Denver Mayor’s Success in Halting Boycott Is Limited : Tourism: He goes to New York, where Dinkins does not call for economic blockade. Travel income has dipped since Colorado passed anti-gay law.

Efforts to contain a snowballing boycott of Colorado over the state’s new law that bans protected status for homosexuals are meeting with only partial success, the mayor of Denver reported Wednesday.

Mayor Wellington Webb returned home from a two-day tour of New York aimed at arresting the boycott and said he had made some progress. Some gay and lesbian leaders, however, suggested that Webb was being overly optimistic.

Webb called the trip a “partial success in damage control.” He said his assessment was based on the fact that New York Mayor David N. Dinkins “did not call for the full economic boycott of the state that had been recommended to him by several members of the New York City Council.”

Despite Webb’s pleas, Dinkins this week banned city travel to Colorado in protest of the new state law, passed by voters here Nov. 3. Atlanta and Philadelphia have taken similar steps.

Webb was also rebuffed during his visit by the Village Voice, a weekly newspaper based in New York. Although Webb met with the newspaper’s editorial board and argued against a boycott, the paper promptly published a scathing editorial on Tuesday titled “Boycott Colorado!”

It is not the first call for a national boycott of Colorado and its glitzy mountain resorts in the wake of the law’s passage.

So far, several organizations have canceled conventions and meetings in Denver, including the American Law Libraries Assn. and the National Council for Social Studies, which alone was expected to bring 4,000 delegates and about $4 million to Denver.

There are also signs that some Colorado ski resorts are losing bookings to other states.

Linda Lu Cannon, who organizes outings for the 400-member Microsoft Ski Club of Redmond, Wash., said: “We were planning one of our trips to be to Colorado, but after the amendment passed I couldn’t find enough skiers interested in paying to go to there.”

Cannon said she had no problem organizing trips to British Columbia, Big Mountain, Mont., and Alta and Snowbird, Utah.

Hoping to stanch the flow of money leaving the state, the Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau on Wednesday announced plans to place a special advertisement in travel and trade publications.

The same ad copy will be sent as a direct mail piece to travel agents and tour operators expected to handle a potential 3,500 meetings in Denver over the next few years, according to Roger Smith, president of the convention bureau.

At a press conference here Wednesday, Webb recalled how he was dogged every step of the way by members of a group called the Lesbian Avengers, who somehow obtained a copy of his itinerary.

“They were there to harass me,” Webb reported. “At points, it got disgusting.”

Carrying signs and chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer and we won’t go skiing,” eight Lesbian Avengers first confronted Webb on Monday in New York’s Regency Hotel while he was being interviewed over breakfast by a reporter from the Wall Street Journal.

“We hit him five more times on Monday,” said Ann Northrop, a spokeswoman for the 300-member lesbian group. “Everywhere he went we were at the door to greet him.”

On Wednesday Bill Dobbs, a spokesman in New York for Queer Nation, a national gay and lesbian activist group, said Webb’s visit to New York “backfired because it brought the issue to a boil and we called in our political chips and got action (from Dinkins).”

Webb agreed that political considerations may have influenced Dinkins’ action.

“Mayor Dinkins has a reelection campaign next year,” Webb said. “He also has a strong gay and lesbian constituency in his city.”

Nonetheless, Webb added “I felt it was important to deliver a message of understanding, which I did not feel was being heard.”

His message was that Denver, along with Boulder and Aspen, already have ordinances that specifically uphold civil rights protections for homosexuals. The three were among the first cities in the nation to enact such legislation, Webb noted.

But Amendment 2, which passed in Colorado by a 53% majority on Nov. 3, prohibits the state and local governments from passing gay-rights laws, and repeals the three cities’ existing anti-bias ordinances. A lawsuit challenging the new state law has been filed on behalf of the three cities.

Although both Webb and Colorado Gov. Roy Romer are actively opposed to Amendment 2, they have said that they are obligated to enforce the new law when it goes into effect Jan. 4.

Times researcher Ann Rovin contributed to this story.