Dying Words

BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield.

When it emerged in the early ‘80s, AIDS was creeping selective death. On a December day 25 years ago, it entered the life of New York Times reporter Jeffrey Schmalz. The disease set him on a new course, one that eventually changed the way the “paper of record” and many others around the country wrote about AIDS and about gay life.

Jeff Schmalz was a prodigy at The Times. He dropped out of college to become a copy editor. Rising up the ladder, he was a deputy national editor by the time he was 37. Schmalz is the subject of an hour-long documentary called Dying Words, produced by Kerry Donahue and Sam Freedman. In honor of Pride Month, we offer a rebroadcast of our excerpted version. It begins with Sam Freedman, who’d just been hired at The Times when he met Jeff Schmalz. Jeff became Sam’s mentor and his friend. Sam Freedman.

SAM FREEDMAN:  From the time I was a teenager, my dream was to someday be a reporter on The New York Times. And on the day I started that job in 1981, I met my new boss. I was 26 and he was just two years older than me. He was a rigorous and inspiring editor who made me a better writer. And when my work met his lofty standards, he promoted it, sometimes getting me on the front page.

There was another thing about Jeff. He was the first person in my life to tell me he was gay, confidently, unashamedly. But in the office, to his bosses, Jeff was tightly in the closet, until this one day just before Christmas in 1990, an unexpectedly quiet day on the national desk. Jeff was working, editing copy.

  [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

JEFF SCHMALZ:  Suddenly I couldn't see the screen well and I stood up. I thought, if I can just get some air I'll be all right. I collapsed to the floor and went into a full-blown seizure, a grand mal seizure, in the middle of the newsroom.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff was soon diagnosed with AIDS, making him just one of nearly 8,000 people to be stricken by the incurable disease that year in New York City alone. Months later, Jeff was able to return to work. And when he did, he had a mission.

JEFF SCHMALZ: 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. And I feel an obligation to myself. This is the place,  reporting, where I'm at home. This is the place where I must come to terms with AIDS.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Soma Golden Behr was national editor of The Times then.

SOMA GOLDEN BEHR:  A lot of people were still closed off to AIDS - it’s not in my life - and Jeff took that in a poignant way. It wasn’t just about one guy, when you read it. It was everybody’s brother, parents' kid, and, and I think that's been a huge part of what has transformed this country.

SAM FREEDMAN:  But newspapers articles don’t last, especially articles that are now 25 years old, and I despaired that his work had been forgotten. My quest to bring it back to life led me here, to a converted barn in upstate New York.

SAM FREEDMAN:  I was up here…

  [VOICES TRAIL OFF]

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff Schmalz's sister Wendy lives in a small house a couple of hours north of New York City. She keeps Jeff’s papers and notes in boxes, including cassette tapes of the dozens of interviews he did for his AIDS stories.

WENDY SCHMALZ:  And I put in...

SAM FREEDMAN:  Each one has a label and a scribbled name.

WENDY SCHMALZ:  Yeah –

SAM FREEDMAN:  Yeah, Magic Johnson.

WENDY SCHMALZ:  Clinton.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Oh, Harold Brodkey, wow.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Wendy works today as a literary agent.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Tom Stoddard, Barney Frank.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Like Jeff, her professional life led her a long way from where they both began, in a small Pennsylvania town.

WENDY SCHMALZ:  We grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia called Willow Grove.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Their father was out of the picture, an alcoholic who died when Jeff was a teenager. Their mother worked as a manager at the local Sears.

WENDY SCHMALZ:  It was hard in the early ‘60s to have two children and work full time, and I think she had to be very strict, and she always instilled in us a drive for perfection.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff got into Columbia University with a special scholarship for fatherless boys. And since he’d worked on his high school newspaper, he applied for a copy boy’s job on The New York Times. A copy boy’s job in those days was to deliver stories from reporter to editor, from editor to printing press.

ALLAN SIEGAL:  And he knew what he was carrying and he knew what he was doing. He knew what you were doing.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Allan Siegal was the news editor of The Times. He hired Jeff.

