Remembering Mike Salinas
I freelanced for the late B.A.R. news editor Mike Salinas in the 1990s, sending him political and AIDS-related stories from Los Angeles. As a former mainstream journalist, I often argued with him when he included activist terms under my byline; he once inserted The Betrayer in a Bill Clinton photo caption. But we worked well together.
Salinas was also insightful. He called me an environmental reporter because I wrote about fundraisers in a you-are-there style. He was right. I imagined my reader as a homebound person with AIDS who had tickets for the event but was too sick to go. I imagined a partner or friend reading him my coverage so that a person living with AIDS could picture himself there. Mike got a chuckle over the fashion fundraisers. One time I thought Sandra Bernhard was wearing a mustard yellow shag-carpet jacket strutting down the runaway. Luckily, I was seated next to a gay guy from the Gap who said she was wearing gay fashion designer Is