Looking Back
March 1987
OITM was then reporting on the introduction of H.247, the lesbian and gay anti-discrimination bill. Guess who is at the press conference table: Howdy Russell, then-Rep. Micque Glitman, and Tim Mazur from the ACLU.
Glitman, now the Deputy Secretary of VTrans (and married to photographer Glenn Russell and the mother of two children), said in a recent interview, “I was thinking a lot about it during the civil unions debate. I have a hard time appreciating what a major shift this has been for so many people. I was stunned then by how much controversy it generated. I couldn’t believe how many people were opposed to it. Who would oppose a law that made discrimination illegal?” She added, “I used to describe it as if someone threw this bill that was similar to a grenade into the hall of the House. It just exploded. One legislator came up to me and said, ‘Why are you doing this? You’re not one of them are you?’”
Above all, Glitman recalled, “It was a fun time, breaking new ground.”
The bill eventually passed – after more years of hearings at which the radical right spoke their slanders about our character and more and more of us stood up and spoke our names and told what it was like to be thrown out of apartments, threatened with physical harm, and fired from jobs simply because of being gay or lesbian. Finally, our persistence and our votes and the truth of our lives won the day.
Also in that issue:
coverage of the introduction of the HTLV-III (now known as HIV) anti-discrimination bill – also sponsored by Micque Glitman (and passed the following year as H.460 and signed into law by then-Governor Madeleine Kunin at a “gala AIDS benefit”); a how-to-use-a-condom article from Terje Anderson of Vermont CARES; letters about domestic violence within lesbian and gay relationships; a piece on coming out at Vermont Law School; an article on the New Alliance Party (a national third party with a radical-left line on class and race, whose dogma included gayness as a “political choice”); and the news that UVM was considering adding gays, lesbians and bisexuals to its nondiscrimination policy statement.