Talk of the Town - Biting back November 28 2001

About 10 years ago, I helped a very talented friend get a gig writing music criticism for another publication. It had been a years-long dream for him, so you can imagine how surprised I was when he quit after a month.

The reason: He couldn’t stomach the feedback. I’m not talking about the ordinary letters to the editor and angry calls every columnist gets from people who disagree. I’m talking about the sick, usually anonymous letters that don’t make it to print, and the calls that compel most columnists to make their numbers private.

Journalists seldom write publicly about this problem, perhaps in part because doing so might invite more of the same. And you don’t want to appear self-important just because you’ve earned a measure of what a columnist friend used to call “micro-celebrity.” After all, many of us make a living reporting dirt about real celebrities.

But the main reason we remain silent is probably that, in having a privileged podium from which to whine and complain and carp week after week, we don’t usually feel it’s our right to whine and complain and carp about the people who whine and complain and carp about us.

I’ve lived most of the last 20 years looking over my shoulder. And when I was doing radio, if my image didn’t give me away, my voice did. I have media friends who seem to enjoy being recognized when they’re out. But being a complete introvert on the Meyers-Briggs scale, I have always disliked it. Of course, these friends are more optimistic than me. I tend to most remember unkind people, like the person who invaded my space in a restaurant recently to say, “You’re more attractive than I thought you would be, but you have shit for brains anyway.”

How do you respond to that kind of comment? This person actually remained in my space, awaiting a comeback. I had only a blank look to confirm his diagnosis.

Nearly all the serious hate mail and calls I receive attack my sexual orientation. I chose early on in my career to be candid about that. I was advised even by friends not to do so. I believe I was probably the city’s first journalist to introduce this as a fact in my work without making it the central point of my work. I did the same thing when I was in radio. It is in some ways more radical, and therefore more offensive, to make one’s deviance — whatever it is — conspicuous and peripheral at the same time. It’s a way of insisting on the virtue of and the right to be different, because we are all different in some way.

I am often amazed at the sheer depth of some people’s unkindness before the facts of how I choose to love. This week was a milestone. I received an e-mail from someone celebrating the impending death of a friend of mine with AIDS and sarcastically congratulating openly gay WSB-TV reporter Roby Chavez for “striking it big” in testing HIV-positive and losing his job. I admit I was left breathless by the cruelty of this e-mail. One wants to dismiss the authors of such tripe as insane. But more often than not, they turn out to be average people with axes to grind. The cloak of anonymity licenses their vitriol.

Because the two stories in question appeared in the city’s gay newspaper, my guess is that the mail was actually from a gay person. The fact is that the vast majority of queer-bashing mail I get is from gay people, many of whom still think sexuality should either be completely closeted or politically normalized to make it look more acceptable to the dominant culture. I’m not interested in either of those agendas.

Some people’s hatred is so intense that they are weirdly indifferent to reality. For years, the same moron has been calling my voice mail at Creative Loafing and engaging in the same 90-second simulation of sex. It doesn’t seem to matter to him that the voice mail has caller ID. When he first began doing this, I called his number and left a message. Then he took to using a fax line that he apparently thinks can’t be traced. Now, I just play his messages for people at parties.

Some people don’t confine their harassment to the telephone or the Internet. I’ve been stalked quite seriously twice. One stalker was, of all things, a chick with a dick. For utterly no rational reason, she’d decided that I was desirable “trans-phobic.” She called me night and day, left notes on cars in the neighborhood. Her bizarre mix of adulation and hatred grew darker the more I ignored her. Finally, she appeared on my doorstep slashing the air with a knife, bitterly reciting aloud something I’d written about love.

Earlier this year, someone I never met took to following me and sending me detailed e-mails about my every move during the day. He called constantly in jealous rages, to the point that I had my phone equipped with something that requires people to make a recording before I take their call.

And then there are the opposite types: people who cop your identity. Several times, a guy has gone to a restaurant using my name and insisted on a free meal. Someone even went to the trouble of designing letterhead to secure tickets to a tourist attraction in my name, planning an entire weekend trip ... as me. My fantasy is that I’ll learn who he is and forward all the hate mail to him, keeping the nice mail for myself.

Do I regret my work? Certainly not. But it’s true that when I’m sitting on the Plaza of the Incarnation in Sevilla — far, far from Atlanta — I’m usually smiling and quite content not to be a micro-celebrity.??