was some Greek Orthodox clergy person.

He and his wife objected.

But from the headline in the D&C was like,

all the parents of the school are up in arms.

So I called the editor.

And I said politely and calmly, you know this is misleading.

You read the article, you find out

it was one couple that objected.

And he was like a Greek Orthodox functionary of some kind.

And yet your headline gives the impression

that all the parents are so angry that these queers are

gonna corrupt their children or something.

So he apologized, what could he say.

And he sent a reporter and a photographer

to the day of silence.

And that was the only time the D&C has ever

covered the day of silence.

You know, there were photos of kids with the bandages

over their mouths.

There were interviews with them.

It was a serious full length article,

which would never have run if I hadn't called the editor

and objected to that initial misleading coverage.

And it never has happened since.

And in this past year, there was no coverage of the Pride Parade

in the Democrat and Chronicle.

They did a little perfunctory article about the picnic.

Did not mention the pride parade nor have a photograph of it.

Here we have like, you know, 10,000 gays

and their supporters marching through town.

The D&C did not cover it at all.

So I'm thinking our local media is seriously

lacking in competence.

EVELYN BAILEY: So you would put the lack of coverage

down to incompetence versus?

SUSAN JORDAN: It could be incompetence.

It could be homophobia.

It could be a combination of the two.

It could simply be just disinterest.

But it's interesting, the D&C in 2009

had an editorial that came out against gay marriage.

And as I understand it, from what I've heard,

opinion was divided within the local editors.

You know, the local editor, whoever that was at the time,

wanted to endorse gay marriage.

But because there was this controversy about it,

they asked the national publisher apparently.

I don't really know for sure.

But he said, no, of course you're not

going to endorse gay marriage.

So they came out against gay marriage in 2009.

So who knows what motivates editors,

what motivates publishers, what motivates reporters.

You know, I suspect homophobia is a big ingredient,

either whether it's active right wing evangelical homophobia,

or whether it's just passive aggressive, I don't know

and I don't care homophobia.

Your guess is as good as mine.

EVELYN BAILEY: The news channels?

thirteen, ten?

SUSAN JORDAN: Well ten and thirteen

have seemed to be a co-operative sometimes.

They do cover things Norma Holland was helpful.

You know, she apparently she had some gays on her morning show

and she got death threats.

And she was a celebrity spokesperson for Dine

Out one year.

Well this past year, and whether this

is something that will ever make it into the videotape or not

I don't know, but Scott Hetsko, the weather man

from another station, I guess, was

going to be our celebrity spokesperson.

And in fact, we even had a million photos of him

at Winfield Grill and everything else.

And then his bosses apparently talked

to Norma Holland's bosses.

Oh, she got death threats for being pro-gay.

And they forbade Scott Hetsko to have anything to do with us.

That's why Sam [Biggo?] was our only celebrity spokesperson

this year.

So, I don't know what goes on and who the decision makers are

or why they make their decisions in the local media.

EVELYN BAILEY: YNN?

Is that?--

SUSAN JORDAN: I don't know.

I think they seem reasonably friendly.

It's like, are you talking about a reporter?

Are you're talking about an editor?

Are you talking about a publisher?

There's many different people.

In the D&C they have a high turnover.

Local reporters are here for a couple of years

and they go off to the Nebraska or something.

New people come in who don't know anything

about the community.

So again, I think it's like you know the Gannett franchise does

very poor journalism.

Usually, not always.

Sometimes they come out with brilliant stuff.

But usually it looks pretty shoddy

and not really interested in the local communities.

EVELYN BAILEY: I do know like August 2

when the Smithsonian came to that, YNN was there.

SUSAN JORDAN: I'm not saying they

don't cover important stories.

And I think they covered that because of the name

Smithsonian, not because of the name Gay Alliance,

let's face it.

EVELYN BAILEY: Right.

But the 40th anniversary of The Empty Closet it

was covered by YNN and Channel 8.

SUSAN JORDAN: Oh I didn't really see anything on TV.

