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New book chronicles founding of gay-owned Falls Church News-Press

Nick Benton emerged as major influencer and nurturer of local talent

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The History Press released a book by D.C.-area journalist Charlie Clark in October entitled, “The Life and Times of the Falls Church News-Press” (a 192 page paperback). 

The News-Press was founded in 1991 by journalist and gay activist Nicholas Benton and has published more than 1,700 consecutive weekly editions since serving the inside-the-beltway Northern Virginia suburb of the City of Falls Church, a mere seven miles from the White House.

In its masthead, the News-Press says of itself, “Since 1991, an award-winning LGBT-owned general interest community newspaper.” It has been named the Business of the Year twice and Benton the Person of the Year by the Falls Church City Council. These are selected excerpts from the Clark book: 

“Its founder, Nicholas F. Benton, is a native Californian, college baseball player, degreed master of divinity, gay activist and journalist born “with printer’s ink in his veins” – or so he suspects. He launched the Falls Church News-Press largely as a one-man band. But with unflagging energy, he emerged as a major influencer and talent nurturer.

“Benton knows the key players, hosts frequent parties and can be see walking the streets and dining at eateries that make Falls Church homey. In editorials written every week by Benton himself, the editor strives to protect the city’s prize schools by pressing for property tax revenues and favoring development in the occasional battles with traditionalists who treasure the residential village. He made his mark on zoning disputes over how to tastefully attract commercial development. News-Press news sections combine small-town intimate coverage – plenty of photographs of smiling residents lined up for the camera – with exclusive accounts of action by the city council and the school board (at whose meetings Benton is sometimes the only member in attendance)….

“Some say it’s a miracle that Benton’s close-to-home news organ – backed neither by inherited wealth nor corporate investors – has survived three decades, given the current death knells for local news outlets…. The book you hold relays the tale of how Benton pulled things off. He takes virtually no vacations (beyond a few weekends). He pays staff writers (and offers health insurance) rather than engaging too many volunteers. He hires and mentors high school students. He gives the paper out for free and publishes letters that criticize. He donates to charities and cultivates youth readers by boosting high school and Little League sports, holiday parades, scouting and local history. His team covers charities, efforts to aid the homeless, published authors, theater productions, demands for low-income housing, struggling small businesses, gay rights and wars over parking. And Benton invites the public to his office parties..

“The News-Press is one of the things that make Falls Church special,” Mayor Dave Tarter told me as this book was in preparation. “The paper reinforces and enhances the sense of community of shared experiences” in covering stories that the Washington Post would not make space for. “It is a labor of love for Nick Benton, and it shows. Whether you love it or hate it, everyone reads the News-Press…” 

“…Benton enrolled at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley (class of 1969). This brought him to the University of California’s flagship school at the height of the antiwar, civil rights and student power protests, a time when the smell of the national guardsmen’s tear gas was familiar on campus. Benton was awarded his master of divinity diploma cum laude on June 13, 1969 (it is framed and displayed today in the News-Press office. He worked as a youth minister for three years at seminary but never pursued that as a career. He would later consider his newspaper ownership a close substitute to ministry…

“Benton remained in the Bay Area and worked for the famous alternative weekly, the Berkeley Barb, enjoying the freedom to publish on counterculture subjects from women’s liberation to rock music…While at the Barb Benton also came out as gay, just before the 1969 Stonewall Riot in New York’s Greenwich Village that launched the gay right movement. His articles, he later wrote, “promoted the notion that fully actualized, gay liberation had the potential to be socially transformative.” He penned the editorial for the first edition of the Gay Sunshine newspaper, and he coproduced a pair of issues of his own fledgling gay newspaper, the Effeminist…

“… By 1987, he had incorporated his own news service…It became the context for his decision in early December 1990 to launch the News-Press. He would pull it off by charming volunteer labor and combining it with his own seven-days-a-week style. Another secret to Benton’s success: he is “frugal.” There were no desks in the office, just boards and folding chairs. “Editor in Chief Nick Benton is too modest to blow his own horn,” wrote reader Robert O. Beach in a letter published in March 1998. “But he deserves tremendous credit for the vital contribution the News-Press makes to our community.”

“Environmental consultant and history activist Dave Eckert goes further. “The News-Press became the focal point of Falls Church,” he said in 2022. “Nick Benton wanted to do good journalism, get readers and advertisements, but in many ways the paper brought the city together. And in many ways it drove it apart.”

