Gay Community

Thousands of people gathered in Druid Hill Park yesterday to paint the park with rainbows, triangles and a sense of pride.The Baltimore Pride festival brought community health and legal services, clubs, and activist groups together with area gays, lesbians, transsexuals, their friends and families.The event, sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Baltimore, drew an estimated 20,000 people last year and organizers expected a larger turnout yesterday.The festival, in its 19th year, is designed to provide a haven for gay celebration.

The headline on an article in Sunday's Maryland section about a conference on homosexuality misidentified the denomination of the Rev. Tony Campolo. He is a Baptist minister.The Sun regrets the errors.The Rev. Tony Campolo, president of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education and spiritual adviser to President Clinton, and his wife, Peggy, a writer, stood together in the pulpit and preached tolerance yesterday at a Towson United Methodist Church discussion on homosexuality.

YOU know, I was just thinking: When was the last time I got together with a million or so of my closest friends?It was in 1993, when people from across the gay spectrum gathered in Washington and turned the nation's capital into a gay capital. It was exhilarating, empowering and enriching to be together with so many people who were out -- or came out -- for one thing: seeking our full civil rights.With a major increase in gay visibility and key victories in workplace, family and other arenas since the march, it's been a whirlwind five years -- we're not in Kansas anymore.

WASHINGTON -- When David Catania heard that he had won a D.C. Council seat this week, the first thing he did was tell a crowd of supporters how thankful he was for Ken Baker, his companion of four years.The fact that Catania is the council's first openly gay council member is not the only reason why his victory is remarkable. He is also white in a majority-black city and a Republican in a town where there are 10 times as many Democrats as Republicans.Catania, a 29-year-old political neophyte with a doughy face and wire-rimmed glasses, surprised the establishment here in Tuesday's special election for the open at-large seat.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Eric Ciasullo runs through his schedule as if he were on a sight-seeing trip through the Land of Pharmacology. If it's 7 o'clock this must be Crixivan. If it's 8 o'clock it must be DDI. If it's 9: 30, it must be D4T, Diflucan, Acyclovir, Bactrim, Myambutol, Biaxin.He opens the medicine chest in his apartment to show me shelves full of bottles. It is a daunting regimen of 19 pills -- some to be taken on an empty stomach, others on a full stomach, some with water -- that he must take every day, for the foreseeable future.

MIAMI -- As the national manhunt for the suspected killer of fashion designer Gianni Versace intensified yesterday, an air of unease hung over glitzy South Beach -- and particularly the gay community here.Police released little new information about Andrew Phillip Cunanan, the prime suspect and reported gay prostitute who has been linked to four other slyings around the country, most often of gay men he seemed to know.WPLG-TV, an ABC affiliate, reported last night that video from a surveillance camera at a hotel near the scene of Versace's death might further link Cunanan to the crime.

There's been much discussion in the gay community lately concerning the so-called "circuit parties," which have become annual high holy days for tens of thousands of gay men. For the uninitiated, circuit parties, in such gay meccas as Fire Island and Palm Springs, are marathon bacchanals where gay men ingest prodigious amounts of drugs, cruise incessantly, and bop and bounce their stunningly buff bods at 140 beats per minute.They've been going on for years, but they've been under the microscope since last August, when a Fire Island partygoer overdosed and ended up comatose and on life support.

Leonard Jackson, 44, prominent figure in gay communityLeonard "Len" C. Jackson, a prominent figure in the Baltimore gay and lesbian community, died Tuesday at home from complications of AIDS.He was 44.The native of New Bedford, Mass., graduated from Duke University in 1975 and lived briefly in New Orleans before moving to Atlanta, where he owned and was chef of the Jackson Square Restaurant. He moved to Baltimore in 1988.From 1988 until 1991, he was executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Baltimore.

BOSTON -- Memo to the travel agent: Don't start booking those wedding packages to Honolulu just yet. The weather on the islands is delightful but the timing is a bit premature.Last Tuesday a Hawaii Circuit Court judge ruled that the state had to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. But he put off the first wedding date for at least a year until the Hawaii Supreme Court hears an appeal.Honolulu may then become the Reno of gay marriages. But no one knows whether a gay couple wed on Maui will still be married when they get to the mainland.

Bach Personnel in San Francisco may be the only job placement agency in America that carries a pink triangle on its sign and a rainbow flag on its door.The triangle and flag, symbols of gay pride, reflect the special niche of this Castro Street firm -- catering to gay and lesbian workers who are looking for employers who accept or embrace their sexual orientation.In a fiercely competitive industry, every angle helps. "There are over 450 agencies that I'm competing with in the San Francisco area," said David Bach, who founded the firm in 1991.

