Colorado's Deep Freeze

By RICHARD CORLISS

Home alone on Christmas? Not Hollywood's swank set: Arnold and Cher, Rupert Murdoch and Marvin Davis and other star lights atop the Hollywood power tree. They're usually skiing or schmoozing in Aspen, the Rocky Mountain town that is the glitterati's Gstaad. This Christmas, though, the slopes may be a bit less congested. And some of the entertainment elite who winter at Colorado resorts may notice the soot of a guilty conscience tarnishing their white Bogner ski togs.

American ski spots are not often political hot spots. But on Nov. 3, by a 54%-to-46% vote, Coloradans approved Amendment 2, which mandated "no protected status based on homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation." The vote voided laws in Aspen, Denver and Boulder that prohibited bias in jobs or housing based on sexual orientation. Says Robert Bray of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force: "Colorado is thus the first state in U.S. history to sanction discrimination against gays."

Two weeks after the vote, Barbra Streisand raised the boycott banner: "We must now say clearly that the moral climate in Colorado is no longer acceptable, and if we're asked to, we must refuse to play where they discriminate." Later, she said she would respect the decision -- to boycott or not -- of "the people living in Colorado, whom this most deeply affects."

Some groups have already decided. The National Council for Social Studies, the American Association of Law Libraries, the National Education Association and the Coalition of Labor Union Women have either canceled or ceased negotiations for conventions in Colorado. Even the Sisters of Loretto, an order of Catholic nuns, said it may move its 1993 meeting out of Colorado because of Amendment 2.

Could it be that, in support of civil rights for gay Americans, Tinseltown's liberals lack the Sisters' guts? Whoopi Goldberg and director Jonathan Demme are among the handful of movie shakers to announce support for the boycott, and a few producers have scratched plans to shoot films on location in the state. But most Hollywood-Aspen celebs are mum on the subject; shhh! has replaced schuss. Politicized performers, who during the South African boycott easily refused to play Sun City, find it tougher to say they ain't gonna ski in snowtown. Well, most of them didn't have Sun City gigs, but a lot have condos in Aspen. As often happens, property triumphs over principle and convenience over conscience. In addition, the industry still cowers before America's perceived antipathy to gays. Though Hollywood's gay community is large and powerful, homosexuality is still the love that dare not speak its name. Hollywood is still Closetland.

And Aspen is still, for many of the richly famous, the place to be. Jack Nicholson will be there this winter, says his agent, "as a show of support | for the people of that community, which overwhelmingly defeated Amendment 2." Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, significant contributors to AIDS groups, say they are troubled by the vote but have no plans to move. Other fun couples -- Robert Wagner and Jill St. John, Chris Evert and Andy Mill -- are expected to be on view, somewhere between the chateaus and the inevitable pickets.

As in any good drama, ambiguities abound. Should out-of-staters take their ski dollars to antiabortion Utah? Should the voters of Denver, Boulder and Aspen, most of whom opposed the amendment, suffer for the attitudes of their neighbors? Tennis ace Martina Navratilova, the resort's most famous bisexual, supports a lawsuit against Amendment 2 but argues that a boycott would hurt local gays as much as the bigot brigade. Wellington Webb, Denver's first black mayor, finds analogy in civil rights history. "When some of us were trying to desegregate the South," he told Arsenio Hall last week, "we went south. We didn't boycott the South."

Different battles may require different strategies. "The radical right is targeting 35 states in the next two years for initiatives like Colorado's," says Sue Anderson, executive director of Denver's Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Oregon's heinous Measure 9, which declared homosexuality "abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse," lost on Election Day, though it was supported by 43% of the electorate -- the same percentage that voted nationwide for Bill Clinton. Antigay activists will try again, says Anderson, "and use Colorado's wording, because it worked."

But boycotting works too. Arizona lost an estimated $500 million in business in the two years after it defeated a motion to declare Martin Luther King Jr.' s birthday a state holiday. The voters finally decided that an extra day off was preferable to permanent blacklisting. A successful boycott of Colorado would send a muscular message to other states considering such an initiative: Don't. "Sanctioning discrimination," says Anderson, "is bad for business." Does it really matter, then, if a boycott is also bad for the pleasure of Hollywood royalty?

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Los Angeles and Joni H. Blackman/Denver