Her truth got her fired, and there was no return

On a fateful day in 1977, Sallie Fiske faced the studio cameras for the last time.

- SHELBY GRAD

BY THE 1980S, TV personality Sallie Fiske had reinvented herself as an activist newspaper publisher, after her coming out ended her TV career. Above, bikers show their pride in a parade in West Hollywood in 1986.

(DAVID BECKER Los Angeles Times)

The pioneering woman of early L.A. television had hosted a fluffy afternoon show on KCOP-TV in the 1950s called “Strictly for Women” and later served as an evening news producer. She later made her way back on the air at KCOP for another show. It was at the height of singer Anita Bryant’s antigay crusade, and Fiske felt compelled to tell her viewers that she was a lesbian.

The station swiftly fired her, and Fiske’s career in television was over.

I thought about this long-forgotten cancellation this week after ABC temporarily pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air after comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer sparked outrage on the right.

Sallie was my first editor, and I met her more than a decade after her KCOP firing. She had reinvented herself as an activist newspaper publisher, and I snagged a summer internship at the West Hollywood Paper.

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