Editor's Notebook
Editor's Notebook
On Wednesday, May 29, the Burlington Free Press ran Sam Hemingway’s regular column. He writes about politics and personalities, and ordinary people caught up in bureaucratic snafus. That day’s column was about Ginny Winn, whose story ran on our front page in the June issue.
The column Sam wrote was fine, as far as it went. Sam described Ginny’s activism on behalf of the poor and women and wrote that Burlington had “lost a bit of its collective soul” when she died while standing up for a mom and two kids who were about to be detained for leaving a grocery store without paying for their basket full of food.
But in his entire column, not once did Sam mention that Ginny was a lesbian.
I dashed off an email to the Free Press letters-to-the-editor address to chide them for this omission. Our correspondence is reprinted in full below (including the apparently deliberate alternate two mispelling of the columnist’s last name):
From: E. Bear
To: <letters@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 10:52 AM
Subject: Erasure/Ginny Winn
By the way, Sam Hemingway (Wednesday May 29), Ginny Winn was a lesbian. Somehow, as always, when someone does wonderful things for the larger community, you and the rest of the mainstream media conveniently erase the fact that she or he is lesbian or gay. Erasure is discriminatory. Stop it. Sexual identity is just another fact of life, get used to it.
Euan Bear
Bakersfield, Vermont
Euan Bear is the editor of "Out in the Mountains," Vermont’s only newspaper for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer community.
From: Sam Hemmingway <shemingway@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com>
To: E Bear
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 2:09 PM
Subject: Ginny
Dear Euan,
I am well aware that Ginny was a lesbian and if you know my work, i.e. the LaStradas, civil unions etc, I think you know I have no problem with whatever anyone’s sexual orientation is. As a matter of course, I don’t put someone’s orientation – heterosexual or homosexual – in a story unless I think it is necessary. In this case, I didn’t. Perhaps I could have, but I thought the essential message here was her accomplishments and dedication to the plight of low income people, not that she was a lesbian.
Sam Hemingway
From: E. Bear
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 7:40 PM
To: shemingway@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com
Subject: Re: Ginny
What you’re not getting, Sam, is that when a person is a member of a minority, especially when that minority has been routinely subjected to the most vile slanders and bigoted remarks in public in the pages of the mainstream press and in the halls of our own State House, then the fact that this wonderful, dedicated-to-the-poor person is a lesbian ought to be part of the picture. She didn’t fight just for poor women but for all women, including lesbians, and she was sustained in that struggle by her lesbian friends and lovers.
Erasure is erasure. When the picture is so skewed that the only things you guys print about us is when there’s some bigot blasting away (verbally or otherwise) or sensationalized photographs of the more extreme members of our annual parade, it should be a part of responsible journalism to mention it when an ordinary person who worked all her life to make the world better and died in that struggle that this person was, by the way, a member of that reviled minority. The fact that you – not an apparent member of any minority whatsoever – decided it wasn’t relevant is quite telling.
Euan Bear
PS: I can only gather from your response that the likelihood of my letter to the editor being printed is nil.
From: Sam Hemmingway <shemingway@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com>
To: ‘E. Bear’
Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2002 10:35 AM
Subject: RE: Ginny
Dear Euan,
I have nothing to do with whether the letter is printed. Another department. I was just writing back personally to give you some insight into how I put the piece together. I am sorry you were disappointed with it.
Sam H.
Corrections:
The alert readers among you no doubt noticed that the articles on the front page of the June issue appeared in italic type. Although, yes, we do feel passionate about our front-page stories, that was an encoding error made by the printer.
And the name of the other publication for which St. Mike’s professor and OITM contributor Paul Olsen (“’Til Divorce Do Us Part”) also writes got mangled – it’s in newsweekly, which also should have been credited as the source for the photo of Arthur Tremblay.
The speaker from Colchester mentioned in the Youth Pride article informed me that her name is spelled Bekki, not Becky, as I had written.
For fans of Curbside, the comic strip by Robert Kirby, don’t worry – we still intend to publish the strip, but had to make some tough choices of what to cut from a very full issue in June.
Finally, I should have made clear to letter writer Paul O’Kane that Out in the Mountains is in fact available at two places in Waterbury: Depot Beverage (1 River Road) and KC's Bagel Café (17-19 Stowe Street). If he – or any other readers – can’t find papers there, it’s likely because so many readers are picking up copies that they simply run out.