I know I did an interview and it was on their website.

It wasn't on the TV show.

EVELYN BAILEY: OK.

SUSAN JORDAN: And I don't know.

It doesn't matter to me.

I wouldn't say that--

I wouldn't say that they've censored all coverage of gays

or anything like that.

But it just leaves a lot to be desired.

EVELYN BAILEY: The interest isn't there?

SUSAN JORDAN: Yeah or they feel like well, we

don't want to give aid and comfort to these, you know,

radical militant political people

or whatever, however they see us.

EVELYN BAILEY: Do you consider yourself a radical militant?

SUSAN JORDAN: I sure do.

I consider myself a socialist feminist.

And I wish Obama were a socialist.

I'd be a lot happier voting for him,

instead of feeling I'm voting for the lesser of two evils

once again.

But that's just me.

That's not the Gay Alliance.

That's not the Gay Alliance board.

That's not even the other staff.

EVELYN BAILEY: But you, Susan Jordan,

have a history in this community of radicalism.

SUSAN JORDAN: I guess I'm the bad girl.

EVELYN BAILEY: And have stood for many, many, many years

with those who move the agenda and are out front, primarily

I think because of your reporting and your recording

of those events and presenting them in The Empty Closet

or in other forms.

SUSAN JORDAN: Yeah, well, what I've tried to do

is keep a space between news reporting and op-ed commentary.

And it's not always easy to do.

For one thing, most media, print media especially,

have always said, we're objective.

That's the hallmark of good journalism.

And the whole thing about the liberal media is such a myth.

I mean, you might have the occasional liberal editor

or reporter or publisher, but the mainstream media

is not there to be political.

The mainstream media is there to make money.

Period.

End of story.

So this whole liberal media myth is

one of the many lies from the radical right.

And they really are subjective media.

Fox News, fair and balanced if you're

to the right of that of Hitler maybe.

But you know, it's the mouth piece for conservatism

and for the Republican Party.

Well, The Empty Closet is also the mouthpiece

for those who say, gay is OK.

And gay people should have equal rights.

So we have never pretended to be objective mainstream media.

My thing is, I don't think most of the mainstream media

is objective either, because they'll go

where the publisher says to go.

Or this is going to make this more money.

Or our publisher is going to fire us

if we don't endorse the conservative or whatever.

They're not really all that objective either, especially

nowadays.

The standards have really fallen.

But The Empty Closet has always been out there

in defense of gay rights.

So we've never been a supposedly objective journalistic project.

But on the other hand, I do try to keep news stories, news

stories and op-ed, op-ed.

And that doesn't always work out.

I could definitely be accused of having crossed the borderline.

But again, we're not here to give you the objective view.

And if the right wing comes out and says,

all gay men are child molesters, we

don't report that as a serious story.

You know, we say anti-gay forces have said this.

And that makes us nonobjective.

That makes us subjective.

But you know, that's what we're here for.

We're not here to supposedly, you know, give all sides.

But it's interesting that the media,

this so-called objective mainstream media

doesn't really do that anyway.

For instance, if there is an African-American event in town,

they don't go out and get the KKK side of the story anymore.

And to some extent, they're still

doing that for gay people.

That if there's a pride event, up until the last few years,

well, we have to get the ultra right-wing evangelical

condemnation of this as part of the story.

They aren't doing that quite so much anymore, which I guess,

is that progress?

I don't know.

EVELYN BAILEY: I'm not sure--

at all.

SUSAN JORDAN: I think it is.

EVELYN BAILEY: Well it seems to me

that the opposition is one of the things that helps us

as a community become cohesive and become

unified in our opposition to that negative barrage.

SUSAN JORDAN: Right, well see, the gay community

is so diverse that it takes this kind of oppression

to really make people like a black kid

from the inner city and a rich white guy

from Pittsford to realize they have something in common.

They don't have equal civil rights.

But by the same token, you know, oppression is not always good

for the oppressed.

Oppression is not good for the character.

