Not Marching Together

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Maybe the happiest moment of David Mixner's life came a year ago, when he introduced his old friend Bill Clinton to 700 celebratory gays at the Hollywood dance club Palace. This was going to be the first President to fight for gay civil rights, and Mixner was going to be his main man on those issues, advising and orchestrating outreach the way he does for Fortune 500 companies in his thriving business life. The candidate, for whom Mixner helped raise $3.5 million in gay support, responded passionately. "I have a vision of the future, and you are a part of it."

A more ambivalent moment in Mixner's life came this month, when Clinton became the first President to meet with an all-gay group at the White House. Mixner wasn't there, in part because of his own suggestion that the invitations go to the heads of major gay organizations. Yet his absence was symbolically correct. He has damaged his relationship with Clinton, some people fear irreparably, by criticizing Clinton for backpedaling over gay military service. Just when Mixner seemed poised to become the unofficial head of a community that has never had a Martin Luther King Jr. or a Jesse Jackson -- although plenty of Eldridge Cleavers and Al Sharptons -- he ceased to be its pre-eminent symbol of mainstream access to power. He is still, to be sure, a pal of Ted Kennedy's, who has offered to sponsor gay civil rights legislation in the Senate. But the White House is indispensable, and right now, Mixner is no insider there.

The rift between the two activists from the Vietnam antiwar movement epitomizes the ambivalence many gays felt last week as they gathered for Sunday's march in Washington. Clinton is the most important friend gays have, but not the uncompromising advocate they want. Do they settle for whatever he offers, recognizing that other quarters of government are bound to be less helpful? Or do they fight for what they want and risk alienating their vital ally?

For Mixner, the decision to speak up was painful but inescapable. As a practicing politician, he was less surprised than other gay leaders by the postelection outcry against Clinton's proposal to lift the ban on homosexuals in the military, which caused barely a murmur during the campaign. Rather than demand that the President sign an Executive Order as pledged, Mixner collaborated with the White House in shaping a compromise.

Mixner was aghast, however, when Clinton offhandedly suggested that he might be open to treating gays in uniform differently from heterosexuals: giving them special assignments or separate accommodation, and requiring them to keep their sexual preference in the closet. This idea would have denied gays what they seek and what their critics want to withhold: recognition as a legitimate part of the community. Mixner telephoned the White House repeatedly to express his disapproval, but his calls were not returned. When he spoke at a gay- oriented church and agreed to appear on ABC's Nightline, a White House aide tried to scare him off with implicit threats of ostracism. But at a subsequent meeting with gay leaders, Clinton left them optimistic that he would lift the ban.

As a key strategist of Sunday's march, Mixner wanted to ensure that it would & not turn into an attack on the President, whatever his perceived shortcomings. Still, Mixner believes that gays must maintain pressure to counter the onslaught from the religious right. "When Clinton was elected," he says, "we were a fan club. We are not a fan club anymore. We are in an alliance that will not be comfortable at all times. We will hold our friend's feet to the fire." Like many gays, Mixner sees Clinton as offering more sympathy than empathy. They perceive a President who is repulsed by discrimination and violence against gays but does not deeply comprehend gay life-style or homosexuals' sense of being different. "I believe his instincts are genuine and solid. But there is a lack of awareness," says Mixner. "Very few people in the Administration have been in a gay or lesbian household."

Gay bargaining power is based on two claims, one rooted in practicality, the other in justice. The moral argument that discrimination is always wrong seems to be gaining momentum -- although religious groups assert that morality actually demands discrimination against homosexuality as unnatural and ungodly.

The practical argument that gays are a significant Democratic voting bloc lost force this month when a major sex-research study suggested that only 1% to 2% of men are homosexual, vs. the traditional assumption of 10%. The findings may be re-evaluated, but their immediate impact has been to make gays seem a far smaller group that could be shortchanged without grave political peril.

That fear explains the urgency among gays heading to Washington by plane, train, bus and car. As Mixner says, "To our opponents, it seems important to prove that we almost don't exist." To gays, it is equally important to prove that they do, in great volume and variety. Organizers expected hundreds of thousands of marchers, maybe 1 million. Advance signs pointed to a huge turnout: hotel rooms in Washington were all but unobtainable, and so were airplane reservations from some parts of the U.S. "Our trains have been crowded since Tuesday," said Amtrak spokesman Howard Robertson. "Every available resource is going to be used. This is bigger than the Inauguration."

Just as important is the tenor of the demonstration. Washington attorney Albert Lauber, a former Reagan Administration Justice Department official who is housing six out-of-town friends for the event, says, "This is a rally, not a parade." Gay leaders are reluctant to criticize anyone for exotic life- style -- the movement is, after all, centered on freedom to live as one wishes -- but they are queasy about the disproportionate media attention that might be paid to "dykes on bikes," bearded transvestites, men dressed as nuns and other proponents of life as street theater. Civil rights arguments are easier to sell when they come from people who seek to fit in. Says Mixner: "Our goal is not to become cookie-cutter images of what's acceptable. But 98% of the marchers are people America will recognize as their sons and daughters."

That is precisely the image Mixner has cultivated for himself. Born to a working-class family in New Jersey, he went off to Arizona State University at 17 and fell in love -- with a football player. After his lover was killed in an automobile crash, Mixner told of the tragedy to many friends, changing the gender. He did not come out until he was 30. A recovering alcoholic, he blames his drinking at least partly on the strains of concealing his true nature. When he decided to assert his homosexuality, he did it with characteristic thoroughness, sending letters to hundreds of his political acquaintances. Some withdrew or thought he was crazy. Bill and Hillary Clinton did not.

Unapologetic about his identity today, Mixner appears decidedly conventional. Black cowboy boots are the only modest eccentricity in a wardrobe full of dark suits, crisp white shirts and suspenders to match his muted ties. He stands 6 ft. 1 in., and his weight fluctuates by a hundred pounds or more from year to year. His high-tech apartment-cum-office is decorated with a peace poster from the Eugene McCarthy campaign, which introduced him to Clinton, and framed photos of himself with the President and the First Lady.

Mixner's political life, on the other hand, has rarely been sedate. As a peacekeeper with the antiwar forces in the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he was beaten by police and spent months on crutches. The next year he was one of four leaders of the Vietnam Moratorium, a massive national series of antiwar protests. In 1986 he devised an eight- month march by more than a thousand people across the U.S. to promote nuclear disarmament; the organization went bankrupt just as the marchers reached the Mojave Desert. Mixner did not focus on gay rights until the advent of AIDS. He has lost 192 friends to the disease, including his business partner of 12 years, Peter Scott. Says Mixner: "Going on Nightline was easy - compared with burying Peter. Everything has a perspective."

Like activists in any other movement, Mixner professes to have been inspired by the sacrifices of others, especially gays in uniform willing to come out of the closet at the cost of their career. Says he: "It is incumbent on the rest of us to meet those acts of courage. Nothing less than our total freedom will do." That was the message Sunday's marchers meant to send -- to themselves, to their President and to a watching nation, where proponents and opponents have come to see gay rights as a test of national character.

With reporting by Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles