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Discrimination Still Very Much
Exists in 1998!
by Norm Kent
One of my former colleagues at the radio station WFTL, the aging Steve Kane, opposes legislation designed to protect individuals from discrimination based on sexual orientation. He ineffectively and ineptly argues that such laws are "special rights" that promote victimization, and are socially and legally unnecessary. Imagine this from a man who was once an acting student.
Seriously, Mr. Kane and his Republican sycophants at WFTL's right-wing harbor, 850 AM, even the gay ones like Mr. Al Rantel, strongly oppose this legislation. Living their lives on the outskirts of reality, breathing hard into their microphones for all of three hours a day, they profess to have never seen or heard of any need for laws that protect gays from discrimination.
I'm here today to open the files for these myopic Neanderthals. Al Rantel, for example, is a superbly talented talk show host who no longer conceals his gayness. But I think it's telling that he never dared speak about it while broadcasting for Jefferson-Pilot, an extremely conservative corporate entity owned by Bible belt personnel out of North Carolina. It is also insulting that he would dare classify gay rights protections as ones that create a 'victim class.' A century behind the rest of us, what Mr. Rantel does not grasp is that far from being a victim class, we are asserting that we will be victims no longer.
Mr. Rantel loves retelling the story of an AIDS dinner he attended at the Harbor Beach Marriott where gay men and women gathered in tuxedos and drove in elegant cars to pay tribute to the gallant souls who had volunteered their efforts to eliminate an epidemic. He plays against the opulence and wealth of the community that claims to be 'second class citizens.' But Al Rantel has been bedside at the passing of loved ones from AIDS. He knows better. And he also knows how much we had to do on our own because his heroes like Ronald Reagan looked the other way for too long.
In a passionate and galvanizing address last Saturday at the Center 1 Red Ribbon Awards Dinner, Kate Shindle, Miss America 1998, noted that there are school districts that still do not allow you to talk about HIV, and in certain districts where you may speak about AIDS, you are not permitted to mention the words homosexual, condoms, or alternative lifestyles.
Trust me when I tell you there are many candles that still need lighting, many minds that still need illumination. We so badly as a nation need to make our school boards more sensitive to the gay lifestyle, and more aware of AIDS. What the Al Rantels of the world do not understand is that a law which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation sends out a legal and social message that homosexuality is natural and its practitioners are normal. It requires the teachers of America to teach youngsters that we are neither 'alternative' or 'illegal.'
The discrimination we encounter is as subtle as a street hustler who robs you of your money, and then laughs that he has ripped off a faggot. Sometimes it is as glaring as a pipe bomb thrown into the Copa, or as frightening as a gay bashing in South Beach. Sometimes it is a loving minister being denied the right to be an elder, right here, last month, in Fort Lauderdale. But the discrimination is very real, and it warrants legal protections and your attention.
Ric Melchionno graduated from FAU as a student of mine back in the late 1970's. After a few successful years as a cartographer for the Defense Department, his promotions were denied solely because of his homosexuality. "Homosexuals," the Defense Department wrote, "even in civilian positions, are security risks who could be blackmailed." Now how can an openly gay man be blackmailed about being gay when he does not conceal his sexuality? Wouldn't it be just as easy to blackmail a straight man who was cheating on his wife? Well, Ric won his case, because he stood up to injustice. But for others, the battles have been hard and many and continued for decades.
In July of 1994, a boyish-looking but homophobic producer at WFTL responded to an advertisement for an apartment rental in Fort Lauderdale. With his straight Canadian friend by his side, they applied with cash in hand. The complex manager looked at them suspiciously: "I ain't taking your money," he said: "I won't rent to fags. Get out of here." It was discrimination, real and legitimate, unprotected by law, until 1996.
Sharon Bottoms had been a terrific mother to her son Tyler. But two years ago District Court in Virginia took the child away from her because Sharon was a mom who was a lesbian. In the world in which we live, immoral straight parents who abuse their children may stand a better chance of keeping their child than a gay parent who loves them. Just last year, here in Fort Lauderdale, a Broward judge upheld Florida's ban on gay parent adoptions.
