SEPTEMBER 3, 1993 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

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Georgia county condemns gays, defunds all arts

Marietta, Ga.—The county commission that in early August condemned homosexuality has voted to eliminate funds for the arts at the urging of a commissioner who warned that the arts are helping further a "gay agenda."

"The smokescreen of censorship was not and is not the issue before us. The issue is how tax dollars will be spent," Chairman Bill Byrne said August 24 before the Cobb County Commission voted 5-0 to take $110,000 meant for county arts programs in 1994 and spend it on law enforcement.

The vote came two weeks after the commission declared that homosexuality is “incompatible with community standards."

Commissioner Gordon Wysong said he backed both proposals because he felt a "gay agenda" creeping into the affluent, politically conservative Atlanta suburb.

He cited residents' complaints about a production at the Theatre in the Square of the acclaimed off-Broadway play Lips Together, Teeth Apart, which discusses AIDS. But theater patrons voted it the season's best play, and Wysong admits he never saw it.

OSU housing policy still isn't out of the woods

Ohio State University's board of trustees is currently reviewing a policy allowing gay couples to live in family housing after complaints from legislators.

The university put the policy on hold in May because of negative public reaction.

Board Chairwoman Deborah E. Casto talked with OSU President Gordon Gee about how and when to proceed on the issue in late August. The trustees had a scheduled meeting on Sept. 1.

The board is expected to review the housing issue in October or November, said Phil Martin, director of the university's Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Student Services.

In April, Gee approved allowing samesex couples in a committed relationship to live in Buckeye Village as recommended by the university's housing office.

Buckeye Village is a 396-apartment complex owned by the university to house married students and single parents with children.

State Sen. Eugene Watts, R-Galloway, got a rider attached in May to the state budget bill which passed the senate, limiting oncampus "family" housing to legally married

students and those with children. The measure was deleted in a conference committee in late June, largely because it was not a budget matter-student housing is paid for entirely by the students themselves.

Rep. Michael Fox, R-Hamilton, introduced a bill July 15 that would prohibit state universities from allowing gay and lesbian couples to live in housing for married students.

Thirteen Republicans co-signed the bill. "I'm hoping the board of trustees this fall will make this a moot issue officially by just saying no and not adopting that policy," Fox said.

"If that doesn't happen, that legislation is there and is looking for a home."

The Association for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Faculty and Staff recently published a handbill asking its members to write letters to legislators and university officials denouncing Fox's bill.

"The state legislature is attempting to micro-manage Ohio State and other institutions," the handbill said. “Gay, lesbian and bisexual persons are not seeking special treatment. We are seeking equal treatment."

Oppressed people are root of new Liberation Church

by Andy Lang

A new church serving Cleveland's gay, lesbian and bisexual community will open its doors next weekend.

Liberation Church will conduct its first service of worship at 10:30 am on Sept. 12 at the Hillel Foundation, 11291 Euclid Ave., on the Case Western Reserve University campus.

The church will be a congregation of the 1.6-million-member United Church of Christ, a liberal denomination with roots in the Protestant churches established by English and German immigrants in the 17th and 18th centuries. But the congregation's pastor, the Rev. Dan Geslin, says that Liberation Church will be open to members of all Christian traditions.

"A United Church of Christ congregation does not require members to repudiate their relationship with another church to which they may already belong," he says. Geslin, a Minnesota native, was a student at a Lutheran seminary when he told his bishop that he was gay. "The bishop asked me to sign a contract promising lifelong celibacy," he says, "and that I would never reveal my sexual orientation to any congregation I served." Geslin refused to sign, and that was the end of his career in the Lutheran Church.

Geslin resumed his studies at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, a seminary affiliated with the UCC, and graduated with a master of divinity in 1982. In 1987 he founded Spirit of the Lakes Church in Minneapolis as an alternative for gay and lesbian Christians who were alienated by their former churches. In 1988 the

congregation voted to join the UCC.

The UCC is the only mainline Christian denomination that supports the ordination of gays to the ministry. The church has ordained about 100 openly gay and lesbian ministers since 1972.

Geslin hopes Liberation Church will be a multi-racial congregation that brings lesbians and gay men of all races and ethnic groups together in a worshipping community.

"The church will be rooted in feminist and liberation theology," he says. "Liberation theology was founded by theologians in Latin America and South Africa who believe the Bible was written by oppressed people. Therefore those who exist on the margin of society-the oppressed, the persecuted, the outcasts are the best able to interpret the original meaning of scripture. "As an outcast community, homosexual Christians can claim the Bible as our own message of liberation, and how we interpret the Bible can have a decisive influence for the wider church," Geslin says.

The church will celebrate unions between same-sex couples. It will also welcome heterosexual Christians into membership.

"We want to be both a church where gay and lesbian Christians can form a spiritual community, and a church we can share with our straight friends and families.

"Liberation Church will be one community where the rightness of homosexual and bisexual orientation is taken for granted," Geslin says, "and where you won't have to justify yourself to anybody."

For more information on the congregation, Pastor Geslin can be reached at 932-2462.

Theater founders Palmer Wells and Michael Horne said no one has complained to them.

Much debate has followed in the wake of the August 10 vote condemning gays. Few are surprised that the debate over gays and family values has come to this usually quiet suburb of Atlanta. The clash of old and new is evident, where sleepy town squares and southern history mix with an influx of housing developments, office towers and out-ofstate transplants. More than half of the county's 450,000 residents are from outside of Georgia.

One town in the county, Kennesaw, requires every household to own a gun.

About 400 people rallied August 14 against the earlier anti-gay resolution, holding their protest outside the theater. The rally was followed August 15 by a "Queer Family Picnic." A bomb scare forced the closing of the town square, site of the picnic, for about 30 minutes after a man was arrested carrying what turned out to be a fake bomb under his shirt.

About 1,000 people attended the otherwise peaceful picnic. A later rally at a church supported the commission's actions.

The August 10 resolution states: "Lifestyles advocated by the gay community should not be endorsed by government policy makers, because they are incompatible with the standards to which this community subscribes." It carries no legal weight.

The Cobb Citizens Coalition, a newlyformed gay group, and the Gay and Lesbian

Alliance Against Defamation have responded to the August 24 vote eliminating arts funding by asking corporations with 250 tentative bookings at Cobb's new $43 million convention center to take their business elsewhere.

The organizers stressed at a news conference that they're not calling for a boycott of Cobb businesses, as gay rights groups did in Colorado after voters there passed an antigay rights measure.

Since the county's declaration of “incompatibility," theater donations and applications for membership are up. The debate has rallied the normally non-political community. Recent voter turnout for a summer referendum that would have paid for parks improvements, (including a site for the 1996 Olympic softball competition), was only 9 percent. Olympic organizers chose a different site.

Wells and Horne said they would consider moving the 225-seat theater out of Cobb County with the elimination of their $41,000-a-year grant.

American Civil Liberties Union leaders said they were considering legal action.

"This is the same issue as when a public entity closes down a park rather than allow the Klan or other groups to demonstrate there because of the controversy," said Teresa Nelson, executive director of the ACLU of Georgia. "We will still be reviewing it and continuing to look at the possibility of litigation."

Jeffrey J. Gerhardstein, L.I.S.W., A.C.C.

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