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Major Newspaper Stokes American Gay Marriage Debate
NY Times By REUTERS
July 8, 2003
 
BOSTON (Reuters) - With Massachusetts' top court poised to issue a ruling that could make the state the first to allow gay marriages, New England's leading newspaper on Tuesday came out in favor of same-sex unions.

In an editorial entitled ``For Gay Marriage,'' The Boston Globe added its voice to those seeking to give gay and lesbian couples the same rights as heterosexuals.

Gay marriages are forbidden in the United States, although one state, Vermont, allows same-sex civil unions. But a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning sodomy laws, a decision allowing gay marriage in Canada and a shift in American public opinion have dramatically changed the climate.

Gay rights supporters praised the Globe's editorial.

``The Globe's position is wonderful ... (this) should really be a no-brainer,'' said spokesman David Smith of Human Rights Campaign, a leading gay lobby group.

The issue of gay rights has long been divisive in America. Conservatives have denounced homosexuality as immoral while liberals want all Americans to have equal rights.

Gays have enjoyed a string of successes in the court of public opinion lately.

On Monday, cable news network MSNBC fired talk show host Michael Savage for wishing AIDS on a caller, calling him ``one of the sodomites.'' And retail giant Wal-Mart has broadened its anti-discrimination policy to cover gay and lesbian workers.

The Globe is not the first major U.S. newspaper to support the right of gays and lesbians to marry -- the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and The New York Times have issued similar calls -- but its language was arguably more pointed.

The newspaper likened the debate to the one that the U.S. high court settled in 1967 when it ruled that the right to marry could not be restricted by race.

``It may be difficult to imagine a time when interracial marriage was considered an abomination by much of society and was specifically outlawed by many states, just as some day it will be hard to imagine that gay couples were once ostracized simply for trying to form stable families,'' the paper wrote.

Others, like The Washington Times, have opposed the notion.

``Overwhelming data confirms that healthy children flourish best under the nurturing love between a man and a woman,'' the conservative newspaper wrote in an editorial last month.

An American society now openly discussing the possibility of gay marriage stands in stark contrast to just a decade ago.

At the start of his presidency, Bill Clinton attempted to change a U.S. military policy that discharged gay service men and women. His efforts sparked a heated national debate that ended in a ``don't ask, don't tell'' compromise allowing gay soldiers only if they kept their sexuality secret.

When gay comedian Ellen DeGeneres' character came out in her mid-1990s sitcom ``Ellen,'' ratings slumped and the show was eventually dropped. Just a couple of years later, NBC launched the successful comedy ``Will and Grace,'' featuring openly gay characters.

DeGeneres caused a major spat when her character kissed another woman on her TV show, but now gay clinches are regularly portrayed in steamy detail on hit shows like HBO's ``Six Feet Under.''

The Boston Globe urged Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court to rule in favor of seven same-sex couples who have sued the state asking for the right to marry under civil law.

With a decision expected within the next week, the court could reject the claim outright, pass the issue to the state legislature to sort out, or openly declare that same-sex marriages are legal and valid.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist wants a constitutional amendment defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. President Bush, elected with strong support from conservatives, last week dodged the issue, saying he did not know if such an amendment was needed. 
[PUBLIC LIVES]After Battling for Gay Rights, Time to Shift Energies
NY Times
By ROBIN FINN
July 8, 2003
 
FIRST, the Supreme Court gives Texas a disapproving slap by striking down anti-sodomy legislation. Next, Wal-Mart clambers aboard the equal rights bandwagon to mollify its gay employees. Then there's the blessing recently bestowed on gay men and women by Canada, where non-heterosexual marriage is on the verge of legal codification. 

It might be a cavalcade of human rights long overdue, but doesn't all this progress signify in Ruth E. Harlow's expert legal opinion that, after 15 years of unrelenting litigation toward gay rights, it finally, really is O.K. to be gay? As a lesbian of long and public standing, Ms. Harlow should be hitching up her low-slung jeans, flinging off those no-nonsense, black-rimmed specs, and turning cartwheels in the privacy of her Brooklyn apartment, should she not? 

But Ms. Harlow is not. She isn't one for spontaneous outbursts. She's a neatnik, so orderly that the crates of documents she hauled home this afternoon from her last day at Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund are already stacked in her home office below the perfect rows of Matchbox miniatures she collected as a child. She harbors no clutter, be it emotional or decorative. 

Ms. Harlow — lead counsel in the Supreme Court case in which two Texans, John G. Lawrence and Tyron Garner, took on the state of Texas for jailing and fining them on a 1998 sodomy charge and received vindication on a historic scale on June 26 — does not reciprocate with a cute rhymed couplet in response to her visitor's O.K.-to-be-gay question. She barely cracks a polite smile. 

She leaves the levity to her Labrador retriever, Potter, whose nonstop giddiness dovetails interestingly with Ms. Harlow's sobriety: once Potter gets overly rambunctious, into her crate she goes after a reprimand, the better to let Ms. Harlow do some serious, undistracted reflecting on gay rights and her (now-finished) role in obtaining them. Following her lead, everybody in the room attempts to be on their best behavior — or risk a scolding. 

"Because all of these issues are so personal, and in some instances the treatment of gays has been so horrible, I've felt a lot of responsibility toward my community," says Ms. Harlow, meaning the homosexual community she joined when she came out at Yale Law School after a confusing, tomboyish girlhood in Midland, Mich. 

"But I've gotten to the point where I've given all the energy I have to give toward gay rights. It's taxed me to where I felt I had to make a change, personally." 

So it apparently is O.K. enough, legally and socially, to be gay these days that Ms. Harlow, at 42, has given herself permission to leave the gay rights platform for a career sea change: no more litigation. Four months before the Supreme Court ruled in her favor in Lawrence v. Texas, she gave her notice at Lambda Legal, which she joined in 1996, serving as legal director since 2000. Four days after the ruling, she's out the door. 

She intends to spend her second career as a residential architect — not that she's lightening up. Her client list will again be composed of second-class citizens, but this time, the lines of demarcation and discrimination are fiscal, not sexual. Ms. Harlow wants to build housing, perhaps prefabricated but what she calls "enlightened," for low-to-middle-income Americans. She is enrolled in a summer course at Columbia, then plans to apply to architecture school. She was committed to the switch, but the Supreme Court ruling made it easier to leave the law. 

"What happened there is that the majority of the court caught up with the vast majority of Americans," she says. "This case was all about the right to privacy in one's own bedroom; it's a very basic freedom most Americans took for granted, and it doesn't have anything to do with a so-called homosexual agenda."


AS for the next issue — same-sex marriage — Ms. Harlow favors it: "There's no question that marriage is not a perfect institution, but it is the institution that both in the law and in society is held up on a pedestal as something respected by the community. If it's reserved only for heterosexuals, gay people will always be, to some extent, second-class citizens." 

As Ms. Harlow sips lukewarm Orangina and not quite relaxes in a French club chair in the living room of her spotless, minimalist Park Slope abode, she recounts her battles leading up to last month's Supreme Court decision to overturn its own 1986 ruling on same-sex intimacy including Boy Scouts of America v. Dale and Able v. the United States (which challenged the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy). 

Though she was lead counsel for Lawrence v. Texas, she did not argue the case — she deferred to Paul M. Smith, an openly gay man and a litigator with Jenner & Block, a Washington firm. "I'd never argued a case in front of the Supreme Court," she said, "and I was afraid I'd inevitably be perceived as just another gay activist. This was Paul's ninth case before the court. It was still, for me, a storybook case." 

When Ms. Harlow told her parents she was gay, she said her father, a lawyer for Dow Chemical, was understanding, but that her mother was reluctant to accept it. "She was fearful it meant I'd be the kind of person who spent their life in porno theaters," she recalled. Ms. Harlow is, for the record, spending life with her new partner, Kristi Mathus. And Potter. And Baby Kitty, a feline whose reserve matches her own.
Next Up, the Gay Divorcée
NY Times
By MAUREEN DOWD
July 6, 2003
 
WASHINGTON: There's a serial cat killer on the loose in the West. Has anyone checked Bill Frist's alibi?

In his 1989 memoir, Dr. Frist, the heart surgeon and Senate majority leader,
confessed that at Harvard Medical School, he used to adopt stray cats at
shelters, take them home and slice and dice them for practice.

"It was, of course, a heinous and dishonest thing to do," he wrote. "And I
was totally schizoid about the entire matter. By day, I was little Billy
Frist, the boy who lived on Bowling Avenue in Nashville and had decided to
become a doctor because of his gentle father and a dog named Scratchy. By
night, I was Dr. William Harrison Frist, future cardiothoracic surgeon, who
was not going to let a few sentiments about cute, furry little creatures
stand in the way of his career. In short, I was going a little crazy."

Now Dr. Frist is not going to let any sentiments about those cute lesbians
on the new cover of Newsweek - headlined "Is Gay Marriage Next?" - stand in
the way of his career. He told George Stephanopoulos that he supports a
Congressional proposal for a constitutional amendment forbidding gay
marriages.

"I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament," he said. "And that
sacrament should extend, and can extend, to that legal entity of a union
between what has traditionally in our Western values been defined as a man
and a woman."

Yeah, love those Western values, from Socrates to Michelangelo to the
Catholic Church. And what is a politician doing talking about sacraments
anyway? Religion is in the business of deciding what is holy, not
government.

If Dr. Frist felt a little "schizoid" in medical school, how must he feel
now? One minute he and the Democrats are cooperating on a Medicare expansion
bill that conservatives denounce as socialism, opposed by Tom DeLay, Trent
Lott and Hillary Clinton. (You know you're in trouble when Hillary calls
your health care plan too byzantine.) The next minute, the good doctor is
throwing out Anita Bryant red meat to conservatives as a sop, after a week
when they were whacked by the Supreme Court and Congress in a capital
they're supposed to be dominating.

Dr. Frist got the top spot after Trent Lott's ode to segregation. President
Bush dumped Senator Lott in favor of Dr. Frist, who has cared for AIDS
patients in Africa, so conservatives could have a more compassionate face.

But now the anti-Lott looks anti-tolerant. Is the doctor merely a cat's paw
for the White House, foreshadowing a demonization of gays in the 2004 race?
Instead of Willie Horton, will the Bushies make Willie & Grace the bogeyman?

James Carville thinks the G.O.P. is pushing its culture war, playing up "the
ick factor," as Newsweek calls it, that gay couplings conjure up for many
Americans, even moderates.

"Their base is all gassed up, screaming that God created Adam and Eve, not
Adam and Steve," he says. But he thinks the Democrats and gay activists
would make a mistake "falling into Frist's trap" and making a stand on gay
marriage now. "I don't care who gets married," he says, "but the Republicans
will use this to divide the Democrats and reduce us to an accumulation of
interest groups - a woman's right to choose, a kid's right to education, a
transgender's right to whatever."

But President Bush declined to endorse the constitutional amendment
yesterday, and Lynne Cheney told Wolf Blitzer she agreed with striking down
the Texas sodomy law: "It seemed to me a stretch that government had any
place in the bedroom."

Strategists involved in the president's re-election effort denied any
coordination with Dr. Frist. "Wedge politics are passe," one said. "You
can't win by tearing down different groups." He noted that younger
conservatives tend to be more libertarian, so why turn them off?

President Bush seems pretty unfazed by different orientations. At his recent
Yale reunion, among the classmates he greeted at the White House was one
Yalie who had changed from a man to a woman.

According to news reports, the president did not blink and warmly greeted
the alum, saying: "Now you've come back as yourself."

Maybe the right's spending too much time worrying about the thorny issue of
gay marriage. Wait until it has to wrestle with gay divorce. 
 
[SATURDAY PROFILE] In Blessing Gay Unions, Bishop Courts a Schism
Source: The NY Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
July 5, 2003
 
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Michael Ingham may not aspire to be a modern day Martin Luther, but he just might be one.

After an unorthodox decade as Anglican bishop of the greater Vancouver area, and years of soul-searching debates and votes within his diocese, in May he became the first bishop in the Anglican Church to bless same-sex unions. 

The fateful decision has brought on charges from conservatives that he is a blasphemer who is willing to split the Anglican Church to suit his taste for social change. Since then, 15 of the Anglican Church's 38 primates, the top Anglican leaders worldwide, have denounced Bishop Ingham's action and have either suspended or entirely severed ecclesiastical relations with his diocese.

In a scornful statement, the primates — representing 38 million Anglicans from Africa, Asia and Latin America — wrote in June that Bishop Ingham's decision to bless same-sex unions represented "a defining moment in which the clear choice has to be made between remaining a communion or disintegrating into a federation of churches."

In greater Vancouver, 8 of the 80 parishes have withheld payments to Bishop Ingham's diocese and 7 of them have voted to have the conservative bishop of Yukon minister to them in what has become a virtual civil war within the diocese. "The dispute over Bishop Ingham's decision to bless same-sex unions is dangerously close to producing a worldwide schism," said Stephen A. Kent, a sociologist of religion at the University of Alberta, "reminiscent of the original Anglican schism from Catholicism in the 1500's as a reaction to issues involving marriage, divorce, blessed unions and authority." 

It may be more than the 53-year-old father of two daughters, who says he has no taste for the limelight, bargained for. But he is utterly unapologetic. He says he is following the majority view of his diocese synod, the local voting body of clergy and laity on church matters, to allow blessings of same-sex unions. This, he says, is the sentiment in the most liberal-minded city in a country that is moving toward legalizing gay and lesbian civil marriage, after the Ontario appeals court ruled in June that current federal marriage law was discriminatory. 

"I see my primary role as being the shepherd of my flock, and part of my flock consists of gays and lesbians," he said in his downtown office. "On this homosexual issue, we're not dealing with theology. Some people have a pathological dislike for homosexual sex. It's not rational. It's visceral. It's communicated through our culture, through myths and legends in which religion of course is a primary agent."

Such graphic, uncompromising comments have made Bishop Ingham a hero among Vancouver's sizable gay community, and a radical threat to many conservative churchmen. Among the flood of hate mail and threatening phone calls he has received, he recalled, "one person wrote me to say that I was not a bishop — I was a pinata — I should be hung from the ceiling on a hook and beaten until my insides spilled out."

David Short, the rector of St. John's Church of Shaughnessy in Vancouver, said: "Every reference in the Bible referring to homosexual behavior is unremittingly negative. Are we as a church going to sit under the word of God or are we going to try to change the word of God?" 

The role of gays in the Anglican Church — known as the Episcopal Church in the United States — has roiled the church worldwide. Two gay bishops were selected in New Hampshire and Britain recently, to the anguish of many conservatives. 

But nothing has split the church as much as Bishop Ingham's blessing of same-sex unions, which still stops short of holding marriage ceremonies in his parishes. "All of this fuss is a bit puzzling because same-sex blessings have been happening in the United States for years with the tacit and/or explicit consent of the bishops," Bishop Ingham said. "What's different here is that we are doing it publicly, openly and in the light of day."

Perhaps it is not surprising that Bishop Ingham ended up in the midst of such controversy. A life of rugged individualism is chiseled on his face, as square as a boxer's. When he decided to enter the Anglican priesthood, it surprised his mother, a lapsed Methodist, and his father, an avowed atheist who wanted him to go to medical school. When it came to marriage, he turned to a woman, Gwen, who lived alone in a log cabin, chopped her own wood and hauled her own water. She currently works as a librarian.

As for his theology, his scholarly search for godly wisdom has taken him to some unexpected places as well. He lived with a Hindu family in India, did graduate studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and read the Koran simultaneously with the Bible. His experiences in India led to the writing of a book published in 1997, "Mansions of the Spirit," in which he described his conversations with gurus and his participation in seances. In it, he came to a conclusion that some conservative Christians find profane. "God is active among spiritual traditions outside Christianity," he wrote. "We have no reason to suppose that any one religion is truer than the others."

Bishop Ingham acknowledges that both the New and Old Testaments disparage homosexual relations, but he says the Bible should not be taken literally.

"The word of God is a person not a text," he said. "Where we diverge is that I would understand the Scripture as the human record of the people of God struggling to understand the direction of God in their world, while others have a tendency to see Scripture as a fax from Heaven."

Bishop Ingham speaks in a deadpan voice, and can even sound monotonous as he mixes theology, psychology and history in his analysis. But his critique of the religious right is passionate and pointed.

"Conservative Protestants and evangelicals who have vilified the pope for years have now found themselves in alliance with a conservative pope on issues of sexual morality," he said. "What you are seeing across the world is a realignment of global religion where the forces of conservatism are finding more cause with each other across religious boundaries than within their own religious traditions."

The conservatives, he says, want to roll back the 18th century Enlightenment "because it brought rationalism and individualism into the Western world." He adds with a giggle, "The fact that it delivered us from superstition and church imperialism is forgotten."

Once he begins throwing darts at the right, there is no stopping. "Conservatives say you cannot pick and choose, but that's exactly what they do because the same texts that condemn homosexuality condemn the eating of shellfish," he said. "I haven't heard any conservative churchman campaign against shellfish in the last few years."
Bush: Gay Marriage Ban May Be Too Soon
Source: The NY Time by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 3, 2003 filed at 9:41 a.m. ET
 
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said Wednesday that a constitutional ban on gay marriage that has been proposed in the House might not be needed despite a Supreme Court decision that some conservatives think opens the door to legalizing same-sex marriages.

