April 1997: Conservative Pundit Writes of ‘Regrets’ at Former Anti-Gay Rhetoric

Conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, who also serves as a political analyst for CBS and MSNBC, publishes an essay in the Washington Post apologizing for her intolerance of homosexuals and claiming to have recanted her views. Ingraham, who won a reputation as a “gay-basher” while writing and editing the conservative Dartmouth Review in her undergraduate days (see 1984), writes that she realized gays are worthy of respect after her brother, Curtis Ingraham, came out as openly gay. Ingraham writes that she witnessed the struggles her brother and his late partner went through in coping with AIDS, writing of their “dignity, fidelity, and courage.” She writes that until her brother’s ordeal, she didn’t understand the urgency for AIDS funding, the problems gay couples face with insurance and the emotional strain of continuing discrimination, and concludes by noting that she regrets her earlier “callous rhetoric.” Jeffrey Hart, the Review’s faculty adviser, responds to Ingraham’s essay with an angry note to the conservative Weekly Standard challenging Ingraham’s choice of bringing the Review into what he calls her “phony political confession”; Hart writes that Ingraham held “the most extreme anti-homosexual views imaginable,” more so than any other staffer. He says she went so far as to avoid a local eatery where she feared the waiters were homosexual and might touch her silverware or spit on her food, exposing her to AIDS. Time columnist Margaret Carlson writes of Ingraham’s apparent conversion, “[D]oesn’t a commentator have a responsibility to find out about such things before venturing an opinion, even if it means looking outside your own tribe?” [Time, 4/21/1997] In 2009, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD) will list Ingraham as one of the media’s worst anti-gay defamers of 2008, noting her repeated attacks on gays from her post as a Fox News contributor. [Out and About, 1/7/2009]