Newspaper Top Stories
Recollections of a 2005 Referendum Vote
The influential people I covered while working for newspapers didn’t give me a lot of memorable material. I was working nights at the Kennebec Journal in Augusta, Maine, when I covered an event at the University of Maine at Augusta in which then-Gov. Angus King spoke. Sitting in the front without many people around me and scribbling away in my notebook, the governor stopped while speaking and looked at me to say, “Either you’re a reporter or you’re writing a letter home.”
I laughed with everyone else. The governor gave plenty of quotes, but nothing as catchy as his observation about my note-taking.
Leon Gorman, the grandson of L.L. Bean and former president of the outdoor retailer, might have been the most important businessperson I met on the job. In addition to expanding the family’s Freeport business, he was a grand marshal of a Fourth of July parade the summer he donated land for a local park. Before the 2007 parade began, Gorman and his wife sat in an antique automobile while I attempted to get a few quotes for my story for The Times Record in Brunswick, Maine.
Parade stories can be tough because they don’t offer many surprises. Fire trucks blare their sirens. People on floats wave. I hoped Gorman might give me something more.
When I asked him if he had been in a parade, Gorman said yes, once when he was a Boy Scout and another time when he was in the Navy. He answered my questions with the shortest responses possible.
Around the time I was giving up on getting any quotes, I noticed the great weather. His wife, Lisa Gorman, told me, “You couldn’t ask for a nicer day.”
Working at The Times Record with a city editor who encouraged me to take chances let me do more than wait for big exclusives from influential people. Thanks to Robert’s encouragement, I tried to find a way to personalize a referendum vote in 2005. He suggested interviewing a high school student who was out and would talk about being gay.
I don’t know how many times I thought, “There’s no way a high school kid would talk to me about being gay!!” Yet one Mount Ararat High School student in Topsham did. His mother was the school nurse.
The conservation went along the lines of “What would you like people to know?” rather than “How do you want everyone to vote?” Maine’s referendum question about extending civil rights protections regardless of sexual orientation gave me a news peg or a reason to write a story, but I avoided legal discussions.
The reason I wanted to write such stories came from knowing I wasn’t an impartial observer. I also wasn’t blameless.
When I taught high school, I had a few incidents when I applied selective hearing, also known as ignoring. That included times when students commented about classmates. Certain girls bad-mouthed a boy they suspected of being gay without saying any slur. I thought because no one was called names in my presence or attacked, I was doing my job at Dirigo High School in Dixfield, Maine. What was also happening was I contributed to an environment in which harassment could happen.
Years later, I learned a new term to describe the conversations. It was called targeting.
The Mt. Ararat High School student talked to me for my story, as did his mother and sister. The stepfather didn’t. I heard him tapping away on a computer keyboard in another room when I talked to the teen one night at their home.
The sister told me when her younger brother said he thought he might be gay. They were sitting in a hammock at a Service Merchandise store when Devin Boilard was six years old and Alicia Boilard was eight.
After he told her, she ran off to tell their mother. Alicia Boilard didn’t know what the word meant but wanted to get her younger brother in trouble.
In 2005, she supported gay men and lesbians having the right to marry, which wasn’t part of the referendum question but I heard it brought up a lot as a reason to oppose the measure. Alicia Boilard told me in the smaller story that ran alongside her brother’s that she didn’t plan to participate in any political campaigns.
Yet for all the conversations I had with elected officials over the years about serious issues, hers stands out despite not officially being a story on politics. I just let her talk about her brother.
“If somebody’s happy, why is that a bad thing?” Boilard said in my April 12 story in The Times Record. “Why is it a bad thing for somebody to be happy?
When people said her brother was going through a phase, she didn’t agree.
“Life’s too short to pretend to be something you’re not,” Boilard said.
After one of my stories about gay people ran, a Times Record receptionist said a man called in to say, “Cancel my prescription!” He might not have been on the phone long enough to be corrected that he was referring to a newspaper subscription.
The 2005 referendum on rejecting an extension of protections against sexual orientation failed. That meant the bill passed by Gov. John Baldacci and the state legislature went into effect. Discrimination based on sexual orientation became illegal in Maine.
What no one tells you about living through a time of social change is that it can be awkward. I began writing about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in part out of a sense of guilt from saying nothing while teens were targeted by others in my classroom. Another reason was I recalled plenty of moments as a high school student laughing at the latest, unfunny joke about AIDS.
When I interviewed two people for what became a sidebar that year, at the end of our talk, one of them told me about being transgender and explained his preferred pronouns, something I hadn’t heard of before. I didn’t know about people identifying as trans before operations. I ended up just using their last names in what I wrote. If I’m going to be honest about how I tried to do better than in the past, I have to admit I wasn’t flawless in the new effort either.
Maybe that’s another detail people leave out when recalling their histories, how a lot of us can feel bad about the past. The town of Brunswick might have had a muted response to my stories because of what happened years earlier.
An editor for The Times Record in the 1990s decided to publish the names of people charged in connection with a bust at a West Bath rest stop. The restroom was a cruising spot, or a place for anonymous gay sex. The people accused included a Bowdoin College professor.
The Times Record’s policy up to that point was to not publish names related to such charges. After they were printed following the editor’s decision, the Bowdoin professor died by suicide.
The details of what happened were always mentioned in passing in the newsroom. The editor who had published the names left long before I joined the paper.
I had one bit of fallout related to the 1990s story, though. While covering a town outside of Brunswick, a person agreed to an interview after saying, “Normally, I never talk to The Times Record.”
He was a member of the professor’s family. But since no one had even said the late man’s name to me, I had no idea with whom I was speaking when I called.
Before the 2005 vote, I did a very back-and-forth piece about the referendum, which I found very dull to write. A local pastor said the vote to add sexual orientation to the text of the Maine Human Rights Act might concern voters because it related to gender identity. When I profiled him and the members of his church without getting into voting, they talked more about the values in which they had been raised and spoke up about them.
The stories of families and high school students didn’t have any campaign slogans. I didn’t talk to them for the campaign piece, instead interviewing the head of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence in Portland.
But I liked how even though the subjects would have been referred to as “controversial” somewhere else, I didn’t have that problem at The Times Record. If someone counted all the LGBT people and supportive family members I talked to, they outnumbered others who weren’t keen on laws against discrimination expanding to include gay people, even counting the people at a local church for a story.
Unlike many stories I’ve written, I don’t think about what I should have done or what I’d do differently with those from 2005. Letting people talk turned out to be a good reporting strategy.