HIGH GEAR

Volume 8 Issue 4

December, 1981

A swinging swing vote? an analysis

R. Woodward

Of sets of local election results which became available for public scrutiny during the month of November, probably the most interesting for High Gear readers is the set of precinct by precinct voter tallies for Ward 17, the Cleveland City Council ward in which John L. Lynch scored a surprise victory over Mary Zone in the November 3rd election.

Lynch seems to have won the election by winning a twoto-one margin in the area of his ward west of West 85th Street, the Cleveland portion of the largely gay neighborhood which is divided by West 117th Street.

The election in Ward 17 was a close one, with Lynch receiving 2,860 votes and Mary Zone 2,649 votes, a difference of only 211 votes.

If only 106 of those who voted for Lynch had voted for Zone instead, Zone would have won the election.

In precincts. Q, R, S, T, and X Lynch received 846 votes to 404 votes given to Mary Zone. In this area Lynch came out ahead of is opponent by 442 votes, twice as many votes as the difference between the two candidates for the entire election.

The area of these precincts together is bounded on the north by Lake Erie, on the east by West 85th Street, on the west by West 117th Street, and on the south by a line extending from West 117th Street along Clifton Boulevard to West Boulevard, along West Boulevard to Detroit Avenue, and along Detroit to West 85th.

After seeing the paid ad which John Lynch ran in the November isue of High Gear which said, "Thank you for your support in the recent election. I'm here to serve everybody," many High Gear readers are probably wondering if Lynch. won the election because of the coverage he received in the October issue of High Gear in the story on the front page describing his meeting with members of the gay community to discuss some neighborhood problems.

The answer is it is impossible to be absolutely sure about it but such an assumption would not be terribly farfetched.

Several thousand copies of the October issue of High Gear were distributed downtown and on the West Side about three weeks before the election and the issue was probably read by at least several hundred voters living in Ward 17.

Lynch received no endorsement from High Gear. (The GEAR Foundation, publisher of High Gear, is a non-profit, educational organization which would lose its tax-exempt status if High Gear were to make any political endorsement.) The coverage Lynch got from High Gear consisted of little more than reporting the answers he gave to questions asked by some of his constituents and by members of the GEAR Foundation's board of directors, and the story was written in a flat news style.

But Lynch did manage to impress readers as someone who would bother to meet with his gay constituents and provide them with some specific

answers.

High Gear did little more than serve as a conduit for the latest news about a local problem concerning its readers, and for the positive impression Lynch gave High Gear readers, he has himself to thank. Negative Impressions

If John Lynch seems to have won a local election by giving local gay readers a positive impression, other local candidates seem to have lost elections by giving them negative impressions.

Adjacent to Lynch's Cleveland Ward 17, on the other side of the West 117th Street city boundary is Lakewood City. Council Zone 4 in which eight year incumbant Harry F. Brockman was upset by John P. Gallagher in the 1979 election for Lakewood City Council. Gallagher, a Democrat, received 2,179 votes to Republican Brockman's 1908 votes.

In the Wednesday, Novem-

ber 7, 1979 issue of the Plain Dealer, an unnamed staff writer refers to Gallagher's victory as "the surprise in Lakewood's city hall races."

Those lease surprised by Brockman's defeat were gay voters in Ward 4 who had read and passed around the August 1979 issue of Cleveland Magazine which contained an article by William Moushey Jr., entitled "Private Lives." The article depicted gay life in the Cleveland area.

The article begins by describing how Lakewood Council Representative Harry Brockman loves his Gold Coast neighborhood, but then says he becomes "puzzled and unsettled" when talking about "one aspect of his Gold Coast."

Writes Moushey about Brockman, "He neither understands nor wants to acknowledge the fact that many consider this unique

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enclave of Greater Cleveland to be the residential center of the town's gay community. He maintains that recent reports about the Gold, Coast area's emergence as a 'gay ghetto' are blown out of proportion."

Brockman is quoted as saying about gays, "I've read about them in the newspapers, and I've heard they're all over the West Side, but to be truthful to you, I've never seen any socalled gay activity around here." Moushey mentions that Brockman has "lived in swank high rises along the Gold Coast' for the past 15 years."

The major daily newspapers and the radio and television stations in the Cleveland area do not usually pay very close attention to the activities of suburban council representatives, and they do not usually bother to cover their campaigns for re-election. (Continued on the next page)

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Ward 17 and its largely gay precincts. In Precinct Q Lynch got 211 votes to Zone's 125 votes (62.8% to 37.2%), in Precinct R, 164 votes to Zone's 72 votes (69.49% to 30.15%), in Precinct S, 205 votes to Zone's 81 votes (71.68% to 28.32%), in Precinct T, 155 • votes to Zone's.72 votos (68.28% to 31.72%), and in Precinct X. 11 111 votes to Zone's 54 votes (67.27% to 32.73%).