25: Straight But Not Narrow

“There were many straight people who actively campaigned against Measure 9. We relied heavily upon the non-gay community to go canvass and talk to voters. I’m glad so many straight people were able to go into places and handle that for us when a lot of us couldn’t do it. I think it’s important we thank these folks for their public support and activity.”  ~ No on 9 activist Sharon Hill, interviewed by Pat Young

In the early 1990s, many Oregonians did not realize they knew a gay or lesbian person. Bonnie Tinker, a lesbian activist whose organization Love Makes a Family was a leader in community education during and after the No on 9 campaign, reflected on this in her conversation with historian Pat Young. Around the state there were “at least tens and often times hundreds of people who suddenly were coming out to their friends” along with “straight people who realized that sexuality was a real political issue.”  

Ballot Measure 9 mobilized the LGBTQ community like never before. But it also activated a huge cross-section of straight people.

“In Oregon, the campaign was strengthened by people and organizations all over the state who were not directly affiliated with the No on 9 Campaign but were determined to do the difficult and loving work of trying to educate ordinary people about a group of ordinary citizens within their midst, those who call themselves lesbian and gay.”  

Suzanne Pharr, in her 1993 essay about Measure 9 (reprinted in Transformation)

Straight But Not Narrow 

“Those buttons, ‘Straight But Not Narrow’ – I was never going to wear one,” says community and business leader Eric Friedenwald-Fishman. “There was a very big thing in those days, ‘I wouldn’t want to be thought of as gay.’”  

Wearing those buttons could reinforce that prejudice. On the other hand, they could be an important form of solidarity, of making visible that it wasn’t just gay people who supported LGBTQ rights.  

Many straight folks joined the No on 9 struggle regardless of the risk of being perceived as LGBTQ. (And it was a risk. Homophobic hate crimes were soaring and being fired or denied housing for being gay was perfectly legal in most of the state.) 

Eric Ward, for whom the risk was compounded by being the target of racist discrimination and violence as a Black man, says of his involvement with the LGBTQ community in the fight against Measure 9, “I would have done almost anything for that movement.”

“People would call me homophobic slurs for years afterwards, in rural areas where I travelled to speak, accusing me of running the secret homosexual agenda. I considered it a point of pride.” 

Eric K. Ward

Others saw the value of speaking as an identifiably straight person, making it clear to voters that defeating Measure 9 was not just up to the gay community. 

“We had to give them a way in.” 

“We wanted the public to see that a heterosexual person took it as seriously as a gay person,” No on 9 campaign manager Peggy Norman, a lesbian, told historian Pat Young about the decision to feature Ellen Lowe as a primary campaign spokesperson. On the staff with Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, Ellen could “talk about religion and no one could take that piece away from her. We deliberately chose someone who the public could hear, to put our story out there. We had to give them a way in.” 

“When you open the door to the OCA and the OCA began to restrict who was going to participate in the democratic process, it was really an assault on everybody. Perhaps the best person, at that time, to articulate that kind of universal application of what was happening was a straight person.”  

Ellen Lowe, interviewed by historian Pat Young

Some queer activists saw the prominence of straight spokespeople in the campaign as an effort to squelch or sanitize LGBTQ visibility in the effort. This was a source on ongoing tension –should the campaign be about increasing acceptance of gay people and reducing homophobia? Or should it focus more narrowly on opposing the writing of discrimination into the state constitution, without asking people to “approve” of homosexuality?  

Many of the straight folks who got involved tried to do both – reduce homophobia by modeling an empathetic and humanizing relationship with gay people and appeal to everyone’s self-interest in the larger case against discrimination. 

Fighting for Our Lives, the short video created by Elaine Velasquez and Barbara Bernstein as an organizing tool, featured many of these voices. 

The Gays Now, Who’s Next? 

The German pastor Martin Niemoller was often quoted in those years. After spending seven years in Nazi concentration camps for speaking out against Hitler, he said, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.” 

This was the cautionary case many of the straight speakers made in Fighting for Our Lives and other educational outreach.  

“I don’t tell people I’m heterosexual because I don’t think it’s any of their business but I’ve always very clearly been an ally to the gay and lesbian community and I do civil rights work. So I’m probably a good target for someone to say, ‘Look, she’s lesbian, she works for the Governor, she shouldn’t be there.’” [Measure 9 would have required the firing of gay people in public employment.] 

Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, at that time director of affirmative action for the Governor, in Fighting for Our Lives  

The video also features two clergymen from rural communities. Paul LaRue says, “I will not be able to put my arm around my male friend [without people saying] ‘Hey, you must be gay’. I know two women who go shopping together all the time, people will say, ‘Something’s wrong with them.’” John Sandusky says, “As some point in the future I could find myself labeled part of some unacceptable group in society.” Portland Pastor Matt Hennessee says, “The African American community can’t see this without asking, ‘How far down on the list [of OCA targets] am I?’” 

An Intersectional Analysis

In a tribute to national LGBTQ movement leader Urvashi Vaid after her death, The New Yorker wrote: “Vaid’s ideas often had to do with the interconnectedness of different causes. She understood and articulated the concept of intersectionality before the word had entered the language.” As an example, the writer cites a transcript of a 1994 conversation Urvashi had with AIDS activist Larry Kramer. 

“What if we tried to identify how [HIV] treatment issues connect with racism?” Vaid said. “It’s going to express itself differently in your life than in mine…. That’s the issue of reproductive choice. It was never about men should march with women because they support women. It was more that men should march for reproductive freedom because we’re marching against the power of the state to tell you and me what to do sexually…. If the state can say you can’t have an abortion, the state can say you can’t have sodomy.” 

Kramer replied, “I have to tell you that I never realized that.” 

Some of the straight allies active against Measure 9 articulated a similar analysis – based less on this could be bad for me than this is bad for everyone, bad for inclusive democracy. 

Kelley Weigel, for example, can be seen in the documentary Ballot Measure 9, out on the road with the Walk For Love & Justice, saying, “The OCA represents a much more fundamental threat to all of us. They have attacked reproductive rights. They have attacked affirmative action. That’s why I’m walking, even though I’m not a lesbian.” 

As she told friends and family in her letter asking them to support her on the 150-mile Walk, “I know you support me and care about the same things I do. The OCA represents a ‘retrovision’ on American life which excludes members of our diverse society. At this time of social and political uncertainty, it is more important than ever that we take a stand for human dignity to insure these rights remain central during public discourse.” 

Looking back 30 years, Kelley sees the tensions embedded in intersectional work as one of the primary lessons for today. “We need to do two things simultaneously,” she says – “to lift up leadership from within targeted communities, while embracing the truth that it takes all of us” to defend and achieve inclusive democracy.

Looking in the Mirror 

For many at that time, Measure 9 called the question: what kind of people are we? The Rev. Rodney Page, executive director of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon and another frequent speaker on behalf of No on 9, closes the Fighting for Our Lives video with the statement: “We have to tell people like the OCA and their ilk, ‘Stop it! This is enough! We don’t want to see this kind of bigotry in our community.’” 

For some allies who understood the case against bigotry but weren’t too comfortable or familiar with gay people, that meant facing their own homophobia. For other allies, it meant looking at their own privilege relative to LGBTQ folks. 

Anne Sweet, who grew up Black in the South during the civil rights movement, remembers the late 1980s as a time when “I was learning more stuff about oppression.” With the passage of the OCA’s first anti-gay ballot measure in 1988, “Something happened in my mind and brain,” she says.

“It reminded me we that all hang out in the camps of the oppressor and the oppressed. I realized the places I was an oppressor, as an adult to children, to disabled people in my able-bodiedness.”  

Anne Sweet

“As a perceived heterosexual woman,” Anne says, “I was given the role to be oppressive to gay and lesbian people. And I didn’t want that role. I didn’t want to look at what I knew about gay and lesbian people and how I treated them, and how as a perceived heterosexual person that I held myself as deserving better treatment.  

“So I got involved, much to my ex-husband’s disapproval.” 

“We’ve Got a Lot of Work to Do” 

Thalia Zepatos, a straight ally who came on as deputy campaign manager for the last crucial months, remembers a life-changing day when she was driving across town with her car stacked to the brim with No on 9 lawn signs and literature.  

“As a progressive activist, I had joined efforts to fight racism in Portland. Now the OCA measure pulled another layer of veneer off the surface of our progressive city,” Thalia says. 

“I stopped at a traffic light and in the next lane was a pickup truck with construction equipment in the back, and one of those really crude, nasty OCA signs with the figures of two men on the side of their truck.  

