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schrodingerswordsmith · 7 years

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Jeff Schmalz- An Inspiration in the Face of a Crisis

It takes a special kind of bravery to report and research a disease as you are actively dying of it. Jeffery “Jeff” Schmalz possessed this bravery. Schmalz was a New York Times reporter who wrote political articles until the rise of the AIDS crisis.

AIDS, an acronym for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, first appeared in 1981 and displayed symptoms of a type of rare lung infection. It was given the name AIDS by the CDC on September 24th of 1982, and went on to devastate many families and communities. AIDS begins as HIV, or Human Immunodeficiency Virus, and is incurable. At the time, there was no way to put the virus at bay before it could progress to AIDS.

Needless to say, this disease swept through the United States, although perhaps San Francisco and surrounding areas were hardest hit, and journalists were at the forefront providing the latest news, updates, and obituaries. One of these journalists was Jeff Schmalz. Before the crisis struck, Schmalz remained closeted from the newsroom management which included homophobic executive editor Abe Rosenthal.

The town of Willow Grove, Pennsylvania served as the town where Schmalz was born and raised. He grew up with his mother and his sister Wendy Wilde past the age of two, as his parents divorced. His father, an alcoholic, died when Schmalz was just a teenager, which prompted him to qualify for a fatherless son scholarship which allowed him to attend Columbia University in 1971.

Interestingly enough, Schmalz studied economics and considered attending law school before he eventually began working at the New York Times at age eighteen as a copyboy. He grew to love this job, and after he was promoted to the position of copy editor he dropped out of Columbia to work at the Times as a full-time job.

Schmalz became part of the national staff in 1988, and there he worked as bureau chief in Miami. Two years later, he returned to New York as deputy national editor. To preserve his position, Schmalz remained closeted from most of his superiors. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, coming out as gay at the Times resulted in at least some sort of punishment or setback. This occurred to Schmalz in 1983, after he was diagnosed with AIDS and his secret was out. He was passed over for an important promotion and instead was given an entry-level reporting job that he had accumulated far too much experience to logically do. However, Schmalz did come out to his colleagues and those below him, including journalist Samuel G. Freedman. As he wrote in his article “The Man Who Transformed How The New York Times Covers the Gay Community”, “Jeff gave me a field assignment. I would cover the Gay Pride Parade. I understood his agenda right away. Already in my brief time on the Times, Jeff had told me he was gay, the first person in my life to make such an admission. Somehow, in spite of my overall ignorance, he’d sized me up as someone capable of being sensitized to the reality of gay existence and of doing some small part to personally improve the Times’ coverage of it.”

On December 21st, 1990, Schmalz experienced a grand mal seizure while sitting at his desk and editing an article. His left eye had been twitching for weeks, and he had been experiencing vision problems. Accounting it to stress, he took ten days off and went to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands to relax and hopefully cure his eye twitching. The twitching didn’t stop, and shortly after he returned to work he had the seizure. Many people from the newsroom rushed to his side, and Dr. Lawrence Altman was called from the science desk to assist the situation.

A month later, Schmalz tested HIV-positive. His body had already been destroyed by the virus, and his T Cell count measured just two. At first, it was believed that he could be affected by toxoplasmosis, which is a deadly brain infection. A spinal tap showed no instance of this infection, and the doctors decided that they wanted to perform exploratory brain surgery. It turned out that he had a fatal brain disease known as Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy. This is when he informed the paper of his condition, as he himself said, “I just went in and told them that I had AIDS.” He had a warm friendship with Max Frankel, and he said that “Max cried. Lelyveld cried. They were just so deeply and genuinely moved. They told me that the Times would do anything it could. Historically, the Times has always rallied around employees who are sick and has always treated people exceptionally well, including people with AIDS.”

Shockingly, Schmalz responded well to Azidothymidine, also known as AZT, and became healthy enough to return to work by 1992. He began by covering the 1992 presidential election and eventually began to report on AIDS. In his article “The Prism of AIDS”, published in December of 1992, he wrote, “Now I see the world through the prism of AIDS… 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.”

When Schmalz interviewed people affected by AIDS, he informed them that he had it as well. “To be sure, that is an interview ploy; I'm hoping the camaraderie will open them up,” he wrote. “But there is more to it than that: I want them to take a good look at me, to see that someone with full blown AIDS can carry on for a while, can even function as a reporter. Much of the time, it works. Their faces light up. There is hope.”

In his last three years of life, Schmalz pressed the Times to change the way that they covered members of the LGBT community and, most specifically, gay people. As Freedman wrote, “Jeff burned for the Times to cover gay people and issues in a way that wasn’t exotic or judgmental, and he knew the newsroom politics well enough to recognize that such change would not happen easily. Young, straight, sympathetic reporters like me were Jeff’s stealthy emissaries.” He also wrote about how the Times forbid the use of the word “gay” in all instances except as part of direct quotes.

Near the end of his life, Schmalz utilized dark humor to describe his condition. When his declining T Cell count reached the single digits, he joked about naming them. He used his disease as a tool to bring attention to it and to put a human face to it, instead of just lines of words covering pages that describe the deaths of thousands upon thousands of multifaceted people, many in the prime of their lives. “I have a voice that needs to get out now,” he said, “AIDS is not just a disease. It is a revolution in your life.”

On November 6th, 1993, Jeffery Schmalz died at the age of thirty-nine in his home where he resided in Manhattan. He leaves behind the legacy of promoting tolerance and acceptance in the New York Times, and providing a voice to those who suffered alone during the crisis. He was a major journalist and was at the face of the crisis via journalism.

In December of 1992, in a personal article, he wrote, “To have AIDS is to be alone, no matter the number of friends and family members around.”

Citations:

Frankel, Mark. "When Gay Journalists Were Closeted: A History of AIDS Coverage at 'The Times'." Columbia News. Columbia News, 23 Dec. 2015. Web. 11 Sept. 2017.

http://news.columbia.edu/content/when-gay-journalists-were-closeted-history-aids-coverage-times

Freedman, Samuel G. "The Man Who Transformed How The New York Times Covers the Gay Community." Columbia Journalism Review. Columbia Journalism Review, 30 Nov. 2015. Web. 11 Sept. 2017.

https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/jeff_schmalz_sam_freedman_new_york_times.php

Martin, Justin. "Remembering Jeff Schmalz, Who Reported On AIDS While He Fought The Disease." KERA News. KERA News, 30 Nov. 2015. Web. 11 Sept. 2017.

http://keranews.org/post/remembering-jeff-schmalz-who-reported-aids-while-he-fought-disease

Meislin, Richard J. "Jeffrey Schmalz, 39, Times Writer On Politics and Then AIDS, Dies." The New York Times. The New York Times, 06 Nov. 1993. Web. 11 Sept. 2017.

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/07/obituaries/jeffrey-schmalz-39-times-writer-on-politics-and-then-aids-dies.html

Signorile, Michelangelo. "Out At The New York Times: Gays, Lesbians, AIDS And Homophobia Inside America's Paper Of Record." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 28 Nov. 2012. Web. 11 Sept. 2017.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/new-york-times-gays-lesbians-aids-homophobia_n_2200684.html

WNYC. "Dying Words: The AIDS Reporting of Jeffrey Schmalz." WNYC. WNYC, 14 June 2017. Web. 11 Sept. 2017.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/dying-words-aids-reporting-jeffrey-schmalz/

#report #lgbt #journalism #journalists #aids #aids crisis #jeff schmalz #jeffery schmalz #lgbtq #my post

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