Works in progress: Charles Berg

  

Letter (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I have a soft spot for folks who write letters to newspapers. Passionate, opinionated, often making excellent points, they're like amateur, shambolic, unpaid columnists. I owe my Chicago memoir to a frequent newspaper letter writer, Bill Savage, who midwifed the process.

     This is from a regular reader, Charles Berg, of Hyde Park-Kenwood, complained that the Sun-Times editorial page took a pass on it. I read what he had to say, and it made sense to me, so I asked him if I could share it on my blog. He enthusiastically agreed. Its headline is: "Trump Administration Financial Accounting."

     Most organizations – including governments – have budgets: estimates of the expenses of operation and the expected revenues needed to meet those expenses. Related to this are ongoing accountings of funds received and distributed.
     During this past year, vast sums of new incomes have been declared by the Trump administration: money from tariffs, money extorted from law firms, etc. There have also been savings by the refusal of the administration to fund programs established by Congress. Further, there have been the revocations of hundreds of millions of dollars of grants made for medical and scientific research – and threats of withholding of funds allocated to cities and states that do not comply with Trump’s edicts. And then there are the “donations” made by entities seeking to curry Trump’s favor (or forestall his ire).
     In addition, the ad hoc “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was supposed to be cutting expenditures via elimination of “waste and fraud.” Many of their initials claims of massive savings have been disproven; their main goals were not financial – but rather the destruction of entities (like the Department of Education and international organizations) that the administration disliked. “Waste and fraud” turns out to have been nothing more than a convenient justification: NO efforts were made to identify and correct systemic problems.
     Where have the accumulated billions gone – what accounting is there? And what have these monies been used for? Clearly not for services benefitting the American public (many of those have been undercut or abolished). Clearly not to assist local law enforcement (despite the administration’s charges of lawlessness in some cities, like Chicago). Clearly not to protect our nation’s natural resources. Clearly not to promote the development of American industries. Clearly not to bring down inflation and the price increases affecting most Americans.
     How much of these funds have been used to pay for judicial assaults on Trump’s “enemies”? To pay recruitment bonuses to enlist Border Patrol and ICE agents to pursue the administration’s anti-immigration policies? To pay for their deployment to round up immigrants (seldom the “worst of the worst,” as claimed – while assaulting citizens and causing fear in the process)? To pay for Kristi Noem’s anti-immigration ads on radio and TV? To pay for legal defense against the many state and local lawsuits filed against the administration’s policies? Have some of these monies ended up in Trump’s own coffers?
     And now it has just been announced that Trump has sold $500,000,000 of seized Venezuelan oil – and put the money, not in the US Treasury, but in a bank in Qatar!! This is staring to remind me of the song in “Evita,” which includes the lyrics “When the money keeps rolling …you don't keep books … accountants only slow things down.”
      The American public should demand a fiscal accounting from the Trump administration – which, of course, will use all means possible to prevent this (denials, delays, refusals to comply with judicial orders and congressional acts, etc.).

Uptown Poetry Slam founder faces the wilderness, live onstage

Marc Kelly Smith

     Shutting up is an art form that I struggle to master. A challenge for many of us older guys, from whom nobody wants to hear anything. We've had our say.
     Several times during the only Bears games I watched this season, the last two, the camera focused in on the "GSH" on the left arms of players' jerseys, and I had to stifle the impulse to explain to my wife, "George Stanley Halas, founder of the Bears."
     Which would have inevitably led to my sharing one of my favorite bits of sports trivia: In the 1920s, when Halas took over the team and moved it from Decatur to Chicago, the practice was to name a city's pro football team after its existing baseball team. Which is how you got New York Giants in both sports. But Halas, noting that players are bigger in football than in baseball, said they're too tough to be Cubs; they're Bears. The name stuck.
     Or so the story goes.
     I didn't say any of that. She enjoyed the game and said we might consider watching this football next year, an outcome not unrelated to my efforts to maintain a manly silence.
     Halas died in in 1983. Most key formative figures in Chicago sports — William Wrigley, Charles Comiskey, Bill Wirtz — are long gone.
     But one Chicago sports pioneer still walks among us. Marc Kelly Smith founded the Uptown Poetry Slam, first at the Get Me High Lounge, then 40 years ago this July, at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge. And if you're thinking, "Poetry is not sports," then you haven't been to the Green Mill and witnessed the slam on the third Sunday of every month.
     As someone who has watched Michael Jordan dunk a basketball, shared an outfield with Minnie Minoso at a charity softball game and watched a Cubs game from inside the scoreboard at Wrigley Field, I can assure you that the poetry slam is as peak a Chicago competitive experience as they come. Poetry is like rugby — not that popular, but plenty tough.
     Smith is appearing in a one-man show this weekend at Chicago's 50-seat Kimball Arts Center, and I phoned to ask him why, at 76, he is still talking. Why bother?
     "That's a good question," Smith said. "When the COVID pandemic hit, I thought, 'Well, OK, the run at the Green Mill, 35 years, that's a pretty good run.' Time to back off the career."
     He'd bought a house in Savanna, Illinois, "a river rat town on the Mississippi," 2½ hours west of Chicago, as a fixer-upper project.
     "I've always been a city guy," Smith said. "But I drove through the area. It was just so cheap. I came back one day and got a house to restore."
     With events drying up post-COVID, he gave up his Chicago apartment and moved there full time. The plan was to write a novel, watch the river flow and the years pass. But he succumbed to that trap snaring so many aging writers: complaining about their shrinking worlds.

