WireTap>Youth Activism>Youth Demand Voting Rights

Youth Demand Voting Rights, Regardless of Ex-Felon Status
Thanks to a proposition appearing on this week's ballot, Rhode Island may join a growing number of states slowly reversing voter disenfranchisement for former felons.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
November 3, 2006

Andres Idarraga dreams of one day becoming a literature professor. As a junior at Brown University majoring in Comparative Literature, Idarraga, 28, seems well on his way to achieving his goal.

Unlike most of his classmates, however, Idarraga arrived at Brown -- and his dreams -- via the Adult Correctional Institutes, Rhode Island's state prison, where he served six years for possession and distribution of cocaine and possession of a firearm. It was in prison that he began to read voraciously; books like Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and a biography of Thurgood Marshall really stuck with him.

"These guys became like role models to me," he says. "They had this hunger to make a difference." So in the year prior to his release, he sent out his applications to college. When he got out, at 26, after securing a place to live and reuniting with his family, one of the first questions that Idarraga asked his parole officer was: "Can I vote?"

The answer, like that which has been given to some 5 million other Americans, was "no." Under current Rhode Island law, Idarraga will not be eligible to vote until he is 58 years old.

Like 31 other states, Rhode Island bars people with felony convictions from voting while they are incarcerated, on probation, and on parole. Five states bar ex-felons from voting during parole but not probation; in 11 states, some ex-felons lose their right to vote for life. Only Maine and Vermont permit inmates to vote. As more and more young people fill the U.S.'s already overcrowded prisons, stories like Idarraga's are becoming increasingly common.

"The criminal justice system targets young people," says Maggie Williams, Project Director of the Voter Enfranchisement Project in the Bronx, NY, Public Defender's Office. "They are the ones that get picked up. They are the ones getting arrested. A lot of young people feel like there is more of a chance that they are going to end up in prison than that they are going to complete high school."

The pattern may start with school Zero Tolerance policies that criminalize students while they are still in high school. Critics describe this phenomenon as the "school-to-prison pipeline." Indeed, the number of school suspensions has almost doubled in the last 30 years, from 1.7 million to 3.1 million annually, even as violent crime among youth has decreased, according to the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund. In the 2003 book, Deconstructing the School to Prison Pipeline, Daniel Wald and Johanna Losen of the Harvard University Civil Rights Project wrote that 75 percent of those under age 18 who have been sentenced to adult prisons have not passed tenth grade.

Idarraga describes the phenomenon this way: "In some schools, the athletes are popular. In some schools, the smart kids are popular. In my high school, the bad kids are popular." Although he managed to graduate from high school, the job skill Idarraga had learned best there was dealing cocaine.

According to the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 41 percent of persons convicted of felonies in state courts are between the ages of 20 and 29, and seven percent are under 20. Taken together, these statistics indicate that almost half of all felony convictions nationwide are among people under thirty.

It is difficult to pin down exactly how many young people have been disenfranchised due to felony convictions. No analysis has been done to piece apart which states these young people live in, and therefore which laws they are subject to, but the vast majority of the current felony convicts in America under age 30 (the last BJS count, in 2002, indicated that number to be over half a million) will lose their right to vote for at least a period of time.

Critics say that disenfranchising people who have already served their sentences is tantamount to double punishment, and that engaging ex-felons in their rights and responsibilities as a citizen helps to re-integrate them back into their communities and prevent a return to illegal behavior. "People who are coming out of the system have paid their price," says Kara Gotsch of the Washington, DC-based Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization, which promotes reform in sentencing law and practice and alternatives to incarceration. "They deserve a second chance. That is equally so -- and probably even more important -- for young people, because they have an entire lifetime ahead of them."

Racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately impacted on both ends of the school-to-prison pipeline: according to the NAACP, while African-American students in the year 2000 made up only 17 percent of the overall youth population, they account for 34 percent of all school suspensions nationwide. Likewise, while only 16 percent of the overall youth population in 2003 were African-American, they accounted for 45 percent of juvenile arrests in that year. These statistics play themselves out in the voting booth. According to the Sentencing Project, 13 percent of African-American men nationwide are disenfranchised -- a rate that is seven times the national average.

