Charles Perez: Getting the Last Word

Charles Perez, the former television anchor and talk show host, has a new memoir that pulls no punches. Perez talks to Neil Broverman from The Advocate about Confessions of a Gay Anchorman, and why many TV journalists are stuck in the closet.

Even though he was out back then, Charles Perez's time hosting his self-titled talk show in the '90s was relatively scandal free. After the show wrapped in 1996, Perez transitioned into the role of television journalist, working for the program American Journal, and then serving as a weekend anchor on the number one station in the country's largest market, New York's WABC.

In 2008, Perez was named main evening anchor at WPLG in Miami — a job he says was a joy until bad publicity, regarding an ugly break-up with an ex-boyfriend, began rearing its head. Perez says his bosses become anxious about the headlines surrounding his personal life, called him "too soft," and then pulled him from the main anchor desk. After filing a complaint under the Miami-Dade Human Rights Ordinance, Perez was fired; WPLG says it had nothing to do with Perez being gay and, since the scandal erupted in 2009, the complaint against WPLG has been dismissed.

Perez's tumultuous time at WPLG, along with his entire career in front of the camera, is documented in his new memoir, Confessions of a Gay Anchorman. Happily married and with a new baby daughter, Perez talked to The Advocate about his book and why it's so hard for some television journalists to come out.

The Advocate: Why did you want to write the book?
Charles Perez: I would not change anything about how my life has unfolded—I have an amazing husband and a beautiful daughter. But when I parted with my last station, WPLG in Miami, which, up until the end, was a great relationship—I felt like two things finally collided—Charles Perez, the TV anchor personality, and Charles Perez, the gay man. And when they did, I felt like fate put me on that intersection and I had to deal with it. It had been a long time coming.

How have people reacted to the book?
I think there’s two reactions—I stay away from reading things online; lots of people have lots of opinions and I have no power over what people think and they have a right to their opinion. But especially with the book, many people with opinions haven’t read it yet. Facebook is a great example—a lot of people have started reaching out to me, particularly young gay men. Most of all, I wrote the book because I thought we have to erase the shame associated with being gay. It’s time for gay men to have our own Rachel Maddow, if you will. There are lots of examples of gay men on television, thank God—there wasn’t when I was coming out in the '80s. But even though that changed, I do believe there’s still a ceiling. I think that’s really disconcerting and I wanted to put a spotlight on it. I know that makes some people uncomfortable, but nothing changes until it changes.

In the book, you mention a newspaper article that had the headline, “Charles Perez, Too Gay for WPLG?” How strongly did you feel there’s a limit on journalists’ "gayness?"
I give an example in the book of a co-worker who called one of our meteorologists “too gay”; he needed to be tempered. First of all, [the gay man] was a great meteorologist. Bottom line. And that’s the other message of the book—as Martin Luther King said, we should be judged on the content of our character. We should also be judged by the quality of our work and our results. But in today’s corporate culture, particularly if you’re on camera, you’re a commodity. Being gay is still considered by the top brass a liability. They’ll take that shot with you if you’re a reporter in the street or if you’re a morning anchor, but if you’re the main evening anchor that they’re putting their image behind—not so much. This is true at a local stations and at a national network. [Executives] might be OK with it, but there’s an unspoken expectation that you will not only not lead with it, but you will allow the misperception that you’re straight to be perpetuated.

Does Joe the Plumber, et al, care if he gets his news from a gay anchor?
I don’t think they care. And if they care, they care for a moment and then they’re more interested if you’re doing a professional job. I think the fear comes more out of advertisers and out of television executives who are afraid what advertisers will think. Ellen DeGeneres is a great example, if you go back to her sitcom. When she came out, there were great ratings, everything was fine, and then unfortunately advertisers started to pull out and ABC didn’t stand with her; they dumped the show. I think in the long run, Ellen and Rosie O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow have proven the case—if you’re good, no one cares. But I think there is a double-standard with men. The Celluloid Closet put a spotlight on how gay men were only allowed in films as jesters or clowns. There are a lot of great people who are on TV today and accepted by management and their colleagues, but there also sort of the role of “Jack” on Will and Grace. That’s unfortunate and needs to change. We can’t be that narrow; our community is broader than that.

Congratulations on your new baby, Madeline. What are your thoughts on Florida’s new house speaker Dean Cannon recently telling the Florida Baptist Witness that he’s interesting in enforcing the gay adoption ban that was struck down last year?
It’s not over until it’s over. And this is an example, like the TV business. Bigotry and discrimination continue to exist, and the fact that some politicians would be willing to consider reversing this decision and reinstituting a ban on gay adoption—Florida being the only state in the union that had a specific ban on gay adoptive parents—tells you there are still a lot of people uneducated about what it is to be gay. I don’t really believe George or Laura Bush had a problem with gay people; they had staff members who were gay. But Bush was willing to stand up and propose an amendment to the Constitution to limit our freedom for political reasons. That may be what’s happening in Florida, but that hurts people like our daughter.

