The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Among those of us who experienced what might be called a "difficult" relationship with mainstream newspapering, one of the jokes about newspapers' numbing institutional voice was that that voice must never, ever risk offending the kind of fine and decent ladies you find serving meatballs and lefse at a Lutheran church dinner. Such ladies were the acid test for hyper-cautious, risk-averse newspapering, for what flew and what didn't. If you could imagine the meatball ladies being shocked, the story or phrasing got the "delete" button.

Well, here's a dark secret. The average second and third tier daily newspaper newsroom was/is full of incipient Lutheran meatball ladies (and men), people who have assigned themselves the task of rigorously assessing the naughtiness quotient of topics and wording. If you're a reporter, good luck getting every day, garden variety, workplace-tested sexual vernacular past that crowd.

So imagine my amazement, (and sophomoric amusement), when I leafed through the latest edition of Vita.Mn, the Star Tribune's latest weekly vehicle for, like, rollin' with the dudes. There was "Alexis on the Sexes", the freebie's sex columnist, dispensing sage counsel and I dare say, encouragement to couples interested in exploring the exotic delights of anal sex.

Well ... from my experience with daily newspapering, I can assure you that decent women and certainly no men in the newsroom would dare mention such a concept above a furtive whisper, the latter out of fear of a call from HR. (A bit of an exaggeration there. In certain "safe zones", such topics were discussed, sometimes ad nauseam).

Vita.Mn of course isn't a mainstream daily, is it? But unlike the various free weeklies that have come and gone around town this one IS owned and operated and edited by the Star Tribune, where encouraging readers to try anal sex is about as remote a concept as suggesting some Hadassah lady set herself on fire on the Guthrie thrust stage.

I called Tim Campbell, the droll fellow who edits Vita.Mn AND the Strib's A&E section. I asked about the reaction to the column. "About what you'd expect," he said. Not much from the public, really. The target audience of precocious teens, college kids, twenty-somethings and pervy geezers took it all in stride, and in fact, said Campbell, they respond far more to fashion stories than "Alexis on the Sexes". (The presumption being, I guess, that all the aforementioned, with the exception of the pathetic pervy geezers, long ago included anal sex as a regular part of their sexual regimen and therefore are really far more concerned with accessory trends.)

Campbell said the intra-newsroom chatter about the column was also fairly predictable, with the usual guardians of righteous propriety, ("a-choomeatball ..."), expressing horror and declaring ... again ... the great and grand institution of the Star Tribune was poised, verily, on the precipice of a terrible slippery slope. If back door lovin' was now appropriate conversation within their sacred, Big "J" journalistic halls, (and mine you, without a breath of moral condemnation!), why every facet of truth, fairness and accuracy, will soon be dragged into disrepute.

As I say, attempts by mainstream newspapers to reach those much-coveted "younger readers" are often laughable. (I mean look at WHO is pretending to be hip!). Such attempts are doomed until Big "J" papers figure out a way to interact with that crowd on ... the crowd's terms ... not the terms of the paper's risk averse, (and often extraordinarily nerdy), meatball ladies/men-in-training. If that means a sex column, so be it. But don't -- and Campbell has not -- then censor the sex columnist.

Frankly, I suspect today's kids have access to so much sexual information -- and sexual bullshit -- they hardly demand it from an actual paper newspaper. But, if you're the big, lumbering corporate publisher trying to reach kids, talking sex comes with the territory, which means you've got to demonstrate a semblance of crede. As in tossing in a column on tips and tricks for back door lovin' with an attitude of nonchalance.

Somehow that led me to ask Campbell if Claude Peck and Rick Nelson's
very amusing, very gay Sunday "conversation" column, "Withering Glance", might be a good fit for Vita.Mn? You know, maybe in an expanded, unfettered sort of form?

Campbell thought a moment, conceded that when Peck and Nelson get into vivisecting fashion disasters Vita.Mn's audience would probably connect, but then, on second thought, no. "I think they're probably just too old."

Brutal. And just when you were thinking every gay guy was forever hip. Instead ... Peck and Nelson consigned to a wing of the same musty floor as other geezers and meatball ladies, the hetero ones who woo-hooed and scowled at the mere mention of back door love.