COLUMN ONE : Gays Alter Dynamics of Politics : Homosexuals have become more visible on campaign trail--as players and as targets. From the presidential race to local contests, views on gay rights contrast sharply.

Had someone told William Waybourn five years ago that TV reporters would be quizzing the 1992 presidential candidates about their views on homosexuality and gay rights, he would have hooted in disbelief.

“I probably would have laughed my head off,” says Waybourn, who directs a national gay political fund-raising network.

But that is just what has happened as gay issues have emerged from the political closet to an unprecedented degree in this election year. From local and state races to party platforms and the presidential race, gay men and lesbians are more visible than ever--as players and as targets.

As the November election nears, gays are poised to make dramatic political gains or suffer stinging losses. Sweeping anti-gay initiatitives are on the state ballots in Oregon and Colorado, while the competing presidential tickets offer strikingly different stances on gay issues.

Democrat Bill Clinton has enthusiastically embraced the gay cause, courting gay votes and dollars with promises of an accelerated battle against AIDS, an end to the military ban on homosexuals and a party platform that endorses federal civil rights legislation for gays. In contrast, the Bush-Quayle reelection campaign has allied itself with the vehemently anti-gay religious right, staking out “family-values” and “cultural-war” themes that pointedly exclude homosexuals. Bush supports the military ban and the GOP platform opposes gay-rights laws and adoptions by gays.

Whereas Clinton featured two openly gay speakers--aide Bob Hattoy and San Francisco Supervisor Roberta Achtenberg--at the Democratic Convention, last month’s GOP gathering spotlighted two of the gay movement’s most strident foes, conservative Patrick J. Buchanan and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson. The Republican Convention podium rang with derisive references to homosexuals and their civil rights movement as a threat to moral society.

The Bush campaign has since tempered the anti-gay rhetoric, apparently worried that the family-values blitz is alienating voters. Vice President Dan Quayle, while continuing to characterize homosexuality as “the wrong choice,” last week attempted to distance the Administration from Robertson’s and Buchanan’s harsh remarks and even urged gays to vote Republican.

Either way, the attention is unparalleled.

“Never before in a presidential election have the rights of gay people and the appropriate role of gay people in society been an issue,” observed Kenneth Sherrill, a political science professor at City University in New York. “People who had never thought of themselves politically as being homosexual--all of a sudden the campaign is telling them what they had thought of as part of their private life is very public. . . . That’s amazing.”

The implications will extend beyond Election Day.

“If Clinton wins there will be a sense that gays were legitimized,” predicts state Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who narrowly won a brawling party primary for a state Senate seat last spring with the help of the gay vote. “And if Bush wins there will probably be a lot of people who feel the campaign against gays worked.”

As threatening as this year’s political attacks are to gays and lesbians, the backlash is itself seen as evidence of their growing clout.

“The political advances were the prerequisite of the negative,” said Democratic Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, one of two openly gay U.S. congressmen. “It’s a sign of the maturity of the movement against anti-gay bigotry.”

Those advances are undeniable. Born in the political turmoil of the 1960s and forged by the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, the gay political movement has made strides by almost any measure.

Six states and at least 110 cities and counties--many of them in California--have some form of civil rights protection for homosexuals. Slightly more than half the states no longer have sodomy statutes on the books. The federal ban on gay immigrants was lifted by Congress in 1990. There are 65 openly gay elected officials around the country, compared to about 50 in 1987, according to Waybourn’s group, the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund.

More and more mainstream politicians, both Democratic and Republican, are openly pursuing gay support. Pro-choice politics has also helped, since politicians who favor abortion rights frequently favor gay rights as well. “Choice and gay rights are not related issues, they are the same issue,” declared Carol Anderson, political vice president of the Stonewall Democratic Club of Los Angeles. “Who has the right to make decisions about a person’s body?”

