8/13/2023 0 Comments Rush limbaugh twitterI was visiting them and decided to ask my dad how he would have voted on Issue 3 had he arrived in the city just a short time earlier. In 1995, Cincinnati city council members were deciding whether or not to repeal the city’s hate-crime ordinance that the new charter amendment appeared to disqualify. My father was a different story, with justifications more blunt and biting for his disapproval. It raised for her an uncomfortable question she once or twice put into words: Was I bringing hostility on myself? For people like my mom, this stigma clouded the impulse toward compassion. Was it unnamed, imagined bullies who might target me on a sidewalk or in a gas station or parking lot and lash out with homophobic violence? Or was it me, for defying notions of religious piety and conformity she held dear and being unafraid to call myself a gay man?Īt the time, fear of AIDS and transmission of deadly HIV was interwoven with gay identity, like the double helix of DNA that researchers were then untangling. My mother professed concern for my safety, though it wasn’t clear whom she held responsible for threats to her son. I was also deeply involved in the 1993 campaign in Cincinnati against a measure, Issue 3, to amend the city charter to forbid any law that grants “minority or protected status … or other preferential treatment” to gay men, lesbians or bisexuals. The measure, the focus of a divisive campaign filled with harsh invective over race and sexuality, passed with 62% voter support. My parents happened to move to the city the following year, as courts and the community dealt with fallout from the charter amendment. I was selective in describing the risks or threats I experienced, including a taxi that once started to drive off with my then-boyfriend’s hand on the handle. I had come out to my parents about four years earlier. I lived in Washington, D.C., working as a field organizer for national organizations that supported civil rights and sought to count and punish hate crimes against what we then called the gay community.īy coincidence, Cincinnati was a hot spot for efforts by religious conservative organizations to stop the movement for legal protections from discrimination for LGBT people and attacks fueled by bigotry, including hate crimes, against us. My father started listening to Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s, about the time he retired as a scientist, while living in Cincinnati.
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