In a profile of Maureen Dowd's early career, Elon Green revisits her early reporting on the Gay Men's Health Crisis – and how radical a departure it was for the NYT back then:
I told her I was pleasantly surprised the story was allotted so much space, almost 3,000 words, given executive editor Abraham "Abe" Rosenthal’s well-known homophobia. As Charles Kaiser once said, "Everyone below Rosenthal spent all of their time trying to figure out what to do to cater to his prejudices. One of these widely perceived prejudices was Abe’s homophobia. So editors throughout the paper would keep stories concerning gays out of the paper."
Dowd says she wasn’t aware of the homophobia.
She doesn’t dispute Kaiser’s account, and others, but "I just had no knowledge of it at the time. I’ve read about it since and don’t doubt the accounts. I just didn’t experience it. Obviously, I wouldn’t have been in a position to." To some extent, her view of the institutional homophobia was shaped by her friendship with Jeffrey Schmalz, a gay Times editor close to Arthur Sulzberger. He was "very powerful," Dowd said, and a "really important person at the paper. So I didn’t see the homophobia because Jeff was just this person you thought would be running the Times someday. I think he would have ended up as the executive editor." (Schmalz, who had AIDS, died in 1993.)
Dowd believed the paper "was good for gays. I didn’t realize until I read the accounts later that to some people it wasn’t."
The Dish 