"If you look at the incredible impact that the criminal justice system has on young, urban communities of color," says Williams of the Bronx Public Defenders Office, "and then you spiral that out and think about the implications in terms of civic participation, and the accountability of the political process to communities of color, we are setting up a very long-term pattern of communities not being engaged."

The tide may be turning, however.

Since 2000, six states -- Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Nevada, New Mexico, and Maryland -- have expanded the number of ex-felons who could vote, whereas only two states -- Massachusetts and New Hampshire states -- have passed laws that add to the restrictions of ex-felons' voting rights.

Most recently, in 2002, the Maryland legislature voted to restore voting rights automatically to most ex-felons three years after the completion of their sentences. In Florida, one of only three states which automatically bars all ex-felons from voting for life, Republican candidate Charlie Crist -- a former Florida attorney general and "tough on crime" state legislator -- recently joined Democratic candidate Jim David in supporting automatic restoration of voting rights to those who have completed their sentences.

Until this year, no state has ever posed directly to their electorate the question of whether ex-felons should be allowed to vote.

On Tuesday, voters in the Rhode Island district where Andres Idarraga would vote -- if he could -- will find him standing outside. Maybe he'll be handing out pamphlets. Maybe he'll be holding a sign. Maybe he'll simply strike up conversations. However he conveys it, his message will be: "Vote yes on 2." Proposition 2 asks voters whether they favor a constitutional amendment to restore the right to vote to people on probation and parole for a felony conviction. If it passes, 15,000 people -- Idarraga among them -- will win back their right to vote. Both the editorial pages of the New York Times and the right-leaning Providence Journal have both endorsed the measure.

"It's really quite unprecedented," says the Sentencing Project's Gotsch of Proposition 2.

In Rhode Island young people are disproportionately stripped of their right to vote. Young men are the most heavily disenfranchised group in the state, with 5 percent of men ages 18-34 unable to vote because of felony convictions. In neighborhoods with high rates of poverty, the numbers are tripled: 16 percent of young men in Providence's urban Southside cannot vote. Among young African-American men on the Southside, the number jumps to 40 percent.

"Youth from communities where many people have been to prison recognize that this isn't an outlier issue," says Daniel Schliefer, 24, field coordinator of the Rhode Island Right to Vote Campaign, which provides the organizational infrastructure to support Proposition 2. As such, young people are involved in the statewide campaign in huge numbers. According to Schliefer, fully two-thirds of the people working on the Rhode Island campaign are under 30. "Growing up in the shadow of the "get tough on crime" age," he says, this generation is in a position to reconsider the way society thinks about prisons and crime.

FORWARD>News>GOP’s Page Scandal Could Boost Dem Candidate in South Florida

GOP’s Page Scandal Could Boost Dem Candidate in South Florida

By Beth Schwartzapfel
October 6, 2006

The scandal over a disgraced Republican’s sexually suggestive emails to teenage congressional pages could end up swinging at least one key Florida race in the fight for the House of Representatives.

Political observers are predicting that a Jewish Democratic candidate and state senator, Ron Klein, is poised to capitalize off of the recent resignation of Republican Rep. Mark Foley and subsequent revelations that House GOP leaders were aware of at least some of his emails months ago. Klein, running in a heavily Jewish district in south Florida that abuts Foley’s, is seeking to oust 12-term incumbent Republican Rep. Clay Shaw.

“I think most experts down here would agree that [the Foley scandal] has the potential for really hurting Clay Shaw,” said Jim Kane, chief pollster of the nonpartisan organization Florida Votes.

The Democrats, who need to pick up 15 seats to take back the House, are increasingly looking at Shaw as a Republican incumbent who can be defeated.

