This scene took place on Valentine's Day, and despite the amendment's growing support and the likelihood that President Bush will endorse it, the air at Westlake, looking to gay marriage licenses in San Franciso and gay marriage in Massachusetts, was filled with the romantic sense that homo love is increasingly being embraced. These recent gay-rights advances are proudly noted at the Westlake rally, and there is a feeling of emotional linkage--that here in Washington, we too are on the vanguard of the gay civil rights struggle: Look at our turnout. Look at all of our signs.
Scene two: Evening, a few days before the Westlake rally. A gay town hall meeting is being held in a gay-friendly church on Capitol Hill. The topic: efforts to get a basic gay civil rights law passed in this state. The proposed law is pretty tame; it would simply keep gays in Washington from being discriminated against in employment, housing, financial transactions, real estate, and public accommodations. It's so basic many local gays probably (and wrongly) think our state already has this law on the books. Gay state representative Ed Murray stands before the meager crowd and declares, rather unconvincingly: "This is the most energy I've seen around this bill in 10 years!"
"This bill" has been ritually introduced and defeated in various forms in the Washington State Legislature for almost 30 years running. As for the energy in the room--it couldn't power a curling iron, laying bare a dismal reality glossed over at the Westlake: The gay-rights movement in Washington State, far from being on the vanguard, is in tatters.
If a federal amendment against gay marriage passed Congress tomorrow and headed to the states for ratification, Murray says, "we would have our clocks cleaned--Washington State would be one of those states that would vote for a ban on same-sex marriage."
When you start asking how gay political activism in Washington got to this point, which Murray describes as "anemic," everyone points to 1997. That's the year that a group of Seattle-based gay activists naively put the question of gay civil rights up for a statewide vote instead of pushing for change through the state legislature. Initiative 677 lost badly, with 60 percent of voters rejecting the idea that gays should be protected against housing and job discrimination.
Jamie Pedersen, a Seattle lawyer who serves on the national board of directors for the gay-rights group Lambda Legal, describes the defeat of I-677 as disastrous. "They essentially sent the message to Olympia that we were not a powerful community," he says. Opponents of gay marriage seized on this perceived weakness, pushing through Washington's own "Defense of Marriage Act" the next year, defining marriage as only between one man and one woman.
Before these losses, there was a series of statewide gay-rights groups with their own networks that could have been used to change the minds and votes of legislators on gay issues. But the last of these groups--Hands Off Washington, author of the 1997 defeat--dissolved after the loss, and more than five years later it has been replaced with a hodgepodge of poorly funded groups without statewide reach
So who's currently fighting for the rights of gays and lesbians in Washington State? On the gay-marriage front, the group that put on the Westlake rally, DontAmend.com, is a national Internet-based movement aimed at keeping the federal anti-gay-marriage amendment from passing Congress-- it's not concerned with the Washington State Legislature. The main group working on the marriage issue here is the Legal Marriage Alliance of Washington, which describes its presence as "virtual." Meaning the group has a website and a P.O. box but no money, no lobbyist, and no clout.
When it comes to promoting the stalled gay civil rights bill, the queer community has essentially two nascent civil rights organizations. There's Basic Rights Washington, whose cofounder Jennifer Lindenauer is a tough, smart 31-year-old lesbian from New York. Her organization has enough money to hire one lobbyist for this session, but needs more (www.basicrightswa.org or info@basicrightswa.org). Then there's Discrimination Free Washington, operated out of the LGBT Community Center on Capitol Hill. Debbie Carlsen, the group's organizer, put together a lobby day that this week bused about 100 supporters of the civil rights bill down to Olympia. (Online: www.seattlelgbt.org/ dfw.html. E-mail: discriminationfreewashington2004@yahoo.com. Phone: 206-324-2570.)
