The most important test of gay clout at the polls in 1999 will come this fall in Dade County, Florida (which includes Miami), where in December the County Commission passed by 7 to 6 an ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Two decades after orange juice queen Anita Bryant led a Christian right referendum repealing a similar ordinance in a landmark defeat for gay rights, the battle will be fought all over again. This time, the gay community is better prepared, with the gay-led SAVE-DADE coalition (the acronym stands for Safeguarding American Values for Everyone) planning to raise $1.5 million to defeat repeal. Already on board are the Spanish American League Against Discrimination, the NAACP, the county AFL-CIO, the United Teachers of Dade, the textile workers' union UNITE, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress and more than 130 members of the clergy.

"The Christian Coalition, which is leading the repeal effort, is going to use Miami and Dade as a fundraising spur," says SAVE-DADE chairman Jorge Mursuli, an openly gay Cuban-American. Against the expected avalanche of Christian right money, says Mursuli, "we're going to have an organizing campaign that is heavily focused on the grassroots. As part of a larger stateside effort to identify 100,000 gay or gay-friendly voters, we've already started canvassing households in targeted neighborhoods--we've ID'ed 10,000 voters already." Despite fears that changed demographics--fewer Jews, more Roman Catholic and Pentecostal Hispanics--over the past twenty years have made for an even more culturally conservative electorate, a December Miami Herald/NBC poll taken just after the ordinance became law showed support for it across the board: 53-33 percent overall, 49-36 percent among Cuban-Americans, 51-33 percent among other Hispanics and 52-30 percent among blacks. SAVE-DADE sees coalition-building on non-gay issues with blacks and Hispanics as crucial: "It's like taking care of your house--if you only take care of your room, and the rest of the house falls down, it affects you," says Mursuli.

As Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, the statewide gay group, puts it: "Look, I'm black, a woman and a lesbian, and to ask me to be a single-issue organizer is to park at least two of my identities at the door--we have to build coalitions." She points to the fledgling Florida Progressive Voter Project--modeled on the Oregon example--as "having created tangible ways of working together," with more than 50,000 progressive voters already tallied.

Furthermore, says Smith, "every gay group has to measure its success by how it strengthens local groups--if somebody belongs to Equality Florida and not to their local group, then we've failed in our mission." This strategy has led to local victories: Gainesville last year finally passed a gay-nondiscrimination ordinance after a seven-year fight, and both Monroe and Broward counties have passed domestic partnership legislation for government employees that includes same-gender couples.

But gay organizing is far from achieving its potential in some surprising areas of the country. A paradigm for the tensions bedeviling many urban gay communities is Chicago, where, despite a large gay population and a thriving and visible gay commercial ghetto along North Halsted Street, the state of gay politics is rather "sedate," says Louis Weisberg, metro news editor of the Windy City Times, the city's most important gay newsweekly. "It's really frustrating how complacent everyone is," he adds. In part, that's because the Second City's mayor, Richie Daley, has managed to co-opt much of the gay community with a shrewd combination of patronage and symbolic gestures: The city has provided domestic partnership benefits to its employees since 1997, and as part of his citywide gentrification and urban renewal program, Daley spruced up Halstead Street, adorning it with gay rainbow markers. Daley's former official liaison to the gay community, Larry McKeon--an HIV-positive former cop--is now the only openly gay member of the Illinois legislature. When Daley ran for re-election this year, he plastered predominantly gay Northside neighborhoods with signs bearing his name superimposed over pink triangles. The gay primary vote went overwhelmingly to Daley.

As in many other large cities, the AIDS crisis has sapped a lot of gay energy and money: Chicago has an impressive skein of AIDS-related social service institutions and healthcare providers, but they take little active part in politics (despite the fact that the city provides only token AIDS funding--around $7 million). Many gay groups are career-oriented or social: One of the largest, the Chicago Professional Networking Association, gets fifty to 120 people to its mixers ("It started a dozen years ago as an alternative to the bars--it was a closet group then; you had to know about it to find it," says its president, funeral director David Kulawiak). And there's a gay chamber of commerce, a gay group for the building trades (architects, landscapers, contractors, plumbers) and gay employee groups at corporations like Ameritech, Commonwealth Edison, AT&T, Arthur Andersenand the like. But there is no citywide gay organization that does political organizing (a recently hatched Stonewall Democratic Club is still in its infancy and tiny).

"The Chicago gay community suffers from the same kind of divisions that permeate the city--segregation on race, gender and class lines--which means that huge numbers of people are not enfranchised in the gay movement," declares editor Weisberg. Feisty black lesbian Renae Ogletree, who runs the Chicago Youth Agency Partnership (a coalition of more than forty social service groups), argues that "the gay environment and its politics are very controlled by white, gay men--and it would be a compliment to say they're even mildly interested in issues of concern to black folk. They're interested in gay marriage--we're interested in housing and employment. We not only have to fight to be at the table, we have to make sure we get the same damn food, or that they haven't co-opted one of us, or that they haven't had the real meeting beforehand." Ogletree points out that the Rocks, the annual black lesbian and gay festival held on Gay Pride Sunday at Belmont Harbor--which draws 20,000 people and is regularly frequented by black politicians--there is no recruiting by any white-led gay organizations ("They're intimidated," she chuckles).

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