JANUARY 12, 1996
GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
9
SPEAK OUT
1995 was a wild year for gays and lesbians
by Mubarak S. Dahir
For gay men and lesbians, peering from hindsight on the cusp of a brand new year, the events of 1995 already seem to be taking on the color-bleeding patina of badly preserved photographs, and as I mentally flip the pages of what happened to us as a group in 1995, the once razor-sharp images of yesterday are already taking on a surrealism of their own.
This time last year, gay men and lesbians were holding their breath like everyone else, anxiously wondering what the new Republican Congress held in store for them and the country. It wasn't long before gay men and lesbians got their first strange taste of the new political flavor in Washington when House majority whip Dick Armey referred to openly gay Rep. Barney Frank as "Barney Fag."
Along with the anger and frustration that such a high-ranking public official felt free to malign us with such disdain, there was also our first taste of much-needed comic relief when the disoriented Armey-who was ap-' parently caught off guard when his comment made national headlines, and also made him look like a buffoon-tried valiantly to convince the nation that his off-color remark was, as one gay publication put it, "an unconscious cry for speech therapy."
The incident seemed to be a foreshadowing of the strange political circumstances and affairs that would follow, like the unsettling photograph of Newt Gingrich with his lesbian half-sister, Candace. But perhaps more unnerving than the uncomfortable smiles Newt and his half-sister shared in their Washington photo-ops was the odd nepotism at play that lifted a previously unheard-of lesbian living quietly in central Pennsylvania into a gay icon.
Also in the category of so weird it was almost funny, there was the time in June
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It wasn't long before gay men and lesbians got their first strange taste of the new political flavor in Washington when House majority whip Dick Armey referred to openly gay Rep. Barney Frank as "Barney Fag."
on duty that day donned rubber gloves to meet the White House guests.
Unfortunately, other AIDS-related news didn't have the same edge of dark humor, only the edge of darkness. In 1995, deaths in the United States from AIDS passed the 500,000 mark, and for the first time, the CDC announced that AIDS surpassed unintentional injuries to become the number one killer of Americans between the ages of 25 and 44. Despite the gravity and toll of this disease, members of the National Federation of Republican Women, convening in September in Albuquerque, New Mexico, felt smug enough to offer this commentary about gays and AIDS printed on a bumper sticker they were selling: The Miracle of AIDS Turned Fruits Into Vegetables.
But politicians and their ilk certainly had no monopoly on the bizarre. In March, a gay man was murdered shortly after he confessed to having a crush on a straight man on the Jenny Jones TV talk show; in May, a Wilmington newspaper quoted CBS golf analyst Ben Wright as saying that lesbians hurt the sport, and that women golfers “are handicapped by having boobs"; and in August, Norma McCorvy, a lesbian who is perhaps better known as Jane Roe in the landmark Roe v. Wade case that established abortion rights, announced after she was baptized in a Dallas swimming pool by a pastor of Operation Rescue that she was a born-again Christian and had switched sides on the abortion debate.
If you were observant, you even saw enough clues in the shenanigans of 1995 to know that 1996 also promises to be an intriguing year for gay and lesbian issues. Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole's flip-flop on gay money-first accepting a check from the Log Cabin Republicans, then rejecting the check, then saying he shouldn't have sent the money back—at least shows us that gays and lesbians will be a part of the debate in the upcoming election year.
We'll be part of legal history, too, when the Supreme Court later this summer announces its decision on whether or not Colorado's Amendment 2-which prohibits gay-rights legislation in the state-is or isn't constitutional.
And no doubt debate will continue to rage throughout 1996 about whether or not gay marriages in Hawaii will be, and should be, legal.
If nothing else, 1996 has this in common with its predecessor for gay men and lesbians: it promises not to be boring.
✓
Mubarak Dahir is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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