Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) Read Free Page B

passionately.
    It has always seemed to me that this bullypulpit should devote itself, in large part, to those who have no pulpit at all, to the publicly disfranchised. While I care about the affairs of the White House, Congress, and the world community, there are many more people to speak for and about them than there are to speak for the powerless, whether it be the homeless, the poor, the gay men and lesbians, African-Americans, the terminally ill, or people with AIDS. I have chosen often to write about those people and their problems. And the response has often been discouraging.
    I don’t mean that all the mail is brickbats. I remember the day my assistant called to say, “You got a fan letter from Paul Simon!” It was only later that I realized I didn’t know whether it was the singer or the senator. (It was the senator.) When I won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, I was often asked what the best thing about it was. The honest answer is that everything about winning the Pulitzer is great. But the thing I found most cheering was the mail from perfect strangers (emphasis on the adjective) who took time out to say: Congratulations. We are pleased and proud. I kept all those letters, and when I’m getting clobbered pretty badly I’ll read one or two.
    Because part of this job is getting clobbered with some regularity. In my case, the columns that generate the most mail tend to be the ones about those social-welfare issues that move me most powerfully. The response to those issues never ceases to amaze me: the meanness, the vitriol, the Old Testament verses, the Ku Klux Klan literature. With the exception of abortion, I receive no mail on any issue that is as horrid and ignorant as the mail I get on gay rights. (While I have received a fair number of passionate, intelligent, deeply thoughtful letters about why abortion is wrong, I have yet to receive such a letter about homosexuality.) I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words. Nor do I understand people like the man who thought the way to show us what he thought of the idea of gay people serving in the military was to send a box of dead roaches. And by first-class mail, too.
    But the flip side of all this comes when you give voice to people who feel rendered mute by the great world. They are grateful out of all proportion to the simple act.
    I was prepared to be reviled for suggesting that gay Irish should be given a place in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and I was. (“It’s a good thing her grandfather’s already dead,” one caller said the day the column appeared, “or she would have killed him for sure this morning.”) But I was not prepared for the letters of gratitude from so many gay people. I was prepared for negative mail about an affirmative action column. But I was not prepared for all the mail from African-Americans who said, “Thank you for speaking our truth.”
    I was unprepared for the reaction we got when I wrote about the press itself, about how and why we do what we do. Clearly the readers believed we never considered such things, when in fact it sometimes seems that considering them is most of what we do. This was particularly true of what became, for a while, my best-known column, a piece criticizing
The New York Times
for its coverage of the woman who had accused William Kennedy Smith of raping her in Palm Beach. (Mr. Smith, of course, was later acquitted of those charges and the woman, Patricia Bowman, went public to insist that what she had said was true. But before and during the trial the question of using her name was of great moment.) I made the mistake of going on vacation soon after that column, and several readers called to ask whether I had been fired. One right-wing zealot thought that after months of championing welfare cheats, boozy vagrants, and perverts I had finally gotten my just deserts. “Quindlen,” he wrote with glee,