Gays Seek to Be Heard With Ads : Media: Two L.A.-based groups are helping finance the campaign. Personal stories--mundane and traumatic--are told.

Throughout the 1980s, it seemed that the voices of some gay Americans were to be heard nearly everywhere. Strident voices, chanting in the streets. Dying voices, murmuring in AIDS hospices. Contentious voices, debating in political campaigns.

Now, some gays want their voices to be heard through a different and powerful means: advertising.

In their first major-media ad campaign, two Los Angeles-based homosexual groups are spending thousands of dollars to put forth in Madison Avenue fashion the self-image some of the nation’s gay population wants to project.

In some ways, the campaign seems similar to those of the National Rifle Assn. and a few major oil companies: an attempt to put appealing human faces on provocative organizations or movements. In the quarter-page ads, gays and their families tell personal stories of their experiences, both mundane and traumatic. One is entitled, “I’m proud of my lesbian daughter.”

The ads’ essential messages are wrought to pluck at the same chords that any number of more traditional campaigns might: “We work, we pay taxes, we go to church or synagogue. . . . We are more like you than we are different, but we also have differences and we should be respected for our differences,” says Catherine Coker, founder and executive director of the Lesbian and Gay Public Awareness Project.

Such a pitch is rather at variance with the recent news images of some gay and/or AIDS activists momentarily halting the Rose Parade with a sit-down protest, infiltrating Catholic events dressed as haloed angels or posing as Knights of Columbus, or tossing bloody-colored paint in protest at public buildings.

Starting Monday in The Times and already in major national magazines, the ads coincide with Gay Pride Week nationally and Los Angeles’ 20th annual gay and lesbian festival and parade next weekend. Their sponsors consider them a major ice-breaking precedent that other newspapers and magazines may now be more willing to follow.

Certainly, it has stirred discussion in the gay community about the efficacy of such advertising as a wedge into public consciousness.

“The political (activity) is important. We don’t do that,” says Coker. “We’re dealing with the social. You can legislate until you’re blue in the face, but the truth of the matter is that when public perception changes, we won’t need to be putting the kind of energy into these other areas.”

The real people on the paste-up ads are winning and winsome. Their faces could sell cake mix or orange juice. Their real-life messages are the stuff of Fourth of July speeches under the town gazebo--”Do you believe in civil rights?”--and of police blotters--”Dan is gay. So they crippled him for life.”

They are intended to tug at gut emotions: One contains a diary excerpt from Bobby Griffith--a 20-year-old Californian who jumped off a freeway overpass after agonizing over his homosexuality and his fundamentalist family trying to “cure” him.

Ideally, says Coker, the ads should encourage closeted homosexuals to feel part of something big and acceptable, and invite non-gays to share in their mutual humanity. If they do, there is a contribution coupon at the bottom of each ad.

The ads, assembled by volunteers, cost nearly $20,000 to run at the discounted rate given to nonprofit agencies. Of that, $8,000 was donated by Chicago Resource Center, which gives grants to gay and lesbian fund-raising efforts, said Coker.

The rest came from individuals and groups, including $1,500 from Christopher Street West, the veteran Los Angeles gay organization that sponsors the gay and lesbian pride festival and has mounted its own “Take Pride” ad campaign.

Awareness Project’s ads have been “adopted” by a gay group in Boulder, Colo., which is footing the bill to run them in that city’s newspaper, said Coker. Gays in Seattle, Phoenix and Akron, Ohio hope to do the same, she said.

The four ads appeared in somewhat different form in the LA Weekly last year as a kind of test marketing.

Christopher Street West’s own monthlong campaign is the first major gay media campaign in “mainstream” press, says spokesman David M. Smith. The $30,000 made at last year’s festival has bought full-page “Take Pride” ads in the June issues of Harper’s, Egg, L.A. Style and Interview. Of that amount, $5,500 went to buy, at discounted nonprofit rates, the same full-page ad in two California editions of Newsweek.

Five years ago, Newsweek and two other news weeklies were sued by Christopher Street West after rejecting their ad with the legend, “Gay Pride/It Begins With Everyone.” Smith credits the acceptance of the new ads “50% to a more professional quality and 50% because times have changed.”

Ten billboards, space donated by Gannett Outdoor Co., carry the Christopher Street West message and are up around Los Angeles for the month of June.

Gay activist Steve Schulte, who was one of West Hollywood’s original city councilmen, says the spots are meant to “help reinforce the sort of matter-of-factness of homosexuality in the population.”

