Jim Snyder stood before nearly 200 people at a political rally on the evening of August 25 and told them he’d recently had the “strangest, most disturbing dream.” He’d been walking down Halsted Street, he said, when he realized he was being chased by two men, one of whom was carrying a baseball bat. When Snyder turned around, he saw that the men were Peter Fitzgerald, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, and Al Salvi, the GOP candidate for secretary of state.
Before the rally, a gay Republican activist named Dan Sprehe had put up three posters on the walls of an upstairs meeting room at Ann Sather restaurant. The posters, under the common rubric “Fight the Right,” viciously slammed the records of Fitzgerald, Salvi, and Poshard. Gay and lesbian political groups had gathered at Ann Sather to launch a voter-registration effort with the National Organization for Women called VOTE ’98. Most of the groups had put aside their political differences for a common goal: defeating Glenn Poshard.
More than a year ago, Rick Garcia, cofounder of the Illinois Federation for Human Rights, sat in state senator Penny Severns’s office and tried to arrange a meeting with Poshard. A three-term congressman from downstate Marion, Poshard was close to declaring his candidacy in the 1998 gubernatorial race. It had become an election rite in recent years for any candidate seeking a Democratic nomination in Illinois to meet with Garcia and other gay political leaders.
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But the activists weren’t ready to give up on the Democrats. In the spring, the Illinois Federation for Human Rights and the Chicago chapter of NOW sent a letter to liberal lakefront aldermen, state representatives, congressmen, and Mayor Daley’s office, asking them to persuade Poshard to modify his views on issues of concern to gays, lesbians, and feminists, particularly his stance on abortion (which he believes should be illegal except in cases of rape and incest), his votes against allowing adoption by same-sex couples, and his opposition to a state housing policy that would outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation.
“It was actually a simple decision,” Garcia says. “The Republican candidate wanted our support. The Democratic candidate did not.”
“That’s ridiculous,” says one gay activist. “What political leader waits to be asked to come to one of the largest parades in the state?”
“I was deeply in the closet,” Sprehe says. “It was an extremely hateful experience to go through. I came out personally soon after the campaign.”
