When New York Times reporter Jeffrey Schmalz collapsed at his desk in the paper’s newsroom, just days before Christmas in 1990, few of his colleagues knew for certain that he was gay – he’d only shared that fact with a close circle of friends and family – and none were aware he had AIDS.
That included Schmalz himself.
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The event outed him on both accounts.
In the aftermath, the veteran reporter, 36 at the time, redefined his role at the paper, foregrounding his own experience with the disease in an unorthodox – for the Times – blend of journalism and activism.
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“I was witness as he shed any trace of the neutrality he’d spent a career assuming, got angrier and more impassioned about what was happening to him,” Schmalz’s gay colleague Adam Moss told Times Opinion columnist Maureen Dowd, in a tribute she wrote this month to her friend.
Schmalz also took the opportunity to apologize.
“I came very late to this fight, and have borne an incredible guilt complex because of that. And I’m sorry,” he told Times colleague David Dunlap.
“Not only did Jeff disguise himself in the 1970s – when the social landscape at the Times was as inviting as a bomb crater,” Dunlap said. “But he did so through the 1980s, as well, when lesbians and gay men at the Times were encouraged by the new leadership to believe they were not just tolerated but welcome.”
That welcome was a long time coming.
“The gifted gay men who surrounded me in the Times’s newsroom were cloaked to varying degrees because of the unease of Arthur Ochs ‘Punch’ Sulzberger, the publisher, and Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor, about gays,” Dowd writes. “Rosenthal banned the word ‘gay’ from the Times” – a rule only reversed in 1986 – “and the paper was slow to give gay rights and AIDS the coverage they deserved.”
“The homosexual clique was a problem,” Rosenthal wrote in his journal, reported in a history of the paper by Dowd’s colleague Adam Nagourney, “because it was usually subterranean, which gave it a kind of conspiracy atmosphere, and because homosexuals in the clique always were convinced or tried to convince themselves that they were wiser, more acute, ‘better’ than the others – the old breed.”
“The greatest sadness was, he was with us at a time when he had to hide so much of his personal life to protect his career,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who took over for his father as publisher and supported that welcome for LGBTQ+ staff in the Times newsroom, told Dowd. “It’s a blessing that those days are long gone.”
Following his diagnosis, Schmalz “came back transformed,” Dowd writes. He asked executive editor Max Frankel if he could write about AIDS and gay issues, “and became a pioneer – for the Times, and for journalism.”
“He became the brains and face of AIDS coverage” at the paper.
But as well as writing about the few successes and many setbacks surrounding the epidemic at the time, from scientific advances to political roadblocks in funding to a lack of national empathy, Schmalz examined his own “dual identity” as a reporter and a gay man.
In a 1992 story, Schmalz reflected on his coverage four years earlier of the family of Ricky Ray, who, along with two younger brothers, contracted HIV through a blood transfusion. Ricky had just died.
“How proud I was of myself. How noble of me to write about these people nobody wanted to touch. How smug I was that I, as a gay man, had escaped AIDS. (I now know that I was already infected. But I had not been tested; I felt great.) And how ambivalent I was about the Rays, these people who had parlayed personal tragedy into celebrity – they seemed just a little too available for interviews – and who talked so glibly of death.”
“Now four years later, at the age of 39, it is I who talk matter-of-factly of life and death and who have used my affliction to advantage to obtain interviews and force intimacy. Does that make me feel guilty? You bet. But to have AIDS is to live with guilt and shame.”
“Now I see the world through the prism of AIDS,” Schmalz wrote a year before his own death. “I feel an obligation to those with AIDS to write about it and an obligation to the newspaper to write what just about no other reporter in America can cover in quite the same way.”
“Some people think that it is the journalism that suffers, that objectivity is abandoned. But they are wrong. If the reporters have any integrity at all, it is they who suffer, caught between two allegiances.”
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