LOOKOUT, if you haven’t heard of it, is a nonprofit, independent news outlet that covers the LGBTQ+ community in Phoenix. And recently, their editor-in-chief and founder, Joseph Darius Jaafari, sent out a note to readers addressing their use of a particular word in their coverage: queer.
It’s been used as a slur in the past, but today it’s become something of an umbrella term. Another example? They use the acronym LGBTQ+. They don’t say LGBT or the longest version adopted by some in the community, 2SLGBTQIA.
Why not? And how does the current political discourse over free speech play into it? The Show spoke with Jaafari more about it.
Full conversation
JOSEPH DARIUS JAAFARI: If you think about who our readership is and who the queer community is, right. It is a community that adopts language pretty freely. You know, they are early adopters of culture and language, and they are, you know, have a large number of people who are part of activist communities who adopt different language than what maybe you and I typically like, use in our news reporting.
And so it's important that as we're reporting to that audience, but also to a wider audience, because we do a lot of republishing, that we're using language that everybody understands. But the second reason why we did it is because one of my reporters kind of came to me and they said, listen, I'm not sure how I feel about certain words that we use.
And part of being a transparent and community news organization is making sure that we listen to our reporters as well, because they're on the front lines and they're talking to people that made us go, OK, so let's take a step back, because if, you know, our reporters are feeling uncomfortable, we don't want that. We want to make sure that they go into the field and are using the language that the people that they're talking to are using.
LAUREN GILGER: OK, so let's talk about some of the examples of that, right? Like you use the term LGBTQ+, and there are other forms of that. The New York Times will just say L.G.B.T.Q., AP Stylebook says LGBTQ, but without periods.
JAAFARI: Right.
GILGER: This has been an evolving kind of label for the, quote, unquote, queer community. And queer is another term I'm sure you've debated. How did you land on LGBTQ+?
JAAFARI: Yeah, well, I think it's important to kind of go into the history of that. You know, first it was GLB for the longest time, and then during the AIDS crisis, when we recognized the lesbian community really stepped up for the gay men, the history goes that then it turned to LGB as, like as a manner of, you know, respect. And then, of course, you know, trans people became part of the community because they were so tantamount to the importance of the Stonewall movement. And then, of course, to gay rights movement generally. So that became LGBT.
And, you know, now we've kind of, like, expanded and grown it. You know, queer is now a word that has become so commonplace, and it's become this ultimate umbrella of the culture and the people who are within the community. But there's also two spirit, there's intersex, there's asexual. And so one of the things that we have to do as news people, our job is just plainly to make the news clear.
At LOOKOUT, we are not advocacy news. We're not activist news. We really kind of make a stand with our community being like, we are not any one thing. We are just news. We are as if the AP took queer news seriously.
And so we will not use, you know, 2SLGBTQIA is a mouthful, right? But on top of it, it's something that only specific people really use in specific spaces. LGBTQIA, not a lot of people use it. And at the end of the day, when we're writing stories, we have to wonder, because we do republishing, how much do we have to explain to a general audience what the IA means? How much do you have to explain what the 2s mean?
And so we kind of settled on LGBTQ+ is pretty encompassing. People understand what we're talking about. That's kind of the point of the plus. Yeah, but again, this is why we did a check-in. Is this not complete enough? Is this something that people are not using generally?
GILGER: So you're kind of getting at this idea that you're covering a community that is often on the forefront of change, but you're not doing that as journalists covering it. You want to be responsive to it, though.
JAAFARI: Yes, 100%. I think this is the problem that we kind of come across when we talk about news generally. And I know I'm going to probably make some enemies with it, probably the younger generation of news people here. But at the same time, news is not supposed to be the movement maker. We are supposed to be following the movements.
There's, of course, space for movement journalism, but that's not what we are. We have to make sure that we're using the language that everybody can understand. We're not documenting just a movement. We're documenting a people that is pretty wide encompassing; that isn't, that isn't monolithic by any stretch of the imagination.
GILGER: Yeah. Let me ask you about the kind of broader political moment we're finding ourselves in right now as you're debating the use of these terms and trying to be kind of neutral about it, right. Clear about it. The political divide is clear right now, even in the language that we use, right.
Like if somebody says transgender ideology, you kind of know what they mean or where they're coming from, right. And the same can be true for things on the left if somebody uses that full term, the 2s included, all that kind of stuff.
As journalists, though, as you're saying, like we're not supposed to take sides. Do you feel that tension in this debate for yourself today?
JAAFARI: 100%. I mean, listen, I say we're not activists and we're not advocates because we aren't like, to me, that is a level of journalism where we won't cross a line in opposition to our community. But we will, if our community does something bad, we will be the first to cover it, right. However, you know, we absolutely come to the news with a perspective.
We come to the news with the perspective of I am a gay man in Arizona, that shouldn't really have to debate about my right to exist. Right. And so we kind of cover it from that perspective. We will never claim to be an objective news source. And any news outlet that claims to try to strive for objectivity, I will argue is fooling themselves.
However, one of the things that I often think about is how for a long time, just within queer spaces, right, that people have been afraid to talk about queer people in ways that they understand because they're afraid of saying something wrong.
And we have had to deal with the fact that when people who are part of this community have policed what people can say or what they should say, you've now had an opportunity for conservatives and very far-right people to use that as a weapon to get people to essentially be against the community, make them seem as an enemy and make them seem as they are, the police, when at the end of the day, we're all just trying to understand what we're saying to each other.
GILGER: That's so interesting, because what you're getting at here is a really big piece of the political debate in the country right now, right. We have seen so much criticism from the right that the left had gone too far in policing the words people use, in policing language and how people talk about themselves even.
And they've called that an infringement on free speech. But now we're seeing kind of a big backlash to that and lots of questions from the left about the same thing. What do you make of that? As a journalist who covers the queer community.
JAAFARI: My main thought on it is what we're witnessing right now is whiplash politics. One side of the aisle or one group of people, they just really doubled down on their language as like, this is how we speak. And for a while there just was no, there was no opportunity to question it. And not that everything needed to be questioned, but there needed to be a moment of getting people to understand what the language was.
Arguably, the language that queer people are using is not wrong. Using nonbinary pronouns is not wrong. It's not grammatically incorrect. But maybe there needed to be a moment to just get people to understand rather than like, like bludgeon them over the head with it. That's kind of our opportunity as a queer newsroom right now is that we are trying to write the news in a way that everybody, no matter what side of the aisle you're on, you can understand what we're saying we're not using.
For example, you know, there's a story that we did where a trans woman said like, "I'm not a trans woman. I'm a woman with trans experience." And I said, I don't really think an audience outside of the queer community will understand what the hell that means at the end of the day, I have to write and we have to write for an audience in Arizona that may not be fully understanding of what exactly the experiences of these people are, but we need them to get them to get to a point of understanding.
That is the goal. And so that's kind of how I've approached it, is that I'm not trying to advocate that queer people went too far or anything like that, but I definitely think that now it's an important time to absolutely get people to get into that understanding phase of this is the why the language is being used in the way it is and there's, there's a reason for it.