By the beginning of this week, several GOP candidates were returning donations from Foley. Shaw, whose district includes parts of Broward and Palm Beach counties, reportedly donated the $2,000 that he had received from Foley to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

While the Foley scandal itself may not have impacted races across the country, Kane said, coupled with the GOP’s mounting problems it could prove to be a key factor.

“If you look at things that are going on with the economy, particularly gasoline, and then the war in Iraq, and some of the ethics violations that have gone on with lobbyists,” the pollster said, “and you add this significant transgression by a well-known south Florida Republican congressman — it just adds to the problems that Republicans are facing in general.”

Klein’s bid to unseat Shaw was initially considered a long shot. Now, Kane told the Forward, it’s “too close to call… and every week it gets tighter and tighter.”

Foley, a six-term congressman representing parts of Palm Beach, St. Lucie, and Charlotte counties, resigned suddenly September 29 after being questioned by ABC News about suggestive emails that he sent to a 16-year-old congressional page in 2005. The emails, in which Foley asks the page how old he is, what he wants for his birthday, and to email him a picture, were not sexually explicit but were described by the teenager as “sick sick sick.”

In the days since the scandal broke, several additional pages came forward with transcripts of instant message communications dating back to 2003 in which Foley referred explicitly to sexual organs and acts. The Congressional Page Program brings 66 teenagers to Capitol Hill each summer to relay messages, answer phones and learn about the workings of the House of Representatives. The page whose emails sparked the investigation did not work directly with Foley, but rather with Rep. Rodney Alexander, a Louisiana Republican.

The scandal has led to a rift within the GOP leadership, and many groups across the political and religious spectrum have criticized the way the leadership has handled the story.

On Tuesday, the right-leaning Washington Times called on House Speaker Dennis Hastert to resign. Hastert knew about the 2005 emails, which he described as “overly friendly,” several months before the scandal broke. He had Rep. John Shimkus, who oversees the page program, and Alexander ask Foley to stop communicating with the boy, but did not take any further action at the time.

Also on Tuesday, House Majority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, told a Cincinnati radio station that Hastert did not handle the situation appropriately.

The same day, however, White House spokesman Tony Snow described the situation as “simply naughty emails.”

Foley served as the chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and introduced several pieces of legislation intended to prevent sexual predation of children.

Democrats are predicting a heavy fallout for Republicans in Florida and nationwide.

State Senator Nan Rich, a prominent Florida Democrat and an active member of the Jewish community, said that discontent with the Republican Party is growing among Florida’s voters, and “Klein will be the beneficiary of that.”

David Goldenberg, spokesman for the National Jewish Democratic Council, told the Forward that nationally the scandal is “going to have a horrible effect on Republican candidates in general.”

Many leading Christian conservatives have criticized Foley and the GOP leadership’s handling of the situation. As of Tuesday, religious conservatives and Republicans in the Jewish community appeared mostly to be staying mum on the matter.

One Orthodox Republican activist, Jeff Ballabon of the Center for Jewish Values, argued that the actions of one man does not reflect the overall values of the GOP, which he believes are more in line with traditional Judaism.

“People who share traditional values want to keep control of Washington away from Democrats,” he told the Forward.

FORWARD>Allen's Allies Fight Back

Allen's Allies Fight Back

By Beth Schwartzapfel
September 29, 2006

As Senator George Allen’s re-election campaign was engulfed in a firestorm of racial and ethnic gaffes, revelations and accusations, leading Jewish Republican allies attempted to reverse the tide with claims that his Democratic opponent had engaged in “antisemitic” ploys.

Allen, a Virginia Republican in a tough race against Democrat James Webb, was scrambling this week to deny allegations from former college football teammates that as a student he frequently had used a racial epithet to refer to blacks. The allegations came as Allen was already facing a wave of criticism and ridicule over his initial denials that his mother had been raised Jewish.

In an effort to counter the perception that Allen had covered up his ancestry because he was embarrassed by his Jewish roots, the Republican Jewish Coalition and two of the three Jewish Republicans in Congress, Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, issued statements defending the Virginia senator and blasting his opponent.

