Newsgroups: bit.listserv.gaynet
Date:         Mon, 17 Aug 1992 13:08:29 -0400
From:         gaynet@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Subject:      GayNet Digest Volume 5 Issue 632

In this issue:
                             msg to Gervais
                          march on washington?
             Australian doctors struggle with HIV infection
                          overlooked opinions
                    Articles against discrimination
                           Univ. of Michigan
                    Cincinnati Human Rights, Take 3

Please send messages for the entire list to gaynet@ATHENA.MIT.EDU,
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----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date:         Sun, 16 Aug 92 23:05:29 MST
From: "Gabriel (in New Mexico)" <G9348712%NMSUVM1.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu>
Subject:      msg to Gervais

Hi, Gervais.  I tried to send you the story but your computer sent my mail
back.  Can you give me another account number???

(sorry to everyone else)

Gabriel (in New Mexico)

------------------------------

From: jeh@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu (Jim Hubbs)
Subject: Re: march on washington?
Date: 17 Aug 92 03:53:21 GMT
Organization: Johns Hopkins University

gaynet@ATHENA.MIT.EDU writes:

>I just want to know when the march on washington(for G/L/B rights) will
>be?  I vaguely remember reading something about it on a poster.  I recall
The March on Washington is scheduled for the weekend of April 23-25, 1993.
I believe the actual march is on the 25th.

>ALSO, when is the quilt supposed to be displayed in Washinton?  I know it
The quilt will be displayed all in one place for the first time in
a while from October 9-11, 1992 on the Mall in Washington, DC.

-Jim

------------------------------

From: John Donald Collier <jcollier@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU>
Subject: Australian doctors struggle with HIV infection
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 92 22:34:02 EST

An article in the Sunday 16 August Melbourne _Age_ reports a debate
in the AMA (Australian Medical Association) concerning HIV infection
reporting:

Doctor's row on sex privacy, by Sue Hewitt

Doctors have been urged to ignore their confidential relationships with
their patients and to report to the state health departments HIV
positive clients engaging in unsafe sex.

A senior vice-president of the AMA, Dr Brendan Nelson, said yesterday
the profession's responsibility to prevent the spread of AIDS was more
important than patient confidentiality.

Dr Nelson said: "We're not talking about clamidia or venereal disease;
we're talking about a disease which at the present time is not yet
curable and is fatal."

Commenting on the new AMA code of ethics for Australian doctors, Dr
Nelson said the issue was an ethical dilemma that "no code of ethics
could adequately" address and it needed further community debate.

AIDS workers yesterday attacked Dr Nelson's comments. There is no
evidence to suggest that HIV-positive people were "recklessly
endangering" the lives of others, Dr Jim Hyde, the gneral manager of the
Victorian AIDS Council/Gay Men's Health Centre, said yesterday.

He attacked Dr Nelson for bringing AIDS into the debate over
patient-doctor relationships, claiming it was being used to
"sensationalise" a serious issue.

There were already systems working in every state to deal with any
incidents of HIV-positive people engaging in unsafe sex, he said.

The president of the Victorian AIDS Council, Mr Tony Keenan, said
yesterday that Dr Nelson had not been kept informed of the work of his
own membership on AIDS in the state.

He said Dr Nelson and others should be reminded that the spread of AIDS
in Australia, especially in Victoria, was defying overseas trends and
declining. In Victoria, doctors could report HIV-positive patients to
the Health Department, which had a five-step plan to deal with the
problem, he said.

The plan could ultimately lead to incarceration.

Dr Nelson said he was unaware of the Victorian system but said that
nationally doctors had to consider breaching confidentiality when lives
were at risk.

Promiscuous HIV patients should be counselled and only reported if they
refused to stop having unsafe sex without informing their partners of
their condition, he said.

He said doctors and the wider community should consider the feelings of
a wife or partner who became infected with AIDS without knowing that
their partner carried the virus.

Patients who were open about their illness allowed their partners to
make informed consent, he said.

AIDS was not the only confidentiality issue facing the medical
profession. Doctors with patients whose actions or conditions could
threaten the lives of others should also break the doctor-patient
confidential relationship, he said.

"If a patient tells you that she is going to kill her husband and you
believe it is a serious threat, then you have a responsibility to the
person whose life is in danger to inform the authorities."

He likened the AIDS confidnetiality problem to that of the proposed
mandatory reporting of child abuse by professionals in Victoria.

[This debate took place in the context of proposed changes to the oath
that doctors take on their responsibilities. The oath is to be
simplified and updated, as I understand it. Dr Hyde is correct, I think,
in charging Dr Nelson with sensationalisation. It is regrettable that Dr
Nelson was unaware of current practice. In a related story in the Monday
_Age_, an anonymous HIV-positive doctor has said that he will stop
working at a hospital because of pressure from other doctors. It appears
that, despite the excellent work of many in the medical profession here,
there is still widespread ignorance and prejudice about HIV infection
in the medical profession. This was brought to the front by the
unfortuante remarks of Dr Fred Hollows some months ago, which I reported
here.]

