Philadelphia Gay News

Flash back to 1980 and the Mariel boatlift of Cuban refugees. Mark Segal, publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News, gets a tip that one group of refugees - Cuban gays - is being detained by the U.S. government at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa. He decides that PGN should investigate. "I gained entrance with my photographer and a reporter. I was dressed as a priest - Father Segal," Segal gleefully recalls. "And they bought it. " Entering the barracks, "Father" Segal and his entourage encountered "hundreds of these Cuban drag queens," and they set to work interviewing and taking pictures.

John Mandes, ex Avon man, former goatherder, one of the last hand bookbinders in the United States of America, is sitting in the airless basement cell at 11th and Locust where he puts out the Philadelphia Gay News. He's trying to find a blank check so he can pay his lone staff copy editor, as the office guys upstairs keep buzzing him on the other line. Actually, they don't buzz him. They assault him. The phone system at PGN, as the respected weekly Mandes is in the process of remaking is known, announces an incoming call with a blast like the air guns they shoot off at Sixers games.

As a Center City real estate investor and businessman of 40 years, Mel Heifetz is no stranger to mortgages, but he still breaks into a grin when he tells you he's been "mortgage-free for 15 years. " Yesterday, Heifetz shared that feeling in a big way with the community where he has been a quiet but forceful presence for decades - giving $274,000 to pay off the mortgage on the William Way Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center. "This is not our mortgage, this is your mortgage," Heifetz, 69, told a crowd of about 100 gathered for a mortgage-burning ceremony at the center, at 1315 Spruce St. Heifetz noted that everyone in the the crowd, a cross-section of the city's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (or GLBT)

For Donald Carter, the groundbreaking of an LGBT-friendly senior housing facility meant more than just the creation of a facility. It was the culmination of more than 40 years of activism. "I started this experience as an outlaw, a social outlaw, a sexual outlaw," said Carter, a gay African American who began demonstrating in the 1960s for rights for lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. Now 62, Carter was in attendance as city, state, and federal officials broke ground Friday for the first LGBT-friendly senior housing facility in the nation, the John C. Anderson Apartments on the 200 block of South 13th Street.

JOURNALISM is an art. But it parades its words as a science at times. We in the news business take printed words and give them to what we hope is an eager public wanting facts. We try to do that in an interesting way without being sensationalistic. When the news is something completely new, like the recent SARS epidemic, we give as much information as possible and as many viewpoints. I learned this from Daily News editor Zack Stalberg and former editorial page editor Richard Aregood.

City Councilmen Francis Rafferty and Angel Ortiz, fighting for their political lives in the upcoming Democratic primary, did a little verbal sparring yesterday in Council. Council was discussing a bill sponsored by Ortiz that would have banned assault weapons in the city when Rafferty suddenly took a detour to talk about gays. "These people are killing more people than the guys with the guns," Rafferty said. "They're spreading the most dangerous disease in the world . . . Hey, but what do we do?

Joseph F. Beam, a writer and a leading spokesman for the black gay community, was found dead Tuesday at his Center City home, three days before his 34th birthday. He had been ill for the last year with respiratory and stomach ailments, his family said. A conclusion in the case has not been reached by the Medical Examiner's Office, but he is believed to have died of natural causes, a spokesman said. Mr. Beam was noted for editing In the Life, an 1986 anthology of work by black gay writers.

As a leather-lunged, gay-rights activist, Mark Segal was sort of a cross between Ralph Nader and Ethel Merman. Starting Saturday, he takes a shot at being Larry King. Segal will host "Gay Talk," believed to be America's first call-in, gay talk show on a commercial radio station. The two-hour, weekly show premieres Saturday at 4:30 p.m. on WDVT (900/AM). "As far as hosting a show, I've never done it in my life. I'm as green as the fields in New Jersey," said Segal, the former Gay Raider, founder and publisher of the weekly Philadelphia Gay News.

TWO MEN who were part of the heartbeat of Philadelphia have died. Each, though completely apart in lifestyle, provided to our city a legacy to remember. Thacher Longstreth, the tall councilman, the man from Chestnut Hill. He was the symbolic picture of a Philadelphia long gone. His manner, his style of clothing, his familiar walk and smile. He was a man who loved to laugh and make others laugh. Like the cobblestone streets of upper Germantown Avenue that led one to Chestnut Hill, he was a foundation and a fighter for our city.

A local theater group held a meeting to discuss performance ideas this winter and came up with a shocking concept: What about a love story? For Avalanche, a multiracial lesbian and gay troupe, this is a radical notion. The group, founded four years ago by gay-rights activist Tommi Avicolli, is better known for making waves than making love. "When we were talking about our next production," said Avicolli, "someone said, 'I'm writing a love story.' I said that I was writing one, too. We've never done love stories before, and we didn't think anyone else had. So that confirmed our feeling we should do this.

