Help Needed: Warning to the Homophobes

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I’m looking for the full text of an article titled “Warning to the Homophobes”, by Steve Warren. It was published in 1987 in “The Advocate”, a magazine devoted to sodomite lifestyles. Here is a snippet of the text:

“[W]e are going to force you [Christians] to recant everything you have believed or said about sexuality.

[…] Finally, we will in all likelihood want to expunge a number of passages from your Scriptures and rewrite others,” he said, “eliminating preferential treatment of marriage and using words that will allow for homosexual interpretations of passages.”

It is interesting that I cannot find it online, nor anything definitive of its author. For example: Someone named Steve Warren won a GLAAD award in 2013. Here’s a list of the winners. He’s the only winner without a Wikipedia page. One would think someone notable enough to win an award from GLAAD would warrant at least a short entry; especially since every other winner has one.

28 thoughts on “Help Needed: Warning to the Homophobes”

  1. More info:

    *The Advocate*, ISSN:0001-8996

    I can get it in microfiche which isn’t useful, so I will see if they’ll put it in PDF for me.

  4. Here’s a journal search for Steve Warren: http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/resultsadvanced?vid=14&sid=749fe82a-d7bb-4883-929f-f9d89141b212%40sessionmgr1&bquery=(JN+%22Advocate%22)+AND+(AU+warren%2c+steve)&bdata=JmRiPXF0aCZ0eXBlPTEmc2l0ZT1laG9zdC1saXZl

    There’s not an article with your title listed. The closest is 9/1/87, “Gay Christians Gather En Masse”. It has not been made available online. A permalink to the record: http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=488244aa-a0e1-4638-9fac-dab82ce6fdf4%40sessionmgr1&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=9449432&db=qth

  5. @Turin

    If one searches Google for the article “Warning to the Homophobes Steve Warren” several articles refer to it, and of them several refer to an essay by a man called Ed Vitagliano–who is with a group called American Family Association. There are reproductions of EV’s essay on FreeRepublic and other sites. Those reproductions (at a few sites) link to the original at a site called “agapepress.org”, but the links return a 404. Here are two examples:

    http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1583393/posts
    http://www.xtec.cat/~vfeliu/writing/atasks/abstinence.htm

    Notice the links to the original.

    I searched agapepress.org. There is nothing there by EV. In fact there is no discernibly Christian content. It’s all lifestyle advice crap.

    I went to AFA’s website. EV has no email listed, but there is a general contact email on the Contact page: faq@afa.net: My email was bounced back

    Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

    faq@afa.net

    Technical details of permanent failure:
    Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain afa.net by postman.afa.net. [12.173.44.233].

    The error that the other server returned was:
    554 rejected due to spam content

    Spam? I use Gmail. I was also in IT for almost 20 years: No one filters Gmail addresses if they actually want to hear from people. Am I on a spam list?

    Something is going on here.

  7. @MNM

    Thanks.

    This puzzles me though: What happened to the agapepress.org domain? Why is the AFA no longer in control of it if they have been in continuous activity from the early 2000s until now?

  8. Most helpful comment right now: “see Warning to the Homophobes- Steve Warren of ACT UP, the Sept. issue of the Advocate 1987 when they demanded same sex marriage — and the “surrender” of Orthodox Jews and Christians.”

    Am in the microfiche reader room right now. Will report back. A 1980s gay magazine is everything you’d expect a cesspool to be.

  9. Somewhere between January 11 and 16 of 2007, the site began redirecting to onenewsnow.com with the message “you are now being redirected to our new and expanded website “one news now.” As of October 21st 2009, the redirect was still in place. The website was not crawled for a number of years, and on the next crawl on Oct 19th 2013, it was parked and available to be purchased.

  10. @Turin

    A 1980s gay magazine is everything you’d expect a cesspool to be.

    I have had the displeasure of attending the International AIDS Society annual conference. I’m prepared.

  12. @MNM

    That’s about a year after Ed Vitagliano posted his article which referenced “Warning to the Homophobes” and Steve Warren; a man who is celebrated by GLAAD, but of whom no information is readily available online.

  13. I should say that it is possible that the GLAAD awarded Steve Warren is not the same Steve Warren who penned the apocryphal Warning to the Homophobes. Steve Warren isn’t exactly an uncommon name. For example: There is a Steve Warren in Florida who “married” Dan

    http://www.eqfl.org/marriagestory3

    and this is the Steve Warren awarded by GLAAD

    http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/lawyer-steve-warren-rails-antonin-444025

    Don’t miss the word choice in the Hollywood Reporter article’s title.

  14. “[W]e are going to force you [Christians] to recant everything you have believed or said about sexuality.

    […] Finally, we will in all likelihood want to expunge a number of passages from your Scriptures and rewrite others,” he said, “eliminating preferential treatment of marriage and using words that will allow for homosexual interpretations of passages.”

    The joke’s on him anyway. Churchians don’t seem to believe anything about sexuality, except that it must be something bad, and never to be discussed.

    Furthermore, the scripture modification/deletion scheme is already underway in some quarters.

    Hey, wait just a second here. When was that written again? Homoprophet.

  15. @Lost Patrol

    The joke’s on him anyway. Churchians don’t seem to believe anything about sexuality, except that it must be something bad, and never to be discussed.

    That was the sodomites’ plan, and they successfully carried it out. These people whom you have called Churchians may have failed, but we should remember that they were spiritually executed–they were brainwashed.

