Sep 08, 2006  |  By: CHRIS CRAIN  | COMMENTS     

IT WAS TEN years ago this weekend, in Atlanta, Ga., and I was sitting in the laundry room of my house, the makeshift location for my home computer. Next to the keyboard was a stack of books I’d checked out from the public library on how to write a business plan, and that’s exactly what I was doing.

Ten years later, thanks to the talent and contributions of too many to mention, that business plan has led to the newspaper you are reading. The company was Window Media, and the idea behind it was to raise the bar on the quality of journalism in the gay press.

Back in the mid-’90s, local gay and lesbian publications ran the gamut, from “bar rags” devoted to nightlife and sex, to small community newspapers that circulate largely among the activist and group joiners among us. Very few aspired to something more, attempting serious news reports alongside the lighter fare.

I had come out just a few years earlier in Washington, D.C., inspired and encouraged by the political activism I read about each week in the Washington Blade. I wanted to see more gay communities, in more cities, served by the same quality journalism. And headstrong as I was, I wanted more from the Blade as well.

To me, a newspaper ought to be judged first and foremost on how well it does one thing: ask the tough questions of people with power. Whether through objective journalism on its news pages or pointed, provocative viewpoints in its opinion pages, a newspaper ought to be playing watchdog, and let its readers play watchdog over it.

OF COURSE, ASKING tough questions isn’t a recipe for popularity. It’s been said you can judge a good man by how many friends he has, and a good journalist by how many enemies he has, although it’s a point on which not all agree.

I remember a few years ago seeing Judy Wieder, the former editor responsible for turning the once-proud Advocate magazine into a gay version of Us Weekly, accept a special award from the Human Rights Campaign.

She gushed about the organization in her acceptance speech, even bragging that she adopted a policy early on that she wouldn’t publish criticism of our hard-working gay activists. A policy like that doesn’t serve the publication, its readers, or the activists very well.

It’s also not in my personal makeup. As editor of Sycamore High School’s newspaper, the Leaf — hey, I didn’t pick the name — I earned the principal’s ire with biting exposes on his policy against girl’s shorts riding more than one inch above the knee, as well as his decision to ban T-shirts designed by the boy’s water polo team. Their slogan: “It takes           to play water polo” — only instead of a blank it was a water polo ball with an apostrophe “s” following.

In college, I was editor of the Vanderbilt Hustler — hey, I didn’t pick that name either, and we had it a good century before Larry Flynt. On a very conservative Southern campus, I assigned stories on the racial segregation of the Greek system that dominated campus social life.

I editorialized on the subject as well, along with the shoddy quality of campus housing, recreational facilities and parking. On the graduation stage, the chancellor shook my hand and with a big grin said, “I’ve never been happier to see one our students accept his diploma.”

In law school at Harvard, I was editor for a student newspaper on a liberal campus that often felt more closed-minded than my college had. It was the late ‘80s and the dawn of “political correctness,” before Rush Limbaugh et al. bludgeoned lefties so much with the phrase that it lost its original meaning.

I thought it anathema that students would be hissed in class in law school classrooms for challenging the constitutionality of affirmative action, a viewpoint well within the American mainstream, and I said so from the editorial page.

In response, the president of the black student group distributed a letter to every law student, saying, “I can’t wait to graduate so I won’t have to deal with ignorant white males like Chris Crain.” I’m guessing the George W. Bush years have been difficult ones for him.

TEN YEARS AFTER that Labor Day weekend, I am enormously proud of the journalism inside the pages of our publications. Then as before, asking tough questions hasn’t won us any popularity contests.

In an interview last week with Karen Ocamb of IN Los Angeles magazine, Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean scoffed when she referred to ...