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March 1994 T PAGE 3 Q-Notes Index News Baptist church opposes Pride parade 8 Busted escort ring has ties to Fleiss 1 County rejects civil rights bid 4 GROW confronts support crisis 1 House member pushes AIDS project abandoned by Clinton 8 Library not dead yet 23 NC Pride PAC hosts reception 10 Nominations sought for annual Q-Notes awards 1 North Carolina to eliminate anonymous HIV testing 1 SC Pride moved to April 4 Victoiy Fund invades North Carolina 13 White receives Senate confirmation 1 Features Auction benefits Raleigh ASO 25 Dining friends do it again 9 Diversity can be a drag 12 Joan of Arc returns for women's history month 35 Narrow federal hate crime definition skews NC results 22 When the relationship ends 15 Columns Between The Covers 28 Classifieds 32 Community Cards 34 Curbside 39 Drops of Water 19 For The Record 33 Gay-la Word Search 39 Letters To The Editor 6 National Notes 16 One Of Our Own 15 Out and About 38 Personals 36 QFYI 30 Quips and Quotes 12 ZodiAscope 39 GAYANI [> LESBIANd PRESS ASSOCIATION Q-Notes Vol. 9, No. 3, March, 1994 Mailing Address: P.O. Box 221841 Charlotte, NC 28222 Phone: (704)531-9988 Fax: (704)531-1361 Street Address: 4037 E. Independence Blvd. Charlotte, NC 28205 Publisher & CEO Jim Yarbrough Editor David Stout Associate Editor David Prybylo Associate Editor Dan Van Mourik Raleigh Bureau Eagle White Typesetter David Prybylo Office Assistant Paris Eley Personals Larry Jackson Contributing Writers: D.J. Instant T, Mel Dahl, David Jones, Don King, Brent L. Pack, Jonathan Padget, Pam Pompey, Gene Poteat, David Prybylo, Marcie Rollins, David Stout, Elisabeth Tate, Dan Van Mourik, Eagle White, Amy Wright Q-Notes ispublished monthly in Chariotte, N.C., by Pride Publishing & Typesetting, a for-profit corporation, and is distributed free of charge throu^out North Carolina and South Carolina. Press mn is 13,500 copies and except for 100 file copies and complimentary subscriptions all copies are distributed to the public. To advertise in Q-Notes, contact Q-Notes, P.O. Box 221841, Charlotte, N.C. or call 704-531-9988. Advertisements are published with the understanding that the advertisers are fully authorized to publish submit ted copy: having secured any necessary written consent for all copy, text, photos and illustrations, and that no ad submitted is in violation of a patent, copyri^t, first right of publication, ora right to privacy. The advertiserassumes all liability for claims of sirits based on the subject matter of its axi, and agrees to hold Pride Publishing & Typesetting, and Q-Notes harmless from any such claim. The Publisher assumes no liability for typographical errorsoromissions beyond offeringtorunacorrection.The entire contents of Q-Notes are copyright (c) 1994 by Pride Publishing & Typesetting, and may not be reproduced in any manner, either in whole or part, without the express written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved. Publication of the name or photog^h of any person or organization in articlesoradvertising in Q-Notes is not to be construed as any indication of the sexiral orientation ofsuch person or organization. The official views of this newspaper are expressed only in editorials. Opinions expressed in bylined columns, letters, articles, and cartoons are those of the writers and artists and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Q- Notes. Are we next. Rico? by Mel Dahl The United States Supreme Court recent ly ruled that the Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, more commonly known as RICO, may be used against Oper ation Rescue. I should be thrilled, but I’m not. A bit of background: RICO was designed to shut down sham businesses which operate as a front for organized crime, and has been quite successful. It provides harsh civil and criminal penalties for organizations and or ganizational leadership found to engage in illegal activity. It allows the seizure ofassets and the jailing for long periods of time of persons found to be engaging in illegal activ ities. However, Congress, being its usual in competent self, drafted the Act so sloppily that virtually any business which engages in activity which is illegal or unfair, or even looks like it may be illegal or unfair, can be swept up in the broad RICO net. At this point, most lawsuits against businesses in clude RICO claims almost as a matter of course. Entirely legitimate businesses, through accident or which deliberately ran afoul of one regulation or another, have been seized and their leaders jailed. In sum, what Congress intended to be used as a weapon against organized crime has become a mon ster. The courts have held that much of what has been done in RICO’S name is beyond what Congress intended, but it is not for the courts to re-write statutes. So, as