In the third installment of this year's "How I Got That Story" series, Malcolm Gay, a regular freelancer for Riverfront Times, talks to Corina Knoll about his feature profile of author Qiu Xiaolong. Gay, who was formerly a Village Voice Media fellow at the East Bay Express and staff writer at the RFT, says he learned how challenging it is to write about a writer. "What they do physically and in terms of their day-to-day existence is very uneventful. So it's hard to bring drama and animation to those scenes," he says. "That's the challenge: to access that inner world and make it evident in the story."
A Feb. 1 story by Education Reporter Alexandria Rocha cited several incidents of harassment suffered by members of Palo Alto High School's Gay-Straight Alliance. According to The Paly Voice, a journalism Web site run by Palo Alto students, Supervising Deputy District Attorney Jay Boyarsky attended a faculty meeting at the school on Feb. 2 to make an official statement offering support for gay students. "I hope that my showing up and lending a hand to GSA will send a signal that intolerance and discrimination against any group is not acceptable," Boyarsky told the Voice.
Amy Jenniges, a reporter for The Stranger, was denied a marriage license to legalize her relationship with her longtime lesbian partner. To make a point about the so-called sanctity of marriage, Jenniges' gay editor, Dan Savage, asked if he could get a license to marry her. Because the two met the man-woman criterion, the King County Clerk's office granted the license. Savage told Matt Markovich of KOMO 4 News in Seattle that he and the woman he doesn't love planned to stay married just 55 hours and 10 minutes in order to best Britney Spears.