“These guys looked over at me, and at the contents of my car, and started yelling at me, taunting me, calling me a dyke and talking about faggots. I started yelling back. After they continued to provoke me, I actually got out of my car, like ‘Do you want to fight?’ 

“Meanwhile cars behind both vehicles were honking, and finally, the pickup truck took off. But it would have been terrible if they had gotten out of their vehicle! 

“And then it hit me. I’d been moving around the city thinking people were basically decent – until someone thought I was a lesbian! Look at the vitriol that’s just been directed at me, just for being seen as a lesbian.”

“I just couldn’t forget that moment. It was so transformative. I felt like: I’ve really got work to do here. We’ve got a lot of work to do in our state.” 

Thalia Zepatos

Thalia Zepatos went on to train generations of LGBTQ advocates and advise numerous campaigns for LGBTQ rights, including serving as the chief message architect for the campaign that secured the freedom to marry nationwide. Watch for more of her insights in October, and read more from Eric Friedenwald-Fishman, Kelley Weigel, and Anne Sweet. 

As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.”  Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory.  

“You are out on the front line of our movement. This Walk is about moral and spiritual values. You are walking in the tradition of the civil rights movement. You are not alone – every one of the 25 million American gays, lesbians, and bisexuals marches with you today.”  

  ~ Urvashi Vaid (1958-2022), then executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, at the kickoff rally for the Walk for Love & Justice  

With those words, a contingent of Oregonians set out on foot, from Eugene, Oregon. They would walk 150 miles north, ending their two-week sojourn in the embrace of the Portland Pride march. They walked from June 7-20, 1992 under the banner: “For Love and Justice: A Walk Against Hate.” 

The Walk for Love & Justice proclaimed, “We will walk proudly and with purpose – taking the agenda out of the hands of the OCA and going directly to the people of Oregon, asking them to stand with us for justice and against hate.” 

Why are we walking? “The fundamental rights of lesbians and gays are under attack in Oregon from a right-wing group which we believe also threatens the rights of women, Jews, People of color, and the poor,” explained the bilingual fliers walkers carried to share with folks along the way. “We walk to build bridges and to promote an end to oppression and hatred in all of its forms including racism, sexism, homophobia and heterosexism.” 

How can you help? “Talk to us. Find out who we are. Join us for an evening program. Invite your friends. Don’t sign the OCA’s petition. Vote against bigotry in November. Contribute to the Walk. HUMAN RIGHTS ARE NOT SPECIAL RIGHTS. More than 100 organizations, churches and synagogues, your friends and neighbors, have made this walk possible. Why don’t you join them? Why don’t you join us?” 

Walking to Break Down Barriers

By the time Oregon faced the prospect of Ballot Measure 9, Anne Galisky says she “knew in my bones that long walks where you are vulnerable and exposed, where you depend on people for everything, for where to sleep at night, for every meal – that breaks down barriers all over the place.” 

She had grown up in California, participating with a direct aid organization that worked in Tijuana, that had a 250 mile walk every year. “As a high school student, it was a social justice awakening for me to see the incredible value of just going out on the road receiving hospitality, meeting all kinds of people you wouldn’t have met otherwise,” Anne says. “And physically learning that doing a little bit each day, you can go a long way.” 

Then in college she heard about a peace walk being planned from the Trident nuclear submarine base in Bangor, Washington to Washington, D.C. and then from Ireland to the occupied West Bank. “It was an absolutely life changing experience, as you can imagine,” Anne says.  

“It’s this really quick intimacy, partially based on the vulnerability of being on the edge of the road. I saw with my own eyes, walking through all these different places – including Northern Ireland, at the height of the Troubles, and Israel and the West Bank, and Yugoslavia just a few years before war broke out there – you could have so many meaningful conversations. I just knew that  a walk like this was a really valuable organizing tool.” 

Anne Galisky

And so Anne proposed a walk across Oregon to the Lesbian Community Project. After some skepticism and debate, the board agreed to serve as the project’s sponsor – but Anne would have to assume all the risk and do all the work. 

This was pre-internet, pre-email, pre-cell phone. Anne worked out of her attic bedroom on a borrowed typewriter, relying on the late-night discount at the neighborhood Kinkos for all her photocopying. 

In her broken-down pickup truck she drove up and down the Willamette Valley, “having meetings with people and saying, ‘We’re going to do this. Can we sleep on your floor? We could have anywhere from 20 to 100 people needing a place to stay. Can you feed us? Will you write a letter of endorsement?” 