long as Congress leaves the broad language in place, the courts will broadly interpret it. Enter Operation Rescue. Let us be clear about one thing from the very beginning: Operation Rescue is one of the most obnox ious blights ever to curse the American land scape. It exists solely to harass women who are choosing to exercise what the courts have deemed a fundamental right — the right to Could it happen here? Those who have seen Stephen Spielberg’s latest movie, Schindler’s List, say that it is a powerful emotional experience. The film— an account of a German industrialist who saves the lives of more than a thousand Polish Jews during the Holocaust—is shot almost entirely in grainy black-and-white, giving it the feel of a documentary and lending authenticity to the atrocities it re counts. From the nightmarish brutality of the purging of Krakow’s Jewish ghetto to the nonchalant murder of concentration camp prisoners by their commandant, each horri fyingly real scene is as impossible to watch as it is to ignore. The film is as close to a vision of hell has we are ever likely to see. Among the many comments made by those who have seen Schindler ’sList, the one heard most often is, “How? How could this have happened?” Surely everyone who has seen the movie has studied the Holocaust in school, yet witnessing the graphic details of this horror adds a dimension to this event that forces the viewer to consider the human element of the story. It’s easy—even com fortable—to see the Holocaust in two dimen sions: The Germans are The Bad Guys, the Jews are the Victims, and the Allies are the Heroes. Without faces, the statistics are simply numbers, and the question of “How” becomes irrelevant. It is the gruesome details of the slaugh ter—the screams of men, women, and chil dren as an army of stormtroopers rush at them from all sides, the sound of an officer’s voice as he casually instructs aguard to shoot a prisoner for talking back, the muffled ago ny of trainloads of thirsty, frightened prison ers on their way to Auschwitz, the deafening silence of a mountain of dead bodies—that we find so difficult to comprehend. How, we ask, could people descended from a culture that has produced the likes of Bach, Mozart, andBrahms become so cruel, so sadistic, and so full of hate that they consciously construct gigantic murder mills all over Europe? How could one person possibly treat another as if he were less than a bacterium? How could this have happened? Beneath these ques tions is the one we’re almost too terrified to ask: Could it happen again? Could it happen here? As horrible as the Holocaust was, the greater horror is that it could have hap pened—that an entire nation of thinking, rational people allowed it to happen. The story of the Holocaust begins more than a decade before Schindler’s List does. Germany in the early 1930s was suffering terrible economic hardships and its people were being seduced by the rhetoric of the National Socialist Party—the Nazis—whose extremely nationalisticviewspromisedclean, simple solutions to the country’s manifold and complex problems. Hitler, as head of the Nazis, said that Germany’s problems were caused by Jews, Communists, Social Demo crats and other “undesireables,” and, though he failed to explain precisely how this was so, most Germans began to agree with them and they were elected to political office in large numbers. The rest of the story—the building of concentration camps, the round-up of Jews throughout Europe and eventually their wholesale slaughter—can be rolled off by most any seventh-grader. What the average seventh-grader couldn’t tell you is that Hitler’s purging began with the swift and systematic destruction—including execution by the tens and even hundreds of thousands—of Germa ny’s gay culture. In fact, the photograph of ahuge pile of burning books that is so closely associated with the beginning of the Nazi reign of terror is actually a picture of the burning of the contents of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, an internationally known library of gay and lesbian literature. The photograph was taken in May of 1933—two years before Germany’s anti-Jewish laws were passed. Spielberg ought not to be slighted for omitting reference in Schindler’s List to the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. At the same time, however, we who see the movie ought to know the whole truth about the Holocaust so that when we hear the likes of Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson and Dan Quayle and Fred Phelps and Joe Chambers and Lou Sheldon and Phyllis Schlafley and anyone else who blames gays and lesbians for whatever problems confront America, we can hear—faintly but clearly—the ech oes from half a century ago. choose whether or not to be a parent. For the past ten years. Operation Rescue has