Twenty-five years ago, protestors and a vindictive defense attorney drove Judge Victor Carlson from the Superior Court bench in Anchorage, and destroyed his career, because he is gay.
I went to talk to him recently to gauge how much our community has changed. Last year, the Anchorage Assembly passed an equal rights ordinance, which still stands, unchallenged by the Christian right opponents who turned back three previous ordinances in 1976, 1993 and 2012.
As deep-voiced and dignified as ever, Carlson lives in retirement on the Delaney Park Strip in Anchorage, a couple of houses down from his husband. They've been together since 1989, but Carlson was unwilling to name the man in print for fear of repercussions from his co-workers.
Carlson thinks a lot less has changed than might appear on the surface.
Carlson grew up on a farm in Michigan and attended a one-room country school. But from an early age he realized he would be different from his parents. He knew he was gay, knew he would go to college and knew he wanted to live in Alaska.
After a stint in the Navy, serving on Adak, he arrived in Juneau in 1962 with a law degree and a job with the attorney general of the newly created state of Alaska. Opportunities were many. Before becoming a judge, he worked as a prosecutor in Fairbanks and, in 1969, organized the brand new Public Defender Agency, renting office space upstairs from a downtown Anchorage gun shop.
But by that time, he had already made a dangerous enemy.
As Anchorage's first borough attorney — the Greater Anchorage Area Borough was the predecessor of our current Municipality of Anchorage — Carlson helped Borough Chairman John Asplund in a fight to build the sewers that allowed the city to take its current form. Attorney Edgar Paul Boyko led the opposition, funded by conservative downtown leaders, with bitter antipathy against Carlson.
It's hard to grasp how vicious local politics could be in those days until you read the old newspaper articles. When Carlson became a Superior Court judge in 1970, Boyko wrote poison-pen newspaper columns about him in the All-Alaska Weekly.
Bokyo didn't call him gay — the closest he came was "peculiar" — but Carlson knew he had to be careful.
He tried hard to hide his sexuality. But dating women carried its own risks, including developing doomed relationships.
"I got engaged, and I decided that was just wrong," he said. "It would have been a very poor thing to do, and it would have hurt me, as well."
Carlson avoided the gay community and lived a lonely existence, but friends knew the truth and it leaked out. In 1984, he feared Boyko would come after him in his election to be retained on the bench, but nothing materialized.
Over the next few years, however, he felt he had to step forward because of the AIDS epidemic, supporting the Alaska AIDS Assistance Association.
"I was wary, but not scared," Carlson said. "I had decided that I really needed to live."
But as the head of the family court in Anchorage, overseeing judges handling some 3,000 divorce and other emotional cases a year, Carlson was vulnerable. Men who claimed he was unfair to them because he was gay organized by talk radio, put up picket lines in front of the courthouse with derogatory sexual references. They testified against him at a hearing of the Alaska Judicial Council.
"It gave some people license to say, 'I don't have to follow what you just said, judge, because you're a faggot,' " Carlson said. "I would look incredulously at them, because I was the one who had the gavel."
Wild Bill Nelson spent years driving around Anchorage with an RV and a trailer covered with vulgar signs attacking Carlson as a "faggot judge" to protest a decision about a gravel contract. Lavern Brooks, unhappy about his divorce decree, was sentenced to six years for hiring a man to murder Carlson, "because he was queer." (A reporter looked into the divorce and found the assets had been divided close to evenly).
In 1989, Boyko delivered the blow that forced Carlson out.
Boyko was defending a rogue Anchorage police officer, Frank Feichtinger, charged with official misconduct for using his position to trick teenage boys into making nude, sadomasochistic tapes. Boyko maintained that Feichtinger's sessions were part of an investigation to bring down a child sex ring of Anchorage VIPs — an investigation so secret he couldn't even to tell his police supervisors about it.
The trial became a weekslong circus with heavy media coverage. Boyko had no evidence to support his theory and the only VIP he named was Carlson. The police shot surveillance pictures through Carlson's windows but never found any cause for suspicion. The jury accepted Boyko's theory and acquitted Feichtinger. The next year, a state senator hired him again to secretly investigate Carlson.
After the trial, Boyko admitted to a reporter that he only made Carlson a public scapegoat because he didn't like him and was happy to destroy his reputation.
Carlson retired in 1991 rather than face a retention election he expected to lose, a decision he has sometimes regretted. He would have stayed on the bench another 15 years if he could. Instead he finished his career as a public defender, representing defendants in rural Alaska for the agency he had originally started.
All that happened not so long ago. And our new equal rights ordinance wouldn't have stopped any of it.
"Depending upon your church affiliation, we still have people who are thrown out of their homes when they come out, we still have people who are beaten up and discriminated against if they are thought to be gay," Carlson said.
We'll soon be debating these issues again, as religious conservatives argue anti-discrimination laws deny their freedom. The next fight is about speech — explicitly about wedding cakes, but symbolically about whether it is OK to oppose homosexuality.
Speech brought Carlson down. In my next column, I'll ask what we can or should do about that.
Charles Wohlforth's column appears three times weekly.
The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com or click here to submit via any web browser.