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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (May 20, 2005)
_ - may 2Q. 2QQ5 » jugt OUtj? rçWRIout critical of BRO and the way it handled the No on 36 campaign. 1 was a volunteer for the No on 56 campaign myself, and 1 had some definite concerns, as did many other people in our community. BRO had raised twice the money that the Yes on 36 cam paign had, and yet it didn’t start running televi sion ads until the last month of the campaign, after many people had already submitted their ballots. Meanwhile, the “Yes” folks had been running a successful ad campaign for months prior to the election. I kept track of how many times 1 saw a “Yes” ad and how many times 1 saw a “No” ad. There were three times as many “Yes” commercials in any given evening. Where was BRO when the “Yes” folks start ing telling their lies about how a “No” vote would force schools to teach homosexual sex? Where was BRO when the “Yes” folks were showing respected members of the community like teachers, politicians and even a gay couple? The “No” ads never once mentioned the phrase “No on 36” but were ambiguous, unknown het erosexual talking heads going on about what marriage meant to them. BRO continues to drop the ball time and again when it comes to same-sex marriage. 1 have to ask: Just how effective is BRO? If it wasn’t for the hard work and dedication of Tinker and Love Makes a Family, we would n’t have been successful in fighting the anti-gay initiatives introduced by Lon Mahon and the Oregon Citizens Alliance. Tinker was fighting for lesbian/gay/transgender Oregonians years before BRO existed and Roey Thorpe came to Portland. Tinker is a knowledgeable, seasoned voice in the community, one of many that needs to be heard. Instead of tearing down respected activists in our community, we should be seeking input from everyone, even when we don’t fully agree. The “my way or the highway” attitude doesn’t work for rhe Bush administration, and it doesn’t work in our community, either. While civil unions are a step in the right direction, I wonder what Rosa Parks’ reaction would have been if she had been told by leaders in her community, “Well, you have to sit at the back of the bus, but at least you get to ride the bus.” Let’s not forget, civil unions are second- class citizenship, and everybody knows it. We should be picketing straight weddings, blocking access to marriage license offices and protesting at the churches that participated in rhe Defense of Marriage Coalition. Passive civil disobedi ence is not a contest about who gets along bet ter with whom. B rad T ownsend -B runs Portland Because of an editorial error in the May 6 issue, the Web site for Senior Housing and Retirement Enterprises was deleted from the article “Queers Prepare for rhe Golden Years.” SHARE’S Web site is www.share-pdx.org. ^^ÿillaniette Financial Group, LLC ♦ Retirement ♦ Life Insurance ♦ College Planning ♦ Long - Term Care ♦ Sustainable Investing Floreid Walker 3529 NE Broadway?™ Portland, OR 97232 503 445 9390 ext.101 floreid (a) wfgad vise irs.ci >m Greg Look 3550 Liberty Rd.SgS Salem, OR 97302 503.566.7266 ext. 114 greg(flhvfgad\ isors.com lthough Jack Nichols was not from Oregon, he touched all gay Oregonians with his five decades of gay activism. He died May 2 in Florida at the age of 67. 1 was first touched by Nichols’ 1972 book, I Have More Fun with You Than Any body, which he co-authored with his lover, Lige Clarke. For many years prior to the publi cation of this bcxik, Nichols and Clarke had touched many other gay people with their column, “The Homosexual Citizen,” published in Al Goldstein’s very heterosexual From left, Frank Kameny, Jack Nichols and George Weinberg Screw newspaper. This column were honored as grand marshals of New York City’s 2004 was one of the only sources of Heritage of Pride Parade. gay news available to Oregoni ans. Screw was only sold in adult bxxikstores. Nichols was interviewed by Mike Wallace of Nichols and Clarke’s column led them to CBS News for the first nationally televised doc become the editors of Gay, the first weekly gay umentary on homosexuality March 7, 1967. He newspaper. (The Advocate was a biweekly news was one of the first homosexual Americans to paper.) It was often sold in hippie-style bxxik- come out publicly. stores and cigar store newsstands alongside the Nichols never retired. His gay activism con other radical political publications of the periixJ. tinued into the Internet age. From 1997 until Nichols’ activism started years before the 2004 he edited the Web site Gay Today, which 1969 Stonewall rebellion. In 1961 he and Frank was read hy more than 50,000. people worldwide. Kameny started the Washington, D.C., chapter In 2002 I sent Nichols an e-mail thanking of the Mattachine homophile rights organiza him for his 1972 Ixxik. As he seemed to do with tion. Inspired by Martin Luther King’s famous everyone who came close, we became friends. 1963 march on Washington for black civil Even though he lived on a beach in Florida, the rights, Nichols and Kameny led a protest July 4, Internet enabled our frequent long-distance 1965, at Independence Hall calling for homo communications. sexual civil rights. Bayard Rustin, the man who Professor J. Louis Campbell of Penn State was the driving force behind King’s march, was i University has spent the past several years working on a biography of Nichols. A contract also gay. with a distinguished hx>k publisher is under Nichols was rhe first activist to challenge the negotiation. An early draft of the fxxik promis medical dogma that homosexuality is a sickness. es to preserve this important part of gay history. He worked with George Weinberg and other More about Nichols can be found at his per activists to get homosexuality removed from the sonal site, www.jack-nichols.com, and official list of mental disorders. Weinberg coined www.gaytixlay.com. the term “homophobia" in the 1960s and initi —Thomas Kraemer ated psychological research on the subject. 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