Oregon daily emerald., June 26, 1973, Page 3, Image 3

‘Gay
Pride
Week’:
speeches,
confab,
and
‘gay-in’
in
Portland
Four years ago this month, the New York City Police Department
made a typical raid on a gay bar in the gay Christopher Street district
of New York.
Something strange happened.
Rather than getting herded off to jail, the gay people — for the
first time — fought back and a three day riot ensued.
This was the birth of the gay liberation movement. The next year
saw the founding of the national Gay Liberation Front and now the gay
movement is a growing cause that is spreading across the country.
Last week in Portland, and in cities all across the United States,
the movement celebrated its third annual Gay Pride Week.
On Saturday gay pickets demonstrated for gay rights in front of
the Pioneer Post Office. Gay activists from around the West Coast
spoke.
Jim Foster, who supported a gay rights plank at the Democratic
National Convention last year, was the first speaker. He urged support
for Oregon House bill 2930, which prohibits discrimination on the basis
of sexual orientation in the areas of housing and employment.
“We are at a turning point,” Foster said, “as all over the nation
the gay movement is exploding to massive proportions.”
Foster is political chairer for San Francisco’s Society for In
dividual Rights (SIR).
George Nicolle, chairer of the Oregon Gay Political Caucus, also
spoke in support of HB 2930 and urged state legislators to endorse it.
By RANDY SHILTS
For the Emerald
“The persecution and discrimination against gay people is not
nearly as destructive as the fact that the society still denies our very
existence,” Nicolle said.
Scott Lewis, a minister for the Seattle Metropolitan Community
Church (one of a network of gay churches), said that “while the
Church has been a key oppressor of gay people...I know Jesus Christ to
be the greatest liberator of all times.” It is the Church and not Christ
that has been oppressive to gay people, he said.
Jerry Harris, a University Sociology graduate student
representing Eugene Gay People’s Alliance, said, “A society that puts
more value on men killing one another than men loving one another is
a sick society.”
He also spoke in support of a proposed ordinance before the
Eugene City council that would ban anti-gay discrimination.
Randy Shilts, chairer of the ASUO’s Incidental Fee Committee
and Oregon’s first openly gay public official, also spoke at the
demonstration.
“This society demands that we as gay people live without love. We
can get by if we pretend we are straight but as soon as we express our
sexual identity we lose our jobs and our free place in the society,”
Shilts said.
“The end result of gay liberation is love. The society must learn to
respect it.”
The demonstration was followed by the Third Annual Northwest
Gay Conference.
Foster was a key-note speaker and urged gay unity among all gay
people.
Two Seattle Lesbians presented their documentary “Gay
Families,” an in-depth analysis of their relationship — as two gay
women — with their children as a gay family.
The speeches were fclowed by workshops on gay media use, gay
student activism, religion and the homosexual and lesbian activism.
The next day a gay-in was held in Washington Park.
“Similar demonstrations were held across the country in Seattle,
San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C. with a gay-in in Mayor
Daley’s Chicago office,” said Shilts. He also urged interested people to
attend the weekly meetings of Eugene Gay People’s Alliance at 8 p.m.
on Tuesday nights at the Wesley Center at 1236 Kincaid.
< Shilts is an Emerald reporter and a member of the Eugene Gay
People’s Alliance.)
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Supreme Court nixes
curbs on Ohio Guard
(c) 1973, The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Closing another chapter in the controversy over
the death of four students during a 1970 antiwar demonstration at Kent
State University, the Supreme Court last week declined to order
“judicial surveillance over the training, weaponing and standing
orders” of the Ohio National Guard.
In a decision by Chief Justice Warren Burger, the high court ruled
that “the complex, subtle, and professional decisions as to the com
position, training, equipping and control of a military force are
essentially professional military judgments, subject always to civilian
control of the legislative and executive branches” of government.
The decision grew out of a federal court suit, filed five months
after the Kent State shootings, by three students who asked for
restrictions on future training and use of the guardsmen.
They suggested that the existing training led the part-time
soldiers, at Kent State and in other circumstances, to use “fatal force
in suppressing civilian disorders when...non-lethal force would
suffice to restore order.”
The Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati had ruled
that a federal district court judge improperly dismissed the students’
suit and had returned the case to him for resolution of that issue.
But Burger’s opinion reversed the appellate court decision and
said the district judge had acted correctly.
The Chief Justice pointed out that since the suit was brought, the
complaining students had left the university and the Ohio National
Guard had adopted new “use-of-force” rules and civil disorder
training.
Burger’s opinion was joined by President Nixon’s other three
appointees to the high court and Justice Byron White.
The other four justices said they would not have gone as far as
Burger on the merits of the case, but would have dismissed the
students’ suit as moot in light of the changes since 1970.
Earlier, the supreme court had ruled that the families of the
students shot by the guardsmen were not entitled to sue the state
government for wrongful death.
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June 28 thru July 1st
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June 28th
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room to be posted