Talk of the Town - Etcetera folds March 13 2002

About 10 years ago, maybe longer, I was lying in a tanning bed, hooked up to my Walkman headset. I decided, contrary to common sense, to tune in WGST talk radio. What I heard — a homophobic rant by one of the “personalities” there — so shocked me that I sat up involuntarily, knocking the bulb guard off the bed and leaving a bruise on my forehead for a week.

It was one of those moments when life presents a picture of itself that is very different from the one you’ve been imagining to be true. Having worked a number of high-profile jobs (editing this newspaper, for one) as an openly gay man, I’d come to the conclusion that responsible people no longer publicly engaged in such hate speech.

I began listening to WGST fairly regularly and was stunned by how often the subject of homosexuality is raised. I suppose, in retrospect, it’s not surprising that people paid to inflame controversy would resort to homophobic ranting. I also have come to understand that homosexuality is an important subject of public discourse because it crystallizes so many cultural issues about freedom, the body and pleasure. What really bothered me was that so few gay people were calling to reply to the homophobic ranting. In fact, the few who called seemed to apologize for the behavior of “bad homosexuals.”

This was about the same time I was doing my clinical training for my master’s in psychology. I did that north of San Francisco, commuting there almost half the year for more than two years. The experience of that city’s gay community — where I was actually invited to be a judge of its monumental gay pride parade one year — was world-changing for me. In Atlanta, my more radical opinions about gay politics and sexuality made me an outsider in the gay community. There, they were no big deal. In fact, they gave me an entree.

So when I heard the ranting on WGST and saw the total lack of effective response from other gay people, I paid a visit to Jack Pelham, editor of Etcetera magazine. I agreed to write a twice-monthly column for the weekly magazine — for the lowest fee I’d been paid in my entire career. I was consumed with the wish — the inflated wish — to give voice to some ideas and perspectives that simply weren’t being articulated in Atlanta’s gay media.

Although Etcetera had a reputation primarily as a “bar rag,” its owners — Pat Coleman, Jaye Evans and Jim Heverly — seemed committed to an edgier perspective than that of then-emerging weekly newspaper Southern Voice. Though the latter continues to do an excellent job of reporting, it has been comparatively conservative in its editorial positions, promoting a mainstreamed gay image that probably accurately represents the interests of most gay people but fails to represent many others.

For about eight years, my “Out of Bounds” column ran twice monthly. Although I was writing “Paradigms” and “Grazing” for CL during these same years, my Etcetera column made me far better known — or infamous — in the city’s gay community. During those years, I worked out much of my own anger and anxiety in public. Starting that column at about the same time I woke up one morning and realized that every one of my closest friends had died of HIV, I was radicalized by my grief and became an active supporter of groups like ACT-UP and Queer Nation. Both employed a kind of guerilla-theater street activism that outraged many mainstream gay people. In some ways, my column, as an exercise in the provocateur’s art, was an extension of that.

I did not enjoy the notoriety my work at Etcetera brought me. Anyone who works in gay media can tell you that many gay people, though marginalized themselves, have an astoundingly low tolerance for any point of view that doesn’t put the best face on homosexuality. The notion is that we must all have the same perspective, look our best to the dominant culture and hide our internal differences in order to advance a fictitiously common political agenda. I became a “bad queer” in many people’s opinion — and nobody hesitated to tell me so, though I often heard that I wasn’t nearly as obnoxious in person as in print.

Etcetera went into a severe decline a few years ago. Coleman and Evans both died of AIDS in the early ’90s. For reasons nobody understood, the magazine stopped employing advertising reps several years ago and then, a year or so ago, as pages dropped dramatically, eliminated all columns and devoted itself almost completely to entertainment coverage, completely dulling any edginess it ever had. Two weeks ago, it ceased publication altogether.

I certainly didn’t miss writing “Out of Bounds” when Pelham discontinued it. As that column fades from people’s memory, so does my own paranoia in every social encounter. But I do mourn Etcetera’s closing. It was the last gasp of the liberal queer perspective in Atlanta and an important part of many people’s coming-out process, including my own. I hope someone decides to fill the gap with a new magazine.??