This is my inaugural issue as editor-in-chief. I am honored and excited to have taken on this position. I started out years ago as a contributing writer and was then promoted to news editor before the publisher asked me to lead our talented team. I work with an amazing group of people dedicated to this important work and to our mission of giving our community a voice, telling our stories and reporting news that impacts our lives.
These are challenging times for us right now, and frankly, I’m not used to that. I came out when I was 29. (I’m 49 now.) During my early years out of the closet, we had a president who was friendly to our community, we celebrated victories like winning marriage equality and saw the White House illuminated in rainbow colors. While those colors on the People’s House have dimmed, we cannot let our spirits do the same.
For strength, I look to our elders, who suffered the indignity of being pathologized by mental health professionals, who demanded dignity at Stonewall and who held loved ones in their arms as they died of AIDS in a country that largely turned its back. We made it through that, and if history is any teacher, we will make it through the current adversity facing us.
We have a place in society and contribute to it just as anyone else does. The stories you have read in these pages and online over the years have celebrated our queer community and have reported our triumphs and setbacks.
That will continue to evolve. Our news department is growing. We are bringing on more reporters to ensure we cover all the issues that affect you from Sussex to Cape May counties and beyond. However, none of us here does this work full time. So I ask you to help us by being our eyes and ears out there.
Send news tips to me at editor@outinjersey.net or to our news editor, Spencer Watson, at newseditor@outinjersey.net.
A while back, I had the pleasure of interviewing our senior U.S. senator, Cory Booker. He said something to me I found quite powerful. I printed out what he said, framed it and hung it in my apartment as inspiration. I look at it every day.
He told me, “You cannot have great courage without great fear. You cannot have great hope without confronting great despair. Ultimately, hope and courage are choices we have to make. In fact, I think hope is the active conviction that despair will not have the last word.”
So while we are going backward in a lot of ways amid the country’s shift to the ideological right, we have to make a decision whether despair will have the final word. It didn’t in the past, and it won’t now.
So while we are going backward in a lot of ways amid the country’s shift to the ideological right, we have to make a decision whether despair will have the final word. It didn’t in the past, and it won’t now.
