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GAYLE'S CHRONICLE

An Independent Chronicle of the Ohio Lesbian and Gay Community

Volume 10, Issue 4 August 19, 1994

August Night Cale

PAT YOUNG

Ohio's own Cyclone Sisters were just one of the many acts appearing on the Michigan festival's four stages.

Rain doesn't dampen festival

The 19th annual Michigan Women's Music Festival wrapped up August 14, with more than 6,000 women attending this now legendary week-long festival near Hart, Michigan.

The festival, begun in 1975 by Lisa Vogel, brings women together from across the country for music, workshops, art, community and empowerment. Four stages feature continuous music, comedy, movies and performance art. Performers this year included the bands Girls in the Nose, Tribe 8, the Story, Rhiannon,

Patty Larkin and Reno and Cleveland's own Cyclone Sisters and comic Karen Williams.

More than 200 workshops, both scheduled and impromptu, add a political emphasis to balance the entertainment. A much-attended workshop followed the performance by Tribe 8, focusing on the raw, unfettered power and energy that the band embraces.

Financial assistance is offered to those in need as well as work-study type aid. A year's worth of planning and work begins in the fall with

around ten people, and culminates with more than 700 people working during the summer months.

The Michigan festival is a completely women-sustained and operated event. A crafts marketplace features the work of women artists while a country store provides lastminute necessities. Word has it that rain ponchos were a hot commodity this year.

Organizers will now begin readying themselves for next year's 20th anniversary, sure to be a record breaker.

10th AIDS conference:

No advances in sight

Prevention, gene therapy, basic research discussed

by Daniel Q. Haney Yokohama, Japan-The gist of 3,500 reports last week from the war on AIDS is simple enough: There is no cure for AIDS, no effective treatment, no vaccine.

Nor will there be anytime soon. "Anyone with HIV won't find much solace at this meeting," said Dr. Mervyn Silverman, president of the American Foundation for AIDS Research.

The tone of the 10th International Conference on AIDS, which concluded August 11, was restrained from the start. Organizers warned the 12,000 participants not to expect anything big. They were right.

After four days of nonstop discussion, the goal of controlling HIV seems as distant as ever.

"Breakthrough findings don't time themselves to coincide with international meetings," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

But in the field of AIDS, breakthroughs are rare in the months between international meetings, too. The only one that surfaced since last year's big meeting in Berlin was the discovery that HIV-positive women can avoid passing the virus to their babies during birth if they take AZT.

Dating has always been a complex ritual, and now HIV has intensified the issues

If any theme emerged from the

✓

conference, it was the need to go back to basics. Rather than a scatter-shot scramble for new drugs, many scientists seemed to agree that they need new ideas. And they will get them by exploring the innermost workings of the virus and the body's complex and ultimately futile response to it.

The new head of the U.S. Office of AIDS Research said this will be the focus of the federal government's annual $1.3 billion AIDS budget.

"The engine that will drive the entire AIDS research enterprise forward is basic research," Dr. William E. Paul told the meeting.

Shakespeare and the ghost of a Shakespearean actor are seen at two local theaters

Continued on page 2

INSIDE

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Issue 3 struck down

by Lou Chibbaro Jr.

A federal judge this week struck down a law approved by Cincinnati voters last fall that sought to deny discrimination protection for lesbian and gay residents.

U.S. District Judge S. Arthur Spiegel, in a 75-page decision, declared the law unconstitutional, saying it violates First Amendment guarantees of free expression and equal protection under the law.

Spiegel said the law is also "unconstitutionally vague" and infringes upon the fundamental right of lesbians and gays to participate effectively in the political process. Cincinnati voters approved the law, known as Issue 3, in an anti-gay ballot initiative last November.

"Despite the fact that a majority of voters may support a given law," Spiegel wrote in his decision, “rights protected under the Constitution can never be subordinated to the vote of the majority."

Spiegel's ruling became another in a series of setbacks for fundamentalist religious activists who have organized ballot measures around the country to repeal lesbian

and gay civil rights laws or to prevent local jurisdictions from enacting such laws.

Last December, a Colorado court struck down an anti-gay ballot measure in that state. And as of last month, religious right organizers had failed to gather enough petition signatures to place anti-gay initiatives on the ballot in eight out of the ten cities or states in which they sought to place them before the voters in November.

The Cincinnati ruling came in response to a suit filed against the anti-gay measure by the Equality Foundation of Greater Cincinnati and other pro-gay groups. The New York-based Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio represented the pro gay plaintiffs.

The measure was sponsored by the anti-gay group Equal RightsNot Special Rights, which received advice and support from Virginia televangelist Pat Robertson, and three-quarters of its budget from Colorado for Family Values.

The measure had been placed on hold pending to outcome of the suit. Continued on page. 2

Who's addressing lesbian health?

by Carol Patzkowsky

A recent national survey by the executive director and president of the American Association of Physicians for Human Rights found immense and appalling anti-gay discrimination in the medical profession, targeting gay, lesbian, and bisexual medical students, physicians, and patients.

As if this blatant discrimination is not enough, one of the most insidious types of discrimination gay individuals are facing as we approach the turn of the century is a lack of medical information about the health concerns which are particular to us. If doctors are often biased against us, the least we can hope is that they are informed about our health concerns.

But often research has not been done about gay, lesbian, and bisexual health issues. The Lesbian Health Fund (LHF) is taking proactive measures against this gap in medical science which disproportionately affects lesbians. The LHF identifies itself as "a medical research and education fund that recognizes the unique health care concerns of lesbians." Current president Dr. Joan Wurmbrand points out that although many national organizations are doing work to benefit lesbians, the LHF is the only one she knows of which is specifically health-related and focused on funding research.

Questions like "Are lesbians at higher risk for developing breast cancer than straight women?" and "What kind of access to the health care system do lesbians have?" are ones that the LHF would like to see answered. To support individuals doing the work which will increase knowledge about lesbian health concerns, the LHF has given out $50,000 since its inception in the fall of 1992. Recent grants were given to researchers studying such varied issues as alternative insemination methods used by lesbians and abuse in lesbian relationships. Several studies funded by the LHF include bisexual women as subjects as well as lesbians; two of them focus on patterns of Continued on page 3

Cakes in image of Col. Sanders and Princess Di benefit Columbus AIDS Task Force

the

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