Gays, Lesbians Gearing Up for March on Washington : Demonstration: Up to 1 million may attend. Parallel is drawn to historic civil rights gathering in ’63.

Thirty years ago this August, William Meredith and his family piled into their fire-engine-red convertible for a drive across the flatlands of Delaware to Washington, D.C., where they marched for black civil rights amid the monuments of a capital city long indifferent to their demands.

Drawing more than 250,000 demonstrators, the 1963 March on Washington was a gathering of historic scope and enduring symbolism, one whose images and voices lingered long after the crowds went home.

This week, Meredith will board a plane in Los Angeles for another mass demonstration in the capital, this time for gay rights. “Here I am again marching in Washington essentially for the same basic rights and freedoms,” said Meredith, 46, a public affairs director at Cal State Los Angeles who is on the board of two gay organizations. “The feelings I had then and the feelings I have now in some ways parallel each other.”

For gays and lesbians across the United States, the march Sunday is assuming the same aura the 1963 march did for African-Americans. Two years in the planning, it is being pegged in advance as the largest gathering of gays and lesbians and the biggest civil rights march in the history of the nation. Organizers are predicting that as many as 1 million people will show up in a collective statement of celebration and protest as they bid for the attention of Washington power brokers and Middle America.

Whether or not the march matches those ambitious expectations, it comes at a critical point for the gay movement. Decades of struggle have nudged gay politics into the mainstream and long-sought goals are falling within reach--even as a backlash grows.

“I think the reason (the march) is going to be so large is that no matter how scared they are, in their guts, people have a hope they didn’t have before,” said gay movement historian John D’Emilio of the University of North Carolina. “So, coming to Washington matters.”

Fewer than 100,000 people showed up for the first gay march on the capital in 1979, underscoring how little national influence the gay and lesbian community had. More than 250,000 gathered for the second one in 1987, but the media did not pay much attention and the political climate was hostile.

“No one expected much,” said Rand Schrader, a Los Angeles Municipal Court judge. “We were simply showing to each other our own sense of community.” This time, Schrader said, “the expectations are greater, there’s more of a sharp sense of demand that might be fulfilled.”

And with good reason. Just last week, President Clinton made history by holding the first Oval Office meeting with gay activists. Elected with the help of a well-organized and highly visible gay voting bloc, Clinton reiterated his campaign promises to lift the military ban on homosexuals and expressed support for federal legislation protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination. He has also appointed openly gay people to his Administration and vowed to name an AIDS “czar.”

Such developments have given the gay rights movement a sense of arrival that activists hope to build on with a massive public demonstration. “We’re the latest chapter in the civil rights struggle,” said Torie Osborn, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a gay rights organization based in Washington. “This is a community determined not to stop until we see full equality under the law.”

At the same time, it has become clear that a sympathetic President is no assurance of victory. Clinton’s plan to allow homosexuals to openly serve in the armed forces has slammed into a wall of resistance from lawmakers and military officials, anti-gay rights measures are being considered in a number of states, and religious conservatives are turning their considerable organizing expertise to the defeat of the gay cause.

Moreover, polls show that although a strong majority of Americans oppose job discrimination against homosexuals, on a personal level they remain deeply divided about gays and lesbians and generally disapproving of homosexuality.

By showing up in huge numbers from every walk of life and every part of America, participants are striving to counter the images purveyed by opponents that they are the evil “other” seeking “special rights.”

“This is an attempt to define ourselves,” said Tim McFeeley, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, a national gay political group. “Our history and oppression are about other people defining us and we can’t whine about that anymore. If someone is defining yourself inaccurately, you have to stand up and define yourself. You have to come out.”

And they will be coming out by car, train, bus and plane, arriving in Washington early this week from every state in the nation. Hotels are so solidly booked that, in recent days, marchers have had to call Baltimore, 40 miles away, to find accommodations.

Part political protest and part gay equivalent of a Shriners’ convention, the week includes a dizzying array of activities: from country-Western dances to a party for the deaf, from $1,000-a-ticket fund-raisers to a mass “wedding,” from demonstrations at the Capitol to candlelight vigils. Attendees are being urged to lobby their congressional representatives, stage civil disobedience actions and attend nearly 300 events.

For months, flyers, advertisements and articles in gay-oriented magazines have publicized march week activities. Travel agents catering to gay and lesbian clientele blocked thousands of hotel rooms and airplane seats. Every vaguely political gathering in the gay and lesbian community has been punctuated with urgent calls to “Go to the march!”

Longtime activists and political neophytes alike have heeded the call.

“I want to go to Washington as a representative of the mainstream,” said Carolyn Davis of Pueblo, Colo., who became more open about her homosexuality last year after Coloradans approved Amendment 2, an anti-gay rights ballot measure being challenged in court. “I think the campaign for Amendment 2 focused on extremist gay behavior.”

In Oklahoma, “more people than you can believe are interested in the march,” said organizer Mary Arbuckle. “People aren’t afraid to (reveal their homosexuality) now. It’s not a bad thing. This is quite a change in Oklahoma, in the heart of the Bible Belt. I think it has a lot to do with the political climate Bill Clinton created.”

Although organizers say they have garnered far more support and endorsements from politicians and civil rights groups than they did for the 1987 march, the lineup of speakers at the five-hour Mall rally is for the most part a predictable mix of activists and entertainers. Democratic senators will be out of town on a weekend retreat, and though Clinton has said he will somehow take part in the march, he has turned down requests to personally appear.

Some AIDS activists are upset at what they see as a downplaying of AIDS issues in the week’s events. “AIDS is sort of being swept under the carpet at this march,” said writer Larry Kramer, founder of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).

“I think the march itself will be an extraordinary success because everybody in the world is going there,” Kramer continued. “But I think they’re going to be bored out of their minds listening to all of these politically correct speeches that really don’t represent the issues, that don’t represent the real crisis and tragedy in our community.”

Organizers counter that they are paying heed to AIDS issues but do not want them to overshadow the broader agenda of the gay community. The nature of that agenda varies according to who is talking. The Log Cabin Club, an organization of gay Republicans, decided not to officially participate in the march because its members said the planks drawn up by the steering committee were too far-reaching and liberal.

Nonetheless, most activists agree on a basic laundry list of issues: passage of a federal civil rights bill barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, increased funding for AIDS research and health care, a policy allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the military, the repeal of sodomy laws, and some sort of legal recognition of gay couples and families.

Gays and lesbians want to “be allowed to do what other people do, if we’re qualified,” Schrader said. “Being gay is not enough to say you’re not qualified.”

Researchers Lianne Hart and Ann Rovin contributed to this story.