While talking about the Holocaust in a high school class in the Fall of 1996, a Missouri History teacher said he too would have been exterminated had he been alive and in Germany during World War II. "I would have had to wear this pink triangle because I was a homosexual. I would not be allowed to teach in the schools." The students were awestruck and proud, not so their parents. The School Board was asked to fire him for 'preaching sexuality in the schools'. So how much has really changed?
Bryan Santer is a high school student in Pennsylvania. His anonymous articles on his life as a gay teenager led to the school board trying to shut down the school paper that published his columns. Perhaps there is some radio talk show host that wants to tell him he does not need legal protections.
Ken S. was arrested and charged with engaging in a lewd act after making the mistake of kissing his boyfriend in a Margate park last year. The charges were dismissed. So was he- by a homophobic school board. He was a teacher in an elementary school and the arrest had been publicized in a Coral Springs newspaper. He lost a job he spent a lifetime working for because of a momentary indiscretion that a straight person would have suffered no penalty for.
I see these people. I meet them in my office. Sometimes, they are in tears, their life collapsing around them simply because of a false accusation or a rotten lie; sometimes because their status as citizens is still treated differently by a law that insidiously and silently still treats homosexuals as second class citizens. As Leonard Matlovich's tombstone reads: "In the army, they gave me a medal for killing two men. Then they threw me out for loving another." After nineteen and one half years in the Coast Guard, and only six months from retirement, last year I represented a Miami man who was going to be thrown out of the military when a superior intercepted a fax to his lover.
Every week another case comes into my office where a young man is arrested for making out with another at John U. Lloyd State Park in Dania. I asked a Marine Patrol officer at a deposition when was the last time he arrested a heterosexual couple for making out on that same beach. When's the last time? There's never been a first time. "It's not lewd if straight people do it," he said. Sometimes we live in a mental ghetto and forget what the rest of the world really thinks.
Do you realize why it took a United States Supreme Court decision in March of 1998 to declare that same-sex sexual harassment can be the basis of a legal claim? It was only because the agencies and courts prior to the Supreme Court had said that homosexuals who were being accosted by their supervisors did not have the same standard of legal protection that heterosexuals had. We had to fight for it. What about the people that were beaten up along the way?
What about a decade of AIDS deaths when the governments of our nation wrote this disease off as a gay disease brought upon people who were doing this to themselves? What about the Jerry Falwells who said AIDS was God's retribution against homosexuals? There was a special moment at the Center 1 dinner last Saturday. It was when my friend, Gary L. Steinsmith, received an award that is to be named after him, honoring those who have dedicated their lives to AIDS awareness, assistance and activism. Gary gave thanks to the dozens of persons who have passed on since the early mornings of Anyone In Distress, the precursor to Center 1. He listed people by name, and gave faces to those no longer with us. Forgotten yesterday, they count today.
Because of the laws that the equal rights advocates have enacted, people with HIV cannot be summarily fired from their jobs. What happened to Todd Shuttleworth a decade ago in Broward County could not happen today, because of laws that make discrimination illegal. These laws do not victimize a class, Mr. Rantel. They protect it.
What about the Reverend Kennedys who raise money for their churches by warning their congregations that 'homosexual militants' are trying to recruit their children ? What about the fact that there are some places that still call sodomy a crime ? What about the verbal taunts and tortures gay youths are subject to? It was only last September that a prominent Utah gay teen activist, Jacob Orosco, took his own life. What is the reason university studies have shown that gay teenagers are seven times more likely to take their own lives then heterosexual counterparts?
Week after week, I write that we as a community
are stronger today then we have ever been before. There is a reason for that. "What
does not kill me," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson "makes me stronger." We are
stronger today because our experience in the arena has forged us with a steady hand and an
iron will. No one will ever set us back again. Still, we must never let down. We must
always call upon ourselves to reach deeper, fight harder. Please don't look away. What you
don't see may one day blind you.