People who grow up in poverty and desperation and abuse

are going to become criminals.

Others are going to overcome that

and will not become criminals, but I'm just

saying oppression is not good for the character.

And oddly enough, over the years the most serious, largest

threats to the survival of the Gay Alliance

have always come from other gay people,

not from the people that send us occasional death threat once

every ten years or something.

It's gay people, personality conflicts, all the rest of it,

that have been the threats to the Gay Alliance's survival.

And that's because partly at least, in some cases,

internalized homophobia.

You know like Groucho Marx used to say,

"I would never join any club that

would have me as a member."

Well you know, if you hate yourself enough,

any organization that represents you has got to be bad

and you've got to find out it's false.

And say see, that gay organization

that claims to represent me is actually full of it.

And that's internalized self-hate, horizontal

hostility.

And it's very prevalent unfortunately.

EVELYN BAILEY: Have you, as editor of The Empty Closet

ever received any death threats?

SUSAN JORDAN: Well, nobody has ever personally said

they were going to kill me.

We have received death threats.

I remember-- I don't think we had any since we've been here,

but I remember back at Elton's street,

we would get a death threat or somebody was--

came by and there was all this red paint

all over the sidewalk.

And apparently some anti-gay freaks

had come by and thrown red paint at the building.

And they must have thrown it from their car,

as you remember, it was about five feet away

from the wall of the building.

And their aim was so poor that it all fell on the sidewalk

instead of hitting the building, you know.

And there was a troubled kid in that neighborhood that threw

a rock through the window.

You know, I've never felt seriously in danger,

but it's also true if Norma Holland

is getting death threats, may be the only reason we've avoided

that is because we're not on TV every day.

We're not visible.

So that the haters would really have

to go to a certain amount of trouble.

But you know, there's little stuff that's

like, a lot of places where we leave the paper every month,

coffee shops, or whatever, as opposed to Outlandish or Equal

Grounds, just general places.

You go and all The Empty Closets are

hidden under other newspapers.

Or people have seen people just take the whole bunch

out to the dumpster and so forth.

So some freelance censorship going on there.

So that kind of stuff still goes on.

I have never personally had anybody

say I'm going to kill you, bitch or anything like that.

EVELYN BAILEY: Have you ever experienced being harassed?

SUSAN JORDAN: Oh yeah.

You know, I think every year in the pride parade

we're all harassed by the men with bullhorns who say,

we're fucking dogs and all the rest of it.

But I've been harassed all my life,

for one reason or another.

So I can't say I've been more harassed for being

a lesbian than for being a woman or for being fat or whatever.

I've had it since childhood.

I'm used to it, if you ever get used to it.

EVELYN BAILEY: Were you born in Rochester?

SUSAN JORDAN: No.

I'm from the Jersey Shore.

But I've been here since around 1972.

EVELYN BAILEY: Wow.

And how did you come to Rochester?

SUSAN JORDAN: Well, just I knew some people who lived here.

And I went to college with some people

whose home was in Rochester.

And they were really the only interesting, sympathetic,

simpatico kind of people that I even knew.

So I ultimately ended up following them here

to Rochester.

And I don't see too many of them anymore

because I've kind of created a life for myself.

EVELYN BAILEY: Right.

SUSAN JORDAN: But it was because I knew people.

I don't know if you know Nancy Rosen.

EVELYN BAILEY: Yes.

SUSAN JORDAN: She was two years ahead of me at school.

And it was funny, when I first arrived

at this horrible women's college in Pennsylvania, my roommate

and I went down the hall from her.

And there were these rumors, is Nancy Rosen really a lesbian?

Oh no!

Know It's true and real.

We couldn't actually know a lesbian, which

is pretty funny thinking back.

You know, it's like oh, right.

EVELYN BAILEY: What do you think has

been the greatest change in the life of The Empty Closet?

SUSAN JORDAN: Well, I would say the fact that we finally

got a professional graphic designer to actually

makes the paper look more credible and more professional.

That's probably the biggest change we've had.

