Question of Gay and Lesbian Rights

The Bible-beating smugness snaking many of the faces last Monday night at the Santa Ana City Council chambers underscored why I rooted for Orange County Cultural Pride from the Council members’ breezeway.

I grew up in Cypress next door to a family of three girls and two boys headed by a lesbian couple named Elaine and Linda. They were nice women raising decent children who all turned out heterosexual. I attended Bible school with the children. I learned respect for the women from my parents. Unfortunately, a conspiracy of silence bubbled in my neighborhood. Elaine and Linda felt compelled to identify themselves as biological sisters in the face of contrary evidence. Most of the adult neighbors supported the lie by changing the subject when questioned by their own children.

Out of respect for their privacy, Elaine and Linda are pseudonyms. This plus their presentation of themselves as siblings stems from having swallowed intolerance and bigotry--the rigidity masqueraded by Christian Alert and its cohorts as “traditional values.”

Christian Alert and its ilk assume that lesbians and gays are “sodomites” and that a pride festival would misrepresent the community. I beg to differ. As a board member of the county’s lesbian and gay hot line, I have found that 96% of all the callers seek alternatives to the bar scene.

Clearly the interests of Santa Ana’s gays and lesbians--as well as those of their brothers and sisters in Orange County’s 27 other cities--reach far beyond the bedroom. They are taking responsibility for themselves! They look to OCCP to promote the facts on all aspects of their lives. They can do without the kind of falsehood-breeding which sent my neighbors Elaine and Linda into hiding more than 20 years ago, and which still prevents self-acceptance for thousands of homosexual women and men today.

KELLI BOND

Cypress