Six Times Journalists on the Paper’s History of Covering AIDS and Gay Issues

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The New York Times had a spotty record of covering the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s — and gay culture in general. Times staffers reflect on the paper’s past, and what we can learn from it today.

Any newspaper must, by definition, aspire to be the “paper of record,” and yet when it came to this newspaper’s coverage of gay people and AIDS in the early ’80s — when the disease was morphing into a national crisis, and when rights that had been won a decade earlier, after the Stonewall Riots, were once again being jeopardized — The Times’s own record was checkered at best. Information about the spread of illness was often scant, judgmental or distressingly vague — even while reporters on the Science desk were trying their best with an ever-evolving story. The social and emotional toll of AIDS and the resulting queer movement were, when covered, often buried in the back of the newspaper (on a page called Styles of the Times), far from national news stories that were deemed important enough for the front page. Famously, it would take President Ronald Reagan more than four years to acknowledge the disease publicly. And it took until 1983 for The Times to run an article about the disease on Page A1, two years after the first reports of symptoms.

When T Magazine chose to devote an issue to the cultural relevance of New York City in the years between 1981 and 1983, it was inevitable that gay people and the disease that disproportionately decimated them would play a major role in our coverage, from the birth of gay literature to the hundreds of creative leaders who changed the culture only to then die prematurely. But we also wanted to re-examine the ways in which The New York Times itself dealt with these issues as they were happening. To reread these articles today is to be struck by how confused and scared and defensive many people must have felt, even those acting from a place of journalistic remove: In Frank Rich’s laudatory 1985 review of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” for instance, there’s a strange addendum noting that “a spokesman from The New York Times said yesterday that charges in ‘The Normal Heart’ that The Times suppressed news about AIDS are untrue.” To reread these articles is also to be reminded how news coverage shapes perceptions and policies, particularly when it comes to oppressed communities. So we asked six members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community who work for The Times (across various ages and beats) to reflect and report on what the paper got right and wrong in those years, and what we might learn from that troubling history today. — Kurt Soller

Like most children of the 1980s, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t hearing about AIDS. I was in my early teens during the height of the epidemic, and it permeated almost everything in my young consciousness: school, culture, sports and the evening news. This was when the Indiana teenager Ryan White was dying, basketball star Magic Johnson announced he’d contracted H.I.V., Tom Hanks won the Oscar for playing an infected gay man in 1993’s “Philadelphia” and the disease became the leading cause of death among Americans aged 25 to 44. At school, the AIDS lexicon was drilled into our heads. We knew by then that you couldn’t get it from a toilet seat or a kiss. But we were constantly reminded how we could get it: “Unprotected sex” and “dirty needles” would fill in the blanks on many a health class pop-quiz about “risk behaviors.”

I think the disease’s ubiquity and the involuntary nature of how we came to know about it was why I was so struck, some 30 years later, when I first came across the 1981 New York Times article that alerted readers to a strange new condition. “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” read the headline. The story was on Page A20, not exactly prime print real estate, and ran the day before the Fourth of July. The article went on to describe the initial hypotheses doctors were making about this sudden outbreak of a rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma — hypotheses that would turn out to be tragically wrong, such as how it might not be contagious or that “there was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals.” It was a bit disorienting to read early, inchoate descriptions of symptoms that soon none of us would mistake. There was the malfunction of T cells that one doctor found in nine of the victims, which was connected to “severe defects in their immunological systems.” And the descriptions of telltale AIDS disfigurement: “It appears in one or more violet-colored spots anywhere on the body.”

I recently talked to the reporter who wrote that article, my colleague Lawrence K. Altman, a physician with training in epidemiology, who told me what a hindrance it was in those first years of AIDS that people struggled to find the right language. This was true, he said, not just for the government officials and doctors talking about the disease on television and in print, but also for the journalists who had to explain it. In doing so, they often employed the same euphemisms, like “bodily fluids,” to substitute for words like semen, leaving the impression that saliva from a kiss might infect you.

AIDS has always been scary to me. But this shed light on a different kind of fear that I hadn’t quite contemplated, the kind that gay men before me must have felt as they watched this plague kill their friends and were left wondering whether they would be next. For my generation, it was the known that was so terrifying. We knew that if you somehow caught the disease it might be a death sentence. But we also knew how you caught it and therefore how to avoid it. The fear of the unknown, it dawned on me, would have been far worse.