------------------------------

Date:         Mon, 17 Aug 92 09:30:15 CDT
From: Stephanie Smith <K295SS%TAMVM1.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu>
Subject:      overlooked opinions

Several recent posts have referenced the firm Overlooked Opinions.  Does
anyone know how to get in contact with them, and get added to their
mailing list?

Thanks,
Stephanie Smith
K295SS@TAMVM1

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1992 17:28:05 -0600
From: Ryon Brame <ryon@support.avalanche.com>
Subject: Articles against discrimination

Jaime-

Sorry this message is so long.  It's two articles I wrote for a
local paper in response to a Colorado for Family Values article.
CFV is a bigoted group of fundamentalists from Colorado Springs
who want to amend the states constitution to bar the state and
local governments from including "sexual orientation" in their
discrimination clauses.  CFV seems to be getting its backing
from the Traditional Values coalition, which is also backing
the Oregon group (similar to CFV), and, I suspect, the jerks up
in Alaska.  Hope there's some info in here that you can use.
Feel free to reproduce it, if you want.  Good luck!

========================= First Article ==========================

Colorado for Family Values has done a good job of shifting the
focus of its campaign from the real issue, discrimination against
gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, to extraneous "facts".  I feel
compelled to clear up some of these "facts" found in CFV
propaganda and Kevin Tebedo's recent Colorado Daily article.

CFV "Fact": The average gay man makes $55,500 a year.

Reality: Tebedo seems fond of citing four articles from the Wall
Street Journal, Rocky Mountain News, Travel Weekly, and the San
Francisco Chronicle that support this "fact".  Three of these
articles based their information on data from the Simmons Market
Research Bureau and the fourth on data obtained from Overlooked
Opinions, a marketing research firm in Chicago.  Simmons
conducted a 1988 readership survey of eight gay-oriented
magazines.  Among other things, the survey reported that their
subscribers had an average _household_ income of $47,800.
Overlooked Opinions estimated that the average household income
for gay males at the end of 1991 was $51,624 with the average
household size being 1.7.

So his numbers were a little off, you say.  What's the big deal,
you ask.  I'll tell ya.  a) The majority of readers were from New
York City or Los Angeles, where the per capita income is much
higher than the rest of the nation.  b) As any marketing
professor can tell you, readers of magazines are more likely to
have higher incomes than non-readers.  c) The income average was
per household, not per person.  (Even if it were true that the
average gay household earned $55,500 per year, the average
personal income of each member would be around $30,000.  Compare
that with the current Boulder County individual poverty level of
$24,600 (by HUD guidelines).  That's only $5,400 more than the
poverty level!)

CFV is trying to portray the average gay man or lesbian woman
based on a poll of a magazine's subscribers.  This is ridiculous!
It's like forming a profile of the average American family based
on information from a poll conducted by The Smithsonian magazine.
The likely result would be a white, heterosexual household with a
$87,000 income, two BMWs, 2.3 kids, and a country club
membership.  People of color and lower-income families are
obviously excluded.  The same is true for the Simmons survey.
Their results simply don't fit the gay and lesbian community.
Let's keep this data in perspective.  It was gathered for the
sole purpose of attracting advertisers to eight, gay-oriented
magazines.

CFV "Fact": Hate crimes against gays fall under the common
category of assault.

Reality: Hate crimes, by definition, aren't common cases of
assault.  Attackers are motivated by a hatred for people
different from themselves.  The difference could be sexual
orientation, religion, race, or skin color.  For example, when a
black motorist was severely beaten by several white policemen in
Los Angeles last year, it was clearly a hate crime.  The same is
true for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.  In Colorado, many hate
crimes have happened in just the past year.  Several were cases
where a gay man or lesbian woman was accosted when leaving a gay
bar.  They weren't simple muggings.  Money or property wasn't
stolen.  We know that they were unquestionably cases of hate
crimes, because they also had to suffer derogatory insults like,
"fag", "cocksucker", "dyke", "fudge-packer", as they were getting
the shit beat out of them.  What else could have been the
motivation for such violent, hateful acts?

CFV "Fact": Gays and lesbians want "special rights and protected
status".

Reality: We have never asked for or demanded "special rights".
We just want the same rights and opportunities afforded every
other citizen.  Period.  We don't want to worry about getting
fired from our jobs or losing our apartments because we are gay,
lesbian, or bisexual.  And it does happen.  I was fired from my
job solely because I am gay.  We don't want any rights that any
other person doesn't have.  We only want to have the reasonable
expectation of equal treatment under the law.

