Cooler heads might have warned Kahn that, in his rush to defend the paper’s antagonism toward an LGBTQ civil rights movement, he risked the kind of infamy that now haunts one of his most prominent predecessors, Abe Rosenthal.
Rosenthal, who led the Times from 1969 to 1986, is perhaps most frequently remembered now for something he adamantly refused to do: cover the LGBTQ rights movement, particularly the AIDS crisis, with the scope or respect it deserved. (The epitaph on his tombstone, he kept the paper straight, now seems like a sick joke.)
Instead, the Times under Rosenthal kept queer people at arm’s length. It even refused to use the word “gay” in its pages until June 1987, doggedly sticking to the more clinical “homosexual.” And it underplayed the spread of AIDS, waiting nearly two years after its first, now-legendary item broaching the subject to run a story about AIDS on its front page.
At the time, plenty of people warned the paper that it was on the wrong side of history. But the Times ignored them.
Now, decades later, Rosenthal’s homophobia, and the Times’ failure to properly chronicle the lives—and the deaths—of LGBTQ people at such a pivotal moment, is regarded as a low point in the paper’s history. The Times itself has issued mea culpas about its mishandling of the era. And the idea that gay people and lesbians deserve equal rights is uncontroversial. The Times even sells coffee table books commemorating Pride.
It is somewhat astonishing, then, that in its coverage of trans people—and its patronizing wrath toward its critics—the Times is repeating the same mistakes it made under Rosenthal. The parallels between its current anti-trans coverage and its past coverage of gay rights are obvious. But the Times appears blind to them—and blind to the fact that, in its obstinance and its arrogance, it is once again placing itself in a situation that it will later regret.