Gay Militancy--the Last Great Civil Rights Move? : Political battles: The new activists are ‘bashing back.’ But some say the tactics could alienate the public.

He was only 14 years old, but Richard Noble knew this was no ordinary crush. The object of his affections was another boy.

When he tried to express his feelings, “it got spread around that I was the school fag,” recalled Noble, now 26. “I got into seven fights before my dad took me out of school.”

The way he sees things now, gay bashing takes many forms. It isn’t just the work of bullies, he says, but of churches that preach that homosexuality is a sin, a government that doesn’t do enough about AIDS, media that perpetuate hurtful stereotypes.

And a governor who vetoes gay rights legislation.

“I’m tired of being bashed for being gay,” says Noble, a member of the radical group “Queer Nation,” described by some as the “shock troops” of the gay rights movement. Their motto: “Bash back.”

Noble’s sentiments reflect a new wave of gay militancy unleashed by Gov. Pete Wilson’s veto of AB 101, a bill that would have outlawed job discrimination against homosexuals--one that Wilson had indicated he would support. A massive demonstration planned today at the state Capitol is expected to be by far the largest in 13 consecutive days of noisy, raucous protests since the governor announced his decision.

“I frankly think we’re beginning a new era of gay and lesbian political action,” said Torie Osborn, executive director of Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services. “I feel this is the last great civil rights movement.”

But long before the veto, the life-and-death struggles of the AIDS epidemic had revived gay consciousness with a militant edge. The movement has been bolstered by the flinty perspectives of young people like Noble who grew up in a society that, despite growing tolerance, remains deeply ambivalent about gay rights.

Those attitudes were reflected in the results of a Los Angeles Times Poll of 1,042 adult Californians published Sunday, which showed a plurality of 46% disapproving of Wilson’s veto, while 40% approved and the remainder were uncertain. It further showed that 36% of respondents believed that gays and lesbians had the “right amount” of political power in California, while 28% thought they had too much and 23% said they had too little.

Whatever the sentiments of the public, more gays seem to be fighting more political battles in more communities across the nation than ever before, said Tim Drake of the National Gay and Lesbian Force in Washington.

For many, the most profound political statement is to come out of the closet, such as the Los Angeles police officers who did so at a gay pride festival this summer in West Hollywood. More and more gays like the defiant spirit, if not necessarily the terminology, of one militant chant: “We’re here/ We’re queer/ Get used to it.”

A community that remains somewhat divided over political tactics has been galvanized toward a common goal, activists say. Demonstrations have attracted new activists, swelling far beyond the relatively modest ranks of such militant groups as Queer Nation and ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). No precise membership figures for these groups are available, but the core group of Los Angeles’ chapter of Queer Nation before Wilson’s veto was about 100.

Now both gay Republican clubs and the radical left have repudiated Wilson. Once a hot topic within the gay community, the tactical differences between such moderate groups as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination (GLAAD), which monitors allegedly anti-gay sentiment in the media, and Queer Nation, which flaunts epithets and profanity in an effort to shock its audience, has become a peripheral concern.

“The fact that there’s a disagreement over tactics isn’t that important. For the most part, the tactics complement one another,” said Roberta Achtenberg, a lesbian attorney who this year became the third acknowledged gay on San Francisco’s 12-member Board of Supervisors. “Using vulgar words or something like that is to my mind not something that makes us look bad. . . . We need people in gray business suits and we need drag queens.”

Hot Rhetoric

Gay rhetoric is running hot, with many leaders declaring war on Wilson and anti-gay sentiment wherever it surfaces. Militant gays have threatened to “out” closeted homosexuals within Wilson’s Administration--a tactic that many gays, including Achtenberg, say they abhor as an invasion of privacy. At the same time, however, several activists say they are grateful that some gays are nervy and rude enough to do just that.

But there is a risk, some warn.

Activists and friends of the movement say that bashing back too recklessly will only serve to antagonize and alienate the public.

Despite those concerns, moderate gays as well as those protesting in the streets remain enraged by the veto. “There’s a part of me that feels like throwing a brick too,” said Dr. David N. Hart of Glendale. The physician, who said he was never much of a political activist, has renounced his membership in the Republican Party and sent a blistering letter to Wilson.

The governor’s veto, Hart said, shows that “we’re the last group that it’s still OK to publicly hate, to publicly discriminate against. You can’t do it on the basis of race, sex, age, religion or creed.”

But does American society see the gay cause as essentially a question of civil rights? The Times poll is the latest of several surveys in recent years suggesting that the American public has grown considerably more tolerant of gays during the last two decades. A solid majority of Americans, polls have shown, favor laws protecting gays against job discrimination, but reservations remain.

A 1990 Times Mirror poll, for example, found that 49% of respondents believe that school boards should have the right to fire teachers “who are known homosexuals.” Only 44% disagreed and 6% said they didn’t know. The Times’ recent poll found Californians far more accepting, with only 27% saying school boards should have the right to fire homosexuals, 68% saying they shouldn’t and 5% saying they didn’t know.