"I don't know if it's necessary yet," Bush said. "Let's let the lawyers look at the full ramifications of the recent Supreme Court hearing. What I do support is a notion that marriage is between a man and a woman."

Bush's words were aimed at calming members of the GOP's right wing, who are upset about the Supreme Court decision, said Patrick Guerriero, director of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay advocacy group. "I think what you're seeing is a momentary time-out from the radical right's temper tantrum," he said.

In striking down a Texas law that made homosexual sex a crime, the Supreme Court on June 26 overturned its earlier ruling that said states could punish homosexuals for having sex.

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia fired off a blistering dissent of the ruling.

The "opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned," Scalia wrote. The ruling specifically said that the court was not addressing that issue, but Scalia warned, "Do not believe it."

The Supreme Court's decision was a broad ruling addressing privacy, and gay rights groups are saying they will use it to push for more legal rights.

"We have a powerful new weapon in our legal battles on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, but the impact of this ruling also stretches well beyond the walls of our nation's courtrooms," Kevin Cathcart, director of New York-based Lambda Legal, a gay rights advocacy group, said Wednesday in announcing a new online resource that maps out how the group will use the ruling to win full recognition of same-sex relationships, among other things.

Legal authorities are also combing the decision to see what its impact will really be on other gay rights issues.

"I don't know that there is any clear assessment -- that anybody has at this point -- about the legal ramifications of a just-made decision," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said.

The president was asked about whether he supported a federal constitutional amendment that would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman during an impromptu news conference that followed his announcement of a new global AIDS ambassador.

Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., was the main sponsor of the proposal offered May 21 to amend the Constitution. It was referred on June 25 to the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution.

To be added to the Constitution, the proposal must be approved by two-thirds of the House and the Senate and ratified by three-fourths of the states.

On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said the Supreme Court's decision on gay sex threatens to make the American home a place where criminality is condoned. He said he supported the proposed constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage in the United States. 
A Gay Rights Milestone
Source: The NY Time
July 3, 2003
 
To the Editor:

Re "Justices, 6-3, Legalize Gay Sexual Conduct in Sweeping Reversal of Court's '86 Ruling" (front page, June 27):

The Supreme Court's landmark decision in Lawrence v. Texas is a triumph of justice and common sense, but it is also a triumph of politics. 

The majority opinion was written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan only after a Democratic Senate rejected Robert H. Bork. The rest of the margin of victory was provided by two appointees of President Bill Clinton, the first president to be elected after openly courting lesbian and gay support. If Mr. Bork had not been rejected, or Mr. Clinton had been defeated, Bowers v. Hardwick might have lasted much longer as the law of the land.

Now Bowers will be remembered as the "Dred Scott decision" of the gay civil rights movement — as the activist Tom Stoddard predicted at the moment it was decided.
CHARLES KAISER
Paris, June 30, 2003
 
New Wal-Mart Policy Protects Gay Workers
Source: The NY Time
By SARAH KERSHAW
July 2, 2003
 
SEATTLE, July 1 — Wal-Mart Stores, the nation's largest private employer, has expanded its antidiscrimination policy to protect gay and lesbian employees, company officials said today.

The decision to include gay employees under rules that prohibit workplace discrimination was hailed by gay rights groups, already buoyed by a Supreme Court ruling last week that struck down a Texas sodomy law, as a sign of how far corporate America has come in accepting gay employees. 

The decision was first disclosed today by a Seattle gay rights foundation that had invested in Wal-Mart and then lobbied the company for two years to change its policy. The group, Pride Foundation, which along with several investment management firms holding stock in Wal-Mart had met as shareholders with company officials to discuss the policy, received a letter last week from Wal-Mart outlining the new employee protections. Wal-Mart officials confirmed the policy change today.

"It's the right thing to do for our employees," Mona Williams, Wal-Mart's vice president for communications, said in a telephone interview. "We want all of our associates to feel they are valued and treated with respect — no exceptions. And it's the right thing to do for our business."

Ms. Williams said the company was sending out a letter today to its 3,500 stores and that store managers would then convey the policy change to the company's more than 1 million employees. She said that while investors like Pride Foundation had a role in the decision, the most important factor was a letter to senior management officials about six weeks ago from several gay Wal-Mart employees, saying that unless the company changed its policy the employees would "continue to feel excluded."

Wal-Mart has been careful not to alienate its customers who might hold conservative views. In recent months, the company has decided to stop selling three men's magazines it said were too racy and to partially obscure the covers of four women's magazines on sale in checkout lines. The company said customers felt the magazine cover headlines were too provocative and planned to use U-shaped blinders to cover them. 

Wal-Mart has also refused to sell CD's with labels warning of explicit lyrics. 

Ms. Williams said she saw no conflict between the decision to limit the distribution of entertainment products based on content and the decision to protect gay employees. 

"In each case, we sit down and think through the individual decisions," she said. "Putting in the blinders was the right thing to do. In this case, once again, we talked about it and decided it was the right thing to do."

With Wal-Mart making the policy change, 9 of the 10 largest Fortune 500 companies now have rules barring discrimination against gay employees, according to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group in Washington, D.C., that monitors discrimination policies and laws.

The exception is the Exxon Mobil Corporation, which was created in 1999 after Exxon acquired Mobil, and then revoked a Mobil policy that provided medical benefits to partners of gay employees, as well as a policy that included sexual orientation as a category of prohibited discrimination.

Wal-Mart said it had no plans to extend medical benefits to unmarried couples, but gay rights groups that have pressed for coverage for domestic partners said they would continue to lobby the company to do so.

Among the Fortune 500 companies, 197 provide domestic partners with medical coverage, including several of the major airlines and the Big Three automakers, and 318 have antidiscrimination policies that extend protection to gay employees, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

With Wal-Mart now joining the ranks of companies with protections for gay employees, and in light of last week's Supreme Court ruling, gay rights groups said they expected many corporations, and possibly state governments, to follow suit. 

"A major argument against equal benefits, against fair treatment of employees, has been taken away," said Kevin Cathcart, executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, referring to the Supreme Court ruling on Lawrence v. Texas. "And so even within corporations it's a very different dialogue today, a very different dialogue."

There is no federal law prohibiting discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sexual orientation, but 13 states, the District of Columbia and several hundred towns, cities or counties have such legal protections in place for public and private employees, according to the latest information from the Human Rights Campaign. 

As outlined in the letter to Pride Foundation, Wal-Mart's new policy states, "We affirm our commitment and pledge our support to equal opportunity employment for all qualified persons, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability or status as a veteran or sexual orientation." 

It goes on to say that managers and supervisors "shall recruit, hire, train and promote in all job positions" based on those principles and "ensure that all personnel actions" are taken based on those principles. 

The company said that it also revised its policy on harassment and inappropriate conduct to include sexual orientation and that the new written policy would encourage employees to report discriminatory behavior to management.

As the nation's largest private employer and one whose stores are not unionized, Wal-Mart has long been the target of organized labor, and some of its labor practices have been challenged in lawsuits. One lawsuit, filed in San Francisco, accused the company of favoring men over women in promotions and pay. 

In addition, the company faces more than 40 lawsuits accusing the company of pressuring or forcing employees to work unpaid hours. 

While Wal-Mart attributed the discrimination policy change to the letter from its gay employees, it had been under pressure from several investors, including the Seattle group and three other management investment firms with stock in the company. 

They are all members of the Equality Project, a nonprofit group in New York that monitors corporate policies on sexual orientation and lobbies for protections for gay employees.

Under Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, any stockholder with $2,000 or more in shares can introduce a "shareholder resolution" on an array of company policy issues, including antidiscrimination rules. The resolutions are not binding, and the shareholders have no influence over "ordinary business," including benefits and wages, according to S.E.C. officials.

The Seattle group and the other investors began discussions with Wal-Mart in August 2001, when several members of the groups went to the company headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to try and persuade officials to change the policy, several group members said. As investors in General Electric and McDonald's, the Seattle group had already pressured the companies, through shareholder resolutions, and both companies have since extended workplace protections to gay employees. 

Wal-Mart initially said it would study the issue, said Zan McColloch-Lussier, campaign director for Pride Foundation. But in a conference call in the spring of 2002, Mr. McColloch-Lussier recalled, company officials told the group, "Thanks, you've educated us, but we're not going to change our policies, we'll do management training." 

More letters and telephone calls were exchanged, and then last Friday a letter came announcing the policy change. 

Arthur D. Ally, president of the Timothy Plan, a religious-based investment group that had pressured the company about the magazines, said today that he would not sell Wal-Mart stock because of the revised antidiscrimination policy but would object to certain sensitivity training programs like "taking every employee in an organization and indoctrinating them in the homosexual agenda."

It was unclear today exactly how Wal-Mart planned to train employees, but Ms. Williams said that a computer-based training program would include discussion of sexual orientation. 
ILLINOIS: BOARD APPROVES SAME-SEX REGISTRY
Source: The NY Time National Briefing: Midwest
July 2, 2003
 
The Cook County Board of Commissioners approved a same-sex partnership registry, officially recognizing gay and lesbian relationships. While the registry would not give same-sex couples any new rights, it is intended to serve as an official government document to prove that they are domestic partners and are therefore entitled to benefits. Beginning in October, same-sex couples can go to the county office where marriage licenses are issued, sign an affidavit stating they are in a committed relationship, pay a $30 filing fee and receive a certificate confirming their registration. Jo Napolitano (NYT)
Gay Families Flourish as Acceptance Grows
Source: The NY Times
By JANE E. BRODY
July 1, 2003
 
Keith Lee Grant and Daniel Tamulonis had been partners for 15 years when Mr. Grant decided their self-focused life was too empty — that they had much more to give.

So eight years ago this interracial New York couple adopted a 2-day-old infant from Arkansas whom they named Isaac. Both dads quickly became adept at diaper changing, middle-of-the-night feeding and all the other challenges of child care.

Five years later, when life with Isaac settled into a manageable rhythm and the men were approaching 50, the cut-off age for adoptive parents, they adopted 3-day-old Trish. 

Mr. Grant knew all along that he wanted children and had initially thought they would become foster parents. But Mr. Tamulonis said of the adoptions that have proved so rewarding: "We never looked back. I have Keith to thank for this. Having grown up gay, I never thought I would have a child in my life."

Linda and her partner Vicki had been together in Brooklyn for five years when they decided to start a family. Though Vicki wanted children but had no desire to bear one, Linda actively looked forward to pregnancy.

They decided on artificial insemination with sperm donated by a mutual friend. Since then, Linda bore first a girl and then a boy, who now have two mommies as well as a papa who sees them about once a month.

Along with advances in reproductive alternatives, the gradual erosion of homophobia over the past 10 or 15 years — a trend conspicuously on display last week in the Supreme Court's decision striking down a Texas sodomy law — has led to a sharp rise in the last 10 or 15 years in the number of openly gay men and women who have chosen to be parents.

According to the authors of "The Gay Baby Boom: The Psychology of Gay Parenthood" (New York University Press, $16.95), as many as 14 million children in the United States are being raised by at least one parent who is a gay man or lesbian.

Many are lesbian couples with children from earlier heterosexual marriages. But more and more gay couples are acquiring their own, through artificial insemination, adoption and, for some gay men, through a surrogate mother inseminated with their sperm.

The authors of "The Gay Baby Boom," Dr. Suzanne M. Johnson and Dr. Elizabeth O'Connor, psychologists and life partners who are co-parents of two girls, decided to explore how families headed by lesbians and gay men come about and how well they are faring.

In 1999 and 2000 they conducted the largest national assessment of families headed by gay people who chose to participate. Data were collected from 415 parents — 336 lesbian mothers and 79 gay fathers — living with their minor children in 34 states and the District of Columbia.

Succeeding as Gay Parents


Scores of earlier studies have already shown that on virtually every level of psychological adjustment — including peer relationships, gender development, intelligence, school performance and sexual orientation — children raised by gay parents are not significantly different from those raised by straight parents.

"How the children turn out depends on how you parent, not your sexual orientation," Dr. Johnson said in an interview. Parenthood requires unconditional love, respect, patience, consistent but appropriate discipline, along with actions and words that build a child's self-esteem, confidence and respect for individual differences. These qualities are not the sole province of heterosexuals, she said.

In fact, the study with Dr. O'Connor revealed that if anything, gay parents might do better, having gone to considerable trouble to become parents and being determined to raise children who respect themselves and others while remaining tolerant of diversity. An important goal of the parents was to instill a strong moral code in their children.

Furthermore, she added: "The sexual orientation of the parents seems to have no effect on the child's sexual orientation. The percentage of children raised by gay parents who turn out gay is no higher than that among children raised by straight parents."

Nor is the percentage of couples who break up after creating a family any higher among gays than among heterosexual couples, said Dr. Johnson, who is an associate professor of psychology at Dowling College in Oakdale, N.Y.

Dr. Johnson and Dr. O'Connor have been together for 19 years, deciding after 10 years to have their first child.

Although Linda and Vicki split up and Vicki moved out three months after their second child's birth, Vicki remains very much in their lives. As their noncustodial parent, she sees the children twice a week and contributes to their support.

Nearly half the lesbians and a quarter of the gay men in the survey experienced initial family disapproval about their decision to have children. A main concern, among family members as well as the couples, was whether the children would be subject to teasing and ostracism because their parents were gay.

But ultimately most family members, including many with initial reservations about gays as parents, were delighted to become grandparents, aunts and uncles.

As one respondent put it: "Initially, both sets of parents were less than thrilled with the idea. Once they realized I was serious, they softened a little. And once the baby was born, they were in love with her!"

Another reported that one brother-in-law had some reservations. "However, he read some research on children raised in gay families on the Internet and reversed himself," the authors reported.

Still, they concluded, there is by no means universal acceptance of these parents or their families.

Support and Opposition


"Lack of support from people and institutions outside the family is something that many gay and lesbian parents must face," the authors said. "Their approach to the outside world seems to be to present themselves as a family deserving of recognition and respect."

In completing school and camp applications in enlightened New York, Mr. Grant and Mr. Tamulonis have found that forms no longer ask for the names of mother and father but rather parent and parent. But three states — Florida, Mississippi and Utah — prohibit adoptions by gays.

As a group, the survey found, "gay- and lesbian-headed families scored as well as, or better than, heterosexual couples on measures of relationship adjustment and satisfaction, allocation of tasks related to child-rearing and housekeeping, and communication about their children."

All in all, the authors concluded, "our study and many other studies that have been done on gay- and lesbian-headed families show that gay men and lesbians make very effective parents."

The studies, they continued, show "strengths in the security of attachment to their children; in their parenting styles, including how they discipline their children; in the quality of their own couple relationships; and in how they share the work associated with raising children and running a household."

Perhaps many heterosexual couples with children and less than harmonious households could learn something.
Gays and Lesbians Parade With a New Sense of Pride
Source: The NY Times
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
June 30, 2003
 
Rainbow flags, samba drag queens, politicians, gay grandparents and a lavish flow of discordantly thumping floats made their way down Fifth Avenue yesterday, as they do every year. But there was an added hop of jubilation this time.

The celebratory jolt at New York City's gay and lesbian pride parade drew from two significant advances in gay rights this month — the United States Supreme Court's ruling to strike down laws against sodomy and decisions in Canada to allow same-sex marriages.

Crowds cheered louder, political groups marched in greater numbers and paradegoers seemed more party-prone than protest-bound, organizers and longtime participants said. The mood mirrored that at gay pride parades that drew hundreds of thousands of people across the country yesterday, from Atlanta to San Francisco. 

"We've broken new ground," said Janice E. Thom, a spokeswoman for Heritage of Pride, which organized the 34th annual parade, now known as New York City's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride March. "It's part of the mainstreaming of us as people. We're becoming part of the diverse quilt of this country."

The parade lasted more than five hours and flowed from Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street down to the West Village. It drew as many as 250,000 observers and participants, organizers said. 

Scant protesters engaging in rosary prayer circles were upstaged by the thick, noisy crowds, which lined the length of the parade and cheered in waves, with many peering through video camera lenses.

Rainbow-hued arcs of balloons led a cacophonous succession of bouncing beach balls, shrill whistles and clashing, often-deafening musical rhythms. In keeping with past parades, veterans of the 1969 gay rights disturbances helped lead the entourage.

"This is what pride is all about," said Greg Curatolo, 47, of the West Village, as he held the Stonewall Veterans' Association banner awaiting his cue to march.

Paradegoers included a gay and lesbian gospel choir; the Brazilian Rainbow Group, which included a bare-skinned man wrapped in the green and yellow Brazilian flag bearing the national motto, "Order and Progress," in Portuguese; a group of lesbian and gay judges; a gay rodeo group; a gay rugby team; and the Imperial Float of New York, filled with would-be princesses in tiaras, waving in slow motion to the crowd. 

Humor was in constant supply. One marcher held a picket sign with a message for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that read, "Hey, Clarence, sexual harassment is demeaning, not sodomy."

Don Bennett and his partner, Paul Templeton, traveled to New York from Albuquerque, specifically to see the parade. 

