GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

JANUARY 13, 1995

EDITORIAL

A strong statewide effort for 1995

The New Year has traditionally been a time of reflection and resolution. Nineteenninety-four was a year filled with much change, for the Chronicle, for our communities, and on the national level, as the first Republican-dominated Congress in 40 years will smugly tell you.

As the Chronicle fast approaches its 11th year of publication, we continue to be the largest newspaper serving gay, lesbian and bisexual Ohio. The Cleveland office has undergone some amazing changes in the past year, including moving to a new office space, promoting a new managing editor, and being presented with numerous journalism and community service awards.

The Columbus office, in existence since September of 1993, also experienced a significant transition in 1994. Originally established as a separate edition, the Columbus eition was combined with the Cleveland edition in October, after it became financially impossible to continue publishing two separate papers.

Since that time, the Chronicle has been operating as a statewide paper. Providing the state of Ohio with a balanced newspaper on a shoestring budget and with a limited staff in both cities has proven to be a challenge. Because the main office is in Cleveland, unless and until individuals in other parts of the state become involved and make the Chronicle their community newspaper, the local content will continue to be more about Cleveland than Columbus, or Cincinnati, or Dayton, or even Akron.

With the holidays recently behind us, we all probably know what it would feel like to

give a gift that never gets used. When you give something away, it feels good to know that the recipient not only appreciates the gift, but uses it often. Columbus, the only other Ohio city besides Cleveland that has its own office, has been mysteriously silent.

Where is your voice, Columbus? We want to hear from you about the things that are happening in the local gay and lesbian community, about the stuff that makes you angry, about the latest controversy. We want your events listed in the calendar. We want to know who the leaders in your gay and lesbian community are so we can support their efforts. We want to celebrate with you at your commitment ceremonies, share your pride when you announce the birth or adoption of a child, and grieve with you when you bury your dead. Columbus, you have a resource that many cities wish they had. Now only you can decide whether or not to use it.

To the statewide community; we are about to embark on a journey the likes of which we've never seen before. In April, the American Family Association PAC of Ohio, headed by Scott Ross, and Equal Rights Not Special Rights, led by Cincinnati-based anti-gay activist Phil Burress, launched a new statewide anti-gay strategy entitled Project Spotlight. The plan attempts to “win back” Ohio city councils by electing "a majority of...candidates who oppose the homosexual agenda," and defeating those with pro-gay positions in elections in 1995 and 1997 in six target cities: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown.

Project Spotlight will "educate voters about the homosexual agenda," register

SPEAK OUT

people to vote, mount petition drives urging voters to pledge their support for anti-gay candidates, and inform voters through direct mail which candidates "have been endorsed by the homosexuals." In a racist attempt at "divide and conquer," the plan also encourages campaigning in African-American communities since, as Buress states, a "key ingredient to victory is winning the black vote." You don't have to be an full-time activist to have your voice heard. We are all different, with varying degrees of "outness," different political viewpoints, and our own special talents and gifts. An individual that may not be able to imagine themselves getting up on a podium and speaking before a crowd of people, may perhaps inspire someone else to speak by writing a letter to their local gay press about something that has happened in their life.

The struggle for the equal rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people requires all our efforts. It's not just the activists who can win this battle. No matter how closeted you are, no matter how much you dislike activism, you can help yourself and the cause by becoming involved to whatever extent you can. There are all sorts of ways you can do this. Call the Chronicle office closest to you. Find out how you might be able to get involved. The Columbus number is 614-253-4038, fax 614253-1367. In Cleveland, the number is 216631-8646, fax 216-631-1082

Columbus, we know you're out there— we'd really like to get to know you. And to everyone else who does not live in Cleveland or Columbus, this newspaper belongs to you too. Let's resolve that in 1995, we will all put our own unique mark on it.

Taking our relationships and our lives seriously

by Richard D. Mohr

Census folk tally a generation as twentyfive years. But in the gay world-even before the temporal compressions worked by AIDS-a generation logs about every seven years, sometimes quicker. This feature of gay time was driven home to me anew by John Boswell's obituary in the New York Times. I rubbed my eyes: he was only three years older than me. Though in both person and photo he always appeared an agelessly angelic youth, his career had been so accomplished and he had done so much personally for me, so much (how to say) paternally for me, that it was hard to imagine that but three New Years seperated our births.

Boswell's 1980 book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality dashed

the taboo covering gay subjects in academe. It cleared the space in which gay studies began to grow exponentially and initiated gay-affirming discourses in the wider public sphere.

Especially just five months before his death, Boswell's final book is a history and prizing of gay marriage. It's main cultural import and challenge is for gays--and others to take gay relationships more seriously. It invites us to view gayness not as something that, like eye-color or an earring, one might have in splendid isolation, but as something, like loving and caring, which is a relational property, a connection between persons, a human bonding, one in need of tendance and social concern. Think about it.

For me, Boswell performed that thankless ivory-tower chore whose real-world

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counterpart is helping a friend move. He wrote letters of recommendation-ones that got me years off to write Gay/Justice (1988) and Gay Ideas (1992) and one that got me promoted to full professor. I think about these good deeds often.

But Boswell was no saint. He could be quite the grouch, and his obit gave cause for moral puzzlement. Boswell's writings possessed the real-world virtues of candor, boldness, and courage that are usually the first things to go in an institution as bureaucratic as the academy.

So I was surprised to see that, apparently at his behest, his obit did not take advantage of the Times' concession to the emerging institutionalization of gay marriage. Further, for years Boswell had told people, including me, that his long illness was "just" Lyme disease, not AIDS, and so I was morally deflated to read that the cause of his death indeed was AIDS. Perhaps these events have innocent explanations, but as fair cultural read of them suggests that in our actual lived experience (whatever our ideals may be), we gay folk, even at our best, have made little moral progress beyond Rock Hudson and Liberace.

It is, of course, unreasonable to expect heroism in every dimension of a person's life. We should be glad that it occurs at all. And Boswell's heroism is already having real-world effects on new gay generations.

Christmas eve, the day of Boswell's death, the post brought me a card of greetings from a gay graduate student with whom I'd been corresponding a bit but about whose personal circumstances I knew nothing. The photo-card's classic format of family snapshot plus Christmas message is the sort of thing that has made Olan Mills the Campbell's Soup of the photo industry.

Well, the student and his lover had just adopted an infant. And there they all are, without the slightest hint of irony or camp, posed against a brick wall with a piece of

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couch art at head level: the dads, in matching rented tuxedos, beam with pride as they jointly hold up baby Joshua swaddled only in a diaper. The photograph is at once a rune and a icon of gay family, an imploding yet radiant fusion of American Gothic and gay Bethlehem. Admittedly, at first the photo struck me as a little bit silly, even as it was a great deal wonderfulsilly because my feelings weren't instantly up there where my mind tells me my pride is.

As I sorted out my feelings, I was taken back half a dozen years to remember another gay family event, the one and only gay wedding I've attended. I didn't bother to take a present, not because I was a skinflint, but because-shamefully—I clearly wasn't taking gay relationships seriously enough, even though by that time I'd already been in one for a decade.

We have learned much from Boswell's writings, but I suspect we-and our future generations too-still have much more to learn.

Richard D. Mohr is professor of philosophy at the University of IllinoisUrbana. His most recent book is A More Perfect Union.