Page Two
Defending the Lauryn Paige Fuller murder story.
By Louis Black, Fri., Feb. 25, 2000
Nobody could have been more surprised than I to receive the e-mails I did in the wake of last week's cover story ["Mighty Real: The Scott Fuller Murder and Austin's Drag Underground"]. The mail from the transgender community attacking us for running Jordan Smith's beautiful reporting of a tragic story was overwhelming. Fuller's path wasn't easy, but she was dedicated to finding her center despite the personal conflicts and contradictions that wrapped her life. The piece respects Lauryn Paige Fuller.
It was a piece Smith never wanted to write, and the Chronicle never wanted to run. We're not a tabloid -- we're an alternative weekly telling the tales of our community. The stories are not always pretty; they're not always pleasant. Sometimes they have to be told, not to gawk at perversion but to demand compassion. This story was a grave marker for a life cut short.
To my mind, there's something especially powerful about Smith's piece. She captures the value of the life lead -- a life and style foreign to most of us in its affectations but so obviously human. Smith told the story of Fuller, of her life and friends, of her frustration, celebration, and tragedy. Jana Birchum's accompanying photos show the beauty of a world that reflects and refracts the one with which we are more familiar. The e-mails make it clear that Fuller is not of their community and suggest that telling Fuller's story does them and all transgender people a disservice. It isn't politically correct; it isn't gender-identity positive. One more time they line up to cast Fuller out, only this time it's her sisters in the line. We offer three of the letters below -- we received over a dozen, and they are available on our Web site. For the record, I'm very proud of the piece and think it is among the more important stories we've published.
The annual Austin Musicians Register has become a legend over the years. The 16 or so registers we've published are a true document of most of the past two decades of the Austin music scene. Rising from not even 200 entries the first year, there are more than 1,300 this year. Kate Messer and her amazing team (aided by Lindsey Simon, head of the Chronicle's shadow government) put together this year's listing. This may be the last time we publish the register in the actual issue of the Chronicle. Some time after SXSW we're going to have a meeting about making the whole project an online publication that is regularly updated.
Years ago, Austin anti-porn activist Mark Weaver got the Chronicle thrown out of the HEB chain because we carried gay personal ads. To make a long story short, in a few weeks we got back in and within a few months began a phenomenal growth spurt. At some point, we talked to Mark Weaver. Most of his complaints were spurious, but Nick Barbaro and I make a habit of listening to people who least expect us to be paying attention. Shortly after that, we began the "About AIDS" column. We thought of it as a fact-based column offering regular information on the disease. Over the years, it evolved into much more of a community bulletin board for a surprisingly large audience.
It all runs together, but at some point, I became responsible for the column, and my contact person was Clifford Ueltschey. He authored few of the columns but mostly gathered them from a variety of organizations and writers. I hadn't realized how completely "About AIDS" had evolved into a bulletin board until Clifford called me one week to scold us for running the column out of order. We had missed some event, and it impacted on attendance.
During a number of years, we talked often on the phone. He was funny, energetic, and committed. He was very focused. He really ran the column, inviting in a diversity of voices. I met him once or twice, in passing, at one event or another. Almost all of our communication was over the phone. He helped take a physically very small part of the paper -- a short column back in the personals -- and make it into a destination stop for many readers. He moved on, and I moved up, though I heard he had become a world-class body builder. Clifford died last week. Having basked in his energy relatively briefly, I can begin to imagine the sense of loss felt by the community around him. Here at the Chronicle, another past light of our history has forever gone out. 
