A Relentless Rebel Pushes Ahead

It was Torie Osborn’s last night in Los Angeles. The next morning she would board a plane for Washington with a one-way ticket to her new job heading one of the nation’s leading gay-rights organizations. But this was no quiet evening of emotional goodbys and nostalgia after a decade here.

No, Osborn was schmoozing high in the hills at a fund-raiser for a new coalition working to lift the military ban on homosexuals. She smiled her way past the hors d’oeuvres, through rooms packed with gay men, greeting and meeting and finally grabbing the microphone for a quick pep talk. It was vintage Osborn, playing a role she had assumed countless times during her four years at the helm of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and will assume countless more times in her new post as executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

A passionate evangelist of the gay cause, Osborn has a hard time passing up a crowd. She has been throwing herself into one movement or another since high school and, at 42, sees herself as a thoroughly political being, wedded to her work above all else.

Osborn is a bundle of contradictions: Part Doris Day with an MBA, part raging rebel operating by her own standards. She tosses off the catchwords of gay rights with an ease that can border on the glibly naive and a zeal and magnetism that is inescapable.

“She is driven by the politics of everything,” observes Sylvia Rhue, a former staffer at the community center. “That’s what keeps her alive.”

Ensconced in the corner of a couch for an interview just before leaving Los Angeles earlier this month, Osborn sat with her feet tucked under her, leaning forward to emphasize points, her voice sometimes resonating like a preacher’s as she bounced from politics to the personal and back again.

“We are right ,” she proclaims, her blue eyes flashing. “Equal protection under the law is a righteous goal. . . . There is the great promise of pluralism and democracy that is the best of America. We will win eventually.”

With such fervor Osborn helped propel the 22-year-old community center into prominence as not only the nation’s largest social service agency for gays and lesbians, but also a high-profile advocate of gay rights. The first woman to head the center, she nearly tripled the size of the staff to more than 150 people, dramatically diversifying it. Predominantly Anglo male when Osborn took over, the staff was half women and nearly half minority by the time she departed last fall for several months of vacation. The annual budget more than doubled to $7.4 million and the organization left its dingy, long-time quarters for a spacious new home in Hollywood.

At the much smaller task force--which lobbies and does grass-roots organizing around the country--Osborn is expected to work a similar transformation. “She will have big plans,” predicts Tim McFeeley, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, another Washington-based gay-rights group. “She will push the board and staff to perform. She’ll drive it.”

Push, drive. Osborn has spent much of her adult life in the restless pursuit of change. Even as a child, she was aware of the world’s failings. One of her early memories is of a food riot in Franco’s Spain, where her father was on a tour of duty with the U.S. State Department. “We were immediately whisked away, and there were explosions and guns and screaming. . . . I remember feeling panicked and angry--why doesn’t somebody do something about this,” she says, pounding her knee as the recollection revives her outrage.

Do something! could be Osborn’s motto. Direct and intense, she “has little tolerance for minutiae. She does cut right to the chase,” says one of her admirers, David M. Smith, who worked under Osborn at the center and credits her with shaping the agency with a vision of growth and political advocacy. “Sometimes,” Smith concedes, that “doesn’t make people feel good.”

Osborn herself says that her “rage can blow people away, I’ve hurt people with my anger. Politically, it’s been helpful. But personally, it’s been hurtful.” Still, she muses with a touch of defiant acceptance, “I’m comfortable with it.”

Osborn officially began her journey of protest after a short-lived attempt to fit her Irish-Catholic adolescent self into the blond, Republican, WASP world of her private girls’ high school outside of Philadelphia. She starved herself, dyed her hair and bleached her freckles--to the acclaim of her classmates and the horror of her father, who had by then left the foreign service to work for a pharmaceutical company as an international liaison.

“My father pulled me aside and delivered this lecture about how boring these women were, how their families contributed nothing,” Osborn recalls. “You want to be on the side of the common man,” her father admonished.

Not long afterward, Osborn dumped the bleach and became an anti-war hippie. Instead of joining ‘em, she would fight ‘em. When she went to college in 1968, she chose Barnard, the closest she could get to the student activism raging through Columbia University. “The first week I was there, the police tear-gassed the demonstration I was in,” she recalls.