To continue reading, click here.

Thirty years a columnist

      
     You can be on the verge of success and not know it.
     "Mom called, depressed," I wrote in my Waterstone's Literary Diary on Sunday, Jan. 21, 1996. "Which is ironic, since I'm feeling pretty down too. Just tired of working hard & not getting anywhere."
     No exaggeration there. Almost nine years on the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times and still scrabbling on the lowest rung. A general assignment reporter, stuck on the night shift to keep me out of sight, which some days meant 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. I nicknamed my wife, "the gray oval" — an indistinct featureless face glimpsed in darkness. Our first son was born three months earlier, and I had taken the year-long, unpaid paternity leave permitted in the Chicago Newspaper Guild contract. Nobody did that —  I never heard of another guy taking a full year. I did so, because I had nothing to lose at the paper. And I had a book to work on, my third. That paid the bills, though even the book wasn't exactly crackling with promise either.
     "Nothing going on," I wrote the next day, a Monday. "No calls from Bill" — my editor at Doubleday —"or anybody. Went to gym & felt better." There I ran into an editor who was leaving the paper I was stuck at, Julia Wallace, off to greener fields in Atlanta. Then had coffee with John McKnight, who had just written his own book, "The Careless Society," reminding me:  books are a dime a dozen.

     Tuesday, Jan. 23, I phoned Games magazine and got an assignment. Freelance brought in both money and a sense of purpose. Phoned a Chicago magazine writer — and future food game show host — Ted Allen to "arrange lunch to discuss Chicago column." A column, anywhere, was what I wanted. Not having one, I used to say, was like being drowned. Not in a hazy abstract sense. But real, visceral. Like someone holding my face under water and killing me. I was 35 years old. Life had thundered past and was disappearing into the distance. While I was stuck at a job that involved random people yelling my name and demanding me to hurry to various addresses and figure out what's going on there, then write instantly forgettable stories about minor events. 
     And lately I wasn't even doing that, having swapped frantic insignificance for total obscurity, my life was a sleep-deprived rondo of changing soiled diapers and plugging bottles of formula into a little screaming mouth.

     We lived in the city, on Pine Grove Avenue. I went out to Great Harvest to pick up bread, When I returned, I found out I'd gotten a call from Nigel Wade, the new editor-in-chief of the Sun-Times, a great red-faced slab of New Zealand press lord, whom I'd met exactly once. The previous October, when he was still editor of the London Telegraph, but had come over to kick the tires of the paper. Most employees leap under a desk in such a situation. Reckless with ambition, I'd run to meet him,  and we went out for a drink. I gave him my latest book, "Complete & Utter Failure." 

     "Something for you to read on the plane to London," I said.

     "I called back. Nigel asked me if I would like to write a column for the Sunday paper. Astounding! He began by asking when my paternity leave was due to end."

     In my memory, the query went like this: "STEINBERG!!! This paternity leave ... how long is it supposed to last???"

     "I said, 'Nine months.' But after he offered the column, I said, 'I of course could return tomorrow.' I faxed him the NY Times piece."

     I'd been working on it for weeks, trying to sell a Chicago column to the Times. People act like success falls in your lap, but a lot of futile pushing is involved. I've spent my life jiggling the handles of locked doors.

     "Nigel sent back a note. 'This is it!'"

     Of course it wasn't "it." The next day was spent redoing the column I had written to wave under the nose of the Gray Lady, then trying something completely different. 