And some people think the paper is boring and dreadful

and have many plans to change it.

But I don't think it's that bad.

If you look at the other papers from around the country,

it's not just a bar rag.

It's not just made of national features

that they got for free or something.

I think our big flaw is that we don't

do investigative journalism.

And that's because we don't have professional level reporters

who are willing to give us six weeks of their time and energy

to do these projects.

And I can't edit and be an investigative reporter

and be a researcher and do the layout and do the mailings

and do volunteer training.

You know, that just that doesn't work.

So I think if we could afford to pay reporters,

we could hire someone who could do investigative journalism.

As it is, I try to do my best.

But this is not what I would do if I had the money.

EVELYN BAILEY: Right.

Has putting The Empty Closet on-line been successful?

SUSAN JORDAN: I guess so.

I mean, you have to do that these days.

And I think what's successful is that we still

have a print edition.

And I think that's good, especially for people

my age who don't really feel simpatico

with all the technology and are not constantly texting

all day and stuff.

But I think it's also that people

like to have something they hold in their hands

and they don't have to have a battery

or they don't have to have electric power in order

to read whatever it is.

But you know, these days you do have to do that.

And I think it's fine, the wider audience

we get, the further our message can spread the better.

But I would be sad if there was no print version anymore.

And it may come to that.

It's just different because when we have a print version,

we can charge a fair amount for our ads.

But as I understand it, nobody gets

a whole lot of money from online advertising,

including big corporations, you know.

That's why they have a lot of problems.

EVELYN BAILEY: Right.

SUSAN JORDAN: It's like they're putting out the money

and nothing is coming in from advertising.

But if The Empty Closet had even one ad sales person working

on commission, we could double the amount of ad revenue

that we're bringing in.

But I can't find anyone.

I put an ad in the paper.

And then you get people coming in who have mental illness

problems or are going to do it for a month

and then decide it's too much trouble.

I haven't had a good ad sales person

since right in the early '90s when John Strand and I

were working together.

We had this wonderful woman.

And then after six months or so, she moved to San Francisco.

But at that point I realized, we needed

to keep having other people than myself selling ads.

And off and on, we've had some good people but then they

move or they lose interest, or they just have never

done much to start with.

And it's just-- you know, we could be making a lot more.

If I had some help in finding some ad sales people.

We give them a generous commission,

but we can't salary them in the way City Newspaper does.

City Newspaper has had salaried employees

right from the beginning, Mariana Tyler

told me years ago.

And it would be illegal for them to have

volunteers working for them.

Whereas we have never been able to salary anyone

except the editor and the graphic designer.

So it's just not that kind of publication.

And unfortunately, I think people

expect to see us doing all this stuff,

not realizing we don't have money to pay people to do it.

It's just is what it is.

EVELYN BAILEY: Talk to me a little bit

about the columnists.

SUSAN JORDAN: We've had a lot of good columnists over the years.

And a few that weren't that great.

But again, they're volunteers.

So they come and go.

And some of them have stuck by us

for years for their own personal reasons in no doubt.

And others kind of come and go.

Occasionally, we've had national columnists

who were journalists or activists who've given me

their columns for free.

And these were people I met at maybe the National Gay

and Lesbian Journalists Association Conference

or that I met elsewhere.

We had a guy Mubarak Bashir who did some excellent columns

for a while.

And new he's dropped out.

I don't see his work anywhere in the gay media anymore.

And I don't know what happened to him.

Right now, we have Reverend Irene Monroe,

Cambridge, Massachusetts who writes "Faith Matters."

And she charges, but she doesn't charge me a cent.

I get her column for free.

And she's the only national columnist we have right now.

In fact, I just downloaded another column from her today.

But basically, it's local people who have

something they want to say.

And that's great, but they just have

to say it in a sort of literate way

so their column is readable.

And I would like to have a transgender columnist now.

Laura McSpadden was doing "Beyond the Binary."

But she lost interest.

I don't think we'll hear from her again, you know.

And various people over the years--

some of the columns have been pretty much

all about eye make-up or something.

