As we head into the final summer month of 2018, I have been thinking a lot about the summer season from two years ago. All eyes were turned to Orlando as we were trying to make sense of a senseless act that left 49 people dead at Pulse. It was also a time when one of my college professors, Ken Carpenter, was battling for his life after a cancer diagnoses earlier in the year.
Ken was the journalism professor at Valencia College, and as I enrolled in more and more journalism classes he became a person that I started to see every single day. He became more than just a teacher to me. He became a friend and mentor, and not just to me. I can’t think of a single student who walked through those glass doors at Valencia College’s West Campus, passing by the mannequin wearing a suit made entirely out of newspaper, into the newsroom, who didn’t feel a connection with Ken that surpassed the word teacher.
Side note: If you got up close to the newspaper suited mannequin and looked under his coat, he was wearing a Superman t-shirt.
Ken was a passionate man who loved to discuss sports (not something I was particularly a fan of) and movies (that’s more my style). In fact, the first Ken Carpenter class I ever took was called “Journalists in Film.” The entire course consisted of watching movies that were about journalism and then talking about them. It was by far the greatest class I have ever taken.
Among the films we watched were “Shattered Glass,” “Absence of Malice,” “The Bang Bang Club” and, of course, “All The President’s Men.” We even took a fieldtrip to the Regal Cinema at Winter Park Village to watch the documentary, “Page One: Inside the New York Times.”
Ken was also the only other person I met who was as passionate about the Academy Awards as I was. I had never met a person who I had more entertaining film conversations with. Some things we agreed on (we both hated Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” and could not understand how that film got a Best Picture nomination at the 2012 Oscars) and some things we did not (Ken hated Quentin Tarantino films).
While Ken had many loves in life including sports and movies, he had two passions that he loved more than anything. When he talked about them you could see him light up and you couldn’t help but smile. They were his students and his wife, Debbie.
Ken passed away in August of 2016, a few months before his 60th birthday. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about him, and whenever I am feeling drained by the job I think of one of his impassioned classroom speeches about the importance of what we do and I am reenergized.
I could fill up pages and pages of stories about Ken’s generosity (he gave me a microwave once because he overheard me saying mine sucked) or all the worldly bits of knowledge he bestowed upon me (Ken stated to me more than once that “there has never been a bad movie about a horse.”), but I will say Ken is one of the major reasons why I love what I do and why I am able to do it, and for that I will forever be indebted to him.
In this issue, Holly V. Kapherr takes an in-depth look at how Central Florida’s Middle Eastern and Muslim LGBTQ communities have found their voice in a post-Pulse country. In Central Florida news, we look at the recent murder of another trans woman of color — the fourth in Florida since the start of 2018 — and why police and local media outlets misgendered her. In Tampa Bay news, we preview Balance Tampa Bay’s fourth annual Masquerade Ball, benefiting Empath Partners in Care. In Arts & Entertainment we chat with a couple of LGBTQ singer/songwriters: “Britain’s Got Talent” finalist Calum Scott, who performs in Tampa Aug. 9, and the legendary k.d. lang, who will be performing in Orlando Sept. 8.
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