Page 10

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE August, 1989

San Francisc Examiner

GAY IN AMERICA

August, 1989

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

Page 11

The San Francisco Examiner has just completed publication of an unprecedented 16-day series, "Gay in America." In this report more than 60 members of their staff have examined where the lesbian-gay movement stands 20 years after the Stonewall Inn riots in New York City.

This 64-page special issue is one of the most comprehensive look at lesbian and gay life not only in San Fransisco but the entire United States.

The Chronicle has reprinted parts of several of the articles that are included in the series. For a limited time, the Examiner is making available this extraordinary work as a special reprint package.

New Poll:

Each is a full sixty-four pages, printed flexographically (the ink won't come off on your fingers). Every reprint comes with a bonus: the original 13 1/2 x 23 inch poster used to promote the series. Cost for the reprint is $5.00. The Examiner makes no profits on sales of these reprints.

The series presents all lesbians and gay men with a piece of their history. One of the articles focuses on Columbus, Ohio. Other stories talk about transplanted Clevelanders. This series is highly recommended reading for any lesbian or gay man who whats to understand their community better. Besides, it looks great on the coffee table.▾

How the U.S. Views Gays

Americans are becoming more accepting of gay people and gay rights, but the closer the subject gets to their own homes and bedrooms, the less tolerant they are, a national poll by the Examiner shows.

While the overwhelming majority of those polled think homosexuality should not be illegal, more than half disapprove of two people of the same sex living together as a married couple.

And while only one in five Americans knows someone with AIDS, more than half of those polled, gay or straight, are wiling to pay $100 more annually in taxes to find a cure for the disease.

A separate poll of gays and non-gays in the Bay Area shows that straights here tend to be more tolerant of gays and lesbians than elsewhere.

The polls are the most extensive survey ever of gay people, and attitudes

toward them, in America.

"The inescapable conclusion, both nationally and in the Bay Area, is that while people are fairly accepting of homosexual lifestyles in the theoretical sense, they are less accepting the closer to reality it gets," said pollster Steve Teichner, whose firm, Teichner & Associates of Fullerton, California, conducted the polls.

"I did not believe that the difference between the theory of homosexuality and practice would be as strong as it turned out to be," said Teichner. "I was surprised at the high number who thought it would be discrimination to

Have you told your family of your sexual orientation?

Yes

U.S.

29%

71%

Letters to the Editor:

As long as you waste so many natural resources and personnel to inform (?) the public/suckers about queers/gays, I shall not again expend any money to read such trash!

Have you told your friends of your sexual orientation?

Yes

U.S.

11%

89%

Some people feel homosexuality should be illegal. Do you? U.S. straight

Agree Disagree

Don't know

-A subscriber (now former) since

I am not alone.

Long live gay bashers!

1923.

If ever a newspaper deserved a Pulitzer Prize, you do for your series "Gay in America." Congratulations for a superb and courageous job. D.Pierce

18%

73%

60 80 100%

deny a job based on sexual orientation, Lesbians Come of Age many gay organizations a major but balked at two people of the same sex living together.

"What the results said is that it's okay

if it happens in a courtroom, but it's not okay if it's my neighbor. The closer you bring it to our day-to-day lives, the stronger the moral objection is."

How do you feel about a man and a woman

age 18-30 living together as man and

wife if not married?

Disapprove

Approve

Straight

U.S.

,4%

Bay Area 3%

33%

18%

Don't know

How do you feel about two people of the same sex living together as a married couple?

Don't know

Approve

Disapprove

Straight

U.S.

Bay Area

427%

42/

57%

Discrimination

Do you agree or disagree that there is much less discrimination today than 10 years ago?

what what Strong Don't

SomeSome-

Strong

STRAIGHT:

agree

agree disagr.

disagr

know

U.S.

Bay Area

GAY/BISEXUAL:

U.S.

Bay Area

Men

Women

៩៩ ន ឝ.

"There are lots more of us and lots more diversity'

Mary Dunlap remembers the day in 1969 when a close friend discovered she was a lesbian.

"What she called me was a queen," said the San Francisco attorney. "That was the only word she'd heard for someone who was gay. It was a universe that didn't have lesbians in it. We were at the stage of being invisible, even to oursel-

ves.

Twenty years later, many Americans still don't know that "queen" is a common word for a gay man. But they do know lesbians exist.

"We're on the map," said gay rights activist Torie Osborn.

