The Boston Phoenix December 21 - 28, 2000
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Central organization wasn't the only baby thrown out with the MWD bath water. In lambasting MWD over the loss in '98, the gay and lesbian activists -- including key Yes on 6 organizers -- were alienating an experienced fundraising machine. Why Maine's latest gay-rights measure failed
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by Sam Smith and Loren King
By taking part in this sort of petty political infighting, Maine's gay and lesbian community simply played out a script familiar to most marginalized groups: when the going gets tough, the tough start picking on each other. Witness the vicious fights in the gay community in the late '80s over whether to close bathhouses in order to reduce the spread of HIV. Or, further back, the battles within the African-American community over how to achieve passage of civil-rights legislation. In the end, the Yes on 6 advocates just couldn't get out of their own way.
One of the most devastating results of the fighting between Yes on 6 and MWD was that, according to Yes on 6, valuable donor lists were withheld from the campaign (MWD leaders would not comment for this article).
Jonathan Lee, a former MWD member who is now executive director of a statewide outreach and education organization called the Maine Speakout Project, explains the situation: "When I joined the executive committee in May, there had already been a certain amount of back-and-forth between the Yes on 6 executive committee and MWD, asking if they'd make the donor list available. They said no, but they would agree to sending out their own letter on their own letterhead; they would commit to giving $20,000 as a result of that mailing."
But, according to Lee, months passed, and the letter remained unsent.
"Various people made various calls to MWD leaders," says Lee. "What was being asked was `Can you give us the list? We could really use it,' and `Has that letter gone out? We need the money.' "
According to Lee the letter did not go out, but in September MWD made a $20,000 contribution all the same.
"There were a lot of bad feelings," says Lee. "There [were] real intra-community tensions and personal animosities, and bad things said about people in public. Whatever kind of healing there needed to be [after the '98 loss] didn't really happen."
By contrast, Volle's Christian Coalition has grown stronger over the years, because with each successive campaign it has been able to build on what was laid down before. This has resulted in a database holding contact information for around 140,000 supporters. "Probably 75 percent of the money we spent on this campaign can be used for the next campaign," Volle says.
For better or worse, MWD formed the foundation of Maine's statewide gay-rights movement. That foundation was not built upon in 2000.
But $20,000 does not make or break a campaign (or at least it shouldn't), and it wasn't just the absence of the MWD list that crippled Yes on 6's fundraising. Like the field director, the campaign's finance director, Gwin Wheatley, was hired late; she didn't join until late July. Wheatley was brought in from Los Angeles, and with such a small amount of time to organize, she had little success in fundraising.
After one particularly abysmal event in Kennebunk in October, Lee and his father, Shep (owner of Lee Auto Mall), took a more active role in the fundraising effort. A few days after the "Kennebunk fiasco," as Jonathan puts it, the Lees hastily organized a fundraiser in New York City, with former senator George Mitchell as the featured speaker. The event raised $45,000 and funded the campaign's sole week of TV advertising (it had planned on three weeks of advertising).
"A couple held the event in their apartment," says Lee. "During the introduction they said they were happy to be able to help the Maine effort, and they only wished they'd been asked to help six months earlier.
"The people running the campaign -- and starting in May I was one of those people -- they were all good people that care a lot about the issue, but they didn't have a lot of experience raising money. In a campaign like this you need people brought in who are very committed to asking their peers for money; you're not going to win if you don't have a strong core group."
Fruen agrees. "One thing that was a continuing major problem was that there were some on the executive committee who had no ballot-measure campaign experience," she says. "That says nothing about what kind of people they are; they just didn't have the experience."
"That was true," admits the executive committee's Garrity, but he says the difficulty in raising money was more a result of having no fundraising director until late in the game: "Whatever the expertise of the executive committee, what was really missing was someone with the fundraising experience to organize the executive committee in that fundraising effort. We looked around for people, but it took a long time to find anyone."
Fruen says the presidential election hurt fundraising as well; supporters of Question 6, bolstered by favorable polls, sent their money elsewhere.
The Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian political organization, contributed funds and volunteers to all four gay-rights ballot fights around the country this year (the others were in Nebraska, Nevada, and Oregon), supplying $37,500 and several staffers to the Maine effort. HRC national field director Seth Kilbourn says the organization budgeted its resources for Maine based on the favorable Question 6 polling data. "It indicated we'd win," he says. "There was no opposition campaign, and Maine was a key state for Gore, so that's where we put our resources."
The Yes on 6 campaign was budgeted to spend $1 million. The latest PAC statement shows the campaign raised only $435,000, of which $55,000 was a loan.
"People can spend a lot of time analyzing this, but the simple fact is that if we'd had the money we would have won," Fruen says.
Yes, more money would have helped, but to some, the campaign had more fundamental problems."They ran a poor campaign," says Chris Potholm, a professor of government at Bowdoin College and a pollster whose Command Research conducted polls for the victorious "no" sides on three hotly contested ballot questions: Question 1 (physician-assisted suicide), Question 2 (restrictions on the forestry industry), and Question 3 (video gambling). "There was no urgency to the Yes on 6 campaign," he contends. "They couldn't raise money because there was no urgency to their message."
