Newspaper Page Text
SOUTHERN
JUNE 23 - JUNE 29 / 1994
GO FISH
New lesbian
movie destined
to be a hit page 21
LOCAL NEWS
Botched big-name concert angers
performers, Pride PAGE 3
Cobb Chair Bill Byrne offers new
resolution; Cobb Coalition gives it a
thumbs down PAGE 3
SOUTHEAST
KY judge says okay for gay parents
to visit children of divorce PAGE 4
NATIONAL NEWS
Bill banning job discrimination against
gays is introduced this week f m,
OUT & ABOUT
THEATRE
it's not on Broadway, and it's still not
a movie but the Normal Heart,
Kramer and Streisand's baby, is at
least a CD page 27
BOOKS
John Boswell's scholastic master
piece about church-sanctioned same-
sex marriages in the Middle Ages has
the Pope shaking in his robe PAGE 31
VBLBME T/KUMBiR tB PlfASE RECYCLE 75G WHERE SOLO
COBB COMMISSION CHAIR S
LESBIAN DAUGHTER COMES OUT
Shannon Byrne, the 24 year old
daughter of Bill Byrne, is tired of
keeping silent about Cobb County’s
anti-gay resolution
In a meeting between the Cobb Citizens Coali
tion and Cobb Commission chair Bill Byrne last fall,
Byrne surprised Coalition members when he told
them that one of his three daughters is a lesbian. And
this spring, he said it again—when the Coalition
began an aborted series of meetings with the chair
man in an attempt to work out a compromise over
Cobb County’s anti-gay resolution.
“The very first words out of his mouth were ‘you
don’t have to tell me anything about the gay and
lesbian community,”’ Coalition member Cherry
Spencer-Stark recalled. ‘“After all,” he said, “I have
a 24-year-old lesbian daughter.’”
But if Bill Byrne thinks that having a daughter
who is a lesbian means understanding the lesbian
and gay community, he’s dead wrong, says Shannon
Byrne.
After watching the controversy simmer and boil
for nearly a year, the “24-year-old lesbian daughter”
of Cobb County’s Commission chair has decided to
step into the fray, aligning herself with the Cobb
Citizens Coalition in their efforts to have the resolu
tion rescinded.
“I just thought that maybe I can. make a differ
ence,” she said during an interview last week. “I’m
tired of hearing about family values. They’re not
speaking about family values at all and I just feel I
need to correct that. Obviously, my dad and the
commissioners don’t know anything about the gay
community, so they have absolutely no right to con
demn us. If they knew anything about us, there would
be no resolution.”
The resolution and the continual bantering about
family values hurts, she said. And the entire contro
versy—from the anti-gay resolution, to the cutting of
arts funding for the county, to the Olympics Out of
Cobb movement—cuts close.
“In every way, this is personal,” Byrne said. “For
example, the arts funding. I went to college, I’m an
art major. I’m a photographer. I went to college to
play soccer. I’m an athlete. I played volleyball in
high school. The whole family thing. It’s extremely
personal. This has hit me in every way possible.”
And she’s concerned about the gay men and les
bians who live in Cobb County, hoping that her
public coming out can help.
“I’m sorry for what my dad has done,” she said.
“That’s one of the reasons I’m coming out. I want to
do what I can [for Cobb’s lesbians and gay men]. I
just wasn’t at peace with keeping quiet. I felt like I
needed to tell these Christian people that they are
dead wrong. I don’t think they have any idea about
how to be Christian.”
The decision to speak publicly has not come easy.
Byrne was at Huntingdon College in Montgomery,
Alabama, last July when Commissioner Gordon
Wysong first introduced his resolution proclaiming
the “gay lifestyle” incompatible with Cobb’s “com
munity standards.” She graduated in late August,
and returned to Atlanta with her partner of two years,
Cheryl Crowson, to begin looking for an apartment.
“We came into town to look for a place to live
after my graduation and just to be in Atlanta for the
weekend,” she said. “I knew absolutely nothing about
the resolution. I came into town, picked up a South
ern Voice, and read all about my dad. That was how I
found out.”
Instead of a planned fun weekend in Atlanta,
Byrne and Crowson spent the entire time in then-
hotel room, with Byrne desperately trying to reach
her father by phone.
“I left hundreds of messages for him all weekend
long, but he was out of town,” she said.
CONTINUED ON PACE 13
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