One of the most important early meetings was with lesbians in Grants Pass. “They begged us not to have the walk go through Southern Oregon,” Anne says. “They told us, ‘If you do, someone will get killed.’” As she wrote in her post-event evaluation, “This meeting felt very valuable in terms of healing past wounds between Portland activists and southern Oregon rural lesbian and gay people. Listening to what rural activists need, instead of going in with a pre-set agenda, seems to be the way to go.” 

Another pivotal meeting was with Cipriano Ferrel of PCUN, Oregon’s farmworkers union. He said, “Yes, you can stay here. Of course, we need you to learn about us.” The rest, as they say, is history. (Read more in our story, PCUN Union Hall.) 

Not everyone was as open as PCUN. “There was so much fear,” Anne remembers.

“People who would say, ‘Yes, but we don’t want our name associated. You can sleep here but you can’t tell anyone.’ There was a lot of, ‘We don’t know what will happen to us if we help you.’ The feeling of the risks involved was very strong.” 

Anne Galisky

“There was also so much courage,” says Anne. “Courage of the people who hosted us, and courage of the people who walked with us.” 

While no one was harmed during the Walk, Anne says, “We did get death threats. We had stuff thrown at us. People screamed at us. When a car is slowing down, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Are they going to offer their support? Or are they going to shoot you?” 

The walkers were prepared. They were in touch every day with law enforcement. And they had spent a day together in non-violent de-escalation training before departing. “We weren’t going in with some naivete that nothing’s going to happen,” Anne remembers. “The premise was, something would happen. And how are we going to handle it?” 

Participant Ellen Goldberg’s response to the tension and danger still makes Anne laugh, 30 years later. “After having eggs thrown at us, she said, ‘You know I wanted eggs today, but I should have said I want eggs on a plate.’” 

Hospitality as Social Change

The Walk for Love & Justice ended up being hosted, fed, or endorsed by more than 100 churches, synagogues, community organizations, and businesses. An exhaustive schedule of public programming along the route included appearances by elected officials, talks by state and national movement leaders, music, comedy, poetry readings, and rallies.  

In her event report Anne wrote, “involving so many organizations turned out to be an important political tool. There is something very disarming about giving food and lodging to strangers. Hospitality, especially by providing a meal, is not viewed as a big commitment, but once people have eaten together and have heard each other’s stories, relationships begin – and with that comes a stake in each other’s wellbeing.” 

A core group of about 20 walkers who did the full distance “helped with the feeling of continuity on the walk and did much of the leadership work,” Anne noted in her report. “However, people who walked for one or a few days made up the bulk of the numbers and provided some fresh energy.” As the Walk passed through larger population centers, it increased considerably in size, reaching the hundreds in its final miles into downtown Portland. 

Thousands more were exposed to the message of the Walk through the extensive media coverage it attracted. Anne described the coverage as “quite plentiful and generally very positive: front page coverage with color photographs in daily papers of Eugene, Corvallis, Salem; included in a front-page story on Pride in Portland; newspapers in Woodburn, Estacada, Canby and Olympia; Associated Press, New York Times, Los Angeles Times; Oregon radio, NPR and Pacifica; local TV + national news coverage on NBC and ABC.” 

The greatest lesson of the Walk, for Anne, is “that coming out changed everything. Allies had to choose. Queer folks had to choose. There was no neutral. The Measure 9 fight gave us an advantage in creating progressive institutions going forward, because we had accomplished something really hard by creating relationships with allies.”  

“I went on the walk because I needed to do something… more than simply write letters. I needed to do something with my body. Something positive. Something transforming. I was transformed. I went believing that we are not supported by the vast majority of Oregonians. I learned the opposite! I learned that we have so many friends, if we only will reach out and express our need for support.”

The Rev. Marguerite Scroggie in The Lavender Connection

One Walker’s Story

Kelley Weigel was already deeply involved in the fight against the OCA but had to be talked into going on the Walk. She and Eric Ward were on the staff of the Community Alliance of Lane County (CALC – originally Clergy & Laity Concerned) based in Eugene, a liberal college town, that bordered the more conservative Springfield. Springfield was targeted by the OCA as a testing ground for their anti-gay ballot measures. They had succeeded in placing a local version of the statewide measure on the May 19 primary ballot. 