A lot of transgender people find that offensive.

I would just like to find a good transgender columnist.

I'd like to find a bisexual columnist.

In fact, I'm writing about that in my editorial this month.

We would love to have a regular column

by local bisexual activists to kind of dispel

some of the stereotypes that exist

in the gay community about bisexuals.

But I haven't seen any real strong bisexual

activism in Rochester since Michele SpringMore left town.

And so I don't know if I'll get any responses

from my little appeal in my editorial.

I doubt it.

But again, I wish we had people representing.

But again, it can't just be, oh we

have our politically correct little list of columnists.

The columns have to be well-written.

They have to be interesting.

And not just about the person.

You know, I mean Eric Bellmann writes about himself.

But you know, he's an older gay man writing about his life

as an older gay man.

And the columns are interesting, usually, you know.

Or even amusing or whatever.

And that's why we love him.

EVELYN BAILEY: He's the longest--

SUSAN JORDAN: Yeah he started a year or so before I

became editor.

And he Michele didn't get along at all.

But then he was still around.

And over the years, he's kept writing.

And I think it's a personal thing for him

that he needs to do this.

And I wouldn't be running it if I

didn't think that it was well written and that men read it.

I do hear from them.

Not everybody likes it.

But I think men do read that column.

But he and Meredith Elizabeth Reiniger

are the two that I want to run every month because one

is an older gay man.

One is an older lesbian.

And I just wish I had a transgender and bisexual

columnist of any age.

But again, it's just getting somebody

who's bi or trans to write something terrible, uh-uh.

I'm looking for really good.

And that's why it's hard to find somebody who can write,

who can get it in by deadline, and not say anything offensive,

and you know, and write something

that people will actually read, as opposed to turning the page

and say well, this is well-meaning but it's boring.

And turn the page, you know.

EVELYN BAILEY: Right.

SUSAN JORDAN: We've had great columnists just like we've

had great volunteers.

We've been really fortunate.

EVELYN BAILEY: Mm-hm.

Talk to me a little bit about the controversy over sex ads.

SUSAN JORDAN: Well it's always--

EVELYN BAILEY: In the EC

SUSAN JORDAN: --always been our policy

not to have ads showing genitalia

for various reasons, one of them being that the US Postal

Service probably wouldn't allow our publication to be mailed

if we were full of genitalia.

In fact, you don't find too many publications

that run anything like that, whether they mail it out

or not.

Right now, an advertiser who has advertised for the last twenty

plus years and is just, you know, a really wonderful

person.

His new ad shows a man who's naked except for one

of those utility belts.

You don't see genitalia.

You don't see his butt.

You know, you see his torso and part of his leg.

And some people might object to that.

But I hope we're beyond the point of censoring ourselves.

I mean, I'm not going to run pictures of penises.

But if you have a guy with his shirt off,

I don't want to hear from offended feminists

or offended gay men for that matter about how

it's so terrible to have a semi-nude guy.

You know, it's like, we're censoring gay sexuality

and gay bodies are censored everywhere.

We should not be censoring.

We should not be in the business of censoring gay sexuality,

up to a point.

I mean obviously, we can't have photos of genitalia or sex acts

in the paper.

But up to that point, I don't want to feel like,

oh I'm censoring it because it's not quite nice

and some middle class heterosexuals might not

approve of our gay sexuality.

Well if they don't like it, tough.

Don't read the paper.

EVELYN BAILEY: I was trying to get at the NAMBLA issue.

SUSAN JORDAN: Oh that's another issue

that I don't think I've even heard anything from anybody

like that for fifteen years, even

wanting to be in the paper.

And no, that's another thing.

We don't want genitalia, we don't want sex acts,

we don't want criminal conduct.

Child abuse is criminal conduct.

There's no way in the world that we can even

condone that, much less publish photos of it

or anything like that.

I wouldn't publish an ad for NAMBLA really.

But on the other hand, I don't like the censorship thing.

It's just a difficult thing.