"This is very special to me," Mr. Templeton said. "I grew up in rural America. You heard about gay pride for years. It makes me feel a part of that."

Of the parade he added: "The costumes are great and, of course, the men. I'd be lying if I don't say the men are gorgeous."

The parade also drew its annual supply of elected officials, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, United States Senator Charles E. Schumer, State Senator Thomas K. Duane, Council Speaker Gifford Miller and Councilwoman Christine C. Quinn.

Mayor Bloomberg, who has been lustily booed at several recent parades, received a warm welcome as he marched down Fifth Avenue with several gay city employees. Shouts from the crowd included: "We love you, Mayor!" "Nice to see ya!" and "Go Bloomberg — No. 1!"

The mayor told reporters that he thought the Supreme Court made the right ruling last week. But he side-stepped a question about whether he supports gay marriage.

"I'm sort of on record as not being in favor of marriage, period, for myself," he said. "I've done one marriage, and I think I'll stay out of the marriage business. I've got other things to worry about."

Senator Schumer proudly announced to a reporter that he was the first senator to march in this parade, in 1999, adding: "I've been saying to people, `Let's hear it for the Supreme Court.' Whoever thought I'd be saying that?"

Brendon Fay, a gay rights advocate and a television producer, held a sign that read "Justice for Gay Couples." Mr. Fay, of Astoria, Queens, is organizing to send a group of gay couples from New York to Canada so they can be legally married.

Mr. Fay said he and his partner, Tom Moulton, will be legally married in Canada in July.

"We want equal justice here in the United States, so when we return our marriages are afforded the same legal rights," Mr. Fay said.

Before the parade began, dozens of couples took part in commitment ceremonies, a staple of the event.

Tempering the joy over the Supreme Court ruling, Carol Parson, 69, of Brooklyn, said she was not ready to believe that it means a permanent victory for gays.

"It's a long time coming," said Ms. Parson, a retired nurse who marched with Senior Action in a Gay Environment. "We've been fighting for equal rights in the city forever, it seems. I've personally seen too much come and go not to be a little subdued about what's happening. I'm waiting for the backlash."
Gay Pride Parades Celebrate Court Ruling
Source: The NY Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 30, 2003 filed at 8:54 a.m. ET
 
NEW YORK (AP) -- Topless lesbian motorcyclists and men dressed as Brazilian carnival queens marched in gay pride parades across the country, an annual celebration made all the more joyous this year by the Supreme Court's landmark ruling striking down laws against sodomy.

"It's a critically important step toward bringing full dignity and rights to gay people," said Ana Oliveira, executive director of Gay Men's Health Crisis, marching with her AIDS prevention group. For many revelers, the high court's 6-3 decision last week raised hope for other advances for gays, including the right to gay marriage.

One couple from Houston, in New York for the Manhattan parade, wore pink stickers with the slogan "My bedroom, my business" on their shirts.

"It's incredible for us because now we're legal," said Randy Roll, a lawyer, accompanied by his partner, Damon Crenshaw. "There was always the fear that you would break the law if you had sex with your partner."

However, in an appearance Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Senate Majority leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., criticized the sodomy decision and endorsed a proposed constitutional ban on homosexual unions.

"I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament, and that sacrament should extend and can extend to that legal entity of a union between -- what is traditionally in our Western values has been defined -- as between a man and a woman. So I would support the amendment."

Same-sex marriages are legal in Belgium and the Netherlands. Canada's Liberal government announced two weeks ago that it would enact similar legislation soon.

Despite the politics, pure fun still abounded at the parades.

Some male spectators wore multicolored leis and long strings of faux pearls as they cheered floats. A woman smiled as she waved a modified U.S. flag, its red and white stripes replaced by colors of the rainbow, symbolic of the gay rights movement.

In Atlanta, Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere, revelers marched, danced and carried banners congratulating the Supreme Court and waving rainbow flags. As in years past, the lesbian motorcycle group Dykes on Bikes got the San Francisco parade off to a roaring start.

"It's a big party," said Jeffrey Sykes, 37, who has attended at least 10 Gay Pride parades in San Francisco. "It's a chance to let it all hang out and celebrate who we are."

The parade's theme was "You Gotta Give Them Hope," a campaign slogan that belonged to San Francisco's first openly gay city supervisor, Harvey Milk, who was assassinated along with Mayor George Moscone 25 years ago this November.

The SF Pride Committee also used the occasion to encourage people to lobby the state Senate to vote for pending legislation that would grant gay couples most of the same legal and financial benefits as married heterosexuals.

As they basked in the Supreme Court decision, many participants said they looked forward to a new era of equality and respect.

"We're all together, one family," said Armando Gonzalez, 21, of Issaquah, Wash., who took part in Seattle's parade as a member of a youth choir made up of gay and straight singers.

Small pockets of anti-gay protesters -- some holding rosary beads and praying -- stood behind police barricades along the New York parade route.

Parade participants cheered and shook their fists them. And Gay Pride parade organizers said a feeling of hope would carry over to this weekend's marches and celebrations.

Chicago's parade drew between up to 400,000 people, according to parade coordinator Richard Pfeiffer. Organizers of the Atlanta Pride Festival, now in its 33rd year, said they expected a crowd of 300,000, the largest in the parade's history. The Supreme Court ruling was cited as a factor in the big turnout.

"You couldn't ask for a better reason to come out and celebrate," said Philip Rafshoon, owner of Outwrite Bookstore in Atlanta's traditionally gay Midtown neighborhood. "A lot of people think (gay sex is) immoral. And, unfortunately for them, it's not illegal anymore."
Gay Pride March Lures First Chirac Party Delegate
Source: The NY Times by REUTERS
June 28, 2003 filed at 1:49 p.m. ET
 
PARIS (Reuters) - Joined for the first time by a representative of President Jacques Chirac's conservative party, thousands of homosexuals, bisexuals and transsexuals thronged the streets of Paris on Saturday for the annual Gay Pride march.

The marchers, clad in skimpy leather outfits, wild feather head-dresses and in some cases little at all, were led by the city's gay Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, and a host of leftist politicians.

Police estimated the crowd at 500,000 people. The lesbian, gay, trans and bi association Inter-LGBT put the number at over 700,000.

For the first time in the march's 13-year history, an official representative of France's leading conservative party took part. Jean-Luc Romero, the gay national secretary of Chirac's UMP party, joined Delanoe at the front.

"I have been a militant for gay rights for a long time, so it was natural that I be the first person to represent the UMP at this march," Romero told France's LCI television.

But the UMP has been far from united in its support, with one member criticizing Delanoe for taking part.

Francoise de Panafieu, a local district mayor who once considered running for Delanoe's job herself, said in a newspaper interview it was ``undignified'' for the mayor of Paris to march in the parade.

Delanoe, who has taken part in the march since before his election as mayor in 2001, has not made an issue of his sexuality and it rarely merits a mention in France.
Gay Pride Events Become Family Gatherings
Source: The NY Times by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 28, 2003 filed at 10:33 p.m. ET
 
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- For 10 years, Bryan Nadeu strutted in the Gay Pride parade as part of a marching band, hammering out a beat on a drum while wearing a rainbow-plumed hat. But that was B.F. --- Before Fatherhood.

Now, with a 14-month-old toddler in tow, he has other things to worry about while preparing for Sunday's San Francisco parade: Baby backpack or stroller? Will there be diaper-changing stations? And how to retreat if his kid melts at the loud music and crowds?

"It's like I'm figuring out how I can be a father and still be gay," Nadeu said.

With 32 percent of same-sex couples now raising children, according to the 2000 census, organizers of gay pride parades across the nation have had to rethink their notions about a tradition founded on celebrating sexual freedom and challenging the status quo.

In New York City, which also has its Pride parade Sunday, the local Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center is sponsoring a children's entertainment area for the first time. "Family gardens" have sprouted at Pride events in San Diego, Seattle, Columbus, Ohio, and Austin, Texas.

Steven Boulliane and Olivier du Wulf will march with their sons Laurent, 3, and Patrice, 2, in the San Francisco parade, along with about 200 other moms, dads and children from Our Family Coalition, a support group for gay parents.

They asked for a kid-friendly spot in the lineup, hoping to avoid a repeat of last year -- when their stroller brigade was awkwardly sandwiched between two groups of leather-bound sadomasochists.

"I don't want my kids to see that, and I don't think either side was too pleased," said Boulliane, 35.

No one knows how many U.S. children have gay, lesbian, transgender or bisexual parents, although the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force estimates 1 million to 9 million.

These parents are making their influence felt beyond once-a-year gay pride events, transforming social dynamics both within and outside the gay community.

John Kirkley, 36, an Episcopal priest in San Francisco, says that after he and his partner adopted a son almost five years ago, straight couples, rather than other gay men, became the foundation of their social network.

"We had a lot more in common with straight parents than single gay or lesbian folks in terms of understanding the joys and challenges of parenting, understanding we can't be as flexible with our schedule," he said. "Some gay and lesbian folks of a certain age had lived in an all-adult world for so long they weren't really comfortable relating to children."

Gay and lesbian parents also have become their community's ambassadors to schools and other public institutions, breaking down stereotypes and biases, said Lisa Bennett, director of the FamilyNet project of the Human Rights Campaign.

"It's the most powerful thing I've seen that is changing public perceptions," said Bennett.

Gay families with children also build momentum for civil rights battles, said Aimee Gelnaw, executive director of the Family Pride Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. "Everybody can identify with a family, so it's one of the things that everyone, gay or straight, can understand."

But despite Thursday's landmark Supreme Court ruling throwing out state sodomy laws, gay parents still face many legal hurdles. Laws affecting dual guardianship of their children are "dramatically different from state to state, county to county and even judge to judge," according to Bennett.

In Florida, Mississippi and Utah, gays and lesbians are prohibited from adopting. Nine states allow gays and lesbians to adopt the children born to their partners and 18 allow such ``second parent adoptions'' to be sanctioned at the county level.

Lyn Shimizu still remembers the grilling she got from the California social worker investigating her application to adopt twins with her partner, Silvia Castellanos.

"She really let her opinions be known and you had to listen to them for hours because she had the ability to make this incredibly important decision," Shimizu said. "She asked who was dominant in the relationship... and she was also against taking your children to the Pride parade because she thought it was politicizing your children."

Boulliane hopes that changes will come in areas beyond just legal issues.

"My hope is that gay and straight will evaporate, to be replaced by the terms 'with children,' and 'without children,' where I just get treated like any other family guy," he said.

On the Net:

Human Rights Campaign Family Net: http://www.hrc.org/familynet//index.asp

Our Family Coalition: http://www.ourfamily.org/

Family Pride Coalition: http://www.familypride.org/

National Gay and Lesbian Task Force: http://www.ngltf.org/
A Few Gay Americans Tie the Knot in Canada
Source: The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
June 28, 2003
 
TORONTO, June 26 — Linda Chopra and Linda Sperry, a lesbian couple from Cleveland, were planning to come to Toronto for a librarians' convention anyway. But when they read the news that Canada was now recognizing same-sex marriage, they decided to fill their trip with a whole lot more than the latest tips about reference books. 

They came to the Toronto city hall this week, where the rainbow gay flag now flies on the roof to celebrate Pride Week and the new social revolution going on inside, and filled out a marriage license application, which still has blanks for bridegroom and bride.

"I would like to have my relationship acknowledged legally, so this seemed like the thing to do," said Ms. Chopra, 56, who has been with her partner for 16 years. "But I don't think I will be able to use the document and get spousal benefits in a state like Ohio, and I don't think it's fair."

Nevertheless, she said she wanted to get married anyway, in part so that when her granddaughter comes to visit, "she will have two grandmothers in the same house and know that our relationship is legally acceptable."

Gay and lesbian couples, some from as far away as California and Britain, are coming to Toronto to marry. They are coming — in small numbers, so far — to take advantage of a ruling by the Ontario Court of Appeal two weeks ago to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples. 

That decision has been endorsed by Prime Minister Jean Chretien and the federal cabinet and is expected to be applied nationwide by the end of the year.

American gay rights activists are hopeful that the Canadian marriage license will be a potent legal weapon to test in American courts to win same-sex couples enhanced rights and privileges covering parentage, health benefits, insurance and inheritance. 

The decision this week by the United States Supreme Court that struck down a Texas law banning homosexual sex is strengthening gay civil rights groups' hopes that barriers to same-sex marriage in the United States will also prove vulnerable.

So far, same-sex couples from 12 states have obtained marriage licenses in Toronto since it became legal for them to do so June 10. A handful of other American gay and lesbian couples have secured licenses in Ottawa and Windsor.

Canadian marriage licenses have always been accepted in the United States, but now that the definition of marriage here has been broadened, American gay rights advocates expect years of legal fights.

More often than not, the gay and lesbian Americans who come to marry here say they are reluctant to think of themselves as revolutionaries or even activists. But they are aware that they are in the vanguard of a movement they hope will eventually bury a taboo that so far has been surmounted only here and in the Netherlands and Belgium.

"I wouldn't say we're doing it as a political statement," said Brian Vetruba, a 35-year-old librarian from St. Louis, as he picked up a marriage license application on Tuesday and reserved a date for a marriage ceremony for himself and his partner in city hall later in the week. 

"But with the presidential race coming," he added, "Americans will see that same-sex marriage has not altered Canadian society, especially in regards to the stability of families. Civil unions and gay marriage are already in the political discourse, and if a Democrat gets into the White House it will happen." 

Actually, Canadian wedding bells are ringing for relatively few American same-sex couples, in part because many are not optimistic that their licenses will be respected in the United States any time soon. 

[As of Friday, 24 American same-sex couples had received marriage licenses in Toronto since the Ontario court decision, as part of a total of 239 same-sex couples including Canadians.]

Some gay activists attribute the relatively small number of Canadian couples who have decided to marry to a decline in the belief that marriage is a necessary institution.

"Not everyone wants to be a June bride like me," said Kyle Rae, a gay activist and member of the Toronto City Council who got married earlier this month. "There are people who don't want marriage and don't need it, while there are others who are waiting to gather their families and friends for the occasion."

For Ms. Sperry, marriage would not be necessary if Ohio permitted civil unions, as Vermont currently does, offering same-sex couples nearly all the rights and obligations of marriage without calling the union marriage. But now that she and Ms. Chopra are ready to take their vows, she recognizes the social significance of their decision.

"It's kind of a big deal," said the 42-year-old librarian. "Our two countries are so close, share so many ties." Nevertheless, she added, "It's more for the two of us."

The number of same-sex marriages may rise considerably this weekend, when many Americans are expected to arrive here by the busload for a gay pride parade. 

Meanwhile, a Canadian marriage license has at least one major drawback. While there is no residency requirement to marry in Canada, there is a one-year residency requirement for at least one member of the couple for the right to divorce. 

"You have to think twice to make that kind of commitment," said David Kloss, a 53-year-old retired off-shore oil exploration rig manager from San Francisco, who came to city hall the other day pick up a marriage license application with his Canadian partner. 

Mr. Kloss would like to live with his 34-year-old partner, Remi Collette, here in Toronto, so the residency requirement is not a factor for them, but both would also like their marriage accepted in the United States.

"You spend your life paying taxes," said Mr. Collette, a 34-year-old leather goods salesman, "So you want the right to choose and have the opportunity to live like anyone else."
 
Gays Celebrate, and Plan Campaign for Broader Rights
Source: The New York Times
By DEAN E. MURPHY
Fri Jun 27, 8:56 AM ET
 
SAN FRANCISCO, June 26 Gay men and lesbians poured into the streets today to celebrate a Supreme Court decision striking down or strictly limiting the country's last remaining sodomy laws in 13 states. 

From Florida to Alaska, thousands of revelers vowed to push for more legal rights, including same-sex marriages. 

Gay activists, many in tears, called the ruling the most significant legal victory in the gay rights movement, likening the decision to the seminal civil rights case, Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kan. They predicted it would embolden the movement and, as in the segregation era, encourage more people to step forward and demand an end to prejudice. 

"I feel like I have been walking six inches off the ground," said Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, one of many gay and lesbian groups based here in San Francisco, where revelers gathered in the Castro District. "The arsenal used against us, with sodomy laws being the foremost weapon, has been neutralized." 

But the authorities in some states with sodomy laws warned against interpreting today's ruling too broadly. The Virginia attorney general, Jerry W. Kilgore, said the court had not created "any new rights for any particular group of people or the general population." 

Mr. Kilgore, in a statement, also said the ruling did not prevent states "from recognizing that marriage is fundamentally between a man and a woman." 

Even so, several legal scholars and gay and lesbian activists said the decision would probably have far-reaching implications for the popular discussion about gay rights. 

Activists and scholars said that by essentially acknowledging gay relationships as legitimate, the Supreme Court justices gave the gay rights movement a new credibility in debates about marriage, partner benefits, adoption and parental rights. 

"The court has put gay people in the mainstream of society for the first time," said Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. "The court understands gay sexuality is not just about sex, it is about intimacy and relationships. Now there is a real respect for our relationships, as us almost as families, that is not seedy or marginal but very much a part of society." 

Some critics of the ruling said they feared it for the same reasons. 