The Republicans accused Webb and his campaign of attempting to push the issue of Allen’s background in an effort to damage him.

“Senator Allen’s opponent and his opponent’s supporters have engaged in a pattern of intimidation and intolerance that I am saddened to see in this country,” said Coleman, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I welcome the news of Senator Allen’s Jewish ancestry. I am sure it adds further depth to his demonstrated commitment to fighting oppression and antisemitism and his championing of human rights and freedom.”

Cantor went further, accusing Webb of launching antisemitic attacks against his Jewish opponent in the primary, Harris Miller.

During the primary, the Webb campaign distributed a flier with a cartoon image of Miller, in which he’s depicted with money in one pocket and described as the “anti-Christ of outsourcing.” Miller suggested that the flier was antisemitic; in response, the Webb campaign insisted that the cartoon was simply ridiculing Miller’s work as a lobbyist for the information technology industry and his support for outsourcing. At the time, several Jewish communal leaders dismissed the notion that bigotry was at play.

Just as efforts to paint Webb as antisemitic did not work well for Miller in the primary, they were unlikely to help Allen, said James W. Ceaser, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia.

“It’s a race of Allen against himself,” Ceaser said. “Webb’s just standing on the sidelines.”

Ceaser said that Allen hurt himself during the September 18 debate, when he bristled at a reporter for asking whether his mother was Jewish and then appeared to deny that she is. Allen released a September 19 statement saying that his mother’s ancestors were Jewish but she was raised Christian. But the next day, Allen’s mother, Henrietta “Etty” Allen, told The Washington Post that she indeed had been raised Jewish. She also said she had told this to Allen when he asked about the subject last month. She attributed her decision to keep the truth from her children to her fear of antisemitism after living under Nazi rule in Tunisia.

According to Allen and his staff, the senator was prompted to ask his mother about the issue after reading an article in the Forward demonstrating that his mother hailed from a prominent Sephardic family. He said that he only lied about the matter because his mother asked him not to talk about it with anybody.

“I think people have seen that these things have been mishandled,” Ceaser told the Forward. “It’s been just a series of making people doubt him. That’s been the whole dynamic.” Valerie Sulfaro, an associate professor of political science at James Madison University, told the Forward that the back-and-forth about Allen’s Jewish heritage is not gaining much traction among Virginia voters. “I don’t see the Jewish issue as being a factor of any kind in this race,” she said. “I doubt it will have much of an effect on voters.”

Susan Weinberg, president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, told the Forward that the organization wishes the candidates would simply focus on the issues. “The Republicans accusing Webb of being antisemitic, and the digging up of the various racial charges against Allen — they’re ugly on both sides,” she told the Forward. “Our desire would be that these allegations would stay out of the campaign.”

Allen’s Jewish ancestry, however, is still making waves.

“This was a good joke on Allen at Rosh Hashanah services,” Ceaser said. “The rabbi began by welcoming him. It brought a good deal of chuckles from everyone in the synagogue.”

FORWARD>News>Chafee Survives Challenge

Chafee Survives Challenge

By Beth Schwartzapfel
September 13, 2006

Stephen Laffey received 11th-hour support from several pro-Israel political action committees, but he still fell short of defeating incumbent Senator Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island’s GOP primary.

Though Rhode Island is the nation’s smallest state, this contested Senate race has national implications: Democrats have targeted the seat as part of their national strategy to win back the Senate. Chafee has angered the pro-Israel PACs with his support of the Palestinians and his criticism of Israeli government policies. Most recently, he blocked the nomination of John Bolton, who is seen by many Jewish groups as an ally of Israel, to the post of ambassador to the United Nations; criticized new Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank, and urged the Bush administration to “have a more balanced approach” to the peace process.

