The publication last year of Edward Alwood’s “Straight News” was a disturbing and embarrassing event for whoever in American journalism may have read it. It demonstrated our ignorance and culpability in helping to sustain for several decades after World War II a homophobic atmosphere in which gay men and women struggled to survive and maintain sanity and self-respect.

     The purpose of Alwood’s book was not merely to rehash this forgotten history or to prove that journalists are as capable of bigotry as anyone else. Instead, he aimed to discover how the “conventional wisdom” of the postwar years, came to be so widely accepted by the media. . . .