Membership in the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the largest gay and lesbian political organization in the nation, has mushroomed from 17,000 to 60,000 in the past couple of years, while its donations to sympathetic candidates in federal campaigns have jumped from $129,000 a decade ago to about $500,000 in the 1990 elections. In this election cycle, spokesman Gregory King said, the fund expects to distribute $1 million.

As the stakes mount in this election year, fund raisers say gays are digging into their pockets as never before. “There’s never been anything like this, ever,” said David Mixner, a senior Clinton adviser and member of ANGLE (Access Now for Gay and Lesbian Equality), a Southern California group of 20 major donors.

Nationwide, more than $2 million has poured into the Clinton campaign from gays and lesbians, Mixner said. “It dramatically increased after the Republican Convention.”

Democrats are working hard to open gay wallets. Last May Clinton appeared at a gay fund-raiser in Los Angeles remarkable for its size and openness, and walked away with $100,000. And in an unprecedented statewide effort, the California Democratic Party is targeting gays with mailings, fund-raising “house parties” and voter registration drives, said Jean O’Leary, a 25-year veteran of gay politics who is helping organize the campaign.

By no means does all gay money go to Democrats. In the past few years, gay Republican Log Cabin clubs in California have raised about $250,000 to give to sympathetic GOP candidates, and a national fund was recently started for pro-gay Republican candidates in the wake of the GOP convention.

“We decided to fight back,” explained Richard Tafel, president of the national federation of Log Cabin clubs.

None of this has gone unnoticed by gay-rights opponents, who are zealously mounting counteroffensives and chalking up their own victories.

The homosexual-rights movement is “a lot more strident, a lot more aggressive and a lot more organized than it was,” lamented Ralph Reed, executive director of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition in Chesapeake, Va. “It used to be, the only time you heard about gay rights was when they had a gay-pride parade and came out in drag. Now they’re pressing their agenda in more conventional ways, and we have to respond.”

An ever-more popular response is to force gays to defend their civil rights gains at the ballot box. Around the nation, from Irvine to Denver to Portland, Me., repeal initiatives have popped up after the adoption of laws protecting homosexuals from discrimination. The emotionally charged ballot drives have had mixed results--succeeding in Irvine and elsewhere, failing in such cities as St. Paul, Minn., and Denver. But they continue.

Considerably more far-reaching are this year’s statewide initiatives in Oregon and Colorado, which reflect a new, preemptive strategy designed to keep gay-rights laws permanently off the books--and, gays assert, to shove homosexuals back in the closet.

“I think they’re a real threat to our development as a minority with political rights,” said gay-rights attorney Mary Newcombe. “These guys . . . want society to institute laws to deny our right to exist.”

Both initiatives would amend their respective state constitutions to forbid the adoption of civil rights protections for gay people by any local or state government entity. The Oregon measure, pushed by the conservative Oregon Citizens Alliance, lumps homosexuality with pedophilia, sadism and masochism and requires the state to set a standard “for Oregon’s youth” that discourages homosexuality as “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.”

“If both of those pass, the homosexual rights movement will be set back a decade,” said Reed, whose organization is pouring time and money into promoting the two ballot measures. “If both of them fail, the pro-family movement will suffer a serious and crushing defeat.”

Supporters deny they are fostering discrimination against gays, arguing they simply don’t want homosexuals to have “special rights” based on “behavior.”

“All we’re saying is minority status should not be given” to gays and that homosexuality “shouldn’t be presented to children as normal,” said alliance Chairman Lon Mabon.

While August polls showed the Colorado initiative losing, there were a large number of undecided votes. And political analysts in Oregon have said the initiative there might pass, despite the state’s progressive reputation.

Elsewhere, the Alabama legislature recently acted on its own, directing public schools to teach in their sex education curriculum that “homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public.”

California Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, also handed gay-rights advocates an unexpected setback last year when he sided with party conservatives and vetoed a bill barring job discrimination against homosexuals. Another version of the proposal just passed the Legislature, but proponents are not optimistic that Wilson will sign it.

The veto, coming as it did from a politician with a pro-gay record who received gay election support, was seen by gay-rights advocates as a painful lesson underscoring the need for more gay officials. “The bottom line is no one can represent ourselves as well as we can,” Mixner stressed. “It’s the difference between serving at the table of power and sitting at the table of power. And we want to sit.”

Taking a cue from the women’s movement, gays are promoting their own candidates, heartened by evidence that homosexuality is no longer necessarily the kiss of campaign death, even in the GOP. Formed to funnel money to gay candidates, the year-old Victory Fund already has some winners.

One of them is Sherry Harris, an African-American lesbian elected to the Seattle City Council last January, beating a 24-year incumbent 2 to 1 in an at-large race. Her homosexuality was never an issue, Harris said.

“The only exception was the media,” Harris remarked. “They got on the gay thing and they could not get off. . . . It got a little dull.”

In Los Angeles, Michael Weinstein and Conrado Terrazas, both openly gay, have declared for the City Council seat Mike Woo is leaving to run for mayor. “The goal is to make someone who is gay or lesbian serving in office not a big deal,” Weinstein said.

That goal has proved elusive for San Mateo County Supervisor Tom Nolan. Easily reelected to the county board in 1988, Nolan says he crashed into the “lavender ceiling” when he ran in the June Democratic primary for the 14th Congressional District. “I had my eyes opened,” admitted Nolan, still smarting from the experience.

“I argued . . . that sexual orientation doesn’t matter. I think that was an overly optimistic view of things,” continued Nolan, who finished third. “I don’t think, in the suburbs around here at least, they are ready for this. We’re simply not one of them.”

Nolan said the local Democratic Establishment ignored him, voters told campaign callers they liked his record but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a gay and some of his campaign workers were called “fags.”

Somewhat less problematic is the pursuit of the gay vote.

“Frankly, it does no real damage anywhere and obviously among gays and lesbians, the greater tolerance shown by the Democratic ticket bodes well for getting a disproportionately high percentage of the (gay) vote,” said Duane Garrett, a political strategist who is chairman of Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s senatorial campaign.

UCLA political scientist Shanto Iyengar called it a “cost-less gesture” for the Democrats. “There’s not going to be any backlash. . . . I think this country has passed the stage where straight people vote on the basis of who is pro- or anti-gay.”

Moreover, by vigorously attacking Clinton’s support of homosexual rights, Republicans are creating a gay voting bloc in the presidential election, Sherrill contended.

GOP strategists, for their part, argue that there are not that many gay Republican votes to win or lose, and that highlighting Clinton’s support of gay rights can only help Bush capture the crucial, conservative-to-moderate swing vote.

“It’s not a winning strategy by itself,” said a California Republican consultant, who did not want to be named. “It is a winning strategy as one example augmented by others of how different Bush and Clinton are. . . . There is a large group in America that does not adhere to certain rights for gays.”

Contrary to common political wisdom, Log Cabin officials insist that there are plenty of gay Republicans; they’re just not as noisy as gay Democrats. Tafel estimates that gay voter registration breaks down into about 45% Democratic, 20% Republican and the rest independent. Even Democrat Mixner says Bush probably pulled 35% to 40% of the gay vote in 1988.

Ironically, Log Cabin leaders say their membership is growing, boosted by dismayed homosexuals seeking to regain a foothold in their party.

The San Diego Log Cabin Club has 100 members, compared to about 30 a couple of years ago, said president Tony Zampella. Nationally, the Log Cabin Federation has expanded from nine clubs and 2,000 members in 1990 to 26 clubs with 6,000 members.

Perhaps even more surprising, Zampella says GOP congressional primary candidates were beating a path to his door to seek Log Cabin support this year. “That was incredible. It showed me that our issues are mainstream.”

Regardless of the election outcome, many gays insist the clock cannot be turned back. “The religious extremists will make us fight every step of the way,” said Rand Schrader, one of the first openly gay appointees to the Los Angeles Municipal Court bench. “But they’ve already lost. We have made gay and lesbian rights a legitimate cause for people in public life. It’s clear we’re here.”