COMMUNITY GROUPS

Anti-Paras piece shows internalized homophobia

by Judith Rainbrook

In the last issue of the Chronicle, Bob Roehr executed a perfect piece of character assassination on Melinda Paras, recently hired executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Although this article was labeled "news analysis," it lacked a balanced presentation of the facts. And it lacked information on just what experiences and background qualified Roehr as an expert on NGLTF.

Paras has strong support from leaders in the gay-lesbian movement across the country. The board of NGLTF is made up of 23 of the most dedicated and experienced people in the lesbian-g liberation movementpeople who travel from

-gay

the board presented a thoughtful and comprehensive strategy for overhauling and modernizing NGLTF's internal operations to enable it to respond quickly and effectively to the thousands of requests it gets each month for information, statistics, and assistance from hundreds of individuals and organizations across the country-including from the Lesbian-Gay Community Service Center of Greater Cleveland.

LESBIAN GAY

Community Service Center

all across the United States to volunteer for leadership in our national movement. They are people like Jan Stevenson, executive director of the Detroit Lesbian-Gay Community Center; Dixie Sheridan, vice president for college relations at Vassar College; Donald Chamberlain, administrator of AIDS housing in Seattle; Susan Anderson, an organizer with Equality Colorado; and Rick Aguirre, founder and publisher of insideOut magazine.

NGLTF's hiring of Paras carried the endorsement of more than 20 leaders in the national lesbian-gay movement--including Richard Burns, head of the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Center; Elizabeth Birch, the new director of the Human Rights Campaign Fund; Lorri L. Jean, the executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Center; Keith Cathcart, the executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund; and Tim Sweeney, former executive director of the Gay Men's Health Crisis.

Paras also received strong support from NGLTF members attending the recent Creating Change Conference in Dallas. She and

OF GREATER CLEVELAND

In light of this kind of broad-based support for Paras, the only conclusion that can be drawn from Roehr's article is that he does not value the experience and wisdom of our national leadership-i.e. that he suffers severely from internalized homophobia. Internalized homophobia is as significant plague in our community as the AIDS epidemic. Projecting our own low esteem onto our leaders keeps destroying everything we try to build. The failure to value and respect the experience and opinion of gay-lesbian leaders and the transformation of organizational conflicts into personal vendettas keeps our community ghettoized, powerless, and emotionally damaged.

We can all help change this cycle. We need to start by seeking information from all sides of a controversy before we leap to conclusions about an issue. And we need to question any community member whose emotional hostility is so strong that he is willing to severely damage the only national education and grassroots training organization the gay-lesbian community has when a community decision isn't to his liking. We need to take better care of each other and to trust each other's motives, even when we don't agree.

If not, we don't have to worry about the right wing. We will destroy our civil rights movement all by ourselves. ♡

Judith Rainbrook is executive director of the Cleveland Lesbian-Gay Center.

JANUARY 13, 1995 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

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