You be the journalist

     While the best columns are often those written the quickest — I think Friday's well-received Maureen Dowd snarkfest took an hour to write — others can be pawed over for days, weeks, or even months.
     It was in December that I interviewed Daniel Kyri, a star in the "Chicago Fire" procedural drama (I keep wanting to call it a "soap opera" but that could have negative connotations). I'd never seen the show before, but he plays an openly gay firefighter, and I thought it might be worthwhile to compare and contrast what he had to say with the thoughts of an actual gay firefighter, if I could find one.
     That got the thing pushed into the slow lane. But — mirabile dictu — my old friend, Larry Langford, at the Chicago Fire Department did actually put me in touch with a real live 28 year veteran of the CFD, Lt. Paul Clark, who is indeed gay. I interviewed him in January.
     I knew that incorporating the two interviews would take some effort, and slow-walked that challenge until I finally decided that putting it off forever was not a success strategy. It was time to shit or cut bait, as we professionals say.
     So I began pulling the column together last week, and tried to get a draft Saturday, to lessen the Sunday morning strain. The column will run Monday.
     In doing so, I had to consider something Clark quotes one of his fellow firefighters saying about the gay pride pylons on Halsted Street: "'Can you believe the city put these up for these fucking fags?'"
     The question being, how much of that goes in the paper?
     Left to my down devices, as a believer in poet Robert Lowell's dictum, "Yet why not say what happened?" I would print the whole quote verbatim and let the complainers complain (the way some readers, already in my spam filter, took exception to the three interjections of "Jesus!" in Friday's column, never considering that the Galilee carpenter isn't my lord and I have no obligation to honor their theological view of the cosmos any more than they respect mine, aka, not much).
     But as I sometimes tell readers, I just work for the newspaper; I don't run the place. Nor do I set style. I follow it. So I knew what I called "the obscene gerund" in my apology regarding Dylan Thomas; a locution I borrowed from a Doonesbury cartoon about Frank Sinatra (from 40 years ago — Jesus!) wouldn't fly. It would end up as "f—-ing." (I found "obscene gerund" so funny in that context I used it in the blog version of the column, even though here, it isn't necessary, as swears are permitted by the boss, aka me).
     But what about "fags"? Such curse words have been dashed even more lately, the result of mission creep stemming from "the n-word," general societal cowardice, and a desire to thwart social media algorithms that will increasingly tag you as a hater and shutter your account if you use derogatory words under any context.

     The word also falls victim to an alarming tendency to whitewash the past. And here the left and the right have drifted so far from center, away from faith in the value of frank confrontation with reality — in my view — that they've begun to converge. Both the MAGA crowd and Blue State lefties posit the existence of timorous souls who will be crushed if exposed to the weight of the nation's true hateful past, and feel obligated to bowdlerize the historical record on their behalf. To lighten the load, as it were. Children and the profoundly sensitive are preemptively given the final say in vetting acceptability for supposed adults. I hate that.
     I tried out "f—-ing f-gs" but that reads to me as cursing out dried fruit. See, that's why I avoid euphemism. Very quickly readers have no idea what you're talking about. Then I considered "Can you believe the city put these up?" without the final clause at all. But that softens the insult so much you wonder why Clark remembers it a quarter century later.
     At this point I wanted to consult my editor, John O'Neill — oh right, he was let go last week.
     Seeking clarity, I went into the Sun-Times NewBank archive and found the word last appeared in a 2014 column about the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting protest buffer zones around abortion clinics:
     "A law aimed to prevent the Westboro Baptist Church from showing up at military funerals with their neon “GOD HATES FAGS” signs would end up stopping people from showing up at Bruce Rauner rallies with “RAUNER’S A FRAUD” signs, and we need more, not less, of those," the author wrote.
     If that writing sounds familiar, well, it was written by me. Seeing myself as the Welcome Wagon for obscenity — not a single colleague writing over the past 11 years felt the need to use the word — took the wind out of my sails. Or maybe someone wanted to use it and wasn't allowed.
     So take it out? Self-editing is the path not only to confusion, but tedium, and I decided to offload responsibility and let whoever draws the short straw Sunday morning and has to edit my column be the one to figure it out. (My editors opted for the nearly-indecipherable: "f—— f—-s.")

     And yes, I did pause, and worry, whether by using "obscene gerund" I was plagiarizing Garry Trudeau. And decided that credit was impossible — it would ruin the passage — and you can't really plagiarize a two-word phrase, any more than if I refer to "household words" I'm stealing from Shakespeare, who uses the term in "Henry V." 

     Of course you can get in trouble with this thinking. Years ago I ended a column "Isn't it pretty to think so?" and a reader sincerely accused me of plagiarizing the last line of "The Sun Also Rises." I had a reply, along the lines of, "I just assume everyone knows it — if I ended the column 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' would you accuse me of plagiarizing the Bible?" But it also reminded me to be careful about that kind of thing.  So if anyone is under the illusion that the life of a writer is carefree, let me assure you it is not. There is a lot to worry about.