Henry McMaster, the South Carolina attorney general, described the possible ramifications as "complex and troubling." While acknowledging that the ruling rendered his state's sodomy law ineffective, Mr. McMaster, a Republican, insisted that the state had a fundamental right to bar behavior considered "inappropriate and detrimental." 

In Virginia, Mr. Kilgore, a Republican, accused the court of undermining "Virginia's right to pass legislation that reflects the views and values of our citizens." 

In Texas, whose sodomy law was the basis of the case Lawrence and Garner v. Texas decided today, celebrations took place in the streets of Austin, Dallas and Houston. 

"The decision is a clear indication that our Texas politicians in 2003 are out of sync with the rest of America," said Randall K. Ellis, executive director of the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas. "Yesterday the relationship that I had with my boyfriend was illegal. Today it is legal, and this is one step in full equality for all Texans and for all Americans." 

The authorities in Harris County, Tex., where John Lawrence and Tyron Garner were arrested in 1998 for having sex in Mr. Lawrence's apartment, said they had mixed feelings about the ruling. 

"Obviously I am a little bit disappointed in the outcome because of the amount of work we put into it," said Bill Delmore, an assistant district attorney in Harris County, who was involved in the appeals of the case. 

"But I have a lot more serious criminal offenses in files on my desk than this," Mr. Delmore said. "It is going to be something of a relief to leave the social implications and philosophy and all that behind, and just focus on putting the bad guys in prison." 

Mr. Delmore, like the authorities in other states with sodomy laws, said today's ruling would have little impact on day-to-day law enforcement because the statutes had been rarely enforced. 

In his 22 years with the Harris County district attorney's office, Mr. Delmore said, the only prosecution under the statute was that involving Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Garner. 

More typically, he said, prosecutions of homosexual acts are brought under the state's public lewdness statute, which prohibits sexual acts heterosexual as well as homosexual in public places. Mr. Delmore said there was nothing in the today's decision that would prevent the au pursuit of those cases. 

Similarly, in Idaho, an 1864 state law that forbids "crimes against nature" will still be applied to public sexual acts involving gays, said Michael Henderson, deputy attorney general. He added that the law would also still apply to acts with animals. 

"The Supreme Court's decision applies to sodomy laws in certain cases," Mr. Henderson said. "We can't enforce our law of crimes against nature as it applies to private consenting adults now." 

Speculation was already rife in several states about how today's decision might be leveraged by gay rights groups to attack other laws deemed antihomosexual. 

In Texas, State Representative Warren Chisum said he expected a legal challenge to a law he wrote this year called the Defense of Marriage Act that bars Texas officials from recognizing same-sex unions performed in other states. 

Mr. Chisum, a Pampa Republican, said today's ruling was nothing less than an assault on the ability of state legislators to uphold moral values. He said he had already assembled a group of lawyers to review how the marriage act might withstand a court challenge. 

"It is kind of scary stuff," Mr. Chisum said. "I think the court really opened the Pandora's box here that legislatures are going to deal with for many years in the future if they are concerned about the moral values of this country." 

Gay groups across the country said that Mr. Chisum's concern about new legal challenges was warranted. They said they intended to use today's victory to push for more legal rights and to ensure that the ruling on sodomy is not ignored. 

"I am confident that never again will there be a serious claim made that a lesbian or gay person is a criminal based on the existence of a sodomy law and thereby fair game for being a victim of all sorts of other discriminatory state action," said Ms. Kendell of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. 

Robin Tyler, a comic and producer in Los Angeles who helped organize some of the celebrations today, said many people were mindful of how difficult it had been for some civil rights decisions to become a reality in everyday life. 

"This is just the beginning of the race for full equality," Ms. Tyler said. "There is going to be an enormous backlash from the radical right. It is not like everybody is going to suddenly say that now that we aren't criminals anymore, therefore we are entitled to housing, not getting beaten up and marriage." 

Jane L. Dolkart, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University who specializes in sexuality and gender issues, said that today's decision did open a legal window for gay rights advocates, but that the court was in essence following the nation, not leading it. 

Antihomosexual laws were already being removed from the books in most states, Professor Dolkart said, most notably in Georgia, the origin of the last major sodomy case to be heard by the Supreme Court, Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986. Today's ruling reverses that decision, which had upheld the Georgia statute. 

"This ruling may have an effect that isn't strictly legal," Professor Dolkart said. "It may have an effect on the beliefs of people in this country." 

Some gay groups, fearing the worst, had been preparing protests had the court ruled the other way. This morning they quickly printed up posters declaring "Terrific!" and "Victory!" and sent out e-mail messages with "talking points" for interviews with the news media. 

As word of the ruling spread in San Francisco, a group gathered at the corner of Castro and Market Streets, where a rainbow flag a symbol of the gay movement for the last 25 years had regularly flown. 

A small chorus of gay military veterans sang the national anthem as the rainbow flag was gently lowered, replaced with an American one.
 
Gays Joyful, Relieved Over Court Ruling
Source: New York Times by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, June 26, 2003
 
Gay men and lesbians reacted with relief and triumph Thursday after the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that bans gay sex acts even in private.

Gay-rights activists, who regarded the anti-sodomy statute challenge as one of their most important legal cases in decades, said the high court's ruling would have a far-reaching impact in guaranteeing equal rights for homosexuals.

"This is historic," said Kate Kendall, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. "There is not a gay person in this country who has not lived their entire life under the yoke of these laws existing somewhere."

The 6-3 decision came in a case brought by two men who in 1998 were charged with breaking Texas' Homosexual Conduct Law. They were jailed overnight and ordered to pay $200 fines after police, responding to a false armed intruder complaint, discovered them having sex in their bedroom.

Though seldom enforced by police, the Texas law and similar provisions in a dozen other states are sometimes invoked by judges to deny homosexuals legal custody of their children, equal employment guarantees and other civil rights.

"It absolutely signals an entirely changed landscape," Kendall said. "It's impossible to be considered a full and equal citizen if you're a criminal in 13 states." She added that the decision marked "a cultural change as much as a legal change."

That the high court's ruling came in June, the month traditionally reserved for gay pride celebrations across the country, made the victory all the more sweet, advocates said.

"Given previous rulings, it's extraordinary and it's inspiring that the court ruled that gays and lesbians be treated the same as their straight brothers and sisters, no better and no worse," said Charles Francis, founder of the Republican Unity Coalition, a gay-straight organization that counts former President Gerald Ford and former Sen. Alan Simpson as honorary members. "Today's ruling is not a victory for gays nearly so much as a victory for the four words carved in stone on the court house: Equal Justice Under Law."

Advocacy groups from Alaska to Florida planned celebrations later in the day.
Not Leading the World but Following It
Source: The New York Times
By Laurence R. Helfer
June 18, 2003
 
LOS ANGELES - Disparities in the legal treatment of lesbians and
gay men in the United States and their treatment in the rest of the world
are becoming more pronounced. As the United States Supreme Court
considers an important gay rights case, expected to be decided this month,
it should realize that much of the globe sees the issue as a matter of
basic human rights.

Last week the Ontario Court of Appeal in Canada ordered the
provincial government to grant marriage licenses to two same-sex couples,
ruling that restricting marriage to heterosexual couples could not be
squared with the fundamental right to equality in Canada's constitution.
The Canadian court's decision is hardly an aberration. In the last
decade, national and local lawmakers in dozens of countries have enacted
laws to bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in housing,
employment, public accommodation and health benefits. Many of these
countries are also beginning to recognize rights for lesbian and gay
families.

Lesbian and gay couples now enjoy full marriage rights in the
Netherlands and Belgium and may enter into registered partnerships in
seven other European nations. In November 2000, the European Union
adopted a new directive that mandates all member nations to provide equal
treatment to lesbians and gay men in employment. At the time, this ruling
covered 380 million people. With the union's expansion to 25 countries,
it will soon cover millions more.

These legal protections are spreading to parts of the developing world, like Ecuador, Brazil and Namibia. South Africa's highest court has issued several rulings in favor of lesbians and gay men since that country became the first to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in its constitution.

The legal landscape in the United States is very different.
Several states continue to impose a criminal ban on sex between consenting
adults of the same gender, even in the privacy of their own homes.
Others have enacted new laws restricting marriage to a union between one
man and one woman. There are two states that recognize same-sex
partnerships, and nearly a dozen states and many more municipalities have
laws banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public
accommodation and in employment. But the majority do not have such laws,
and the prospects for enacting a federal anti-discrimination statute are
bleak.

A ruling expected soon from the Supreme Court provides an
opportunity to redress at least one of these issues. In the case of
Lawrence v. Texas, the court is considering a constitutional challenge to
the Texas sodomy law, which bans private, consensual sex between
homosexual couples. When the court last reviewed a similar law in Georgia
in a 1986 case, a 5-4 majority rejected the constitutional challenge.

Will the recent trend recognizing gay rights in other countries influence the court's decision this time around? The justices are sharply divided over whether it is appropriate to consider foreign and international law when interpreting the United States Constitution. But in a recent ruling banning executions of the mentally retarded, a majority of the court took into account that such executions had received condemnation from the world community.

The international consensus in favor of gay rights is still evolving. But the court can no longer state, as Chief Justice Warren Burger did in that 1986 case, that a decision striking down a sodomy law would "cast aside millennia of moral teaching."

Recent events have created rifts between the United States and the rest of the world over important questions of law and policy. But respect for human rights should not be among them. When it comes to protecting the basic civil liberties of all people, including lesbians and gay men, the United States should lead the world, not lag behind it.

Laurence R. Helfer is professor at Loyola Law School.
 
A Milestone for Gay Marriage (5 Letters)
To the Editor:

Re "U.S. Gays Who Marry in Canada Face Hurdles" (news article, June 19):

Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council, in arguing against legalizing same-sex marriage in this country, claims that it would "devalue" the sanctity of marriage.

This reminds me of statements made by white homeowners living in exclusively white neighborhoods during the 1960's who feared the arrival of black families. In fact, the blacks simply wanted the same American dream as the whites.

The American promise of equality dictates that gays should have the right to marry the person they love. Marriage is a license from the government granting certain rights, benefits and protections to citizens. They should be available to all citizens, regardless of sexual orientation.


DON GEORGE
Atlanta, June 19, 2003
• 


To the Editor:

Under the leadership of George W. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress, the United States government is not only out of step with much of the rest of the world on gay rights issues ("Not Leading the World but Following It," by Laurence R. Helfer, Op-Ed, June 18), it's also out of step with the American people and even rank-and-file Republican voters.

A May 2003 Gallup poll found that 88 percent of Americans support "equal opportunities for gays and lesbians in the workplace." The 2000 National Election Study found 56 percent of Republicans, 70 percent of independents and 75 percent of Democrats support sexual orientation nondiscrimination laws.

Treating everyone equally is not just an ethical imperative. It's what most Americans want their leaders to do.


SEAN CAHILL
Director, Policy Institute, National
Gay and Lesbian Task Force
New York, June 18, 2003
• 


To the Editor:

Re "Not Leading the World but Following It," by Laurence R. Helfer (Op-Ed, June 18):

As a conservative, I have no interest in regulating the intimate private relationships between adults, but marriage is not a solely private act. Marriage involves the state in the sanction and protection of the relationship and the welfare of any children that come from it.

There is no consensus for legalization of homosexual marriage, and, indeed, the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose such unions. The decision of other countries to legalize homosexual marriage is of no concern to the United States, except as this legalization affects our laws. It is the weakest and most foolish sort of argument to claim that we should abandon our traditions because other countries choose to toss aside theirs.


AUGUSTUS GODDARD
Atlanta, June 19, 2003
•


To the Editor:

Re "Gay Marriage Plan: Sign of Sweeping Social Change in Canada" (news analysis, June 19):

Canadians have always had difficulty describing themselves. We've often felt like the poor cousins of Europe or the United States. Today, however, after years of "navel gazing" and social upheaval, we are emerging for the first time as a society that is beginning to understand itself as a nation apart from any others.


JOHN LEWIS
Toronto, June 19, 2003


To the Editor:

Re "Gay Marriage Plan: Sign of Sweeping Social Change in Canada" (news analysis, June 19):

As a Canadian expatriate, it is apparent to me that many Americans look upon Canada as an easily controlled and unrebellious younger sibling. One need only look at Canadians' unique brand of mocking humor to see that they are fond of bucking the system. 

In their typically subtle way, the Canadians have done their version of kicking out the Redcoats, a revolution that was definitely worth the wait.


JULIANNE DIXON-YANG
Indianapolis, June 19, 2003
U.S. Gays Who Marry in Canada Face Hurdles
Source: New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
Thursday, June 19, 2003
 
WASHINGTON, June 18 — Gay Americans who visit Canada to marry may revel in their newfound status there, but they will come home to a confusing patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions and competing laws and are likely to face a struggle for recognition, legal experts say.
 
It is too soon to tell the legal implications here of Canada's decision to allow same-sex couples to wed, the experts said. But the ease of marrying in Canada — it has no residency requirement - is expected to lure numerous Americans seeking to sanctify their relationships or make a political statement.
 
When they return, they will find a landscape of legal battles and a federal government that has determined that marriage may only occur between a man and a woman.
 
"Couples who marry in Ontario and return to the United States seeking the same rights, responsibilities and obligations that heterosexual married couples receive should be aware that discriminatory laws in this country remain a problem," said Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay advocacy group. "We will continue working to end marriage discrimination in this country."
Most experts predict that a newlywed gay couple will eventually seek to test the legality of their Canadian marriage, although no one knows the exact circumstances. It might, for example, be a couple in Texas seeking to adjust their immigration status through marriage.
 
Canadian visitors to the United States may also press the point. If one gay married partner driving to Florida is hurt in a car accident, does the other have a spouse's right to make medical decisions or file a wrongful death suit?
 
Some critics of same-sex marriage say that, regardless of the legal distinctions, Canada's move should be viewed as an assault on the traditional nuclear family and serve as a wake-up call to Americans.
 
"Marriage is the foundational institution of civilization," Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council, said in a statement. Same-sex unions "devalue" the sanctity of marriage, he said.
 
"Unless the American people rise up to defend this indispensable institution, we could lose marriage in a very short time," Mr. Connor added. "What's happening in Canada is a warning to America."
 
Gay rights groups are advising their members not to force the issue in the United States until they can determine what kind of case would set the best legal precedent. In the meantime, Canadian-wed couples can expect a mixed reception in the United States, with some businesses and localities recognizing their union, and federal offices and a majority of states rejecting it.
 
Federal law is clear on same-sex marriages. In 1996, Congress approved the Defense of Marriage Act, which said that marriage applied only to persons of the opposite sex. For purposes of income taxes, Social Security, immigration and other federal activities, the Canadian marriage would not be recognized.
 
Still, marriage is an institution regulated by the states. The Constitution establishes that one state will recognize the public acts and rulings of another under the "full faith and credit" clause. Historically, people who have been married in one state have been treated as married in all.
 
But marriage in Canada leaves lawyers to seek other precedents. Generally, a principle of "comity" has applied with foreign countries, under which Americans recognize foreign marriages and may expect their own to be accepted abroad.
 
Thirty-seven states have their own versions of the Defense of Marriage Act. But those that do not include some large states like New York and Ohio, making them likely testing grounds for a challenge by advocates of gay marriage.
 
Some states, like California, send mixed signals. The state approved an initiative in 2000 that asserted, "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." But California has also been at the forefront of expanding domestic partners' rights.
 
Vermont, which already allows for civil unions, may be expected to embrace Canadian marriages. Hawaii and Connecticut, which allow benefits for nontraditional pairs, may also endorse the marriages, as may cities that now maintain registries for domestic partners. Legal challenges for civil marriage rights are pending in Massachusetts and New Jersey.
 
Some gay marriage advocates warn that couples should not be hasty in their decision to wed in Canada. While marrying is relatively easy, getting divorced is another matter, requiring a year's residency in the country.
 
"The trend is going to be a little bit of chaos for a while," said Jon W. Davidson, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, a lesbian and gay legal group. "It's very exciting. They're calling it the Canadian earthquake."
 
Show Examines Fight Between Gays, Blacks
Source: New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sunday, June 15, 2003
NEW YORK (AP) -- In any other context, it's a mundane act. Yet when a real estate agent walks through a vacant house to end the PBS documentary "Flag Wars," it seems sinister.
 
The film about blacks and gays fighting over the future of a neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, opens the 16th season of the PBS series, "P.O.V." Tuesday at 10 p.m.
The title refers to the flags filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant spotted when visiting her father in the working-class black neighborhood known as Olde Towne East in Columbus. She naively thought it had something to do with a flower show.
 
Instead, the rainbow colors fluttering outside homes owned by gay men and African flags on other houses symbolized a conflict tearing the community apart.
 
Gay men seeking an urban enclave were buying and renovating Victorian homes in Olde Towne East. They felt they were improving a neighborhood down on its luck, but instead antagonized black families who had been there for years.
 
Bryant felt it was an interesting story, and spent four years filming it with Laura Poitras.
 
"I personally entered with the assumption that because both groups had a shared history of oppression in this society, that that would create an immediate kind of bond between them," said Bryant, who's black.
 
The fact that it didn't "was really disheartening to me," she said.
 
Poitras, a white lesbian who recently moved into a Harlem home with a partner, brought a different perspective.
 