Image-shaping ads are consonant with the thrust of a recent Doubleday book, “After the Ball,” by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen. The book excoriates the “national sickness” of homosexual hate. But in prescribing a cure, the authors eschew traditional mass demonstrations as counterproductive, “ghastly freak shows,” opting for a Madison Avenue “propaganda” wedge into the American psyche.

The gay community, it contends, should put across an unthreatening, button-down profile, showing itself to be a segment of American pluralism like any other, except for its sexual preference.

Here is where Gunther Freehill objects. He has been arrested at such ACT UP/LA (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) protests as the Rose Parade and a recent Board of Supervisors meeting, and for him, some ideas in “After the Ball” represent “mushy” thinking.

He and others believe that such vigorous pitches to the mainstream may alienate gays who do not feel themselves to be everyday middle Americans.

Freehill said the ads are “encouraging people to think about the gay community sloppily, that we really are the same except for what we do in bed. It’s a commonly held belief, but I really think that sells us short.

“(Mainstream) people are going to be more comfortable with people who appear ‘quote unquote’ normal. But we’re not about fitting into a preset mold. We’re about breaking the mold. . . . When you ask for acceptance you implicitly suggest that the power structure is valid.”

Bob Craig is publisher of “Frontiers,” a gay news magazine and a member of the board of directors of Christopher Street West. There will be those, says Craig, “who feel (the ads) are a little too Pablum” for so diverse a community.

“It’s difficult to try to do a mainstream campaign. How do you take sexuality out of a sexual movement?” In particular, “How do you organize in order to create a better education and understanding when you know there are areas of your own community, especially regarding sexuality, that it’s very difficult to get anybody to accept?”

Those “areas” are familiar stereotypes. They include: spiked and studded men, the drag queens, the blatantly promiscuous. They make conspicuous targets for anti-homosexual legislators and divines, and the public is “laboring under whatever images are constructed for them by the Dannemeyers (conservative Republican congressman William E. Dannemeyer of Fullerton), and even the media,” says Virginia Uribe, founder of Project 10, a school-sponsored counseling program for homosexual students.

John Maceri is past president of the Valley Business Alliance, which numbers among its nearly 300 gay and lesbian members business executives, lawyers and realtors. The group donated to the current Awareness Project ad campaign, in part, because when his friends turn out for gay events, “What ends up on the news is the one or two drag queens. We don’t see the gay fathers, the doctors, the tennis team.” For Maceri and his friends, then, “the ads put reality in a real concise form.”

In that, sponsors said, the ads are but a counterpunch to redress stereotypes, to reclaim the middle ground for a gay invisible majority. Any ad, any image is “a leveler,” said Schulte, “a palatable common ground which is by definition going to cut off the edges even within this community. How many drag queens do you see in those (ad) pictures? How many people in leather?”

The philosophical conundrum isn’t new. Leaders have worried before over how, even whether, to plump and shape the gay image, lest by excluding the fringes to woo acceptability and political leverage, they would appear as intolerant as the larger society they criticize. In the aftershock of AIDS, some of it has already happened.

Organizers of the Gay and Lesbian Pride parade--now the third largest parade in the Southland, they say, and televised nationally on public access cable stations--operated under the expansive notion that “if the organization is expressing pride, we don’t have any problem,” says Craig.

Then along came the gay Nazis and NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Assn., which advocates legalized pedophilia, and they wanted to march. “We politely asked them not to join us,” said Craig. “There is some point at which you’ve got to draw the line.”

It is of a piece with the splintering of gay voices on other public-image topics, such as the county’s closing of local bath houses. There was argument when Ryan White, the Indiana schoolboy, became America’s unofficial AIDS poster-boy. Did his case raise sympathy--and money--for all AIDS patients, as some contended? Or did it ignore and exclude the homosexual men who are most AIDS victims?

Political technique has vexed interest groups from civil rights to the women’s movement. What works? Change from the inside, or the outside? Storming the barricades, or joining the building department and condemning them?

For Schulte, who has done both--been arrested in a White House protest and campaigned for Dianne Feinstein--both are valid for the gay movement. But he hears less now that “street activities are the way to go. . . . I know lots of other folks who are more and more convinced that by coming out in their business or their corporation or church and doing a good job at that and trying to raise a family (they) are going to have more of a long-range impact.

“People are less willing to be activists than they were five or 10 years ago, because of the strong reaction that AIDS has to some extent engendered.”

The last ad in the series of four shows Dan Guiling in his wheelchair. Today, he works at UCLA. Eight years ago, he was set upon in his San Antonio hometown by a couple of men yelling, “Look at those fags.”

He was stabbed. His spinal cord was severed. He had to think for a long time before he agreed to make his face and his name public, to perhaps be wounded a second time, in a different manner.