BY KATE SOSIN
Three decades ago, a 28-year-old lawmaker pulled off a feat for gay rights that most say would be impossible today.
David Clarenbach helped lead the passage of the country's first statewide gay rights measure. The state was Wisconsin, and the year was 1982.
Wisconsin LGBT advocates are currently celebrating the 30th anniversary of Assembly Bill 70, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in housing, employment and public accommodations in a state that few associate with gay rights today.
"We controlled our destiny," Clarenbach recalled. "It was the gay and lesbian community that set the strategy and made the decisions."
Clarenbach was not exactly "out" at the time. He never tried to hide his sexual orientation, but no one had ever asked him to discuss it publicly either. And he was a likely champion for gay rights regardless of his sexual orientation.
Clarenbach was the son of Kathryn Clarenbach, founder of the National Organization for Women, and he learned progressive politics at a young age.
"When you grow up in Madison in the '60s, you cannot escape the vigor of the anti-war movement and the civil-rights movement," he said.
A self-described precocious Clarenbach started serving in government at age 18, when he won a seat on the Dane County Board of Supervisors. Three years later, he became a Madison alderman before entering the Wisconsin State Assembly that same year.
Others before him had made a run at a Wisconsin gay-rights measure. The Milwaukee LGBT History Project website notes that Lloyd Barbee, an African-American lawmaker from Milwaukee, introduced a bill to decriminalize homosexuality in 1967 and a non-discrimination bill in 1971.
In the years that followed, hundreds of activists worked at building support for an anti-discrimination bill. Among them was Leon Rouse, a college-aged gay-rights activist who was mobilizing local religious leaders in support of gay rights. Rouse would later have a hand in writing the bill.
Clarenbach knew that in addition to religious support, they needed votes from across the aisle. So, he and others bid their time, slowly adding Republicans to his list of supporters.
"In a way, we snuck up on the opposition," Clarenbach said. Clarenbach knew that if they brought the bill to a vote before they had the support to pass it, the failed bill would create a rallying point for anti-gay activists, who were working to undo similar protections in cities across the country.
By late 1981, they finally had the votes.
Clarenbach describes the days leading up to the vote as worrisome. While gay-rights advocates believed they had enough votes to pass the bill, they also knew that a last-ditch attempt to add a schoolteacher exemption amendment could gut the bill.
"I knew that if an amendment of that sort were introduced, it would pass," Clarenbach said.
Further, an amendment that made it legal to discriminate against schoolteachers could set off a domino effect of exemptions for several professions, leaving the bill unenforceable.
The morning of the Assembly vote, Clarenbach watched as a lobbyist from the Wisconsin school board association pulled out an exemption and began to walk it around the floor.
According to Clarenbach, Rep. Richard Flintrop, then chair of the education committee, walked up to the man and told him to fold up the amendment and put it in his pocket. The lobbyist complied, and the bill passed without the amendment.
It passed, said Clarenbach, because it had from several Republicans as well as Democrats.
By February 1982, the bill had also cleared the Senate and was sitting on the desk of Republican Governor Lee Dreyfus.
With Clarenbach and Rouse behind him, Dreyfus signed the bill into law, and the first statewide gay rights law was born.
Don Schwamb, webmaster of the Milwaukee LGBT History Project, said the bill changed more than the law.
"Just the fact that the law was there was helpful to people's self-confidence," said Schwamb.
The new law was a sign of changing times for LGBT people in Wisconsin, and other states soon followed.
But 30 years after its passage, many, including Clarenbach, say the same law would not pass in Wisconsin today.
"I really think there is a level of mass hysteria [about LGBT people now], and I'm not trying to be funny," said Clarenbach.
Schwamb agreed. "I think it was just a very fortunate set of circumstances that made it possible at that particular time," he said.
But while the two say the bill would not pass today in Wisconsin, Clarenbach noted it has survived against an increasingly anti-gay right wing.
More than that, he said, it is a story of "how in even the most improbable of conditions the moral high ground can prevail."
It may also serve as a reminder that even in the most unlikely places, the LGBT movement has roots.
As Clarenbach joked, "Our license plates say 'America's Dairyland,' not 'America's Fairyland.'"
