AT THE EYE OF A STORM IN IRVINE : A More-or-Less Typical Irvine Couple Fight to Preserve Gay Protection in City’s Unique Human Rights Ordinance

They are typically suburban--right down to their two-car garage, back-yard barbecue, stereo-console room and comfortable, traditional furnishings.

Their jobs signify both material success and Ph.D. respectability. One of them is a corporate manager and chemist, the other a state university professor.

And their 1,600-square-foot, single-story home is in the heart of Irvine, that ultimate symbol of modern suburbia.

“We’re like any couple here. We keep up the lawn; we pay our bills; we want to be good neighbors,” says the oldest of the two, James Boone, 56, the chemist and USC alumnus.

In a pointedly matter-of-fact tone, he adds: “We’re really like anyone else who’s settled down here.”

But not exactly.

Boone and Joseph Bucuzzo, 48, an associate professor of mathematics at Cal State Fullerton, are a gay couple who began their “committed life partnership” 15 years ago, not long before they bought their home in their tree-lined, green-belted neighborhood.

They are also outspoken activists for gay rights--especially Boone, who was on the Irvine citizens panel that helped draft the city’s “human rights” ordinance.

The Irvine City Council last July 12, by a 4-0 vote, adopted the first such comprehensive rights ordinance in the county. The ordinance forbids job, housing and other kinds of discrimination based on a person’s race, color, religion, national origin, gender, age, marital status, physical handicap, or sexual orientation. (The Irvine ordinance is much broader than one adopted in 1986 in Laguna Beach, which deals only with protection of the rights of gays.)

Because of its inclusion of protection for gays, the Irvine ordinance has become the center of a heated debate over gay rights.

On March 29, the city announced that the Irvine Values Coalition, an organization of residents opposed to the sexual-orientation provision of the ordinance, had collected 5,433 valid signatures on a petition--enough to force the City Council either to eliminate the sexual orientation provision or to put the issue to citywide vote.

On Tuesday, the City Council is expected to act on the issue. If an election is scheduled, it would probably be held either Nov. 7 or June 5, 1990. Four Irvine council members said this week that they favor putting the ordinance on the ballot. The fifth, Cameron Cosgrove, said he is not willing to commit himself until seeing the city attorney’s final report, but indicated that he favors an election.

“It’s ridiculous to say homosexuals are asking for--or gaining--special privileges” under the ordinance, says Boone, who was the “gay representative” on the nine-member city Committee on Human Rights, which recommended adoption of the comprehensive rights ordinance after conducting studies in 1987.

“We’re not asking for special protection,” he says. “We seek equal protection--no more, no less. Now their (Irvine Values Coalition) initiative is saying: ‘Hey, it’s all right to discriminate against homosexuals.’ ”

Although Boone says he is convinced that most Irvine voters would support retaining the sexual-orientation provision of the ordinance, he says that, should the provision be voted out, the rejection “would clearly be a vote for discrimination. It would send a most unfortunate message to all minorities: that this community isn’t willing to go on record to provide them their rightful moral and legal protections.”

Indeed, many gay activists, including Boone and Bucuzzo, argue that the coalition’s opposition is symptomatic of what some called a “homophobic vehemence” in U.S. society. This, they say, includes an alarming increase in gay-bashing assaults.

“There are some people who can’t see past the sexual orientation of others. They see only their own prejudices and biases,” Bucuzzo says.

And there is still the overwhelming fear of job reprisals. “We’re talking about economic violence, about gays who have lost, or would lose, their jobs if they are somehow found out,” he says.

The vast majority of gays and lesbians still fear “the possible consequences of coming out,” Bucuzzo says. “They believe it is still safer to be silent--and stay in hiding.”

For much of his life, James Boone was haunted by the image of gays as something monstrous.

Raised in Corpus Christi, Tex., he was one of 7 children in a devoutly Catholic, Irish-American family. To condone homosexuality, let alone be gay, was unthinkable to him.

Yet, he recalls, “I always knew I was somehow different. I was a very angry young man. Life didn’t seem to make sense.

“I didn’t even really know what a gay person was--except that he was somehow scummy, an awful kind of person, a degenerate. But I knew I wasn’t any of that, so I didn’t think I could be gay.”

Instead, he remembers, “you went on and did all the things that everyone else says you’re supposed to be doing . . . like getting married.”