We’re not perfect parents but I dare you to come into our home and tell us we don’t love and care for our child as well as anybody can or would. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in Florida who get behind this issue. When I left the station, most of the response that I had from viewers was really supportive. But there was one guy who wrote me a letter and said, “I am going to do everything I can to get my congregation to start a campaign against you to make sure you never work in this market again.” And I thought, That’s a good use of your time.

As I wrote the book, the “It Gets Better” campaign started. I love the campaign, but it also falls short. The message is that it gets better after you leave your home, after you leave your school, after you leave your place of worship. Shouldn’t we try to make it better in those places? Along with the book, I’m launching the “No Shame” campaign, and people like [openly gay former baseball player] Billy Bean are involved. The purpose of the campaign is to make it OK to be gay and unacceptable to shame someone for being gay—at home or church. It’s no longer OK for someone like Joel Osteen to say homosexuality is a sin.

There was a cover of Time magazine in 1976 with two men holding hands. My dad held it up and said, “Enough with all these damn queers. They should put them on a damn island and get rid of them.” At 13, I shrank and told myself no one would ever know I was gay. Every time a preacher or politician takes an antigay stance, they do that.

How important is passage of the Employment Nondiscrimination Act?
When I lost my job in Florida, I was struck by the lack of employment protections for gay people in this state. I knew I’d be OK; I had a high-enough profile. But I thought about the kid who works in the hardware store or the young mother who’s gay and her employer find out and cans her, regardless of how good she is—my heart went out to them because they have no recourse. When the House became Republican as a result of the midterm elections, a lot of people, including Barney Frank, felt the wind just leave their sails. But [ENDA] is not dead. It’s got to come back, and the earlier versions of it that didn’t include transgender protections were not right. We can’t do to each other what others have done to us. I would love to help champion [ENDA]. My agent said, “Do you want to carry around a gay flag?” I said, “No, but I want inequality to go away.” The only way for the issue to go away is to grant equal protection.

Charles Perez: "We Found Our Way Around Florida's Ban on Gay Adoption"

"Are you a homosexual?" she asked.

"Excuse me?" I responded.

"Are you a homosexual?" she asked again.

It was not her second question, or the third, but the first question once I told her I was interested in adopting.

Her name was Sue. She was the on-phone representation of "Our Kids" one of Miami's premiere adoption agencies. Given Florida's anti-gay adoption laws, I didn't blame her for her question, but I didn't like it, either. I knew if I were to tell the truth, that my partner and I are gay men who want kids, the call would be over. I knew if I lied, we might move forward, and maybe even end up with a child, acquired under false pretenses with one of us as the parent and the other pretending, all the while building a web of lies to prove our acceptability to a system that has deemed us unworthy.

Unwilling to lie, I told her the truth and the call quickly ended.

All we wanted were kids and a family, when there are so many kids in the state of Florida who need families.

David Strah, in his book Gay Dads, talks about the growing phenomenon of gay fatherhood, and how so many of us, upon coming out, thought we had to give up the dream of ever becoming a parent. Instead, Strah argues, the instinct to build families and raise kids is a part of who we are, straight or gay. It is a right of being human that we don't have to abdicate because of our sexual orientation.

That said, I wish the state of Florida felt the same.

Not long after that call my husband and I were invited to a welcome home party for two beautiful twin boys who had been adopted by a friend and his same sex partner. The boys were born out of state and were now, at one year old, finally coming home. Their story gave us hope, but it also raised a lot of questions. How did they locate these boys? How did they manage this out-of-state adoption? Was the adoption legal in Florida? And, why'd it take a year to bring them home? Little did I know these questions and their answers would drive our lives for the next year.

My former colleague directed us to an out of state attorney who specialized in counseling prospective adoptive parents. Familiar with Florida's anti-gay adoption laws he made one thing very clear, "When you locate the right baby for you, you'll likely have to move there, take up residency and wait out the 6 months to a year for the adoption to be finalized before you can go back to Florida." Additionally, we were told, without reservation, were we to return to Florida before finalization, the Department of Children and Families has the right to take our child away from us and put our child into foster care. We could then lose our child forever.

"But, what if we were straight?" I asked.

"Then you'd take your baby right home," he responded. "Florida would honor with full faith and credit the court's decision in the birth state and you'd wait for finalization while living at home in Florida."

"Wow!" I responded. "Not only is Florida discriminating against gay people as parents, but also against those of us who can't afford the time of the money to disappear for up to a year."

"Exactly," he said.

That reality made me sad. As an unemployed former news anchor I had the time, and with a husband who has a great job and career, we could make it work financially. But what about the school teachers who'd make great parents? Or, what about all those loving and embracing would-be working class and middle class gay parents who might make the choice to adopt if only the state of Florida didn't stand in their way?

Regardless, grateful for our relative good position, we decided to move forward, and so we scheduled a home study with a Florida state approved child placement agency.

The home study went great. They reviewed our histories, our families, friends, education, finances, pet records and medical records. They came to our home and put their findings together in a report that would be delivered to any judge considering placement. We felt great about it, but there was one significant catch. No matter what they'd concluded, it was against the law for us to be approved. No set of circumstances, no matter how potentially favorable to an adoptive child, could be enough to get approval. Approval was against the law.

In good faith, however, they did the next best thing. Hoping a judge in another state would read between the lines, they wrote, "this agency -- regrettably -- cannot pursuant to Florida Statue 63.042(3) approve either Mr. Perez or Mr. Rinehard for adoption. However, I can offer this: But for Florida Statue 63.042(3), this agency would highly recommend Mr. Perez and Mr. Rinehard as adoptive parents without reservation."

Though these words would not open any doors in Florida, they would open doors somewhere else. Our first stop was Missouri.

Mary Ann was identified as our first potential birth mother. She said she was pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl! After 2 weeks on the phone and a couple of Western Union cash transfers, everything changed. We wanted her medical records to both confirm her pregnancy and learn the health in the baby. That's when she disappeared.

Next there was Cindy. Cindy lived in a Chicago half-way house designed to get her back on her feet after serving prison time. We liked that she lived in a controlled environment since the earliest days of her pregnancy. She talked to us about her dreams for her daughter and how she knew we were the ones to parent her child. But then, on a trip to Chicago to meet her, she turned. She was demanding money like only a drug addict or someone who's been around one can understand. She left her halfway house, returned to the streets and decided to spend the last trimester of her pregnancy on crack cocaine. She told us, "This is not about you. It's not about the baby. It's about me." We walked away.

Finally, we came to the woman who would be our birth mother. She was a smart, sweet, drug free young woman from Kansas, who just didn't want to have another child. She didn't seem to care that we were gay, and neither did the State of Kansas. Kansas has no laws supporting gay adoption, but they also have no laws banning it.

Having asking us to be in the delivery room, we cut the umbilical chord and witnessed our daughter's first courageous reach up and out of the womb and into the world. It was glorious. Tears ran from our eyes for about 3 days. They were tears of love and gratitude. Gratitude for our beautiful daughter, for the gracious and generous birth parents who put their baby ahead of themselves and gratitude for the state of Kansas, that put its babies before bigotry.

Then, in the midst of this celebration, we received a final slap from the State of Florida. We discovered we were unable to get health insurance for our little girl because our insurance policies required that any adoption be in compliance with Florida Statute. Now, we thought, not only are they hurting us.. they're hurting our baby. So for now, we wait, pray for good health, and hope that Medicaid will fill any gap should anything unthinkable happen.

It's been a roller coaster of a ride, filled with hope and disappointment, love and acceptance, birth and renewal. But, in short, we'd do it again. The experience of seeing our love amplified into a family has had the effect of making all those other important things in our lives seem small. It is a blessing that we deserve. But, more importantly, it is a blessing every Florida child deserves.

So, for now, we remain in Kansas, blissfully changing diapers, alternating midnight feedings, staring into her deep blue eyes, and wondering why this couldn't have happened in Florida.

Charles Perez is a former main anchor at Miami's ABC station and an anchor at New York's WABC. He and his Husband, Keith Rinehard were married in Westport CT in September 2009. Perez' book, Confessions of a Gay Anchorman comes out in November.

SoFLa Local: Ousted Anchor Charles Perez is Ditching Florida to Marry in Connecticut

If Miami television network WPLG doesn't want fired anchor Charles Perez, and Florida as a whole doesn't want Charles Perez, then Charles Perez doesn't want any of them. He's leaving. For Connecticut. And he's going to marry his partner there.

Ousted from the network for allegedly being, uh, too gay, Perez, 46, is now decamping from Florida, a state that bans gays from marrying or adopting, entirely. He's packing things up and heading to Connecticut, where Gay Marriages are perfectly legal, to marry his partner, muscle-y accountant Keith Rinehard.

"We just want to be normal people and not work in places where they say `Don't have kids, don't get married,'" says Perez. "On Friday, September 25th, we're going to Westport, Connecticut. Saturday we're going house shopping. And Sunday we're getting married on the beach — in linen and flip-flops."

Though they still haven't figured out what to do about Rinehard's job, which remains in Florida. ("We're playing it by ear," says the 41-year-old Rinehard.) Let's just hope they live happily ever after … unlike Perez's last relationship.