The flier, sleek and disarming, showed up one day on newsroom bulletin boards in the summer of 1992. It was an invitation in search of a guest list.

“We’re having a party.We’d love to invite you.But we don’t know who you are.”

It was the first time that gay people working at The New York Times had publicly advertised one of their pride parties, which had been happening for six years. “The idea that a bunch of gay people from The Times would get together and have a party was remarkable, after so many years of hiding,” said Richard J. Meislin, a former reporter and editor, who kept his sexuality secret until the 1980s, when other queer people at the newspaper started to come out.

It wasn’t easy to be gay at The Times when Meislin started in 1975 as a copy boy. Many employees felt that A.M. “Abe” Rosenthal, the paper’s editor, was homophobic. And the publisher at the time, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, had his own blind spots, according to his son. “Abe was part of the challenge. It was one of the issues my father struggled with as well,” said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher since 1992, who recently handed over the reins to his son, A.G. “The way [gay people] were being treated by being forced to be hidden was antithetical to the values of the company and the values of journalism.”

For this essay, I spoke with five current and former Times staffers who were among the first people to come out at the paper in the 1980s and beyond, including Donna Cartwright, who in 1998 became the first newsroom employee to come out as transgender. I read Samuel G. Freedman’s oral history chronicling the work of Jeffrey Schmalz, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1993 and transformed the paper’s coverage of the disease. I watched a video of his memorial service.

What emerged was a picture of a newsroom that often forced its L.G.B.T. journalists to choose between their career ambitions and their desire to have an openly queer life. The Times spent much of the 1980s figuring out how to cover gays as real people with newsworthy problems. It was also deeply unsure of how to deal with its gay employees, whose sexuality may have seemed, to those in management, to be at odds with the pedigree the institution wanted to uphold.

Meislin, for instance, never had control of his own story: He was outed by AIDS, even though he didn’t have the disease. After arriving in Mexico City as a correspondent in 1983, he got sick with a mysterious ailment that made his joints ache. The paper sent an editor to check on him, because some people thought he’d contracted H.I.V. He hadn’t, and though Meislin recovered within weeks, word of his sexuality reportedly got to Rosenthal’s desk. Two and a half years later, Meislin was called back to New York City, cutting short his prestigious stint abroad. “The perception in the newsroom was that I was brought back because I was gay,” he said. “And it’s one that I shared.”

Cartwright, who started at the Times in 1977, said that episode was one of many reasons she didn’t come to terms with her gender identity sooner. “If you lived openly as a gay person you were sticking your neck out.”

Rosenthal, who died in 2006, denied that Meislin’s move had anything to do with his sexuality in an interview with Michelangelo Signorile for The Advocate 26 years ago. “People who are used to being discriminated against will sometimes take certain acts as being discriminatory when they’re not,” he told the magazine.

Nancy Lee, who eventually became the paper’s picture editor, didn’t dare put a photo of her girlfriend at her desk when she arrived in 1980. “That was to risk everything,” said Lee, who is now the executive editor of The New York Times News Service & Syndicate.

David W. Dunlap, a former Metro reporter and current Times historian, said he added a pullout couch to the Washington apartment he was sharing with his boyfriend during his first job as a clerk to the columnist James Reston in 1975. The idea, he said, was to give the impression that the couch was definitely the place where his roommate slept.

To me, those stories are unavoidably personal. I started at The Times as a clerk to a columnist in 2012, while I was figuring out that I was a lesbian. I never came out to him, because I wasn’t sure I wanted him to know. After I left and returned as a reporter three years later, I put a photo of my girlfriend at the time next to my computer.

The path to my comfort, I now know, was paved by people like Lee, who decided to show up to New York’s pride parade in the late 1980s with other closeted Times staffers. “We weren’t wearing any New York Times gear, but we knew we were at risk,” she said. “People were photographing it. You could end up on the news.” They had their first pride party in 1987. Sulzberger Jr., then an editor, had started meeting with his gay colleagues several years earlier. “He would take us to lunch and say ‘I know you’re gay and don’t worry about it, you’re going to be fine,’” Dunlap said.

In the fall of 1986, Max Frankel replaced Rosenthal as executive editor. Months later, Sulzberger Jr. became assistant publisher, signaling the rise of an avowed progressive on L.G.B.T. issues. The parties doubled, and then tripled in size. AIDS began to kill Timesmen like Robert Barrios, a copy editor; J. Russell King, who helped edit the front page; and Schmalz, who wrote dozens of stories about the epidemic.

