MARCH 7, 1997 GAY PEOPle's ChronICLE 9
SPEAK OUT
'Remove me from your rooster': The best of hate mail
by Kathleen DeBold and George N. Neighbors, Jr.
One of the joys of working for a gay organization is the singular pleasure we get from reading the daily dose of hate mail. We've arranged our favorite snippets in letter form so we could share with you the best of the Beavis and Butt-heads of the biblically impaired:
"Dear Fagots, Fagees, Dikes, Soddomites, Lissbians, and Queer Bates:
"I recently came across your address in a magazine I was reading and a plea for donations to support your perversions caught my
eye. Their is no excuse for you. Your all sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick.
“Gays are barf-inducing because you know what they do in private. Sex organs are not very sanitarilly clean. Regardless of a man's ability as an artist, dress designer, or choreographer (three favorite professions, I'm sure) the bottom line is that he enjoys [a long, explicit and obviously well-researched description of gay male sex]. I'm sure that lesbians engage in similar disgusting acts [no description: they still can't figure out what we do in bed].
"Who is Barry Goldwater compared to
AIDS anti-discrimination bill introduced
Ten years ago, KWIR Publications took over the Gay People's Chronicle, which had ceased publication following the death of founder Charles Callendar. These are some of the stories appearing in March issues since then.
March, 1988
Republican State Sen. David Hobson introduced a bill to outlaw discrimination against people with AIDS. The bill also funded AIDS service organizations and residences for people with AIDS.
March, 1991
The State of Ohio Advisiory Committee on Gay and Lesbian Issues, a group created by Gov. Richard Celeste when he took office in 1983, issued its report to the governor on anti-gay discrimination. Some activists said the report, the result of hearings over seven years, was watered down. It was issued two years after its deadline, on the last day of Celeste's administration.
PEOPLE'S
PUBLISHING THE GAY P KWIR
A
DECADE OF
The Chronicle, then a 10-page newsletter, also
had seven personal ads (this issue has 277) and a full-page ad, mostly text, which described a new telephone service providing an "interactive, exciting teleconference with up to eight other men at one time."
March, 1989
Ten young men and women attended the first meeting of Presence and Respect for Youth in Sexual Minority, or PRYSM, the Cleveland Lesbian-Gay Center's new youth group. Then and now, the group meets at noon on Saturdays.
Karen Thompson was permitted to visit her lover Sharon Kowalski for the first time in three years. The Minnesota couple were separated after a car accident left Kowalski severely injured. Kowalski's father forbade Thompson from having any contact with Kowalski, and kept her confined to nursing home. Thompson began a eight-year court battle in 1984 which eventually returned Kowalski to her care. Thompson, Kowalski, and Patty Bresser now share a home in Clearwater, Minnesota.
March, 1990
The Kent Gay-Lesbian Foundation announced it will host the 9th annual All-Ohio Lesbian-Gay Conference in April. The conference had been held at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland since 1981, but the CWRU Lesbian-Gay Student Union said it needed to focus on serving its students instead of producing a statewide conference. In the 1970s, the Kent State University group, then called the Kent Gay Liberation Front, hosted some of the nation's first lesbian-gay Campus conferences.
G
CHRONICLE
March, 1993
Leigh Robertson announced she would resign
as director of the Cleveland Lesbian-Gay Center in July,
after two years in the post. Cleveland Mayor Michael White endorsed the third March on Washington
for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Rights, set for April 25, saying, “We are all in the same boat, rowing in the same direction... Everyone is entitled to the pursuit of their dreams and aspirations." Over 700,000 people attended the march. The first two national marches were in 1979 and 1987.
March 11, 1994
The Chronicle began publishing every two weeks in 1993.
The Ohio Pro-Family Forum met secretly in Columbus to plan a statewide anti-gay referendum, and gay and lesbian civil rights leaders from across the state later met to strategize against it. The gay leaders discovered that the newly-formed Ohioans Against Discrimination had replaced Citizens for Justice as the state's lesbian and gay political action committee.
The statewide referendum never materialized, but Cincinnati voters the following November passed Issue 3, which banned lesbian-gay civil rights laws. Issue 3 is presently all but dead, as it awaits a final circuit court hearing in light of a 1996 Supreme Court decision outlawing such measures.
March 25, 1994
With hardly a ripple, Cleveland City Council on March 14 passed legislation to include "sexual orientation" in all of the city's civil rights ordinances, including those covering housing, public accomodations, and employment.
The employment ordinance was modified in late 1996 to make job bias, including antigay bias, a criminal misdemeanor instead of a civil offense.
She's out there...
You just have to go find her!
Start in the
People Chronicle Personals
Someone for everyone
starting on page 25.
God? Check the following versus of scripture: Genises, Romens, Leviticals, and Profits. God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. God never made men for men or women for women. And for anyone to say 'He' did would be to call 'God' a lier.
"The Bible makes it clear that Jesus preferred straight men. That is why God sent you Aides. In our day Aids were helpers in the principals office. Q: What do we who trust in God call Sodomites and Lesbians? A: Sodomites and Lesbians!!!
"The homophiles are nothing short of a hatred spreading group that has joined forces with the KKK, and the brown shirters and the anti-semetics. Homos have no right to teach in our pubic schools. You just want to pray on our children and lead them in a stray. There isn't a homosexual alive who fought and died for his country like we did.
"My wife is not a lesbian and neither is my son. I've never had sex with a man and neither has my wife. I hope that your campaigning for homosexuals is due to your being unknowleable rather than you thinking the things they do are just 'sexual preferance.' Keep your sexual perversions to yourself and I'll keep my sexual perversions to myself.
Call us! Let us help you design the cake of your dreams.
"I also challenge the word 'homophobic' as fear of hobosexuals. I'm not homophobicI have no fear of your type, only contempt. And now you have homophobia to wave around just like the Jews have anti-semenic. So lets get rid of the word homophobia: How about 'Homo-Blyiccch' (gag, choke, vomit)? Sure, you can call me homophonic if you like but I know what's right and what's wrong. When all you perverts are in hell it will be a much better place.
"I am curious about how you got our name. I suppose that's a secret you'll keep buried in your bosom. I do not encourage anyone likely to place me on your mailing list to get more such weird offers. I demand that you remove me from your rooster!"
(Signed) Satan, Hell Inc., Hell Fire Lane. As you can see, we have met the enemy, and they are illiterate.
Kathleen DeBold is deputy director of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. George N. Neighbors, Jr., is field director of P-FLAG, Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.
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