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Arlene Stein is associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University. She has written for The Nation, The Oregonian, and Newsday, among other publications, and is the author of Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation and editor of Sisters, Sexperts, Queers. 

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The Stranger Next Door

Beacon Press

Chapter One

Introduction

Midway between San Francisco and Seattle, in a spectacular verdantvalley, is a place I will call Timbertown. Home to eight thousand people,it is in many respects a typical small Oregon community, and atypical small American town, a place that prides itself on the fact thatmost people know each other, at least by sight, and a place where lifegoes on and relatively little changes?or so many believe. Yet severalyears ago, within the space of a few months, the intimate acts of individualsbecame the subject of a raucous public debate that pittedneighbor against neighbor. Should the community recognize lesbiansand gay men as a legitimate minority group, and accord them equalprotection under the law?

    Since Timbertown possessed little power to create such protections,the question was above all a symbolic one. Nonetheless, it createda storm of controversy few will forget. Families stopped theirchildren from playing with friends whose parents stood on the opposingside of the issue. Husbands and wives quarreled over it, and itsparked fistfights at the high school. The local newspaper, normallypreoccupied with news of the timber industry and Little Leaguescores, covered little else for months. Practically overnight, the questionof lesbian/gay civil rights became a matter of public debate andacrimony.

    Rural Oregon was a rather unlikely site for a battle over homosexuality.In this vast, sparsely populated region of the country, therewere few visible signs of queer life outside of the few metropolitanareas: no out homosexuals lobbying for civil rights; no lesbian/gaycoffeehouses, newspapers, or running clubs, commonplace in largertowns and cities. Yet suddenly the issue of homosexuality moved tocenter stage. "Across rural Oregon, where homosexuality used to bethe last thing you'd expect anyone to be discussing, much less debating"a newspaper reported, "people are talking about little else."

    In 1992, religious conservatives sponsored a highly controversialstatewide ballot measure that sought to deny civil rights protectionsto lesbians and gay men. The initiative, known as Measure 9, lost by alarge margin in the state's two most populous metropolitan areas butwon across rural Oregon. The following year, in an effort to buildupon its successes in rural areas, the Oregon Citizens Alliance, whichspearheaded the campaign, targeted eight counties and three dozensmall communities where the statewide measure had passed the yearbefore. These measures sought to amend local bylaws to prevent anti-discriminationprotections for gays and lesbians and prohibit governmentspending to promote homosexuality (see Appendix B).

    When I moved to Oregon in the fall of 1994, the year after theballot measures rippled across the state, people were still talking aboutthem. On several occasions, friends warned me to stay out of a particularcommunity when it had passed an ordinance prohibiting lesbian/gay rights the year before; gay rights sympathizers waged unofficialboycotts of these towns. It seemed to me that homosexuality had becomea primary way these towns defined themselves, and others definedthem. But why, I wondered, did small-town folks find homosexuality,seemingly a nonissue, so confusing and troubling? And whybother organizing against lesbian/gay rights in towns where queerpeople were barely visible? A second question also emerged: How didsmall towns defend lesbian and gay rights in the absence of a visible,identifiable gay community?

    I became interested in how discussions of homosexuality andlesbian/gay civil rights entered public life in small communities,shaping how "ordinary" people talked about sexuality. Small ruralcommunities have usually been thought of as the repository of traditionalAmerican values, conjuring up images of close, face-to-face relationshipsamong like-minded people. In recent decades, a series ofsweeping social changes, including the dissemination of new mediatechnologies and the growing movement of urban dwellers into ruralareas across the nation, has called this nostalgia-tinged image intoquestion. What happens, I wondered, when small-town people andbig-city, indeed global, cultures come into contact with one another?The issue of homosexual civil rights, as it was debated by a small community,provided a lens for looking at this process.

    I spent two years talking with community activists on the rightand the left, along with city officials, teachers, students, car mechanics,and lumbermen in the small Oregon town. I examined what peoplesaid publicly in the debate about homosexuality?in newspapers,radio broadcasts, television interviews, and organizational literature.And I interviewed people who participated in these debates to try tofigure out what homosexuality symbolized for them on a deeperlevel?for those who sought to legislate against gay rights or who defendedthese rights, as well as for those who had few opinions on thematter.

    I had to admit that I was drawn to the project because it offered thechance of entering an alien world: small-town America, and particularlythe world of Christian evangelicals. I had read about the ChristianCoalition and its efforts to shape American politics, seen filmssuch as The Apostle, about a southern Pentecostal preacher, and hadfollowed the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandal in the news. But Ihad never actually talked with a card-carrying evangelical. Nothingseemed further from my reality as a Jew, an urbanite, and a laborer inthe agnostic groves of academia.

    As I embarked on this project, friends and colleagues were curious.How would I present myself to my subjects? Would I tell peoplethat I was a Jew? A lesbian? Would I reveal my progressive politicalsympathies? A colleague of mine, Linda Kintz, had studied the worldof Christian conservatism, attending conferences of such organizationsas Concerned Women for America. Kintz, a sweet-voicedwoman with a smooth Texas drawl, wore a tasteful pantsuit and presentedherself as a conservative activist in order to gather what we sociologistscall "data." Reporter Donna Minkowitz chose a differentstrategy: she bound her breasts and donned a goatee makeover to attendrallies of the Promise Keepers, the hugely successful Christianmen's organization. But my appearance irrevocably marked me asnot-Christian (and not-male). I couldn't pass. Nor did I want to, particularly,as I imagined that interactions with my informants wouldtell me as much about their world as would their answers to mypointed questions.

    Indeed, much of what I learned surprised me. I was struck by howmany people expressed opinions about the world that were both honestand forthright yet based upon operating assumptions diametricallyopposed to those I took for granted. While I understood diversity andmulticulturalism as a positive ideal, for example, others felt threatenedby it, and refused to mince words when describing their feelings. Theschools "require our children to celebrate cultural diversity," onemother complained. "But what if the families don't want to celebrate?"

    Why would individuals come to such different conclusions aboutsomething that seemed, to me at least, relatively simple and straightforward?To find out, I would...