In the mainstream, lesbian visibility manifests itself in strange and sundry ways: Two lesbians serve on the Democratic National Committee. An article on "What It's Like to be a Gay Woman Now" is published in the March 1989 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.

Columnist Herb Caen reports that Jodie Foster and Kelly McGillis are an item. One character on TV's prime-time drama Heartbeat is a lesbian nurse.

Within the gay movement, visibility surfaces in the co-sexual leadership of

Homophobias

The homosexually oriented have nothing to fear from science, but they have a great deal to fear from pseudoscience.

-A. Damien Martin, in "Innovations in Psychotherapy with Homosexuals"

Middle Ages: "The famous surgeon William of Bologna... attributed lesbianism to growth emanating from the mouth of the womb and appearing outside the vagina as a pseudopenis," according to sociologist David E. Greenberg's book "The Construction of Homosexuality"

change from the male-dominated '70s.

Osborn's position as executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center of Los Angeles reflects this shift.

"I oversee a staff of 100, with 38 government contracts and a budget of $4 million a year," she said. "This is the largest, oldest gay organization in the world and I'm the first woman to do that.

But it is within the lesbian world itself that the most significant changes have occurred.

"There are lots more of us and lots more diversity," Osborn said.

Beyond the head counts of lesbians on boards and commissions, this newfound diversity is perhaps the most lasting legacy of 20 years of struggle.

The number of options is staggeringparticularly in terms of politics, appearance and sexuality. In the '70s and early '80s, lesbians dared to be different from the dominant culture. Now they dare to be different from each other.

Elena Montoya, for instance, remembers her first encounter with lesbian life. "I was really turned off," said Montoya (not her real name). "It was a horrible dyke bar with a bunch of ugly women. They played pool. None of them played the piano. Who wants that?"

1849: French psychiatrist Claude Francois Michea suggests male homosexuality occurs in men with a rudimentary uterus.

1940s and 1950s: Colorful New York psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler argues that male homosexuality is "caused" by an infant's failure to get enough milk from its mother's breast. Upset, the child grows into an adult who unconsciously seeks revenge against women by having sex with men.

1972:The American Psychiatric Association votes to drop its designation of homosexuality as a mental disorder. The American Psychological Association follows suit the next year.

A New Gay Activism Have you ever been physically abused Special Problems for Emerges

Last January 31, Waiyde Palmer (a former Clevelander) was one of 26 activists who sat on the roadway and stopped rush-hour traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge for two hours to call attention to the government's inaction in the AIDS epidemic.

The action angered thousands of motorists and was criticized even by some AIDS and gay rights activists. It also focused national attention on complaints that government agencies are doing too little, too late, to prevent, fight and cure the deadly disease.

"Desperate days call for desperate measures," said Palmer, 28, a member of the protest group ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). "If you want to make news, you have to be aggressive."

And, even if it makes more straightlaced AIDS activists uncomfortable, newsmaking on the streets is crucial to gaining reform in the suites, he and others say.

Last fall, Palmer was one of 1,200 people who blocked the entrances to the

Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C., to protest the snail's pace at which new drugs are tested and released.

Five days later, FDA officials met with AIDS activists to discuss treatment issues. Since then, the FDA has announced plans to expedite the release of new AIDS drugs.

"[They] went in with a stronger hand," said Sue Hyde of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, one of the groups at that meeting. "Public expressions of frustration and anger strengthen the positions of our lobbyists."

The activists know that well: "We make a mess and do it colorfully, then politicians can step in and say, 'Hey, there's a problem here," said Michele Roland, 27, a hospital worker who is a member of Stop AIDS Now or Else (SANE), a key group in the bridge action.

For years, gay activists have fought on the streets against homophobic violence and in the courts, city halls and capitols for equal treatment in jobs, housing, immigration, the military and the law.

AIDS refocused their efforts.

"Prior to AIDS, there were many gays attempting to enact civil rights laws, but it was not perceived to be an immediate life-or-death matter," Hyde said. "Along came AIDS, and we saw the government would rather see us dead than tell us how to protect ourselves."

Palmer remembers the pre-AIDS days of the 1970s in his native Cleveland "a beautiful time to be gay." Then the epidemic killed his lover in 1982. He finally left Cleveland, where "people didn't want to even discuss AIDS," to plunge into the front lines here.

"I don't really see a gay movement today," he said. "It's all been set aside while we've tried to stay alive."

Some activists have responded by learning the inner works of electoral and congressional politics. Others have formed patients' advocacy groups.