Interviews with some Californians who participated in the recent Times poll show a variety of perspectives among people who said they were “somewhat opposed” to or “somewhat supportive” of the gay rights movement. All interviewed expressed reservations about potential for protests to turn violent.

Bill Pettijohn, a 32-year-old blue-collar worker who lives in rural San Diego County, and Howard McClelland, a 79-year-old retired San Pedro resident, said they oppose the movement and the militant street protests in part because they doubt that gays face much discrimination.

Nevertheless, both expressed a “live and let live” philosophy.

“Whatever somebody does in the privacy of their bedroom is their own business,” McClelland said.

“If somebody can stand next to me and work like me and sweat like me, if he can do the job, he deserves it,” said Pettijohn, who unloads hay trucks for a living. Pettijohn said that although he used anti-gay and racial epithets in his youth, “I wouldn’t do that now. . . . I’m a live and let live guy.”

Melanie Jackson of Cupertino and Alan Uehara of Pasadena, who identified themselves as supporters of the movement, said they believed gays face job discrimination.

“As far as marching and standing up for rights goes, I definitely believe in that,” said Uehara, a 31-year-old financial analyst. “But I think you can take it too far. . . . Like some people who wear it on their shoulder, like they’re saying, ‘I’m gay and I dare you to do something about it.’ ”

Jackson, a 29-year-old writer, said she feared the gays’ message would be lost amid the broken windows and other vandalism depicted in media coverage of the demonstrations. Jackson said she believed that more conservative views would prevail in the short term.

But over time, she added, “I don’t think you can stop this. The genie’s out of the bottle. . . . The world’s getting too small. We simply have to find a way to live with one another and tolerate our differences.”

Wilson, some observers say, tried to divine these complicated public attitudes in his veto message. In it, he harshly criticized anti-gay bigotry but asserted that existing laws and legal opinions are sufficient to protect gays against discrimination in the workplace. He also said that there is little evidence that there is anti-gay job bias prevalent in society.

Gays vigorously disagree.

If what Wilson says is true, gays ask, why did it take so long for gay Los Angeles police officers to come out of the closet?

And why does the Department of Defense discriminate against gays as a matter of policy? (Gay activists are challenging the policy in federal court.)

And why do they still face ongoing and vehement opposition by conservatives who contend that their behavior is sinful and perverse, even after recent medical findings that suggest homosexuality is an aspect of personal nature that can’t be altered?

Many gays enthusiastically assert that science is on their side. Research findings announced recently by Salk Institute neurobiologist Simon LeVay indicate--but by no means confirm--that homosexuality is reflected in a person’s biological makeup. LeVay’s study found that a tiny segment of the hypothalamus--the part of the brain that influences sexual behavior--is smaller in homosexual men than in heterosexual men.

Proof of a biological predisposition should help undermine religious objections to homosexuality, activists say. During a raucous, noisy demonstration by gay militants during Sunday services at Santa Ana’s Calvary Chapel, one protester’s sign put the argument this way: “God Chose Me to Be Queer.”

However large America’s gay population may be, and whatever the cause of sexual orientation, fundamentalists such as the Rev. Lou Sheldon, leader of the Traditional Values Coalition, say gays are bent on “recruiting” more people into homosexual behavior and contend that their political power already far exceeds their numbers. Conservative commentator Tom Bethell, media fellow at the Hoover Institution, says that gays have succeeded in cowing many detractors into silence by quickly branding even mild criticism as evidence of bigotry.

If that is true, it is progress, gays say. The story they tell is of “a people” that has overcome centuries of scorn to demand equal treatment, a people forced to develop its own culture and political dialectic.

Violence is inseparable from their heritage, activists say. Only two generations have passed since Hitler ordered the extermination of an estimated 50,000 homosexuals in Nazi Germany. The Nazis forced homosexuals to wear pink triangles of cloth as identifying markers; the gay community now uses the pink triangle as a poignant symbol of pride.

Their goal, many activists say, is for homophobia to be regarded as a social taboo on a par with racism and anti-Semitism.

Activists like Osborn speak ardently of a history of oppression and persecution that, they say, is more complex and insidious than those suffered by other minority groups. Gays often endure deep emotional struggles--often self-hatred--trying to come to terms with their sexual identity in a society that often treats them as outcasts. Suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse rates are high within the gay community. Unlike other minorities, their differences tend to be invisible. Unlike other minorities, scorn typically begins within their own families.

“We’re the only minority born into the enemy camp,” explained Joel Rothschild, sporting a black eye and scores of stitches that resulted from an altercation with a cabdriver wielding a heavy flashlight during a Los Angeles march last Tuesday. “I was born gay. I’ve known it since I was 10 years old. . . . You’re alone out there.”

