By Terry Diggs
Special to The Recorder
October 18, 2001

Our current patriotic zeal notwithstanding, there are still a few good men the Marines won't be looking for. In fact, Osama bin Laden has done little to alter a legal policy that keeps homosexuals who love their country from fighting for it: A post-Sept. 11 stay in discharge proceedings isn't so much a renunciation of Department of Defense biases as a recognition that the brass is otherwise occupied these days. But the basis of the prohibition against gay soldiers is worth remembering. In the end, that bar -- a mix of cultural attitudes sanctioned by law -- may say more about America than a thousand placards extolling our national unity.

This Thursday, Golden Gate University School of Law's film-law series focuses on the legal environment that led to a renewed ban on non-heterosexual military service, to a plethora of anti-gay initiatives, and ultimately to the deaths of hundreds of homosexuals -- casualties of AIDS and violence. Thursday night's program, "The Nineties: Law and Stigmatization of Homosexuality," addresses head-on the effects of a legal policy that consistently sent the message that some Americans are outside the protection of the nation's law.

Series guest, Mary Dunlap, opens the evening by recalling how gay activists resisted legal efforts to brand them as undesirable. Dunlap, a local icon, founded Equal Rights Advocates and went on to represent litigants targeted because of their sexual preference -- among them Gay Games founder Tom Waddell -- before the U.S. Supreme Court. When Dunlap's observations end, the audience will examine the intersection of legal policy and pop culture through an hour-long compilation of clips and shorts -- a multimedia presentation dubbed, "I Thought I Saw a Kulturkampf."

Justice Antonin Scalia's opening volley in Romer v. Evans ("The court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite") may be the gold standard in judicial glibness. Yet critics who agree with the six justices in Romer who invalidated a Colorado initiative that -- heads up, here -- barred legislation that barred discrimination, should object more to Scalia's disingenuousness than to his derision. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's kulturkampf -- a legislative program that removed Catholics from teaching positions and public office and that resulted in the incarceration of dissenting clerics -- aimed to erase the very idea of Catholicism from German minds. And the eradication of homosexuals from public consciousness was exactly what the authors of Colorado's initiative, and a score of statutes like it, contemplated.

Recognizing that conservatives were using law to write them out of existence, gay filmmakers responded. The result, an array of films appropriating a variety of styles and genres, is not simply visual proof that these artists existed, but a record of the extent to which their legal insignificance permeated their daily lives. Offering films seldom seen by mainstream audiences, "I Thought I Saw a Kulturkampf" will reveal an outlaw existence that is both hilarious and horrific.

A Century in the City: A Film Retrospective of the Legal Issues That Shaped San Francisco. Thurs., Oct. 18, 2001. Complimentary reception: 6:30. Program: 7:00. Films: 8:15. Delancey Street Screening Room, 600 Embarcadero. For more information: http://www.ggu.edu/schools/law/filmfest.