     "Wrote new column — first tried something on Oprah, then settled on State St. Mall. Wrote column and faxed it to the paper. Talked to Mark Jacob in the afternoon. I need to change the lede since it refers to my niece (no kids) and to make it funnier."

     The niece reference is ironic. Nigel had no children, so was puzzled about their possible appeal. My son became the one subject in my career I was formally forbidden from writing about, not that I listened. A key survival skill in journalism is knowing when to pay attention to your bosses, and when to just ignore them.

     Dealing with consequences is the difficult part of the job. Readers thunder their disapproval. Colleagues too. In the few days between when I spoke with Nigel and when the paper hit the streets, I didn't tell anybody the column was coming. To make my getting it a pleasant surprise for my colleagues? Nah, I didn't want to give anybody time to stab me in the back, to try and stop it. A smart move, as afterward another columnist, whom I considered a friend, went around telling anybody who would listen that the last thing the paper needs is another 35-year-old white guy writing a column. I forgave him, but am not sure that he ever forgave me for poaching on his personal preserve. 

     I used to say that writing the column, I do for free. It's the dealing with the consequences that demands a healthy salary.

     Not that the salary was particularly healthy, at the start. Because I was on unpaid leave, the paper paid me $250 a column. To my credit, I stayed out the rest of the year, writing from home. When I returned, I had one day a week to write the column. The other four, I was still a reporter. The column ran on Sundays — luring readers to the Sunday paper was a continual struggle for the Sun-Times, like the Russians quest for a warm water port.

     A dynamic I copied myself. My midweek column began after I convinced Nigel that if I could attract daily readers, I could shunt them toward the Sunday paper. Then in 1997, my second son was born, and I took only three months paternity leave. I thought they'd be happy, my logic being, three is much less than 12, I thought I was being considerate, but Nigel thought it was insane, and when I got back, I was made the environment reporter (writing two columns a week wasn't a full-time job either. The other three days I covered some sort of beat. For a while, I was the charities, foundations and private social services reporter).

     Covering the environment was so contrary to my nature — they wanted someone who cared about the environment, for starters, and could attend conferences and pick over reports, or who even liked being outside, none of which applied to me — that I quit on the spot, pausing only long enough to secure myself a job as features editor at Chicago Magazine.

     But the paper didn't let me go. Goodies were assembled: I would be given a third column and three days to write them, which could be spent at home. And the paper would promote me. And a raise. 

     Why am I recounting all this? Nostalgia, I suppose. Five years ago, when I hit 25 years as a columnist, I merely reprinted that first column here, and did not mention the anniversary in the paper. Because heads were rolling. I decided to keep a low profile, and not leap up crying "Here I am; fire me!"  Nor do I plan on remarking on the three decades in the paper because ... well, a lot is going on, dire doings at home and abroad, and there's enough self-indulgence in the world without my adding to it.

     But I do have to fill today somehow.  I figure, 30 years on, a person can pause to reflect. Heck, I might do something on the day itself, Jan. 28 — list 10 favorite columns maybe. Or might not. That sort of choice — being your own man, making your own calls — is the essence of column writing. They give you a regular hole to fill as you please. How you fill it is your affair. That's a great responsibility. And a joy. I've got nothing to regret. It was a good way to make a living, for many years, and still is, most days. The journey is nearly done, the coastline in sight, the safe harbor just around the bend. But not yet.

    Ten years ago, I also paused to reflect on this job. Cultivating gratitude, I thanked 14 colleagues on staff who made life at the paper enjoyable  for me. Of those 14, two remain.

President Trump's tantrum is no reason to invade Greenland

     He took it.
     Give Donald Trump credit. Truly a wonder. A continual marvel of what human beings are capable of doing: the Great Pyramid of Giza, Hoover Dam, and Donald J. Trump.
     I'm serious. Despite decades of his toddler pettiness being ground in our faces, daily if not hourly, the man still manages to surprise. How can that be? Maybe because we cling to our traditional values, and confronted with someone who is an utter moral void, untouched by conscience, self-awareness or humility, the mind just rebels and insists on assigning him a notional decency he actually doesn't possess. We rush to cover the naked madman with a blanket.

