ETC.

Hitting Ma Bell where it hurts

SAN FRANCISCO The Human Rights Commission here ordered early in March that the city's Department of Public Works cancel its contract with Pacific Telephone Company (a Bell System subsidiary) because the firm discriminates against gay people. If the action is upheld on appeal, Pacific Telephone will have to pull out 30 pay phones it operates in the city. The Commission's decision grew out of charges brought more than three years ago by the San Francisco-based Pride Foundation, a gay civil rights group. According to the Pride Foundation, Pacific Telephone refuses to hire known gays and fires closeted gay employees if their homosexuality becomes known. The company in effect has admitted this, saying that it has a policy of not hiring persons who may "create conflicts with existing employees or the public we serve. This includes, but is not limited to, any manifest homosexual" (emphasis added).

Bishop implies gays are weather risks

FORT VALLEY, Ga.-According to the Dignity newsletter, published by the organization for gay Catholics, the graduate dean of Fort Valley State College here has told English Prof. Louie Crew, founder of Integrity (an organization for gay Episcopalians), that he cannot address graduate counseling students about the needs of gay counselees. The action followed criticism of Crew by Bishop James Dees of South Carolina, who suggested that Crew and his lover were the causes of the tornado that damaged Fort Valley last spring.

Manly restraint

LONDON All over Europe, scoring a soccer goal provides an excuse for butch young men to hug and even kiss their teammates. However, a group of fuddie-duddies in the English football association, fearing for their reputation as a nation of cold fish, is determined to. stamp out this delightful practice here. They have drafted a new set of on-the-field standards of player behavior barring such overt "demonstrations of pleasure." The xenophobic London press applauded the move, calling the soccer byplay "something that British footballer learned from the foreigner."

Gay rights move chilled in Anchorage,

ANCHORAGE, Alaska-The Anchorage City Assembly on March 2 passed a revision of its equal rights ordinance that included protections for gay people, but Mayor George Sullivan vetoed it, commenting that "The people of Anchorage should not be forced to associate with sexual deviates."

According to The Advocate, pro-gay rights forces lack the votes to override the mayor's veto, and do not see any point in taking up his suggestion of putting the issue on the ballot for a voter referendum. Sullivan had promised: "In the event a majority of the public votes in favor of such inclusion, I will bind myself to that expression and not veto an addition of 'sexual preference' in the ordinance."

Pope cries foul

ROME-A gay French writer, Roger Peyrefitte, asserted in a recent issue of the Italian magazine, Il Tiempo, that Paul VI is himself homosexuallyoriented, and that before his election, while he was still Msgr. Montini of Milan, he "had as a boyfriend a movie actor whose name I am not going to mention but whom I recall very well." The Pope personally denied the charge, which he called "a horrible and slanderous insinuation," during his address to a crowd of 80,000 gathered in St. Peter's Square for a noon blessing.

On orders from a state attorney, Italian police seized the issue containing Peyrefitte's article, and a suit has been filed against the editor of Il Tiempo for "abusing the honor of the Pope." Catholic bishops all over Italy called for atonement prayers in their churches because of the article, for which "demonstration of filial compassion and moral sensitiveness" Paul VI thanked them all "from the heart."

Peyrefitte was expelled from Italy in 1958 for an article attacking Pope Pius XII. Apparently he remains unrepentent. Taking the Fifth

NEW YORK In a major article for The New Yorker on the Fifth Amendment, published in three parts last month, author Richard Harris focuses on the case of lesbians Ellen Grusse and Terri Turgeon, imprisoned for months on contempt charges for refusing to talk to a grand jury investigating Susan Saxe and Kathy Power. Commenting on FBI bungling of the search for fugitives Saxe and Power, which led the agency into wholesale harassment of the lesbian community, Harris says: "If the F.B.I. had difficulty understanding the New Left, it had far greater difficulty understanding a related development known as women's liberation or the women's movement, and could understand nothing at all about an outgrowth of that movement the increasing number of women who had become, or admitted being, lesbians... Homosexual acts are crimes in most jurisdictions in this country, even if the men and women who are homosexual are not often prosecuted for it, and their way of life is sufficiently despised by the heteroexual public to make official persecution of them generally acceptable."

The first installment of the series, published in the April 5 issue of the magazine, explains the background of Grusse's and Turgeon's confrontation with the grand jury. The second, in the April 12 issue, traces the history of the Fifth Amendment bar against self-incrimination and the government's recent. (Continued on Page B4)

Page B2 GAY NEWS -

May 1976

Goodstein proposals rejected

Advocate conference

sets up gay rights lobby

by Richard Rusinow

CHICAGO Although the "Advocate Invitational Conference" held here March 27 was explicitly not intended to be "representative of the wide and divergent spectrum of gay and civil rights opinion,' there was as much controversy among the 65 delegates hand-picked by Advocate publisher David B.. Goodstein as could have been. generated by the gay movement leaders left out. Though he controlled the invitations, the agenda, and the procedures, Goodstein proved incapable of controlling the attitudes of the supposedly "like-minded people he called together. So many of his proposals were resoundingly defeated that he may decide not to support the Gay Rights National Lobby that has been organized as a result of the conference.

Incorporated last month in Washington by a five-person provisional board (consisting of conference delegates who happen to live there), the lobby office is charged with working for passage of federal legislation to secure equal rights for gay people in the areas of employment, housing, public accomodations, credit and insurance, immigration and naturalization. and military service. The organization is to be funded for at least five years, with a first-year budget of $105,000, of which $66,400 was pledged at the Chicago meeting. It will have a 30member elected board of directors, evenly divided between men and women, with male and female cochairpeople and a smaller genderbalanced executive board.