ALLAN SIEGAL:  If an editor overlooked something, he'd tactfully bring the piece of paper back and say, didn't you mean to do something here? And his suggestions were always on point.

SAM FREEDMAN:  For Jeff, The Times was a perfect fit. He had dropped out of school at age 20 after being hired as a copyeditor on The New York Times.

JEFF SCHMALZ: I don't know that I would want to be a newspaperman for anybody else. I'm a Timesman.

SAM FREEDMAN:  He talked about that in a 1993 interview.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  There's an anecdote. You know, some mayor of New York - I don't know if it was Jimmy Walker or whatever – and he asked if there were any reporters out there waiting to see him. And the aide said that there are four reporters and a gentleman from The Times.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Throughout the '70s and much of the '80s, as long as a gay reporter at The Times stayed secretive, the paper was willing to operate on a basis of “don't ask, don't tell.”

RICH MEISLIN:  It was more a matter of omission, rather than commission

SAM FREEDMAN:  Rich Meislin, former reporter and editor at The New York Times.

RICH MEISLIN:  Things that you didn’t say, things that you didn’t talk about, you know, the pronoun of who you saw last weekend, laughing at jokes where gay people were the butt of the joke. You’d laugh along because you had a cover to protect.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Even as gays and lesbians were struggling within The Times, reports began to emerge about a mysterious new illness striking gay men.

  [CLIP]:

ANNOUNCER:  This is NBC Nightly News.

TOM BROKOW:  Scientists at the National Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta today released the results of a study which shows that the lifestyle of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer.

  [END CLIP]

SAM FREEDMAN:  The New York Times first reported on the disease in July, 1981. It was a medical story, under the headline, "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals." But the story was buried on page 20, just a single column stuck to the left of a big ad for holiday fireworks.

ERIC MARCUS:  If it had been the Boy Scouts or PTA Moms, it would have been on the front page.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Eric Marcus is a journalist and the author of Making Gay History. He was a network TV producer in the late '80s.

ERIC MARCUS:  What I found, when I worked in journalism during those years, was a profession that was completely unprepared to cover gay people, in general, let alone an epidemic.

SAM FREEDMAN:  When Eric worked at ABC’s “Good Morning America,” he had to convince his colleagues to let him do a story about AIDS as part of a series on being single in America. But the show’s film library only had a handful of stock images.

ERIC MARCUS:  They showed gay men stripped to the waist, sweaty and gyrating in a disco or they showed two guys holding hands, shot from behind, walking down Castro Street. But I wanted to show gay people beyond discos. And I got the Front Runners, which was an organization of gay runners here in New York, to allow me to come and shoot background footage. And they were thrilled because gay people were hungry for true portrayals in the media. We shot the footage and the executive producer said, no, that the only way that we could portray gay people in the segment was with [LAUGHS] footage of gay people at discos.

SAM FREEDMAN:  By 1983, more than 500 people in the United States had died from AIDS and a thousand others had been diagnosed. Jeff saw that the paper was missing a very big story. Mike Norman was a metro reporter then, one of the strongest - and straightest - reporters on Jeff's desk. He was a former Marine who'd served in Vietnam and was now married and raising kids in the suburbs. Jeff convinced his boss, Peter Millones, to assign Mike to do a big feature story on AIDS and gay life in the city.

MIKE NORMAN:  And when Peter gave it to me, he said, just remember, we want you to write about gays as if you're writing about the Daughters of the American Revolution. We don't want anything melodramatic and, above all, we don't want sex. I said, okay, I can do that. So I go walking out of Millones' office, and I didn't get 10 or 12 feet before there's Schmalz right in my face. And he says, “You know I’m gay, don't you?" I mean, I didn't know for sure but I just said, "Of course, Jeffrey." And he said, "You're gonna need help with this.”

And I remember two places that he took me to. They were nightclubs and they were subterranean, both of them. And in one, you had to take off your shirt when you walked in the door. And I said, okay fine, I'll take of my shirt. So Jeff is not only talking to people he knew in these clubs, but he's also sort of half keeping an eye on me. And I, I got propositioned a bunch of times, you know. If it got to be too much, Jeff would always just kind of slip in and say, hi, I'm his editor. He's really got to work.

