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It was a huge step for her and she found nothing but support from management and coworkers, who probably didn’t understand just what a big deal this was for her. More than a year into her time at KARE, at the age of 26, Shortal began telling people she was gay. “Here I was in Minnesota, all alone with no friends or family. “It was a clean start once again,” she said. I always played the part up until the point it was going to kill me.”Ī Kansas City coworker helped Shortal land a job as a general assignment reporter at KARE in late 2003.
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“I would be gay at night and straight during the day,” she said. Soon, she found herself living a sort of double life. While in Kansas City, however, Shortal discovered her first gay bar and, for the first time, met people who were openly gay. She grew her hair long and wore the sort of attire that was expected of a female television reporter. “I was the textbook slow roll when it came to coming out.” Gay by night, straight by dayĪfter graduating, Shortal got a job as a morning show anchor in Jefferson City, Mo., and then moved to another station in Kansas City. “That doesn’t mean I did anything or said anything about it,” Shortal said. Finally, in my early 20s, I could admit I was really into her. Close to graduation, I had an incredibly large crush on a roommate, to the point I couldn’t pay attention to anything else. They were nice guys, but I didn’t feel filled up by any of them. “When I reflect on college, it’s very clear that friendships with women held a lot more importance to me and were much more intimate than any boyfriends I had. Still, Shortal was starting to realize she was not straight. Maybe it is like sports.”īut with no gay bars in town, sexuality remained a taboo topic. You have to get up and try again the next day. News, to me, is being a constant learner who is constantly humbled and constantly fails. I felt like it was the most fascinating career to figure out things and make them understandable. “I became a student of current events and news. I saw that pretty quickly and thought, ‘Forget it, I’m not going to try to join another club that doesn’t want me.’ Sports was fun, but this was the late ’90s and there wasn’t a lot of room for women in sports departments anywhere.
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News has far more (opportunities) to get your arms around things and ask questions. But while pursuing her degree, she switched her focus to news reporting. When it came time to choose a college, Shortal enrolled at the University of Missouri, which has a strong journalism school. I realized I wanted to do that and I didn’t want to do anything else,” she said. The anchors talked about sports in a different way, it was clever and funny. I’d watch ‘SportsCenter’ while I had my breakfast. I was good at them and I loved watching them. Sports also fascinated Shortal, who caught the journalism bug as a teen.