And they did so in an environment of warm welcome from the mainstream media. Speakers included popular syndicated columnist Molly Ivins, NPR "Weekend Edition" host Scott Simon, CNN anchor Bernard Shaw, San Francisco Examiner Managing Editor Sharon Rosenhause and Wall Street Journal Page One Editor John Brecher.

Asked if news organizations do a better job of covering gays fairly and comprehensively when they have open gays on staff, Rosenhause said: "If you have an all-white newsroom in a multicultural city, that's a problem."

A job fair featured booths set up by the Los Angeles Times, Minneapolis' Star-Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, Cleveland's The Plain Dealer, The Denver Post, Gannett Newspapers, L.A.'s NBC-Channel 4, CBS News, Ft. Lauderdale's Sun-Sentinel, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Arizona Republic, St. Louis' The Post-Dispatch, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the San Francisco Examiner, Kansas City's The Star and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The convention program contained ads from ABC News, ABC Inc., NBC News, CBS News, the Orlando Sentinel, The Boston Globe, Knight- Ridder newspapers, Entertainment Weekly, the Houston Chronicle and The Hearst Corporation.

"Ideally what's happening here and what happens when people go back home is that in an every day sort of unsplashy way, print and broadcast coverage of gay people, gay issues, gay communities and other subjects in which gay people have been otherwise invisible is interstitially becoming more visible day by day in a very work-a-day kind of way," said "NBC Nightly News" Producer Barbara Raab.

"There's two things in society that create change -- legislation and public opinion," said NLGJA Executive Director Michael Frederickson. "This organization is dedicated to uncovering and revealing mistruths about our community, about lesbian-gay- transgender-bisexual lives, and looking for fair and balanced coverage in the newsroom."

At one session, media coverage of the Andrew Cunanan story came in for criticism.

"It's homo-ignorance," said Liz Tracey of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. "It's not outright prejudice, but simply not knowing the community well enough to tell a story that doesn't come off as homophobic."

This year's convention offered more workshops related to online journalism and use of the Internet, as well as increased content for journalists who work for gay media.

But several gay-press staffers said they still feel like NLGJA's unwanted step-children.

"The amount of gay-press participation is very low," said Drew Rapp, managing editor of The Front Page, in Raleigh, N.C. "I just spoke with one of the [candidates for NLGJA president] and told her that I was voting for her almost solely on the basis that she mentioned the gay press twice in her statement. It's one of the few times I've heard the gay press acknowledged here. I've gone to several workshops and almost without exception they forget that their audience includes the gay press."

Syndicated gay-press writer Wayne Hoffman of New York City agreed.

"There's an acknowledgement here that there is an issue to be addressed," Hoffman said. "That's new [for NLGJA] -- that there actually are gay-press concerns that need to be addressed. They still aren't really particularly being addressed, except on a couple of panels -- nothing particularly significant other than at least the knowledge that there needs to be more done."

"What frustrates me," added Rapp, "is that the discussion is still how should gay issues be covered in the media and I've heard a lot of suggestions come up, things that are basically what the gay press already does -- people saying, 'Well, there needs to be this kind of story written, there needs to be this kind of work done.' Well, we do it every week, and it's frustrating to be in the audience saying, 'It's there, you're just not reading our paper.'"

NLGJA has 1,200 members who belong to 21 chapters. One of the group's more interesting projects is a "Stylebook Addenda on Gay and Lesbian Terminology," which will be released later this year.

According to a press release, "Copy editors are educated [via this addenda] about outdated words, replacing them with more sensitive and preferred terminology."

If the project succeeds, we may say good-bye once and for all to the "self-avowed homosexual," the "admitted homosexual" and the "practicing homosexual" -- not to mention nonsense phrases like "the gay lifestyle" and "special rights for homosexuals."