SAM FREEDMAN:  In 1990, Jeff was 37 years old and deputy national editor. And the newsroom had changed. There was an openness that came from a new executive editor, Max Frankel, and from the incoming publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. Rich Meislin remembers.

RICH MEISLIN:  Arthur was taking people out for lunch and asking them what it was like to be gay at The New York Times. And you like dropped your fork because the message it was sending was, I know, and it’s okay.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Gay and lesbian staffers started to test that new tolerance, even posting signs around the newsroom to gather a group for the annual Gay Pride March.

RICH MEISLIN:  And the signs said, we’re having a party, we’d love to invite you but we don’t know who you are.

SAM FREEDMAN:  The Times had changed, but Jeff wasn't taking any chances. Maybe he could have come out if he had been content to stay a regular reporter, but it was something else entirely to be an openly gay man on the masthead, and the masthead was where Jeff wanted to be. So he stayed in the closet to his bosses, at least until the December afternoon in late 1990, when he collapsed at his desk.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  Doctors and medical technicians arriving and I just remember this big fuss, and I remember I kept telling people, I’m, I’m okay, I’m okay. [LAUGHS] And they kept saying, you're not okay.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff's sister Wendy was at her office Christmas party.

WENDY SCHMALZ:  And the phone rang and it was someone at The Times who said that he had had a seizure in the newsroom and was rushed to St. Clare’s Hospital, and Rich Meislin had gone with him.

RICH MEISLIN:  It was horrible. Nobody understood why it was Jeff collapsed,, including Jeff, although I suspect that he suspected.

WENDY SCHMALZ:  I don’t know, maybe an hour or an hour and a half later Jeff comes out: I’m fine, let’s just go to Joe Allen's and have some dinner.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff hadn't been tested for HIV before his collapse, but more seizures led to more tests. He went back to his doctor weeks later for the results.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  He said, I must tell you that you officially have AIDS and, furthermore, your T-cell count is two. Most normal people would have a thousand T-cells. My life expectancy at that point was really a matter of weeks. And I remember getting in the cab, leaving my doctor, and we're talking about a five-minute cab ride, and I thought, God, I hope I live just these five minutes. That's was how, how much I thought I was going to die immediately.

WENDY SCHMALZ:  He called me the day he got the diagnosis.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff's sister, Wendy.

WENDY SCHMALZ: He was completely unsentimental and said, this is what I want for my funeral, this is what - don’t tell Mom because she shouldn’t know yet. We have to figure out what we’re gonna do, very businesslike. And again, over dinner, over martinis, it was just – [LAUGHS] it was like he was going away for a vacation and I had to feed his fish. I mean, it was – he was that matter-of-fact about it.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff was equally matter-of-fact when he went to tell Executive Editor Max Frankel about his diagnosis.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  I said, Max, I have the results of the tests and it's very bad news. It's about as bad as it could be, actually. I have full-blown AIDS. And he looked stunned, and he said, does this surprise you? And I said, well, when you’re a gay man, it's always in the back of your mind that you could have AIDS.

SAM FREEDMAN:  He left that day with every reassurance that if he were able to return, he'd still have a job at the paper. By that year, 1990, more than 60,000 people had already died of AIDS in the United States. For the next few months, Jeff was in and out of the hospital - for pneumonia, for blood clots. He underwent brain surgery.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  I think emotionally I just collapsed. I - I just became so despondent. I just thought, this is it, I’ll never recover from this.

SAM FREEDMAN:  But then, to everyone's astonishment, Jeff did recover. He went on AZT, the primary drug treatment at the time. He felt better and he thought about taking whatever time he had left to travel, but then he realized:

JEFF SCHMALZ:  It is not my way. And my way for 20 years has been The New York Times. The New York Times defines who I am in a lot of ways. And I wanted to work this out in the pages of The New York Times.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Even though The Times had become a much more tolerant place for its gay employees, the paper's coverage of the AIDS epidemic was widely criticized by gay activists. The group ACT UP even held a protest march outside the publisher's apartment. In their eyes, by not giving more prominent attention to the disease, The Times was contributing to the death of thousands of people.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  In retrospect, I feel terrible that I wasn't more open and that I didn't say, wait a minute, this is outrageous. We're missing this epidemic. And I didn’t. I was afraid. I was a coward, really. And one of the things that happened when I got AIDS was that I made the decision that I was not going to be timid or closeted about either having AIDS or being gay and that I was going to speak out and that I was going to use my position to help both those causes.