For Donald Carter, the groundbreaking of an LGBT-friendly senior housing facility meant more than just the creation of a facility. It was the culmination of more than 40 years of activism. "I started this experience as an outlaw, a social outlaw, a sexual outlaw," said Carter, a gay African American who began demonstrating in the 1960s for rights for lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. Now 62, Carter was in attendance as city, state, and federal officials broke ground Friday for the first LGBT-friendly senior housing facility in the nation, the John C. Anderson Apartments on the 200 block of South 13th Street.

IF MARRIAGE equality is a matter of civil rights, then America is finally starting to wake up. If it's a wedge issue designed to win elections, then social conservatives might want to find a new one. And if banning same-sex marriage is God's will, then God can't be thrilled with voters in Maryland, Maine and Washington. Tuesday, they became the first states to approve same-sex marriage by popular vote, a stunning turnaround that gay-rights leaders say could spur pushes for similar rights in states that already have established civil unions, including Delaware, Illinois, Rhode Island and Hawaii.

When I got to the Chick-fil-A on Columbus Boulevard above Oregon Avenue on Wednesday, I couldn't tell if the "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" called for by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was a success in South Philly. The chicken chain is the newest Ground Zero in the culture wars, this time over same-sex marriage. By the end of the day, it was reported that people had flocked to the chicken chain, creating its best day ever. Supporters of gay marriage plan to demonstrate Friday.

NEW YORK - After a confidential two-year review, the Boy Scouts of America on Tuesday emphatically reaffirmed its policy of excluding gays, angering critics who hoped that relentless protest campaigns might lead to change. The Scouts cited support from parents as a key reason for keeping the policy and expressed hope that the prolonged debate over it might now subside. Bitter reactions from gay-rights activists suggested that result was unlikely. The Scouts' national spokesman, Deron Smith, told The Associated Press that an 11-member special committee, formed discreetly by top Scout leaders in 2010, came to the conclusion that the exclusion policy "is absolutely the best policy" for the 102-year-old organization.

The Boy Scouts of America has reaffirmed its longtime policy of barring openly gay boys from membership and gay or lesbian adults from serving as leaders. The decision, announced Tuesday, came after what the organization described as a wide-ranging internal review and despite public protests. The exclusion policy "reflects the beliefs and perspectives" of the organization, the Boy Scouts said in a release from its national headquarters in Irving, Texas. "While a majority of our membership agrees with our policy, we fully understand that no single policy will accommodate the many diverse views among our membership or society," said Bob Mazzuca, the chief Scout executive, according to the statement.

SOME DAYS, Mark Segal writes about gay history. Other days, he makes it. As leader of the "Gay Raiders" activist group in 1973, Segal forced the gay-rights movement into the national spotlight by running in front of the cameras during a live broadcast of "CBS Evening News" with Walter Cronkite. Two years later, he founded the Philadelphia Gay News, a weekly newspaper targeting the area's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender population. He still publishes it. So when Segal heard some tea-party types on TV last year saying the Founding Fathers didn't have homosexuals in mind when they formed the United States, he started plotting a response.

EVEN FROM his pioneering days in the early 1970s as a young "Gay Raider" who broke into nightly newscasts just to get the media to acknowledge that homosexuals exist, Mark Segal insists, he believed this day would come. In Pennsylvania - long viewed as an East Coast bastion of blue-collar social conservatism - a new poll shows that half of residents now support gay marriage, and a solid majority supports civil unions for same-sex couples. The Franklin & Marshall College Poll, conducted for the Daily News and other statewide media outlets, finds that exactly 50 percent of Pennsylvanians either strongly or somewhat support a constitutional amendment to allow same-sex marriage.

In January 1976, Philadelphia Daily News staffer Pete Dexter reported that the Philadelphia Gay News had just published its first edition, with a "lavender-colored front-page story about Dr. Walter J. Lear. " The headline: "Philadelphia health official comes out. " The new monthly newspaper reported that Dr. Lear, who was 52, only recently "came out of the closet . . . to emphasize the need for better medical treatment for gays. " Dr. Lear, living in Powelton Village with his partner of 22 years, was the regional health commissioner for the Pennsylvania Health Department.

It's happened so often that it's now a cultural cliche: the gay politician pretending to be straight. In most parts of the nation, homosexuality or bisexuality is a clear electoral liability. Not in Center City's 182d state House district. There, it's a badge of honor. Veteran Rep. Babette Josephs (D., Phila.) last Thursday accused her primary opponent, Gregg Kravitz, of pretending to be bisexual in order to pander to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender voters, a powerful bloc in the district.