1992 Jerry Knight Campaign Incident

by Michael Mahler, 1996

I am writing this because some people may not be aware of or may not remember Jerry Knight's gay-baiting campaign when he ran as the Republican candidate for State Assembly -1st district in 1992 against Democrat Linda Bebko-Jones (LBJ did win that election and has been re-elected since.)

Jerry Knight is currently running as the Republican candidate for County Executive (Erie County, PA) against Democrat incumbent Judy Lynch.

Let me begin by explaining that in 1992, I was the coordinator for the Erie chapter of the League of Gay and Lesbian Voters. I left LGLV to focus on the newsletter and am no longer a member of LGLV. I am a registered Democrat. Many lesbigay groups were newly coming into existence in that time period in Erie. The Erie chapter of LGLV had only been around since September of 1991.

In the spring of 1992, LGLV sent surveys to many candidates in several races in a several counties. Both Mr. Knight and Ms. Bebko-Jones received the voters survey, but only Bebko-Jones completed it and returned it. When the Primary edition was produced, Ms. Bebko-Jones received a relatively favorable rating based on her response, and Mr. Knight was shown as having no data. He has not held elected public office. He is currently on unpaid leave from Rep. Phil English's office, so we had no information to go on.

Just before the fall General Election, Mr. Knight circulated inflammatory, distorted and unauthorized material from the LGLV Voters Guide. He also did the same with materials from the League of Women Voters, who also publicly criticized him for this.

What made me personally so angry about this was Mr. Knight's disingenuous remarks that he was only "documenting" his opponent's position. (Never mind it wasn't accurate.) Somehow, it was important to him to subtly invoke homophobia against his opponent, yet his own views on lesbigay people weren't important enough to tell us when we had asked him a few months before that. This would be like refusing to answer a survey from the NAACP and then turning around and painting one's opponent in terms calculated to appeal to racists. If we're important enough to talk about, we're important enough to talk to!

As Erie's first publicly out lesbigay person, I received phone calls and appeared on the news. Some of the phone calls that I got were harassing, but they weren't too frequent and they weren't too extreme.

The day before Jerry Knight lost that election in November 1992, I received a message on my answering machine.

The message said: "Well faggot, you're invited to a big victory party tomorrow night at Republican Headquarters for Jerry Knight and afterwards in the parking lot, there'll be a good old fashioned gay-bashing, and you'll be the guest of honor."

Let me make some things clear. No, I don't think anyone from Knight's campaign had anything directly to do with this. Probably they would be surprised to have heard about this. I figured it was some pathetic character, and I was in no immediate danger, so it's not as if I was traumatized for life. Annoyed and angered, maybe. I am also a pretty self-confident person, so I might not have reacted as much as someone who hadn't been out.

Knight hasn't used any gay-baiting in the current campaign for County Executive, to the best of my knowledge. This leaves me with two rather repellant possible conclusions.

1) Jerry Knight is to some degree cloaking bigotry, because it isn't politically expedient to be quite so naked about it. Remember how well folks reacted to the Republican National Convention in 1992?

2) Jerry Knight exploited what he or his advisors thought was a market for homophobia and didn't genuinely believe his own campiagn materials.

Truth to tell, for a number of reasons, I think that #2 is both more likely and also more reprehensible.

Using lesbigay people as scapegoats for social problems is bad enough when it is personally believed in. To use hatred and fear of any group of people for personal or political gain is even worse when one knows better. If I believe that Jews are involved in some kind of worldwide conspiracy, then my anti-Semitic rantings are at least genuine. Hateful and harmful, but genuine. But to appeal to fear of a group of people when one knows better is worse. As the phone call I received shows, stirring up hatred is harmful regardless of the motivator's genuine opinions.