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The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle Over Sex, Faith and Civil Rights; by Arlene Stein; Beacon Press; 267 pages; $27.50.
1994 was also the year that sociologist Arlene Stein moved to Oregon. Coming from a large urban area, she was amazed and intrigued by the cultural war that brewed in Timbertown and other places like it. "Rural Oregon was a rather unlikely site for a battle over homosexuality," she wrote. "In this vast, sparsely populated region of the country, there were few visible signs of queer life outside of the few metropolitan areas; no out homosexuals lobbying for civil rights; no lesbian/gay coffeehouses, newspapers, or running clubs, commonplace in larger towns and cities. Yet suddenly the issue of homosexuality moved to center stage." Unlike the sexually-charged gay men of most major cities, Timbertown's queers were mostly laid-back lesbian couples who kept their sexuality to themselves. This did not stop OCA and its leader, Lon Mabon, from raising the specter of homosexuality. "Do you know that homosexuals are taking over the local schools?," asked Mabon, and the rest is history. Stein set out to discover why Timbertown got into a frenzy over a "gay menace" that did not exist. Though Christian conservatives were behind the OCA initiative, there was more at stake than religious beliefs. As an union leader told Stein: "Christianity has very little [to] do with the appeal of the Christian right . . . It's not about theology, it's about economics."
"As the old devils - Communists, working women, the counterculture -- lost their power, a new devil was needed -- preferably one that embodied the worst excesses of the permissive society, that transgressed sexual respectability, that seemed sufficiently outside the community to be alien, but that simultaneously represented familiar (and therefore doubly scary) urges that were accessible to anyone," namely gays. The Religious Right -- and the Oregon Citizens Alliance -- took advantage of this wave of resentment. "Conservative Christians believed that they alone could lead the reimagined community and assert the primitive status of heterosexuality. They alone could produce a different sort of politics, one that would bring the values of intimate familiarity -- nurturance, reciprocity, and community solidarity - into the public realm. They alone could restore rules, order, authority - structures that give shape and meaning to a world out of bounds, and guide individual actions in a world of bewildering choices and changes. The future of the community, and indeed the nation, was at stake." The people of Timbertown -- or 57% of it -- readily agreed. The Stranger Next Door is an incisive and evenhanded study of the culture wars, as experienced by a community that was torn apart by sex, faith and civil rights. Though Stein -- a Jew, a lesbian and an intellectual -- disagrees with everything that OCA stands for -- she gave its supporters the benefit of every doubt, and allows them to tell their side of the story. She is also critical of the Community Action Network, the "progressive" group created to fight Timbertown's antigay initiative. Like other "pro-gay" groups before or since, CAN pushed homosexuals (and homosexuality) to the background, replacing them with friendly straights who pleaded for the rights of those who "just can't help" being who they are. As in other similar circumstances, their tactics failed miserably. All in all, and whether we like it or not, the Christian right survives because "it speaks to the aspirations and fears of millions of Americans", while "Liberalism lacks a moral vocabulary that is adequate to sensibly discuss the link between family, morality, and politics." For those of us who support "gay rights" to succeed, we must "generate a language that speaks to the anxieties and aspirations of Americans [and] . . . makes a convincing argument for the importance of sexual diversity." We have our work cut out. 
Brief Views: The Banquet
Most of us who experienced a liberal education got to read The Symposium, Plato's classic defense of male love. Unfortunately for Plato, his masterpiece has been repeatedly bowdlerized, and his sexual politics tamed into a sexless "platonic love". The Banquet, a new edition of the "Symposium" published by John Lauritsen's Pagan Press (Box 1902, Provincetown, MA 02657-0245; $8 postpaid) has rescued this classic from the academic straightjacket inflicted upon it by old farts like Benjamin Jowett. This translation, by Percy Bysshe Shelley no less, "achieves [to quote Lauritsen] a splendid balance between eloquence and intimacy." Required reading for every literate gay, The Banquet greatly benefits from a translation and an edition that are truly labors of love.
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In 1994 the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA) sponsored a series of antigay
measures in nearly three dozen cities and counties in Oregon. OCA
deliberately targeted those places which had supported its statewide
initiative in 1992, an initiative that lost because of the opposition from
large urban areas. This time OCA was more successful. One of its victories
was in "Timbertown" (not its real name), a town that gave 53% of its vote to
the statewide initiative in 1992 and now expressed its disapproval of
homosexuality by a vote of 57-43%.
Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer who lives in South Florida with
his domestic partner. He can be reached at