COLUMN ONE : Gays, Foes Seek Spin That Sells : Both sides have escalated the propaganda battle. Explicit material, claims of morality and fairness are among weapons wielded in broadcast and video campaigns. But, sometimes, such strategies backfire.

The video is titled “Gay Rights/Special Rights.” Its music is sinister, its images provocative. The camera lingers on scenes of gay men and lesbians kissing passionately and dancing suggestively. African-Americans and Latinos complain that the gay movement is undermining their civil rights gains. Gay protesters scream, “We’re gonna rule the world!”

A speaker warns that “we’re going to lose thousands and thousands and thousands of good heterosexuals to the homosexual revolution.” A ravaged AIDS patient tells of having 50 sex partners in one night.

Switch to a television advertisement aired briefly last summer. The music is gentle. There are scenes of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a snapshot of a smiling soldier.

“Among the 58,191 names on this wall are those of gay Americans,” intones a sympathetic voice. “Young Americans like Donald Dean Winn, killed in combat New Year’s Day, 1971, remembered now on the fifth panel of this black, granite wall. Donald Winn, soldier, patriot, gay American. . . . Was it wrong for them to serve and die? Should their names be erased from this wall?” The words “End Discrimination” fill the screen.

The techniques are classic: Warnings of society’s ruination, tales of disease and sexual menace on one hand; cries of equality and justice on the other.

The clash over gay rights has become America’s latest morality play, with gay advocates and their opponents competing for public support on a variety of stages. The war of words escalated this year with the debate over the military ban on gays, but it also is being waged on such matters as adoption rights and partnership benefits, anti-discrimination laws and the inclusion of gays in multicultural school curricula.

Like abortion, the gay rights issue has taken the nation into hazy, emotionally charged territory where traditional notions of morality collide with an evolving sense of civil liberties. X-rated topics have become the stuff of political flyers and videotapes. Catch phrases such as “special rights” have become potent tools of persuasion, as have fear and anxiety. Science, religion and civil rights have all been thrown into the pot of rhetoric stirred from talk shows to televangelist broadcasts to referendum battles.

Each camp’s message attempts to strike different chords of the national psyche--a sense of equality and fairness versus a widespread discomfort with homosexuality. The framing of the issue thus becomes crucial, a nudging of public attitudes in one direction or another.

Get the public to think of gay men and lesbians as individuals discriminated against because of who they are, and opinion leans toward them.

Get the public to view gays as a threatening minority seeking special treatment, and opinion veers off in the other direction.

“Gay Rights/Special Rights,” distributed by the Traditional Values Coalition of Anaheim, reflects many of the major themes repeatedly struck by gay rights opponents, particularly religious conservatives. Gays are portrayed as beyond the moral pale, a moneyed and politically influential group carrying out a carefully orchestrated plan to overhaul society in their image.

From the standpoint of shaping public opinion, such characterizations can carry a powerful punch. “The minute you say someone is different, (they’re) already at a disadvantage,” said Sheila T. Murphy, an assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at USC.

In the case of gay men and lesbians, the difference is rooted in sexuality--a subject about which American society is generally uneasy.

“They then play on people’s fears about those differences. ‘The Gay Agenda’ does that brilliantly,” Murphy added, referring to a widely circulated, church-produced video that focuses on lewd behavior in gay pride parades and contains many of the motifs in “Gay Rights/Special Rights.”

Further, gays are a group most Americans say they do not know well and don’t like. Voters questioned for a national political survey conducted during presidential election years by a University of Michigan-based consortium have consistently placed gays at the bottom of popularity ratings compared to a wide spectrum of ethnic, religious and political groups.

Whereas most groups earn at least a neutral rating of 50 (with 100 the highest), gays have yet to hit 40.

Those sentiments give gay rights foes a foundation of discomfort on which to build. “If they can translate the whole debate as whether people will be forced to live with, be taught by and take a shower with openly gay people . . . I think by and large (opponents) can win,” said Virginia Sapiro, a University of Wisconsin political science professor who specializes in political psychology.

In contrast, Sapiro said the “straightforward justice argument” used by gay activists “is a kind of abstract argument. . . . It doesn’t seem to be as a symbol as compelling as when (Georgia Democratic Sen. Sam) Nunn says ‘look how close those bunks are.’ ”

She was referring to one of the enduring images of the battle over the military’s ban on gays--Nunn’s tour of a submarine’s cramped sleeping quarters to underscore his concern about privacy.

Also compelling for many people are religious arguments. Even though Americans routinely ignore religious prohibitions on everything from birth control to divorce to eating bacon, censures of homosexuality still carry weight.

“Birth control affects everybody, every couple,” said Garth Jowett, a University of Houston communications professor. “But when you get to homosexuality, you . . . can afford to be much more zealous in your attack because you’re dealing with a minority.”

In some ways, gays are also at a disadvantage in getting their message out. Religious programs on radio and TV have millions of listeners and viewers. The membership and budgets of conservative organizations dwarf those of gay groups. And some media outlets are reluctant to carry advertisements on controversial issues. When the Campaign for Military Service, a coalition lobbying to end the military ban on gays, tried to buy air time for the Vietnam Memorial ad, three major television networks declined to run it.