As the secretary for the Lane County No on 9 organization, Kelley was putting all her effort into defeating the local measure and “didn’t see the point” of taking two weeks to walk to Portland. But CALC had signed on to support the Walk and its Eugene kickoff. Eric felt strongly that someone from their team needed to go. The BIPOC members of the staff didn’t see themselves walking down Oregon’s back roads. And then an out lesbian on the CALC board made her appeal to Kelley even more personal. 

“She said, ‘You need you do this for me, because I can’t go’,” Kelley remembers. The board member was older, didn’t feel safe, and had to work. 

Kelley got to go on paid work time. But, like all walkers, she was asked to raise contributions to cover costs. (Read her fundraising letter.) Her largest donation came from an unexpected source. 

The day after the primary election, when a majority of Springfield voters approved the OCA’s local anti-gay measure, “there was a vigil at City Hall to mourn what happened,” Kelley remembers. “I’d been working really hard to defeat it, and I was crying. My picture ended up on the front page of the Eugene Register Guard – this young white girl, crying. The headline was, ‘Discriminatory measure passes Springfield.’ 

“Somehow my grandma and grandpa got a copy of that paper. They sent me $200 to go on the Walk. I had to raise $300. It wasn’t that much, but it was a lot for me and I didn’t know where it was going to come from. My grandma said, ‘We know how much this means to you, and so we want you to be able to go do it.’ I cry today just thinking about it. So I had everybody kind of pushing me to go.” 

Kelley Weigel

Despite her initial skepticism about the Walk, Kelley looks back at the experience as “pretty profound – the walk serving as something of a pilgrimage to think about the things that need to change, and to make the space for that to happen, in a way that’s different from a march that lasts a few hours. 

“It’s about creating an intentional community and the ways people can live in community, even if they don’t get along all the time. It was also about the basic needs that people have, making sure you have good organization and logistics so that those needs are met.” 

It was also about having fun in challenging circumstances. “We sang the song ‘We are a gentle, angry people, about a billion times,” Kelley says. “Many of us joked at the end, that if we ever sang it again we’d have to change the lyrics, because how we really feel is, ‘We are fucking angry people!’” 

On a more serious note, the Walk underscored “the importance of really being out, being visible for what you believe,” Kelley says, as a straight ally – and the courage that takes, “not knowing what’s going to be coming down the street at you, quite literally.” 

After completing the Walk, Kelley recalled the trepidation she’d felt before it started. “I wondered how smart it was to walk through the heart of Oregon, challenging people’s ideas about gays and lesbians,” she wrote. But after the all-day non-violence training walkers participated in before setting off, “I realized I was with a group of people I could trust, and when I felt scared or angry, there would be someone there to help me get through that time.” 

While Kelley doesn’t remember having any persuasive conversations with undecided or pro-OCA people along the Walk, she got a foretaste of the value of the “solidarity and connection with isolated pockets of people who, in their own communities, felt afraid to speak up against bigotry” that would become the signature “ROP thing.” (Kelley was co-director of the Rural Organizing Project from 1994-2002 before working at Western States Center for 15 years, including serving as its first female executive director.) 

Last Days in the Service of his Values 

One of the walkers who joined for a three-day stretch from Corvallis to Salem was a 78 year-old man named Isadore who had spent his life showing up for human rights.  

In her report to her donors, Kelley described Isadore dancing along with a dozen other seniors at the Polk County Fairgrounds where walkers were serenaded by a song composed by their local hosts to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers” – “Walk for Love and Justice/ Walk in truth and pride/ We will walk together/ People side by side.” 

“Inspiration has never had such concrete meaning,” Kelley wrote of that night with Isadore and their elder hosts.  

After walking into Salem the next day, Isadore left the walkers at the rally, assuring them in a phone call that he was not feeling too well, but had had a great time and wished them well. They learned later that he had a fatal heart attack. The nurse who attended him said that he was glad he had gone on the walk, and he would do it again, even if it cost him his life. 

“I hope my last days are spent in such a way,” Kelley says.