"My expectation wasn't that it would create common ground," she said. "My expectation was that the status of the gay community and the status of being marginalized would create blinders to the residents who lived there."
 
"It's human nature that big groups tend to look out for their own interests," she said.
 
Two personalities stand out in the film. One is Shango Baba Olugbala, a soft-spoken, longtime resident taken to city court by new neighbors who objected to a wood-carved sign on his home. Another is Linda Mitchell, a dying alcoholic who was living in squalor but nonplussed by newcomers who constantly complained to authorities about her code violations.
 
In Olugbala's case, there's a sense his new neighbors don't understand anything about him, or even want to. Mitchell is invisible; she's simply an annoyance standing in the way of potential new homeowners.
 
The filmmakers said they went in with an open mind, wanting to tell all sides of the story fairly. Yet the new residents are clearly portrayed as villains.
 
That's what makes the final scene --- a real estate agent casing Mitchell's house after she dies --- so potent. It feels like vultures picking over a warm body.
 
"If you lived in a neighborhood and saw Linda Mitchell living in a rundown house that she couldn't afford, maybe you could say we're bettering the neighborhood," Poitras said. "When you spend time, as you do in the film, you learn about her passion for the house and her history and her struggle to hang on to the house, it's a lot harder to see yourself in that light."
 
The gays moving in are clearly wealthier than longtime residents. But they're still minorities not fully embraced by society; Bryant emphasizes that point by including a scene where a right-wing minister rails against legislation designed to protect gays from attack.
 
"I've heard it countless times -- victims are the worst victimizers," she said. "I don't understand that about human behavior. I'm hoping at some point that's a conversation that is engaged as a result of this film."
 
Their film is the first of five productions planned by "P.O.V." this year that are financed by public broadcasting's Diverse Voices Projects. Black, Latino, Asian, American Indian and Hawaiian filmmakers received money for projects
Although "Flag Wars" takes place in Columbus, the filmmakers say similar gentrification is taking place in Boston, Atlanta and Chicago.
 
Governments can learn some lessons from the film, they said. For instance, the filmmakers questioned the fairness of a code enforcement policy in Columbus that was driven by anonymous complaints.
 
What's happening with the homes, however, is simple capitalism at work --- something governments are usually loathe to interfere with.
 
"There is a human cost to capitalism and I hope the film makes the viewer sensitive to that and aware that when we make decisions that are all about, quote-unquote progress, that we realize that these decisions affect human beings," Bryant said.
 
For more info On the Net: PBS
 
Gay Canadians' Quest for Marriage Seems Near Victory
Source: New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
Sunday, June 15, 2003
 
TORONTO, June 14---A decision this week by an Ontario appeals court to extend full marriage rights immediately to gay and lesbian couples, after two similar though less sweeping recent rulings in Quebec and British Columbia, appears to have given decisive impetus to efforts to make same-sex marriage a reality across Canada.
 
Dozens of gay and lesbian couples have already rushed to municipal buildings in Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton to marry without waiting for a decision by Justice Minister Martin Cauchon on whether he will appeal the Ontario court decision to the Supreme Court.
 
Mr. Cauchon's announcement is expected early next week. But even if he does appeal the case or asks for an advisory opinion from the Supreme Court, many legal scholars note that recent rulings by the nation's highest court suggest that it would back the decisions of the three lower courts.
 
"The trend of court decisions is overwhelmingly in the direction of recognizing an entitlement for gays and lesbians to be married," said Patrick Monahan, incoming dean of the Osgoode Hall Law School at York University here.
 
The Netherlands and Belgium are currently the only countries that extend full marriage rights to same-sex couples.
 
France, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland allow gays and lesbians to enter into legal partnerships that award many of the same protections and responsibilities that marriage does.
 
Quebec and the state of Vermont have also enacted legislation enabling such unions in recent years. In the case of the Quebec law, enacted last year, gay and lesbian couples gained the same full parental rights and obligations once given only to heterosexual couples, along with sweeping pension, health insurance, inheritance and other benefits. Six of Canada's 10 provinces extend some parental rights to same-sex couples, as do many states in the United States. Legislation to grant legal status to same-sex couples was introduced in Chile's congress on Wednesday, suggesting that the issue is emerging at least for debate in even socially conservative countries.
 
Last December, lawmakers in Buenos Aires granted legal status to gay and lesbian couples, allowing benefits like pensions and hospital visits. The law encompasses insurance policies and health benefits covered by local government only, and it does not permit same-sex couples to adopt children or marry.
 
In Ottawa, some members of the House of Commons have argued that the issue of whether marriage rights should be broadened to apply to gays and lesbians should be decided by Parliament or the Supreme Court, to ensure that there is a national policy rather than practices that differ from province to province.
 
Leaders of the two national conservative parties and Premier Ralph Klein of Alberta have objected to tampering with marriage traditions. But political resistance appears to be subsiding as polls indicate that a majority of Canadians accept the premise that gays and lesbians should have the right to marry.
 
All three candidates for leader of the governing Liberal Party who are vying to replace the retiring prime minister, Jean Chr彋ien, in February have expressed support for allowing same-sex marriage. A House of Commons committee on Thursday voted narrowly in favor of extending marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples, the first time that an elected body in Canada had done so.
 
Some legal scholars have suggested that Parliament may leave the final decision on the matter to the courts, but that it will eventually enact legislation enabling religious institutions that view marriage as valid only between men and women to refuse to marry same-sex couples.
 
"Same-sex couples are capable of forming long, lasting, loving and intimate relationships," the Ontario court ruled unanimously.
 
The three appeals judges said the extension of marriage rights was obligatory under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada's version of the Bill of Rights, and would cause no harm to the general community.
 
The decision retroactively recognized the 2001 marriage of a gay Toronto couple that were married in a church ceremony but were refused a license by the city.
 
Since the Ontario court's decision on Tuesday, daily images of gay and lesbian couples kissing before their relatives and friends have appeared on newspaper front pages and have been broadcast on television news programs across Canada.
 
On Wednesday alone, the city issued 26 marriage licenses.
 
"It means an awful lot," said Brian Rolfes, a 38-year-old personnel director of a consulting firm, while he and his partner, Bradley Berg, a 35-year-old lawyer, filled out a marriage license application at Toronto city hall on Thursday.
 
"To be able to go anywhere in the world and be able to say, `Well, actually, we're a married couple,' " he said, adding, "It's the final piece of the puzzle. It's true equality."
 
The celebrating has stretched across the border, where American gay rights advocates say the extension of marriage rights in Canada will have an enormous effect in the United States.
 
"Americans will be able to look across the border to a country that speaks the same language and is also committed to democracy and pluralism and see that the sky does not fall when gay couples are allowed all the protections and status of marriage," said Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, a New York-based group that supports the right to marriage between people of the same sex.
 
Only a few American same-sex couples have married in the Netherlands because that country has a long residency requirement for foreigners seeking to marry, and Belgium only allows same-sex couples to marry if they are eligible to do so in their home countries.
 
But since Canada has no residency requirements for marriage, gay and lesbian Americans can be expected to marry here in great numbers.
 
Brad Ross, a spokesman for the city, jokingly predicted that Toronto could become "the new Las Vegas."
 
Whether a Canadian marriage certificate granted to a same-sex American couple will be recognized in the United States remains uncertain.
 
"There will be a period of uncertainty and discrimination," Mr. Wolfson predicted, "but they are going to come here married and be married just like anyone else on the planet."
 
The extension of marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples in Ontario was built on a string of recent Supreme Court precedents. In one 1998 case, the high court unanimously ordered Alberta to include the term "sexual orientation" in provincial human-rights legislation protecting against discrimination.
 
Based on that ruling Julius Grey, a prominent human rights lawyer in Montreal, said, "the recognition of marriage between people of the same sex looks inevitable."
Last month, a lower British Columbia court ordered the federal Parliament to rewrite the definition of marriage by July 2004, or it would do so itself as "the lawful union of two persons."
 
In the United States, similar cases are now before courts in New Jersey and Massachusetts. Lawyers for seven gay and lesbian couples have already made oral arguments before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and a decision is expected later this summer.
 
John Ashcroft and Gay Pride
Source: NY Times, Editorials/Op-Ed
Friday, June 13, 2003
 
Last week, the Justice Department said its gay employees' group could no longer hold its annual Gay Pride Month celebration. After a storm of protest, the department has now relented, but it has downgraded the event to unofficial status and wants the group to pay for it. The decision is wrong, and it calls into question whether John Ashcroft understands his duties as head of the Justice Department. He should restore the gay pride event to its full former status.
 
Gay employees of the Justice Department have been holding such ceremonies for six years, and Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson spoke at last year's. The event has drawn protests from the far right, but at his Senate confirmation hearings, Mr. Ashcroft promised to allow it to continue.
 
This year, however, DOJ Pride, the sponsoring organization, says it was told that it could not proceed with its celebration. Now the department has changed its mind, sort of. DOJ Pride says if it is forced to underwrite the audiovisual services, overtime security and other expenses — something other employee groups are not made to do — it may not be able to go forward.
 
The Justice Department may be violating the law, including its own rules against discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. Senator Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, has called for the Committee on Governmental Affairs to see whether any civil rights or civil laws have been broken. He also wants it to investigate whether the department engaged in a cover-up when it denied ever telling DOJ Pride its event had to be canceled.
 
These actions would be unacceptable if Mr. Ashcroft were postmaster general. But as attorney general, he is responsible for fighting the sort of discrimination — and misleading statements to Congress — of which he now stands accused. There is no way Mr. Ashcroft can champion justice nationally if he cannot do so in his own office.
 
Justice Department Permits Its Gay Employees to Use Headquarters for Annual Celebration
Source: New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
 
WASHINGTON, June 10 — The Justice Department said today that it would allow gay employees to hold their annual celebration at department headquarters after all.
Reports last week that the department had forced the cancellation of an annual employee event celebrating Gay Pride Month had led to protests from civil rights advocates as well as praise from some conservative groups.
 
But Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman, said today, "This was just a case of miscommunication, a misunderstanding." He said that while department officials had notified the employee group, DOJ Pride, that the department would not sponsor or subsidize the event this year, it never intended to ban the event altogether.
 
Group members, however, said department officials told them in several recent conversations that the June 18 event was being canceled because President Bush, unlike former President Bill Clinton, had not recognized Gay Pride Month in a White House proclamation. Group members said they were told that Attorney General John Ashcroft's office had ordered the cancellation.
 
In a voice mail message played today for a reporter, an official in the Justice Department's equal employment office was heard telling a DOJ Pride representative late last month: "The attorney general's office has decided that we will not have a DOJ Pride program this year. I just wanted to give you as much of a heads up on that as I could."
 
Last week, the official acknowledged to a reporter relaying the decision to DOJ Pride representives.
 
Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, who last week condemned the cancellation of the gay pride event, said today that he planned to call for a Congressional hearing into possible civil rights violations by the Justice Department in connection with the incident.
 
"This is the politics of a cover-up," the senator said in a statement.
Today's move left both sides in the debate claiming a partial victory.
 
Peter LaBarbera, senior policy analyst for the Culture and Family Institute, a conservative Christian group opposed to gay rights, said he was glad that the Justice Department would not be an official sponsor of the gay pride event this year.
 
Department officials said that it had helped to underwrite some production costs of the event the last few years, and that Mr. Ashcroft's top lieutenant — Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson — spoke last year before the group at the department's Great Hall.
 
"We still see this as progress in that they're not endorsing the event," Mr. LaBarbera said. "It's an improvement over last year."
 
DOJ Pride members and gay rights supporters said that while they were pleased that the event would be able to continue, they were left chastened by the experience.
 
"This is a step backward," said Marina Colby, a policy analyst at the Justice Department who is president of DOJ Pride, which has several hundred gay and lesbian members.
 
"They're not supporting us like the other employee associations at the department in terms of sponsoring our events," she said.
 
Gay rights advocates said they believed the department had bowed to political and public pressure in allowing the event to continue.
 
"I think they realized what a horrible mistake it was to cancel the event," said David Smith, senior strategist for Human Rights Campaign, a gay advocacy group. "The public perception that the Justice Department — the agency charged with protecting the rights of all Americans — was banning this event just sent a terrible message."
Mr. Corallo, the Justice Department spokesman, said that the department policy was clear in the handling of such employee events.
 
"Any properly constituted group can request the use of facilities, but being able to use the facilities does not mean the department is required to sponsor the events," he said. "We said they could have the event. It just won't be officially sponsored."
 
Bush and Gays
Source: The New York Times
JEFF SLUTZKY,Jersey City, 06.06.2003
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
 
To the Editor:
Re "Justice Dept. Bans Event by Gay Staff"
(news article, June 6):
According to the White House, President Bush does not believe "in politicizing people's sexual orientation."
 
Unfortunately, sexual orientation has already been politicized. It has been politicized by judges who refuse to give gay parents custody over their own children; by national and state governments that withhold the legal protections of marriage from loving couples; by the authorities who arrest and prosecute adults for having consensual sex in their own homes; by employers who fire American workers merely because they are gay; by school principals and school board members who silently condone physical violence against gay students.
 
Sexual orientation will no longer be "politicized" on the day when people stop punishing each other merely because of whom they happen to love.
 
Justice Dept. Draws Heavy Criticism Over Cancelled Gay Rights Event
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Saturday, June 7, 2003
 
WASHINGTON, June 6 ?Democrats and civil rights advocates condemned the Justice Department today for barring a gay pride event planned by department employees, and called on Attorney General John Ashcroft to reverse the decision.
 
Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, told Mr. Ashcroft in a letter that he found the decision "unconscionable" at a department charged with protecting civil rights. Mr. Lautenberg said he would propose legislation addressing the issue if the Justice Department did not allow the event to take place.
 
But conservative groups opposed to gay rights rallied to Mr. Ashcroft's defense, over a matter that has renewed questions concerning his stand on homosexuality.
 
Sandy Rios, president of a conservative Christian group, Concerned Women for America, said that "homosexuality is immoral" and that she was grateful that Mr. Ashcroft had taken such a "courageous step to stand against the pressure of the politically correct elite."
 
A group of several hundred gay and lesbian Justice Department employees, called DOJ Pride, had budgeted $600 to hold an awards ceremony on June 18 at the department's Great Hall to celebrate Gay Pride Month. The group has held similar events at the department each of the last six years, members said, and Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy spoke at last year's event.
 
But Justice Department officials have told the group that it cannot hold the ceremony at the department this year because of a new policy prohibiting events not recognized by White House proclamation.
 
Mr. Bush has issued hundreds of presidential proclamations, recognizing events like National African American History Month, National Prayer Day and Leif Erikson Day.
But unlike President Bill Clinton, Mr. Bush has not recognized Gay Pride Month.
"The president believes everybody ought to be treated with dignity and respect, but he does not believe we should be politicizing people's sexual orientation," said Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman.
 
Officials at the department's equal employment opportunity office acknowledged that the office had notified DOJ Pride of the decision regarding the gay pride event, but referred all other questions to the department's public affairs office. Officials there declined to comment.
 
Gay associations at many federal agencies have held gay pride events in recent years. Employees at the Commerce Department and a few other agencies have complained about not receiving enough administrative support, but this is the first time any agency has forbidden a gay group to use the premises, said Leonard Hirsch, president of Federal Globe, a gay and lesbian association of government employees.
 
"There's a political calculation going on here by the Justice Department," Mr. Hirsch said, "and they figure they gain more with the conservative right than they lose by discriminating against gays."
 
Mr. Ashcroft, socially conservative and deeply religious, was known for his strong views against homosexuality during his days in the Senate. He said then that he considered homosexuality a sin, and he opposed legislation to protect gays.
 
But in his confirmation hearings in 2001, he pledged not to tolerate discrimination against gays in the Justice Department. Critics said today that the decision to bar the gay pride event amounted to his backpedaling.
 
Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, said in a statement today that he had asked Mr. Ashcroft before confirmation about DOJ Pride's use of government facilities. Mr. Ashcroft said then that he had "no intent to treat this group differently than any other."
 
Writing to Mr. Ashcroft today, Mr. Lautenberg noted that conservative groups had lobbied to ban gay pride events at government facilities, and said that "the possibility that the department would put the wishes of groups with a political agenda ahead of the civil rights of its own employees is unconscionable."
 
The American Civil Liberties Union said the decision could violate the Justice Department's own anti-discrimination policies.
 
A Justice Department official denied that, but the A.C.L.U. said it was considering a legal challenge.
 
"I think Ashcroft has gone out on a legal limb on this," said Matt Coles, director of the A.C.L.U.'s Gay and Lesbian Rights Project, "and he's certainly trashed his own personal word in the process."
 
'Mother of the Nation,' Poet and Lesbian?
By LARRY ROHTER
Wednesday, June 4, 2003
 
SANTIAGO, Chile ?Nearly a half-century after Gabriela Mistral's death, her presence can still be felt almost everywhere in Chile. There is probably no town in this country that does not have a street, square or school named for her, the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, and her poems and essays have long been part of the school curriculum.
 
But "the mother of the nation," as Mistral is often called here because of her poems for and about children, is now the focus of a controversy that is forcing a re-examination of her life and work. The recent publication of her private journals shows that she had a love-hate relationship with Chile, while a biography and a film project argue that part of her ambivalence stemmed from what is described as her lesbianism.
 
"Mistral is a legend and a myth," Jaime Quezada, the scholar who edited "Blessed Be My Tongue," a 290-page selection from her journals, said in an interview here. "She is part of our national patrimony, and everyone thinks that they know her. But the paradox is that only now are we beginning to have a direct and truthful relationship with her work."
 
An even greater paradox is that most of Mistral's six books of poetry were published abroad before appearing here, where they received mixed reviews. In the newly issued journals and notebooks, she wonders why "nobody in Chile likes me," in contrast with Pablo Neruda, a younger poet and future Nobel laureate whose work she had championed. She repeatedly expresses exasperation with the conservatism and indifference of Chilean society.
 
"Chile has no brains or common sense yet, it has no maturity," she wrote in one typical entry. "I pray for it."
 
Born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in 1889, Mistral began writing as a child and took her pen name from a French poet when her first collection, "Death Sonnets," was published in 1914. At first she earned a precarious living as a teacher, transferring from one remote rural school to another. Later she became headmistress of a prestigious private girls' school here in the capital.
 
"I lived in isolation from an illiterate society whose daughters I educated and which disdained me as badly dressed and badly coiffed," she complains in one journal entry.
Mistral left Chile in 1922 and in a sense never returned, even after the awarding of the Nobel in 1945 finally brought her acclaim at home. After working in Mexico in a government educational reform program, she joined the Chilean diplomatic service, spending the rest of her career as a consul in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico and the United States, visiting Chile only three times. She died on Long Island in 1957.
 
Since her death, Mistral's image has been remade and manipulated, especially during the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, which went so far as to put her face on the currency's highest denomination note at that time. In the 1970's and 80's, she was packaged as a symbol of social order and submission to authority, "a uterus birthing children for the motherland" in the memorable phrase of the writer Diamela Eltit.
 
"After the 1973 coup, Mistral and her religiosity were used against Neruda and his atheism," said Luis Vargas Saavedra, a leading Mistral scholar and a professor of Latin American literature at the Catholic University of Chile. "Any time an official representation of Chilean culture was needed, it was Mistral and not Neruda to whom they turned." Since the return of democracy in 1990, Mistral and Neruda have enjoyed roughly equal official status here. But to a generation of young Chilean readers she seems a fusty spinster, the antithesis of the eternally hip and contemporary Neruda, whose poems have recently been set to music by pop, rap and heavy metal groups and issued on a best-selling CD called "The Mariner on Land."
 
Mistral's admirers argue that she remains relegated to that status because even today the official curriculum stresses the poems she wrote for and about children, many with echoes of lullabies or nursery rhymes. Her more complex, dense or disturbing poems are largely left out, as are her political essays, in which she often takes internationalist and feminist positions that were unusual for their time.
"The worst enemy of Gabriela Mistral in Chile has been the Ministry of Education and the teachers' union," Dr. Vargas Saavedra said.
 
Despite her close identification with motherhood and children, especially those who were indigenous or disenfranchised, Mistral never married or had children. Throughout her life she was trailed by rumors that she was a lesbian, and one passage in the journals reveals her resentment at that.
 
"About Chile, the less said the better," she wrote. "They've even hung this silly lesbianism on me, which wounds me in a way that I can't even put into words. Have you ever seen so big a falsehood?"
 
But in "A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral" (University of Minnesota Press) Licia Fiol-Matta, an assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College, argues that "Mistral was a closet lesbian" and that her posthumous "consecration as a celibate, saintly, suffering heterosexual national icon" is at odds with the reality of her life and work.
 
"Although hard documentation of her sexuality simply does not exist, it is quite possible that Mistral's exile was in part sexual," Dr. Fiol-Matta said. "Certainly, the assumption of the schoolteacher's image resonated with her need for self-protection when she was in Chile."
 
The appearance of the Fiol-Matta book comes as a Chilean director-screenwriter team based in Mexico have announced plans to make a movie of Mistral's life in which her American secretary is to be portrayed as her lover. "Gabriela Mistral was completely and totally a lesbian and spoke and wrote from that vantage point," the screenwriter, Francisco Casas, a former member of a gay arts collective here, said.
 
But the project has been heavily criticized in Chile. The government arts agency has turned down a request for financing, and a mayor in Mistral's home area in the Elqui Valley has warned that he will do everything to prevent the filmmakers from shooting there. "We are not going to permit them to attack one of Chile's greatest cultural references," the mayor, Lorenzo Torres, said.
 
Volodia Teitelboim, the Chilean author of the biography on which the screenplay is partly based, has also complained about the movie, saying he "could find no proof" of Mistral's lesbianism. He described the film as an attempt to "besmirch the memory of a great Chilean and Latin American woman."
 
When asked about the dispute, Dr. Vargas Saavedra said: "You cannot say that Mistral is a lesbian writer. In all of her work, there is not a single text in which she presents herself as such."
 
As if to undermine the claims that Mistral was a lesbian, the love letters she exchanged with a married male poet while a young woman are to be published here later this year. But at the same time, the literary detectives are hard at work in their search for new material that can clarify the question of Mistral's sexual orientation and the impact it may have had on her poetry.
 
"That one reference in the journals was the first and only time I found a reflection on or complaint about this issue of lesbianism," said Dr. Quezada, who is also a director of the Gabriela Mistral Foundation. "But there are a lot of letters still out there."
 
Board Asked to Reconsider Jobless Benefits for a Same-Sex Partner
Source: NY Times
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Saturday, May 31, 2003
 
When Jeanne Newland's companion landed a prestigious computer job in Virginia, Ms. Newland did not hesitate to quit her own job in Rochester and make the move south.
After applying for 150 jobs in Virginia with no success, Ms. Newland applied for unemployment insurance back in New York, hoping to benefit from an unusual wrinkle in New York State law. While workers usually receive jobless benefits only when they are laid off, workers who voluntarily quit their jobs to follow a spouse who has obtained a job out of state can still qualify for benefits.
 
But when Ms. Newland applied for unemployment insurance, her application was rejected. State Labor Department officials informed her that she did not qualify because she and her domestic partner, Natasha Doty, were not married.
 
"This isn't fair," Ms. Newland said this week, "because I'm not even legally allowed to be married to my partner, so I'm excluded right at the outset. As far as we're concerned, we're as married as we could be."
 
Ms. Newland's appeal of the decision was rejected, first by an administrative law judge and then by the Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board. But in an unusual move, Gov. George E. Pataki has asked the board to reconsider its decision.
 
Mr. Pataki's intervention, announced yesterday by a Labor Department spokesman, came after several gay advocacy groups, led by Empire State Pride Agenda, urged him to step in. But lawyers involved in the case acknowledged that the appeals board might face some difficulties in reversing itself and ruling for Ms. Newland, because that might open the door for any person, even one in a relatively brief relationship, to qualify for jobless benefits after quitting a job and following a partner out of state.
 
State law says that people who quit jobs voluntarily can qualify for jobless benefits only if they quit for "good cause." In the past, the Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board ruled that quitting a job and following a partner out of state was good cause so long as the claimant was married.
 
Ms. Newland and Ms. Doty have been together for six years. They met in Los Angeles, where Ms. Newland was a police officer, and they moved together to Rochester. There, Ms. Newland worked in technical support for Element K, an educational software company, while Ms. Doty was a printing test manager for Xerox.
 
Ms. Doty landed a higher-paying job in Richmond, Va., as an information technology manager at Capital One, a financial services company, and Ms. Newland moved there with her in December 2000. They own a house together, share living expenses and have joint bank and investment accounts.
 
Romana Mancini, Ms. Newland's lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said yesterday: "Jeanne and Natasha have done everything they can to demonstrate their commitment to one another and to solidify their relationship. Their relationship deserves just as much protection and recognition as that of a married couple."
 
Ms. Newland has filed a lawsuit against the state seeking to overturn the appeal court's decision. But lawyers involved in the case said they expected it to be suspended pending the appeal board's reconsideration of the case.
 
Ms. Newland and Ms. Mancini applauded the governor's intervention. "It's a good sign, but it doesn't mean we won yet," Ms. Mancini said.
 
In another unusual twist, Ms. Newland's former employer, Element K, filed a legal brief on her behalf. Employers often oppose applications for unemployment insurance because their unemployment insurance taxes increase with the number of former workers receiving jobless benefits.
 
"The Rochester community is pretty open about this kind of thing," said Lance D'Amico, Element K's general counsel. "We have some senior-level people here who are openly gay. We thought it was important to support employees and people who have left."
 
Even though Ms. Newland landed a job as a fraud investigator with a bank last year, she decided against dropping her unemployment insurance case.
 
"It's not about the money now," she said. "I'm not the first person this has happened to and I know I won't be the last. It would be nice if the decision against me was overturned so these benefits could be available to other people in my situation."
 
Over Time, People 'Catch Mood' of Friends, Lovers
SOURCE: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2003;84:1054-1068.
By Dana Frisch
(Friday, May 30, 2003)
 
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Laugh and the world laughs with you, the saying goes, and this is especially true for couples and roommates, the results of a new study suggest.
 
It seems that couples and roommates tend to have similar emotional reactions as time goes by. So if your roommate or lover laughs out loud at movies or gets weepy over hurt puppies, you may too -- given time.
 
This so-called emotional convergence seems to be beneficial to friendships and romantic relationships, making them stronger and longer lasting.
 
Everyday experience suggests that people are capable of "catching" the mood of a spouse or friend, said lead author Dr. Cameron Anderson. But he told Reuters Health that he was surprised by the extent to which peoples' emotions converged in his study, which is reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (news - web sites).
 
"The romantic partners and roommates were virtually becoming the same emotional person over time," said Anderson, a visiting assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
 
In the first part of the study, 60 heterosexual couples at the University of Wisconsin in Madison answered questions about their personality, their satisfaction with their relationship and the balance of power within it.
 
To test emotional convergence, partners discussed positive and negative situations -- such as a recent success or an ongoing worry. Then each partner privately reported his or her feelings regarding the issue.
 
Six months later, the 38 couples that were still together repeated the experiment. The couples maintained distinct personalities, but they were more closely attuned emotionally than they had been at the start of the study, the researchers found.
Although couples' emotions converged over time, similar emotions might have drawn them together in the first place. Couples that stayed together during the study were more emotionally similar than couples that broke up, the researchers point out.
Anderson's team also found that the partner who had less power in the relationship did most of the changing in terms of emotions.
 
In other experiments, which involved college students who lived together in dormitories, the researchers found that roommates tended to have more similar emotional responses toward the end of the school year. The researchers gauged emotion by having students watch film clips that tend to elicit laughs or tears.
 
Roommates whose emotions converged the most during the school year tended to become closer friends than roommates whose emotions did not become as similar, according to the report.
 
The study also found that the roommate who had a lower social status in the dormitory tended to change more than popular roommates.
 
Anderson said these results show that "people's emotional responses to events are not completely fixed and rigid."
 
According to the Illinois researcher, emotional similarity could be helpful in assembling the most productive corporate team, and might be an important consideration when searching for love or friendships.
 
C. A. Tripp, 83, Author of Work on Homosexuality, Dies
Source: New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Thursday, May 22, 2003
 
C. A. Tripp, a psychologist, therapist and sex researcher who wrote an influential book on homosexuality, died on Saturday at his home in Nyack, N.Y. He was 83.
 
The cause was cancer, said Lewis Gannett, a friend and author, with whom he finished a book shortly before his death speculating that Lincoln was homosexual.
 
In his earlier book, "The Homosexual Matrix" (McGraw-Hill, 1975), Dr. Tripp, who had trained with Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, the pioneer sex researcher, tried to dispel many popular misconceptions about homosexuality, as well as to suggest new ideas about sexual attraction. Although the book's tone was scholarly, it sold nearly 500,000 copies.
 
Newsweek's review said that Dr. Tripp's straightforward message was that "homosexuality is best viewed as an alternative lifestyle and society benefits from tolerating it."
 
The magazine observed that the book might not have found a major publisher just a few years before, but that by 1975 it stood a chance of becoming a best seller "among `straights' and `gays.' "
 
Larry Kramer, the author and AIDS activist, said in an interview that the book was the first from a "reputable source" that "dared to openly speak of homosexuality as a healthy occurrence."
 
He continued, "I remember reading it and saying, `Wow, that's me,' and I'd never had that reaction before in reading a book about homosexuality."
 
Jonathan Ned Katz, who writes about the social history of homosexuality, said in an interview that before Dr. Tripp's book "you could count on one hand the books on the subject that had any intellectual substance."
 
Dr. Tripp used captivating historical examples to support his arguments, from the ancient Jews to modern prisons. He noted, for example, that during World War II the Federal Bureau of Investigation operated a male bordello in New York City staffed with homosexual agents charged with extracting information from foreign sailors.
 
Clarence Arthur Tripp was born on Oct. 4, 1919, in Denton, Tex. He studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, served in the Navy until minor disabilities led to his discharge and worked for 20th Century Fox making propaganda films for the rest of the war, Mr. Gannett said.
 
He worked in photography through the 1940's, but became increasingly interested in psychology, particularly the psychology of homosexuality. He became friendly with Theodor Reik, a prot嶲?of Freud, and immersed himself in Freudian theory, Mr. Gannett said.
In 1948, when Kinsey's "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" was published, Dr. Tripp contacted Kinsey, visited his Institute for Sex Research in Bloomington, Ind., and worked with him until Dr. Kinsey's death in 1956. The collaboration transformed Dr. Tripp's thinking about homosexuality.
 
At Kinsey's urging, he went back to school. In 1953, he received an undergraduate degree from the New School for Social Research, and in 1957, a doctorate in clinical psychology from New York University.
 
Dr. Tripp maintained a private practice of psychology for years, and taught at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center, from 1955 to 1964.
 
In recent years, Dr. Tripp has worked with Mr. Gannett to prepare a biography of Lincoln that published reports have suggested will disclose a series of homosexual encounters the president had. But Dr. Tripp, who finished the book two weeks before his death, has cautioned in interviews that no conclusions should be drawn until people read the book.
 
Dr. Tripp is survived by his companion, Vacharin Prasertthai.
 
Republican Lawmakers Back Senator in Gay Dispute
By Carl Hulse
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
 
WASHINGTON, April 29 ?Republican leaders in Congress gave strong backing to Senator Rick Santorum today, dismissing calls by gay rights groups and Democrats for him to be replaced as the third-ranking Republican in the Senate for remarks about homosexuality.
 
Senior officials in both houses swiftly rose to Mr. Santorum's defense as Congress returned from a two-week recess and the lawmakers faced questions about him from reporters.
 
"I think Senator Santorum took a very courageous and moral position based upon principles and his world view," said Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader from Texas.
 
Mr. DeLay said he was proud of Mr. Santorum for "standing on principle."
 
Mr. Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican who is the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference has been caught in a storm since he discussed a Texas antisodomy law under review by the Supreme Court during an interview with The Associated Press.
 
Referring to sodomy, he said, "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything."
 
The remarks sparked outrage from gay rights groups, Democrats and a few moderate Republicans who suggested he should apologize or be replaced in the upper echelon of the Senate hierarchy. They made comparisons to the way Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the former Republican leader, was pushed aside after comments seen as racially divisive. But Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, said today that Mr. Santorum's support among his fellow Republicans in the Senate was solid. "Absolutely, he will remain in leadership," Dr. Frist told reporters. "He has the full, 100 percent confidence of the Republican leadership in the United States Senate."
 
Dr. Frist went on to praise his colleague for his "inclusiveness, in terms of growing the Republican Party." Officials said Mr. Santorum thanked his fellow Republican senators for their support in a closed strategy luncheon and received a round of applause.
 
People at the meeting said Mr. Santorum even received expressions of support from fellow Republicans who last week had expressed some misgivings about the comments. Mr. Santorum, who did not speak in public today, has refused to apologize and said that his remarks were more directed at the right to privacy rather than homosexuality. He said his position was shared by a majority of the Supreme Court in upholding a Georgia antisodomy law in 1986.
 
Mr. DeLay repeated that point today, saying the court found "that it is very dangerous to say that whatever you do behind closed doors is your right to privacy."
 
"It undermines a lot of moral questions that we have in this country," he said.
 
To Us, Rosie, You're Just Big Boned
By Joyce Wadler
Wednesday, April 9, 2003
 
I'm sorry that I wasn't here sooner," ROSIE O'DONNELL was saying to the audience at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Awards on Monday night. And a bit later, referring to an interview with DIANE SAWYER last year in which she came out, she asked, "Is there anyone in this room who didn't know I was a big fat" ?substitute lesbian for the word she used ?"before that day?"
 
There's a question we're glad was rhetorical. But on to the Glaad Awards, given to people in the media and entertainment for their "fair, accurate and inclusive representations" of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people and issues. Ms. Sawyer, an honoree, talked to a reporter from Extra about her high-heeled sandals. MARLO THOMAS, CYNDI LAUPER, JOHN WATERS, LAUREN BACALL, CYNTHIA NIXON, DAVID EIGENBERG, BAZ LUHRMANN, NICOLE KIDMAN and EDWARD ALBEE were among the celebrities. No CHER, but PHIL DONAHUE gamely posed with the Cher impersonator HOWIE V. Performing, both in suits and ties, were TONY BENNETT and K.D. LANG, and Ms. Lang's suit was boxier than Mr. Bennett's.
 
