National survey finds pro-gay police departments
Adapted from reporting by M. David Stein
Five police departments across the country responded in a PGN survey that gay people should be evaluated as potential officers on the same basis as anyone else.
PGN sent the survey to 25 city departments and 14 responded.
The cities that took a liberal stance to allowing gay people to become police officers included Berkley, Palo Alto and Sunnyvale in California; Madison, Wisc.; and East Lansing, Mich.
“We need no ordinance to force us to take this position,” said Wesley Pomeroy, Berkeley police chief. “It’s clearly within the subject of constitutional guarantees not to discriminate against gays. Beyond that, common decency demands that they be treated no differently than heterosexuals.”
Stephen Naert, East Lansing police chief, quoted his city’s anti-discrimination ordinance, which explicitly protects homosexuals, in his survey response.
Only one respondent was blatantly negative. Richard Rowan, police chief in St. Paul, Minn., said when his department’s testing procedures identify people with “abnormal tendencies,” “they are encouraged to seek employment elsewhere.”
Rowan added he didn’t have information about the number of gay officers in his department.
“I would hope that if we could develop that information, it would produce a zero result,” he said, noting St. Paul’s gay-rights ordinance was passed against his department’s recommendation.
Gay Media Project starts television series
Adapted from reporting by PGN staff
The Philadelphia-based Gay Media Project aired a half-hour television broadcast Dec. 13, 1975, that focused on society’s fears regarding lesbians and gay men.
The show, called “Up Front,” aired on WPVI-TV, an ABC affiliate. As the first in a planned series, it was geared primarily toward a non-gay audience. It addressed the definition of homophobia, its psychological and social causes and what can be done to overcome it.
Well-known gay activist Barbara Gittings and David Waldron from the Gay Media Project hosted. The show’s guests included Delores Klaich, author of “Woman Plus Woman,” and Dr. Charles Silverstein, a psychologist and founder of the Institute for Human Identity in New York City.