Learn More

• Watch Anne Galisky and Ramón Ramírez reflect on the impact of PCUN’s hosting the Walk for Love & Justice as panelists at the GLAPN event, “Lessons of Measure 9,” also featuring Kathleen Saadat and No on 9 Remembered Senior Fellow Holly Pruett. 
• Read more of Ramón Ramírez’s recollections about the impact of the Walk in our story, PCUN Union Hall. 
• View footage from the Walk in the feature documentary Ballot Measure 9. 
• Check out pdfs of archival materials from the walk: statement from Walk Coordinator Anne Galisky; fundraising pitch letter from walker Kelley Weigel; Walk registration brochure; Join Us flier (bilingual); Daily Itinerary; Public Program Schedule; Eugene kickoff flier; Salem rally flier; Walk song sheets. 
• Walk for Love & Justice Nonviolence Guidelines – For the purpose of building trust and a common foundation for safety, participants in the Walk are asked to agree to the following: 
  • Our attitude will be one of openness, friendliness, and respect toward all people we encounter. 
  • We will use no violence, verbal or physical, toward any person, even in the face of hostility. 
  • We will not damage any property. 
  • We will not bring or use drugs or alcohol other than for medical purposes. 
  • There will be no nudity during the walk, and everyone will keep their shirts on. 
  • We will carry no weapons. 
  • We will break no laws. 
  • We will cooperate with the police and Walk security team to ensure the safety of all participants and spectators. 

As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.”  Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory.  

“Teaching people to just think about it,” was the heart of the work, Anne Sweet says. “Helping them to make a personal connection, how Measure 9 would negatively impact them if this passed. This is your uncle; your bull dyke neighbor who mows your lawn and fixes your car for free; your son who we all know is gay but we pretend they aren’t.” 

Anne was one of the hundreds engaged in educational outreach both inside and outside their own communities, who helped to defeat Measure 9. 

The No on 9 message was delivered via all the pre-internet electoral methods – through television and radio ads; newspaper editorials, Op Eds, and letters to the editor; in debates and voters forums hosted by civic groups and news organizations; via visibility materials like lawn signs and bumper stickers; and through a methodical voter contact program that identified No voters through phone and door to door canvassing and then turned them out in a massive Get Out The Vote (GOTV) push.  

We’ll hear more in the coming months from inside the campaign. This month’s focus is on the educational outreach that originated outside the “official” campaign. Some of this focused on the queer community itself, from teaching nonviolent communications skills to unlearning racism; other efforts focused externally on specific sectors. Some created organizing tools –videos, speaker trainings, fact sheets; even events to build bridges, like the Walk for Love & Justice. 

New organizations sprang up as vehicles for those who wanted to take a different approach to the entire campaign – No on Hate, for example, which had several chapters around the state. Others were created to focus on a particular strategy or audience such as People of Faith Against Bigotry, African Americans Voting No on 9, Eugene-based OUTPAC, and the Oregon Speak Out Project. Some initiatives, like the extensive organizing within the labor movement, and the Oregon Democracy Project which gave rise to the Rural Organizing Project, tapped into the skills and relationships of existing organizations.  

These efforts, looking back, are many flowers blooming, a profusion of creativity and commitment that collectively reached thousands of Oregonians, solidifying No votes and in some cases, changing hearts and minds. But at the time, some of this work was driven by desperation and fear. Some arose as an alternative to – even a critique of – what was called “the mainstream campaign.”   

“It was a very scary time – as much for the fear that the Oregon Citizens Alliance was engendering; but also, I think the way that we responded exacerbated the fear. A lot of us were envisioning Nazi Germany all over again. In a way we really overreacted to the situation and took it out on each other.” 

Radio & video producer Barbara Bernstein

Some of the division within the LGBTQ community, and the fear, was driven by the loss on Measure 8, the first statewide campaign against a ballot measure sponsored by the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA). “People were so determined not to make the same mistakes that we made in 1988, when we lost that first anti-gay initiative,” Barbara says. That meant fierce and frequent debates about campaign messages, messengers, tactics, and spending priorities. 

Fighting for Our Lives

Barbara Bernstein and Elaine Velasquez knew they would step into the fray from the first moment they heard about the ballot measure. Barbara secured funding to do a radio documentary on Measure 9, and Elaine was hired to produce a segment about the campaign for a group in New York doing a series on gay issues. They captured some incredible footage, for example on the Walk for Love & Justice, before ending the contractual relationship with the series sponsor. Soon after, another guy in New York stepped up with a “nice chunk of funding,” Barbara remembers, which allowed them to keep the cameras and audio recording rolling. 

The result was the 20 minute video, Fighting for Our Lives, designed to counter the poisonous propaganda videos being circulated by the OCA. Marcy Westerling, who was mobilizing the statewide network of battered women’s shelters and rape hotlines through the Oregon Democracy Project, helped Elaine and Barbara develop their strategy and introduced them to several strong interview subjects.  