SAM FREEDMAN:  It was unheard of for a reporter at The Times to deliberately abandon his or her objectivity, especially on a topic where you had such a personal stake. But when he went back to work, Jeff wrote a series of profiles of people suffering from AIDS. All of them, like him, were still working, in spite of the disease - a San Francisco AIDS doctor, a gay Bill Clinton campaign staffer, a mother infected by a blood transfusion, and  Mary Fisher, a Republican insider, tapped to speak at the 1992 Republican Convention.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  I mean, I really confronted her and said, you know, how can you speak at this Republican Convention when these Republicans have done nothing for AIDS?

JEFF, READING:  Enter now Mary Fisher, very rich, very Republican and very much infected with the virus that causes AIDS. With her shoulder-length blonde hair styled just so, Ms. Fisher is right out of Republican central casting, the Muffy-Buffy-Jody look writ expensive. And why not? Her Republican credentials are impeccable.

MARY FISHER:  You know, I didn’t like that description of me. But, other than that, I thought that the article was really right on, and I thought he was very honest.

JEFF, READING:  Ms. Fisher, who so far has not had any AIDS- related illnesses, is caught between the worlds of Republican politics and AIDS activism, both of them at times uneasy about her.

SAM FREEDMAN:  He soon came to realize that he had a lot in common with Mary Fisher.

 [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

They both had to stop during the interview to take their doses of AZT, and they'd both chosen to be very public about their illness.

JEFF, READING:  A few minutes later at the door, she rushed up. I want a big hug, she said. With that, she threw open her arms, squeezing tight and whispered, "Stay well." 

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff wrote about those small moments of connection, and when he did he showed readers the experience of living with AIDS in precise and indelible ways. His fierce specificity was, paradoxically, the thing that made his articles so broadly relevant, so universal.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  The mission, on the one hand, is to just, in general, show the public that even an editor at The New York Times can get AIDS, that people, in general, with AIDS are not the scum of the earth. And also, I want people with AIDS to see me. I want them to hear the message that you're not dead immediately because you have AIDS. You're not dead, 'til you're dead.

BOB GARFIELD:  Coming up, Schmalz transforms and, in so doing, transforms the public perception of gay men and women and the disease that was killing them. This is On the Media.

 

BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield.

We pick up the story of Jeff Schmalz during the 1992 presidential race, when he scored an interview with then-Governor Bill Clinton. Schmalz asked him why he thought gay issues had emerged in the campaign. Clinton replied that AIDS had a lot to do with it. Sam Freedman.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff’s interview with Bill Clinton became part of a larger story about the emergence of a gay and lesbian constituency in American politics.

  [CHARLIE ROSE THEME MUSIC/UP & UNDER]

It was like the entire community starting to come out of the closet.

  [CLIP]:

CHARLIE ROSE:  Today’s New York Times features an in-depth interview with Magic Johnson, but there is more to that story. The man who wrote it, Assistant National Editor Jeffrey Schmalz, has AIDS….

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff went on “The Charlie Rose Show” to talk about his profile of basketball star Magic Johnson. Johnson was HIV positive and he'd been forced to retire from the NBA. Other players said they felt it was too dangerous to play with him on the court.

  [CLIP]:

CHARLIE ROSE:  Take us there to the time you two were talking.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  He asked me a lot about myself. And then it got a little, a little wrenching when we started sort of pressing back and forth, as, as happens in these AIDS interviews.

  [BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]

CHARLIE ROSE:  What’s wrenching?

JEFF SCHMALZ:  Well, I, I asked him, had he not betrayed people with AIDS by pulling out of the League. And I think he was very stricken by that question coming from me. I don’t think it would have been the same if it had come from you.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  But then he came back with a very thoughtful answer, and, and he started talking on and on about his life and how he was really two people; he was Magic and he was Irvin and how AIDS or HIV had changed his life and so -

CHARLIE ROSE:  So that there was no more Magic.

