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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE AUGUST 18, 1995
In Memoriam Of Our Founder, Cecil Ray deLoach (1952-1991)
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GAY PROPIES CHRONICLE
OBITUARIES
Cal Anderson
Cal Anderson, the first openly gay member of the Washington state legislature, died August 4 after a battle with AIDS. He was 47. Secretary of the Senate Marty Brown said Anderson was found dead by his partner, Eric Ishino, at their Seattle home when Ishino came home from work.
The immediate cause of death was not known. However, Anderson, a Democratic senator from Seattle's 43rd District, was absent for most of the 1995 legislative session, battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma, an AIDSrelated cancer.
Anderson announced in April that vigorous chemotherapy had eradicated the lymphoma, but he was left weakened and susceptible to further opportunistic illnesses. In June, he missed being grand marshal of Seattle's lesbian and gay Pride parade due to blood clots in his legs and lungs.
Anderson was appointed to the House in November 1987 to fill out an unexpired term.
He won House elections in 1988, 1990 and 1992 in the heavily Democratic 43rd District, and won an open Senate seat in 1994 with 81 percent of the vote. He took an interest in civil rights, the environment, and legislation dealing with elections, ethics and state government.
Anderson for years waged an unsuccessful battle for legislation to include gays in the state's anti-harassment and anti-discrimination laws. He was a major force in fighting anti-gay rights initiatives in 1994.
In a 1994 interview, on the day the antidiscrimination bill died for the 17th year in a row, Anderson said his tenure in the legislature put a human face on homosexuality and would pave the way for eventual passage of the legislation, and equal treatment for gays and lesbians.
"Egotistically, my being in the House has helped, because they see that gay men care about the same issues they do, that we are not monsters. We are their friends, their family, their compatriots," he said.
But the inability to pass the anti-discrimination bill was a perennial disappointment for him.
The closest he came to pushing the measure through was in 1994, when it cleared the House and died by two votes in the Senate. In the 1995 Legislature, in a much more hostile environment, the bill wasn't introduced.
Anderson, a hero to the gay community, also helped battle anti-gay initiatives in 1994. Opponents of a Washington initiative
mounted an unprecedented $1 million “decline to sign" campaign and kept initiative backers from collecting sufficient voter signatures to reach the ballot.
Anderson, who called himself "a Democrat who happens to be gay," was low-key about his sexual orientation, but was open about it in his campaigns.
"What I do in my bedroom behind closed doors just isn't what my life is about and I've never made it that big of a concern for myself," he told a reporter in 1988.
Anderson stunned his colleagues and constituents in February by announcing that he had full-blown AIDS.
"For many years I've known that I am HIV-positive," he said in a letter he called "difficult and emotional" to write.
His absence from the 1995 session left his party without a working majority in the Senate and allowed the Republicans to push through key amendments and procedural motions over the protest of the Democrats.
On August 7 in Seattle, more than 750 people took part in a candlelight march in Anderson's honor despite the rainy weather. Organizer George Scarola, who predicted that only 100 to 300 would show up for the march due to the weather, said word of the event was spread by phone, leaflets and computer.
The procession, led by former Anderson campaign manager Ed Murray, traveled 15 blocks to Cal Anderson House, a $2.6 million apartment complex for poor people with AIDS. The march ended with a silent vigil and the singing of "We Shall Overcome."
A memorial service on August 10 drew over 2,000 people, many of them spilling into the street. The Rev. Michael Ryan likened Anderson to John F. Kennedy as a man of "great stature and great substance" who "believed that all people counted, the little as much as the great, the marginalized as well as the mainstream."
Washington state governor Mike Lowery, a friend of Anderson for three decades, praised the "incomparable contributions" the senator made in his career in politics. "What Cal did is show the tremendous contribution everyone makes, and why diversity and tolerance are so vital," the governor said, his voice cracking.
In addition to countless friends and colleagues, Anderson is survived by his partner Eric Ishino, and his mother, Alice Coleman.
Coroner makes anti-gay diatribe
Continued from page 1
and it is not just a simple . . . aberrant sexual activity," Amend continued. "It is significant when it takes in innocent minds like this Carver gal."
Rachel's uncle, Jason Wickenhagen, 23, has been accused of killing her and dumping her body near the Spokane River. He pleaded innocent August 10 to a charge of aggravated first-degree murder.
The Spokane Human Rights Commission has called for Dr. Amend's resignation.
"Dr. Amend has scapegoated an entire group of people," the commission said. "His comments are personal in nature and devoid of fact. Most sex crimes are not perpetrated by gays or lesbians, but by heterosexual
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males. Homosexuality and pedophilia are not the same thing. The SHRC welcomes the opportunity to help the public distinguish between the myth and reality regarding our gay and lesbian neighbors."
Members of the local gay community are considering a recall campaign against Amend. "He's passed on information that is medically incorrect," openly-gay Human Rights Commission vice-chair Craig Peterson told a news conference August 10. "Part of the harm that he's done cannot be undone."
"Homosexuality had nothing to do with the death of Rachel Carver," commission chair Janet Stevenson said, adding that statistics show that 98 percent of pedophiles are heterosexual men.
Ann Wood, of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, said the coroner should realize that sodomy, which includes anal and oral sex, is not an act exclusive to gays. "This whole thing is appalling," Wood
said.
"Dr. Amend's comments reveal a larger problem not endemic to Spokane,” said National Gay and Lesbian Task Force spokesman Robert Bray. "He is a licensed doctor as well as an elected official. Despite the advances in medical and scientific research on AIDS and homosexuality, prejudice and bigotry still permeate the medical profession." Bray called on the medical profession to condemn statements like Amend's, and to "sensitize medical practitioners to the facts about being gay."