Mike Penner/Christine Daniels Story Returns
By Matt Coker, Monday, Jun. 21 2010 @ 5:43PM
http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/oc-media/mike-penner-los-angeles-times/​Mike Penner cut his teeth at the Anaheim Bulletin before jumping over to the Orange County edition of the Los Angeles Times as a sportswriter, garnering more fame as a sports columnist for the mothership in LA, even more fame as transsexual sports columnist Christine Daniels for a year--and more fame still when he took his own life.
The 52-year-old's tragic end was covered fairly extensively by the Times' Christopher Goffard this past March in "Public Triumph, Private Torment."
But there's something about a rich, sordid, heartbreaking story: it seems to reappear again and again, like a horror-movie villain.
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New Mike, Old Christine
In 2007, sportswriter Mike Penner announced that he was becoming Christine Daniels. For the June 2010 issue of GQ, Nancy Hass reported on the tragic events that followed
By Nancy Hass
June 2010
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/mens-lives/201006/mike-penner-sportswriter-christine-daniels"Christine had the eyes all the girls wanted, translucent turquoise marbles fringed by strawberry blond lashes. And the smile. Wide and natural, but somehow coy and elusive, too. You could work for years and not get that right. Her peach-colored blouse draped just so on her six-foot-one frame, the silky skirt skimming her calves. She had let her sunstreaked blond hair grow to chin length, and she helped it along by pinning on a little hairpiece that grazed her broad shoulders."
So begins "New Mike, Old Christine," Nancy Hass's gripping and heartbreaking story about the late Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike Penner. A Times staffer for more than twenty-five years, Penner announced in a column on April 26, 2007 that he was in the process of becoming a woman and that his byline would now be Christine Daniels. "I am a transsexual sportswriter," Penner/Daniels wrote in that instantly famous column, which elicited more than 500 emails, almost all of them supportive. "It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears, and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words."