engaged in a systematic hate campaign of vicious harassment and unspeakable cru elty. Some bright attorney for the abortion providers finally got the idea that, since Operation Rescue’s raison d’etre is to en gage in illegal acts, it is a criminal enterprise within the meaning of RICO. I will concede the argument has a certain plausibility to it. I will ^so concede that the antics of Operation Rescue have gotten en tirely our of hand, and something has to be done about it. And, frankly, if Randall Terry and company spend the next 25 years in prison, I don’t know if I would cry very hard. In sum. Operation Rescue is what attorneys refer to as an unsympathetic party. The problem lies with what the attorneys refer to as the slippery slope; that it is much easier to start something Aan it is to stop it once it gets going. What other organization do we know of that routinely engages in illegal activity for the purpose of trying to bring about social change? I’ll give you ahint: It’s acronym has five letters; the first three are ACT and the last two are UP. That’s right. I fully expect the next wave of RICO litigation to involve ACTUP. After all, the Operation Rescue argument is that it is an organization whose stated purpose is to engage in illegal activity, that it has a long pattern of engaging in illegal activity, and that it does so to harm the business and commerce of businesses providing a legiti mate service. That analysis, of course, ap plies equally as well to ACT UP. Now, even I know the difference between Operation Rescue and ACT UP, and I am not for a minute suggesting that a reasonable person would find the two comparable. The problem is that I’m not at all certain the Continued on page 10 Three strikes and he’s out Mayor Richard Vinroot must be com mended for his performance. After all, it’s not every day that a homophobe can conceal his prejudices at a gay and lesbian candidates’ forum well enough to leave the audience enthralled. But, Vinroot did just that. At the June 1991 meeting of First Tues day, Vinroot convinced a skeptical crowd that he was the mayor who would finally make homosexuals matter in the Queen City. In a speech peppered with sound-bites like “I will listen and be fair,” “[The gay coimnu- nity is] not mine to judge” and “I will respect you,” candidate Vinroot wrangled himself a strong base of support from homosexual con stituents. Now, less than two years removed from that bravura bit of theatrics, Vinroot has de nied us three times. It sounds like he is audi tioning for another role these days. The first betrayal occurred in November 1992 during the unsuccessful drive to have sexual orientation added to the city’s list of protected classes. Following the city council ’ s vote to deny the addition, Vinroot told his colleagues, “I think you made the right deci sion.” The second betrayal related to the March on Washington held in April 1993. Mayor Vinroot watched the event on television and the only enlightening comment he could think to make to the media was that he found it to be offensive due to the “language” and the “pub lic exposition of sex.” Conceding that some marchers and rally participants probably did behave inappropriately, Vinroot still had an obligation to place those individuals in per spective in his comments, and he didn’t bother. He was perfectly content to dismiss a civil rights demonstration by one million Ameri cans based on the actions of a minority of its participants. The final betrayal, the one which has cost him whatever shred of support he had left from the community, stems from the recent controversy over the starting time of the NC Pride March. Putting his opinion into the debate, Vinroot declared that he wished the March “wasn’t happening at all.” Ilie first reaction to these instances is to say “What gullible fools we all were.” And while this is an accurate statement, it is much too defeatist. We should instead be empower ing ourselves by organizing our retribution for these backstabbings. It is widely held that Vinroot will seek Jesse Helms’ seat in the U.S. Senate; we must diligently organize against this prospect. We have seen the type of representation gays and lesbians can count on from Vinroot, and we cannot allow him to take his prejudiced atti tudes to Washington where he will have even more influence over our lives. Besides, Mayor Vinroot has garnered our scorn the old fashioned way—he’s earned it. \Suji^auj6ef I I Subscriptions are by 1st and 3rd class mail in sealed envelopes mailed in Charlotte, N.C. Subscription rate ? is $25.00 (1stclass) or $15.00 (3rdclass) for 12 issues (free to PLWAs). To subscribe contact Q-Notes, I PO Box 221841, Charlotte, N.C. 28222. Make checks payable to Q-Notes. I Name I Address City, State, Zip.
Q-notes (Charlotte, N.C.)
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