The Times had stepped up its coverage of the crisis, but staffers still took issue with the language the paper used to talk about gays. The gay and lesbian caucus, formed by employees in 1993, put out regular bulletins that occasionally addressed language issues. They wanted to be called gays, not homosexuals. (The Times had started to allow the word gay to be used in this context as an adjective in 1987, but the caucus said it should also be used as a noun.) They also asked that the newspaper stop referring to “admitted homosexuals” when it really meant openly gay. “The term connotes confession, criminality and shame,” one bulletin said. The point was to get the company to stop insulting a chunk of its readers — and its employees.

Progress happened quickly after the caucus revved up, thanks partly to Sulzberger Jr.’s determination to get The Times out in front of the issue. The company began offering spousal benefits to gay couples in 1994. And in 1998, Cartwright judged the newsroom ready to handle her own coming out, typed and printed on yellow paper and tacked onto more than a dozen bulletin boards throughout the building. “I have decided to resolve a longstanding conflict in my life by beginning to live full time as a woman,” the letter said. Cartwright, a former copy editor, remembers hurrying back to her desk after posting the last copy and walking by the clump of people reading what she’d written. Someone looked at her, and smiled. She started showing up to work as Donna six weeks later.

“The only part that was difficult was getting people to stop calling me ‘he’ and ‘him,’” she said. She told someone in human resources, who reminded staff of Cartwright’s pronouns, but it just kept happening. One day she realized that she was just being too polite: “One time when someone referred to me as ‘he’ I got visibly angry about it, and that worked, so I did it a couple of times.” She didn’t have many problems after that.

The Times gave Cartwright a key to a bathroom on the 11th floor of the building. After she had gender reassignment surgery, she began to use the ladies’ room.

When I told her that The Times still doesn’t have gender neutral bathrooms, she caught her breath. “They may have decided that I was a unicorn,” she said. She suggested quietly letting the paper’s leaders know that “The Times is kind of behind the times on this.” If asking nicely doesn’t work, Cartwright said, we could always get visibly angry. It worked for her.

In July 1981, The New York Times reported that 41 gay men in New York and California had been diagnosed with a mysterious cancer. It took almost two years, right before Memorial Day weekend in 1983, for The Times to finally dedicate front-page space to the story. Under the headline, “Health Chief Calls AIDS Battle ‘No. 1 Priority,’” readers of The Times would learn about a growing catastrophe. There were 558 dead in the United States. There were more than 1,400 cases reported. The fatality rate was through the roof.

The front page of The Times has long held a sacred place in the media. Back then, seven or eight stories, filed from Washington and around the world, would set the day’s agenda. For decades, TV morning-news producers have used the front page as a guide to mapping out top stories. And yet roughly 700 editions of the paper had come and gone before AIDS, quickly turning into a full-fledged crisis, had earned a spot on Page One. It was never lost on AIDS activists just how vital the paper was — and for how long it did not pay serious attention to the disease.

“Are you kidding?” emailed Larry Kramer, the activist and writer. “The front page of The New York Times is the most important real estate in the world for getting any issue out. As The Times goes, so will every other news outlet all over the globe.”

So why was The Times seemingly indifferent to the story for so long?

The paper’s Science desk, which was responsible for reporting on outbreaks at the time, was overtaxed in the early 1980s, and it did not help that identifying the cause of AIDS was a slow burn. “Science news was running as fast and freely as Trump is today,” said Lawrence K. Altman, the Times reporter who wrote the rare cancer story and still works at the paper. He cited stories the desk covered about President Reagan and Pope John Paul II getting shot, along with advances being made with the artificial heart.

If the burden was then on other sections at the paper, top editors were less than enthusiastic about surfacing the story. “There were strong messages that you got that were not written on any whiteboard,” said David W. Dunlap, a reporter in the Metro section at the time. “You knew to avoid it. It was a self-reinforcing edict: Don’t write about queers.”

And then there was Kramer’s perspective: “Every friend I had from those days is now dead because it was no secret that Abe Rosenthal hated homosexuals,” he said, referring to the paper’s executive editor at the time. “This is the chief reason why I hate The New York Times.”

