From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 01:15:28 -0500

Hello,

Here is another of my recent columns for your archive.

Patricia

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NEWS YOU WON'T SEE ON TV

Syndicated column by Patricia Nell Warren

Patricia Nell Warren is the author of "The Front Runner" and other
bestselling novels.  Her publisher is Wildcat Press of Los Angeles.   Her
books are available from Ingram and other trade distributors.    This column
was written in response to remarks by Jerry Netolicky in the Iowa State Daily
in Nov. '95.   Iowa State Daily wouldn't print it.  But The Letter did.

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READER'S DIGEST REDUX

by Patricia Nell Warren

When I saw the mighty powers of the Reader's Digest invoked against
homosexuals  in Mr. Netolicky's column, I couldn't resist a smile.  I worked
for the Reader's Digest for 22 years, from 1959 to 1981, at the corporate
headquarters in Chappaqua, N. Y. Yes, the Reader's Digest has published
articles disapproving of homosexuality.  And yes, the Digest, like many
conservative media companies, has employed gay people -- more or less
knowingly.  I was among them, and lived to tell the tale.

The Bible is one thing, and real life is another.

"The solid-gold salt mine," we called the magazine. I was a book editor,
first with the magazine, later with the book club.   There, in that bucolic
Westchester landscape, on my lunch hours in 1973, on the brink of coming out,
I labored over a novel about closet gay love in the sports world.  I called
it  "The Front Runner" and kept it in a locked bottom drawer.  Next spring,
when it was published by William Morrow,  I outed myself, in effect.  The
outing ceremony was completed by my  statement to a New York Post reporter
who interviewed me, about relationships with women.  Since all my colleagues
read the Manhattan press, the big secret was all over the company next day. 

Shortly that "Front Runner" hardback  leaped onto the bestseller list, and a
year later was still selling briskly  in Bantam paperback.  All the while,
some RD eyebrows were raised, for sure.  But surprisingly, no one  tried to
burn me at the stake in the company parking lot. In fact,  the company
magazine "Pegasus" actually did a little article on my bestseller.   I went
on working there for another 6 years, and had many piquant adventures...like
being sent to interview  Merle Miller, after the Digest decided to condense
this gay writer's  biography of Truman.

Finally I left in 1981, having landed a book contract with Random House  that
led me to greener pastures.   My CB buddies gave me a send-off party and many
blessings.  

Whether Mr. Netolicky can accept  it or not, we homosexuals  are  everywhere.
We belong to everybody's families, and everybody's companies, and everybody's
organizations.  Many of us still stay hidden  because of the terrible
penalties for getting caught. Our society has chosen to live by the rules in
a book compiled 2000 years ago, and the enforcers of those rules have tried
to make us buckle.  For centuries,  they've tried torture, public execution,
humiliation, blackmail, institutionalizing, shock treatment, prison, shame,
unemployment, taking away your children.  All things considered, I was
treated royally by the Digest.

But the enforcers always fail.  We always come back, like the geese in
spring.

Oh yes,  the shame, pain, horror, etc. do get to some of us.  Some of us
choose -- yes, choose -- to try and stop being gay. I tried  --  for 16
years, while working there in the solid gold mine -- young career woman,
coming and going in that 70s maxi-coat, with that heavy briefcase chained to
my wrist.  After I came out, I often lunched with another woman staffer, who
was 24-carat  like me.  The two of us sat at a corner table in the RD
cafeteria,  and  talked of the hair-raising try -- giving heterosexual
marriage our best shot for many years.   We even reached the point where we
could laugh about it.

Today "The Front Runner is still in print, and  I have to smile at all the
sermonizing about evil gays -- the dramatic pointings to this and that verse.
The thunderings in that ancient bundle of writings, which were edited and
re-edited so many times, don't mean anything to me.  You see, working at the
Digest taught me of the power of an editor's pencil. 

 There is the fact of countless thousands of  writers, translators and
editors who labored over the Bible through so many centuries. Some people
talk about  the Bible as if it was never touched by human hands, or fought
over -- or jimmied by a whole train of church councils, who put things in and
took things out.  I took things in and out of books for 22 years, and it
taught me something unforgettable (a favorite Digest word) about the vast
power that I had -- just one person at a solid-gold desk -- to change one
single word in a text. Through changing that word, I could skew a whole
paragraph or a rticle.  I could slightly twist 28 million minds (the number
of Digest subscribers at that time).  After all, didn't those people "have
faith in Reader's Digest"? Didn't they believe everything they read?  

In my opinion,  any Deity -- Goddess and God -- who is  smart enough to
create the Universe, and all the laws in it, is also smart enough not to lock
Truth in a  book where people can mess with it. 

Of all the things I learned in the solid gold salt mine,  that illumination
was the biggest nugget that I carried away.

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Copyright 1995 by Patricia Nell Warren.   Permission granted to post on the
Internet.  All other rights reserved.   This column was printed in The Letter
12/95.  Permission to reprint in print media must be obtained from the
author.  For information, email [email-masked]

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