THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 21, 1994 TAG: 9406210005
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By THOMAS L. LONG
DATELINE: 940621 LENGTH: Medium
Soon, many of us will travel to New York for a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, the symbolic beginning of the modern gay and lesbian equal-civil-rights movement.
{REST} On a June night in 1969, after the funeral of gay icon Judy Garland, patrons of Greenwich Village's Stonewall Inn found themselves in a police raid, in the 1950s and 1960s a typical form of official harassment. However, there was a difference on the night of June 27: The patrons and eventually the crowd of neighbors who gathered at the tavern fought back.
Although gay and lesbian civil-rights organizations had existed as far back as the 1950s, the Stonewall Rebellion has come to signify the modern movement for gay and lesbian equality. Since then, each year, usually in June, communities around the United States hold gay/lesbian-pride events as opportunities for gay-community development and general-community education.
A diverse cross-section of New York's gay community initiated the Stonewall Rebellion and has been a part of similar communities around the United States. The sensationalist media (and an audience always hungry for distraction) have typically focused their attention on the more Rabelaisian members of our gay and lesbian communities.
More sinister political forces, who find in us a convenient scapegoat for wider social ills, have even attempted to misrepresent a single, monolithic ``gay agenda,'' which they have widely broadcast by means of their extensive financial and political resources.
But just as hate-mongers misrepresent mainstream moderate religious and political positions, so, too, some of our most visible gays and lesbians have misidentified the aspirations of the gay mainstream. Recently, however, writers like gay-conservative columnist Bruce Bawer (in A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society) and University of Illinois philosophy professor Richard D. Mohr (in A More Perfect Union: Why Straight America Must Stand Up for Gay Rights) have articulated a middle ground for gay and non-gay citizens alike.
The American gay and lesbian equal-rights movement is the most visible in the world precisely because it is American. The ideal that Americans at least espouse is one of unity in diversity (the ubiquitous e pluribus unum), acknowledging that all citizens are endowed with God-given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Because we are a diverse and often invisible minority, there is no single ``gay agenda.'' But my guess is that if you could ask a cross-section of our estimated 49,000 Hampton Roads' gays and lesbians, they might offer the following:
We want to be free from harassment, violence and the threat of violence.
We want repeal of laws that proscribe our most sacred and private relationships (and in many states, including Virginia, those of heterosexuals as well).
We want to work at our careers without the fear that our sexual orientation will become an issue in hiring or promotion.
We want to have equal access to housing and public accommodations.
We want to have vulnerable gay or lesbian adolescents (already more likely to attempt suicide than other teens) protected from the physical or psychological tortures of ``conversion treatments'' or ``orientation cures.''
We want the opportunity both to serve our country and to develop productive careers in a military rid of homophobia and sexism.
We want acknowledgment of equivalent effort, fidelity and commitment in our relationships and personal affiliations, providing opportunities for both deeper and more pliable definitions of ``family,'' which in the South has never been limited to blood or marriage alone.
We want our children's custody to be decided on the content of our character, not on our sexual orientation or a judge's fantasies about our lives.
All Americans, whether they know it or not, know someone who is gay or lesbian. We want you to acknowledge this fact and to let us work together on the more important agendas that we all share: strengthening families and neighborhoods; protecting children from violence and abuse; building employment and health security for all Americans; and facing the moral depredations of our culture's tendencies toward avarice, consumerism, violence and racism.
{KEYWORDS} GAY RIGHTS HOMOSEXUALS GAYS LESBIANS
by CNB