Steve Friess pulls boners in LA Weekly transgender sportswriter story

Las Vegas blogger, New York Times stringer, Gay Vegas author, concert promoter and comp queen Steve Friess apparently made some embarrassing errors when he brought his opinionated work to Los Angeles in the form of a reheated LA Weekly cover story on the tragedy of LA Times sportswriter Mike Penner, who committed suicide after coming out publicly as a transgender, then changing his mind.

A correction in the LA Weekly print editions and website today reads:

"A story published August 20 about the life and death of former L.A. Times sportswriter Mike Penner incorrectly spelled Amy LaCoe's last name as LeCoe. In addition, the story should have said that Penner's father died 12 years ago, not when Penner was 12 years old; that Penner met his future wife, Lisa Dillman, when she worked at the Detroit News, not at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune; and that the couple wed in 1986, not 1987."

We'd criticized the article after it was published in August as a riff on past coverage, including details from a comprehensive Los Angeles Times article, and spanked Freiss for his lazy and kneejerk degrading descriptions of Los Angeles architecture.

Friess came to our attention in May 2009 when he attacked us publicly for asking questions about the mysterious death of Las Vegas superstar Danny Gans. He later helped in an active campaign to mislead reporters on the case-- and made a move to have this site closed down.

Dreary, dumpy & dank: Steve Friess insults Los Angeles architecture in reheated cover story for LA Weekly

Guess who wound up with an LA Weekly cover story? Las Vegas blogger, New York Times stringer, Gay Vegas author, concert promoter and comp queen Steve Friess, that's who, with an article on the death of Mike Penner, the Los Angeles Times sportswriter who went public in a column as a transsexual and returned to work as Christine Daniels in 2007, changed his mind about the process and resumed his original name in 2008, and allegedly committed suicide in 2009. The article and its cover placement are confusing in that Friess's work is little more than a reheating of and elaboration of a number of previously published pieces on the subject, including a well-publicised article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in March.

On his own blog, Friess describes his LA Weekly work as "one of the finer pieces of journalism, with the space and time truly needed, I've had a chance to do." Yet, his contribution to the Penner/Daniels saga appears to be a GLBT activist slant which points blame at Penner's co-worker wife, a competing journalist who wrote that Penner as Daniels resembled a man in drag, and even respected journalist Evan Wright (Friess challenges Wright's claim that he'd put the brakes on a Vanity Fair article because of Daniels' fragile mental state). And although he promises revelations from Penner's wife and Penner himself ("Dillman has never spoken on the record about her husband's transition, and Penner never answered the media's questions about their relationship..."), those teases do not pay off.

For all his alleged research (phoning people who had already appeared in other articles), Friess insinuates that he never even read, nor ventured to find the LA Times blog Penner wrote during his transition and which the Times has removed from its site and archives ("...Daniels also never wrote of it in her blog on transgenderism, according to those who read it when it was available online.").

The Las Vegas public figure who came to our attention after he attacked Tabloid Baby online and in print for asking questions about the Las Vegas media's lax coverage of the death of local superstar Danny Gans, is most egregiously ungrateful in his use of the forum to toss off lazy, disputable and easily fact-checked insulting of various Los Angeles locations, all of which seem to have been cooked up at the kitchenette table of his Las Vegas apartment:

"a dreary apartment building on Sepulveda just north of National..."

"...a small shop of roughly 1,000 square feet nestled in a dumpy Studio City strip mall..."

"...a circuitous and dank hallway in L.A.'s fortress-like, nondescript Westwood Villa Apartments..."