"I know a lot of people were confused when they saw Tony singing with a young gentleman," Ms. Lang said. "Why are those two men singing love songs to each other?"
 
Ms. Lauper filled in as a presenter for HARVEY FIERSTEIN, who was said to be snowed in at his home in Connecticut. "He's such a queen," Mr. Fierstein's "Hairspray" co-star, MARISSA JARET WINOKUR, joked backstage, politically incorrect humor (personally our favorite kind) being correct at these awards.
 
Ms. O'Donnell, who received her award for being an advocate for gay parents, talked about two friends who had urged her to come out: NATHAN LANE and Mr. Fierstein. She had been dubious. She said she thought that happiness came from show business. She hadn't realized that coming out would change everything about her life, she said. When it did, she realized how important it was to speak the truth.
 
Among the sweetest and largest gentlemen attending was ESERA TUAOLA, the former N.F.L. linebacker who came out of the closet last year. Mr. Tuaola, who wears a size 54 jacket, was at the awards for the first time.
 
"Before this, I had no idea that this kind of stuff went on," Mr. Tuaola said. "Like Rosie O'Donnell was saying before, you know, like, I'm just happy I'm at the party now. I've arrived at the party late, but I'm here and it's great to be here."
 
Mr. Donahue, with whom we spoke at the end of the evening, also had many fine things to say about the awards. When the conversation turned to television, and we asked Mr. Donahue ?whose talk show had been canceled ?how he felt being in the company of people like TINA BROWN ?whose show was canceled before it even aired ?he demurred.
 
"We're blocking the escalator," Mr. Donahue said. "I've got to get out of here."
 
Goodbye to the Fishers
 
The memorial service for M. ANTHONY FISHER and ANNE FISHER, held aboard the Intrepid yesterday morning, was not your typical send-off. The 2,500 mourners for the couple included GOV. GEORGE E. PATAKI, SENATOR HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON and SENATOR CHARLES E. SCHUMER. THOMAS E. WHITE, secretary of the Army, came from Washington to honor Mr. Fisher with the highest military award for a civilian. There were four huge video screens broadcasting the service and press agents from Rubenstein Associates on hand.
 
The 52-year-old real estate developer, who died with his wife in a plane crash on Friday, was good at everything, his friend and business partner CHARLES DE GUNZBURG said in a eulogy. Mr. Fisher was an aficionado of sailing, wine, art, golf, cars, motorcycles, skyline-changing real estate developments and fund-raising. He was also the chairman of the Intrepid Museum Foundation.
 
The strong military presence, with coffin teams from Arlington National Cemetery and a message from GEN. TOMMY R. FRANKS, perhaps stemmed in part from a Fisher family foundation that has provided housing near major medical centers around the world for the families of military people.
 
Mr. Pataki quoted one of his favorite Talmudic expressions in speaking of Mr. Fisher at the service:
 
"Be strong, be strong, and give your strength to others."
 
With Greg Retsinas
 
Egypt Prison Terms for Homosexuality Conviction
By Abeer Allam (NYT)
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
World Briefing: Middle East
 
GYPT: PRISON TERMS FOR HOMOSEXUALITY CONVICTIONS In a case widely condemned by human rights groups, a Cairo misdemeanor court sentenced 21 men accused of homosexuality to three years in prison for practicing "sexual immorality." Twenty-nine men were acquitted. The defendants, who are free on bail, appealed the verdict. They were first convicted by a state security court in 2001, but the verdict was overturned by President Hosni Mubarak.
 
The Plague We Can't Escape
By Larry Kramer (Co-founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis and founder of Act Up, is author of "Women in Love and Other Dramatic Writings.")
Saturday, March 15, 2003
 
hy does no one have the courage to say loudly and unequivocally that 50 million people around the world are going to die in a matter of days or months or at the most a few years unless they are treated immediately with the life-saving drugs that are now available? I have arrived at this figure after conversations with many experts.
Why has no effective plan been started to stop this immense horror? "AIDS is not a death sentence" is heard over and over again, when it most emphatically is a death sentence to these 50 million people, most of them in countries other than our own, most of them poor and without health insurance. In China, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria and Russia, the number of AIDS cases is predicted to double by 2010, with a total of 50 million to 75 million infected people in those countries alone.
 
This plague is not going away. (And may we all please start calling it a plague?) These 50 million people are dying now. They do not have time to wait while we clean up their countries' water supplies and change their economic and educational systems, rain condoms on their communities, promote abstinence and teach them about the dangers of drug abuse.
 
There simply is not enough time or money to make these noble and expensive suggestions doable. The $15 billion in AIDS programs that the heroic Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health designed and won support for from the Bush White House will not enter the system for two years. It is already bogged down in so much bureaucracy that in my estimation most of it will never see the light of day.
 
Most of all, 50 million dying people do not have time for governments and drug companies to battle endlessly over patent rights and who can manufacture generic versions of life-saving drugs. In the 1940's, streptomycin was the first antibiotic to be effective against tuberculosis. Merck owned exclusive rights to the drug, which meant it could profit mightily from it. But George W. Merck, the company's head and the son of its founder, released its hold on the patent, thus allowing any company to manufacture streptomycin and effectively keeping its cost minimal and hundreds of thousands of people alive. George Merck was on the cover of Time in 1952 above a caption of his own words: "Medicine is for people not for profits."
 
It is impossible to imagine today's Merck or any other pharmaceutical manufacturer being so humane. GlaxoSmithKline, which controls most of the drugs people with H.I.V. must take, refused for years to provide AZT at a reasonable price to poor countries. Only after a publicized dispute did it hand over rights to its AIDS medicines to a local generic drug company in South Africa. AZT was developed to treat H.I.V. at the National Institutes of Health ?financed by taxpayer money ?in collaboration with Burroughs Wellcome, now GlaxoSmithKline. The most recent anti-H.I.V. drug, Fuzeon, also developed in part with taxpayer money, has been priced at $21,000 a year in Europe by its manufacturer, Roche. (It is feared it will cost even more in America.) For one person. That works out to more than $57 a day.
 
It is incumbent upon every manufacturer of every anti-H.I.V. drug to contribute its patents or its drugs free for the salvation of these people. Almost every such drug on the market ?there are some 18 effective drugs ?has already more than paid for its development in spades, and also earned millions of dollars in additional profit for its makers.
 
I believe it is evil for drug companies to possess a means of saving lives and then not providing it to the desperate people who need it. What kind of hideous people have we become? It is time to throw out the selfish notion that these companies have the right not to share their patents. The world should no longer tolerate this. There are too many of us now dying, and there are too many destructive illnesses appearing every day. A new world prescription must be written immediately.
 
When I first heard about what would become known as AIDS there were 41 cases of some strange occurrence. Almost 25 years later we have failed to mount a thoughtful, concerted effort to stop what is now this plague. We have failed to keep up any pressure. We have failed to outrage each other enough so that people in authority would have no choice but to do something.
 
For almost 25 years we had our chance to do something. Year after year, we blew it. AIDS tells us about the worst of America and the world. It tells us that people don't care about others. It shows us over and over and over again that people can be allowed to die. It should break everyone's heart. Why doesn't it?
 
A New Phase for Gay Books
By Martin ARnold
Thursday, February 27, 2003
Here are the conventional wisdoms about why gay and lesbian book publishing is nearly inaudible: assimilation has generally succeeded; so many television shows and movies appeal to gay consumers with gay characters that they have robbed reading time; gay fiction has gotten far beyond "coming out" and is sold on the regular fiction racks in bookstores and not as a niche; the number of gay and lesbian bookstores has declined.
 
So as a genre it is nearly absorbed, if not quite dead. Except that along comes Kensington Publishing, one of the largest general independent book publishers, with a glossy 15-page catalog proclaiming, "On the Cutting-Edge of Gay and Lesbian Publishing." (Kensington's regular catalog also lists gay books.) Which is a new experiment in book publishing. No large mainstream house has had a gay imprint since St. Martin's Press closed its Stonewall Inn Editions in January 2002, although it still publishes a number of gay and lesbian books.
 
The gay and lesbian part of Kensington's list consists mainly of what is called "boyfriend" fiction: light, lively entertainments neither literary nor erotic, glimpses of gay life, mysteries. In short, commercial fiction that is mostly hardcover for men and trade paperback for women, who the house fears have less disposal income.
 
With all the "wisdoms," what chance does Kensington's program have? John Scognamiglio, an editorial director at Kensington Books, said that "we don't overspend for books, and there's a readership for gay and lesbian books at a certain number." First printings are 10,000 to 15,000 copies for hardcover and about 7,500 for trade paperback. Advances are from $5,000 to $25,000, not enough for an author to live on but a better average than those of smaller independent publishers.
 
"We are doing entertaining books that are not depressing," Mr. Scognamiglio said, "not about AIDS or suicide, but are positive and uplifting and fun." Along the away, Kensington is building a valuable backlist, which includes many titles it published first in hardcover and then a year later in trade paperback. Its gay catalog includes 30 backlist titles, mostly fiction, that it hopes will be perennial sellers.
 
Kensington is filling what it perceives as a void in gay publishing: romance fiction, for which the publisher is noted. In gay and lesbian books there is virtually only literary fiction and self-help, published by large houses like St. Martin's Press and by Alyson Publications, a gay publishing house whose publisher, Craig Constante, described it as "a miniature Random House." Meaning a span of books from the literary to the not. (There's also erotica out there, of course.)
 
David Rosen, editor in chief of Insightoutbooks.com, a gay and lesbian book club with 35,000 members, praises Kensington for the very idea of cracking "a tough book market with a line of books similar to sitcoms - a circle of gay friends looking for love while on vacation in Provincetown; funny, witty, easy to read."
 
There is yet a third category of books that is difficult to classify and makes the subject of gay publishing interesting, summarized by this debate: Is "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998) a gay book or a book that has some gay characters and gay incidents? "The Hours," a best seller made into a critically admired movie, is perhaps a literary parallel to Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway." A successful idea begs for imitation. In July St. Martin's will publish Paul Russell's "War Against the Animals," has a parallel to Henry James's "Wings of the Dove," but in this case the triangle will be gay.
 
Keith Kahla, who edits many of St. Martin's gay books, asks this question: "Is this a gay book, or a book with significant gay content?" He answers his own question this way: "Yes, it's a gay book, and no, it's not just a gay book."
 
There are other questions of interest. For instance, one of the most exciting developments in recent years in mainstream publishing has been the creation of five major imprints devoted to books by African-Americans with content relevant to African-Americans. Why not a similar burst for gay authors writing about the gay experience? Mr. Kahla said: "Over the years there's been lots more gay content published by mainstream houses than black authors writing about black content. Until recently there's been a great paucity of black writing for a longer time."
 
African-American is now considered a major growth sector for publishing. Gay and lesbian is not. "Gays are more likely to shop in the main fiction section for books than in a special section," Mr. Kahla said. On the other hand, there are many indications that more and more black authors, like gay writers, are building crossover audiences.
 
Charles Flowers, co-chairman of the Publishing Triangle, a gay-publishing networking group, said: "It's a mystery why more publishers aren't doing what Kensington is, and I think it's a mistake. Publishers aren't giving gay books enough of a push because they have been assimilated in bookstores onto the regular fiction shelves." Kensington, for its part, publishes a number of novels and promotes them all together, en masse. "That works better and makes for bigger sales than publishing one big gay title every other season, which is what the bigger publishers do," Mr. Flowers said.
 
Assimilation has changed gay publishing in another way. What gay authors wrote about 20 years ago or so isn't relevant. Coming out is boring. Good contemporary stories are not.
 
For Michael Lowenthal, the young author of the literary novel "Avoidance" (Graywolf Press, 2002), "there's still a core of readers particularly plugged into looking for the key word, gay." But he added: "A general literary audience at a book reading is no longer particularly concerned about the sexual orientation of the writer or his characters. Nobody is put off. I connect at both gay bookstores and in nongay bookstores."
 
In the end it comes down to the story and how good it is. It was that way in the beginning also, I suppose. Nothing new. What Kensington hopes to recapture is a core of gay readers with the well-written light and lively. It shouldn't be difficult. A year from now their type of fiction will be a genre, I would bet.
 
Tchaikovsky
By Dirk Olin
Sunday, December 8, 2002
Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" will be performed on stages from small towns to the New York City Ballet this month ­ and in "literally hundreds of productions around the world." according to Jeffrey Milarsky, music director and conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra. That, along with the "1812 Overture," "Swan Lake" and certain other works, means that Tchaikovsky, as Milarsky says, "is played more than any composer." Yet where Milarsky and other members of the classical music establishment herald a revival of esteem for Tchaikovsky during recent years, Milton Babbitt, 86, a giant of the serialism movement in modern composing, has a problem with him. "He said Brahms was an untalented bastard ­ that's a quote," Babbitt says. "But I've learned a lot from Brahms, whereas I can't say that about Tchaikovsky." Richard Einhorn, 50, whose compositions have been performed from Lincoln Center to the Netherlands, makes even less effort to disguise his antipathy: "Tchaikovsky has as much to do with real classical music as the Three Tenors have to do with real opera. Most contemporary composers I know haven't listened to Tchaikovsky since the third grade, when they were forced to watch 'Fantasia' and gagged." Babbitt and Einhorn echo earlier derogations of his work as too sentimental (the Victorians) or insufficiently Russian (a group of composers who were Tchaikovsky's late-19th-century contemporaries), but the emergent issue now is a question that could throw what the critic Terry Teachout calls "the Tchaikovsky wars" into Armageddon. Is Tchaikovsky's music gay?

The man certainly was, and it was an open secret in Russian society, particularly after an unconsummated marriage whose failure was relatively well known. But can we really hear Tchaikovsky's sexual orientation in his composition? "Of course," says Joseph Kraus, professor of music theory at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. "There is no completely right or wrong way to listen to any music. And if our interest in his homosexuality forms part of the filter through which we listen, then it would seem that an investigation into this area would be appropriate." Kraus has written most pointedly about Tchaikovsky's "Symphony 'Manfred'" ­which some consider his first significant work after a seven-year creative slump following the disastrous nuptials ­ as a kind of musical "coming out" process.

Balderdash, replies Richard Taruskin, professor of music at the University of California at Berkeley. "That's plumbing some shallows, if you ask me. Tchaikovsky's sexuality may be what interests us, but it mainly distorts if you only look through that lens." Although Babbitt doesn't share Taruskin's enthusiasm for Tchaikovsky's work, he certainly agrees on this point. "I understand that Tchaikovsky suffered terribly and that he was a homosexual, but that doesn't interest me. It would never occur to me to listen to Tchaikovsky in those terms."

HISTORIOGRAPHY

In his own day, when nationalistic sensibilities were ascendant, many countrymen savaged Tchaikovsky for being too stylistically cosmopolitan, "looking to the West while so many other Russians were turning eastward," according to Leon Botstein, a conductor, musicologist and president of Bard College. "Despite the resistance, though, he would become common ground between the two schools."

Not right away. After his death in 1893, Tchaikovsky increasingly came under attack from modernists who found him full of fluff and bombast. Although Igor Stravinsky resuscitated Tchaikovsky's reputation, most modernists still had scant regard for him well into the latter half of the 20th century. "As late as 25 years ago," according to Patrick McCreless, chairman of the Yale University music department, "virtually no one in the music-scholarly community was interested in Tchaikovsky. But things have changed radically."

Walter Frisch, a Columbia music professor, personifies the shift. "If you'd asked me 20 years ago, I might have joined the bandwagon that said he's just bad Beethoven or bad Verdi, that he's too sentimental or pretty, that he's not complex. But that's applying standards developed for other music. He's just not an adherent of the Beethoven model."

COMPOSITION AND APPEAL

Tchaikovsky himself copped to a fundamental inability to master some compositional forms. With much of modern composition prizing rigorous formality, even atonality, the whimsy and melodic emphasis of Tchaikovsky was bound to take some hits. As Babbitt puts it: "It is often said that his music lacks the structure of textbook form. His pieces are mostly studied as orchestral niceties. That's all."

But you can't keep a good tunesmith down. Enter postmodernism. "Today, there is a continuing modernist group that takes issue with him as a composer who they say can't command a grammar of music composition that transcends the imposition of a story line," Botstein says. "But most of this is snobbery. All great art is complex, even when it appears simple."

So Tchaikovsky is more than treacly and twee? "You can make the mistake of mistrusting pleasure," Frisch says. "There's a school that concludes, 'If it's popular, how good can it be?' The postmodern view is more inclusive. It's the same problem as those who value Schoenberg and discount Samuel Barber because his work wasn't on the trajectory of modernism. But today, you don't have to be ashamed of loving Barber's 'Adagio for Strings.'" The young Einhorn remains unconvinced: "If Tchaikovsky is the 'new black,' then serious music is in worse trouble than I feared."

