exhilaration: the thousands of delegates and observers were celebrating. In the highest balcony I spotted a group of Utah women, dressed in their black dresses all the same, slowly, grim ly exiting.
There were maybe ten of them; they had seen it through to the
end; they were not happy. I raced to the high balcony to talk with
them. It was deserted up there; all the noise was hundreds of feet
below us; them and me.
T hey were somber. How did they feel about this, I asked. It
was horrible, the end of everything, the death of the country, an
affront to God; homosexuality was a sin that deserved death, and
here women had voted for it, were clapping and cheering in behalf
of it. T hey were mortified, ashamed of women, ashamed of the
ignorance of women’s libbers. T hey admitted to never having
known any homosexuals; they admitted that churchgoing men in
their own communities were sexually molesting their own daughters; they admitted that they were surrounded by men who went to church and were at the same time adulterers. I asked them why
then they were afraid of homosexuals. One woman said, “If you
had a child and he was playing out in the street and a car was
coming you would move him out of the w ay, wouldn’t you? W ell,
that’s all we’re trying to do—get homosexuality away from our
children. ” I began to argue that the car coming down the street was
more likely to be a heterosexual male neighbor, or even daddy,
than a male homosexual or a lesbian. One woman stopped being
nice. “You’re a Je w , ” she said, “and probably a homosexual too. ” I
found m yself slowly being pushed farther and farther back against
the balcony railing. I kept trying to turn m yself around as we
talked, to pretend that my position in relation to the railing and the
fall of several hundred feet was not precarious; I kept talking with
them, lowering the threshold of confrontation, searching m y mind
for pacifist strategies that would enable me to maneuver away from
the railing by getting them to turn at least slightly toward it. T hey
kept advancing, pushing me closer and closer to the railing until
my back was arched over it. They kept talking about homosexuals
and Jews. I kept saying pleasant things about how I respected their
religious views; I kept asking them about their own lives and plans
and ideas. They closed in around me. I was completely isolated up
there, and I was getting panicky, they were getting moblike and
intransigent, I kept trying to make myself human for them, they
kept at transforming me into the embodiment of every homosexual
Jew in the hall, the direct cause of their frustration and anger, they
kept saying there was no middle ground and sin had to be wiped
out and they hated sin; and I was deciding that I had better risk
breaking through what had become a menacing gang, breaking
away from the railing by pushing them as hard as I could, knowing
that if I didn’t make it they would start beating on me, when two
dykes, one of whom I knew well, appeared there and just stood,
watching. I made the religious women aware of the presence of the
lesbian women, just standing, watching; and they moved away
slightly, they moved reluctantly backward. I straightened up,
moved away from that dreadful railing. I kept talking and slowly