   Last week, Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, gave the U.S. president her Nobel Peace Prize, the latest in a series of blatant buy-offs attempting to curry favor. The Swiss delivered a gold brick. Qatar gifted a plane. Machado handed over her Nobel.
    And he took it. The irony of a man who thunders against DEI as undercutting achievement through merit, then turning around and accepting a prize earned by a Latina, hardly needs to be pointed out.
     Maybe my mind boggles extra hard at this because I'm so averse to awards. Sour grapes, perhaps, since I seldom win one. But unlike the president, I don't go out of my way trying to win them either. I have never, for instance, applied for the highest award in journalism, the Pulitzer Prize, because A) applying seems a waste of time; B) I know how political the award process is, being familiar with Tribune panjandrums on the awards committee and C) I am too busy writing stuff.
     Not that I wouldn't take one. From the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University. Not from any random past winner. Though it's fun to imagine a scenario similar to what played out last week in the surreal farce called Washington, D.C.
     "Hey buddy," Mark Konkol says, over the phone. "You know, I was reading another one of your hard-hitting columns and was struck, yet again, by how unfair it is that I was given the Pulitzer Prize while your high-caliber professional journalism is somehow always overlooked. So I'm going to hop on my motorcycle and blast up to Northbrook and give you mine, along with my heartiest congratulations."
     That would horrify me. I would beg Mark not to do it.
     Honors can curse as well as uplift. They're a monkey's paw. Even legitimately won prizes. I wasn't the paper's charities, foundations and private social services reporter for long, but managed to write a story on how the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grants ruin people's lives. Recipients kill themselves, get divorced, have breakdowns, stop creating whatever it is that snagged the award in the first place. Not all winners, obviously. But enough for a story.
     The MacArthur Foundation didn't send out a press release tipping me off to this. I just knew it had to be so, and went looking. Because every rose comes with thorns. With honor, mitigation. In 2009, Barack Obama was abashed, almost horrified, when nine months into his first term he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He said he didn't deserve it. He was right.

To continue reading, click here.

One down, three to go.

    

Photo by Ashlee Rezin

     “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
                                                                  ― Haruki Murakami

    January 20. Whew. The optimist in me wants to point to one year, done and gone, as of today. The first year of Trump 2.0 in the bag! Yippee! We made it through. We're still here, sorta.

     Are we? Not everybody, of course. Renee Good is no longer here. Plus hundreds of thousands of people who were living among us, neighbors and colleagues and employees, bosses and friends and relatives, working, raising families, snatched off the street by masked men, dispatched to unknown fates outside the purview of law. No celebration for them. Or their loved ones. Or anybody who cares about things such as the Constitution. And the dignity of human beings. And decency.

     One year ago, he signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America" — that sweet spot of arbitrariness, insularity, isolationism and nationalism where he would dwell — and was off to the race. Two hundred and 24 executive orders followed, more than his entire first term. And the other two branches of government fell in line without a murmur. It's hard to grasp what happened last week, never mind tally the toll for the first year.

     Besides, even if we came off the first year, unscarred, or not all that scarred anyway, there are three more to go. How many children will die due to our secretary of health's delusional policies? A hundred? A thousand? More? 

     Based on the damage being done, the standards eroded, the precedents set, the reputation soiled, even then, even if there is an election, and someone not committed to imposing a cult of personality fascist state wins, the foundation is cracked, the rot exposed. Not to forget the growing legion of imitators, with their red ties, their collagen puffed lips. Many will weather vane into whatever new wind blows. But others will persevere, following their master, even when absent. It worked for him...

      The rich, always powerful, consolidated their stranglehold on our society, aided by the omnipresent social media that gave them their wealth. Government, once a counterbalance, became a hand maiden. That will not be easily undone. Elon Musk has all your most sensitive data on a hard drive.

      We will never be free of this. I am certain of that. We are changed or — to be negative — our true national self is revealed, undeniable. We can't be free, because we weren't before — as I've said many times before, Donald Trump is a symptom, not a cause, and his nationalism and malice, prejudice and self-regard, stupidity and violence were all there before, giving us the Vietnam War. Jim Crow. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. The internment of citizens of Japanese ancestry. The war against labor. Racism and sexism, cruelty, greed and indifference. Once you start looking for bad stuff in the American past, there's a lot waiting. Donald Trump didn't plant it; he harvested it.

     That isn't defeatism. The starry eyed look toward some transformative miracle, that will make everything right, justice and decency showing up at the last moment, like the officer in white at the end of "Lord of the Flies." That is a recipe for failure, and disappointment. No bucket of water is going to melt the Wicked Witch and inspire the castle guard to take a knee and all hail Dorothy. Only in the movies. In real life, the guards see their mistress melted, and hack Dorothy apart in a fury.