After a couple of years, though, the Columbia scene lost its luster. Student politics were chaotic, she had an illegal abortion to end a pregnancy stemming from a date rape and she found herself “kind of desperately in love” with a girlfriend. She fled to Middlebury College in Vermont.

There, surrounded by classmates depressingly like the ones she went to high school with, she organized anything she could: a women’s union, anti-war teach-ins, protest trips to Washington. She also continued to struggle with her attraction to women.

At 15, she had experienced “this unexpected sexual encounter with a girlfriend that scared the hell out of me. I went out and got a boyfriend that I could throw at this terror.” In college she paraded boyfriends home at Christmas and had brief, secret flings with women.

“I was like a classic, self-hating, homophobic lesbian,” she says in retrospect. She even devoted her first public speech at Middlebury to one of the trendy feminist topics of the time: “How lesbians were a threat to the movement.”

But she couldn’t escape the fact that she was one of them. A year after graduating with an honors English degree, she came out to her parents. Her father “was great.” Her journalist mother, with whom she had many battles growing up, was furious.

“A huge wall developed between my mother and me. She just couldn’t stand it,” says Osborn, who didn’t see her mother for years afterward. Gradually their relations thawed. “Now they’re great, but it took a long time,” says Osborn, who now advises young people to come out early, to give their parents plenty of time to get over the news.

Osborn spent her 20s wandering in the counterculture: living in a women’s collective, teaching college English, working for an alternative newspaper in Chicago, producing women’s music festivals and acting as business manager for Redwood Records, singer Holly Near’s company in the Bay Area.

Her world became one of lesbian separatism. “After the sexism I encountered in the left, I loved not having to deal with men for a few years. It’s not that I hated them,” she says, fondly recalling the music festivals as magical gatherings that transformed women’s lives.

Eventually, the utopianism of lesbian separatism faded. Anyway, she adds, “I was never really a separatist.”

Indeed, Osborn--a “recovering Catholic”--declares a deep aversion for orthodoxy. One of the reasons she left San Francisco in the early ‘80s to go to UCLA business school was to escape what she calls the “lesbian fascism” of the time. Wear this, don’t eat that, don’t do this. “I personally felt throttled by it,” she says, bristling at the memory of a steam room talk in which she was warned about selling out. “I just felt I had to get out of there.”

Osborn didn’t see it as selling out, but after years of paltry salaries, she was thinking mainstream, of going to work in the entertainment industry and saying goodby to politics. But even with her MBA in hand, Osborn couldn’t make it through a corporate interview without her stomach tying up in a knot. “I knew it went against the fundamental grain of who I was.”

Instead she joined forces with Los Angeles activist and fund-raiser David Mixner and became the communications director of the ill-fated Great Peace March of 1986. While a few hundred true believers managed the trek from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to call for nuclear disarmament, the march collapsed under a mountain of debt. It was a stinging but instructive experience.

“I have learned so much more from my own failures (than successes),” Osborn says with the cheeriness of one who’s been through therapy and overcome a drinking problem.

“It (was) a way of filling up space,” she says of her drinking, which stopped three years ago. “I think I’ve had a lot of fears of failure, of success, of being myself.”

Los Angeles attorney Sheila Kuehl, Osborn’s former lover, observes: “I think Torie constantly struggles between the dark side that says she can fall on her ass the next day and knowing she can (succeed).” It is a struggle, Kuehl adds, typical of many women.

Osborn and Kuehl--who as a young actress played Zelda on the “Dobie Gillis” show--were together for more than eight years and remain best friends. “I really think she’s one of the best people in the universe,” Kuehl says.

Osborn is now going out with Lauren Jardine, whom she started dating while they were both working at the center last year. Eyebrows went up, but they had both announced their impending departures and Jardine was put under someone else’s direct supervision. “I handled it the way it was supposed to be handled,” Osborn declares, flaring as she recalls the gossip.

Jardine is not moving to Washington. “We’re realistic about the fact that I’m going to be married to the movement,” Osborn says. “My work has always been my first love.”

Working for social change is, in Osborn’s mind, “the genuine antidote” to life’s sadness. “The human project of collectively building alternatives to that pain is profoundly spiritual and satisfying. . . .

“Some people become suicidal. I became a radical organizer.”