    Hey, wait just a second here. When was that written again? Homoprophet.

    He wasn’t a prophet. He was a leader with a plan and allies and he won. In 1987 sodomites were so far outside the mainstream and their behavior so odious that it seemed needless to defend against them. That was wrong.

  16. The phrasing is ambiguous in the quote above. Is ACT UP the name of the magazine issue or of a group? There’s no full-text search so if the article’s not by Steve Warren (he’s only quoted), I can’t locate it except by locating likely articles.

    There are three September issues, 9/1, 9/15, 9/29. The microfiche is really blurry so I can’t scan the text as I go.

  18. Ed Vitagliano: ‘In 1987 Steve Warren, a spokesman for the controversial homosexual group ACT UP, wrote an article for The Advocate, a magazine for the gay community. Titled “Warning to the Homophobes,” Warren spoke of “the mean-spirited nature of Judeo-Christian morality.”‘ So ACT UP is a group, then.

    Also, the Gibbs pamphlet looks to have verbatim the text in MNM’s linked essay with no further citation.

    This link cites the 9/1 issue, so I’m looking there again.

  19. I assume the Steve Warren in question is the lawyer version. From The Hollywood Reporter:

    Another member of the Supreme Court — Chief Justice John Roberts — also was singled out by Warren, who noted several key parallels in the two men’s lives.

    “[Just as I did], Chief Justice John Roberts attended an Ivy League college, followed by Harvard Law School and Harvard Law Review and built a thriving private practice as well,” Warren pointed out. “And [he] has adopted two children of his own. Only one of us, however, was told by their state that their home was not fit for a child, despite all the child-proofing and security measures in the world. Only one of us was subjected to the humiliation and degradation of being forced to appeal to a family court judge with the power to overturn that hate-filled judgment mandated by then-Gov. Pete Wilson.”

    http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/lawyer-steve-warren-rails-antonin-444025

    Straight out of the playbook; about which I haven’t written yet. And here:

    Warren’s client list is as starry as they come. He closed Leo DiCaprio’s deals for The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street, helped put Charlize Theron in Prometheus and Snow White & the Huntsman, shepherded Colin Farrell’s Total Recall deal and reps not one but two Hunger Games stars (Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson).

    “My first client Warren handled talent deals for Comic Relief fund-raisers in the mid-’80s. “I had to get signatures before they performed. Paul Shaffer left his release at the Universal Hilton so I had to drive him. It was my first time with a celebrity.”

    http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/power-lawyers-2012-christian-bale-349784/item/alan-wertheimer-power-lawyers-2012-350452

  21. OK, I have examined every page in the September 1, 1987 Advocate. 9/1 could ambiguously be January 9, but there’s not an edition on that date so that’s not it.

    At this point I am comfortable stating that in the magazine as it has come to me the statement does not occur. I noticed no missing pages, and only two pages were completely illegible due to coloration; it did not appear to be either of those pages by the photo content. Either the citation is completely wrong or the quotation is itself apocryphal.

  22. Mystery solved?

    The 1989 book Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in America by William Dannemeyer has the original quote in full. On that same page (p. 105), a different citation is made to Steve Warren, 9/1/87.

    Dannemeyer does not cite anyone in his claim. He rather prefaces it with the following text: “Let me paraphrase the argument the homosexual community is making in its assault on the Christian community.” So the statement that has been bandied around is itself a work of conservative apologetics, not a statement by a homosexual activist.

  23. @Turin

    Thanks for your work. I am disappointed, but not surprised because while I initially found it hard to pin down this Steve Warren fellow, I also found it hard to pin down the AFA and its writers; as I somewhat chronicled in these comments. Someone is not being truthful.

    Does Dannemeyer give a citation for that other Warren quote?

  24. Yes, you can search the full text of the Dannemeyer book on Amazon (I linked it above) to see exactly how the page is structured. It likely arose from someone being quite sloppy in reading the reference of one and assigning it to the other. Dannemeyer then is the (original) source of the quote now credited to Warren, and Warren’s quote is from the “Gay Christians” article I found above in The Advocate.

  25. “He wasn’t a prophet. He was a leader with a plan and allies and he won.”

    OK, I see that. He wasn’t forecasting, but rather making it happen.

    “These people whom you have called Churchians may have failed, but we should remember that they were spiritually executed–they were brainwashed.”

    I don’t want to take credit for that term, having only recently learned it – as I understand it Christians who have, or are in the process of submitting to popular culture rather than to God.
    Attending church as a sort of social affirmation and support group. I may not have that quite right. I don’t think they (I include myself) should be let off the hook by a notion they were brainwashed. They knew the truth, but were simply weak and ineffective in resistance, if they even bothered to protest what they were seeing at all. So now we (the collective we) have ordained homosexuals, among other things.

  26. @Lost Patrol

    We’re good.

    I don’t like the word “Churchian” because I do like churches, and the people who wield it most don’t actually participate in the life of the Church.

  27. Impressed by the quick research on this one. I’m a whiz at finding stuff on the Internet and I couldn’t find anything but Christians quoting the work, not the original. Google Books only has copies of The Advocate going back to 1994 and archive.org only has a few scattered issues.

  28. I don’t do much on the reactosphere, but when it needs my access to a 20M volume library, I may as well exploit it. 🙂

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