Editorial Viewpoints

Thanks, Rev. Lovely,

for showing us the truth

We knew it was bound to happen. We've seen it coming with the crusade of Anita Bryant, who used the name of God to justify the denial of our civil rights. We've felt it building with the

REV. DAN LOVELY'S, REPENTANT GAY BAPTIST RALLY

ever-mounting power of the right wing, with Our Readers Say

Congressmember Larry McDonald, who has introduced a resolution into Congress which employs sonorously sacred-sounding language to condemn us and call us "abominations," and with Christian Voice, a lobbying group twisting the words of the Bible against us to achieve political power for their own ends.

But even though we've anticipated it happening eventually, we were still shocked and appalled to learn that a fundamentalist Baptist minister, inappropriately named Rev. Daniel Lovely, is wielding Leviticus to loudly demand the extermination of gay people by governmental means. It's not just lesbians and gay men against whom Lovely's self-righteous wrath is directed-he demands death for "adulteresses and adulterers" as well. But we are the main targets of his rage; he has placed a sign outside his Watertown, N.Y., church which reads, "God Says Death to Homos."

Through our shock, we'd like to thank Rev. Lovely for performing a service for the gay community. At last, someone has had the courage to reveal the hatred behind those pious words. Bryant and her cohorts, McDonald, Christian Voice and the rest, profess to love us and to want to help us. But Rev. Lovely is showing us what we're really up against: the specter of genocide. It seems impossible that the horrors of Hitler's concentration camps, where hundreds of thousands of gay men and lesbians died, could ever happen again. Rev. Lovely is driving home to us that they could indeed happen again-that there are those who would cold-bloodedly murder their fellow human beings in the name of God. And if hearing him helps lesbians and gay men to wake up and start fighting, not only for our rights but for our very lives-then we'll have plenty to thank Rev. Lovely for.

Thanks, Mayor Byrne

We'd also like to thank Chicago mayor Jane Byrne for expressing her support for the pending gay rights ordinance in that city. Alderman Clifford Kelley has credited Mayor Byrne for the unanimous approval of the ordinance by the crucial Human Rights and Consumer Protection Committee. We hope that Mayor Byrne is just as helpful when it's time for the ordinance to come up for a vote before the city council. GAY NEWS-Sept. 21, 1979

REV. LOVELYS GAY-MOBILE

The Alternative: Final Solution

Thom ShaFER

On backbiting, responsibility, and thanks

"Many people” doesn't mean everybody

To the Editor:

I was interested to read the jux-

taposed essays regarding the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights (Gay News, Vol. 3. No. 18), and I am concerned by what appears to be back-biting and

divisiveness evident throughout at

least one of those essays.

Scott Tucker and Larry Gross are two of the most vocal proponents of the March in Philadelphia. Mr. Tucker has written articles and essays about the March which

have been published in the gay press from Philadelphia to Canada, and it is likely that he has had stories published elsewhere.

In the current instance, however, it seems to me that, in his

headlong rush to pick at David basis. he and Mr. Gross have made Fair's essay on a point-by-point the error of adding no new information, and of providing no honest, real answers to what I feel were

some quite legitimate concerns

raised by Mr. Fair. It would seem

March come off, Mr. Tucker and

endorsement of the March by the sponsibilities provokes panic in national Integrity organization. some, but it is not shit. And to People in the midwest and Rocky say it smacks of socialist realism Mountain regions of the country only shows what nonsense we still have expressed the feeling that believe about art and artists. NonMarch organizers are concentratsense such as the notion that ing too heavily on urban centers on artists are divinely irresponsible, the East and West Coasts, ignoring bound in duty only to "aesthetic truth." I have never promoted non-urban and rural areas. or defended a doctrine-socialist realism-which has been used, for example, to send a gay poet like Gennady Trifonov to a Soviet labor camp for circulating his love lyrics. In fact, I used just this example in Body Politic to argue against socialist realism. (But if I object to Stalinist censorship, I also object to slurs which smack of McCarthyite red-baiting.)

