Colorado’s Tourism Fighting Anti-Gay Boycott

Colorado’s tourism industry is stepping up efforts to avert a boycott following passage of what is widely viewed as an anti-gay amendment to the state’s constitution, trade groups said Friday.

The Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau is shifting advertising in trade convention magazines to argue that a boycott against the city is unfair, spokesman Rich Grant said.

The advertisements explain that Denver residents voted two to one against Amendment 2 to the state’s constitution, which passed in last month’s election.

The measure makes its illegal for local authorities to enact legislation giving protection to homosexuals and lesbians.

Amendment 2 overturns city ordinances in Denver, Aspen and Boulder that provided equal employment and housing opportunities for gays.

Denver’s meeting and convention business is worth $540 million a year, Grant said. He said that a teachers’ convention, scheduled for 1994, has been canceled and two other groups considering Denver for their gatherings have crossed the mile-high city off their list.

Last week, Mayor Wellington Webb appeared on the Arsenio Hall show to plead the city’s case. “All of the gay and lesbian groups in Colorado and in Denver that were part of the campaign (against the referendum) have opposed the boycott, but there are other groups that have sprung up. . . . I think it’s unproductive,” said Webb.

The Aspen ski community took out advertisements in the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety pleading with filmmakers not to boycott, said Killeen Russell, spokeswoman for Aspen Skiing Co.

“Aspen, as a community, did not support passage of Amendment 2,” said Russell. Aspen Skiing Co. is co-owned by industrialist Marvin Davis and the Lester Crown Corp. It owns three mountains and two hotels in the trendy resort.

Yet the boycott pressure is mounting. Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation/Los Angeles has announced that actress Whoppi Goldberg, “Silence of the Lambs” director Jonathan Demme and talk show host Joan Rivers have endorsed the boycott.

The Philadelphia City Council, in a measure that must still be approved by Mayor Edward Rendell, on Thursday passed a bill aimed at discouraging the city from hiring firms based in Colorado and avoiding sending city officials to conventions in the state.

Meanwhile, a gay group Friday issued a “travel advisory” to homosexuals planning trips to Colorado, saying “adverse conditions” exist now that the state has passed the anti-gay rights measure.

The advisory asks members to avoid Colorado until Amendment 2 is repealed, said William Waybourn, executive director of the Washington-based Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, a national political action committee that raises money for openly gay and lesbian candidates.

“The lesbian and gay community should ski slopes in Oregon, Vermont or New Mexico, three states that have elected openly lesbian and gay public officials,” said Lynn Greer, a Victory Fund co-chair from Columbus, Ohio.

The group is the latest to join in a boycott of Colorado since passage of Amendment 2, which bans any laws that would protect gays, lesbians and bisexuals from discrimination.

Since the amendment was passed, several groups have canceled conferences in the state, including the National Organization for Women, the National Assn. of Social Workers and the American Assn. of Law Libraries.

Elsewhere, tourism officials in Tampa, Fla., are worried that last month’s vote to repeal that city’s gay rights law will hurt their local economy.