     If there is one — and I'm reluctant to use the word — lesson in all this, it is that there is a darkness and a hardness and a meanness in all people, just waiting for the right pied piper to play the right tune and draw it out. That was true before the arrival of the current administration. And it will be true long after it is gone, replaced by ... God knows what. How can good hope to prevail if it doesn't even recognize the game being played?

     That is not a recipe for surrender. There is also goodness and fairness and decency. We see that too. Americans did not look away when their neighbors were being hauled off. They did not cringe. They stood up, some of them, and fought the fight that has always be fought. Chicago repulsed the slave catchers in the 1850s and did no less now. It was a centuries-long struggle to arrive to the state that our current leader has ripped apart so easily. We rose up before, from worse. We can rise up again. But don't kid yourself. It won't be easy. It wasn't before, this struggle that started 10,000 years ago and never ends, never can end. 

     Not a truth that makes anybody feel good but, another lesson many Americans can't seem to stomach: the truth doesn't exist to make you feel good.

It was also against the law for a Black person to sit at a Woolworth's lunch counter

 

     In a time of madness, people lose sight of the basics. So it is worthwhile to review the facts.
     For instance.
     Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A day when our nation — well, some of us anyway — honors the slain leader. I will fly the flag, as befits a patriotic holiday. Put my hand over my heart, say the Pledge of Allegiance and feel good about our country.
     How can I? With so much bad going on?
     Let me explain, as simply as possible.
     Who was Dr. King? He was a civil rights leader. And what is civil rights? It was — is — the process where people who are excluded from guaranteed American rights struggle peacefully to gain access to those rights.
     People such as?
     Black people, for starters. For about 200 years, Blacks were kept as slaves. And what had Black people done to deserve slavery? The answer is hidden in the question. Their skin was darker than those who enslaved them. Lighter-skinned people somehow considered themselves better, based on nothing. Nobody says, "I have a great accountant; his skin is very light." Nevertheless, they'd hire the white applicant over the Black, for that very reason. It wasn't written down. You just did it.
     Though there were laws written down, designed to deny the humanity of Black people and so facilitate their oppression. When Black people, inspired by Dr. King, tried to rise up and enjoy the freedoms guaranteed as American citizens, they often broke the law.
     The year I was born, a University of Illinois student named Jesse Jackson couldn't find a book he needed in the shabby and inadequate one-room McBee Avenue Colored Branch of the Greenville Public Library in Greenville, South Carolina. So he went downtown to the main branch to look for the book — on patriotism, ironically — and was met by the police, and turned away. Instead of accepting this humiliation, he returned with friends and was arrested.
     "Groups of Negroes have invaded the quiet of the public library," the News and Courier reported.
     Tradition, backed by law, kept a Black teenager from checking out a book. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2026, we ought to remember how unjust laws, brutally enforced, facilitate oppression. The Holocaust was legal. The Nazis kept meticulous records, never imagining humanity would return. Slavery was legal. A Black person eating at a Woolworth's lunch counter in 1960 was not.
     Now our government is acting as if stories like that somehow hurt white people. Biographies of Black heroes are whitewashed from military websites. The idea that we should live in a country where Black people can go to college is being criminalized. Colleges are being shaken down for money by the government for the crime of trying to create diverse campuses.
     Anyone who ever took a college tour knows how admissions work. There are academic standards, sure. But universities also let in a football team of students based on athletic prowess. And if the school band needs a trombonist, then a few trombonists are admitted. Plus someone from Alaska, so they can brag about having students from all 50 states. To suggest that also wanting a diverse campus that reflects our nation is somehow out of bounds is absurd.
     Then again, this is an absurd time. The harassment of dark-skinned Americans on the streets of Democratic-run cities — Los Angeles and Chicago last year, now Minneapolis — is absurd. Again, laws are invoked. Immigration violations — misdemeanors, paperwork issues — become enormous crimes that justify widespread brutality, the way the crucifixion of Christ was used to rationalize a millennium of killing Jews. Renee Good was a woman whose crime was sitting in a car that began to roll. She was shot in the face and the government denounced her as a terrorist, then went after her widow. It's cruel.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 1999: On the allure of `Xena'

 Xena, played by Lucy Lawless, left, shared adventures in a vague heroic past with her particular friend, Gabrielle, played by Renee O'Connor (Photo: ©Universal Television / Everett Collection)

     Rick Garcia, a key figure in the Chicago gay community, died last week. I've known him for decades — he's the reason my memoir, "You Were Never in Chicago," ends at the Chicago Gay Pride Parade: he invited me to ride on the float for his new organization, Civil Rights Agenda. Riding a float in the pride parade on a fine day in June is one of those peak Chicago experiences that you are lucky to do once in your life, like reciting at the Uptown Poetry Slam or watching a Cubs game from inside the scoreboard at Wrigley Field, or climbing one of the television masts on the John Hancock Building, or going down the Deep Tunnel. 