Gays began to assert political power in the turbulent 1960s. The nation’s first gay protest march, according to GLAAD, occurred in Los Angeles in 1967 in a demonstration against alleged police harassment. The gay liberation movement emerged in full force in 1969 in New York’s Greenwich Village with three days of rioting in protest against police raids at the Stonewall Bar.

It was not until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Assn. removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.

Historic Parallels

Drake and other activists see several historic parallels between the gay rights movement and the African-American civil rights movement.

The Department of Defense, until the early 1950s, used to segregate blacks from whites; the DOD still doesn’t want homosexuals at all. The African-Americans had the moderate NAACP and the radical Black Panthers; the gays have the NGLTF and Queer Nation. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and other African-American leaders has its parallel in the 1978 slaying of gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk.

And, like the black civil rights movement, the gay movement has achieved steady progress, activists say.

But the onset of AIDS, beginning in 1981, abruptly altered the gay agenda.

Health care, by necessity, became the new cause of the gay movement. “Every activist dropped what they were doing and worked on AIDS,” Drake said. The epidemic claimed many leaders in the gay community, such as Los Angeles political power brokers Sheldon Andelson and Peter Scott.

But AIDS also transformed many gays into activists. “It only takes having one friend to die to turn somebody into an activist,” Drake said. “And you get their friends, their brothers and sisters. And those people don’t go away.”

Grief gave rise to anger. Convinced that traditional lobbying wasn’t effective, militants launched ACT UP in 1987, dramatizing their anger in scores of raucous, disruptive demonstrations. The documentary “Stop the Church,” the airing of which inspired a recent feud between KCET and Cardinal Roger Mahony, depicted an ACT UP “die-in” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1989.

Queer Nation has applied the same sort of militant tactics to civil rights--often with a deliberately offensive “in-your-face” flair that puzzled and offended not only outsiders but many gays as well. As journalist Randy Shilts said in a January, 1991, article in the gay magazine the Advocate, “Older gay activists often found themselves privately asking ‘What do these Queer Nation people want?’ ”

Many “straights” wonder too. If gays want their private sex lives respected, then why are they “outing” their own? If gays want to be accepted into the mainstream, then why do militants seem determined to offend people who might be sympathetic to their cause?

Consider, for example, the way Richard Noble confronted a Los Angeles celebrity this summer when Queer Nation attended a public event en masse.

“Why didn’t you tell us your son was gay and died of AIDS?” Noble asked, stunning everyone within earshot. The reply, Noble recalled, was swift and angry: “Why don’t you shut your mouth before I knock your teeth out.”

Noble is not apologetic.

“If somebody like that stood up and talked about it, I think it would have been a positive thing,” Noble said. “It would reduce a lot of people’s fear and parents all over the place would start supporting the AIDS issue.”

Terrifying Moment

Consider the plight of Dorothy Hind of Westlake Village, who was out for a night on the town with her husband and friends when their car was suddenly stuck in the middle of a gay march.

“They were screaming at us and shaking our car and we were scared out of our mind,” recalled Hind. “All we did was make a wrong turn. And a policeman was standing 50 feet away and he just watched. . . . Where are the rights of the citizens in this deal? It was terrifying.”

And consider the Sept. 8 Calvary Chapel protest, when gay militants supposedly “bashed back” at a small number of church members who proselytize in the gay community of West Hollywood.

Some activists made their political points with biblical references. But others taunted church members with profane signs. One man’s placard suggested he performed oral sex to glorify the Lord. Another graphically questioned the sexual orientation of Jesus Christ.

The protest dismayed more conservative activists. “I just strongly believe that two wrongs don’t make a right,” one said.

The new gay terminology is another source of puzzlement.

Queer Nation, a loose-knit group that was founded last year in New York, now has wings in several major cities. Members decorate telephone poles, walls and bus benches with stickers bearing profane phrases in utter disdain of social mores.

GLAAD, meanwhile, urges against derogatory terms, and even gets worked up when a newspaper uses such phrases as “gay lifestyle,” which the group sees as casting homosexuality as a fad rather than a sexual orientation.

The flamboyance of Queer Nation and the button-down manner of GLAAD suggest deep divisions in the gay community.

But some leaders say such divisions are more style than substance.

“Gays will never be fully assimilated into this society, and they should not hope to be,” said Achtenberg, the San Francisco supervisor.

“They are the hope for the future, these people that don’t grow up thinking, ‘I’m a loser, I’m a second-class citizen,’ ” said Jay Blotcher of New York’s Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center.

Not that young militants, many of whom have been openly homosexual since their teens, always appreciate their elders.

Richard Noble, for one, has a hard time wondering what the “right to privacy” fuss is all about. The way Noble figures it, if they’re here and they’re, well, gay, they should get used to it.

“World War II is over,” he said. “Hitler isn’t going to put you in a concentration camp.”

TRUSTEE SAYS HE IS GAY: Los Angeles school board member Jeff Horton has decided to publicly announce that he is gay. B1