CFV "Fact": "Truth is truth," Tebedo says.

Reality: If Tebedo sincerely wants to report the truth, he has a
responsibility to honestly report the facts.  By avoiding the
necessary research, he is not fully, and thus honestly, reporting
the facts.

But all of this is beside the point.  Discrimination is unjust
and it is wrong.  It is unfair to deny a group of people based on
one aspect of their lives.  Gays and lesbians are everywhere.  We
can be found in every walk of life and every profession, playing
football and playing bridge, sitting in church and sitting in
jail, watching TV and reading books.

The injustice of a law which denies equal opportunity to any
group is obvious.  The amendment which CFV proposes will give a
black eye to Colorado and send a message to the nation that the
state will not tolerate differences.  We must all come together
to soundly defeat it.

====================== End of First Article =======================


======================== Second Article ==========================

It's hard to be pissed off when eating Ben and Jerry's Chocolate
Chip Cookie Dough ice cream, but Kevin Tebedo's recent article
was infuriating enough to cause me to fire up the ol' word
processor and try to set the record straight (so to speak).  The
executive director of Colorado for Family Values continues to
sing his shrill song of 'gays make a lot of money and therefore
shouldn't have the same basic civil rights that the rest of us
have'.  By drawing false conclusions and presenting incomplete
information, he makes a convincing, albeit erroneous, argument
for supporting his organization's discriminatory efforts.

I am very reluctant to get drawn into an argument on the points
that Tebedo continually brings up because, overall, they are
irrelevant to the debate over CFV's proposed amendment allowing
discrimination against gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.  (I
sometimes wonder if his strategy is to keep us "gay militants" so
busy responding to his flawed reasoning, that we won't have the
time or energy to focus on defeating CFV's moronic proposed
amendment.)  Unfortunately, I feel compelled to point out a few
facts that Tebedo conveniently omitted or twisted.

Tebedo seems fixated on trying to portray gays and lesbians as
being significantly more affluent than heterosexuals.  He
continues to 'lie with statistics' in order to support his
assertion.  As I have previously pointed out, the data that
Tebedo bases his ENTIRE conception of gays and lesbians on was
taken from two sources.  The first (Simmons Market Research
Bureau), a magazine survey of eight gay-oriented magazines, and
the second (Overlooked Opinions), a panel of 12,000 gays,
lesbians, and bisexuals, who were recruited from gay bars, gay
social organizations, and gay events.  As most sensible people
realize, the first source provides marketing data of a specific
segment of a population, in this case, readers of eight gay-
oriented magazines.  That's hardly representative of the whole
gay and lesbian population.  Tebedo claims the second source is
from a "35,000-subject study, conducted in every conceivable gay
environment."  Although a 12,000-subject study (the correct
number) is impressive, it's a far cry from 35,000.  And, a study
that draws its information from people attending gay bars and gay
events cannot even begin to accurately paint a picture of the gay
community.  I know several people (including myself) that rarely
frequent gay bars or gay events, therefore the likelihood of
being included in a similar survey is slim.

Paul Danish recently called CFV's campaign one that is based on
"politics of envy".  There must be some truth in this or why else
would Tebedo spend so much time trying to persuade the public
that gays and lesbians are more affluent than he thinks we should
be?

The glaring error, of course, isn't just Tebedo's version of the
economic status of gays and lesbians, but of his simplistic idea
that all gays, lesbians, and bisexuals neatly fit into one
category.  This just isn't so.  The fact of the matter is that
the gay and lesbian community is as diverse as the rest of the
population.  That's because we are made up of individuals from
every possible ethnic, economic, occupational, religious, and
geographic background.  One cannot make any generalizations about
gays, lesbians, and bisexuals except that our affections are
usually directed toward members of the same sex.

The real puzzler for me is, what motivates Kevin Tebedo to
actively promote such a blatantly hateful and hurtful amendment?
He's an enigma because he hasn't identified himself as a
fundamentalist (intolerant) Christian (like the other supporters
of CFV have done) which would partially explain his motivations.
As I see it, if he's not religiously motivated, there are three
possible causes for his actions: 1) envy, 2) guilt or anger, or
3) ego.

Envy: I don't know Tebedo's financial status, but, based on his
continual "gays make too much money" smokescreen, I'm led to
believe that he's not very well off.  He could simply be jealous
of those with higher incomes and thereby consider gays and
lesbians to be an easy target for his frustrations.

Guilt or anger: It's possible that Tebedo has long repressed his
homosexual desires and the guilt of having such feelings is
driving him to persecute those people who have accepted them.
Conversely, maybe he is still feeling guilty about some youthful
gay experience that haunts him with the possibility of his own
gayness.  Then again, he could be as straight as they come, but
angry about a past experience, such as being sexually harassed by
a gay employer, propositioned by a male stranger, or even
sexually molested by an older male in a position of trust.