“Marcy sat down with us and talked about what was needed,” says Barbara. “‘You need to interview Mr. and Mrs. America,’ she said, so she introduced us to Jim and Elise Self in Grants Pass. Jim and Elise laughed later that they didn’t really think of themselves as Mr. and Mrs. America! But they came across as people that America could understand.  

“We thought a lot about how to connect with people who don’t get this, who think it doesn’t affect their lives. Elaine has this incredible skill in getting people to be really personal, getting people to tell their own stories. One of the most powerful moments is when Elise Self talks about how she was afraid that her daughter Jennifer would be discriminated against, and fights back tears.” 

Barbara Bernstein

“It provided information that people needed to have, says Barbara. “But it provided it in a context where they could really relate to it, and then have the follow up discussions. The reason it got out so well, was because the organizers knew how to use it. I felt like we got amazing support from the community to do this piece.” 

The video received an unexpected boost when Barbara and Elaine released it with a news conference that – unbeknownst to them – “turned out to be on the same day that the OCA released their infamous video, the Gay Agenda. The news coverage depicted them as dueling videos. They shared a clip from our video and a clip from the Gay Agenda,” Barbara remembers. 

Described by the Los Angeles Times as a “slick, professional tape… that features nudity, public lasciviousness and assertions that homosexuality is unnatural, a sickness and not worthy of legal protection,” the nationally-produced Gay Agenda was subsequently used in other efforts to solidify anti-LGBTQ discrimination in local, state, and national policy and law. 

“When we got ahold of a copy of the Gay Agenda, it frightened us,” Barbara says. “It was so slick, and it was really an excellent propaganda piece.” 

Even up against such hateful propaganda, Barbara remembers the years fighting the OCA as an “incredible blossoming of grassroots activism. It was really amazing to see how the word got out to such a wide community. It became very unacceptable [to openly support Measure 9] in lots of parts of Oregon, including places that we might not have expected. I remember at one point early on in the campaign I said to people, if only we had as many No on 9 signs on cars and houses, as there are ‘Go Blazers’ signs. And it ended up, we had more!” 

Making a Personal Connection

Countless Oregonians stepped out of their comfort zones to make the kind of personal connection that was fostered by the Fighting for Our Lives video. 

Anne Sweet – a union activist with Communications Workers of America who had her employer, the phone company, loan her to the No on 9 campaign – dove into these conversations directly, and also led trainings in making connections – not just between people, but among forms of oppression. 

In addition to co-leading antiracism workshops through No on Hate, Anne worked with No on 9 door-to-door canvass volunteers. “Canvassing attracted lots of young, white gay and lesbian people,” Anne remembers, “and a lot of the canvassing happened in the Black community. We would have classes on how to behave in the Black community. For white kids, it isn’t, ‘Hi Betty!’ It’s, ‘Mrs. Jones, how are you today?’ – helping to dilute the social entitlement that persists in racism.  

“I did the same thing in Black communities and organizations to remind Black people that when we say ‘gay and lesbian’ the picture we get is white – but remember that’s not true. When they throw out the gay and lesbian people, that’s your brother, uncle, cousin we’re talking about.  

“Antoinette Edwards, her husband and I were canvassing the beauty shops and barber shops. This woman went on a tirade [against gay people] and the person doing her hair was flaming gay, begging us silently not to confront her and out him. But trying to interrupt that woman who felt very entitled to say those things; wanting her to remember when he can’t get a license to do your hair or open a beauty shop [if Measure 9 passed], he can’t do your hair anymore.” 

Read more of Anne’s recollections. 

Oregon Speak Out Project

Other efforts focused less on personal relationships and more on making a factual case against the measure to groups of people. The Oregon Speak Out Project was founded by gay attorney Ed Reeves with the vision of training 25 attorneys (gay and straight) as speakers. “I personally felt that I could not survive this unless I stood up for myself and spoke positively about myself and my community,” he told Pat Young in her master’s thesis research.  

Their first task was generating invitations from host organizations. Initially, according to Pat, they “concentrated on Clackamas and Washington counties because of the number of ‘middle voters’ in those counties, and because the project wanted to reach beyond the friendly territory of Multnomah County. As time went on, the project expanded into outlying communities such as Bend, Klamath Falls, Medford, and Coos Bay…. Eventually the project generated over 150 speaking engagements and over 20 [speakers] training sessions, reaching thousands of Oregonians.” 