The fact is that not all lesbian and gay Americans are convinced that this March is a good idea, or that it is an idea whose time has come. I submit that Mr. Tucker and Mr. Gross have replied in a fashion that nit-picks and borders on ridicule in parts. Their response to Mr. Fair's essay appears vague and over-broad, and does not directly address the questions raised.

It is a fact that many peoplelesbian and gay people-will be in Washington on October 14; but "many people" is not everyone. It should be borne in mind that there are still a lot of questions in a lot of minds, and if all those people are similar to that accorded Mr. Fair, to be answered with a response people will be more alienated than ever before, leading to an increasing sense of divisiveness within our communities. Dan Daniel Cambridge, MA

The Soviet government was quite correct, however, in charging Trifonov with subverting the State: under Soviet repression, the most purely aesthetic gay love lyrics are absolutely subversive. And political. It is Holleran, not I, who po"aesthetic truth": the one is, in larizes "political need" apart from fact, bound up with the other. Even the most intensely subjective masturbatory fantasy has political dimensions. Ask any feminist-or the wiser and better artists, for

that in their fervor to see this "Political need" that matter. Mr. Gross are attempting to disbound up with "aesthetic truth"

credit Mr. Fair in a condescending, divisive, and bitter tone.

To the Editor:

During the filming of "Cruising," Friedkin and Weintraub were confronted by outraged gays. They de"clared they were mere servants of Art and Truth, rather than fastbuck artists and defenders of the status quo. They, too, are divinely irresponsible; they, like Holleran, falsify reality. What market would those three have for their works. had not both Stonewall and the right-wing reaction happened? Here's an even more vulgar question: Which side are they on?

David Fair is a Philadelphia activist of long standing, a fact which should lend some credence to the Rich Grzesiak's interview with fact that Mr. Tucker and Mr. Gross questions raised in his essay. The Andrew Holleran, published in the accuse him of being "fixated on a preliminary conference" held in Philadelphia in February is unfair.

I too attended that conference and observed firsthand the "left/right" phenomenon which Mr. Fair points out. Perhaps that phenomenon was not so well-defined or so strong as Mr. Fair indicates, but it nonetheless did exist. The fact that the conference was a preliminary one does not discount the fact. as Mr. Tucker and Mr. Gross would seem to feel it does. that many people came away from that conference with a certain amount of bad feeling.

That bad feeling was one of the major reasons for the initial reluctance of the National Gay Task Force to endorse the March on Washington; it continues to be the reason for the withholding of an

last Gay News. was very revealing. Holleran, the pseudonymous author of the novel Dancer From the Dance, defends Art and Truth in a

manner which is reminiscent of Friedkin and Weintraub, the director and producer, respectively, of the anti-gay film "Cruising."

I wrote a review of Holleran's novel for The Body Politic, critiçizing the narrowness of Holleran's vision and disputing his self-proclaimed "apoliticality." Discussing the review in the Gay News, Holleran says. "He (Tucker) sounds to me as if he wants literature to serve a function in helping people." Why shouldn't literature serve that function, among others? Grzesiak adds. "It smacks of socialist real-

ism." "It does, it does, it does,"

agrees Holleran with gusto, "and I think that's shit."

To affirm that artists have re-

Grzesiak quotes a surprisingly foolish comment by Gore Vidal: "Gay sensibility implies hetero-

sensibility. Since the second doesn't exist, neither does the first." A film like "Cruising" is definitely a manifestation of one kind of heterosensibility. And the protests against it were definitely a manifestation of a fighting gay sensibility, just as a novel like Dancer is a manifestation of an anachronistic "doomed queen" sensibility.

Books like Dancer and films like

"Cruising" help to doom queens. and that is political. Scott Tucker.

Philadelphia (Continued on page 11)