From: [email-masked]

Atlanta (GA) Mayoral Race:
Anti-Gay leader Nancy Schaefer Joins Three Openly Gay Candidates
Filing for City Posts
 
[Southern Voice, 930923]
     By Richard Shumate
 
     Nancy Schaefer, Atlanta's best known and most vitriolic anti-
gay/lesbian activist, is running for mayor.
     Last Wednesday (930915), on the last day to qualify for the
Nov. 2 city election, Schaefer, who is head of Family Concerns,
Inc., a Christian supremacist group that works against gay and
lesbian rights, paid her qualifying fee at City Hall.
     But in the event that she were to pull off a victory over the
three major candidates in the mayoral race, Schaefer might have to
face the prospect of a gay or lesbian face---or two or three---on
the City Council.  That's because one lesbian, Carolyn White, and
two gay men, Andy Loftis and Eric Spivey, qualified to run for City
Council posts.
     When contacted by Southern Voice, a spokesman (sic) for Family
Concerns, Eddie Cannon, said Schaefer was out of town and
unavailable for comment.  But he did confirm that the Nancy
Schaefer running for mayor was indeed the Nancy Schaefer who has
become known as Atlanta's Anita Bryant because of her strident
anti-gay campaign that dates back to the 1980s.
     As president of a group called Citizens for Public Awareness,
Schaefer tried unsuccessfully to have the city's 1986 ordinance
prohibiting discrimination against lesbian/gay city employees
repealed.  In August, during the battle over domestic partnership
legislation, Schaefer took a lead role in fighting against the
measures to establish a registry for partners and extend benefits
to the partners of city employees.  Her group, Family Concerns, is
providing legal assistance to a group of plaintiffs suing to have
the ordinances overturned.
     In addition to her political lobbying, Schaefer has become a
spokesperson for the city's anti-lesbian/gay forces, appearing in
public forums and in the media.  She once told a television
audience that gay men were infected with "amoebas," and, in a
fundraising letter for her organization, said, "We are in a major
spiritual morality war."
     Among the gay candidates, Loftis, the chief financial officer
for an electrical contracting company, qualified to run in the 6th
District, which includes many of the intown neighborhoods on the
city's northeast side, including Midtown, Virginia-Highland,
Morningside and Druid Hills.  The district contains perhaps the
largest concentration of lesbian/gay voters in the city.
     Spivey qualified to run in the 2nd District, a diverse and
oddly-shaped district that starts in the Inman Park-Little Five
Points area, foes west through the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood and
then south to the neighborhoods around Atlanta-Fulton County
Stadium and north into the heart of Midtown.  While the district
has fewer identifiable gay-friendly neighborhoods than does the 6th
District, it does contain all of Midtown south of 10th Street, a
heavily gay area.
     Spivey is the host of "Out In Atlanta," a gay/lesbian show on
Atlanta's public access cable channel.
     White, an attorney with a practice in Decatur who is on the
national steering committee for next year's Stonewall 25
celebration in New York, is running in the 1st District, which
includes much of southeast Atlanta, including the lesbian/gay-
friendly neighborhoods of Grant Park and Ormewood Park