At the same time, conservatives complain that the news media are increasingly sympathetic to the gay cause--at opponents’ expense.

Within both camps, the tactics are evolving and there is dissension about what is appropriate and what is effective.

In Colorado, some gay rights foes are eschewing material such as “The Gay Agenda” as irrelevant.

“There are certain segments of the public who will believe almost anything negative you say about gay people and other sizable segments who won’t and another sizable segment who just don’t care,” said Tony Marco, one of the architects of Amendment 2, an anti-gay rights referendum that is being challenged in court after its approval last year by Colorado voters.

Instead of talking about sexual behavior, Marco favors another approach, also used in “Gay Rights/Special Rights.” It skewers gays with their own marketing surveys and political boasts, implicitly pitting them against minority groups with an impoverished history.

“(Gays) themselves have been claiming to be an extraordinarily affluent, influential, highly educated community,” Marco said--and therefore, he contends, hardly in need of anti-discrimination protection.

Marco’s strategy has developed with an eye on polls in Colorado that show the state’s residents to be generally more tolerant of homosexuality than the country as a whole.

“The perversity argument doesn’t work very much,” said Paul Talmey, a Boulder pollster whose firm has done extensive surveying on gay issues. “What we find in Colorado, it was live and let live . . . but don’t make it my business and don’t make it a (legally) protected class.”

What did work in Colorado was the characterization of gay rights laws as bestowing on gays “special rights”--a message that gay groups never effectively countered and that tapped into what activist Lawrence Pacheco calls a backlash against civil rights laws in general.

Gay rights organizers also say they blundered in accusing opponents of hating gays, a concept they embodied in the slogan, “Hate is not a family value.”

“People have a really strong, knee-jerk reaction to that,” said Pacheco, who works with Equality Colorado, a gay outreach group. “They don’t like being termed hateful, even though it was a very catchy phrase.”

The degree to which the phrase backfired illustrates the confines in which gay rights proponents have to operate. As a minority long branded as outcasts, gays have to step gingerly in courting the majority.

Ann Northrop, a New York lesbian activist, says that when she and others decided to make a video to counter the right’s focus on raunchy behavior at gay pride parades, “everybody wanted me to make a video called ‘The Straight Agenda’ that would show Mardi Gras and Ft. Lauderdale and kids retching in the gutter at St. Patrick’s Day parades.”

But she realized that most heterosexuals would reject the comparison. Instead, the Gay and Lesbian Emergency Media Campaign made “Sacred Lies Civil Truths,” in which gays are presented as “your mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers”--multiethnic and from every walk of life. They talk of being harassed and bashed, of how the Bible has been used to defend slavery and control women.

There is sinister music in this video too, along with warnings of a societal takeover. This time the culprit is the religious right, which is portrayed as having its own extremist agenda of turning “American democracy into American theocracy.”

In a slightly altered form, that message was used successfully in Oregon last year, when voters defeated a ballot measure that would have banned gay rights laws and written a moral condemnation of homosexuality into the state constitution.

Opponents of the referendum painted it as a threat to everyone, not just gays. “I wasn’t saying it’s OK to be gay, I’m just like you,” said Pacy Markman, a Santa Monica political consultant who helped devise the media campaign against the measure. “I was saying vote for yourself.”

Still, the initiative garnered more than 40% of the vote, and the Oregon Citizens Alliance, the group that authored it, is promoting milder versions at the local level.

“A lot of the reason we got 44% was the fact that we did expose what the homosexual community embraces and what they view as acceptable behavior,” said alliance Chairman Lon Mabon, who dismissed Marco’s criticism of such tactics.

Anti-referendum groups combatted the alliance’s portrayal of gay life with a stream of psychologists and other experts who denounced the material as distorted and inaccurate.

Yet even as they counter such images and present themselves as ordinary folk, gay men and lesbians shift the discussion away from sexual activity into the arena of discrimination.

“If we only respond to being called abnormal, perverse and unnatural, then we’ve missed the point completely ourselves,” said Pacheco. “We need to get off this whole behavior aspect and say: ‘Regardless of what people do in bed, it doesn’t matter.’ ”

While supporters of the military’s ban on gays talked about showers and bunks, opponents talked about the spotless records of men and women who had been expelled from the service for saying they were homosexual.

“When you get people to think of this in terms of discrimination . . . they think it’s obviously wrong and needs to be stopped,” said Mark Mellman, whose Washington, D.C., firm conducted public opinion research for the Campaign for Military Service. “I think the underlying public opinion was basically in our favor.”

Murphy, of the Annenberg School, said: “People in the United States do basically have this very strong equality frame. That turns out to be a very strong button to push.”

Beyond the immediate strategies of fighting a referendum or military policy, the gay movement is also pursuing broader efforts--to get more gays to be open about their orientation, to get the entertainment industry and the news media to present “more accurate” images of gay men and lesbians, to show that the gay community does not just consist of well-to-do white men.

“I do think what is most effective is when we are introduced as three-dimensional human beings, when we get beyond the slogans and the stereotypes,” Northrop said.

More than their opponents, though, gay rights advocates are still pondering how best to promote their cause.

“The majority of Americans don’t like to see themselves as discriminating,” said Torie Osborn, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “But they want us to go away, period. . . . We haven’t figured out how to make our case yet.”