Those in groups like ACT UP and SANE have chosen direct action: They have blockaded buildings, chained themselves to doors, clambered on rooftops, zapped politicians and blocked roadways.

or assaulted because you are gay?

U.S.

Yes

-No

12%

88%

Do you expect your local community to become more accepting of gays in the next five years? U.S.

Yes

Don't know

11%

65%

24%

Bias Lingers in Sports

For decades in the oh-so-straight world of sports, homosexuality has been talked about mostly in giggles, sneers and whispers. "It's as if there's a huge lavender elephant in the locker room, and everyone sort of tiptoes around it and doesn't want to deal with it," says University of Massachusetts physical education professor Pat Griffin, who runs workshops on homophobia in athletics.

The best estimate is that there are about the some number of gays in sports as there are in other segments of the population.

But only two male professional athletes, former 49er running back Dave Kopay and former Oakland A's outfielder Glenn Burke, have ever come out of the deep, dark sports closet. And neither did so during his playing career.

The same was true of Dave Pallone, who was fired last season after 10 years as a National League umpire, and said recently he believed he had lost his job because he's gay.

"Leading a double life for a decade was not easy," Pallone says. "Obviously, I could never be myself. I'd be introduced in a gay bar, for instance, and the inevitable question was, 'What do you do for a living?' For years I would lie."

Ex-All Pro tight end Jerry Smith of the Washington Redskins went to his AIDSrelated death in 1986 without letting on that he was gay. Tennis great Martina Navratilova discussed the subject candidly in her 1985 autobiography but no longer will talk about it. Former tennis star Billie Jean King's homosexuality wasn't disclosed until she was the target of a lawsuit. Now she, too considers the topic closed.

Employment

Big co. white-collar Big co. blue-collar

Gays of Color

Politically, They're known as gay men and lesbians of color. Individually, they are:

Rafael and Ana Chang, a brother and sister who a year ago pooled their strength to tell their parents they were gay. They haven't seen their parents since.

"If your gay and Asian you're culturally ostracized," Rafael says.

• Richard Sevilla, long time active in both the gay and Latino communities, more than once pressured to choose between the two.

"They said, 'You're either gay or Latino, you can't be both.' I said, 'Screw you all. I'll be what I want to be," he recalls.

• John Wilhite, a leader of Black and White Men Together, a group formed

some 10 years ago in response to overzealous carding of nonwhites at gay bars. Wilhite, who is black, says the problem persists.

"There's as much racism within the gay community as there is in the community at large," he says. As the gay movement marches on, minority gay men and lesbians are struggling to keep up.

As gays, they face homophobia in their communities. As nonwhites, they often feel unwanted in gay enclaves.

Will Rogers once said he never met a man he didn't like. Unfortunately, he had a rare world view. Today, there is much evidence that many of us don't like each other at all.

There are many reasons for that, of course, as there are individuals, families and nations involved. And it's a fact that hatred and violence are often rooted in bad information, or in no information ar all.

Even in San Francisco, perhaps America's most liberal city, misinformation still contributes to the circumstances in which The City's most visible minority finds itself as the 20th century moves to its close.

Gays men and women alike make up that minority. And as the The Examiner finds in a 16-day series, they remain the least accepted and most disliked minority in America. ▼

The idea of measuring gays' progress and their impact on society began almost a year ago as a lunch-table conversation between San Francisco media consultant Ken Maley and Greg Brock. The Examiner's assistant managing editor for news. Since then, the project has stretched and tested The Examiner staff in many ways.

There was, candidly, little newsroom enthusiasm for the series at the start; but as work progressed, so did staff support.

Reporters and photographers searched out and recorded the words and images of hundreds of people in the Bay Area and across the country. As part of theat effort, our library staff retrieved and inspected more than 30,000 photographs and 100,000 clippings. To find 800 gay people and another 5,200 nongay Americans who would answer our poll questions pollster staff had to place more than 27,000 telephone calls in all 50 states. It took nine full days of polling to locate one out-of-the-closet gay in the entire state of Kansas.

"Gay in America" is a journalistic examination of gay culture and its influence on the Bay Area and on America life during the past two decades. It is not intended to advocate a point of view, but to challenge assumptions. It's a slice of life, with stories about people, about families, about deeply felt feelings and about values.

We will never be a community where everyone thinks or feels the same way, nor should we be, but neither should we become a community of strangers. William Hearst III Editor and Publisher

Have you told your co-workers about your sexual orientation?

Yes

Don't know

U.S.

44%

54%

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