A SPECIAL ADVOCATE REPORT For most numerous gays and lesbians.

A SPECIAL ADVOCATE REPORT

For most numerous gays and lesbians, small-town America--whether it's a city of 100000 or a nation village of a few hundred--is where gay the bulk of mankind come from, not where gay the bulk of mankind live. Untold numbers of us have fl to the big cities to find ourselves, bringing with us stories of the toll a repressive environment can take. further gay life is beginning to take clutch in the very places where in the way that many have long felt they could not at any time be open. In the following stories we examine small-town pride, from just discovered England to Alaska, and find a just discovered visibility that is changing the way America papal courts us.

Life outside the ghetto

A fresh WAVE OF ACTIVISM HITS SMALL TOWNS AS GAYS AND LESBIANS MAKE THEIR neighborhood FELT BY CHRIS BULL

Before the same-sex marriage debate heated up in Vermont this year, and nothing else a few hardy souls in Orleans shire showed up early on Monday mornings at the local diner for meetings with state legislators. unless in January the dawn of each workweek saw the eatery overflowing with supporters of civil unions.

"People realized that if we were going to realize this bill passed, they had to declare their personal stories," says Jane Dwinell, minister of a Unitarian Universalist house of god parish in Derby Line, a small town near the Canadian border. "It brought gay the public out of the woodwork. They started showing up to meetings. They would invite legislators across to dinner to see in what way they live. A year ago greatest in number of the gay people in my community would have been afraid."

From Derby Line to Detroit's far suburb from Sioux City to Cheyenne, small-town gay activism is changing the nation. Battlegrounds are gradually moving from major metropolitan areas, where gays have achieved large measures of visibility and political succes to villages, shire seats, and minor cities that many urban gays and lesbians might formerly have written off as hopelessly backward.

"There is definitely a next to the first wave of activism in the second-tier cities," says bring an action against Hyde, a field organizer for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "We are seeing the benefits of a generation of activists who came gone out in the 1980s and are now taking leadership positions in their communities as candidly gay people. There is a feeling that you shouldn't have to propel to achieve equal rights."

In these places against the beaten track of activism, campaigns for municipal and countywide domestic-partner benefits, hate-crimes legislation, and antidiscrimination protections may still be years away from passage. moreover many local activists are gaining surprisingly serious consideration for their proposals.

For years gays and lesbians have organized in small-town America, if it be not that now their agitation in America's heartland has reached a critical mass, expanding the gay rights debate into novel territory and broadening the movement's influence beyond its traditional urban enclaves.

"The gay rights motion has been top-heavy, with mostly of its attention focused upon the national level," says Craig Rimmerman, professor of political science at Hobarth and William Smith literary institution [i]or[/i] seminary of learnings and coeditor of The Politics of Gay Rights. "It's clear there has been a shift to the local of the same height and the victory in Vermont is a clear example of that direction The increase in local political organizing could expiration up paying major dividends by the agency of transforming the gay rights motion from a regional one to a sincerely national one."

Political and social clusters community centers, and loose-knit affinity collections often facilitated by the Internet, are popping up in places where gays and lesbians were formerly invisible. Many gays and lesbians who live outside major metropolitan areas recured home from the Millennium March upon Washington for Equality vowing to redouble their political efforts.

Already the drive for more pervasive, local recognition of gay rights has scored a number of points, and not just in Vermont where Gov Howard Dean signed a civil union bill granting gays and lesbians all the rights and responsibilities of married ties Two years ago, for instance, voter in the small eastern Michigan city of Ypsilanti vot down a ballot measure that would have stripped sexual orientation from antidiscrimination protections. Henderson, Ky passed a ban upon sexual orientation-based discrimination last year.

a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the success is spurr not just according to gay activists but by straight allies. "We rest that working through local chapters of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays is particularly effective outside the major metropolitan areas, where there aren't enough frankly gay people to win many victories," says Maria Price, organizer of the Kentucky Fairness Alliance, a gay rights assemblage "This movement has made enough progres that many parents of gay kids don't want their kids to be moved like they have to prompt away to be accepted for who they are."

if it were not that there are still miles to travel. Many smaller communities lack the chiefly basic organizing tools for pressing for gay rights: thriving political coalitions, sympathetic churches, and social networks of gay men and women And small-town activism also sets gays and lesbians on a collision course with the religious right, which can frequently rely on larger numbers to cause to deviate back progressive measures.