Early in the year, the pro-Israel Washington Political Action Committee donated $5,000, the maximum amount allowed, to Laffey, mayor of Cranston and a staunch conservative. Federal Election Commission records show that the Los Angeles-based pro-Israel Citizens Organized PAC followed up with a $5,000 donation in June.

During that same period, the conservative Club for Growth, and other rightwing PACs, spent more than $50,000 in independent expenditures, campaign contributions and in-kind contributions to defeat Chafee, who is far to the left of most Republican lawmakers in Washington on taxes, the environment and Iraq.

Laffey spokesperson Nachama Soloveichik told the Forward that an additional four pro-Israel PACs, including the prominent Chicago-based CityPAC, contributed a “nice amount of money” to the campaign in the third quarter, but Soloveichik conceded that it comprised a “small percentage of the total amount” of contributions.

Spokesmen for these PACs either declined comment or were not available.

Reasons for the less-than-anticipated financial support include the fact that PACs often have rules preventing them from contributing to primary races, especially those against incumbents. Perhaps more important, however, is the fact that the Democratic candidate, the state’s former attorney general Sheldon Whitehouse, is favored to win in November and is a candidate whom members of pro-Israel political groups consider to be strong on Israel. As a result, some pro-Israel PACs chose to make donations to Whitehouse’s campaign. “In November, Whitehouse will win,” said Mark Vogel, who is chairman of NationalPAC, the largest pro-Israel PAC in the country, “so I thought the logical way to approach the race is to put all our chips on Sheldon Whitehouse.”

Providence Phoenix>The Long Wait for Gay Marriage

The long wait for gay marriage

Although Rhode Island offers a hospitable home to gays and lesbians, equality remains elusive

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 15, 2006


Justice Brown-Duso is an outspoken nine-year-old with a big smile. He knows what his name means, and he is quick to criticize injustice when he sees it. “He gets really indignant,” says his mom, Michelle Duso. “Like, ‘What do you mean a mom and dad family is better than my mom and mom family?’ ” In 1998, when Duso, the executive director of the Providence nonprofit Youth Pride, and her partner, Julie Brown, went before a judge to adopt Justice, they were essentially asking the same question.

The two women went through the entire process together, insisting, recalls Duso, that they would not start “our family based on lies and shame and loopholes.” Despite this, Brown ultimately wound up stepping aside to allow Duso to file an individual petition for adoption. Told that the adoption was unlikely to be granted if they petitioned together, the couple decided it was more important to have Justice in their home than to start a court fight. A few years later, though, in 2002, Duso and Brown were able to jointly adopt their second son, Dylan, now five, and then his brother, Corey, now four.

The friendlier stance of Rhode Island courts toward gay and lesbian parents is just one sign of how things are steadily improving, locally and nationally, for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ) people. The changes can be seen in such disparate events as the mainstream success of Brokeback Mountain, a string of legislative victories in Rhode Island, and how David N. Cicilline’s status as an openly gay man proved a non-issue in the 2002 Providence mayoral election. As Rodney P. Davis, president of Rhode Island Pride, which runs the annual Pride Parade in Providence and other events, puts it, “Individuals feel comfortable to be who they are in places where 10, 15, 30 years ago that wouldn’t have been imaginable.”

Stephen Hartley, director of development at AIDS Care Ocean State, agrees. “People are finally coming around,” he says. Hartley, a Johnston native who is well known in the LGBTQ community through his alter ego, drag queen Miss Kitty Litter, says the scene is far less furtive than when he came out in the 1970s. “I have been dressed in drag in every bar, every restaurant in downtown Providence,” he says. “It astounds me how many people in Rhode Island know me. The governor of Rhode Island knows Kitty Litter.”

But despite considerable progress, Rhode Island still lacks a formal community infrastructure, beyond nightspots, for gays and lesbians. There are only two organizations — RI Pride, and Youth Pride, which provides support, advocacy, and education for youth — with their own offices and paid staff. More fundamentally, the ongoing legal inability of gays and lesbians to marry here shows how a central social convention — and all that it conveys — remains out of reach.

While six states have marriage or some form of domestic partnership on the books, gay marriage legislation has been introduced at the General Assembly and then killed in committee for seven of the last eight years. The state’s top three elected officials, Republican Governor Donald L. Carcieri, and Senate President Joseph Montalbano and Speaker William J. Murphy, both Democrats, are united in their opposition to the bill. As evidenced by a well-attended Valentine’s Day rally at the State House on Tuesday, gay and lesbian activists are continuing to press their fight. But despite the enactment of steadily more legal protection for Rhode Island’s LGBTQ community, this year’s gay marriage legislation is expected, once again, to have little chance of becoming law.

Toward a more tolerant state
Gwendolyn Howard, a clinical social worker, sees her clients in a tidy and comfortable office on Wickenden Street in Providence. In her words, Howard is “a woman who has experienced gender reassignment surgery.” (Others might call her transgendered, but Howard says, “Labels can get really charged and confusing.”) During her transition, Howard moved from upstate New York to Providence in 1996, and the process was at times frightening.

Howard and her partner (a woman whom Howard married while she was still a man, and to whom she remains legally married — they just celebrated their 25th anniversary) rented their apartment as two women. Since Howard was hired at a temp agency as a man, however, she would wear men’s clothes to work, and then change in the car on the way home, hoping she wouldn’t run into her landlord, or someone from the job. Had such a chance encounter occurred, and not gone well, she would have had no legal recourse, since Rhode Island lacked civil rights protection for transgendered people at the time. “That awareness that you can lose your job, you can lose everything, just if someone found out,” Howard says, “that can be kind of a crippling fear.”

Five years ago, state Representative Edith Ajello (D-Providence) introduced a bill to bar discrimination against transgendered individuals in a variety of areas. The Rhode Island Alliance for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights, a nonprofit advocacy organization, intended 2001 to be merely a test year for a bill. But when community activist Lauren Nocera was able to arrange a meeting with then-Senate Majority Leader William V. Irons of East Providence, everything changed. Nocera happened to have grown up in the same Rumford neighborhood where Irons had raised his family (Irons’s daughter, in fact, had babysat Nocera when she was a girl). So when Nocera asked the legislative leader to meet with Gwen Howard, she was speaking not just as a constituent, but a family friend.

“You’re a parent,” Nocera recalls telling Irons. “You know my parents. And these are issues that affect families.” In the subsequent meeting, “Gwen was brilliant,” recalls Nocera. “That meeting wholly illustrates the power of personal connection.”

Irons (who left the Senate at the end of 2003) proceeded to take a strong interest in the legislation, even speaking in favor of it during a committee meeting. The bill ultimately became law, making Rhode Island at the time one of only two states offering such protection to transgendered people. These types of stories abound in the history of the LGBTQ community’s struggle for legislative recognition. As longtime community activist Tina Wood, who operates Rhode Island’s LGBTQ news list (listserv.brown.edu/rilgbt-news.html), puts it, “Other states are huge. Here, people are more likely to say, ‘Hey, you’re talking about my cousin.’ ”

The enactment of protection for transgendered people capped a string of legislative victories, including three in 1998 alone. First, the legislature repealed the state’s sodomy statute, which categorized oral and anal sex acts between consenting adults — dubbed “abominable and detestable crimes against nature”— as felonies. Second, Rhode Island became only the second state to allow individuals to choose their “immediate family,” including same-sex partners, for the purposes of hospital visitation. Third, the General Assembly passed a hate-crimes law, implementing harsher penalties for a crime committed specifically because of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (the law already contained such provisions for race and gender, among other things, but still does not include transgendered people). In 1999, Rhode Island became the first state to allow individuals to designate someone who is not an immediate family member to be responsible for their funeral arrangements. And finally, in 2001, same-sex partners of state employees became eligible for spousal benefits.

If activists were surprised by how quickly the transgender civil rights bill, and the array of subsequent legislation, passed, it was partially because of how long and how hard they had fought for their first victory.

