These notes are from Bendnotes 4, December 3, 1988. Most of this letter is about COCC politics and intense moments in teaching. But I want to finish up my chatter on queer issues with this materal.
"Background: remember that I told you I had signed or was going to sign an ad which would run in the local paper asking people to vote "no" on Proposition 8, a state proposition designed to make it legal to overthrow Governor Goldschmidt's proclamation that people who work for the executive branch of state government should not be fired because of their sexual orientation. It was called the Gay Rights proposition. Those who supported proposition 8 did to great extent because they were fundamentalist Christians or because they believed the arguments of the creators of the proposition that it called for 'special rights' for homosexuals. The No on 8 people (the group was called Oregonians for Fairness) used the image of Jerry Fallwell and the lines, "'It's not right. It's not fair. It's a witchhunt!' to try and convince Oregonians to support the bill. They didn't mention homosexuality at all. So anyway, I had heard from ---- [name given in letter] a local gay leader (owner of the antique store . . . which has the dance party every Saturday night at one of their buildings, . . . [This antique store] is 10 minutes out of town north on Highway 97.) --- had told me that Orde Pinckney had agreed to sign the petition. I then agreed to sign and gave him a list of names of my colleagues. (I did not tell my colleagues that I had done so.) He called them, got them to sign. And the ad was published over the week-end before elections.
"We lost."
Much of the rest of this last Bendnotes is about conversations I had with the COCC liberals who had signed the petition when many of us attended a post-election party at the antique store. I am saving those discussions for later posts.
I suppose this would be a good place to say that I was also on the founding board of Central Oregon chapter of PFLAG, the secretary and member at large for a year or two and spent several years as the editor of the newsletter. (Pretty much a cut and paste job.)
Finally, I want to note that "coming out" is, in some ways, a never ending process if one doesn't have a super-close fit between the culturally "understood" stereotyped signs of a particular identity. Although I have been "out" since high school, many people look at my life and assume that I am heterosexual because I am in a long-term relationship with a man and, let's face it, because I wear my hair long and chemically stressed.
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