As documented by Pat, “the project put together packets of information for people speaking on the issues. The packets contained questions and appropriate answers to main issues surrounding the measure, such as how it affected libraries, schools, employment, and democracy.” 

Coalition for Human Dignity

Coalition for Human Dignity (CHD) had already been tracking the activities of, and assembling information to refute, the right in Oregon for several years. They described their role in civil rights education and research as “monitoring and opposing bigotry in all of its many forms, working to counter the agenda of the white supremacist moment and the Christian Right.” 

The documentary podcast “It Did Happen Here” revisits CHD’s origins as “Portlanders who came together in response to neo-Nazi violence after the 1988 murder of Mulugeta Seraw” to its eventual move to Seattle and merger with Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment. 

As one of the groups whose No on 9 work was supported through Western States Center in the Oregon Democracy Project, CHD contributed to the formation of the Rural Organizing Project through road trips with Marcy, and produced a range of research and materials. 

One of their efforts was organizing a series of research papers and educational pamphlets that made the case for specific constituencies, like “Facts Environmentalists Should Know About the OCA.” Tarso Luís Ramos commissioned and edited some of this work while serving as editor of the leftist newspaper The Portland Alliance.

Tarso recalls, “The newspaper sublet space to CHD and collaborated on various things. We each saw that the OCA was trying to build statewide power by vilifying an already widely-stigmatized group and we feared this strategy could leave the LGBTQ community isolated.” He adds, “CHD co-founder and No On 9 organizer Scot Nakagawa asked me to help broaden the resistance by revealing the OCA’s broader reactionary agenda and giving various organized progressive constituencies information that could sway their members.”

The pamphlets presented the OCA as a “comprehensive political organization” whose rising influence threatened various communities and values, including women’s equality, religious freedom, communities of color, labor unions, economic fairness, and environmental protections.

Some of these targeted arguments appeared in a special edition of the CHD journal, The Oregon Witness, including “Traditional Family Values and the War on Women” by No on 9 Remembered author Holly Pruett (read it here.) 

The “Bigots, Ballots & Bibles: The OCA & the Christian Right” edition of The Oregon Witness also included: “An Introduction to the Politics of Fear” by Jeannette Pai-Espinosa; in-depth analysis of the OCA and their national connections by Scot Nakagawa, Sara Diamond, Steve Gardiner, and People for the America Way; discussion of the OCA as backlash to inclusive democracy and the gains of feminism and the civil rights movements by Suzanne Pharr, Johanna Brenner, and Inga Sorenson; a Christian and a Jewish perspective from People of Faith Against Bigotry; a “Case Study in Rural Organizing by Marcy Westerling; and “Oil & Water Do Not Mix! The OCA & the African-American Community” by Cecil Prescod. 

Tarso continued working on the pamphlets after joining the staff of Western States Center in May, 1992. He remembers that WSC paid to mail pamphlets to thousands of union members and later funded CHD to produce a multi-state report on the Christian Right

Of the background research papers Ramos says, “Some were roughly written and never published, but nonetheless provided many of the talking points for the pamphlets as well as material that was repurposed for articles and speaking engagements, organizing meetings, and outreach for organizational endorsements.”

The research and analysis assembled as part of the No on 9 fight later reached a wider audience of organizers and funders through efforts like the NGLTF Fight the Right Action Kit; a “live chat” about anti-gay initiatives Scot hosted on AOL (some of the very first “streaming” content); and the “When Democracy Works Resource Guide” that Scot narrated which included Eric K. Ward, by then with Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment, and others who came out of the No on 9 campaign. “These broader movement tools leveraged the talents and lessons from Oregon for people in every sector who were standing up,” Tarso remembers.  

One of the lessons Tarso thinks we need to take from that time is, “You have to respect your opponents.” For Tarso that involves going beyond denunciation. “We had to understand their strategy well enough to out-organize them.”

“In Oregon we built a broad coalition that ranged from moderate Republicans to anti-racist skinheads. Thirty years later, the No On 9 fight holds important lessons for progressive organizers nationwide.”

Tarso Luís Ramos

Tarso Luís Ramos left Western States Center to join Political Research Associates in 2006, currently serving as their executive director. Access PRA’s current educational resources on Anti-LGBTQ Organizing. 

As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.”  Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory.