The High Cost Of Cheap Journalism

I woke up this morning with one goal: De-gay my resume.

It's now 5 p.m. and I haven't gotten anywhere.

One problem is, I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to do that since I've spent the bulk of my career writing about gay and lesbian issues. ( I've penned 2 long-running gay columns, 175 episodes of a gay soap opera, the pilot episode of a gay sitcom, the pilot episode of a gay dramedy, this blog, and I have a book of humorous essays that are all based on my —you guessed it — gay life. I also went to a pretty gay college, live on the gayer coast — a little over 30 miles from the Golden Gay Bridge, I'm married to a woman, for fuck's sake, and ... ding! ding! ding! ...we have two cats.)

Have I done anything that isn't gay, you might ask? Yes! I currently edit a one-nipple-shot-shy-of-porn sex site, and a few years back I edited teacher's guides and materials for ... wait for it ... children in grades K-8.

Oil, meet water.

Now, you might think that living on the west coast, so close to San Francisco, would be an advantage for a lesbian writer, and you'd win a toaster. I can definitely get a job writing for a gay Web site or magazine. But, here's the catch: Gay mags and Web sites are notoriously poor. I make more money working three hours a day editing stories about an over-sexed and very straight superhero than I would if I worked full time for my own peeps. And, perhaps needless to say, the man behind the superhero mask doesn't give a rat's ass that I'm a lesbian.

So, here I sit, prepared to re-write a resume that's neither boring nor ugly, too thin nor even too long. It's just, well, not bringing results. In 2009, I sent out approximately 537 of those suckers, and I received four responses. Yeah, four. And of those four, only one offered a (barely) decent wage. That's the bad news. But here's the good news: That's one more than I received in 2008.

For the record, I've showed my resume to friends ... and friends of friends, including HR professionals and owners of companies. I've even shown it to other writers and people with six-figure salaries who haven't written a complete sentence since the invention of the Blackberry, and everyone agrees that it's a darn good resume. "Impressive!" they say. "Big words!" ... "You wrote a book? A WHOLE book?" ... "If I needed a writer, I'd hire you, even if you are gay!" Etc., etc., and I think they meant every word.

So, if there's nothing wrong with the content, length, font, grammar, color, feel or smell of my resume, if my resume is otherwise resumetastic, it must be too gay. Right?

Not necessarily.