LIFE IN ART

From 'Tchaikovsky: A Life Reconsidered.'
by Alexander Poznansky, included in 'Tchaikovsky and His World' (1998)

"For most of our century Tchaikovsky was portrayed as a sort of fictionalized figure, an embodiment of romantic grief and turbid eroticism supposed by many to have committed suicide as a logical end to his sexual lifestyle. … Recent studies suggest that, given Russian social attitudes, sexual mores and criminal practice in the late 19th century, as well as Tchaikovsky's elevated social standing and the generally sympathetic attitude toward homosexuality in court circles and the imperial family, any scandal or repression involving the composer was most improbable. … An inquiry into the personality of any great artist is imperative if we would deepen and enrich our appreciation of his or her achievement, for it allows us to respond in a more complex and powerful way to the emotional and psychological issues involved in the creative process and in their artistic resolution. In the case of Tchaikovsky, his inner longings, which we cannot fully comprehend without studying the realities of his life, had a bearing on the striking and peculiar emotional poignancy of his music, which today is either extolled or else berated as sentimentalism. In the end, such inquiry will enable us constructively to reconsider the whole set of musicological cliches about Tchaikovsky, and perhaps even reconsider his status in art's pantheon, as well as the relevance of his work to our present-day cultural and spiritual concerns."

Dirk Olin is national editor at The American Lawyer.
Some Outspoken Opinions on Coming Out
By Lisa Belkin
Sunday, November 24, 2002
It is instructive and humbling, after 20 years in this business, to be reminded that what I think I have written is not what others think they have read. I received such a reminder with my last column.
 
What I had meant to write, and what I thought I had written, was one man's opinion, some of which I agreed with and some of which I questioned. The man, Stephen Viscusi, owns a head-hunting firm and is host of a radio show on which he gives career advice. He is also gay, and the column I wrote was about his decision not to share that fact with co-workers over the years. When callers ask whether they should come out to employers, or, more particularly, potential employers, he tells them no.
 
The piece looked frankly at the workplace, where the way things should be often clashes with the way things are. It was also a warning to all, whatever our personal lives ?know your audience when seeking a job.
 
What many of you read, however, was a declaration that gay workers should stay in the closet, which I did not say and obviously (or, I thought it was obvious) do not believe. Most of you asked for a chance to be heard. The rest of this column belongs to you.
 
Ed Baskiewicz, an operating vice president for human resources and diversity for a department store chain: "When asked ?or not asked ?I will say my companion and I saw a great movie last weekend, had a great vacation in Provincetown or attended a gay fund-raiser. Personal sharing of one's life outside of work promotes teamwork, warmth and makes the eight-hours-plus you spend at the job, well, enjoyable and (dare I say) `human.' Yes, it is a tight job market. And yes, the realities sometimes dictate concessions ?I will wear a tie if I have to, travel more frequently than I prefer, etc. But a company that would force me to lie about anything, not just my sexual preference, is one I do not wish to work for."
 
Christopher Buczek, marketing consultant: "Stephen Viscusi's recommendation certainly applies during the interview process, when job qualifications are the only criteria being assessed and questions about personal matters are not only inappropriate, but often illegal. But once in a job, the few closeted individuals I know are not at the top of any corporate ladder. Everyone knows that they're gay, and they are, I think, pitied. People who force co-workers to participate in a needless, endless and undignified charade are not leadership material."
 
Hilary North, insurance executive: "I have not felt it necessary to broadcast my sexuality to the C.E.O. or to the guys in the mailroom, but those who work closely with me on a daily basis are in the loop. I disagree that people should leave their private lives at home. I don't want to know every detail of the trials and tribulations, but it can be helpful to know why someone's job performance is suffering and to give them some slack for a certain amount of time."
 
Glenn Lunden, an urban planner: "Married employees receive benefits, like health insurance, for their spouses as a matter of course; gay and lesbian employees fortunate enough to work for an employer that offers domestic partnership benefits must declare their sexuality to receive those benefits. If an employer does not offer domestic partnership benefits, gay and lesbian employees should consider coming out at the office, anyway; employers will never provide domestic partnership benefits if they don't realize there's a demand for them."
 
Kim Mills, education director of Human Rights Campaign: "What many of us in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community are seeing ?and we can't all be deluded ?is much greater acceptance in the workplace. We hear from recruiters that more job applicants are asking about nondiscrimination policies and domestic-partner benefits, even if they're not gay. To many people, these policies signal a workplace that is welcoming, that does more than pay lip service to diversity."
 
Eric Marcus, writer: "At first, I felt angry about Stephen Viscusi and his advice to gay callers. But now that I'm past that, I just feel sad. Sad for him. Sad for the people who call. And sad for those who call and feel compelled to take his advice. The reality is that many people do need to stay in the closet to keep their jobs, but even in places where you wouldn't expect, there are many gay people who are no longer hiding."
 
Dean Sandler, marketing coordinator at Morgan Stanley: "Every heterosexual person I have worked with has told me their sexual orientation within the first 15 minutes of meeting them. They don't realize they do, but whether through pictures at a desk or talking about vacations, they do. Who you love is as integral to your humanity as your race or religion. Printing this homophobic advice is like telling a Jewish person to come to work on a religious High Holiday, or suggesting black people paint their faces white, just to avoid discrimination at work."
 
In a First, a Lesbian Is Elected District Attorney in San Diego
By John M. Broder
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
 
San Diego, Nov. 12 - One of the bitterest San Diego campaigns in memory came to a welcome close today, when officials declared that a state judge had ousted the district attorney after an 18-month campaign featuring charges of corruption, anti-Semitism, mental instability and sex discrimination.


But one issue that was not aired in this conservative county was the winner's sexual orientation. With her victory over District Attorney Paul Pfingst sealed, Judge Bonnie Dumanis of Superior Court will become the first openly gay prosecutor elected in the country, gay advocates say.


Judge Dumanis eked out her victory by about 3,500 votes of more than 570,000 cast in San Diego County. The race is nonpartisan, but it was no secret to the voters that she is a Democrat and he a moderate Republican. The same voters preferred the conservative Republican candidate for governor, Bill Simon Jr., by more than 11 percentage points over Gov. Gray Davis.


Judge Dumanis claimed victory this afternoon and addressed a question about her sexual orientation, saying, "My orientation doesn't have anything to do with the job and I don't intend it to have anything to do with the job.


"It is a part of me that I am proud of," she added. "And I do, by the way, have an agenda, and that is public safety."


Judge Dumanis's campaign manager, Kevin Tilden, said it was a mark of social progress that homosexuality was not an issue in the campaign, even in a city with so conservative a reputation.


"There was enough meat to chew on without getting into Bonnie's sexual orientation," said Mr. Tilden, who is also chairman of the Lesbian and Gay Men's Community Center of San Diego.


He said Judge Dumanis's margin of victory could have been provided by the gay neighborhoods Hillcrest and North Park, which voted overwhelmingly for her. But he said it was just as likely that her sexual orientation had cost her thousands of votes in the suburbs.


"We don't know if people even knew she was gay or lesbian," Mr. Tilden said. "We can't hypothesize. But this is a countywide election and you could ask whether being gay cost her more votes than it netted her."


Mr. Pfingst gained a solid reputation as a prosecutor in his eight years in office, winning nationwide notice for an impressive felony conviction rate, a large increase in collections of child support payments and innovative programs for victims of rape and other violent crimes.


He won a death sentence this year in the highly publicized prosecution of David Westerfield for the murder of 7-year-old Danielle van Dam.


But what was perceived as his imperious manner and numerous missteps in his 300-lawyer office hurt his re-election chances. Most damaging was a no-confidence vote last year by 68 percent of the members of his office. Deputy district attorneys said he had failed to enforce ethics codes in his office; one lawyer was prosecuted for running a real estate business out of the district attorney's office on government time, and several prominent cases were taken over by the state attorney general. Two female lawyers said they were demoted after returning from maternity leaves, accusing Mr. Pfingst of sex discrimination.


A United States customs inspector who declined to give his name said that virtually all his colleauges voted against Mr. Pfingst because of his reluctance to charge people who assaulted officers.


"A lot of times, the D.A. wouldn't prosecute even if we're holding our teeth in our hands," he said. "Everybody I work with, whether extremely liberal or extremely conservative, voted for Dumanis."


Mr. Pfingst was also accused of planting a question about Judge Dumanis's mental health at a candidate forum during the primary campaign. She was forced to acknowledge that she attempted suicide in the 1980's after her sister's murder.
Judge Dumanis struck one of the most telling blows with a devastating television commercial featuring the parents of Stephanie Crowe, a 12-year-old girl from Escondido who was killed in January 1998. Mr. Pfingst's office charged her 14-year-old brother and two friends in the crime when evidence pointed to a drifter who was seen in the area the night of the killing. The charges against the boys were dropped a year later, and the transient is now awaiting trial. The Crowe family is suing the county.


Mr. Pfingst accused the judge of orchestrating a smear campaign against him for anti-Semitic remarks he was said to have made 17 years ago. A deputy in his office filed a discrimination suit against the county in September charging that Mr. Pfingst had used an ethnic slur in referring to a colleague in after-work comments with other young prosecutors. Judge Dumanis and her supporters gave copies of depositions in the case to reporters. Mr. Pfingst denied having made the comments but said he might have been present when a Jewish former colleague was ridiculed. Mr. Pfingst is Roman Catholic; Judge Dumanis is Jewish.


Mr. Pfingst did not raise Judge Dumanis's sexual orientation in the campaign, although in the final days he made frequent references to his wife and children and to his opponent's "lifestyle." Radio hosts and Christian conservatives carried on a relatively muted dialogue, but it never reached the level of ugliness seen in campaigns elsewhere.


"Nobody dared bring it up; it was as sotto voce as could be," said Samuel Popkin, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego. "What really decided the election was that Pfingst made a lot of enemies on his staff," Professor Popkin said. "And that never helps. When the other D.A.'s say, `We don't support you,' that's a very big slap in the face."

At Work, How Far to Leave the Closet
By Lisa Belkin
Sunday, November 10, 2002
 
TEPHEN VISCUSI is the host and creator of "On the Job," a nationally syndicated radio show. Once each week, employees and job seekers call with practical questions (not "what are employers allowed to ask," but "what do employers really want to know").

 Mr. Viscusi gives real-world advice ?don't wear perfume to the job interview, it might remind the interviewer of his ex; buy one of those teeth-whitening kits and clean up your smile, it might make all the difference.


Periodically ?and more often lately ?he'll hear from gay listeners who are wondering how much of their personal lives to share at the office. "I tell them it's hard enough to find a job, let alone keep one," Mr. Viscusi says. "Why muddy the waters by bringing up something that has nothing to do with your ability to perform the job?

 They may feel better about letting the secret out. But will they feel better when they don't get the jobs or recognition they want?"


The question comes in waves. He heard it a lot after the actress Ellen DeGeneres talked about her homosexuality, and more recently, after a similar declaration by Rosie O'Donnell. Those who call with this question, he says, "feel a dilemma about whether they should be true to themselves or keep things hidden. Often they're being pressured by a partner who feels hidden away, like the arguments some couples have about wearing a wedding ring. But it didn't help either Rosie or Ellen to tell America about their sexual preferences. One's sexuality has no place in the workplace."


He tells his callers all those things. What he doesn't tell them is that this is advice he has followed in his own life over the last two decades. Mr. Viscusi and his partner met in college and are still together ?a fact he has rarely mentioned in all these years at work.


His first job upon graduation in 1980 was as a salesman for a large furniture company. Although the design end of the furniture industry is "fairly accepting," he says, and although he was based in Manhattan, which is equally so, his particular employer was "a large, conservative, Midwestern-based company, and it was very clear to me that it was totally inappropriate to discuss anything about my personal life." Every December, he went to the holiday party alone. When he and his partner decided to rent a house on Fire Island, he told co-workers he would be vacationing on Block Island "because that sounded less overtly gay."


In time, Mr. Viscusi started his own business ?a head-hunting firm for the furniture and design industry. Business boomed, growing from 4 employees to 64. "Even though I owned the business, and I owned the corporate culture, I still didn't feel comfortable parading my private life in public," he said. Then, in the early 1990's, his industry crashed, and he segued into the world of job-hunting advice, creating his radio program, which is on more than 100 stations.


He realizes that his belief that gay men and lesbians should "not advertise their lives" at the office will rankle many who have fought for acceptance of all lifestyles. And he agrees that this is not the way the world should work, but is unquestionably the way it does work. A recent study by Witek-Combs Communications, for instance, found that more than 70 percent of Americans believe gay men and lesbians are discriminated against at work ?fired, harassed, denied promotion ?because of sexual orientation. Randy New, a lawyer specializing in employment discrimination, warns that homosexuals regularly face workplace discrimination "in ways that we would find disgusting if it were done to African-American employees, for example."


When I argue with Mr. Viscusi and suggest that the only way to chisel at discrimination is to step forward, not hide, he agrees. Then he reminds me that his callers are not asking advice on how to lead a crusade. They are wondering how to get or keep a particular job. And that goal, he says, won't be helped by "gabbing about inappropriate details of your life while you're at work." By that, he says, he means all employees, regardless of what the details are.


In other words, we should all show more discretion and leave chunks of our private lives back at home. There should be less gabbing about potty training or wedding planning or fertility charting at the water cooler (or in sound-permeable cubicles), thank you very much. "All this personal chatter is a distraction," explains Mr. Viscusi, who also rarely talks about his mother's death or his adopted son or a number of other nonworking matters while at work.


So why is he talking to me about this now, in this very public space? He says it is because he is hearing the question increasingly often and he suspects his listeners aren't listening when he answers. If a heterosexual career counselor gave this advice, he says, it would sound patronizing at best and hostile at worst. But because he's lived as he preaches, he hopes people will hear. "It's just common sense," he says. "Especially in a tight job market like this, why add something that could damage your prospects?"

 
Gay History Is Still in the Closet
By Richard Goldstein
Wednesday, October 30, 2002
arry Hay was a remarkable figure by any measure, though most Americans have not heard his name. As a Marxist who proudly called himself a sissy, he was the first American to imagine a gay community.


In 1948, Mr. Hay would later write, homosexuals were "the one group of disadvantaged people who didn't even know they were a group." He set out to change that by organizing ?on the muscle beaches of Los Angeles, no less. At a time when any gathering of more than two homosexuals was a crime in California, Mr. Hay and a few friends created the first significant gay rights group in America, the Mattachine Society. When he died last week at the age of 90, he had lived long enough to see his impossible dream become an international movement.


Yet most gay people know little about Harry Hay. Even fewer know that his comrades, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who founded the first American lesbian organization, Daughters of Bilitis, are still alive.


It is unlikely that these pioneers will be honored with a postage stamp. Gay and lesbian leaders have yet to find a place in the civil rights pantheon.


Why are the gay movement's roots so obscured? The reason is the invisibility of gay history. With rare exceptions, schools fail to acknowledge that there even is such a thing. Only university students who opt for elective courses ?if they are offered ?learn that, in the 1920's, gay liberation was an important part of Emma Goldman's radical agenda. You won't find that mentioned in the film "Reds," in which Goldman was a prominent character. Nor can you deduce from "Cabaret" (film or play) that gay people in the Weimar Republic did more than patronize kinky nightclubs. The gay community was a very visible part of Berlin's political landscape, and its leader Magnus Hirschfeld was an emblem of the liberal society that the Nazis smashed. The famous photo of storm troopers burning books is widely thought to have been taken at Mr. Hirschfeld's library.


The gay movement has produced a group of historians whose work is widely recognized in the academy. Yet their writing rarely reaches the classroom. As a result most people know very little about the lives of homosexuals before the Stonewall riot of 1969 and the civil-rights activism that grew out of it. Young people are far more likely to identify Ru Paul, the popular drag performer, than Harvey Milk, America's first openly gay elected official, who was assassinated in 1978.


The silence about gay history persists because teaching this subject raises anxieties about promoting homosexuality. Countless school boards have decided that young people must be protected from positive information about the gay community lest they be converted to that "lifestyle." Last month, the chancellor of Boston University, John Silber, closed down a a student club dedicated to bringing together gay and straight students at a high school academy affiliated with the university (and founded by Mr. Silber). According to a report in a Boston University student newspaper, Mr. Silber later said that many homosexuals come to their orientation "because that is the way in which they were first seduced into sex. Not because of anything else. And there's just no reason for us to encourage that."


Mr. Silber's stance has not gone without protest ?and similar so-called "gay-straight alliances" do exist in some 800 high schools. But support groups and lectures about preventing homophobic violence are just the first step toward presenting a full picture of gay and lesbian lives. No other group is subject to such a blackout of its past. This is a problem Harry Hay didn't live to see solved.


Richard Goldstein is executive editor of The Village Voice and author of "The Attack Queers: Liberal Society and the Gay Right."

 
Openly Gay Politicians Remain Scarce
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sunday, October 20, 2002   Filed at 1:49 p.m. ET
MADISON, Wis. (AP) -- Her Republican rival assails her ``radical pro-gay agenda,'' but Tammy Baldwin -- who in 1998 became the first out-of-the-closet lesbian in Congress -- can take comfort in the power of incumbency.

Openly gay politicians remain a rarity in America -- just 228 out of 511,000 federal, state and local officeholders, according to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund. Once elected, however, they are no easier to unseat than other incumbents, as Baldwin and the two openly gay men in Congress are proving in this campaign.
 

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