NBC's hit Thursday night comedy, Will & Grace, features a lovable single gay lawyer who faces conflicts not unlike those of other single men on TV sitcoms. He searches for a partner; he looks for love; he dates with mixed success; and he helps his friends, especially roommate Grace, out of jams.

On Wednesday evenings on ABC, Daman Wayans stars in My Wife and Kids. Married, with three children, father Wayans, like Will, experiences his share of TV sitcom adventures and conflicts. Even on this show, featuring a typical middle-class family, gay characters are presented sensitively and without fanfare. When Wayans and his TV wife experience marital trouble, they visit psychiatrist Dr. Steven Michael, a gay counselor, who helps them repair their relationship.

A recent Sunday night movie on NBC focused on gay hate crimes. "The Matthew Shepard Story" (aired in March) told of the 21-year-old gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten to death by two men in 1998. According to entertainment reporter J. Max Robins, "MTV and Showtime are in 'serious discussions' about launching a gay channel." There have also been discussions at HBO, USA Networks and Rainbow Media.

According to Michael Hopkins, an Episcopal priest who is president of Integrity -- a 27-year-old Episcopal organization whose purpose is to educate the church about, and work for change on, issues of concern to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, and to represent the Episcopal Church in the lesbian and gay community -- enlightened television programming may not mean that the LGBT movement has won all its battles, but the shows are still important.

"The more exposure people have through all kinds of media to gay and lesbian people, the more comfort they will have. Some of the TV portrayals are on the banal side, but that is television. This is a sign of our arrival in American culture, and, in the long run, it is good. Of course, the real work of changing hearts and minds is always one-on-one."

Discrimination and legal rights

According to the Lesbian and Gay Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, the most important work in the LGBT movement right now focuses on two areas: ending discrimination and gaining legal recognition for gay families. Efforts to end discrimination based on sexual orientation concern, among other things, employment and housing issues, as well as treatment in the military. Family issues involve custody and adoption of children and health insurance coverage and survivor benefits for partners.

According to Ken South, a United Church of Christ pastor who works with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Religious Leadership Roundtable, an interfaith association of LGBT organizations and denominations, "The federal government is far behind on gay and lesbian issues. Nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies, thousands of universities, counties and cities, already have same-sex and domestic-partnership benefits and non-discrimination policies that protect people on the basis of sexual orientation."

In fact, as Paul Mazur explains in an article in the January 2002 issue of the International Journal of Public Administration entitled, "Developing a Paradigm for Worldwide Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Public Policy and Administration," 11 states plus the District of Columbia have passed laws that provide some form of civil rights protection for gays, lesbians and bisexuals. Transgender people are the glaring exception. "Only Minnesota provides comprehensive civil rights protection for transgender individuals. California prohibits discrimination in schools based on transgender status," writes Mazur.

The National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce reports that 22 states include sexual orientation as a protected category for pursuit of hate crimes. As of August 2000, 3,572 companies, colleges, universities, states and local governments were offering health insurance coverage to domestic partners of their employees.

Marriage key to benefits and equity

Key to issues of benefits and equity is the subject of marriage. Thirty states officially prohibit same-sex marriage. In 1996, when the Supreme Court in Hawaii ruled that denial of marriage licenses to same-sex couples is sex discrimination, a conservative religious organization sponsored a statewide ballot initiative to create legislation defining marriage as a union of opposite-sex partners. The legislation passed in 1998 and was followed by the Defense of Marriage Act, federal legislation, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, that defines marriage in a similar way.

In the U.S., only Vermont officially recognizes same-sex partnerships as "civil unions." As Paul Mazur explains, "These civil unions, created in light of a Vermont Supreme Court decision declaring that denial of marriage rights and privileges to same-sex couples violates the Vermont State Constitution, come with all the privileges and responsibilities of marriage, but without being called marriage."

Even in Vermont, South notes, there is talk of an effort to repeal the state's recognition of civil unions. This parallels other regressive ballot initiatives. On Election Day 2000, citizens in Nebraska banned domestic partner benefits and gay marriages. Voters in Nevada defined marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. And Maine voters barely defeated an effort to repeal civil rights protections based on sexual orientation.

To South, "It is imperative that people of faith get out front in these matters and say that the Christian Coalition [the conservative religious group that backs many of these anti-gay ballot initiatives] doesn't speak for all people of faith or for all Christians."

Save Dade

This year is the 25th anniversary of singer Anita Bryant's anti-gay Save Our Children campaign, mounted in response to passage of a Miami-Dade County Commission ordinance making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in 1977. Bryant, a devout Baptist and a former Miss America, believed that gays, armed with their new-found civil rights, would be out abusing and recruiting children. Three years ago a referendum was held, and the county's citizens voted to overturn the ordinance. Now, the Christian Coalition has put a referendum on the Dade County September 10, 2002, ballot to ask the public to reinstate the original discriminatory ordinance. Save Dade is a group working to stop the repeal.

"This is a benchmark campaign," says The National Religious Leadership Roundtable's South. "On the one hand, people say it's just one ordinance in one county in the U.S., but the symbolic nature is huge. Really, we see this as a way for us to say where the gay community is 25 years later."