In 1995, Rhode Island became the eighth state to pass legislation prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing, employment, credit, and public accommodations. In retrospect, it seems so simple — why would anyone oppose protecting people against discrimination? But a bill guaranteeing that gays and lesbians could not lose their jobs or be kicked out of their homes because of their sexual orientation was introduced almost every year for 11 years, starting in 1984. And every time, it was either voted down, killed in committee, or passed in one branch of the legislature, but not the other.

In 1993, after nine years of fighting, supporters erupted in a minor riot at the State House, hollering and shouting in the rotunda, bringing the legislature to a standstill after the House Judiciary Committee killed the bill. “The frustration was palpable,” recalls longtime community activist Marti Rosenberg, the executive director of Ocean State Action. “We were just there, and angry, and loud.” The LGBTQ community felt alone, and it had very little support from other groups. “At the time,” remembers Rodney Davis, “we were singular activists, out in the cold, fighting.”

Rosenberg recalls sitting in the wings of the Senate in 1995, listening to the legislators’ debate in the hours before the anti-discrimination bill finally passed. “When the vote finally happened, people were crying,” she says. “I had chills. Just to see that justice was being done was an amazing thing. It was electric.” Two weeks later, Rosenberg’s then-partner gave birth to their daughter, Abby. Abby was six weeks old when the family marched in that year’s Pride parade; taped to her stroller was a triumphant sign: “Born in a Free State.”

The splintering of a movement

The mounting victories for the LGBTQ community, coupled with the more tolerant general atmosphere toward gays and lesbians, can lend a sense of inevitability to the community’s progress, leading young people to conclude that these changes were only a matter of time. Stephen Hartley, the drag queen known as Miss Kitty Litter, spends a lot of time in gay bars and clubs, mentoring and keeping an eye on the rising generation. “Sometimes I see them being disrespectful to the older people. I need to remind them that if it weren’t for the older people, there wouldn’t be 14 gay bars in downtown Providence,” Hartley says with a measure of hyperbole. “You have American history, and if you’re gay, you have gay history. These changes don’t just happen. People fought for them.”

Following the passage of the civil rights bill in 1995, the “us-against-them” cohesiveness that unified the extended gay and lesbian community for 11 years began to wear thin as different priorities came to the fore. The anti-discrimination bill “was the holy grail for so many years,” says Tina Wood. “There was no clear sense of what was next.” Although the issue of gays in the military, for instance, was a hot topic during Bill Clinton’s first term, “there’s no way I’d ever spend my time working on that,” says Peter Hocking, a former director of Brown University’s Swearer Center for Public Service, reflecting the views of the large number of LGBTQ Rhode Islanders who believe in equality, but are uncomfortable with militarism.

Ultimately, depending on who’s speaking, the Rhode Island Alliance for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights either disbanded or was put on hold. The group’s nonprofit status was revoked in 2001 and its Web site (members.aol.com/rialliance/) was last updated in 2003.

The previous focus on the civil rights bill has shifted to same-sex marriage. There is not the same unqualified support for marriage, however, from all corners of the community, particularly from its more politically radical members. Hocking, for example, respects those who have taken up this cause, but adds, “Marriage is a fundamentally flawed institution in this country. It’s an issue of patriarchy and it’s an issue of ownership of women and transmittal of property.”

Jenn Steinfeld, co-chair of Marriage Equality RI (www.marriageequalityri.org/), the group that is spearheading the fight, acknowledges, “Marriage is still a really controversial issue within the LGBT community.” Further, civil rights affect everyone, while marriage affects only some. “Maybe if I had a partner, I would be more involved,” Hartley says, “but I don’t have a partner, so marriage is not my fight.”

In some ways, the splintering of goals and priorities is a sign of the LGBTQ’s community’s ongoing successes. The community, after all, is a diverse one, and diversity of interests and demographics is no longer strictly set aside in favor of commonality. The community’s diversity, however, in combination with Rhode Island’s small size, leads to some of the community’s most glaring shortcomings.

