Sharing a Political Platform : Activism: Gay rights groups, once the domain of men and their concerns, are naming women to powerful positions. The fight against AIDS brought lesbians into the fold.

As a member of the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Metropolitan Coalition in the mid-1970s, Torie Osborn was often paired with gay men to give speeches to high school or college classes.

At one such event, Osborn heard a male speaker extol gay liberation because “you could go to bars and have fun and be free from supporting wives and children.”

At the time, in 1976, Osborn was helping to raise her female lover’s son from a previous marriage, working for his school PTA and coaching his Little League team.

“I felt I was from another planet,” said Osborn, who is now executive director of the Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center in Los Angeles. “ . . . The idea that liberation was about freedom from responsibility was anathema to me.”

Osborn acknowledges that the male speaker was not advocating promiscuity, but she nonetheless abandoned the coalition, moved to California and worked exclusively on lesbian and feminist projects until the mid-1980s. “I did not see a gay man for five years,” she said.

She renewed her contacts with gay men in 1985 and became Southern California coordinator for the successful campaign against the Lyndon LaRouche ballot initiative, Prop. 64, in 1986. The measure would have barred from schools and from all food-handling jobs persons who tested positive for exposure to AIDS.

As she renewed these contacts, Osborn said she noticed that gay men were more sympathetic to her concerns. In 1988, she assumed her post at the Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center.

Experts say Osborn has followed the pattern of many women who joined gay and lesbian groups at the start of the modern gay liberation movement in the late 1960s. During the 1970s and the early 1980s, many lesbians said pervasive sexism and an unwillingness to address issues that concern same-sex families drove them into separate lesbian and feminist groups.

But the fights against AIDS and political attacks from the right lured women back to gay and lesbian organizations in the mid-1980s. And today, using the leadership skills they gained in the separate organizations, lesbians have assumed executive positions, dramatically increasing their power in groups once dominated by men.

“It’s definitely true that lesbians are in leadership and staff positions in organizations once considered gay male groups. I would say it’s become very obvious the last five years,” said John D’Emilio, a University of North Carolina history professor and author of “Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities,” a history of gay politics before 1970.

Walter Williams, an associate professor of anthropology at USC who specializes in societal attitudes toward sexuality, agrees: There has been “a stronger emergence of (female) leadership within the lesbian and gay movement. The separatist stage was a good thing for women to gain leadership skills and self-confidence,” he said.

Said Osborn, “Sexism which existed in the gay male community has markedly decreased because lesbians have been in the forefront of the war on AIDS. If you were a gay man and you took your gay lover to Century City hospital to die, you bet your booties you were going to run into a (lesbian) nurse.”

As gay men and women worked together, gay groups began advocating causes that lesbians had championed, including legal protection for the rights of partners in same-sex relationships.

“AIDS . . . made clear to gay men how fragile their relationships could be under the present legal system,” said Thomas B. Stoddard, executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.

“If two men live together and one dies of AIDS, the other may have no entitlement to property and may be excluded from the funeral and all other formalities surrounding the death,” Stoddard said.

“Women, particularly lesbians, knew this at an early time. . . . Many lesbian women also lost their children as a result of their sexual orientation.

“That made lesbians especially aware of the need to do political work to make them secure, but many men came to learn the importance of political work only through personal tragedy.”

Karen Clark, a Minneapolis lesbian and veteran state legislator, said that gay men “have started to recognize the central nature of some issues we have been thinking about for a long time.

“Gay men have begun to get concerned about laws that provide health insurance or retirement benefits to partners who are not legally married,” she said.

The changes within the gay and lesbian communities are evident in the Advocate, the self-described largest gay and lesbian magazine in the nation with a bimonthly circulation of 81,604. The publication’s Oct. 9 masthead identified it for the first time as “The National Gay and Lesbian Newsmagazine.” For 560 issues since 1967 it had been labeled “The National Gay Newsmagazine,” without reference to lesbians.

“This change brought tears to my eyes and cheers to my staff,” Osborn said.

