COVER STORY/ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Chasing the Rainbow

Is a gay population an engine of urban revival? Cities are beginning to think so.

t was an unusual pep rally for a conservative place like Cincinnati. Seventy-five volunteers crammed into the multi-purpose room of the First Unitarian Church to hear New York organizer Sarah Reece tell them to go out and knock on doors and collect signatures. A fiery speaker with short-cropped hair and dressed in tan overalls, Reece prepared the mostly white posse of teenagers, senior citizens and every age in between for a day of awkward chitchat. “We’re going to talk to people and use the word ’gay,’ ” she cried. “Everyone say it — gay!”

Not all of the men listening to Reece were gay, nor were all the women in the room lesbians. Probably half of the volunteers, in fact, were straight. What brought them together was anger toward a unique Cincinnati law known as Article 12. Lots of cities allow discrimination against gays and lesbians. But Cincinnati is the only place where that principle is written into the very charter. Even if elected officials there wanted to pass an anti-discrimination law, Article 12 would stop them from doing it.

So on this sunny Saturday in August, the volunteers charged out into Cincinnati’s neighborhoods to gin up support for repealing Article 12. This marked the first time gay-rights activists had gone door to door in Cincinnati. The point of it all, Reece made clear, was not just to collect enough signatures to get a repeal measure on the ballot. It was to engage Cincinnatians on their doorsteps in a frank conversation about gays and lesbians — perhaps uncomfortably frank — and to alter public opinion, one handshake at a time. “Most folks have never had someone stand on their porch and say ’gay’ before!” Reece hollered. “It will change the way they think about gay people — if they’ve ever thought about them at all!”

As in any grassroots campaign, these canvassers, whether gay or straight, were motivated by conviction. In their view, no person should be fired from a job or be denied a place to live simply for being gay. But there is another argument for repealing Article 12, and support for it is building in Cincinnati from an unlikely source: the corporate community. There is a growing sense among Cincinnati’s business leaders that the city’s reputation for hostility toward gays and lesbians is taking an economic toll on the region and its ability to attract a top-quality workforce. Article 12, they say, is symptomatic of a mindset that turns away not only talented gay workers but also legions of creative straight people who are the key to growing jobs and wealth in the global economy.

And even more surprising, much of the momentum within business ranks is coming from the Cincinnati corporation with perhaps the stodgiest historical reputation: Procter & Gamble. P&G thinks Cincinnati must become more gay-friendly if it wants to reverse its steady decline in population. Internally, the company has changed policies so that the domestic partners of gay employees get the same benefits package as the spouses of married workers. Now P&G wants Cincinnati to take the next step and repeal Article 12. According to Louise Hughes, the firm’s director of Ohio government relations, Article 12 is a significant obstacle to corporate recruiting efforts. “We recruit employees fresh out of college,” Hughes says. “They think Cincinnati is not inclusive and that it could be a reflection that we’re an intolerant community. That doesn’t appeal to Generation Y.”

FACE TO FACE

It’s too early to tell whether Cincinnatians will repeal Article 12 when they get a chance to, probably in November of next year. What is clear, however, is that the terms of debate about gays are changing, not just in Cincinnati but in cities around the country. It seems that a new relationship is forming between cities and their gay and lesbian populations. Politically, local gay activism is coming out of the closet: Campaigns such as the one in Cincinnati are counting on open, face-to-face conversations to win public support. At the same time, new research supports the argument that Procter & Gamble is making, that there is a link between gays — or at least acceptance of them — and urban economic vitality.

Since the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York launched the modern gay-rights movement, cities have been by far the major focus of gay and lesbian activism. Gays have always liked big cities for their protective anonymity, so when they began to push for legal protections it was logical for them to start there. Today, even as a national debate brews over same-sex marriage, cities are still the center of action. As of the end of last year, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, 119 cities had passed laws prohibiting workplace discrimination based on sexual preference. Some 140 cities or local government agencies now offer domestic partner benefits for public employees. Meanwhile, Christian conservatives have launched an urban counter-offensive, winning many local-level battles to repeal these policies or trying to override them at the state or federal level.