In 2004, creating a community/resource center, for example, was one of the top priorities identified by LGBTQ community members in a Rhode Island Foundation study. Consistent concern was expressed that the only opportunity for social interaction for LGBTQ people is in bars and clubs, which are not welcoming for families, non-drinkers, and some older people. However, despite the intense interest, no such center has lasted for more than a few years. Two of the more notable examples were the Triangle Center, which opened in 1994 and closed a few years later, and the India Point Project, which hastily closed in 2004, amid questions involving financial impropriety. Other problems aside, Peter Hocking says these centers didn’t last because they were “trying to do too many things.”

Rather than trying to be “monolithic,” Hocking suggests that the only way community centers will work is if there are lots of them, each of which starts small and grows organically from a specific mission. Money to establish such a center has also been scarce, in part since less than 0.3% of all national charitable dollars go to gay and lesbian issues, according to the Rhode Island Foundation.

Hocking is the chair of Equity Action, the Foundation’s new fund for sexual orientation and gender identity initiatives. Since going public in 2004, Equity Action has distributed more than $100,000, including recently announced grants to expand the GLBT Helpline of Rhode Island and to provide a safe and supportive space for LGBTQ Southeast Asian-American youth. Hocking says Equity Action is particularly invested in projects and programs that build community infrastructure, especially those which are “interesting and inventive, which enliven the cultural life and allow people to know each other.”

The 2004 WhamBamTrans art festival, which received Equity Action funding, is a good example of the latter. Similarly, Options, the longstanding newsmagazine of Rhode Island’s gay and lesbian community, was volunteer-run until an Equity Action grant enabled it to hire a managing director. “We want to see that grow and flourish,” says Hocking, “to make the transition to a more serious professional organization.”

Advocates push for a stand

Michelle Duso and Julie Brown have been together for more than 17 years, though Duso can’t say when in their relationship they might have gotten married had that been legal. “There were conversations early in the relationship, like, ‘What if?’ — but the future looked very different because that wasn’t an option,” she says.

When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2003 that same-sex couples there should be allowed to marry, marriage was suddenly an option, albeit not a palatable one to Brown and Duso. “We’ve talked about why we wouldn’t go to Massachusetts,” Duso says. “This is where we live. Not to have your marriage recognized in your home state? It made more sense to work towards inclusion here than seeking inclusion elsewhere.”

Despite disagreement within the LGBTQ community about priorities, marriage is widely acknowledged to be the current focus. And though there are five states in which same-sex couples can either be joined in civil unions or be registered as domestic partners, there is only one — Massachusetts — where they can get married. Despite the obstacles, Rhode Island aims to be the second.

The state’s first gay marriage legislation was introduced in 1997, largely as a countermeasure to a “Defense of Marriage” (DOMA) bill that defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Gay marriage bills and DOMAs have been introduced almost every year since then, although none have come to a vote, in part due to strategic reasons. (That Rhode Island is one of only 12 states without a DOMA is itself a victory.) Marriage Equality RI’s Jenn Steinfeld says the overall expectation was always one of incremental movement, raising awareness among legislators without forcing a vote. “They don’t want to vote against it,” she says, “but they don’t feel like they can stick their neck out” and vote for it.

Although some gays and lesbians see civil marriage as a step that would build wider social acceptance, Marriage Equality has decided that civil unions are not worth fighting for. Steinfeld says, “There’s a real sense of inequality, having to stand on a separate line and get a piece of paper that says something different.”

Marriage Equality introduced this year’s gay marriage bill amid fanfare in late January, with more sponsors than ever before. Despite the opposition to gay marriage of the state’s top three elected officials, Steinfeld hopes to see this year’s bill finally go to a vote. “In the House, I think we have a good shot,” she says. “In the Senate, not so much.” Referring to gay marriages in Massachusetts, Steinfeld says, “The Rhode Island community, we’ve seen it be a reality. It’s time for people to take a stand.”