 [END CLIP]

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff’s life was going through its own transformation. He was in a steady relationship, his first since college, and with a man he had met at an AIDS support group. He bought an apartment near Lincoln Center, moving out of the place he’d occupied since college. Even his writing had changed. It  became looser, more conversational, less Timesian. Old friends like columnist and novelist Anna Quindlen noticed something bigger going on.

ANNA QUINDLEN:  It wasn’t that Jeff’s style changed. It was that Jeff’s character changed. He was incredibly skilled, but he could be really arrogant and judgmental, when I first met him.  There was a sense that he was judging you harshly because you’d messed up, because he was more capable than you were, which was almost always true but is not attractive. And I hate to say it because the trope of the person ennobled, humanized by terrible illness is such a cliché but, in his case, it was completely true. 

ADAM MOSS:  I mean, he - whistled. [LAUGHS] You’d always know he was coming around the corner because you heard the sound of his whistle.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Adam Moss is now the editor of New York magazine. Back then, he sat next to Jeff at The Times.

ADAM MOSS:  He was one of the happier-seeming people. I didn’t know the old Jeff. I didn't know the buttoned-down Jeff. I just knew this new Jeff, who felt, I think, so relieved not to be carrying secrets, not to be having to perform the function of a Times man.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff’s articles in The Times began to gather growing attention. The New Yorker and New York magazine ran features on him. ABC News profiled him. The star photographer, Annie Leibowitz, did a spread of Jeff at work for Vanity Fair. Then, in late 1992, Jeff tackled his most personal story yet,  his own. When he did, the words poured out of him.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  I took it over to Joe Lelyveld who was the managing editor and I said, I've written this piece. He came over a little while later and said, we'll print it. And that was it and we put it in the newspaper.

SAM FREEDMAN:  That piece was titled, "A Reporter's Testimony: Covering AIDS and Living It." Jeff wrote about waking up with nightmares where he was in a coffin. He wrote about his mother's death after she learned he had AIDS. He wrote about his sense of being completely alone.

JEFF, READING:  I make sure everyone with AIDS whom I interview knows that I have it too. To be sure, that is an interview ploy; I'm hoping the camaraderie will open them up. 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. Much of the time it works. Their faces light up, there is hope. But sometimes it fails and I am the one changed by our chat, overcome by guilt that I have lived these two years, when so many of my friends and hospital roommates and people I've interviewed have died. At times, I think my fellow AIDS sufferers are laughing at me, looking up from their beds with eyes that say, you'll be here soon enough.

SAM FREEDMAN:  After the piece ran, Jeff got hundreds of letters from readers. They covered the whole range of attitudes at the time about gay men and about AIDS.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  Some of them were incredibly nasty:  I think all of you bastards with AIDS ought to just die. You ought to be in a home, the least expensive ones possible, until you die, pretty much what one of them said recently. Most of the letters are favorable and very moving, you know, a wonderful letter from a woman in Florida, “My son died of AIDS, whose name was also Jeffrey.” And she detailed his agonizing death. She was writing it to me, like so many of them write, to use me really as the sounding board for just venting all of their own emotions and their own horrors with this disease. And then she ended the letter by saying, "Consider this letter a mother's hug." And I cried, really, when I read that letter. I carry it around with me and read it from time to time.

SAM FREEDMAN:  In February of 1993, he addressed students at a private school in Manhattan.

STUDENT:  Do you ever feel cheated?

JEFF SCHMALZ:  When you think that you’re going to die, as I did, and then you rebound and you live, and not only live but thrive, you don't feel cheated; you feel blessed. I stand before you as someone who was given time – a year now - that I never thought I would have, and time that I’ve been able to put to really good use. I'm proud of that.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff made sure the students knew there was no escape from the reality of his situation.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  It's like knowing that you’re going to be killed by a speeding car but you don't know what moment, you don't know what day. It could happen this afternoon. It could happen two years from now. And so, you always live with this sense of, my God, this car is running to me - when is it going to hit me?

