Campaign fundraiser reception invitation, Herzenberg for Town Council, 1987

Campaign fundraiser reception invitation from 1987, Herzenberg for Town Council. Courtesy of Mark Donahue.

Campaign contribution thank-you note from 1987, Herzenberg for Town Council

Campaign fundraiser reception invitation from 1987, Herzenberg for Town Council. Courtesy of Mark Donahue.

Postcard invite to founding meeting of the Triangle Alliance, 1987

Invitation to attend Jan. 28, 1987 founding meeting of the Triangle Alliance. Postcard courtesy of Mark Donahue.

Joe Herzenberg tells it like it is...

Lambda, Carolina Gay & Lesbian Association Newsletter, page 1, October, 1986

Speech by Joe at the Triangle Lesbian and Gay March & Celebration in Durham on June 28, 1986

View or print as PDF in Lamdba archives

Marchers at 1986 Triangle Lesbian and Gay March & Celebration. Photo courtesy of NC Pride.

Lesbian and Gay Pride ‘86

Lambda, Carolina Gay & Lesbian Association Newsletter, page 2, April/May, 1986

Thanks to speakers at Lesbian & Gay Awareness Week 1986

Lambda, Carolina Gay & Lesbian Association Newsletter, page 12, April/May, 1986

Vote for Joe Herzenberg ad, 1985

Lambda, Carolina Gay & Lesbian Association Newsletter, page 8, October, 1985

"Gay-Baiting in Southern Politics," Southern Exposure, Sept/Oct 1985

Southern Exposure, Issue 13, Sept/Oct 1985.

By Joe Herzenberg





After being personally slimed by the hateful tactics of Jesse Helms' political machine during the 1984 Hunt-Helms Senate race, Joe wrote this article for Southern Exposure magazine's Fall 1985 issue. He cast light on how gay-baiting was a tactic used all over the South by the Republican Party in recent elections to scare up votes for its backwards, right-wing candidates.

Joe's article doesn't touch on his and Lightning Brown's own history as the most prominent targets attacked by gay bigots in North Carolina during 1984. He left that to his fellow gay activist Mab Segrest, who wrote a companion piece in the same issue titled "Anatomy of An Election."

"Anatomy of An Election," Southern Exposure, Sept/Oct 1985

Southern Exposure, Issue 13, Sept/Oct 1985.

By Mab Segrest

This article by gay activist and writer Mab Segrest appeared in Southern Exposure magazine's Fall 1985 issue. It provides a comprehensive look at how the Helms machine used shameful hate mongering against Joe, Lightning Brown, and the rest of North Carolina's gay and lesbian community to eke out Jesse's narrow 1984 re-election.

The inset of the article's second page is a reprint of a story that appeared in The Landmark, a virulently anti-gay publication printed in Chatham County, in June 1984, titled "Faggots Dominate Fourth Congressional District Convention." It was at this convention that Joe was elected as an openly gay Mondale delegate to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.

Sadly, this article is typical of the scurrilous bile that The Landmark published two or three times a month throughout 1984. It was distributed in regular editions of tens of thousands of free copies all over North Carolina, and its press run increased dramatically in the weeks leading up to Election Day. Every word of this hate-filled propaganda tool passing as a "newspaper" dripped with bigotry and prejudice.

"The faggots worked the crowd like maggots in a manure pile. They had their ducks in a row for the second time and the so-called Gay Rights resolution passed."

- The Landmark, June 7, 1984

The paper's homophobic publisher, Bob Windsor of Chapel Hill, was a cog in the machine of right-wing Helms backers. According to lyndonlarouchewatch.org, Windsor was being used by the political organization of extremist Lyndon LaRouche to spread anti-gay filth around the state and help ensure Helms’ re-election.

Former LaRouche security staffer Charles Tate "says he was told in early 1984 that work would be done on Helms's behalf. This was no surprise to Tate: he knew the security staff had been in touch with a top Helms aide for several years…Security staffers discussed sending an infiltrator into the Hunt campaign, but decided they could do the job best through undercover phone calls."

Posing as reporters for the black and gay press, LaRouche staffers made and taped phone calls to gay activists and civil rights leaders around the country who were backing Hunt. Articles based on distorted excerpts from the phone calls were then published in issues of The Landmark.

"The idea was to show that Hunt was getting substantial local and national support from constituencies disliked by many conservative Democrats…At least some of the tapes used by The Landmark came from LaRouche's security staff.

In early March 1984, a LaRouchian phoned Virginia Apuzzo, director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, pretending to be a news reporter. Charles Tate says he heard the call being made and "saw the tape recorder running." A transcript of Apuzzo’s remarks appeared in the March 29 issue of The Landmark, which also included excerpts from a phone conversation with Lightning Brown, a gay activist in Chapel Hill.

