A reporter from the
Washington Post wrote a story about my family. My father, who recently sold a business he built from the ground up for a pretty penny, had decided to set up my four brothers and I (and our spouses) in businesses of our own design, and the premise of the article was how these businesses interact on a commercial and family level.
(My own business, by the way, is an eco-friendly home store. I promise I'll tell you all about it when I get the e-commerce feature working!)
I was not interviewed by the reporter while he was writing the story, but he did call me at work to fact-check his article.
(More on the flip...)
"Are you married?" he asked, because my brothers' wives had been the driving force behind the other family businesses.
"Yes."
"OK, and what's the name of your spouse?" he asked, to his credit not assuming that I am married to a woman.
I mentioned the name of my husband, and he asked me the proper spelling. Then he said, delicately, "You know, we have to ask because of our style policy . . . were you married in a state where it's legal?"
I explained that we were married in New Paltz, New York, an upstate town near Woodstock where the mayor had begun legally wedding same-sex couples at around the time the ceremonies in San Francisco were making headlines. The truth is, we were married there after it was no longer officially legal, but I didn't mention this because I wanted to see how the paper would treat the reference, and in any case, he didn't ask about the timing, which might have been an obvious question.
"OK," he said.
Two days later, he called back to confirm the spelling of my husband's name, a level of fact-checking I had thought would be unheard of in today's Washington Post. "And does he work with you in the business?" the reporter asked.
I said that he did not. My husband is a professor at NYU and a soon-to-be-famous-Broadway composer so he doesn't work with me every day, but he has of course provided invaluable support from the beginning. What spouse of an entrepreneur hasn't?
I was curious how the whole thing would play out, and this morning, when the article appeared, I got my answer. I, myself, was relegated to one sentence in a story about my brothers and their wives, and the Washington Post solved their stylistic dilemma by avoiding it completely: the existence of my husband was not mentioned at all.
An editorial case can be made that he was not relevant to the story, I suppose (although I think an interesting aspect to the story would be how my Rush Limbo dittohead father came to support me in my gay marriage), so I'm not bitter.
I just think it's funny that after all of that fact-checking, the fact that I am a man with a husband proved too inconvenient for the newspaper to acknowledge.
UPDATE: Stupid of me at this late date, but as I wasn't interviewed for the story itself, I didn't know: I just found out that the article appeared only in the local county edition of the WaPo. That being the case, it is understandable that more details about me, my husband, and my business weren't mentioned, as we are not located in that county. The reporter was a nice guy, and I don't want to imply an anti-gay bias on him personally.