Enduring symbol: Stonewall

For many, Stonewall marks the beginning of the gay liberation movement. As the website www.stonewallrevisited.com explains, "The word 'Stonewall' signifies quite possibly the most important single landmark in the worldwide struggle for gay rights." In 1969, patrons of New York's lower-Manhattan (largely gay-frequented) Stonewall bar fought back when Stonewall was raided one hot summer night by New York City policemen, who came hoping to arrest gay individuals for engaging in then illegal sex acts.

"Eyewitnesses claim that the homosexual patrons' counter-riot began when one burly Stonewall patron hurled a lidded, metal garbage can filled with empty liquor bottles through a police car window," the website says. "Ever since that night, Stonewall has been revered as an enduring symbol of the gay militant spark ... which has become a gay/lesbian/bisexual militant conflagration setting America -- and the world -- aflame with gay rights issues and conflicts."

Michael Hopkins of Integrity agrees that Stonewall was a defining moment, but also notes that the movement has changed so much since then. "I'm not part of the Stonewall generation," he explains. "I am a sort of post-1980s person. It is not always easy to articulate how the movement has changed. In some ways it is less of a political movement and more of a self-actualization movement now, and it is sometimes hard to get people motivated to do political activism until it really impinges on them."

He discusses one of the challenges facing Integrity, the LGBT presence in the Episcopal Church. "Once progress has been made, it is hard to keep people interested in the larger movement. When there is that local comfort level, it is hard to convince them to work for change. In typical American fashion, as soon as I begin to get comfortable I stop caring about larger issues."

Hopkins continues, "This is not unique to the lesbian and gay movement. Other justice movements have this same experience. Women who have been ordained since 1985 or 1990 weren't part of the original [ordination] struggle and so don't have the same motivation as women who were involved to be politically active in today's struggles because it seems they have already arrived."

Louie Crew, the founder of Integrity and a member of the Episcopal Church's Executive Council, sees shifts in Integrity's organizing efforts. "In the beginning, most chapters met once a month, for Eucharist. We were primarily in a single parish setting. Success meant that more and more Integrity members were becoming involved in their own churches and dioceses and so the need for a regular Eucharist gathering was diminished."

For Integrity, and for the Episcopal Church, Crew says, the focus right now is on getting authorization for rites of blessing for lesbian and gay relationships. According to Crew, whether people like it or not, this issue "is on the front burner and it will stay there until it passes. Justice issues do not go away. We don't get past issues until we resolve them."

"For the record," Crew adds, "I don't believe that the gay and lesbian issue is the cutting-edge issue of the 21st century. Those issues are racism, poverty and neglect of children, but God is using gay and lesbian people as the canary in the coal mine. You send a canary into the coal mine to see if there are toxic gases in there. If the canary dies, then you know not to go in. A whole lot of people who are in need of what the church has to give are watching how the church treats gay and lesbian people. If the church abuses gay and lesbian people, people who are divorced, or who have drug addictions or who have any less visible problem will say that there is no reason for me to go there -- to go to the church."

A movement going global

Integrity President Hopkins believes that it is important to help gay and lesbian people around the globe win their struggles for equality and justice. Integrity sponsored a conference on human sexuality in Brazil, and helped found an Integrity organization in Uganda. Hopkins will return to Uganda this month to help activists there with their work.

U.S. LGBT activists are also looking to the successes of Canadian and European organizers. In Canada, explains Paul Mazur, "a groundbreaking Supreme Court decision on October 27, 2001, redefined the word 'spouse' so that the parliament of Ontario revised 67 statutes, extending to same-sex couples all of the rights and responsibilities enjoyed by common-law heterosexual couples, including obligations involved in a break-up, adoption procedures, and hospital-visitation rights."

In Holland, lawmakers approved a bill to convert the country's registered same-sex partnership into full-fledged marriages, complete with divorce guidelines and wider adoption rights for gays.

In Germany, a law allows gay couples to register marriages officially, have the same tenant and inheritance rights as heterosexual couples and some joint parenting rights for children living in a gay couple's house. Denmark, Hungary, Iceland, France, Sweden, Norway and other European countries have begun to provide domestic partnership benefits.

'Transgender issues are cutting-edge'

Maintaining a global perspective is important to current organizing and so is moving past a simple or clear focus on the heterosexual/homosexual duality, says Virginia Mollenkott, author of the groundbreaking book, Omnigender: A Trans-religious Approach (see TW 7-8/01). "The church is still talking in terms of homosexual versus heterosexual and that is very rapidly becoming passé. Transgender issues are cutting-edge."

The reason, says Mollenkott, is that transgender people challenge the idea that a person is either straight or gay, male or female. "The presence of transgender people of every sort -- feminine men and masculine women -- indicates that this duality is not the way God set things up.

"If we look at same-sex marriage and domestic partnership issues, transgender forces us to shift the ground. It would be impossible to support the concept that marriage should be between a man and a woman because we realize that the definitions of 'man' and 'woman' are unclear. Many scientists don't know how to define them."

Unfortunately, says Mollenkott, a survey in the Advocate, a popular magazine of gay and lesbian topics, "showed that 64 percent of readers didn't want to include transgender issues with gay and lesbian issues because it would slow things down. This is very un-Christian and wrong. Acceptance isn't what we should care about. Justice is what we should care about. If just getting a piece of the pie is all we want then we want nothing important."

Witness staff writer Camille Colatosti lives in Hamtramck, Mich.