“… ‘We worked all night on that first issue,’ Benton recalled, ‘and as the deadline approached, as dawn began to break on March 27, we looked out our second-story windows to see that the cherry blossom trees on North Virginia Avenue had blossomed overnight. That was our sign to press ahead.’

“After the proverbial all-nighter, his team of three drove to Gaithersburg, Md., to the Comprint Co. plant to witness the maiden print run. ‘When the press bell rang and everything started to move, it was a very special moment,’ Benton remembered. ‘As the papers started chugging onto a conveyor belt, I couldn’t help but stand on a box and loudly exclaim, ‘Let every tyrant tremble!’ The noise of the press drowned me out so that only a couple of pressmen gave me funny looks.’

“Back in Falls Church, young O’Brien had walked the streets crowing, ‘Have you heard the news? Come March 28, Falls Church is going to have its own newspaper!’”

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Books

From genteel British wealth to trans biker

Memoir ‘Frighten the Horses’ a long but essential read

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(Book cover image courtesy of Roxane Books/Grove Atlantic)

‘Frighten the Horses: A Memoir’
By Oliver Radclyffe
c.2024, Roxane Books/Grove Atlantic
$28/352 pages

Finding your own way.

It’s a rite of passage for every young person, a necessity on the path to adulthood. You might have had help with it. You might have listened to your heart alone on the quest to find your own way. And sometimes, as in the new memoir, “Frighten the Horses” by Oliver Radclyffe, you may have to find yourself first.

If you had observed Oliver Radclyffe in a random diner a few years ago, you’d have seen a blonde, bubbly, but harried mother with four active children under age seven and a distracted husband. You probably wouldn’t have seen trouble, but it was there.

“Nicky,” as Radclyffe was known then, was simmering with something that was just coming to the forefront.

As a young child, Nicky’d been raised in comfort in a family steeped in genteel British wealth, attended a private all-girl’s school, and never wanted for anything. She left all that behind as a young adult, and embraced the biker lifestyle and everything it entailed. The problem now wasn’t that she missed her old ways; it was that she hated life as a wife and mother. Her dreams were filled with fantasies of “exactly who I was: a man on a motorbike, in love with a woman.”

But being a man? No, that wasn’t quite right.

It took every bit of courage she had to say she was gay, that she thought constantly about women, that she hated sex with men. When she told her husband, he was hurt but mostly unbothered, insisting that she tell absolutely no one. They could remain married and just go forward. Nothing had to change.

But everything had already changed for Nicky.

Once she decided finally to come out, she learned that friends had already suspected. Family was supportive. It would be OK. But as Nicky began to experiment with a newfound freedom to be with women, one thing became clear: having sex with a woman was better when she imagined doing it as a man.

In his opening chapter, author Oliver Radclyffe shares an anecdote about the confusion the father of Radclyffe’s son’s friend had when picking up the friend. Readers may feel the same sentiment.

Fortunately, “Frighten the Horses” gets better — and it gets worse. Radclyffe’s story is riveting, told with a voice that’s distinct, sometimes poker-faced, but compelling; you’ll find yourself agreeing with every bit of his outrage and befuddlement with coming out in a way that feels right. When everything falls into place, it’s a relief for both author and reader.

And yet, it’s hard to get to this point because this memoir is just too long. It lags where you’ll wish it didn’t. It feels like being burrito-wrapped in a heavy-weighted blanket: You don’t necessarily want out, but you might get tired of being in it.

Still, it remains that this peek at transitioning, however painful, is essential reading for anyone who needs to understand how someone figures things out. If that’s you, then consider “Frighten the Horses” and find it.

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Books

‘Radiant’ an illuminating biography of Keith Haring

Author captures artist’s complexities in sympathetic new book

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‘Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring’
By Brad Gooch
c.2024, Harper
$20/502 pages

“Radiant” is an illuminating biography of the talented artist Keith Haring, who made his indelible mark during the 1980s before dying young of AIDS. Brad Gooch, biographer of poets Frank O’Hara and Rumi, follows Haring from his childhood in Kutztown, Pa., to his early days in New York City painting artistic graffiti, to his worldwide fame and friendships with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The eldest of three children and the only boy, Haring learned to draw early on from his father. Art quickly became a lasting obsession, which he pursued fiercely. Growing up in a small, conservative town, he was drawn to countercultural movements like hippies and religious “Jesus freaks,” although he mostly found the imagery and symbols appealing.

He studied commercial art in Pittsburgh but later dropped out, spending several years working and learning at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center, before moving to New York City in 1978. Studying painting at the School for Visual Arts, he also learned about video and performance art, making interesting projects. He also began drawing images on subways and blank advertisement backboards. One of his most distinctive was the Radiant Baby, a crawling baby shooting rays of light. 

