Gay, Lesbian Leaders See Silver Lining in Military Defeat : Politics: Despite the movement’s loss in its first big national fight, the exposure is seen as rewarding. Members seek to learn from mistakes.

The staff at the Campaign for Military Service had scrambled for days to put together a video to counter Senate field hearings at the Norfolk, Va., naval installation, where gay activists knew there would be a chorus of protest against lifting the military ban on homosexuals.

In the video, shown to reporters from the back of a van, service members spoke from the shadows to disguise their identities, saying that they were too frightened for their careers to speak out against the military policy.

None of the news outlets picked it up. Instead, splashed across the evening newscasts and the next day’s newspapers was an image that stuck in the throats of gay and lesbian activists: Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) crouched in a submarine talking to worried looking sailors crammed together on a row of bunks.

There, with one photo opportunity, supporters of the ban had pushed all the emotional buttons they could. “Protect us from these perverts,” is the way David M. Smith, the campaign’s media director, sums up the image.

“We felt overwhelmed,” recalled Thomas Stoddard, who directed the campaign, a coalition of groups that banded together last winter to lobby for an end to the gay ban. “We were peddling our little bicycle up the mountainside and the big bus of the federal government ran us off the road.”

And so it went in the gay movement’s first big fight in the national arena. The opposition easily seized the upper hand during the first week of the new Administration and maintained it right up to President Clinton’s Monday announcement of a new military policy roundly denounced by anti-ban activists.

“I think the last six months has revealed how young a movement we still are and our lack of depth as a political movement,” observed William Rubenstein, director of the national Lesbian and Gay Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “We still don’t have a national organization with 100,000 members. We still don’t have a national organization with an affiliate in every state.”

The outcome of the contest is likely to hearten conservative opponents of gay rights across the country. “It gives them encouragement, and it’s encouragement that the gay movement can ill afford,” observed Jean Hardisty, director of Political Research Associates, a liberal research center in Massachusetts.

Yet gay and lesbian leaders insist that their cause benefited even in defeat from new alliances with non-gay groups, from support from such unlikely sources as conservative Barry Goldwater and from having a gay issue in the national news month after month.

“We’ve never been able to raise the debate to this level and for that we’re grateful,” said William Waybourn, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which promotes gay political candidates. The topic “got a lot of time on the national networks. It’s great. It forces the American public to deal with the issue over the dinner table. Awareness creates a real defeat for prejudice.”

Few in the gay rights movement anticipated last year that one of Clinton’s many campaign promises would erupt into such a political brawl. And many activists said they would have chosen a different issue. “There was not a collective decision of the movement to put this issue front and center. It just happened,” noted Smith, a Los Angeles activist who until recently headed the local chapter of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

Some organizers say that it was a mistake to put pressure on Clinton, both as candidate and President, to confront the military over homosexuals when the Pentagon was already feeling under siege on a variety of other fronts.

“Strategically, it was sort of a stupid thing to do,” suggested Jan Platner, executive director of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a Boston-based group. “Obviously this is a lightning rod issue.”

Once the issue exploded, however, it was something gay rights groups felt they had to stay with. Smith, for one, saw it as a chance to transform public opinion on gay issues in the same way that the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings had reshaped public attitudes toward sexual harassment.

The Campaign for Military Service was formed amid high expectations in the gay community. The organization would raise millions of dollars for public opinion research, television ads, a bus tour of gay veterans and a lobbying effort to sway Congress.

Though the group was able to carry out many of its plans, the hoped for groundswell of support never materialized. Recent polls show the public divided over Clinton’s policy, indicating that support for ending the ban on gays in the military had fallen somewhat when compared to polls last year, before the ban’s supporters took the offensive.

Organizers say there are a variety of reasons, including the power and prestige of their adversaries, the ambivalence with which some gay men and women viewed the military issue and the lack of the help they expected from the White House.

Even as late as last week, Smith said he thought Clinton would deliver on his campaign promises. Last Friday, he said, “I woke up to the Washington Post article that the President had agreed to the (Pentagon) proposal and I didn’t believe it.”

Said Los Angeles gay activist David Mixner, “I think I will be hesitant to put such an incredible belief and faith in an individual word.”

“I think the gay and lesbian community has learned, if we’re going to get our freedom . . . no one is going to hand it to us,” said Mixner, a friend of Clinton’s who has bitterly criticized the President in recent weeks.

Now, gay leaders are vowing to build grass-roots support. They say they will try to create a strong national network, and will urge more gays and lesbians to be open about their sexual orientation in their personal and professional lives.

“Really, it’s time to go back to basics on civil rights organization,” said Rich Jennings, executive director of Hollywood Supports, which promotes gay causes in the entertainment industry. “I welcome failure . . . to reassess our tactics, our message, and be more effective.”

Torie Osborn, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, argues that there are still advances to be made under the Clinton Administration. “The enemy has blasted their guns,” she said. “We know their arguments. . . . The last six months have been the beginning of making our case to America. There’s nothing more (the opposition) can say about us. They can just repeat it over and over.”