Thread by @jbenton

I am very sorry to report the death of @bydebprice, a tremendous journalist, a Nieman Fellow (Class of 2011), and a real trailblazer for LGBTQ people in newsrooms and around the country.

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One trail she blazed: In 1992, Deb — then an editor in the Washington bureau of the @detroitnews — launched the first nationally syndicated column about gay issues to run in mainstream newspapers.

It's hard to overestimate how significant this was. This was long before the Internet gave Americans a window into any topic or community they wanted. Most people got a huge share of their information about the world from the local daily and local TV news.

Most Americans in 1992 said they didn't know a single gay person. Then suddenly there was Deb, on the breakfast table next to the sports section.

She wasn't just running in NYC and SF, either — she was reaching people in red states, too.

An openly gay columnist in 1992 generated the kind of negative response you might expect. When a paper started running Deb, the letters to the editor often featured one or more locals who viewed it as an endorsement of sin.

(This was 5 years before Ellen DeGeneres came out.)

But opinions went in the other direction, too.

(One side note: One of the very first people to complain about the column was Michigan politician David Jaye, who called it a symptom of cultural decline. "Will bondage columns be next?")

(Jaye would later become the first Michigan state senator to be thrown out of office by his colleagues, for "drunken, assaultive behavior at a gas station" and because he wouldn't stop getting DUIs. Here's one of his more recent mugshots.)

Deb and her partner (later wife) @joycemurdoch compiled her columns and other experiences into a book, "And Say Hi to Joyce: The Life and Chronicles of a Lesbian Couple."

amazon.com/Say-Hi-Joyce-M…

They dedicated it "to all the gay readers who’ve put 25 cents in a newspaper box and found nothing reflecting their own lives inside."

amazon.com/Say-Hi-Joyce-M…

Another trail blazed: In 2003, Deb and Joyce married in Canada — when it was still illegal in all 50 states. The @washingtonpost published their marriage announcement — the very first time a major U.S. newspaper did so for a gay couple.

"We feel like we are finally first-class citizens," Joyce told an AP reporter.

Deb and Joyce also wrote "Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. The Supreme Court," a history of gay rights cases that involved interviewing more than 100 former SCOTUS clerks and deep manuscript research

amazon.com/Courting-Justi…

My favorite (awful) tidbit from that book:

Lewis Powell, about to cast the deciding vote in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), told his fellow justices that he'd never met a gay person.

Turns out Powell had: He picked one or more gay law clerks for six straight years in the 1980s.

(Powell's decisive vote was not a good one: In Bowers, the court ruled 5-4 that it was perfectly fine for the state of Georgia to make consensual oral and anal sex a crime with a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowers_v.…

Deb most recently worked at the @SCMPNews in Hong Kong, after being @WSJ's SE Asia editor.

I only got to know Deb for her year as a @niemanfdn Fellow, but it was obvious she was a gem.

All my thoughts are with Joyce, her partner for 35 years, and to her friends and family. /end