Editor-in-chief Richard Rouilard wrote in the magazine that the change was made to recognize lesbians who in the last decade had “thrown themselves--emotionally, physically, and financially--into the vortex of the AIDS crisis, an epidemic that has struck down very few of them.” He vowed that in the future the magazine would show “empathy” toward lesbians and become “a clearinghouse for sharing of information between men and women.”

The Advocate’s position is not the only indication of lesbians’ new power in the gay/lesbian movement:

* In Los Angeles in 1988 the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center named Osborn its first female executive director since its founding in 1971.

* Lawyers for Human Rights, the lesbian and gay bar association for Los Angeles County, elected its first female president in 1989. The group, started in 1978, also amended its bylaws to require male and female co-presidents.

* The National Gay Task Force, begun in 1973, changed its name in 1985 to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The Washington-based group, the nation’s oldest gay and lesbian civil rights organization, has always had some lesbian leaders. But in the past five years, females have filled five of its top eight executive positions. They include executive director Urvashi Vaid and department heads in charge of lobbying, fund raising and civil rights legislation.

* The New York-based Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, one of the nation’s largest gay rights organizations, opened its Los Angeles office this fall with Mary Newcombe as staff attorney.

* The Municipal Election Committee of Los Angeles, a political action committee that supports elected officials sympathetic to gay and lesbian causes, successfully lobbied the city to allow unmarried employees bereavement leave for the death of their partners.

* The Los Angeles Chapter of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, formed in 1987 to improve images of gays and lesbians in the media, has achieved “near gender parity” on its board and has male and female co-presidents, a spokesman said.

Despite these changes in leadership and priorities among gay groups, some observers say they see no increase in the percentage of female leaders. They say female executives only appear more prevalent because gay and lesbian organizations are proliferating.

“The size of organizations, the leadership slots, the proliferation of organizations have all increased dramatically over the last decade,” said Jean O’Leary, former executive director of National Gay Rights Advocates, a national public interest law firm that defends the civil rights of gays and lesbians and people with AIDS.

Osborn conceded that more organizations and leadership slots exist now than a decade ago. “But there is still this dramatic change in values and openness to strong female leadership that is feminist,” she said.

While gay men seem more sympathetic to lesbian causes, lesbians say barriers remain between the groups.

“First and foremost we have been raised as males and females, not as gays and lesbians,” said Deborah L. Johnson, a former member of the board of directors of the Gay & Lesbian Community Services Center and consultant to several local gay and lesbian organizations.

“There is a sense that reciprocity is lacking between men and women,” Johnson said. “Whenever an issue affects the gay community more than the lesbians, lesbians show up and do their share, whereas men have not shown an equal interest in women’s issues like the passage of the ERA or abortion.”

Whatever the extent of reciprocity between gays and lesbians, women find gay and lesbian groups more comfortable than they did a decade ago.

“Sexism . . . comes out from time to time,” said Jeri Deitrick of the Los Angeles chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP/LA). “But I don’t get treated like a second-class citizen. Part of the reason is that they know why I’m here. We’re all fighting AIDS.”

Many men and women find the new cooperation encouraging.

“I find it very hopeful that this deep division within the gay world has been somewhat repaired,” said Martin Duberman, a history professor at City University of New York and co-editor of the anthology “Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past.”

“In the past there have been so many splits and defections and inner turmoil, and it sapped whatever energies were available. If that is ending or diminished, there will be more energy for working against the real enemy: homophobic or patriarchic America.”

“I’m extraordinarily heartened by the emergence of strong female leaders,” said Stoddard of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. “It’s not just that we have more leaders. We have better leaders, in part because of their gender.”

“It was only someone else’s political agenda that threw us in bed together politically,” Osborn said. “Because of AIDS and feminism there has been a convergence. We have learned to love and respect each other and it has truly . . . put lesbians into the gay movement. . . .

“I often reflect on the irony of having spent all these years working exclusively with women, and now that I love and care for men, they are dying.”