By the time The Times did give AIDS front-page attention, it did so with a bit of a stiff arm. Though public health officials were now going on the record to discuss the disease’s devastation, there was reluctance to discuss whom it affected most. In that first front-page story, it took seven paragraphs — which appeared after the jump, or inside the paper — to mention how hard it was hitting gay men.

Max Frankel, the former editorial page editor at the paper, which operated separately from the newsroom, said this was in keeping with the paper’s ethos at the time: “They were being squeamish for some reason,” Frankel said, speaking of the newsroom. “Their squeamishness was actually damaging to the public understanding of what was going on.”

Frankel, who would take over the newsroom in 1986 as executive editor, said the editorial department was quicker than the news columns to describe “anal intercourse” as a means of spreading the disease. “Whatever their rules were down there, we said we’re going to do it our way,” he said. “That was the approach.”

On June 16, 1983, AIDS would land on Page One for a second time, under the headline “Homosexuals Confronting a Time of Change.” The story, which ran longer than 3,000 words, examined a wave of anxiety hitting New York gay men, and took a broader look at what their lives had been like since the Stonewall Riots in 1969.

By that point, the death toll was fast approaching 600 people.

Newspapers can be funny places. Writers know. Take the premium placed on brevity, concision and economy. Saying more with less, it’s called. Good advice. Maddening rigorousness. Depends on the day. But sometimes it hits a snag. In order to say “SYTYCD,” for instance, it’s probably helpful to use “So You Think You Can Dance?” first. The show needs a proper name before a concise one. For three decades, though, newspapers — this newspaper — made an exception. There’s nothing more concise than AIDS. It names a larger disease: acquired immune deficiency syndrome. But, really, “AIDS” gets the job done. Only, it was an improper name. And so it often went unused, since it named an impropriety.

When the choreographer Alvin Ailey died in December of 1989, his obituary made the front page. The headline was accurate but bloodless: “Leading figure in modern dance.” (Cristal: leading bubbly wine of France.) But it was the cause of death that was cause for concern: “Dr. Albert Knapp, Mr. Ailey’s physician, attributed his death to terminal blood dyscrasia, a rare disorder that affects the bone marrow and red blood cells.” AIDS would have been the more economic choice. Ailey died of AIDS. But terminal blood dyscrasia? Rare disorder? They tell a story — of tremendous suffering, certainly, but of intense trepidation, too.

Search for the Times obituary of anyone who we now know died of AIDS during the 1980s (and beyond). You’ll often find they died of something else. “Hospitalized earlier this month for a neurological disorder, but the cause of his death was not immediately disclosed” (Michel Foucault, 1984). “Died at 1:30 A.M. of viral encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, after having slipped into a coma several days ago” (Perry Ellis, 1986). Saying less with more.

Medically, it’s not really AIDS that kills you. AIDS acts as a doorjamb for other diseases to traipse in and ravage a body. But the average obituary noted what traipsed but omitted what made the traipsing possible. “AIDS-related” rarely appeared — nor did coverage of the deaths of black people and Latinos.

Occasionally, things would be called as they were. When the incandescent light of underground theater Ethyl Eichelberger died in 1990, one of his leading ladies “said that he had AIDS and had committed suicide by slashing his wrists.”

The exceptions to euphemism are notable: Women, for instance, even a trans woman, like the actress Elizabeth Eden, who died in 1987. When the art critic, actress and advice columnist Cookie Mueller died at 40, in 1989, her brief notice in the paper named the cause as “pneumonia resulting from AIDS,” which was the same explanation for Eden’s cause of death.

Newspapers can be funny places. So can people. The omission of AIDS wasn’t necessarily an editorial judgment. It’s often up to the families and friends and physicians of the deceased to state how they died. In a real power move, the dying could name their cause of death. To see Roy Cohn die in “Angels in America” is to know that. Liver cancer was his preferred cause of death, not the complications from AIDS that actually killed him. That was for homosexuals, a label he swore he was too good for. AIDS killed people. But it also threatened to kill pride. Families, friends and co-workers died of embarrassment. No one wanted to go to an AIDS funeral. Hence the euphemisms and the workarounds. There was only so much they could cover up, of course, since lots of people went to too many AIDS funerals.

And so a disease of the body spawned a disease of good — appallingly good — manners. The shame of AIDS endured, in part, because we were too uptight, too judgmental, too fearful to call it by its name. But this paper — and to some extent the culture — has shaken free of those old misgivings. Being on the other side of a crisis helps with that. When the theater composer Michael Friedman died of AIDS-related causes last year at 41, the paper not only said so, it devoted a long and searching story, by Michael Paulson, to the matter of how and why.

Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, told Paulson that Friedman’s death was “a real warning shot across the bow for anybody who thinks this disease isn’t deadly any more.” People were speaking of distress — and they were in distress about a disease that still kills. Writing in The New York Times Magazine last year, Linda Villarosa detailed how the disease is still ravaging black gay and bisexual American men at rates higher than anyplace else on the planet. And when she did, she said AIDS.

It was a world that thrived in the shadows of New York — late at night, hidden on dark streets behind barely-marked doorways, typically guarded by a man sitting on a stool under a light bulb. What took place inside ranged from questionable to outright illicit: the full-service bar that kept serving drinks after 4 a.m., the open use of cocaine and marijuana and, in many cases, the anonymous and often marathon sexual encounters among gay men. Sex clubs, bathhouses, back rooms, movie theaters, after-hours bars, dance clubs — places like Alex in Wonderland and the Mine Shaft and the New St. Marks Baths, all part of New York in the 1970s and early 1980s. This was a culture that was known to some of gay New York, but arguably not most of it. And it certainly was not known to most of straight New York.

The AIDS epidemic changed all that. Almost overnight, as panic spread and Governor Mario M. Cuomo issued regulations in late 1985 to close down establishments where unsafe sexual activity took place, this underground world came crashing to the surface. A battery of city inspectors, police officers and reporters went in undercover to see for themselves what was going on behind those doors — and shared their findings with the public. “The Case for Closing Bathhouses: Night Visit by Post Reporter Reveals Shocking Evidence,” read a New York Post headline over a 1985 story that described, in considerable detail, what the reporter saw and heard as he moved through the dark warren of a bathhouse. It was part of stream of columns and editorials — not to mention grainy video from local news cameras that had been secreted into the clubs — that was turning up the pressure on public officials.

And while The New York Times was sluggish on reporting the first stirrings of the AIDS epidemic, it quickly jumped on the train as the story became something of a frenzy: voyeuristic and yet significant at the same time. “Guests paid a $12 ‘membership’ fee and were asked to sign a form pledging to engage only in ‘safe sex’ involving no exchange of bodily fluids,” read a 1985 Times report on a club known as the Hell Fire that catered to a straight and gay crowd with an interest in sadomasochism. “Signs on the walls listed the club rules, which included ‘no bullwhips, electric prods or animals’ and ‘no touching without permission.’”

These were uncomfortable times for many of the people drawn into this: There were the city inspectors who spent hours compiling firsthand reports that were detailed if at times unnerving. (“Two of the inspectors said they heard sounds of whipping and moaning, but did not investigate ‘for reasons of personal safety,’ a 1985 Times story said.) There were the elected officials, who had to explain — and justify — evolving policies as they navigated a politically fraught epidemic transmitted by sexual activity, with terrifying questions around every corner.

It was challenging for news organizations as well, drawn to the story for legitimate reasons (a health crisis) and perhaps less noble reasons (sensationalism) as they struggled with just how explicitly detailed the reports needed to be. And no less discomfited were many in the city’s gay and lesbian community, concerned that raising the curtain on a world that most people did not know existed could threaten the gay rights movement after a decade of progress. Some gay leaders decried the city crackdown as an assault on privacy. “Consensual sexual activity by adults out of public view should always be beyond the eye and the arm of government,” said Thomas B. Stoddard, the executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, in 1988. Others considered it a legitimate response to a health emergency. “Is compulsive sexuality freedom?’” Jim Fouratt, one of the city’s earliest gay activists, said a few weeks before the city cracked down. “I would argue it’s not. All we got was a lot more alienated sexually, and a lot more disease.”

Cuomo, whom I covered at the time as a Daily News reporter based in Albany, would seem at times astonished — even ashen-faced — as he learned about this side of New York from inspectors and aides struggling to advise the governor about which kind of sexual practices the state might regulate. Down in the city, Mayor Edward I. Koch was already facing criticism that he was slow to act in combating the epidemic; gay political leaders contended that it was because the mayor, who never married and lived in Greenwich Village, was gay. (At various points in his life, Koch said he was not, or would not answer the question.)

