36 Gay-Rights Backers Arrested at Wilson Dinner

Thirty-six gay rights activists were arrested as hundreds demonstrated against Gov. Pete Wilson and state Sen. Ed Davis at a fund-raiser Friday night in Woodland Hills.

Wilson was the featured speaker at a $250-a-plate dinner, marking Davis’ 75th birthday, at the Warner Center Marriott Hotel. The senator, who represents a sprawling district that includes much of Ventura County, was making his first public appearance since cancer surgery last month.

The demonstrators--who protested both Wilson’s veto of a gay-rights bill and an AIDS bill introduced by Davis--were estimated by police to number about 250 and by organizers to be about twice that.

More than 180 police officers, on foot and horseback, awaited the demonstrators.

Shortly before the dinner was to begin, 14 protesters--who had rented rooms in the hotel earlier--burst down a corridor leading to the first-floor ballroom and lay down near the entrance, blocking the dinner registration desk.

As police in riot gear surrounded them, the demonstrators chanted “AIDS phobia, homophobia, genocide” and yelled obscenities. Guests in evening clothes sipped drinks about 30 feet away as police rolled the protesters on their stomachs, bound their wrists and led them off.

Most went quietly but several struggled and were subdued.

After the dinner began, five men and women, dressed in evening clothes, were arrested at the entrance to the ballroom as they began chanting slogans.

About 20 people were arrested for blocking traffic, but three were released without charge. Ten men who kissed and simulated sex acts in Oxnard Street--chanting “Ed Davis is a slime, HIV is not a crime”--were taken to jail at the Van Nuys police station.

They were arrested without resistance by officers wearing rubber gloves, which a Los Angeles police spokesman said was “common practice for officer safety.” The demonstrators called the gloves “HIV hysteria.”

Davis has introduced legislation that would make it a felony for anyone who knowingly has the HIV virus to engage in unprotected sex, and would impose a possible lifetime prison sentence on anyone who intentionally gives another person the disease.

Davis did not vote on the gay-rights bill when it came up on the Senate floor but voted against it in the Senate committee on appropriations on Aug. 19.

The demonstrators--a mix of blacks, Latinos and whites, men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals--carried signs with slogans such as: “Stop GOP Death Squads.”

Some demonstrators wore white theatrical makeup or black sweat shirts with the symbol of the gay-rights movement, a pink triangle, and the slogan “Death.” One carried a large American flag with a pink triangle sewn over the field of stars.

Demonstrators screamed “Shame! Shame!” at carloads of dinner guests pulling up to the hotel. Some wore mock police uniforms and shouted “ Sieg Heil !” into police officers’ faces, calling them “Nazi pigs.”

“It’s just another day in the city,” Officer Mike Bissett said.

Two events transformed the significance of the birthday fund-raiser since it was planned months ago.

On Sept. 29, Wilson vetoed a bill banning job discrimination against homosexuals, setting off a string of protests by gay-rights activists.

In addition, Davis (R-Santa Clarita) underwent surgery Oct. 21 to remove 20% of a cancerous right lung. Two clusters of malignant cells were discovered during an annual physical, aides said.

As protesters marched and blew whistles outside, tuxedo-clad Davis was greeting supporters in the hotel’s presidential suite. “I feel great--for three weeks and four days after surgery,” he said.

Davis seemed unperturbed by the demonstration. He said his bill “doesn’t have a prayer of passing the Assembly . . . because the gays in San Francisco don’t like it” and “they can control the Assembly.”

However, he said, with the publicity from the demonstration “this now becomes an extraordinarily important bill” and he may try to convert it to a state initiative.

An aide to Davis said the senator had agreed to have a statement, signed by five organizations that sponsored the protest, read at the dinner if he received a copy in advance. “We never got anything,” the aide said.

The organizations were ACT UP/Los Angeles, Queer Nation, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, League America and the Colors United for Action Coalition.

The demonstrators, however, gave reporters a copy of their planned statement, aimed at telling those in attendance “why we felt it was necessary to disrupt your dinner.”

“We can no longer quietly sit by and operate as politics as usual when one of the attendees . . . vetoed basic civil rights for lesbian and gay people,” the statement said.

It said that Davis’ bill adds “insult to the very real injury” and would “promote hysteria” without doing anything to curb the spread of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome virus.

Organizers of the demonstration confirmed that some of their group had checked into the hotel earlier in the day to carry out a protest inside, dressing conservatively to avoid rousing suspicions. “We do great Republican drag,” Tay Aston of ACT UP/Los Angeles said.

A homosexual Los Angeles police officer, who asked not to be named, expressed ambivalence about being assigned to the demonstration and said any misconduct by colleagues would be reported.

“I believe in civil disobedience. That’s how we’ve always changed things in the United States,” the officer said. “Unfortunately, I feel like I’m on the wrong side of the street tonight. But I took an oath to make sure the laws of the state are enforced, so here I am.”