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                                                                                SOCIETY, Page 54

Colorado's Deep Freeze


A star sparks a boycott to protest the state's antigay amendment,
but Aspen's glitterati can't bear to give up their holiday hot
spot

By RICHARD CORLISS - With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Los
Angeles and Joni H. Blackman/Denver


    Home alone on Christmas? Not Hollywood's swank set: Arnold
and Cher, Rupert Murdoch and Marvin Davis and other star lights
atop the Hollywood power tree. They're usually skiing or
schmoozing in Aspen, the Rocky Mountain town that is the
glitterati's Gstaad. This Christmas, though, the slopes may be a
bit less congested. And some of the entertainment elite who
winter at Colorado resorts may notice the soot of a guilty
conscience tarnishing their white Bogner ski togs.

    American ski spots are not often political hot spots. But
on Nov. 3, by a 54%-to-46% vote, Coloradans approved Amendment
2, which mandated "no protected status based on homosexual,
lesbian or bisexual orientation." The vote voided laws in Aspen,
Denver and Boulder that prohibited bias in jobs or housing based
on sexual orientation. Says Robert Bray of the National Gay &
Lesbian Task Force: "Colorado is thus the first state in U.S.
history to sanction discrimination against gays."

    Two weeks after the vote, Barbra Streisand raised the
boycott banner: "We must now say clearly that the moral climate
in Colorado is no longer acceptable, and if we're asked to, we
must refuse to play where they discriminate." Later, she said
she would respect the decision -- to boycott or not -- of "the
people living in Colorado, whom this most deeply affects."

    Some groups have already decided. The National Council for
Social Studies, the American Association of Law Libraries, the
National Education Association and the Coalition of Labor Union
Women have either canceled or ceased negotiations for
conventions in Colorado. Even the Sisters of Loretto, an order
of Catholic nuns, said it may move its 1993 meeting out of
Colorado because of Amendment 2.

    Could it be that, in support of civil rights for gay
Americans, Tinseltown's liberals lack the Sisters' guts? Whoopi
Goldberg and director Jonathan Demme are among the handful of
movie shakers to announce support for the boycott, and a few
producers have scratched plans to shoot films on location in
the state. But most Hollywood-Aspen celebs are mum on the
subject; shhh! has replaced schuss. Politicized performers, who
during the South African boycott easily refused to play Sun
City, find it tougher to say they ain't gonna ski in snowtown.
Well, most of them didn't have Sun City gigs, but a lot have
condos in Aspen. As often happens, property triumphs over
principle and convenience over conscience. In addition, the
industry still cowers before America's perceived antipathy to
gays. Though Hollywood's gay community is large and powerful,
homosexuality is still the love that dare not speak its name.
Hollywood is still Closetland.

    And Aspen is still, for many of the richly famous, the
place to be. Jack Nicholson will be there this winter, says his
agent, "as a show of support for the people of that community,
which overwhelmingly defeated Amendment 2." Don Johnson and
Melanie Griffith, significant contributors to AIDS groups, say
they are troubled by the vote but have no plans to move. Other
fun couples -- Robert Wagner and Jill St. John, Chris Evert and
Andy Mill -- are expected to be on view, somewhere between the
chateaus and the inevitable pickets.

    As in any good drama, ambiguities abound. Should
out-of-staters take their ski dollars to antiabortion Utah?
Should the voters of Denver, Boulder and Aspen, most of whom
opposed the amendment, suffer for the attitudes of their
neighbors? Tennis ace Martina Navratilova, the resort's most
famous bisexual, supports a lawsuit against Amendment 2 but
argues that a boycott would hurt local gays as much as the
bigot brigade. Wellington Webb, Denver's first black mayor,
finds analogy in civil rights history. "When some of us were
trying to desegregate the South," he told Arsenio Hall last
week, "we went south. We didn't boycott the South."

    Different battles may require different strategies. "The
radical right is targeting 35 states in the next two years for
initiatives like Colorado's," says Sue Anderson, executive
director of Denver's Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Oregon's
heinous Measure 9, which declared homosexuality "abnormal,
wrong, unnatural and perverse," lost on Election Day, though it
was supported by 43% of the electorate -- the same percentage
that voted nationwide for Bill Clinton. Antigay activists will
try again, says Anderson, "and use Colorado's wording, because
it worked."

    But boycotting works too. Arizona lost an estimated $500
million in business in the two years after it defeated a motion
to declare Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a state holiday.
The voters finally decided that an extra day off was preferable
to permanent blacklisting. A successful boycott of Colorado
would send a muscular message to other states considering such
an initiative: Don't. "Sanctioning discrimination," says
Anderson, "is bad for business." Does it really matter, then, if
a boycott is also bad for the pleasure of Hollywood royalty?