But the most striking new development is the growing number of blue-collar cities never considered especially friendly to gays that are passing gay-rights laws anyway. They seem to be saying that if gays need cities, then cities also need gays — whatever one may think about the homosexual lifestyle itself. “Quite apart from whether you approve or disapprove of gays and what they do in the privacy of their bedroom, there’s now ample evidence that you don’t want to alienate that population,” says Terry Grundy, a professor at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Planning. “In fact, you want to attract them.”

Much of this evidence comes from the work of Gary Gates, a researcher at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and Richard Florida, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Gates was one of the first to study where gays and lesbians live, and has developed a statistical measure he calls the “Gay Index.” Florida, meanwhile, studies educated and highly mobile workers who are the new muscle of the U.S. economy, workers employed in information technology, health care, finance, the arts, science and other knowledge-based fields whom he calls the “creative class.” Putting their research together, Gates and Florida found that cities where lots of creative types live — places such as San Francisco, Austin and Madison, Wisconsin — also tend to have large gay populations.

PROMOTING ACCEPTANCE

What does this mean? Economic development officials around the country have been snapping up copies of Richard Florida’s book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” in an effort to find out. Florida doesn’t argue that homosexuals are more creative than heterosexuals. And he’s not saying that gays are the secret of urban salvation. But he does make the case that in today’s knowledge economy, where younger people especially jump from job to job and move from city to city, the cultural attributes of place matter more than the old virtues of corporate loyalty.

And one of the many things the creative class looks for in a place to live, the argument goes, is tolerance, not just toward gays but toward people who have purple hair, wear nose rings or are culturally distinctive in almost any way at all. The individuals who Richard Florida studies, more often than not, are in fact straight, don’t die their hair odd colors and would never wear a nose ring. But they think diverse places are more interesting and authentic, and more hospitable to outsiders who want to come in and settle for a while.

As Richard Florida sees it, the number of gays in a community is a proxy for tolerance. Gays may therefore serve as a bellwether of a city’s economic fortunes. “Homosexuality represents the last frontier of diversity in our society, and thus a place that welcomes the gay community welcomes all kinds of people,” Florida writes. “Openness to the gay community is a good indicator of the low entry barriers to human capital that are so important to spurring creativity and generating high-tech growth.”

Gates sees a more direct link between gays and economic development, especially when it comes to gentrification of run-down urban neighborhoods. Real estate developers have known for years that the sight of rainbow flags hanging from front porches — the symbol of “gay pride” — is also a sign of newly fixed-up homes and a neighborhood on the rebound. Now Gates has data showing that gay couples are more likely than others to settle in places with slightly higher rates of crime but where home values are also jumping. Gays, it seems, are good at playing the role of “urban pioneers,” making sketchy neighborhoods feel safe enough that young professionals and others will follow.

Why is this? For one thing, most gays are childless, so struggling city school systems aren’t an issue for them. Gays, especially gay couples, also have money to pump into real estate, not because they all hold high-paying jobs — a largely inaccurate stereotype — but because they don’t carry the considerable costs of raising children. Gates, who is about to publish a book called “The Gay and Lesbian Atlas,” has another theory for why gays are more willing to gamble on depressed neighborhoods. “It could be that gay and lesbian people are less risk averse,” Gates says. “They’ve already taken the risk of coming out of the closet, so it could be that they’re willing to take more risk in other dimensions of their lives as well.”

TARGETS OF RECRUITMENT

Urban experts had been talking about these ideas for years before Gary Gates and Richard Florida began measuring them. But it’s only recently that some cities have set out deliberately to fashion a gay-friendly image for themselves.

Baltimore, for one, is zeroing in on the gay role in gentrification. The local government there is touting its relatively cheap stock of historic homes, trying to woo homebuyers from pricey Washington, D.C., an hour down the road. Part of that campaign is a direct appeal to gays. The nonprofit group Live Baltimore, which gets some of its funding from the city, took out an ad in D.C.’s gay newspaper. The ad shows a picture of a giant old row house above a provocative headline: “Completely stripped and ready for you to have your way with it.”