Potholm adds his own take on the illusion of a presidential-election-year advantage: "There are more people, so you have to work harder," he says. "There are more people voting who pay less attention [to the issues]." This makes a succinct message and a hard-hitting TV and print campaign all the more essential, says Potholm. These were in place, he says, in the successful 1995 statewide referendum campaign run by MWD, which blocked a measure barring gay-rights laws in Maine. "This time, why wasn't the governor used?" Potholm asks. "Where were the people with first-person stories of discrimination? There was no strong message that it would be a bad thing for Maine if the status quo continued. Maine people are fair if presented with a real-life situation.... I wish [the Yes on 6 side] had won. But they ran a bad campaign. You can't ignore strategy and expect to win. You can't take anything for granted; you must pound away to the end."
Now Governor Angus King himself is also wondering why he didn't get more involved. In an e- mail exchange with Jonathan Lee (which the Phoenix was given permission to quote), King reflected on his very public support of the "no" vote in the '98 special election: "Sadly, our experience of overusing me in '98 may have made us all gun-shy and led to my being under-used this time."
King, like Potholm, also lamented the lack of urgency in the Yes on 6 message. "Advocates didn't make a convincing (or much of any) case that the legal protection sought was actually needed," he wrote.
"That was a failing of the campaign," says Jonathan Lee. But, he says, it's not as easy as it sounds to portray the kind of discrimination going on in the state. "When people say, `Show me who's discriminated against,' it ignores something that is very important: the experience of living in fear of discrimination happening to you and knowing you don't have that protection. There are many living in fear that if they show who they really are, they will pay a price."
To Lee, this is one of the best arguments for why a minority's civil rights should not be voted on by the majority; the issue should simply be handled by the legislature.
But the need to instill a sense of urgency in a campaign like Yes on 6 is even more crucial -- and difficult -- in this Queer as Folk age. In a December 9 New York Times op-ed piece, Richard Goldstein, the executive editor of the Village Voice, reflected on the loss of Question 6, as well as the losses in Nebraska and Nevada: "The critical and commercial success of shows like Will & Grace and Friends, which feature gay characters, raises the question: Why are so many Americans willing to watch gay characters on TV but unwilling to support gay rights? This is a paradox we should confront before we settle down to enjoy the next gay-friendly sitcom."
Goldstein goes on to point out that the gay liberation of popular culture is, ironically, working against the gay-rights movement. Rural Mainers can watch young, upwardly mobile, urban gays and lesbians on TV, characters who certainly don't appear to be members of an unfairly treated class. The reality, however, is that it is legal to fire someone from his or her job in Maine because that person is homosexual. Such discrimination is also legal in areas of housing and public accommodation.
Fruen acknowledges that the campaign faced a difficult task. "A `yes' campaign is twice as hard as a `no' campaign," she says, "because you have to make people understand first that there is a problem, and then convince them that your ballot question is the solution. Without money, that's difficult."
With the campaign's rural network failing to materialize and the originally planned three weeks of TV advertising condensed to one, the campaign could do little educating.
And the near-invisibility of the opposition campaign didn't help, either. As far as most Mainers were concerned, there was no enemy. There was no publication like "The Gay Agenda," the hatemongering 1998 flier that Volle distributed in opposition to a gay-rights ordinance in South Portland.
Was the opposition covert by design or by circumstance? Volle and his co-campaigner, the Christian Civic League's Michael Heath, have different answers.
"We didn't want to stay undercover," says Heath. "We would have been more out there if we'd had more money."
Volle, on the other hand, says it was strategic. "You don't kick sleeping dogs," he says. "You don't go out and have a big public campaign and activate your opposition. You have to use wisdom in this political strategy."
What is clear is that Volle doesn't plan to be invisible any longer. He says that for the first time he'll be registering as a lobbyist. He says the Christian Coalition is developing a service that will allow activists like him to perform key-word searches on bills.
"We're going to look at every piece of legislation going through," he says. "We'll either testify for or against it. We're going to hold legislators accountable for their actions."
What role Heath and his Christian Civic League will play in all this is not quite as clear. Volle says the Civic League was slow to get involved in the referendum battle and now shies away from Volle's proposed legislation.
"They've opted out," he says. "They didn't want to appear as the aggressors, I suppose. If you're meek and lowly, you'll probably come out last."
On December 7, at a forum in Augusta organized by Jonathan Lee's Speakout, Maine gay-rights advocates -- including Governor King, Speaker of the House Mike Saxl, and former Speaker Steve Rowe -- vowed to keep up the battle. But a lot of advocates are wondering, as they did after '98, whether anyone has the energy to go back to the battlefield.
"We lost more than a referendum," says Gowen. "We really, really screwed up here."
As for the executive committee's Garrity, he looks back to '98, as so many people did so often in planning this campaign.
"It's much easier for me today to understand how the leaders of the last campaign must have felt," he says. "And I realize now it's more important than ever that we unite all the talent, expertise, and leadership of this community."
Well, united or not -- and ready or not -- the community is going back into battle; Volle plans to make sure of that.
"It's time," he says, "to preserve the pro-family agenda."
Loren King is a freelance writer living in Chelsea; she can be reached at lking86958@aol.com. Sam Smith is the managing editor of the Portland Phoenix; he can be reached at ssmith[a]phx.com.
