October 1997

Dear City Council Candidate:

The District of Columbia has recently endured an unprecedented series of challenges to the most fundamental home rule principles, particularly over the last few months. Lesbians and gay men have been at a particular disadvantage because the Religious Right has too often taken advantage of the District’s financial and management crisis by stampeding Congress into gratuitous assaults on our basic human rights and dignity. The next City Council must be much more aggressive in confronting both the District’s self-inflicted wounds and the Religious Right’s demagoguery.

In order to elicit your viewpoints on issues currently of great importance to lesbians and gay men, I have enclosed your copy of our questionnaire for all At-Large City Council candidates running in the December 2 special election.

GLAA is proud of our rank as the nation’s oldest continuously operating gay and lesbian rights organization. In every election since our founding in 1971, we have sent out similar questionnaires to help educate our community about the choices facing us at the polls.

As you may know, GLAA does not endorse candidates in partisan races; rather, we give numerical ratings to all candidates on a scale from -10 to +10, based upon each candidate’s written responses to our questionnaire, combined with our assessment of each candidate’s past record on behalf of lesbians and gay men. Our candidate ratings are released to the media and are advertised and circulated widely. We believe that our quarter-century of service gives our candidate ratings considerable credibility.

We encourage you to do more than give a simple “yes” or “no” response to our questions; the depth and completeness of your answers play a major role in determining your final rating. To help you understand the background for the issues raised in this year’s questionnaire, we would be glad to give you a briefing (probably about an hour long) before you send in your replies. Just call us on (202) 667-5139 to request a briefing.

I have taken the liberty of enclosing a copy of GLAA’s Agenda : 1997. Please take the time to read this for a summary of our perspectives on a wide variety of issues and concerns.

The deadline for submitting your questionnaire responses is Friday, November 7. We ask you to sign the bottom of each of your answer sheets. We suggest that you mail or fax your replies; however, we can not accept e-mail transmissions. If you would like to fax your answers to us, please call us so we can set up the arrangements with you. If you also submit your replies on a disk, we can include them in the Election section of our world wide web site. If you send us a black-and-white “head shot” photo of yourself, we will also include that photo in our web site. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Richard J. Rosendall
President, Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, DC

Enclosures (2)