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When a nationwide manhunt ensued for a spree killer shortly after designer Gianni Versace was killed in 1997—during the height of the Clinton era, a time in which we were supposedly heralding the gay rights movement’s having arrived—Tom Brokaw, on NBC Nightly News, warned millions of people to be on the look-out for a "homicidal homosexual." Brokaw was talking about suspect Andrew Cunanan,
who was gay, and he conjured up every dark Hollywood fabrication about murderous sexual deviants.
Could you imagine Brokaw saying "a homicidal Jew" was on the loose? Not likely in 1997, but it certainly was how, 70 or so years ago, the media in Europe and America would have described a murderer who happened to be Jewish. Brokaw’s words underscore how far the media have to go in dealing with gays and lesbians, Will & Grace and civil union announcements notwithstanding.
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Usually, it’s around issues of physical intimacy that the media break down entirely in covering gays, as if sexual anxiety suddenly takes over and rational thought goes out the window. When Ellen DeGeneres and actress Ann Heche nuzzled one another in front of Bill Clinton in 1997, the New York Times—that bastion of the so-called liberal media—wasted precious space on its editorial page to criticize the duo for supposedly inappropriate behavior, as if we’ve not seen heterosexuals nuzzling and doing a lot more in public ad nauseum. (Just think Al and Tipper Gore)
That was when the leader of the liberal media, Howell Raines, ran the editorial page.