As the demand for “moral clarity” in journalism grows, at least among progressive journalists, I’m forced to reconsider my career as a censor, back when I was an editor at The Village Voice. The paper had a history of antigay commentary, though, in fairness, insults directed at all sorts of groups appeared in its pages. There were no rules about what could be written, other than considerations of libel. I flourished in that climate, but in 1979, something happened that shook my belief in free speech.
That year, the Voice became the first major publication to feature a special section on gay life. It was my idea, and I edited the project. In an ecumenical spirit, I invited the cartoonist Jules Feiffer to contribute something. He produced an odious strip that featured all the common epithets for gay people, with regrets that he could no longer use those words. Instead, he would have to go back to saying “nigger.” Was Feiffer being ironic? I didn’t think so, and neither did a black colleague to whom I showed the piece. We were horrified, and we asked the editor-in-chief to kill it, but after reflecting on the matter he decided to publish the cartoon. The result was a typical Voice brawl in print. I was accused of being part of the “thought police.” I noticed that everyone attacking me belonged to the same group: straight white men. I concluded that, for the dominant class in any hierarchy, losing the right to express contempt for their inferiors felt like censorship, whereas for those low on the pecking order, it felt like justice. In order to make my position on bigoted language clear, I came out in the paper, and as a result I lost most of my straight male friends, a painful reminder of what it meant to be gay in a workplace proud of its tolerance.
The relationship between free speech and social ranking hasn’t changed. It’s still about who has the power to regulate discourse, and the pattern I detected at the Voice still applies. Straight white men (along with the “virtually normal” Andrew Sullivan) lean toward the libertarian side, while women and blacks usually favor suppressing racist and sexist rhetoric. I don’t mean to suggest that all white dudes relish insulting women and minorities—it would be unthinkable for my male students to admire Eminem’s frenzy of poetic hate. But the urge to build a new world casts a wide net on the culture. Everything from films to songs by suspect artists is subject to scrutiny, and even debates over policy have to be considered in terms of the threat they pose.
Earlier this month, a piece by Senator Tom Cotton, advocating the use of military force against protesters, briefly appeared on the web site of The New York Times. Nearly 1000 staffers objected, and its publisher apologized. Even more decisively, the editor of its op-ed page was, let’s say, inspired to resign. Three Times columnists weighed in: one—a woman—endorsed the paper’s response, while two white men found the Times guilty of bowing to what one of them called “a mob.” (A mob is a crowd whose views you don’t share.) I’m delighted to see the staff of any publication act up, and I share their revulsion at Cotton’s views. But I also worry about a retreat in journalism from presenting all sides in a public dispute. I note that, under the new regime at the Times, the op-ed page has become an echo chamber of what the paper stands for, along with tips for better parenting (as in: stop Instagraming your children). That’s a far cry from the spirit of the op-ed page when it began in 1970. It was supposed to offer views too unorthodox for the rest of the paper. Now it’s part of an anodyne environment in which the paper gives the reader what zie wants.
Yet, I can’t say this without recognizing that my libertarian leanings reflect the rising status of white gay men like me. I don’t fear being shot by a cop who takes my identity into account. My enemies are individuals steeped in hatred, not a systemic presence that dominates every aspect of my life the way it once did. Still, I remember when I was on the other side of the safety divide, so I empathize with the rage that racist and sexist images inspire in those who carry a sense of peril as a constant burden. So, when I state that I favor airing offensive ideas, I do so as a leap of faith, not a certainty that I am right.
Tom Cotton’s piece revealed the noose under the Republican red tie. That’s one reason why I think it was an important read. Another is Cotton’s ambition. The essay was a bald attempt to inherit the MAGA mantle, and if Trump is defeated, that may well happen. I’ve long believed that we should be grateful for Trump’s impulsive stupidity. But what if he were succeeded by someone with a smart version of the same agenda? Cotton is a Harvard Law School graduate with a firm grasp of policy. He is Trump with a pedigree.
But how dangerous was his piece? Here’s why that question is important. Free speech isn’t absolute. That right may be abridged when it presents what courts have called “a clear and present danger,” and so the question for me is whether Cotton’s essay placed the demonstrators in peril. That’s what the protesting staffers at the Times thought, and its most nuanced columnist, Michelle Goldberg, agreed. By publicizing Cotton’s essay, she argued, the paper was abetting potential violence.
The first thing that came to mind when I read Goldberg’s column was the memory of how glad I was to see troops arrive on the streets of Chicago during the antiwar protests of 1968. They were much more sympathetic than the police, and they formed a buffer between us and the raging cops. Troops were called out in the race riots of the 60s, but the death toll was much lower than it would have been in had they fired their weapons. They were under orders from Lyndon Johnson not to shoot looters. This time, the orders would have been different, and the result could have been a bloodbath. So the problem was not the ideas in Cotton’s piece, but how they resonated with the president’s brutality. If it had been politically feasible to send in the troops, Trump surely would have done so whether or not The Times published an essay urging him on. Nor did publishing it change the widespread opposition to using military force. That consensus was what protected the protesters.
Journalists—including me—tend to think of their words as immensely consequential, but Cotton represented a minority opinion, and the mere fact that his views appeared in the paper of record didn’t change that. If there was a threat in the piece, it wasn’t to the protesters, but to the Times. Publishing the essay stood to upset their major growth market, online subscribers. Devotees of social media are more likely to cancel a person or boycott a publication that offends them than are those who still prefer print. That’s partly because “legacy readers,” as they’re called, grew up in a more libertarian era. The op-ed editor’s problem was not his penchant for unorthodox writing, but his archaic devotion to the value of controversy rather than affirmation.
I don’t mean to suggest that the Times is uniquely censorious. Every for-profit publication is an amalgam of principles and business interests. But there’s a difference between a readership that expects to be challenged and one that demands to be affirmed. This brings me to Goldberg’s second, and more valid point: that Cotton’s essay was repugnant. “In a racist inversion,” she writes, “he equates his fantasy of soldiers putting down an uprising triggered by police brutality against black people with previous presidents using the military to enforce desegregation.” She concludes that “the liberal inclination to hear both sides” would smack up against “sheer moral abhorrence.”
Feiffer’s cartoon was morally abhorrent, too. Remember that, in 1979, it was possible to mount a homosexual-panic defense in murder trials; overt discrimination against gay people was legal in most states, and transpeople of color were in triple jeopardy. Danger was all around me, even before AIDS. Under those conditions, I saw the cartoon as the expression of a perilous bias, and I wanted the Voice to reject it. But our editor-in-chief made the right call. I learned something from having that odious strip in the same issue as mainstream journalism’s first gay life section. It forced me to face what we were up against. I realized that we had to struggle against men, including some progressives, for whom heterosexism was an acceptable attitude. Feminists at the paper had reached the same conclusion about such men, and thanks to their support I survived the crisis.
I’m certainly not in a position to lecture today’s protesters. I can only offer the lessons of my experience. I’ve concluded that the need to censor stems from a feeling of fragility. That insecurity is usually a rational response to reality. But forbidding offensive attitudes from being publicly stated doesn’t mean they’ve been repressed. It merely guarantees that they will be expressed in inflected ways. Better to understand that the remedy for fragility is unity. Once you unite, you’re stronger than you think.