I attended the 2nd Annual Equality Conference at Duke on the 15th along with about 300 others at the Bryan Student Center. The sessions ran from 9 am to 5 pm with two plenary sessions and three breakout sessions. Five options were offered at each breakout sessions, and I went to the groups on Aging in the LGBT Community, Growing Up Gay in America, and PFLAG. The aging group was led by a policy analyst at the NGLTF who presented a lot of statistics about gays as they age. The session on Growing up Gay included Mitchell Gold, who talked about his book CRISIS (the stories of 40 gay Americans); Brent Childers, the director of Faith in America; and Matt Comer, the editor of Q-Notes, the LGBT newspaper of the Carolinas (who didn’t look as though he was quite grown up yet). The PFLAG presentation was by Neena Mabe, from Winston-Salem PFLAG (and a member of Green St. UMC), Andrea Angelo (also from Winston-Salem), and Spencer Duin from Asheville PFLAG.

Of course, there was a lot of discussion of California’s Proposition 8 and more coverage of transgender and gender identity issues. It seemed to me as though there were more students from all across the state as well as people of color, and once again I would guess that straight allies outnumbered the LGBT community.

One of the themes of the conference is that national and state level LGBT leaders are no longer abandoning leadership on moral issues to the radical right and are becoming more engaged with both mainstream and evangelical religious organizations and churches. The discussion has moved beyond a debate about the “seven deadly” verses so often quoted from the Bible about homosexuality to broader issues of discrimination, harassment of youth and adults, same sex marriage, and economic abuse of all minorities (particularly the poor).

The Equality NC, Equality NC Foundation, and Equality N-PAC have grown to more than 13,000 members in the Carolinas, a budget more than $300,000, and a full-time staff of four. Their focus has been in preventing passage of an anti-gay marriage amendment to the state constitution and promoting anti-harassment legislation to protect public school students. They have not been successful in the anti-bullying effort, but they have kept North Carolina from being one of the 30 states with discriminatory constitutional amendments. The conference was much broader in reach than just political action topics and dealt with a broad range of issues relevant to the LGBT community.

Having dealt with many of these issues for more than 30 years beginning with the Houston Gay Political Caucus and the Texas Gay & Lesbian Task Force’s conferences and rallies in 1978, I admit to becoming somewhat weary in the battle to achieve parity in civil rights accorded to other minorities in this nation. I was excited last year to see North Carolina sponsor a very professional conference and was glad to see that Equality NC was capable of following up again this year and maintaining the momentum. We are not in the forefront of civil rights for the LGBT community as much as other populous and larger states because of the conservative nature of the NC General Assembly, but we’re far ahead of most other southern states.

More details of the conference are available at these web sites: equalitync.org and qnotescarolinas.com (which has audio of the opening address and plenary session online).