The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights; Or, How the Right Divides Us

by Arlene Stein

Book Overview

Winner of the Ruth Benedict Prize The story of a small town's fight over LGBTQ+ rights that reveals how the far right weaponizes social issues to declare whose lives are valuable--and whose are... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807079537
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.7" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

A fascinating, thought-provoking study of small-town America

I had to read THE STRANGER NEXT DOOR for a Sociology class, and I must say that this is one of the more fascinating nonfiction books I've read yet. The author, Arlene Stein (who is a Sociology professor at Rutgers University, where I currently attend), spent some time in the mid-90s in an Oregon town she names Timbertown, and tries to understand what led this town to be torn apart by a divisive argument about gay rights when there was no apparent queer population in town to speak of (and if there were any gays, they usually kept a low profile). Basically the town is divided into two groups: those who support a particular measure to try to curb gay rights, and those who do not. It is a thought-provoking book, and also rather frightening to read: the actions some of these people take against the "other" border on hate violence, and lead some people to compare the actions of the pro-antigay-measure people to Nazis. It is always rather scary to see what happens when fear coupled with ignorance is allowed to run rampant in these kinds of small, closely-knit communities. And yet Stein thankfully never comes off as overly smug or judgmental (though she clearly has her liberal leanings---and she's a lesbian herself): she makes an admirable effort to try to understand both sides of the issue, and what kind of circumstances, whether economic or religious, might have led these ordinary folk to turn against homosexuals the way they did. The end result of her painstaking field research is a well-written, fascinating, compelling book that might astonish you with its insights about what leads ordinary people to suddenly turn against each other. This is no dull academic lecture in writing, trust me: you won't be bored by this at all. Highly recommended.

Could have been a novel!

Inherent in the Fundamenalist view is the assumption that ethical principles come together harmoniously and do not meaningfully conflict. Indeed, conflict is seen as a test of one's ability to adhere to these moral priniciples. Thus, Fundamentalism knows the answers and isn't particularly open to persuasion--or so it would seem. However, Stein's sympathetic interviews reveals a different story about the Fundamentalists who launched a charter amendment against 'special rights' for gays and lesbians in a small, Oregon town where there weren't many gays and lesbians to speak of. Here, we meet Christian Fundamentalist women who weren't particularly close minded; felt uncertain about their principles; regretted the conflict they engendered; and, in some sense, felt an unacknowledged sense of shame. For reasons which are probably not very far from view, they just couldn't accept pluralism--mostly because it didn't speak to their insecurities. Those seeking insight into the present turn in American and feminist politics would do well to read and take heed!

Anytown, USA

It tooks about four pages to suspect that TImbertown is the town in which I live -- and a couple of more references for me to confirm it. I picked up the book not so much because it was a dicourse on homosexuality and politics but because it addressed the grass roots philospohy and tactics of a conservative Christian political movement. Being neither gay or very conservative, I found the book to be a well written insight into community relations, politics, gay politics, gay non-politics, the devlopment of evagelicalism in the West, and the politics of the far right. I also had a great time trying to figure out who the pseudonyms were. This aside --the Timbertown situation is representative of a lot of small town in many states

