From: Carlos Maltzahn <carlosm@piper.cs.colorado.edu>
Subject: Gays gird for Amendment 2 results
Followup-To: amend2-discuss@cs.colorado.edu
Originator: doherty@ucsu.Colorado.EDU
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Distribution: usa
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 23:57:35 GMT

Reprinted without permission from Colorado Daily (12/14/92):

Gays gird for Amendment 2 results

(Many fear atmosphere for homosexuals will worsen)

By Tom Spring

She was blatantly fired form two jobs in Colorado Springs for 
being a lesbian. She faced scathing slurs and graffiti 
scrawled on her walls at college in Vermont. Now she's await-
ing a court ruling on Colorado's Amendment 2.

And she hopes the hate won't become in Boulder what it was in 
her home town.

The 34-year-old CU-Boulder graduate student has braced her-
self, along with the rest of Boulder's gay community, for the 
result of the pending court case on Amendment 2, which bans 
laws and ordinances seeking to protect gays, lesbians and 
bisexuals from discrimination.

The amendment could be instated as early as Dec. 27.

The City of Boulder, along with Denver and Aspen activists, 
filed a lawsuit in Denver District court Nov. 12 that seeks 
to overturn the amendment. Boulder's City Attorney Joe de 
Raismes said plaintiffs based their case on grounds that the 
amendment violates federal equal-protection laws and state 
home-rule rights for municipalities.

Aspen, Denver and Boulder have anti-bias ordinances based on 
sexual orientation, all of which face repeal because of 
Amendment 2's approval in the Nov. 3 general election.

"We are prepared to file a preliminary injunction if we have 
to. Our request is for a permanent injunction, and if Amend-
ment 2 is found unconstitutional, w3e should be entitled to 
one," de Raismes said.

A preliminary injunction of Amendment 2 would postpone the 
implementation of the amendment until a hearing in front of 
Denver District Court determined whether the amendment is 
constitutional. A preliminary injunction could be filed as 
early as this week.

"We had equal protection in three places in the state, and 
now that's been overruled. But what's about to happen is that 
discrimination is about to be codified in the state Consti-
tution," said on gay CU student who preferred not to be iden-
tified.

Over the past six years, since Boulder has had anti-discrim-
ination laws, 12 cases of discrimination based on sexual 
orientation have been filed with the City of Boulder Office 
of Human Rights.

Probable cause was determined to exist in two of those cases. 
Two cases were settled by a written agreement, four are still 
pending. However, no later than Jan. 7, if plaintiffs fail to 
halt the amendment, discrimination based on sexual orienta-
tion will no longer be illegal.

The 34-year-old graduate student, who asked that her name 
not be used, is fearful of the time when she will no longer 
be protected by anti-gay discrimination laws, because of her 
past experiences in Colorado Springs. Colorado for Family 
Values, the group that succeeded in placing Amendment 2 on 
the ballot, is based in Colorado Springs.

By age 17, she had already been fired from a job at a crafts 
store in Colorado springs for being a lesbian, she said. Her 
second firing, because of her sexual orientation, came a 
year later while working at another Colorado Spring's store.

"I had been working at this record store for a couple of 
years as assistant manager and made the mistake of telling 
someone, again, I was a homosexual. I was really stupid when 
I was young. i just didn't realize how bad things were. The 
manager called me into her office and asked me if I had 
indeed said what I had said. I said yes. And she said, `Well, 
you can't work here, We don't have that kind of a thing in 
this store.'"

She moved to Boulder three years ago and has reservations 
about returning home to Colorado Springs after she finishes 
school. Before moving to Boulder, she lived and went to 
school in Massachusetts and Vermont.

"The first year (in Vermont), everything was pretty smooth. 
It was a small school, and there were a few other gay people 
on campus. Things began to heat up only after some of the 
women got together at a place where women could meet and talk 
about sexual harassment, women's history and things like 
that. And since I was on e of the founder, a lot of hostile 
remarks were aimed at me.

"Our building was broken into repeatedly, and vile graffiti 
was put on the walls like, `Lesies get out' or `fuckin' 
homos.' Next were the phone calls. `We're going to rape you; 
we're going to kill you; get out of here; we're going to hurt 
you bad,' and things like that."

The beginning of the end of her time at the small, rural col-
lege began when she returned to school from Christmas break 
to find windows broken out in her car. Soon, the number of 
harassing phone calls stepped up, and mail sent to her had 
been opened with slurs written inside. The last straw was 
when people began banging on her window at night and scream-
ing, "Homo go home."

"The campus police told me I was imagining things. Then they 
told me I had to expect this kind of thing, what with my sex-
ual orientation being what it was. They basically blew me 
off. So I left."

One of her more telling stories occurred while patronizing a 
known gay bar in Colorado Springs.

"It was about 11 at night when a truck load of rednecks with 
rifles pulled up and fired a couple of shots through the win-
dow. Everybody, of course, got down on the floor, and the 
manager of the bar called the police. We remained on the 
floor, and the rednecks were outside. We waited about 20 to 
25 minutes, and no one showed up. The manager called the 
police again, and they laughed at her and said something to 
the effect, `You're on your own. The laws don't work if 
you're queer.'"

She said despite Boulder's "no" vote on Amendment 2 and its 
liberal atmosphere, she still has to live with the constant 
reality that others will not accept her for who she is.

"The other day I was returning home to my apartment an heard 
a neighbor say to another, `The Bill of Rights was a mistake 
because it gave homosexuals the right to pretend they are 
human beings. And everybody knows they aren't.'"

Christopher DeWinter has lived in Boulder for eight years 
and is open about being gay. And he is concerned about becom-
ing a victim of hate crimes.

In direct response to the passage of Amendment 2 he said, "It 
confirms my suspicions that a lot of people really hate me, 
It makes me feel that, regardless of my being an American 
citizen, people in our society can tell me who I should be, 
how I should be, and how I should act."

The 31-year-old "queer activist" was Boulder County's coor-
dinator for EPOC for 12 months and is part of the Boulder 
Queer Collective.

DeWinter, who works at Career Track, a local Boulder busi-
ness that has anti-discrimination policies, said he has a 
genuine concern for his future and others who have and will 
be faced with discrimination in the workplace.

"The summer before last, a friend of mine who worked at a 
local restaurant in Boulder was fired because he got cut 
twice in a two-day period. And what the manager said was, `I 
can't have faggots bleeding in my restaurant.' To me, that's 
a statement. When he complained about this, the manager 
denied it. So it's just the word of this person who owns the 
restaurant and any person whom he could drag out from under-
neath the counter to say that it never happened."

Although DeWinter is concerned with discrimination, he calls 
it a smaller part of a larger problem.

"When we know that the problem here is bigotry, yet what we 
do is say that the problem is a legal technicality called 
equal-protection laws, it's really the most incredible lie." 
Amendment 2 opponents said it raped homosexuals of their 
civil rights, while proponents said it only offered them 
special rights they did not deserve.

"The civil-rights gains that were made in the `60s weren't 
about, `Well, I think black people really deserve to have a 
job, too.' It was much more than that," DeWinter said. "If 
all I'm fighting for is the right to have a job and public 
access or some kind of protection that regardless of how much 
people hate me they can't do certain things to me, then it 
just isn't worth it."

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