by Torie Osborn
In the early 1970s, Vermont's Middlebury College, like campuses everywhere, was a-buzz with student activism. Several of us started an antiwar group (that's the Vietnam war...) that educated and agitated, bringing speakers and holding teach-ins nearly weekly. One night, the ROTC building burned down mysteriously; we transformed it into a Black Student Union. They were heady days; I also founded the college's first feminist group, the Women's Union, and authored a regular column in the student newspaper titled, I'm embarrassed to say, "Notes from Women's Lib". In the excitement and swirl of new ideas and social change, I and my activist friends had one nemesis. He headed the small Young Republicans club on campus, and, whenever we had a rally or a speaker on women's issues or on fighting racism or about the war, there he was: one solitary, implacably conservative voice of opposition. His name was Jim Douglas. I must have argued with him a hundred times on a host of issues, in public forums, in the dining rooms, in the student coffee house, on the lawns of the sprawling idyllic campus. At the time, he seemed impossibly square ("straight" we called it in those days...) - a decent guy but stubbornly out of touch with the zeitgeist. Today, 38 years later, he is once again out of touch. Two days ago, Governor Jim Douglas' veto of marriage equality in Vermont was overridden.
After my radical days on campus -- where I drank away stolen nights with other women while having a serious boyfriend -- I came out of the closet and was in the very first group of lesbians in Burlington, Vermont. Somewhere I have photos of the first "gay pride" march in Burlington (was it 1973?): we are a colorful, merry, hippie-looking band of about 20 lesbians - no gay men - parading down Burlington streets, pedestrians and shopkeepers gaping from the sidewalks. There were no gay bars back then; we had to drive two hours to Montreal, to "Madame Arthurs", a lesbian bar that seemed wrapped in anonymous brown paper even in openminded Canada. We went to Boston, even farther away, for Cris Williamson and Holly Near feminist music concerts. Vermont had no gay community center; we tried to build "My Sister's Place", a lesbian-feminist coffeehouse, but lost our lease due to a sexist landlord (another future governor, Madeline Kunin, advocated unsuccessfully on our behalf).
I remember sometime in the mid '70s sitting under a tree with a gay male friend talking about what it would take to bring legal gay rights to the state. We agreed our advantage over other states was the small size, independent spirit and democratic town-hall traditions of our beloved Vermont. Vermont is organizable. We were just beginning to imagine how to translate our gay liberation counterculture into real-world policies, as part of a generational wave of young idealistic activists that turned Vermont very blue. That gay man was Bill Lippert, who went on to be Vermont's first openly gay legislator, and helped propel the state in 2000 to the leading edge of LGBT relationship recognition at the time: civil unions. I itched for urban life and left Vermont for points west in 1976, after six formative years. Ever since, I've been blessed to blend my passion for social change with my professional life, including working for many years as a leader in the GLBT movement in large, unwieldy, difficult-to-organize California. Although my passion is now tackling urban poverty, the Right's deviously brilliant anti-gay Prop 8 campaign while I worked fulltime on the Obama campaign inspired my latest volunteer effort: a community organizing training inspired by Camp Obama to help channel the new wave of post Prop 8 protest into effective political organizing. Camp Courage (www.CourageCampign.org) is teaching hundreds of people - gay and straight, inspired by the justice movement of this era -- to go door to door in "red" neighborhoods. Looking people in the eyes, listening to them respectfully and then telling our stories about why marriage equality matters to us is working; we are seeing a 7% steady conversion rate that bodes well for a future campaign if the CA Supreme Court does not overturn Prop 8. California may be organizable after all.
In Vermont, my college classmate and regular debate counterpoint from an earlier era of activism, Jim Douglas, is, of course, now governor and a leader in the Republican Party. To his credit, he supports civil unions - although, of course, what was once radical is downright retro now as marriage equality steadily gains momentum and acceptance. At least he didn't ever become a rabid Rightwinger as so many in his party have. I like to think it was those endless debates we had in Middlebury College's Crest Coffee shop in 1970-72 that echo in his heart. But, true to his nature, he stayed on Republican message when he vetoed the Vermont legislature's historic vote to legalize marriage equality.
When I heard his veto was overridden on Tuesday with a vote to spare, I whooped for joy. I have no idea if Jim even remembers his solitary wars against progress in the 1970s at college. He lost on Vietnam, on moving racial and gender justice forward too. This time he had the power to help make history. Oh well; too bad justice was never Jim's bag.
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