I don’t remember any policies about interoffice relationships, but I do remember an ever-replenishing supply of impressive young women. Increasingly well-educated and ambitious, they were the beneficiaries of everything the women’s movement had fought for—graduating from college with every expectation of a serious and fulfilling career, not just a job to keep them busy before marriage and motherhood.
Now there was so much proximity between male and female colleagues—in meetings, at work dinners, on the road. Suddenly men were surrounded by exceptional young women seeking mentors, looking to impress and rise through the ranks and even compete with their male counterparts—women they were spending more time with than their wives. While there were plenty of guys who jumped on the 6:07 to Scarsdale and back to their families, many others felt perfectly within their rights to come on to their new colleagues.
Meanwhile, it fell to the women to navigate the situation. Some cheerfully deflected advances, defusing the moment with humor. Others willingly participated, having flings for the fun of it, a no-harm-no-foul mentality. Some leveraged the situation, accommodating a supervisor’s desires for the sake of their careers. Still others objected and risked being marginalized, demoted, even fired for some cooked-up reason. In that culture, as dysfunctional as it was widespread, women had to adapt to survive.
As for Matt, his MO had a psychology and contours all its own that wouldn’t be revealed for years to come.
45
Affable Eva Braun
WITH THE CULTURE wars raging, the ’90s were an incredible time to be in the news business. Everything from abortion to religion to the National Endowment for the Arts sparked vicious debate, although nothing more so than gay rights.
Ellen DeGeneres had come out and Will and Grace was a huge hit—gay life was in the nation’s living rooms like never before. But so was its equal and opposite reaction, homophobia. Pat Buchanan decried “homosexual rights” at the ’92 Republican convention; the Defense of Marriage Act passed—defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman; and Focus on the Family launched a “conversion therapy” ministry, sending a message that one’s gayness can and should be reversed. It was all so fraught. An ideological tinderbox.
In 1988, a month into his freshman year at the University of Wyoming, Matthew Shepard left a bar in Laramie with two high school dropouts who then beat him with the butt of a gun 19 times, fracturing his skull. Then they lashed him to a fence by a desolate stretch of prairie and left him to die.
Matthew was slight, just five foot two and 105 pounds, and he still had braces on his teeth. He was also gay, and his brutal murder made him a symbol of virulent homophobia. The story dominated the headlines as the nation grappled with the depraved violence that had unfolded that night.
I sat down with Matthew’s devastated parents, Judy and Dennis, for Dateline; watching the interview now, I’m struck by how differently the subject of having a gay child was treated back then. Even by me.
Dennis: I think it was hard for him initially to say, “Dad, I’m sorry but I’m gay.”
Judy: He was our son—we would have accepted him and loved him and supported him no matter what decisions he made.
Me: Having said that, was it a bit hard to accept at all?
Dennis: You want to see your son or your daughter have grandchildren so that the family tree continues. It was hard to accept the fact that it stops here.
I interviewed Jim Geringer, then the governor of Wyoming, about the crime, specifically asking if conservative groups were contributing to an anti-gay atmosphere by promoting conversion therapy.
Geringer had a good answer. “I wouldn’t trade one type of stereotype or hate for another,” he said. “Don’t categorize people unfairly. Deal with people individually, and let’s approach this in a way that’s more rational.”
I’d barely said, “Thanks so much for joining us,” when the NBC switchboard lit up. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and one of the most prominent Christian conservatives at the time, had put out an APB, telling his acolytes to call NBC and raise hell. Which they did. And suddenly the rap on me was that I was an unabashed, agenda-driven liberal who hated Christians.
That came up again during my cage match—I mean interview—with right-wing femme fatale Ann Coulter in 2002. She’d been booked on the show to promote her latest screed, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right. Ann Curry had been slated to do the interview, and when I found that out, I offered my services. Not only was I pretty certain that Coulter would eat Ann for lunch, but I thought it was only fair, since she had written some pretty nasty things about me in the book that we were promoting. One of her more pungent lines was that I was “the affable Eva Braun of morning TV”—as in Hitler’s mistress, the cheerful promoter of a heinous agenda. Yeah, I didn’t really get it either.