The editor and publisher of the San Diego Reader, San Diego’s largest alternative weekly and one of the largest alternative publications in the nation, is a conservative Catholic with strong anti-abortion and anti-GLBT views, and those views routinely find their way into the editorial coverage and advertising policies at the Reader.

A trip to the Registrar of Voters reveals that Reader publisher Jim Holman donates frequently to conservative candidates and pro-life legislation. On Major Donor and Independent Expenditure Committee Campaign Statements on file, his 2003 total expenditures and contributions totaled $153,592.20, including $47,637.50 worth of contributions to Life on the Ballot #127969 – an attempt to put parental notification, before an abortion is performed on a minor, onto the statewide ballot – $21,000 to Tom McClintock for State Senate, a Republican fiscal conservative, and $40,000 to a PAC supporting the recall of Governor Davis. (These figures do not include free Reader advertising donated to some of the same causes.) In 2000, he donated $1,500 to the San Diego County Family Values Coalition in support of Jay La Suer for the 77th Assembly District seat.

But for the most public outline of Holman’s private views, one need look no further than Holman’s other publications, the conservative Catholic San Diego News Notes and its sister publications, the Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission, San Francisco Faith and La Cruz de California. The News Notes, according to its website, offers “stories, articles, and news of interest to Catholics and is published monthly by Concerned Citizens for Life.”

However, Holman’s News Notes has expanded its content beyond abortion and Catholic issues in order to criticize gay parents and gay adoption, to speak against openly gay Deputy Mayor Toni Atkins and to condemn this year’s Youth Pride festival.

A reporter for the News Notes, Allyson Smith, appeared at this year’s Youth Pride festival on May 1 with members of Concerned Women for America, a national conservative Christian group, and filmed the youth march and daylong festival while members of an affiliated local Christian church passed out flyers outside the event.

Smith’s follow-up to Youth Pride in the June edition of the News Notes, entitled “Better to have a Millstone… Youth Pride in Hillcrest”, opens with: “Children as young as 12 years old and dance students from Carlsbad High School mingled with gray-haired homosexuals and transvestites amid booths hawking erotic gay magazines, free condoms, and anal lubricant samples during the second annual San Diego Youth Pride festival Saturday afternoon, May 1, at the taxpayer-funded Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Center in Hillcrest.”

Following the event, on May 4, Smith and others from the group spoke at a San Diego City Council meeting in protest of the council’s decision to issue a resolution proclaiming Saturday, May 1, as “San Diego Youth Pride Day”. Smith was among those that spoke in opposition to the resolution and said they were considering a lawsuit against the city for allowing discriminatory acts on public property.

“To those of you who have proposed a plan to vote for this reprehensible proclamation,” said Smith to the council, “I ask: Where is your true compassion for children? … The kids were able to mix freely with adult homosexuals, transvestites and Miss Gay Teen San Diego winners, observe same-sex sexual behaviors and obtain free and confidential HIV testing for ages 13 and up from a tax-funded San Diego County Health and Human Services van parked across the street. … Shame, shame, shame on this council for supporting a resolution that celebrates corrupting children.”

Regardless, the council voted 7-0 in favor of the resolution recognizing Youth Pride.

Smith could not be reached for comment by the Gay & Lesbian Times for this article.

The News Notes is, of course, allowed to print any and all diatribes against the GLBT community, however paranoid and ignorant, that they want to. The News Notes does not purport to be anything but what it is – a publication for the conservative Christian lifestyle.

However, the Reader is a different story. According to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, the Reader “covers San Diego life in general, with emphasis on politics and the arts and entertainment. … With an average of over 220 pages each week, the Reader is the largest alternative publication in the nation. It is the second-largest circulation newspaper in San Diego with a 4-week readership of over 797,000 adults.”

Somehow, no one seems to notice the conservative bent of our city’s major alternative weekly.