Several Sun Belt cities, notably Fort Lauderdale, Key West and Palm Springs, have been targeting gay and lesbian tourists for several years. Now Philadelphia, a much bigger place with no beach resorts to boast about, is doing the same thing. Last year, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. added a gay-travel link on its Web site, www.gophila.com, and published a gay travel guide titled “The City of Brotherly Love (and Sisterly Affection)”. The group, which receives both city and state funds, is embarking on a more ambitious $250,000 marketing campaign aimed entirely at homosexual travelers, promoting historical attractions and gay nightlife.

Other city efforts are more symbolic. Six years ago, Chicago designated a gay neighborhood known as Boystown as a “gay business district.” The city put up $3.2 million for streetscape improvements, including rainbow-colored, art deco pylons on the sidewalks. (Ironically, the area has since become a popular place for straight couples to live). Last year, Jane Campbell became the first mayor of Cleveland to march in the local gay pride parade. She also raised a rainbow flag over City Hall, the first time one had flown there.

Cleveland is at the forefront of cities that are giving the gay community an official channel for airing concerns. Campbell last year appointed the first openly gay member of the city’s Community Relations Board, an agency that fields complaints from residents and tries to resolve community conflicts. The mayor of St. Louis has appointed a liaison to the gay and lesbian community, as have the police departments in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Salt Lake City.

Do these symbolic gestures add up to much? Yes and no, says Craig Covey, the first gay councilman in Ferndale, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. Covey, along with an influx of other gays, moved to Ferndale in the late 1980s. Since then, Ferndale’s once-dead downtown has come alive with activity day and night, catering to gay and straight alike. Oddly, though, from a gay perspective, Ferndale has none of the “right” laws on the books. Meanwhile Detroit, which was one of the first cities to pass an anti-discrimination law back in the 1970s, is not a big gay hub.

Why? In a word: crime. “Gays love decaying areas that were once grand and are now shabby,” Covey says. “But before you can get to that, people have to feel safe. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got a gay bar in town or if the president of your city council will come speak at a gay pride dinner. If you’re afraid to walk a few blocks down the street, then how gay is that?”

SECOND ROUND

In resistant cities such as Cincinnati, the gay issue comes down to a simple question but one that is difficult to answer: Is it possible for a campaign of civic activism to make a place more accepting?

Gays and lesbians in Cincinnati call the city a difficult place to live openly. Nearly all of them tell stories of gay friends who have moved to friendlier towns such as New York, West Hollywood or even Columbus, Ohio. Outside Cincinnati’s one “gay neighborhood,” a place called Northside where a few gay bars and a lesbian bookstore line the street, it’s difficult for same-sex couples to hold hands in public and feel comfortable about it.

It is impossible to legislate acceptance, of course. But what Cincinnati has done with Article 12 is legislate non-acceptance. The article’s supporters, of course, don’t frame it that way. But the fact remains that Cincinnati is an infamous place to anyone who reads national gay magazines such as Out or the Advocate.

It didn’t start this way. In 1992, Cincinnati’s city council passed an anti-discrimination law that was fairly bold for its time. Gay-rights activists stuck to a strategy that was then pretty typical around the country: They quietly lobbied for enactment and hoped to avoid a backlash. The first part worked. The second part didn’t. The day after the council vote, Phil Burress read about it in the newspaper. Burress is head of Citizens for Community Values, a Christian advocacy group based in the Cincinnati suburbs that spends most of its resources waging war on pornography. The city council’s vote enraged him. Burress set out not only to undo the anti-discrimination law but to prevent the council from ever passing one again.

Burress raised funds for his effort mostly from a few wealthy Cincinnati businessmen and from out-of-state donations. His message to voters avoided the topic of discrimination. Instead, he said that what gays and lesbians wanted were “special rights.” That argument found some support in the African-American community. K.Z. Smith, a prominent black minister, served as Burress’ spokesman and made the case that offering gays legal protection would be a slap in the face to blacks who had fought so hard for civil rights. These arguments carried the day in the end and by a wide margin: Burress’ side won, 62 to 38 percent.