Manufactured Conflict Makes Real Conflict

Arlene Stein is a professor of sociology who moved to Oregon in 1994, a time when rural Oregon was in the surprising position of coming to terms with homosexuality. She tells how this happened to "Timbertown" (a pseudonym, and she has used pseudonyms for all the town residents) in The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights_ (Beacon Press), a balanced history of a contemporary controversy. Timbertown was a logging community, and in the eighties the economy turned bad for it. Newcomers came to the region, some in communes, and in the bad economy, didn't always get along with the long term timbermen. Among the newcomers were homosexuals, not many, to be sure, and most of them were women who blended into the community so that most others hardly knew. When the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA), an outside agency powered by Christian fundamentalism, came, Timbertown started fracturing. Timbertown was hardly teeming with the sort of gay population that scared the OCA, those that could be found in the larger, more open cities of the area, the hypermasculine muscleboys in leather, who dared to flaunt aggressive sexuality. Though a spokesman for the OCA could warn that the intent of homosexuals "... is to take over the state of Oregon and turn it into Queer Nation," no one in Timbertown could have seriously thought that of any fellow residents. The idea that homosexuals were going somehow to ruin government, or that homosexuality somehow weakens marriages (whose?), were never shown to have any factual foundations. But the OCA put a petition to put an anti-gay civil rights measure on an upcoming ballot, splitting the community into sides. This had bizarre and unexpected consequences. An exhibit based on the life of Anne Frank became politicized, with the OCA calling it "pro-homosexual propaganda." The valuable role of victimhood was sought by both sides, with the OCA unconvincingly arguing that they themselves were the persecuted minority, the equivalent of Jews in the Holocaust. The mayor of the town had to withdraw from the traditional annual prayer breakfast as it, too, became political rather than ecumenical. Children at school began to beat each other up depending on what sides their parents took on the issue. The few members of minority races in the town saw an increase in hostility, and although the newspaper and schools took an anti-racist attitude, the white majority who were losing jobs did what people always do, and found someone else to blame. There was no racial strife before the sexual issue started splitting people. Even more sadly, although the ballot measure passed with 57% of the vote, it accomplished little except the fracturing of Timbertown. In less than a year, there was an injunction against putting the measure into effect, a statewide antigay ballot failed, and U.S. Supreme Court ruled in ways that would make the measure a dead issue, but of course Timbertown could

Trouble in Timbertown

A social history of the political repercussions of an anti-gay coalition formed in a small town in Oregon in the mid 1990s to alter the town charter to prevent "special rights" from being granted to gay/lesbian citizens, "The Stranger Next Door," does a brilliant job of distilling the national discourse on gay and lesbian rights through a description of the pitched battle between conservatives and liberals for the hearts and minds of the citizens of "Timbertown." An often harrowing tale of the manipulation of a small town which has fallen on hard times by a conservative organizer, Ms. Klein's admirably balanced re-telling of the events leading up to the vote on the anti-gay referendum, bristles with memorable people caught in a web of intolerance. Short, concise, compelling, Ms. Klein introduces us to Christian evangelical ministers and their flocks vs. mainline liberal Presbyterians, rednecks vs. yuppies, business owners vs. unemployed mill hands, long-time residents vs. recent arrivals from California, and takes us through an increasingly bitter political fight that eventually polarizes the town into two bitter factions, and sets neighbor against neighbor in a fight where sexual orientation, once private becomes public. Along the way she discusses the stratgies undertaken by the opposing camps, such as the too-easy invocation of the Holocaust and Nazism as analogous to the situation in Timbertown by the liberal elite, and on the other side, the invocation of the Bible by born-again Christians as the ultimate authority on sexual behavior. There is also a particularly trenchant chapter which clearly illustrates the tendency of the media to respond only the most divisive stories and events, and thus fan the fires of hatred higher. Also worth the price of admission is a precise discussion of the various "creation tales" of homosexuality. For instance, there is the "essentialist" view of many liberals and parents of gays/lesbians, a view that insists that sexual orientation is purely genetic, a response that was perhaps partly developed to counter the conservative Christians' insistence that homomsexuality is a choice, and therefore a sin. She notes the essentialist view gets parents of homosexual children off the hook, and also, for liberals "normalizes" homosexuals as a natural category, thus making them worthy of political voice. Klein believes this view is a disservice to the truth and the multifarious ways in which sexual orientation may come about. For instance, she tells a lovely vignette of two women, both married with 6 children between them, who, without ever thinking through the "political" aspects of their attraction, leave their husbands and set up housekeeping in Timbertown. The peculiar and ironic tragedy of this couple is that until the trouble in Timbertown started, no one thought of them as lesbians, and neither had they ever gone out of their way to make it known. A profoundly sad book in the end. The intransigence on