     I spoke to Rick a few times over the summer. Like many, he was having a hard time after the death of Lori Cannon. I tried to help, but wish I'd done more. Rick was a big-hearted man, but even the largest of hearts can break, and give out from overuse.

     My colleague Mitch Dudek wrote a fine obituary for Rick, explaining how nuns helped crack calcified resistance against gay rights by Catholic aldermen. He also said how he "became the first person many news reporters would call for a quote on gay issues." I can vouch for that. Back in the 1990s, Rick served as a kind of Gay Everyman. He shows up in a number of columns of mine — this is from when the column appeared Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, the latter two days being briefer, lighter efforts in the feature section. While the unapologetic male gaze in this might cause trouble today, we didn't think anything of it 26 years ago, and I believe I can repost it without getting in hot water. Besides, right about now people might appreciate reading a cheery trifle. I know I did. 

     Ever since "Northern Exposure" went off the air, I don't watch TV regularly anymore.
     Except when cleaning the kitchen. You need something to distract from the slop and the grind. This is easy in the evening, when you can count on something newsy.
     Weekends are different. Nothing's on. The choices are "Xena: Warrior Princess," auto racing or golf (who watches that? Anybody? I don't believe it. A whole round?).
     Of course I settle for "Xena." Not for the plots: tepid Dungeons & Dragons-type myth run through a food processor of squishy 1990s morality. But if you're going to look up from scouring the sink and see something, you might as well see a few heaving bosoms and battling babes.
     I have accidentally enamored our 3-year-old son with "Xena." Now it's his favorite show. I probably should be concerned because of the fighting. But I find it sweet.
     "Hey, your girlfriend Xena's on," I said Sunday afternoon, and he scampered upstairs. Wearying of the kitchen, I joined him, and the family, all camped out in front of "Xena."
     I must never have really paid attention to the show before, while cleaning, other than ogle whoever was on screen (it's like one of those Russ Meyer women's prison movies, but set in ancient times).
     About two minutes' worth of watching were enough to establish the, ummm, intense relationship between the Xena character and her petite blond sidekick, Gabrielle.
     "This makes `Ellen' seem like `Bonanza,'" I said to my wife.
     That raised a question.
     "It's huge among lesbians," said gay activist Rick Garcia. "I've only seen it a couple times, but that's all you need to catch the extremely heavy lesbian overtones. They talk about feelings. They're in tune to one another. It's almost a cliche."
     Rick put me in touch with a friend, who explained the appeal.
     "First of all, it's just a very feminist show," said Alicia Obando,* 35, a lesbian who is a legislative aide for Cook County Board Commissioner Mike Quigley. "She is a very strong person, physically, mentally, emotionally."
     I asked her if she thought the overtones were accidental, imposed on an innocent adventure show, or intentional.
     "They supposedly do it on purpose," said Obando. "She knows she has a strong lesbian following."
      Lucy Lawless, the New Zealand-born actress playing Xena, has admitted as much.
     "We are aware, and we're not afraid of it," she told a Scottish newspaper. "This is a love story between two people. What they do in their own time is none of our business."
     North Sider Melissa Stanley, 28, who dressed up as Xena for two of the past three Halloweens, pointed out that the implied relationship appeals to more than simply lesbians.
     "I'm not sure if it's for the women viewers or the men," she said.
     I wondered how, considering the big hoo-haw that erupted over "Ellen" two years ago, that "Xena," the most popular syndicated show on TV, could craft itself into a lesbian fantasy epic without public tumult. Stanley had an intriguing theory.
     "For one thing, they never made a political agenda out of it, like `Ellen' did," she said, pointing out that Ellen DeGeneres really is a lesbian, while Lawless merely plays one, maybe. "I think people have a better time with straight people playing gays than with gays playing gays."
     Now why would that be?
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 13, 1999

* She would go on to become Ald. Tom Tunney's chief of staff in 2003, serving for almost five years.