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That fear is why anonymous calls threatening to "slit your throats and watch your faggot blood run in the street" drove Jon Greaves to drop a grass- roots campaign last year against an antigay resolution adopted in Cobb County, Georgia, a prosperous and fast-growing Atlanta suburb. He and his lover moved instead to Atlanta, or Hotlanta, as its large and lively gay community likes to call it. "It wasn't a surrender," says Greaves, "just a retreat to safer ground." The resolution, which stands, declares homosexuality to be "incompatible with the standards to which this community subscribes." That apparently makes Cobb County, where the lynching of a Jewish man in 1915 sparked a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the only government jurisdiction in America to declare homosexuals officially unwelcome. Says the Rev. Charles Scott May of St. James' Episcopal Church in Marietta: "People are feeling insecure. The world is changing. They're confronted with different cultures and personal values, and it scares the hell out of them." One factor that intensifies the battle is the 1996 Olympic Games. Cobb County is the venue for volleyball, and gay activists are lobbying Atlanta's Olympic committee to get the sport moved or the resolution rescinded.
When Cobb County turned hostile, Greaves had a gay-friendly place nearby. That option does not always exist for gays in rural areas, as 400 marchers bore in mind in early June at Montana's first ever gay-pride parade, through the streets of downtown Missoula (pop. 45,000). "You have to understand the risks people here are taking," said Linda Gryczan, the lead plaintiff in a suit challenging the state's sodomy law. "This is different from being one in a million in New York or San Francisco. We are not anonymous anymore." Unlike gay parades in some big cities, the kind depicted in alarmist antigay videos used for fund raising by conservative Christian groups, this 30-minute procession had no men in nun drag, no topless women on motorcycles. The marchers mostly looked like the cowpokes and earth mothers next door. Even so, many closeted gays stayed away. One would-be participant watched longingly from a parked car.
The main reason for the protest: Montana's unenforced "deviate sexual conduct" law, theoretically among the nation's harshest, deeming gay sexual contact a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. When Governor Marc Racicot said last year he would support repeal, he got hundreds of angry letters, some threatening his family. For gays, the issue is dignity. Montana law prohibits harassment of sports officials and livestock, but not of them.
Long-term, low-key approaches have helped gays elsewhere. In March 1993 a law banning many kinds of discrimination -- including that against gays -- went into effect in Miami Beach, where gay investors have played a key role in the resurgence of the South Beach area. Greg Baldwin, a gay partner in Florida's largest law firm, Holland & Knight, spearheaded the drive for the ordinance. Says Baldwin: "We were very careful. We weren't screaming and yelling and alienating. That wouldn't have helped us achieve our goal." Instead, Miami Beach's gay leaders spent a year and a half working to elect supportive politicians, then consulting everyone -- even conservative clerics -- and negotiating compromises. The ordinance was worded so that it could not be repealed piecemeal, only as a whole.