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Deb Price, a First as a Columnist on Gay Life, Dies at 62

If she wrote for mainstream Americans about same-sex couples in everyday situations, she thought, society would have a harder time denying them equal rights.

Deb Price in 2001. Through her writing, which appeared in scores of local newspapers, she demystified gay life for Middle America.Credit...Richard A. Bloom/National Journal

As the nation’s first nationally syndicated lesbian columnist who wrote regularly about gay life, Deb Price certainly covered pointed issues, like the debate over gay people in the military.

But she also turned to small matters of everyday domesticity, telling readers, for instance, that she and her partner, Joyce Murdoch, had bickered over whether to get air conditioning in their new convertible. She wrote about gardening together. She described attending Ms. Murdoch’s high school reunion.

She wanted to convey that being in a committed same-sex relationship wasn’t all that different from being in a heterosexual one — except maybe for the presents.

“We watch our siblings get eight silver trays, 12 pickle forks, a fondue pot and a trip to Hawaii for settling down,” she wrote. “And then our relatives give us a hard time or nothing at all.”

Ms. Price sought to demystify gay life for Middle America. If her readers could see same-sex couples in ordinary situations, she reasoned, they would find them less foreign and less frightening — and would have a harder time denying them equal rights.

She wrote 900 columns over 18 years and believed that they might have had something to do with the reversal in cultural attitudes that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015.

But by 2011, she contracted a relatively rare autoimmune lung disease, and her health began to decline.

Ms. Price died on Nov. 20 at a hospital in Hong Kong, where she lived with Ms. Murdoch, who by then was her wife. Ms. Price was 62.

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Ms. Price with Joyce Murdoch in 1985, the year they became a couple while working at The Washington Post. They legally married in 2003 and published two books together.Credit...via Joyce Murdoch

The cause of death was interstitial pneumonitis, Ms. Murdoch said in a phone interview from Hong Kong. She said that the hospital had allowed her to stay with Ms. Price for the last 11 weeks of her life, a privilege that had long been denied to same-sex couples all over the world.

While columns about gay life had long appeared in the alternative press, Ms. Price’s was the first to appear in the mainstream media. She worked for The Detroit News, a newspaper with a conservative editorial page and owned by Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain. The Gannett News Service distributed the column to its 83 papers across the country, most of them located in small or medium-sized cities, giving Ms. Price access to a broader audience.

When the column made its debut on May 8, 1992, it was not an easy time to be offering a sympathetic view of gay life.

The country was terrified of and horrified by the AIDS epidemic — 1992 was the year in which AIDS became the leading cause of death for American men between 25 and 44. Still to come was the Defense of Marriage Act, effectively banning federal recognition of same-sex unions. It was not until 1997 that Ellen DeGeneres would come out on her prime-time sitcom, “Ellen,” a watershed moment in television history.

“It’s hard to overestimate how significant this was,” Joshua Benton, who founded the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, wrote of Ms. Price’s column on Twitter recently. “Most Americans in 1992 said they didn’t know a single gay person. Then suddenly there was Deb, on the breakfast table next to the sports section.”

Her column quickly paved the way for other gay journalists in the mainstream media to write their own columns.

Ms. Price was working in the Washington bureau of The Detroit News, when she proposed a column from the gay perspective.

“I found the courage to ask for the column that I’d always wanted to read,” she said in a 1993 speech in New York to what is now called The Association of L.G.B.T.Q. Journalists.

“I wanted to be entertained, not offended,” she said. “Talked to, not about. Informed, not maligned. Inspired, not demoralized.”

Her publisher, Bob Giles, agreed and announced the column in a front-page letter to readers.

In her first column, Ms. Price asked how she should introduce Ms. Murdoch (girlfriend? lover?). Some readers were disgusted and offered their own choice suggestions of what Ms. Price could call Ms. Murdoch.

Mr. Giles said at the time that such bigotry only hardened his resolve to continue the column.

