The Stranger Next Door: the Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights

The author chronicles the economic decline of a small town in the Pacific Northwest and the concurrent rise of religiously fueled homophobia, a movement promoted by Lon Mabon, an outside agitator from the Oregon Citizens Alliance.

"To conservative Christians, homosexuality was sinful, unnatural, against God and family... but to the vast majority, who believed that religion--and sex--should be kept private, these words sounded intolerant... even hateful," writes Stein in this astute social analysis of how a small Oregon community dealt with an early 1990s political referendum to prohibit "special rights" for homosexuals. A Jewish lesbian, Stein (Sisters, Sexperts, Queers) writes as both a community insider and outsider, drawing upon personal observation, media analysis and interviews with 50 of the town's residents to sympathetically and critically reveal how both sides, and those caught in the middle, responded to this culture war. She conjures a complex portrait of people under stress, attributing much of the community's conservatism to the flagging economy caused by the weakening of the timber industry in the 1980s. Stein is best when articulating and exploring the myriad paradoxes and contradictions of the situation. Her most striking observation is that while conservative Christian organizers from outside Timbertown created widespread fear of a gay takeover, the town itself had no visible homosexual community, and most of its gay citizens were well integrated and accepted within the social fabric. A careful observer and writer, Stein uses traditional sociological methodology to reach conclusions about the boundaries of tolerance that are similar to those in Beth Loffreda's recent work of straightforward reportage on the murder of a young gay man in Wyoming, Losing Matt Shephard (Forecasts, July 31).

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

In 1992 religious conservatives succeeded in getting rural Oregon communities to agree to a measure denying civil rights protection to lesbians and gays, setting off a firestorm of animosity. Stein, a sociologist--and an urbane, agnostic, lesbian Jew--examines why those isolated communities, which she collectively calls Timbertown, targeted people who were barely visible to them, given how few homosexuals lived among them. She spent two years talking with activists and residents to explore the nature of the dispute and get at the underlying anxieties about general social changes affecting them, from loss of jobs in the timber industry to the influx of outsiders interested in high-tech careers and environmentalism. She found that Timbertown was ripe for agitation by an outsider who formed a citizen's group and targeted gays as the source of the problems. Sexual orientation, race, and feminism eventually figured in the rising resentment fomented among religious conservatives. Despite having a totally different perspective, Stein sympathetically portrays an area made anxious and frightened by change. Vanessa Bush
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detailed, and very readable study of politics in rural Oregon. Stein spent several months in "Timbertown" (not the town's real name), a small town in central Oregon caught up in the battle of liberals and conservatives over a proposed amendment to the town's charter prohibiting "special status" for homosexuals. While the battle seemed to center on the issue of gay rights, Stein reports that this was only a proxy battle between longtime residents and newcomers over the change from a reliance on the old ways of the timber-based economy and the new service-based economy of the state. Stein provides detailed examinations of the conservative Oregon Citizens' Alliance and the more liberal Citizens' Action Network, exploring the belief systems driving each group. Her in-depth analysis of the evangelical Christian movement in America is also particularly noteworthy and broadly applicable beyond Oregon. This book is very highly recommended for academic and public libraries. Mark Bay, Indiana Univ.
Purdue Univ. Indianapolis Lib.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.