Gooch begins the biography with his own encounter with this public art, which felt colorful and “extremely urgent.” It had to be done guerilla-style, before the authorities could catch him, and they were frequently painted over. He was arrested a few times.

Ironically, a few years later Haring would be paid huge sums and flown around the world to create large-scale art on public property. People were amazed at how quickly he worked, even in terrible conditions. Sometimes at these events, while a crowd was gathered, he would draw and give away the artwork. Knowing that his art in galleries sold for incredible amounts, he enjoyed occasionally frustrating the art world’s commercial desires.

His Pop Shops also revealed Haring’s competing impulses. Opened in 1986, first in New York and later in Tokyo, they put his art on all sorts of merchandise, including T-shirts and posters. On the one hand, they allowed ordinary people to buy his work at reasonable prices. However, they also earned him more money and increased his public image.

He made art for everyone. His best-known pieces, featuring babies and dogs, are colorful and family friendly. Some even consider it “lightweight.” He eagerly created murals and artwork for elementary schools and neighborhoods. But he also made art with social and political commentary and sexual explicitness. “Michael Stewart – USA for Africa” depicts a graffiti artist’s strangulation by New York City Transit Police officers. He painted “Once Upon a Time…” for the men’s bathroom of New York City’s Lesbian & Gay Community Center.

Haring worked nearly right up to his death in 1990. The Keith Haring Foundation keeps his work in the public eye, while also funding nonprofits working with disadvantaged youth and AIDS education. Gooch captures Haring’s complexities; he befriended graffiti artists of color and dated working-class men, but was sometimes ignorant about how his wealth and fame affected these relationships. Well written and sympathetic, the book can sometimes overwhelm in detail about life in the 80’s and Haring’s celebrity friends.

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Books

New book is a fun whodunit set in London drag world

‘Murder in the Dressing Room’ will keep readers guessing

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(Book cover image courtesy Berkeley)

‘Murder in the Dressing Room’
By Holly Stars
c.2025, Berkeley
$19/368 pages

Your alter ego, the other half of your double life, is a superhero.

When you’re quiet, she’s boisterous. Your confidence is flat, hers soars. She’s a better dresser than you; she’s more popular, and maybe even a little smarter. By day, you live a normal existence but by night, your other side roars and in the new mystery, “Murder in the Dressing Room” by Holly Stars, both of you solve crimes.

Lady Lady had been a little off all evening.

As owner of London’s most fabulous, elegant drag club, she was usually in command but her protegee, Misty Devine, could tell that something was wrong.

She discovered how wrong when she found Lady Lady on her dressing room floor, foaming at the mouth, dead, poisoned by a mysterious box of chocolates.

Hours later, Misty de-dragged, morphing from an elegant woman to an ordinary, binary hotel employee named Joe who was heartbroken by the tragedy. Only employees had access to Lady Lady’s dressing room – ergo, someone they knew at the club had to be the killer.

Obviously, the London detectives assigned to the case had a suspect list, but Misty/Joe and their boyfriend Miles knew solving Lady Lady’s murder was really up to them. They knew who the killer wasn’t, but who had reason to kill Misty’s mentor?

Maybe Mandy, the club’s co-owner. The club’s bartender and bouncer were both sketchy. Lady Lady had spats with two employees and a former co-worker, but was that motive enough? When the dress Lady Lady was wearing that night proved to have been valuable stolen goods, Joe’s investigation list grew to include people who might have sneaked backstage when no one was paying attention, and a shady man who was suddenly following them around.

Then Misty learned that she was in Lady Lady’s will, and she figured the inheritance would be minor but she got a huge surprise. Lady Lady’s posthumous gift could make others think that Misty might’ve had reason to kill her.

And just like that, the suspect list gained another entry.

When you first get “Murder in the Dressing Room” in your hands, hang onto it tight. It’s fun, and so fluffy and light that it might float away if you’re not careful.

The story’s a little too long, as well, but there’s enjoyment to be had here, and authenticity enough to hold a reader’s attention. Author Holly Stars is a drag performer in London and somewhat of a murder maven there, which gives her insight into books of this genre and the ability to string readers along nicely with solid characters. If you’re unfamiliar with the world of drag you’ll also learn a thing or two while you’re sleuthing through the story; drag queens and kings will like the dual tale, and the settings that anchor it.

As a mystery, this is fun and different, exciting, but tame enough for any adult reader. If you love whodunits and you want something light, “Murder in the Dressing Room” is a double delight.

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