Ms. Price took the attacks in stride. “If there weren’t hostility and if there weren’t misunderstandings about gay people,” she told The Associated Press, “there would be no point in doing this column.”

Many others applauded her, grateful that a gay point of view was appearing on a regular basis in the mainstream media.

Among her loyal readers was Dana Nessel, now Michigan’s attorney general.

“Thank you for making me feel less alone and hopeful for a world that might one day embrace L.G.B.T.Q. people instead of loathing us,” Ms. Nessel wrote recently on Twitter. “Your brave work impacted many in ways you might never have imagined.”

J. Ford Huffman, who was the managing editor for features for the Gannett News Service and put the column on the wire, said in a phone interview that many of the chain’s editors, from Rochester, N.Y., to Muskogee, Okla., were happy to print it.

When one editor called and said he wanted to run the column but asked what he could “balance” it out with, Mr. Huffman said he replied: “Two hundred years of American newspaper commentary.”

The column was soon picked up and distributed by The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, in addition to Gannett.

Mr. Huffman said the column was successful not only because of its novelty but also because it was not polemical: Ms. Price backed up her views with reporting, and her overall message was positive.

“She basically was saying that the world is changing in unexpected and delightful ways,” Mr. Huffman said. “She often said, ‘Don’t let fear choose your path.’ That meant so much to me as a gay man.”

Deborah Jane Price was born on Feb. 27, 1958, in Lubbock, Texas. Her father, Allen Palmer Price, was an Episcopal priest. Her mother, Mary Jane (Caldwell) Price, was a receptionist at a law firm.

Deb grew up in Texas and Colorado until she was 15, when her parents divorced and she moved with her mother to Bethesda, Md.

She attended the National Cathedral School in Washington, graduating in 1976, and began college at the University of Michigan. But Ann Arbor was too cold for her, and she transferred to Stanford, where she earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English in 1981.

After stints at The Northern Virginia Sun and the States News Service, which covered Washington news for dozens of papers across the country, she joined The Washington Post in 1984. Both she and Ms. Murdoch were editors on the paper’s national desk, and they became a couple in 1985.

They were the first to register as domestic partners in Takoma Park, Md., where they lived, in 1993, and were joined in a civil union in Vermont in 2000. They were finally able to marry legally, in Toronto, in 2003. Theirs was the first same-sex wedding announcement that The Washington Post put on its weddings page.

“Avid tennis players, world travelers and certified scuba divers, the newlyweds will celebrate their honeymoon in Hawaii later this year,” the announcement said.

The couple produced two well-received books. “And Say Hi to Joyce: America’s First Gay Column Comes Out” (1995) collected most of Ms. Price’s columns with commentary by Ms. Murdoch. They dedicated it to “all the gay readers who’ve put twenty-five cents in a newspaper box and found nothing reflecting their own lives inside.”

Their second was “Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court” (2001), described by a Kirkus reviewer as “a crackerjack resource volume on gay legal history.”

Ms. Price continued her column until 2010, when she received a Nieman fellowship to study at Harvard.

In Hong Kong, where the couple moved when Ms. Murdoch received an academic appointment there, Ms. Price, long interested in business and finance, worked for The Asian Wall Street Journal. She went on to become managing editor of Caixin Global, an independent financial publication in China, and senior business editor for The South China Morning Post.

Ms. Murdoch is her sole immediate survivor. Ms. Price’s older brother, Stephen, died in 2018.

“We never had children,” Ms. Murdoch said. “We knew that our gay-rights work would be our most important legacy.”

Katharine Q. “Kit” Seelye is a Times obituary writer. She was previously the paper's New England bureau chief, based in Boston. She worked in The Times's Washington bureau for 12 years, has covered six presidential campaigns and pioneered The Times’s online coverage of politics. More about Katharine Q. Seelye

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Deb Price, Columnist Who Brought Gay Life Into Mainstream, Dies at 62. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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