ALBERT L. GORDON, 94 Gay rights advocate Albert L. Gordon, an attorney who helped advance gay rights in the 1970s and 1980s by challenging discriminatory practices and laws, including a successful effort to decriminalize consensual homosexual acts, died Aug. 10 in Los Angeles. He was 94. His death was due to old age, said his son Harold Gordon. Albert Gordon, a heterosexual whose twin sons are gay, became a lawyer in his late 40s and devoted most of his practice to defending the rights of homosexuals and battling the bigotry of law enforcement.

Sgt. John Kowalczyk wasn't hiding his sexual orientation; he just wasn't broadcasting it. But word was spreading through the police academy, and he sensed tension. He asked to address his fellow officers and got right to the point. "I'm gay," he said. "What do you want to know?" He answered questions for the next hour - some inquisitive, others downright insulting - and spent the rest of the training academy working to show his peers that he could hold his own as a cop. Seven years later, Kowalczyk, 31, remains one of the few openly gay officers in the Baltimore Police Department.

Given the timing, it's hard to view the executive order signed Wednesday by President Barack Obama extending some benefits to domestic partners of federal employees as more than an attempt to appease a gay community unhappy with the White House's seeming indifference to its cause. Certainly the decision is helpful for gay federal workers, but it's also overdue and inadequate - it does not, for example, include full health benefits. Many companies have already done more, and so have a growing number of states, cities and towns.

Gay and lesbian activists thought they had a friend in Martin O'Malley. As a progressive mayor in Baltimore, O'Malley attended gay pride parades and signed into law a measure to protect transgender people from discrimination. When he ran for governor, he said he supported civil unions and wanted to extend benefits to same-sex partners of state employees, as he had done for city workers. But two years into O'Malley's first term in Annapolis, neither has happened. He largely stayed out of the debate over legal recognition for same-sex unions that fizzled in the General Assembly, and aides say his financially strapped administration probably won't grant benefits for at least another year.

Societies that are tolerant, free and diverse tend to be richer and happier than societies that aren't. Maryland has shown this for decades. Now is the time to extend the legacy by legalizing same-sex marriage. The move would beam welcome signals not just to gays and lesbians but to all members of the young "creative class" who represent the economic and social future. Not coincidentally, it's the right thing to do. More and more research shows how inextricably linked tolerance and prosperity really are. No religion, race or sexual orientation has a monopoly on talent.

We're off to see the wizard. No, not the one who lives at the end of the yellow brick road. This one might be said to live somewhere over the rainbow, as in the flag that symbolizes gay pride. Or hadn't you heard about Albus Dumbledore? If you are, or live in proximity to, a Harry Potter fan, you've already made the acquaintance. If not, suffice to say that he is our hero's mentor, the headmaster of Hogwarts, the school for wizards in training. Recently, we learned that he is also something else.

Ford Motor Co.'s decision this week to stop some advertising in gay publications doesn't necessarily signal a retreat by corporate America from marketing to this demographic because many of these companies have a lot more to lose by not doing so, advertising experts said. "We're at the most comfortable place we've ever been in terms of gay advertising," said Michael Wilke, executive director of Commercial Closet Association, a nonprofit that educates corporations on how to avoid stereotypes in gay advertising.

Angie Henle was just a spectator when she partied last year at the Baltimore Pride Block Party. But when the signature event of Baltimore Pride 2005 got going last night, Henle could say that, for a few moments at least, she was the life of the party. Henle, 20, who lives in Dundalk, beat out a legion of performers last month in an American Idol-like contest to earn the right to sing in front of thousands at the gay, lesbian and transsexual celebration in Mount Vernon. "This year I get to experience this at a whole 'nother level," Henle said.

New York's alert that a gay man had become ill with a possible super strain of HIV has left experts eager for clues that could show whether the strain poses a real or imagined threat to public health. But while some fear a repeat of the grim, early days of the AIDS epidemic and others say the strain is probably nothing new, just about everyone agrees that the case has revealed an enemy at work. That enemy is the waning of safe-sex practices that were credited with curbing the epidemic after it cut a deadly swath through the gay community in the 1980s and 1990s.

BOSTON -- Let me see if I have this right. The Republicans are now accusing the Democrats of being insensitive to gay Americans? Or to one gay American, at least? After John Kerry mentioned Mary Cheney in the third debate, talk-radio hosts finally found a lesbian they wanted to protect. Even the homophobic wing of cable TV rallied to the support of a family with a gay offspring. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney described himself as "a pretty angry father." And Lynne Cheney said of the senator: "This is not a good man."