They attended 150 workshops and training sessions as the ongoing battle between gay-male sex activists and so-called neo-cons bubbled around them.

"It's a conference for activists or people who want to know what's happening in the gay community," said NGLTF Public Information Director Mark Johnson. "They come here, they meet each other, they learn from each other, they share, and they go back hopefully a lot more empowered, a lot stronger, a lot more knowledgeable."

In the cyberized '90s, the conference also is a time to match faces with e-mail addresses, said Don Romesburg, publications manager for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

"Especially since the Internet, we all work so closely together and yet we don't really know each other, and I think it's a way to bring our community closer together as persons instead of names," Romesburg said.

As NGLTF Executive Director Kerry Lobel sees it: "This is the most incredible political gathering and party every year. It is just such a tapestry of every idea and issue that is facing our community."

Countdown to Hawaii

"The participants in the marriage workshops were really high- caliber," reported Evan Wolfson, director of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund's Marriage Project. "People were very motivated, very into it -- good exchange of views from state and national perspectives, so I actually am in a really good mood, really enjoyed it, it was very productive."

Wolfson is in a good mood for another reason, too, of course. Same-sex marriage is going to be legal in Hawaii in a matter of months, or sooner.

"We're going to see a decision from the Hawaii Supreme Court, possibly as early as December, almost certainly sometime this winter, and at that point, same-sex couples will be able to get married and we will enter into the next phase of this struggle which will be an extraordinarily transformed chapter where we will be in a very different place in our society," Wolfson told GayToday: "We'll have a range of challenges but also unbelievable opportunities to engage non-gay people in support of our families and our equality, and to really have people understand what this discrimination has meant and why it should end."

Even if, as threatened, Hawaii's voters and legislature manage to amend the state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, logistics will prevent them from doing so until after gay marriage has been legal for several months.

"Our job is to make that [amendment] not happen by getting in there and fighting," Wolfson said. "If, however, this constitutional-amendment proposal is ratified by the voters, one question is, what will the legislature do? The actual amendment- proposal says that the legislature shall have the power – though not the obligation -- to restrict marriage. So it's not automatically clear what would then happen. We'd then have to go into the legislature and fight to protect the lawful marriages we want to preserve.

"But even again, if they do the worst, and pass some kind of discriminatory, restrictive legislation, it's very clear that our legal position would be that people who are married are married, and whatever the subsequent change in law that may occur as to who can then get married, it would not take away the validity of those lawful marriages."

The Sex Panic

The conference's other hot topic was the ongoing fighting between New York's Sex Panic! group and its supporters, and gay authors Michelangelo Signorile, Gabriel Rotello and Larry Kramer and their supporters.

Sex Panic! says gay men are under renewed attack from politicians, cops and, most disturbingly, gay "neo-conservative" writers who disapprove of promiscuity, sex clubs, backrooms, 'tea rooms,' cruisy adult bookstores and so-called public sex.

The "neo-cons" have been writing and speaking in favor of reduced gay-male promiscuity and monogamy. Signorile's new book takes aim at the drug abuse and unsafe sex at circuit parties, while Rotello's Sexual Ecology attempts to prove that core groups of promiscuous urban gay men are passing on HIV at a rate high enough to keep the AIDS epidemic alive.

A day-long Sex Panic! Summit explored the issue in detail from the sex-activists' point of view [GayToday archives, November 14, Top Story] while an NGLTF town meeting on the topic degenerated at times into a shouting match about "barebacking," the deliberate decision to have anal sex without condoms.

A few of the men among the 200 attendees at the town meeting defended--or at least tried to explain the reasons for--barebacking, while a few visibly upset lesbians implied that if gay men are going to irresponsibly infect themselves then lesbians are done being sympathetic.

NGLTF was criticized for stacking the meeting's panel with only Sex Panic! supporters. Lobel responded that the panelists themselves were "fairly irrelevant" given the town-meeting format.

"People here have so many different perspectives that I'll be shocked if they're not all presented by the participants at the town forum," she said before the meeting began. "Did NGLTF drop the ball on a number of things? Absolutely. Do we every year? Yes. Should people take it personally. No."

Keynote speakers at this year's Creating Change conference included lesbian California state legislator Sheila Kuehl, National Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization Executive Director Martin Ornelas-Quintero, youth activist Roland Sintos Coloma, and dyke author Dorothy Allison, who wrote Bastard Out of Carolina.

"This conference creates a place once a year where activists and organizers from all over the country have the opportunity to be together, to share information, resources and ideas, and to go home better prepared to get the work done in what is, in my mind, truly the grass roots, dealing with issues at the local and state levels," summed up Conference Director Sue Hyde.

Next year's conference is in Pittsburgh.

Copyright (c) 1997 Rex Wockner. All rights reserved. Do not publish, broadcast, or post online without permission.