Ego: Everyone wants to leave a mark to show future generations
that he or she existed.  Tebedo could see the CFV as his
opportunity to make a mark.  How else could an unremarkable
person legally make such a permanent mark for our descendants?

Whatever the reason, it's interesting to note the similarities
between his strategy and the historical persecution of other
minority groups.  The most obvious example, of course, would be
the oppression of Jews during Nazi Germany.  Jews were labeled as
an affluent class during a time of high inflation and
unemployment, so bitterness among people with a lower income
developed.  Following that, the problems of the German society
and economy were pinned on the Jews, causing even more resentment
in the non-Jew population.  Tebedo claims that his proposed
constitutional amendment would only prevent gays and lesbians
from having "special rights", but the means they incorporate to
achieve their goal would incorrectly brand us (gays and lesbians)
as affluent, and possibly, make us the object of resentment.

Even if it were true that gays and lesbians have a higher than
average income, it does not negate the fact that we are still
discriminated against.  It is amoral when a fully-qualified
person is fired from his or her job solely because of his or her
sexual orientation.  It is wrong when a responsible and stable
person is evicted from his or her apartment solely because of his
of her sexual orientation.  As a society, we should not allow
this senseless bigotry to continue.

The real issue surrounding this proposed amendment is: does any
person deserve to be treated unjustly simply because he or she
does not match the majority's idea of what a person should be
like?  Should a group of people be denied basic civil rights
solely because they are different from the majority?  Of course
not!  But this is exactly what CFV proposes.  Tebedo claims we
(gays, lesbians, and bisexuals) have the same rights as any U.S.
citizen, which is true, but we are routinely denied those rights
solely because we are different from the majority.  Their
amendment would be the first in the country to write
discrimination into a state's constitution.  This is a
distinction Colorado cannot afford to have.  When election day
rolls around next November, please vote NO.

===================== End of Second Article =======================

+--------------------+-----------+------------------------------------------+
| Ryon Brame         |   *****   |  Due to financial contraints, the light  |
| ryon@avalanche.com |    ***    |  at the end of the tunnel will be turned |
| Boulder, Colorado  |     *     |  off until further notice.               |
+--------------------+-----------+------------------------------------------+

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 10:23:11 -0600
From: Ryon Brame <ryon@support.avalanche.com>
Subject: Univ. of Michigan

I stand corrected!  The University of Michigan does _not_ have a
discrimination policy that protects LesBiGays.  I was confusing it
with the University of Wisconsin, which is understandable.  Once you
get that far north, everything looks the same.  :)

+--------------------+-----------+------------------------------------------+
| Ryon Brame         |   *****   |  Due to financial contraints, the light  |
| ryon@avalanche.com |    ***    |  at the end of the tunnel will be turned |
| Boulder, Colorado  |     *     |  off until further notice.               |
+--------------------+-----------+------------------------------------------+

------------------------------

From: <MARKD@urjwc.ucla.edu>
Subject: Cincinnati Human Rights, Take 3
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 92 10:11:00 PDT
Encoding: 54 TEXT

The City of Cincinnati, in an attempt to bring itself into the 20th Century
and perhaps undo some the the harm done when it attempted to prosecute a
museum for displaying Mapplethorpe photographs, has before its city council a
human rights ordinance which guarantees equal rights to gays and lesbians.

The ordinance is being attacked by a group called NewWave 2000, led by a
minister claiming God came to him in a dream and ordered him to fight this
ordinance.

The ordinance looked like an easy one to pass originally, but now some
members of council are faltering.  They need to hear from people all over,
they need to hear that this is not a political football but an issue of basic
human rights.  They need to hear that we will remember them for the decision
they make.

Furthermore, city council is a traditional stepping stone for
congressmen from the First and Second districts in Ohio and for senate.
*****These people may very well end up in national politics*****

I've posted this message twice, and asked that anyone who responds please let
me know so that I know my efforts have not been in vain.

The silence has been deafening.

So what's the deal?  Are we all just too busy?  Or, perhaps since it's just
a city as opposed to a state, we can't be bothered?  Or worse yet, does no
one respond to any of these postings?

Once more, for those who do care:  write to city council members and please
let me know when you do (Address markd@urjwc.ucla.edu):

    Nick Vehr, opposed
    Bobbie Sterne, in favor
    Roxanne Qualls, in favor
    John Mirlisena, undecided
    David Mann, leaning against (recently won a special election to become
            a member of YOUR House of Representatives)
    Mayor Dwight Tillery, undecided
    Peter Strauss, undecided
    Nell Surber, undecided
    Tyrone Yates, in favor

    Cincinnati City Hall
    801 Plum Street
    Cincinnati, OH 45202

    If anyone can provide fax numbers, phone numbers, or more or better
information, please do.

------------------------------

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