As the mayor and governor were at odds about what to do (sound familiar?), Cuomo’s health advisers, after much debate, recommended shutting down establishments that permitted unsafe-sex practices. City Hall pushed back, as many of Koch’s aides argued that a crackdown would simply push this kind of behavior into darker corners, making it harder to regulate. Cuomo finally moved, essentially ignoring the mayor as he issued state regulations that would close clubs that permitted these kinds of activities, and leaving it to cities to enforce. Koch resisted at first, contending the order was poorly drafted and difficult to implement: He was obviously aware of how many gay activists viewed this as a civil rights issue, a setback at a time when gay rights seemed to be on the advance.

But Koch’s resistance did not last for long: On November 7, 1985, the city closed down the Mine Shaft, the start of a march of enforcement, reported with the exquisitely detailed stories about what had led authorities to act. “In graphic depositions written by city inspectors, a portrait emerged of a dark place with black walls, back rooms, open cubicles without doors and the accouterments of sadomasochism,” wrote one story. “They reported seeing many patrons engaging in anal intercourse and fellatio — the ‘high risk’ sexual practices cited in the state rules.” And that was from The Times, which was relatively restrained compared with the rest of the coverage. New York would never quite be the same.

The Styles section of The New York Times is where many readers first learned of gay rodeos, the drag queen Angie Xtravaganza and the propensity of hair dressers to wear leather shirts, silk gazar tunics and other outré garb typically reserved for the catwalk.

In the mid-2000s, the Thursday section was even nicknamed “Thursgay Styles” by the creative underclass, for its effete coverage of men’s fashion and unabashed objectification of the male body. Maybe it was the mandate to cover fashion, night life and subculture, but by the time the Styles section ran its first report on a same-sex commitment celebration in 2002 (two years before same-sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts), its gay-centric reputation was hard to dispute.

But that wasn’t always the case.

At the dawn of the Reagan years, when “Dynasty” introduced one of the first gay characters on prime-time TV, but before Madonna released “Like a Virgin,” the Styles of the Times page (yes, it was a single page back then) ran just three articles between 1981 and 1983 that examined gay life in general. That’s not counting, of course, the (often closeted) gay characters who flitted in and out of “Notes on Fashion,” a weekly column by John Duka, a reporter who went on to help start the publicity firm KCD, before dying from AIDS-related complications in 1989.

Using language that betrays the era’s ignorance and discomfort with gay sex, the first Styles piece in that time period, published on May 30, 1983, explored the “special emotional difficulties of AIDS victims.” While other sections of the paper covered the science of the disease and, to a much lesser extent, the political ramifications, Styles addressed its emotional toll. In addition to the shock and stigma of a diagnosis, the piece also touched on the fear that people with H.I.V. could somehow “spread AIDS to family, friends or partners.” A second article covered the second annual convention of what is now known as PFLAG (the Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) in New York, “where 125 parents of homosexuals from all over the country gathered” to combat prejudice.

But it is a third article, “Of Herpes, AIDS and Fear Of Sex,” that reveals the most about the Style section’s coverage of queer people in the early 1980s. Published on July 18, 1983, under the rubric “Relationships,” it begins with a pointed question: Has the fear of AIDS and herpes led to a decline in promiscuity? Granted, the thesis does adhere to a certain editorial logic. It’s the kind of “if true” story that editors — such as I (an editor at Styles) — might propose based on a hunch: If AIDS has led to a fear of sex, then it stands to reason that some people, especially gay men, are having less sex.

The problem was, there was no definitive evidence to support that claim, only the opinions of public health officials who, when asked, were quick to poke holes in the story. They invoked the word “speculation” three times. A hospital supervisor in Brooklyn was even quoted saying the opposite: “We are continuing to see tremendous amounts of sexual activity among adolescents.”

So why was this piece published in the first place? One could argue that The Times, which proudly bills itself as a family newspaper, is puritanical to a fault. But it also has to do with simple arithmetic: In 1983, there were few, if any, openly gay reporters on staff, and hardly anyone to challenge stereotypes about gay people. It would take until the next decade before the floodgates would open at The Times, and openly gay men and women would assume positions of leadership in the newsroom. But even that, more than two decades later, hasn’t stopped many gay people from debating what, exactly, Styles — and the rest of the Times — gets right about their lives.

Read more:

New York City, 1981-1983: 36 Months That Changed the Culture

Four Geniuses, Gone to AIDS, as They Might Be Today

What New York Was Like in the Early ’80s — Hour by Hour