Brown says he received two calls. The first was from Grant Duay, a supposed reporter for a gay weekly, the New York City News. Brown said that Duay "asked about my fund raising for Hunt. The details ended up in The Landmark right away—it was frightening." Duay was in fact a notorious LaRouche operative who had previously used the New York City News as his cover for interviewing and taping political opponents of LaRouche. (In 1986 Duay would be arrested in Manhattan as part of a homosexual child pornography ring.)

Brown's second call was from the black LaRouchian. "I told him I felt sorry for the publisher of The Landmark and that I had prayed for him," said Brown, who is a Quaker. "My remark later appeared in The Landmark. It was supposed to prove I was a devil worshipper."

Landmark publisher Windsor was in close contact with the LaRouchians throughout that spring. He accompanied Tom Allred, Hunt's LaRouchian opponent in the Democratic primary, on a trip to Raleigh. "We toured the legislature and I introduced him to Liston Ramsey, speaker of the house, and many other people,” Windsor wrote in a front-page article about Allred.

In a 1987 phone interview Windsor said he had also attended a meeting held to recruit North Carolina conservatives to run on the LaRouche slate, Windsor claimed that a number of his conservative friends had contributed money to the NDPC (National Democratic Policy Committee – one of LaRouche’s national political organizations), including one $50,000 contribution.

- LaRouche and the New American Fascism, by Dennis King, Chapter 15 - LaRouche and the Reagan Revolution, from www.lyndonlarouchewatch.org)"

Besides running made-up stories that slandered Joe and Lightning in every way possible, including accusations that they had started a Chapel Hill NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) chapter and were secretly "porno kings," The Landmark also published their home addresses and did everything possible to incite violence against the two of them.

No wonder, as Segrest recounts in her article, that "Brown and Herzenberg were subjected to more than a dozen separate incidents of intimidation, vandalism and harassment…for their work within the Democratic Party."

In a 1984 interview with the Independent Weekly when Joe and Lightning were awarded two of the Indy's first-ever Citizen Awards, Lightning told of how "two people even threatened to kill me on Rosemary Street." Joe called the attacks "very disruptive and at times painful." Asked if he had been scared, he admitted, with a subtlety that testified to his courage, "At moments."

At the time "Anatomy of An Election" was published in Southern Exposure, Mab Segrest served as coordinator of North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence. Earlier versions of her article appeared in Gay Community News and The Front Page.

Citizen Awards 1984 - Lightning Brown and Joe Herzenberg: Personal Dignity

North Carolina Independent, Dec. 22, 1984, Inaugural Citizen Awards



Lightning Brown and Joe Herzenberg: Personal Dignity

Most of us experienced the ugliness of the 1984 political races from a safe distance. We didn't like all the name-calling on TV but, heck, the mud wasn't flying directly at us, and we could simply turn off the tube when it got too thick.

Joe Herzenberg and Lightning Brown couldn't do that. Every few weeks during the height of the election season they read trash about themselves in a scandal-rag called The Landmark which is published in Chatham County and circulates widely around the state. The rest of the state's press finally repudiated Landmark editor Bob Windsor when he told vicious lies about Jim Hunt. But no such support came to Lightning and Joe.

For the last decade the two of them have been involved in every good cause in Chapel Hill. Joe, who is writing a biography of former UNC President Frank Porter Graham, served on the town council. Lightning, a computer programmer for the dental school, is currently vice-chair of the town's planning board and a member of the Democratic state executive committee.

Both were active in the Hunt for Senate campaign, especially in the gay community. When Bob Windsor found out, he published many pictures of the two and printed their home addresses. He accused them of being child molesters, implied they are porno kings and called them dozens of foul names.

And during the second U.S. Senate debate, Jesse Helms himself got into the act, invoking their names before an enormous television audience as if they were evil villians.

Through it all, Lightning, 37, and Joe, 43, showed immense courage. They stuck with the Hunt campaign (even though Hunt never denounced the attacks on them) and were the most visible representatives of the gay minority scapegoated by right-wingers. They did this despite the false rumors, the public notice when they didn't want it, the physical threats.

Lightning says the attacks were "political terrorism. They were extremely painful. They were evil and destructive gossip. Two people even threatened to kill me on Rosemary Street."

Joe says the attacks were "very disruptive and at times painful." Was he scared? "At moments."

And yet Lightning and Joe persisted. They organized Chapel Hill's famous East Franklin Street precinct as thoroughly as ever before and continued to raise funds for Hunt. Instead of hiding from Windsor's camera and Helms' innuendo, they remained in the public eye as campaign activists.