Only members may nominate or vote for board members, or serve on the board. The minimal membership fee was set at $15, but after the initial election the new board may waive that fee for persons unable to pay it. The National Gay Task Force (NGTF) is administering the election process, with May 30 set as the final date for receipt of nominations and July 15 as the due date for ballots. Membership rolls and fundraising are being handled by the provisional board in Washington,

inflammatory calls for action to muz-

zle activists he characterized as "gay spoilers" and for the new organization explicitly to disassociate itself from "revolutionaries unwilling to work within the system," as well as his

GAY NEWS UPDATE

suggestion that the lobbying office use an "innocuous" name without the words "gay" or "homosexual" inIcluded. A surprisingly "liberal" Goodstein proposal that the lobby also concern itself with the rights of other sexual minorites (e.g., tran-svestites and transsexuals) was voted down after members of the Task Force expressed their opposition. Reportedly there was bitter debate over this issue, with Joe Beckmann (aide to Massachusetts state Rep. Elaine Noble) telling Gay Community News that it was "really scary, (since) it divided the good guys."

However, the greatest controversies erupted at the very beginning, when the conferees debated whether to set up a new organization at all or to leave the lobbying effort to existing groups (like NGTF), and later when the issue of gender-balance on the board of directors and in executive positions was raised. The question of the conference's "legitimacy" and the right of the invited delegates to take action on behalf of all gay people led a large minority -the lesbian-feminist caucus (10 women, not counting two female Advocate staffers), representatives of religious groups (e.g., MCC and Integrity), the lone black conferee (Les Trotter of Chicago), and others to oppose creation of a new group. Instead, it was suggested, the con-ference should take no action except to plan a more representative successor to itself, free of Advocate sponsorship.

After the debate, 33 supported Goodstein's original resolution and 28 voted for the vaguely-worded alternative of supporting existing

lobbying efforts. The minority con-sidered walking out at that point, but decided to stay and work to influence the direction the conference would then take. As it turned out, their influence was decisive in creating a much more openlystructured organization than Goodstein had called for.

"The hardest fight of the day," according to Arli Scott of the Unitarian Universalist Association's Office of Gay Con-cerns, was over the gender-balance question. Goodstein commented afterwards, in the pages of the Advocate, that the conference had "created the most sexually-balanced organization yet to be seen in the gay movement," but at the meeting he and most of his associates vigorously opposed this. The equal balance on the board of directors drew less. fire than the proposal to have male and female Cochairpeople/executive directors, with most of the male lawyers, doctors, and businesspeople present. arguing that it would be impossibly "inefficient." Nevertheless, both proposals carried by hefty margins.

The most "dramatic" moment of the conference came at the luncheon, when all but one of the women and three of the men rose and left the dining room in protest after Goodstein announced as the substitute luncheon speaker (Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp was unable to make it) Nat Lehrman, editor of Oui magazine. A somewhat "racier" spin-off from Playboy, Oui is generally considered "outrageously sexist" by feminists. The one woman (besides the two Advocate staffers) who remained was Barbara Gittings of Philadelphia. who questioned Lehrman about the magazine's policies.

Despite the frequent acrimony during the long day, the conference concluded with a unanimous resolution thanking Goodstein for convening and chairing it. He was accorded a standing ovation by all but the women, who applauded from their chairs.

working out of the Metropolitan Utah t-room probe

Community Church's (MCC) Capitol Hill office. Membership is open to anyone sending a check or money order for $15 or more (made out to Gay Rights National Lobby, Inc. or GRNL) to: Adam De Baugh, Suite 210, 110 Maryland Ave., N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002..

Veteran activist Dr. Frank Kameny, who is probably the Movement's greatest "specialist" on relations between gays and the federal govenment, told the Gay News after the conference: "In general, I'm pleased with what came out of it and have very high hopes for the future... Nothing is going to happen yet this year, but on a fiveyear time scale I expect something very impressive..." Goodstein himself told Boston's Gay Community News that his support would be contingent upon the choice of board. members, who he feared might turn out to be "irresponsible." Among his proposals rejected in Chicago was one calling for a seven-person, selfperpetuating board whose initial members would have been chosen then and there.

Also rejected were Goodstein's

ends in suicide

PROVO, Utah A Brigham Young University (BYU) instructor has committed suicide and at least 20 other men await trial or sentencing on lewd conduct charges following conclusion of a police undercover investigation at a rest area. near here on Interstate Highway 15. Three police officers were equipped with concealed radio transmitters and used as "decoys" to entrap persons frequenting the rest area into solicitation of homosexual acts.

The dead man, in his 50s, was found in his car three days after his arrest, killed by a shot from a 44magnum pistol found in the car. Out of consideration for his family, authorities said, the pending charge against him was dropped and his name withheld.

The other arrests during the first two weeks of March netted another BYU instructor, several students at BYU and other area schools, and non-university con-

nected Provo area residents. BYU security officers were called into the case and cooperated with police, including making several arrests on the University campus based on information gained during the rest area investigation. The Mormon religion unreservedly condemns homosexuality and in recent years there have been several reports of gay "purges" at BYU, which is supported by the Mormon Church..

According to sources contacted by News West, the West Coast gay newspaper, about half of those arrested in this latest Utah crackdown have pled guilty, while the others have demanded trials.

The sources indicated that the investigation was triggered by recent complaints about sexuallyoriented graffiti on the men's room walls at the rest area, as well as sporadic charges that young men were being "molested" there.