SAM FREEDMAN:  By now, Jeff knows that no last-minute miracle will save him. Worse still, he senses that national interest in AIDS is waning.

ADAM MOSS:  We were talking and he uttered the phrase, “Whatever happened to AIDS?" And I said to him, that’s a magazine article.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Adam Moss was then the editor of The New York Times Magazine. He encouraged Jeff to write a major article about the state of AIDS.

ADAM MOSS:  The thesis of the story is very simple. A lot of the political wars had been won. It was no longer a function of getting funding for AIDS. AIDS had come up against a wall. And that wall was the wall of science, [LAUGHS] is that with all of the money and with all of the sort of changed policies, they were still stuck at this moment when they could not solve the disease.

SAM FREEDMAN:  The heart of the piece is Jeff's despair that the suffering of AIDS victims is still being pushed to the margins.

JEFF, READING:  I usually say that my epitaph is not a phrase but the body of my work. But, actually, there is, in fact, a phrase that I want shouted at my funeral and written on the memorial cards, a phrase that captures the mix of cynicism and despair that I feel right now and that I will almost certainly take to my grave:  Whatever happened to AIDS?

SAM FREEDMAN:  The piece alternates between Jeff's personal experiences living with AIDS – taking his boyfriend to the emergency room on a Sunday morning – and his interviews with key AIDS doctors, activists and public health officials. He fleshed out the first-person sections early on. But by late summer, Jeff was getting sicker and weaker.

ADAM MOSS:  One was torn, as his editor and his friend, between wanting to push him, yet not to push him because there were clearly more important things happening to him, which is that he was sort of grappling with his end.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff's brain infection returned. He went to lunch one day with a longtime friend and colleague on The Times, David Dunlap.

DAVID DUNLAP:  And as we walked back toward The Times’ headquarters, Jeff had his arm through mine, partly out of fondness, perhaps out of just physical support to help keep him steady, and it was clear that he wanted to stay arms locked until we had to negotiate the revolving door. And I remember thinking, oh my God, I’m walking arm-in-arm with another man toward The New York Times building and having that old fear like, what if they see me? [LAUGHS] Who is they?

SAM FREEDMAN:  By the fall, Jeff was at home. He could no longer speak, but the urge to write never left him. Jeff's brother-in-law, Michael Wilde, recalls one particular day when Jeff gestured that he wanted a pen and paper.

MICHAEL WILDE:  And, you know, I remember the nurse saying, don't even bother with that, and I remember Wendy saying, he's a writer, he needs to have this. It would take him a long time, but he would write stuff out. And one of the last things he wrote out was, “This is odious. Dying is monstrous.”

SAM FREEDMAN:  David Dunlap lived a few blocks away. Early one morning, he got a call, “Come quick.”

DAVID DUNLAP:  There was a nurse there and Wendy was there. We’re in the bedroom. We gather around Jeff. I recall having my left arm under Jeff’s shoulder and head so that he was cradled in the crook of my left elbow. And basically it was a matter, as you do with the dying, of saying, as we did, “It’s all right. You’ve done your job. You've got love is everywhere around you.” And that was the end. I mean, then all of the things began to kick in that you – that you do, the calls and the coroner and the removal of the body and all of that.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff Schmalz died on November 6^th, 1993. He was 39. Jeff's obituary ran in The New York Times and other major newspapers around the country. But even in death, he had his critics. U.S. News & World Report published a column deriding Jeff's first-person journalism. Jeff's sister, Wendy.

WENDY SCHMALZ:  In Jeff’s will it says, “Under no circumstances am I to be buried in the family plot in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.” He didn’t want to go home again.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff's family and friends gathered early one morning a week later on one of the piers along the Hudson River,  a place that had famously been a gay cruising spot. Jeff's brother-in-law, Michael Wilde, reading from his diary.

MICHAEL WILDE, READING:  Scattering the ashes, 6:30 am at the Christopher Street pier on West Street, what Jeff jokingly referred to as "the scene of the crime." The somber moment approaches. The tin is opened and we discover the remains of Jeff in a plastic bag. Ben opens this with a Swiss Army knife and Rich peers into the can and describes the contents as "gravelly." A sober silence is observed and Jeff is scattered to the wind.