In 1984, candidates make only veiled appeals to the racism of voters. But gay and lesbian people - hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians - are fair game for name-calling and out-and-out threats.

That vile practice is not over. Though more and more North Carolinians know gays and lesbians at work and as friends, it will be a long time before that knowledge leads to acceptance. Meanwhile, the reaction from extremists will continue.

The public courage and personal dignity of Joe Herzenberg and Lightning Brown have done much to advance the time when this political terrorism will end. Too few people spoke forcefully on their behalf: Their public ordeal was, ironically, a lonely one. Lightning Brown says, "I haven't been living my own life for the past year. I fall back on some foundation of individual personhood when I can't rely on anything else."

Many people relied on him and Joe Herzenberg in 1984.

Joe as an openly gay Mondale delegate to the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco

In the summer of 1984, Joe went to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Joe had previously attended the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami, along with his friend and colleague from Tougaloo College, John Dittmer, as an alternate delegate from Mississippi.

This time around, Joe had been elected from N.C.’s 4th congressional district as an openly gay Mondale delegate. Joe was one of only 65 openly gay delegates, alternates, and committee members in attendance. As recently as 1976, the number of openly gay delegates to the Democratic National Convention was four.

Joe saved this Mondale campaign sign from the 1984 Democratic National Convention.

On Sunday, July 15, Joe marched with his fellow delegates and alternates as the guests of honor at the head of a parade of 100,000 gay men, lesbians, and their supporters in the second ever National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights. They marched from the Castro district up Market Street to the George Moscone Center, where the convention would take place later that week.

Bobbi Campbell, the featured speaker in this video, was a gay activist and San Francisco's most prominent AIDS sufferer, first diagnosed in 1981. He would die of AIDS exactly one month after the march, on August 15, 1984.

It was not the first national gay and lesbian march (which took place in Washington, D.C. in 1979, in the wake of Harvey Milk’s assassination), or the biggest (three years later, in October, 1987, between 200,000 and 500,000 marchers would return to D.C.).

But this day, more than any other, was a political coming out for the gay liberation movement. It signaled that gays and lesbians were a force to be reckoned with in national Democratic politics, and Joe must have been thrilled to be marching at the front of the line.

Gay Awareness Week 1984: Gay Visions of a New World

Lambda, Carolina Gay Association Newsletter, page 1, April/May, 1984

Gay Republican addresses state conference despite rumblings

Lambda, Carolina Gay Association Newsletter, page 2, April/May, 1984

Life in the South - The Landmark has recently taken on the subject of homosexuality

Lambda, Carolina Gay Association Newsletter, page 7, March, 1984

N.C. Lesbian & Gay Democrats Organize

Lambda, Carolina Gay Association Newsletter, page 2, May/June, 1983


(Editor's note - Although not mentioned in this article, Joe and Lightning Brown were key organizers and co-founders of the Lesbian & Gay Democrats of North Carolina.)

Gay Democratic Club?

Lambda, Carolina Gay Association Newsletter, page 2, November, 1982

The organizing that grew out of Lightning and Joe's efforts to form a gay Democratic club in Orange County led to a meeting of approximately twenty activists from across the state on March 27, 1983 at the N.C. Gay and Lesbian Conference in Chapel Hill, and the subsequent founding of the Lesbian and Gay Democrats of North Carolina.

Joe at Gerry and Pamela Cohen's wedding

Photo courtesy of Pamela Farmer Cohen.

Lightning Strikes Town Council

Lambda, Carolina Gay Association Newsletter, page 3, October/November, 1981

Lightning Brown, a local member of the gay community, is currently running for a seat on the Town Council here in Chapel Hill…

Cont’d as PDF in Lamdba archives

Joe’s first campaign for public office, 1979

Campaign flyer from Joe’s first Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen race, 1979

During Joe's first unsuccessful campaign for the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen (later re-named the Town Council), in 1979, he came in fifth in the race to fill four seats. He was not publicly out at this time, although as one longtime observer of the Triangle's gay community claimed when interviewed in 2000 by Chris McGinnis as part of Listening For A Change: A History of Gay Men and Transgender People in the South, "everyone knew Joe was gay."

Following the election, partially because of his status as the runner up with the highest vote total, Joe was appointed to fill Gerry Cohen’s unexpired term as Alderman, when Cohen stepped down to run for Mayor. He served two years in office, but would lose his race for re-election in 1981, the same year his partner, Lightning Brown, also ran unsuccessfully for the Board.

Kathie Young and Joe - New Year’s Eve, 1978

Kathie Young & Joe - New Year’s Eve, 1978