GLR May June

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“toning down her style to strike what she conceives to be a may-
oral demeanor ... while the spirit is still there, too often she has
sounded false and vague.”
He was even tougher on three of the candidates who out-
polled her. He dismissed the incumbent Abe Beame as “hope-
lessly bereft of substance”; excoriated Mario Cuomo (the
eventual runner-up) for remarking that “we’re at a point now in
society where you have to be as primitive as talking about how
we lock up the animals [i.e., blacks] who threaten us”; and de-
nounced the winner, Ed “Fast Eddie” Koch, who—after the fa-
mous blackout that summer and the citywide looting that
followed—shifted to a “law and order” platform and was re-
warded for his shameless “right-left fan dance” with victory.
Doug’s wit was as razor-sharp as his intellect: on another occa-
sion he referred to Cuomo (who in general he admired) as “a
politician able to hide behind his own candor.” And of Koch he
made the devastating comment: “I refute the fact that Ed Koch
is a closet gay man. He is a closet human being.”
STARTING IN THE MID-’70 S, Doug increasingly felt
that his talents and his opportunity to influence
events lay not in direct-action politics but in jour-
nalism. As he put it in one of the first of many ar-
ticles for the then hip, now defunct, SoHo Weekly
News (Jan. 26, 1978):
I used to be in the politics business. Running campaigns for peo-
ple. Helping them ornament their public personalities, and or-
dering their person, private and public agendas, and like that. ...
The politics business is, after all, a trade based upon the manip-
ulation of people. So those skilled at [it] ... are usually quite adept
at ordering their own personalities in such a way as to mask com-
pletely their own real identities ... people who would like to be
nice people but don’t quite know how—and [also] people whose
closets are entirely empty: there’s nobody home at all.
He worked briefly for a wire service, then got hired at The
New York Post in its pre-Murdoch days, when Dorothy Schiff
was still the owner and it had the reputation for being the most
liberal paper in the country. In addition to writing for the radical
SoHo Weekly News, he went on to become, for seven years, the
chief media critic for what was then another genuinely alternative
source of news, The Village Voice. Over time he would write as
well for New York, In These Times, the L.A. Weekly, The Nation ,
POZ, and, later still, the on-line site Tom Paine.com. Overseas—
he lived for most of the ’80s in France—he wrote for Libération
and for the investigative blog Bakchich.
A long list of publications, yet Doug never found a true
home in any of them. One reason was that he insisted on writ-
ing about the struggle for gay equality, though editors and
friends would admonish him, telling him that it would hurt his
credibility as a journalist: “We want you to be taken seriously”
is a line Doug often heard. It reminded him of André Gide’s re-
sponse to friends who tried to dissuade him from publishing
Corydon, his pioneering treatise on homosexuality. Gide would
quote Ibsen: “Friends are dangerous not so much from what
they want to make you do, but because of what they want to
prevent you from doing.”
Also at issue was Doug’s combative refusal to dilute his
commitment to radical politics. Micah Sifry, Doug’s editor at
The Nation, recalls that “it was often a struggle to get his writ-
ing” into the magazine. During the Clinton administration, Sifry
adds, “Doug’s politics were to the left of the magazine’s. It was
not a happy relationship. There was a time when everyone ex-
pected Doug to be the next Jimmy Breslin, but he couldn’t be
the next Jimmy Breslin because he was too true to his principles
and wouldn’t cut those corners.”
John Berendt, Doug’s editor—and lifelong friend—at New
York, tells a similar story. Doug published less than a handful of
pieces in the magazine, his tenure cut short over a political spat.
He was part of a team effort putting together a feature piece
about Andrew Stein, then running for Manhattan Borough pres-
ident, when Stein’s influential father, Jerry Finkelstein, got wind
of Doug’s participation and raised hell about what he assumed
was going to be a hatchet job. Finkelstein was given “assur-
ances”—and Doug resigned in protest.*
If the press lords as a group found Doug toxic, many of his
fellow reporters valued him highly. Bruce Shapiro recalls first
meeting Doug in 1981 when he was “holding court in the con-
ference room at The Nation.” Its editor-in-chief, Victor Navasky,
had enlisted Doug’s help in putting together an American Writ-
ers Congress based on similar leftwing gatherings in the 1930s.
Shapiro also worked on that Congress and remembers Doug as
“an immense, rumpled, bespectacled owl ... regaling a tableful
of interns and editors” with sardonic yarns, “gleefully report[ing]
every ancient sectarian faction fight, sexual imbroglio and bar-
room brawl in New York, inviting us to picture the blood-and-
feathers mayhem that would ensue if Novelist A was put on a
panel with Historian B.” Alternately, Doug held court at Jimmy’s
bar, the Lion’s Head (a favorite hangout for journalists) and
Elaine’s, the celebrity mecca. At all of them Doug ate, drank,
and talked with flamboyant enthusiasm.†
Micah Sifry emphasizes the serious side of Doug’s Fal-
staffian conviviality: “He was probably the most knowledge-
able person I had encountered on the ins and outs of New York
politics and national politics. I was always learning at his knee.”
The writer Christopher Hitchens (“Hitch”) was another pro-
found admirer. When they met in the late ’70s, Doug was one
of the few mainstream journalists who’d come out as openly
gay. That took guts in a notoriously homophobic profession and
Hitch admired him for it. He made a point of telling Doug that
the most emotionally intense—and sexual—relationship of his
22 The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE
* Revealed to me by John Berendt in an e-mail dated March 27, 2014.
† Bruce Shapiro’s “Remembering Doug Ireland” appeared in The Nation, Nov.
2, 2013.