  [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

This wasn't Jeff, the hero. It was just Jeff, and we were his family.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Two weeks later, The Times ran Jeff's final story, with the title, "Whatever Happened to AIDS?"

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON:  On Sunday, the cover story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine was written by a journalist named Jeffrey Schmalz who lived and, just a couple of weeks ago, died with AIDS.

SAM FREEDMAN:  President Clinton gave his World AIDS Day address a few days later, on December 1st.

PRESIDENT CLINTON:  He was a remarkable man who interviewed me in a very piercing way last year when I was running for president. He challenged us all with these words in the article, “I am dying. Why doesn't someone help us?" I have to say to you that I think that is a good question and a good challenge.

SAM FREEDMAN:  A week later, a public memorial took place at the Dalton School in Manhattan.

  [MEMORIAL CLIP]:

ADAM NAGOURNEY:  Good evening. Thank you for joining us here tonight.

  [END CLIP]

SAM FREEDMAN:  The high school auditorium was packed with mourners. And David Dunlap gave one of the final tributes. He said the way Jeff described gay life jumped out at the reader from the long grey columns of The Times.

  [CLIP]:

DAVID DUNLAP:  Jeff’s choice of words let readers know the writer knew his subject, that he moved with familiarity through the territory he was describing, that he recognized its pace and it quirks. No question about it, Jeff was pushing hard, very hard, and not everyone was pleased. But something important began to happen. Straight readers were making our acquaintance more intimately than ever before. And gay readers, who had known only an anguished loyalty to an ignorant and indifferent Times, began to feel as if their stories might finally find a hope in our pages. Something else happened. Those of us at The Times who saw ourselves in the vanguard during the 1980s learned quickly, thanks to Jeff, what it meant to come all the way out of the closet, to make demands and take risks.

  [END MEMORIAL CILP]

SAM FREEDMAN:  Today, there are gay TV stars, gay athletes, gay politicians, and marriage equality is the law of the land. Hardly anyone seems to realize how big a part Jeff’s AIDS coverage – and his role as the out gay star of The New York Times – played in all this positive social change. Eric Marcus, the author of Making Gay History.

ERIC MARCUS:  So much has changed in the last 20 years, 25 years, that it makes it hard to understand why he mattered and why he made such a difference. Today, I don’t have to follow the gay press to understand where we are on the gay rights movement. I read The New York Times.

SAM FREEDMAN:  Jeff wrote about three dozen stories on AIDS in the year and a half before he died.

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Nearly all of the people he profiled with AIDS died not long after he did. And they were just some of the more than 600,000 people who've died in the United States since the epidemic began. AIDS caused Jeff Schmalz to collapse on that December afternoon 25 years ago. And, facing death, Jeff asked himself some hard questions.

JEFF SCHMALZ:  Here's your life. Is - this is it. If you died tomorrow, would you be happy? Would you feel you had achieved what you wanted to achieve? Is this how you want to go out of this world, the way you are right now? And the answer came back, no, it isn't how I want to go out. Okay, let's change it and let’s change it now. We don't have a lot of time here. And I did. I just [SNAPS FINGERS] changed it really very quickly.

I’ve constructed this life that I have right now. I’m extremely happy, in a certain way.

I know that sounds ridiculous – here I am dying – yet my life, in a lot of ways, has never been happier, has never been more directed. I mean, I feel [LAUGHS] – I feel more content. I feel – that this is where I should have been all along, and I'm sorry that it took a fatal disease to do it, but better late than never.

BOB GARFIELD:  This was a shorter version of “Dying Words: The AIDS Reporting of Jeffrey Schmalz,” which was produced by Kerry Donahue and Sam Freedman and edited and mixed by Ben Shapiro. To hear the full version and check out the companion book, go to DyingWordsProject.com.

 

That’s it for this week’s show. On The Media is produced by Meara Sharma, Alana Casanova-Burgess, Jesse Brenneman and Dasha Lisitsina. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I’m Bob Garfield.

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