SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CAREERS / BALANCING WORK AND FAMILY : Companies Offering Benefits to Same-Sex Partners of Employees : Entertainment concerns in Southern California lead a small but steady national trend.

For years, Christopher Laabs has referred to his live-in lover Keith Hoshal as “my spouse.” Now Laabs’ employer, Sony Pictures, regards Hoshal that way as well.

Laabs immediately signed up last year when Sony began offering benefits to domestic partners of its employees. But getting health insurance and other perks for Hoshal wasn’t his main goal.

“It was more to get on board and be part of a change within the social system,” said Laabs, 39, who works in the script clearance department at Sony. “[Gay] people are getting civil rights that I feel have been withheld” until now.

Over the past three years, entertainment companies in Southern California have been leading a small but steady national trend toward offering health insurance and other benefits to domestic partners of eligible employees. Such a move has given domestic partners--long-term couples of the same (or sometimes opposite) sex--some of the advantages enjoyed by married employees and their dependents.

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Five major film companies--MCA/Universal Inc., Paramount Pictures, Sony, Warner Bros. and, starting next year, Walt Disney Co.--extend such benefits, joined by a handful of smaller firms such as Lucas Films. Laabs and other workers praise these companies for promoting the equality of gays and lesbians in the workplace and expanding the concept of family in American society.

But many companies and employees have not been so quick to embrace domestic-partner benefits. Fewer than 150 employers nationwide have such programs, according to Lincolnshire, Ill.-based Hewitt Associates, a benefits consulting firm. Some companies have feared a backlash from conservative and traditional family groups vehemently opposed to gay rights. Bucking the industry trend, two big studios--Fox and MGM--do not offer domestic-partner benefits.

Even when the benefit is offered, few employees take advantage of it, citing reasons ranging from tax consequences to privacy fears. Paramount estimates that fewer than 25, or 1.5%, of 1,500 eligible employees have signed up for its plan. Hewitt says less than 3% of workers typically opt for such coverage, a rate far below most companies’ expectations.

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Yet industry observers say the benefit remains an important workplace development, if more for moral and symbolic reasons than practical or financial ones. Because no state currently recognizes same-sex marriages, domestic-partner status is necessary to give gay and lesbian employees access to the same benefits enjoyed by married colleagues, proponents say.

“The basic argument is [one of] equality,” said Richard Jennings, executive director of Hollywood Supports, a nonprofit advocacy group focusing on AIDS and sexual orientation issues at entertainment companies. “By setting up a criteria of marriage [for spousal benefits], companies are excluding people with partners who can’t be married.”

The concept has caught on slowly, partly as an outgrowth of the 26-year-old gay rights movement. The Village Voice, an alternative newspaper in New York, became one of the first U.S. companies to offer domestic-partner benefits in 1982.

A number of media and high-tech firms, along with colleges, municipal governments and various other employers, have gradually followed suit. California employers with the benefit include Apple Computer, Levi Strauss and the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco and West Hollywood.

Media and high-tech companies in particular “are typically at the forefront of social issues,” Jennings said. But having the most complete benefits program “also becomes a competitive issue in high-tech, entertainment and academia. Those companies are trying to retain the best employees, and there’s a lot of competition for people with certain talents. When [employees] have a choice, they’ll go where they’re supported.”

MCA became the first studio to adopt the benefit in 1992. The following year, Sidney Sheinberg, then president of MCA, and fellow mogul Barry Diller launched a campaign to win acceptance for domestic-partner benefits at the other major film studios.

“Basing benefits on marriage is not mandated by law and a benefit that recognizes marriage as the only vehicle for extending benefits to the partners of employees is a criterion that not all can meet,” the pair wrote in a letter to fellow studio executives.

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Other studios have gradually taken notice.

“It took us awhile to make sure we would not run afoul of any laws” governing benefits, said Bill Hawkins, senior vice president of human resources at Paramount Pictures, which adopted domestic-partner policies in 1994. The move “is kind of the right thing to do . . . .It just has to do with consideration of our employees.”

Laabs said that he and other Sony employees signed a petition in 1993 suggesting the company consider domestic-partner benefits. Sony formally adopted the policy in September, 1994. Since then, Hoshal, a 33-year-old nursing student, has used the health plan to help pay for a visit to an osteopath. While Hoshal already had some insurance coverage through a trade association, using the Sony plan was “more cost-effective,” Laabs said.

But there is a catch. Workers must pay taxes on the market value of domestic-partner benefits--a burden not borne by married employees with dependents. Some say this has prevented eligible employees from taking advantage of the plan. Laabs figures the benefit adds about $245 to his annual tax bill.

This hasn’t stopped workers at other studios from fighting for the benefit, though.

“Everything is helpful in combatting homophobia,” said Stuart Baur, a media analyst at MGM who has argued for the benefit. “A message from top management that gays and lesbians are equal is always welcome.”