Boone met his wife when he was an undergraduate at Jesuit-affiliated St. Louis University. Two years later, in 1956, they were married while he was doing doctoral work in chemistry at USC.

In 1959, when he was hired by a major Los Angeles-based mining corporation, the Boones settled in northern Orange County, where they raised their four children.

But, Boone says, their marriage, already beset with “communications problems,” began to unravel. Their relationship grew worse when he began to question his “sexual identity” and traditional church teachings on sexuality and other moral issues.

When he finally recognized the possibility of his homosexuality, the discovery, he says, was devastating: “You see, all my life, we were told that homosexuals were the enemy. And now, I was one of the enemy.”

He took the next emotionally painful step: He told his wife. Attempts at marriage counseling and group therapy followed, but in early 1973, they separated. Their divorce became final 2 years later.

Even more agonizing, he recalls, was telling his four children, then 15, 14, 13 and 8.

“It was a year after (moving out of the house). I took each of the three oldest aside, one by one. I told them I was gay. They said they already knew--they had learned about it by way of family relatives.

“I tried to tell them I was leaving their mother--and not them . . . that I was no different than what I was before as their father . . . that I still love them very much.

“Looking back now,” he says, his voice halting and barely audible, “it seems so clear. I was always gay. But for such a long time, you feel like you’re the only one. You feel so alone.”

Boone met Joseph Bucuzzo in late 1973.

They had similar upbringings. Growing up in the Boston region, Bucuzzo was also raised in a staunchly traditional household, one of five children in an Italian-American Catholic family.

Yet the recognition of his homosexuality, he says, came much earlier than did Boone’s.

“I always knew I was gay, maybe as far back as junior high. But I never told anyone--I didn’t dare--and I never acted on it (sexually) until I was almost 30,” says Bucuzzo, who earned his doctorate at the University of Notre Dame and in 1970 was appointed to Cal State Fullerton’s mathematics faculty.

The next year he began attending public seminars about homosexuality that were being held at various university campuses in Orange County and other Southern California areas.

“You find out there are other perfectly normal people who happen to be gays and lesbians but who were, like me, so secretive and isolated,” he recalls.

But being a gay person, Bucuzzo says, is not--as the Irvine Values Coalition and others contend--”a matter of choice, a ‘preferred’ life style.”

Such foes, he says, “take this absurdity even further. They say that somehow we can all be ‘saved’--that we can just as easily become un-gay !”

“This is the purest nonsense,” Bucuzzo says. “You can’t pick your sexual orientation--homosexual or heterosexual--like deciding what color suit you’re going to wear to work.”

Social scientists, he says, “tell us that a person’s sexual orientation is something that is established at a very early age in childhood.”

“We fall in love the same way that heterosexuals do,” Bucuzzo says. “You’re drawn by a person’s sensitivity, their intelligence and values, and because they’re fun to be with.

“You find,” he says, “you want to be with him the rest of your life.”

In 1975, Bucuzzo and Boone went house-hunting. They found a newly built, three-bedroom home in Irvine. It cost $52,000 and was close to city parks and freeways. Irvine itself, a new city, seemed ideal.

“It’s that planned-community reputation. It’s that being a university town, as well as a family town,” Boone says. “It’s the residents--they’re more educated, more cosmopolitan, more progressive.”

In other words, it seemed a community that would be hospitable to gays.

Still, Bucuzzo and Boone kept a very low profile for the first 3 years. Being a gay couple, even more so than now, was not a fact that most people publicized.

“You’re always wary about coming out--and very fearful,” Bucuzzo says. “You never know what the people will say or do, whether they will be supportive and understanding--or be one of those (anti-gay) extremists.”

Boone and Bucuzzo came out in 1978, the year the Briggs initiative, Proposition 6, was put on the state ballot.

The proposal--sponsored by Republican John Briggs, the fiery conservative state senator from Orange County--would have allowed the firing of any public schoolteacher who engaged in or advocated gay activity.

The initiative galvanized religious fundamentalist coalitions praising the measure and gay-backed alliances condemning it.

Boone and Bucuzzo used the Proposition 6 controversy to formally introduce themselves to their Irvine neighbors.

“We asked them over for coffee and pastries,” Boone recalls. “We shared with them our concerns and said we hoped they would vote no.”

Then, as casually as possible, “we mentioned that, “ ‘oh, we’re gay, you know.’ ”

The replies, he says, were almost always the same: “They said, ‘Oh, we thought you were,’ but it didn’t make any difference to them.”

