Homosexuals Get Their Week, 6-3

Gay Pride Week Backers Sing In Celebration Of Council Action 

Homosexuals Get Their Week, 6-3

After a two year absence, Gay Pride Week has returned officially to Ann Arbor.

City Council voted 6-3 Monday night to recognize this week as Lesbian and Gay Pride week to commemorate a nationwide celebration by homosexuals. 

The proclamation was offered by Councilwoman Kathleen Kozachenko, HRP-Second Ward, an acknowledged lesbian, who noted unlike the past local gays were not asking for a council declaration of Gay Pride Week. 
 

"We are not asking you to declare it," she told her fellow council members, we have recognized our pride and we are declaring it." 

The official proclamation says American society teaches people to repress their feelings for persons of their own sex and "the culture even further represses the natural and healthy sexual expressions of love among persons of the same sex." 

"The encrusted and severe sex roles in  American culture are one of the most blatant examples of the society's illness," it says.

Kozachenko added. "We are fighting the society as it is, we are fighting the sex laws as they are . . . We are struggling for a society in which male dominance is abolished."

Kozachenko told her fellow council members, "I'm convinced personally that many of your unconscious mannerisms and patterns of speech will be very sexist and anti-gay. I'm asking. I'm demanding you take this seriously and review your own feelings for members of your own sex.' 

Unlike past years when the Gay Pride issue faced council with a raucous audience, the crowd of gays at Monday night's meeting was orderly. Council even agreed to allow the audience 10 minutes to lobby for passage of the resolution, but no one wanted to speak. 

The only disruption came after Kozachenko and the five council Democrats approval of the measure (with Republicans dissenting) when the audience broke into a song. Part of the , sung loosely to the tune of "I Enjoy Being a Girl," were:

"It doesn't make my mother happy.
It doesn't make my father cheer.
And in spite of what my doctor tells them. 
I enjoy being a queer."