Both the Oct. 30 and Nov. 6 editions of the Reader featured articles that fit better with the political agenda of the News Notes or one of its spin-offs. These were written by Ernie Grimm, now (though not then) the editor of News Notes, for the City Lights section. “Too Close” and “Bathhouse Quagmire” both not only quote heavily from but focus on “ex-gay” conservative activist James Hartline – known to many in the GLBT community for his anti-gay, religious zealotry – as an expert on the issue of San Diego adult entertainment bookstore zoning laws and the closing of San Diego’s three remaining bathhouses due to the spread of HIV/AIDS.

“Too Close”, which is highlighted with the lead-in “Sex stores get cozy with schools and churches” in the table of contents, analyzes San Diego Municipal Code 141.061, which outlines the zoning laws for adult entertainment shops in relation to other adult businesses, residential zones and public institutions such as parks, schools, churches or social service institutions. An assessment of five Hillcrest and North Park businesses follows: in relation to these restrictions, Rainbow Road, Sensual Delights, two Crypt stores and Midnight Adult Video Store are found to violate the code, though the City of San Diego found that three of the stores in question were either not classified as adult stores according to the percentage of space devoted to adult and sexual material, or were doing business prior to the establishment of the code in 1979.

In “Bathhouse Quagmire”, Hartline is quoted outlining his past involvement with bathhouses, which he blames for his own HIV infection. Grimm does not mention Hartline’s religious and anti-gay activism, though they are a major factor in Hartline’s public persona.

In fact, one cannot listen to Hartline speak without hearing him “shout the gospel from the rooftops”, as Robert Kumpel writes in “Ex Gay Takes on His Past: A Tour through Hillcrest” from a November 2003 issue of the News Notes. Kumpel’s article establishes Hartline as a “converted homosexual”, beginning by quoting his past experiences cruising older men in public parks as a youth, and his assumptions about why he was picked up: “The gay community is always trying to separate child molesters from homosexuality, but I’ve found that most pedophiles will participate in homosexuality if they can’t get children.” Hartline goes on to say: “God has told me that I am going to be healed of this disease. The purpose behind that is, when I am healed, the case is going to be so well documented that it will send shock waves throughout the medical community. I believe God will use me to preach the gospel and one of the platforms for me to preach from will be my healing from HIV… the Lord wants to use me to ignite the land and bring revival to the homosexual community.”

Some members of the GLBT and HIV/AIDS communities took offense at the use of Hartline as a valid representative of both communities.

“[A]lthough I know the Reader tends to disdain the so-called gay community and its radical little self-proclaimed potentates “wrote one letter to the editor following the bathhouse article, “… It would be a refreshing change if you at least considered the possibility that we’re not all raving perverts.”

“I thought the way to go about it was to approach it from a sort of health management position,” Grimm said in an interview with the Gay & Lesbian Times shortly after the article was published. “If you take the example of San Francisco, when the AIDS virus broke out, epidemiologists were really certain that the bathhouses were places where it was being generated, and they closed them down for that reason. And San Francisco is obviously a very gay-friendly city. It wasn’t a statement about homosexuality, but about health risks to their citizens, and so that’s why I didn’t want to open it up into a cultural piece about homosexuality…. I did quote [Hartline] making a statement about it being a cornerstone of the gay community…. If I was going to say that I probably should have had a response…. That was a point of imbalance.”

“He’s very outspoken, and journalistically he’s kind of hot to handle in a way because he mixes a lot of everything with the facts,” Grimm said of Hartline. “…I can understand that he is going to be a hot-button issue there, and I think he understands that too, and he probably even relishes the situation.”

The American Psychiatric Association and other professional psychology groups have discredited the ex-gay movement.

In other sections of the Reader, gays and lesbians are not so much disparaged as conspicuously absent, while religious life in San Diego is highlighted, albeit somewhat ironically. The “Sheep and Goats, Places of Worship Reviewed” section of the Reader critiques various churches around the San Diego area; categories for judgment being sermon, liturgy, music, snacks, flowers, architecture and friendliness. Does any other alternative weekly have a church review section?

