Laguna Beach, California -- The cities of Irvine and Laguna Beach mark opposite ends of Southern California’s urban-genuineness spectrum. Irvine is the sprawling stucco-and-plasterboard fantasy of a property-development company that has made the scrubland bloom with cul-de-sacs and office parks; Laguna Beach, its narrow streets lined with colorful cottages, is a turn-of-the-century artists’ colony that grew up to be a wealthy beach town with a social conscience. And Robert F. Gentry has one foot in each.
In Irvine, where he has worked since 1970, Mr. Gentry is associate dean of students at the University of California’s 16,000-student campus. In Laguna Beach, a 15-minute drive away, he is Mayor. In both, he is openly homosexual: He’s one of the university system’s most visible gay employees, and he’s the only openly gay elected official in Orange County.
This spring Mr. Gentry signed into law a domestic-partnership ordinance that will allow gay and lesbian couples, among others, to register with the city and seek some of the legal protections that married heterosexuals enjoy. He says the law is one of the broadest in the nation -- this in a county known as a bastion of conservatism. At the university, he is working to add a formal Gay and Lesbian Student Services program to those he oversees for women, veterans, disabled students, and others.
He is also busy with other projects. He’s trying to complete Laguna Beach’s purchase of a 2,100-acre wilderness on which the Irvine Company had planned to build 3,300 homes, and he is seeking marine-sanctuary status for a stretch of coastline to protect it from oil drilling. As a politician, he says, he’s as interested in the environment, land use, and transportation as he is in human rights.
Not that Mr. Gentry ever expected to be interested in anything political. As a young member of the university’s student-affairs staff in the 1970’s, he didn’t say much about being homosexual. “I was very much in the closet,” he says.
He moved to Laguna Beach in 1972 -- in those days it was cheaper than Irvine -- and got involved in politics by accident: “I was trying to save two 100-year-old pine trees next to a house I was living in -- they were going to be cut down by a developer. We organized the neighborhood, and then one thing led to another.” He was elected to a four-year term on the city council in 1982, and has been re-elected twice. Each year the council chooses one of its five members to serve as Mayor; this is Mr. Gentry’s third turn in the job.
A 1983 Los Angeles Times article made his homosexuality a matter of public record. “It was a story about being gay in Orange County, and people kept telling the reporter to talk to me,” Mr. Gentry says. “When I realized they planned to use my name, I had to think about that. But my lover said, `Don’t be ridiculous -- we don’t have anything to hide.’ So I said O.K.”
Mr. Gentry says the article “started to commit me to a level of activism I didn’t really expect.” People called him about this and that, and after then-Gov. George Deukmejian vetoed a state gay-rights bill, Mr. Gentry got angry. “The Governor had said it was O.K. to discriminate, so we initiated our own gay-rights ordinance.
“Once I got over my own homophobia, I thought it was important to be out there doing what I could,” Mr. Gentry says. “It’s a role I enjoy -- there’s a real sense of purpose about it. My agenda for gay and lesbian rights is very basic: a safe environment and equal treatment.”
Mr. Gentry says he seeks not only physical safety for homosexuals but psychological safety as well. “We have our share of physical attacks, but the psychological oppression is horrendous,” he says. He doesn’t suggest that the campus is any more intolerant than the nation, but he says: “The majority of gay and lesbian students are fearful of disclosure, because nowhere has the university validated them, outreached to them. What we have to have is a gay and lesbian services center, a place to congregate and find support, counseling, and information.”
Guaranteeing equal treatment, he says, is also difficult -- even at the university. Gay couples are not allowed to apply for married-student housing, for instance. And because his health and retirement benefits do not extend to his lover, Mr. Gentry says, the university is effectively paying him much less than it would if he were heterosexual and married. “I will serve this university as long as I am able,” he says, “because I care very much for its faculty and its students. But I’m hurt and saddened that I’m treated differently than my heterosexual counterparts at one of the best universities in the country.”
In politics, too, Mr. Gentry suspects he is treated differently: “As a member of a minority group, I think I’m judged more. I’ve had to work a lot harder to maintain my position.” He knows he has critics. “I’ve had a sound truck out in front of my house saying, `Faggot, get out of our community -- you’re spreading AIDS.’ But you can’t do what I’m doing and not expect that,” he says.
Mr. Gentry admits that he’d like to serve in Congress, where he could get more involved in human-rights and environmental issues. But he says: “I’m not going to do symbolic things -- I want to win. And I don’t perceive that I’m electable beyond Laguna Beach.”
He is proud of his 25,000-resident town, and not just because it has re-elected him twice since the Los Angeles Times article. He is proud of the shelters it has helped open for battered women, runaway teenagers, and homeless people, proud of the hospice for people with AIDS, proud of the commitment to helping others. He likes to tell the story of an 80-year-old woman who, a few years back, was taking care of a man, almost a stranger, who had AIDS. Asked why, she answered: “I live in Laguna.”
Says Mr. Gentry: “It’s heartwarming to serve a community like that.”