When Proposition 6 was defeated by a 2-to-1 margin in November, 1978, it seemed to usher in an era of greater openness for pro-gay organizations--and for some gays, like Bucuzzo and Boone, a personal activism.

They supported the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Orange County and the Election Committee of County of Orange, a gay-backed political action group. They spoke to college and other community groups as part of an educational program sponsored by local chapters of the Parents & Friends of Lesbians & Gays.

And in 1986, when Boone was appointed to Irvine’s Committee on Human Rights, the climate seemed favorable for municipal actions to bar discrimination against gays. Earlier that year, the Laguna Beach City Council--led by Mayor Robert F. Gentry, the county’s only openly gay elected official--became the first city in the county to adopt such an ordinance.

But by early 1988, when Irvine’s more sweeping rights ordinance was presented at City Council hearings, the mood seemed to have changed.

“We knew it (gay rights protection) would be opposed. We knew there would be anger,” Boone says. “But we didn’t expect--at least in Irvine--to be subjected to such hysteria and nastiness, such a replay of old myths.”

To Boone, the opposition of the Irvine Values Coalition is part of a well-orchestrated attack. He cites the support given the coalition by four conservative Republican legislators: Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (Fullerton), Rep. Robert K. Dornan (Garden Grove), Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (Newport Beach) and Assemblyman Nolan Frizzelle (Huntington Beach).

In a widely circulated letter seeking support for the Irvine Values Coalition’s initiative campaign, the legislators urged others to “stand up and affirm the heterosexual ethic” and not to “allow those who espouse a perverse life style to dictate the moral standards in our society.”

Boone calls the letter “another example of political homophobia” and says it signals an attempt “to tear down the entire (Irvine rights) ordinance, piece by piece.”

If this happens, Boone says, “you’re right back where we were in the ‘50s and ‘60s--with the same arguments these people used to keep others they didn’t like in their place. All you have to do is substitute black or Asian or some other minority in place of sexual orientation. No one is safe from discrimination unless everyone is.”

Only an estimated 2.2% of Irvine’s population of 100,000 people are nonwhite minorities, which include black, Asian, Pacific Islander, American Indian. There is no official figure on the number of gays in Irvine, but gay community leaders estimate that gays represent about 10% of the county’s population.

Boone says local cases of discrimination--including those involving jobs and housing for gays--were reported to the city’s Committee on Human Rights. Although the committee said the city’s overall record was “favorable,” it recommended that Irvine reaffirm its reputation as a city open to all groups, including gays, by adopting a comprehensive rights ordinance.

But while Boone, like many other gay activists, insists the Irvine Values Coalition represents a “small minority,” he says he does not underestimate the “levels of viciousness” that might surface in an election campaign.

His case in point:

“I do this sociological kind of experiment sometimes when I drive the freeways,” he says. “In the back window, I put up a sign--I’M GAY & HAPPY--just to test the reactions.

“By far, most people are friendly--they smile, they give me the thumbs-up. But some toss debris at me, spit and curse. It’s scary, this kind of hate.

“Once,” he says, “someone tried to run me off the road.”

The most affecting, the most personal--in many ways, the most crucial--tests of acceptance are still familial.

When Boone attended his family reunion in Texas 9 years ago, Bucuzzo for the first time went with him--and went openly as his life partner. They have returned that way ever since.

When Boone’s oldest child, Jim, then 25, was married 5 years ago, the wedding was held in the back yard of Boone’s and Bucuzzo’s Irvine home. Two years later, a wedding reception was held there for Boone’s daughter, Kathy, and her husband.

“These were truly family affairs,” Boone says, smiling. “We had wall-to-wall relatives here both times. All my kids were here--and my former wife.”

There has been another sign of familial embrace: Both Boone’s and Bucuzzo’s mothers paid them visits. (Boone’s father died in 1978, Bucuzzo’s father in 1963.)

“Before my mother died (in 1978), she told me she was happy for me, because I was happy and had found someone to share my life with,” Bucuzzo says.

And Boone’s mother, now 87, writes regularly to her son--and to Bucuzzo. At first, Bucuzzo says, she would sign her letters and cards to him “Elizabeth” or “Jim’s Mother.”

Then a few years ago, after one of her annual 3-week visits to the Irvine home, she sent Bucuzzo yet another warm thank-you note.

This time she signed it, “Love, Mom.”