Noticeably, the Dec. 4 “Best Of” edition of the Reader lacked any GBLT-themed categories, and no GLBT bars got a mention; though, if included on the list of “Best Dance Club for Exhibitionists” candidates, even non-patrons would realize that Rich’s or Club Montage is a much better fit than the actual winner, the now-defunct Buffalo Joe’s. And though there was a category for “Best Place to Ogle Straight Men”, there was no such category for gay men. Club Montage, however, did receive props for “Best Afterhours Club”, though it is one of the only after-hours clubs in San Diego proper.

“Best Church for Miracle Healings” must have taken the spot for “Best Gay Bar”. “Best Marathon Religious Experience” must have replaced “Best Club for Gay Singles”. “Best Place for a Religious Retreat” is definitely hipper than, say, “Best Place to Get Free Condoms”. Or was it “Best Soul-Stirring Sermons” that replaced that one?

Who could pass up “Best Place to Get High When You’re Dying” (given to Stir It Up Cannabis Coffeehouse) for something as drab as “Best Place to Get Tested for STDs” or “Best Youth Education and Outreach”? If the Reader lists “Best Heart Recovery Program” and “Best Mental Health Program” under options for “Goods and Services”, where was “Best GLBT Outreach Services” or “Best HIV/AIDS Outreach”?

Holman, who keeps a low profile in the San Diego community in general, declined to be interviewed by the Gay & Lesbian Times for this article, as did Grimm.

Meanwhile, Holman has been quoted as finding our city’s conservative Union-Tribune as too liberal, an unusual position for the publisher of any city’s “alternative” weekly to take. An article published online in Dittohead, a conservative news posting, after the Union-Tribune fired right-wing columnist Marc Morano in August 2003, praised Holman, saying: “Jim Holman, who is the editor of the weekly San Diego Reader, has written about the Union-Tribune’s liberal shift. Holman said, ‘It is not a big surprise’ that Thomas’s column was dropped because he believes the paper’s editorial stance has become increasingly ‘more anti-family, pro-abortion and pro-homosexual.’ Holman said that while the paper still endorses many Republican candidates, the staff tends to be GOP ‘social liberals’.”

In a February 1995 article in the Gay & Lesbian Times Holman confirmed for the GLBT community the reasons they may find their community somewhat invisible in the pages of the Reader. “‘The reason we don’t run [gay-friendly] ads is me,’” Holman said at the time. “‘… I don’t want to encourage gay relationships. I don’t want to be an agent for that. … This [banning gay ads] is a moral decision on behalf of myself. It was my decision not to be an agent for immoral behavior.’” The article did assert that the Reader runs fair articles on the GLBT community and its politics, some written by openly gay writers and reporters on staff.

But a quick glance through recent editions reveals that the personals section only offers “Shared Interests”, “Women Seeking Men” and “Men Seeking Women”, and there are no GLBT bars or clubs listed, except Club Montage and Lips, which both attract a large heterosexual clientele.

Similarly, the San Diego Union-Tribune last February refused to run an advertisement for Showtime’s lesbian-centered drama “The L-Word”, one of only five publications in the country to do so, and they have previously refused such innocuous ads as the promotion ad for the film Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss.

The Reader seems to offer no products or services that directly target GLBTs, such as UCSD studies, counseling and support services, advertisements for GLBT fundraisers or even advertisements for HIV/AIDS medications.

However, there are advertisements for the News Notes, which offer a free subscription if you visit the News Notes website. One ad features the top of a News Notes front page, with the headline “Gay Friendly, What’s with USD’s Theology Department?”

Often a legitimate paper has a slant – and every paper should be allowed to publish that slant. It is all of our responsibility to protect freedom of expression and practice self-censorship if we do not like what we hear. Let us, then, keep our gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender hands off of the Reader. Jim Holman will appreciate the effort.