Burress ran an effective campaign. But it was also clear that the gay-rights side was clueless about how to communicate with voters. Reluctant to engage citizens face to face, the pro-gay side ran TV ads that compared Burress and his allies to Adolf Hitler. It was a hateful message and a political disaster.

Demoralized by the loss, Cincinnati’s gay-rights advocates fell into disarray. They tried to stop Article 12 from taking effect, but a federal appeals court ruled against them twice. Several activists involved in the campaigns left Cincinnati for cities that seemed friendlier to them. It wasn’t until last year that a new crop of leaders emerged and decided that the national climate had changed so much in a decade that Cincinnati might be ready to get rid of Article 12. They appealed to the Human Rights Campaign for help, as well as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. And they decided to run a more public campaign — the sort that gay advocates have begun waging in other cities.

According to David Fleischer, NGLTF’s director of organizing, gay activism over the past 30 years channeled most of its energy into creating “safe space,” where gays and lesbians could retreat from public life. They relied on backroom lobbying because whenever their issues went before voters, they invariably lost. “We wanted to make it an insider discussion,” Fleischer says. “We feared that, while we might be able to persuade opinion leaders on the merits, it wouldn’t have broad popular support.”

Now advocates are trying a more straightforward approach. Even in the most hostile cities, such as Topeka, Kansas, where anti-gay protesters hold several rallies a day, gays are going out and talking to voters. The strategy seems to be paying off. As recently as 2000, gays lost five out of six citywide ballot initiatives around the country. Then fortunes turned. The following year, they won five and lost two, and in 2002 they won five and lost only one.

The face-to-face strategy is becoming part of the strategy for winning support on city council votes as well. “We’re doing the opposite of what we used to do,” Fleischer says. “We’re trying to build public support so that elected officials don’t have to go out on a limb for us, but instead are doing what their constituents are ready for.”

The day that Sarah Reece gave her exhortation in the Unitarian Church — “Everybody say it — gay!” — Cincinnati volunteers gathered 425 signatures in behalf of their campaign to repeal Article 12. It will take 9,500 to get on the ballot 13 months from now.

But Cincinnati gay activists have some heavyweights on their side this time. Procter & Gamble has offered financial backing. Chip Harrod, who heads the local branch of the National Conference for Community and Justice and who has strong ties with religious and African-American leaders in the Cincinnati area, is enlisting prominent business leaders to lend their names, if not the names of their corporations, in support of the campaign.

The wildcard will be the African-American vote. Two years ago, a police shooting triggered race riots in Cincinnati and a black boycott against downtown businesses. It’s racial issues, not gay issues, that grab most of the headlines in Cincinnati these days. And it’s racial reconciliation, not reconciliation with gays and lesbians, that civic leaders have been spending most of their energy on. Gay-rights strategists decided to hold off the vote on Article 12 until next November in order to give wounds from the riots more time to heal. Nobody is sure whether that will work.

What’s clear is that the debate over Article 12 has more dimensions now than it did a decade ago. The research by Richard Florida and Gary Gates is getting a lot of attention at the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, for example. Some elected officials are interested as well. “Article 12 clearly turned out to be detrimental to development in Cincinnati,” says David Crowley, a council member who has a gay son in New York and a lesbian daughter who lives in Washington, D.C. “We have racial problems and other economic problems, too, but then we have this added burden we’re carrying around, that Cincinnati is the only city in the country that is prohibited from taking any action to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination.”

Burress calls Richard Florida’s work something cooked up by a “homophile” in pursuit of an agenda and says he’s “never heard that Cincinnati is not a gay-friendly place.” K.Z. Smith says the idea that tolerant cities are the most prosperous ones may be true but that it doesn’t change his opinion. “Our reasons weren’t based on economics,” he says. “My premise is that the gay lifestyle is wrong.” Neither Burress nor Smith will say whether they plan on fighting to keep Article 12 in Cincinnati’s city charter.

For Cincinnati’s gays and lesbians, the stakes are big. But if Florida and Gates are right, the stakes for the city itself may be bigger. Gary Wright, a demographic researcher at Procter & Gamble and one of the leaders of the effort to repeal Article 12 puts it simply: “A city that’s inclusive,” he argues, “is fundamentally better off.”

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