A revolution in the states: gay and lesbian candidates are campaigning for state-level offices like never before. And even where conservative attitudes dominate, they're finding it a friendly experience.

While speaking at a campaign rally to a gathering of the Curmudgeons--a group of older, mostly retired, and mostly Republican men in Colorado--longtime lesbian activist Donna Red Wing finally heard the question she was expecting. Or so she thought. "When are you gonna talk about the L word?" one of the men asked.

Red Wing, a candidate for the district 25 legislative seat in Colorado's house, responded by saying that while her sexual orientation shouldn't be an issue that, yes, she is a lesbian. "Yeah, we know that," the man shot back. "We want you to talk about being a liberal."

"I thought, Wow, things have changed," Red Wing says. Indeed, while out on the campaign trail in her rural district, a picturesque 100-mile stretch of western Jefferson County, Red Wing, 54, who shares a Colorado mountain home with her partner of 17 years, Sumitra Red Wing, has found that her sexuality has played only a small role.

A well-known activist who was once field director for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and more recently served as the gay liaison to Howard Dean's presidential campaign, Red Wing has joined a new breed of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered state-level political candidates. Spurred in part by antigay state lawmaking, they are raising record amounts of money to run for seats in traditional]y conservative districts nationwide. And surprisingly, voters seem largely unconcerned about their sexual orientations. At a time when New Jersey governor James McGreevey is resigning at least in part because he lied about being gay, gay politicians in this new generation, seasoned by years of activism and social justice work, are making no secret of who they are. And they're garnering broad support, from community leaders who see state lawmakers as having the most potential to make a difference in the gay lights movement.

"A lot of serious attention is being paid right now to people elected at the state level," says Chuck Wolfe, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which supports openly gay candidates. "The questions of ballot initiatives, amendments regarding marriage and civil unions, and all kinds of various legislation have brought the importance of state representation into focus."

Brad Sears, director of the Williams Project on Sexual Orientation Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, agrees. "Despite the advances, particularly in the last 20 years, we're still woefully underrepresented in state and local governments," he says. "I think it's important that people who are directly impacted by [gay rights] decisions are represented, both in policy-making and in public-speaking positions."

For its part, the Victory Fund has doubled its efforts to help elect out candidates in state races this year, designating the 26 states that currently have no openly gay officials in their legislatures as "Horizon" battlegrounds where added resources are being committed. The Victory Fund provides candidates with dollars as well as direction, but it's the former that's the key, says Wolfe, noting that "money moves their message."

That certainly was the case for Missouri's Jeanette Mott Oxford. "The Victory Fund was tremendously important in raising the funds that were necessary for me to win my primary," she says, adding that she was able to send out more than double the number of direct mailings to voters than her Democratic opponents in the battle for the nomination to Missouri's 59th district house seat. Oxford, 50, who lives with her partner of 20 years, Dorothy Gannon, on St. Louis's near south side, lost the 2000 primary for the same seat by just 64 votes to Russ Carnahan, son of then-governor Mel Carnahan. But Russ Carnahan has moved on to run for the U.S. House of Representatives seat being vacated by the retiring Dick Gephardt, and now Oxford appears poised for victory. "If I don't win in November, it will be utter shock," she says. "There could be a big backlash around the gay and lesbian thing, but we really do have a lot of gay and lesbian households and allies in the district."

Oxford, a longtime social justice advocate, won her August 3 primary in the same election in which Missouri voters overwhelmingly passed a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, further illuminating the need for her presence in state government, she says. "It'll be much harder for state legislators to pass crappy bills about lesbian and gay people when they have to interact with an out lesbian every day," she argues. "Ultimately, what I've really learned about life is that to have better public policy, we have to break down prejudice at all levels."

Nicole LeFavour, a Democratic candidate for Idaho's house district 19 seat, also hopes to bring a much-needed lesbian presence to her state's legislature. "We have 105 representatives and senators, and not one of them is openly gay," LeFavour says. "Even by the most conservative estimates of our population, we should have somebody in there. Obviously [gay] issues are such a tiny portion of what legislators deal with, but some years it's more than others. And I do hope to be there and look someone in the eye when they say some of the things they say."

A teacher, writer, and activist, LeFavour, 40, shares a home in Boise's north end with her partner of four years, Carol Growhoski. Education, conservation, tax policy, and women's issues have been the cornerstones of her public advocacy work since she arrived in her district 14 years ago, but most of the media coverage of her campaign has focused on the fact that she is a lesbian, she says. And as with Red Wing and Oxford, that hasn't seemed to have much of an impact. "The voters in my district just want to know how I'm going to work for them on the [everyday] issues," she says.

Some candidates are actually welcoming the added media attention their sexual identities can bring. Amanda Simpson is running for Arizona's 26th district house seat as the first transgendered person ever nominated for state-level office in Arizona. "I'm actually hoping that the media gives me a little bit more airtime," says Simpson, a divorced 43-year-old Tucson resident who transitioned from male to female five years ago while a senior engineer at defense giant Raytheon, where she's worked for 21 years. "For the most part, the media doesn't pay much attention to legislative races--certainly not the attention I think they deserve and they demand down here," she says.

Simpson, a Chicago native, currently serves on the Tucson Commission on LGBT Issues. She decided to run for office out of frustration over a wide range of bad policy decisions in her state, she says. "I'm not just talking LGBT issues," she says. "I mean, I'm sorry, just because we're the 48th state to enter the union doesn't mean we have to be ranked as the 48th in everything else, such as education and access to health care."

Education is also a big issue in Charlie Smith's campaign for South Carolina's house of representatives district 119. The Democratic candidate says that his being openly gay "is not even a factor" with most voters he talks to. As in the other state races, they seem much more concerned about larger issues, he says: "We've lost 70,000 jobs in the last three years."

Smith's Republican opponent is John Graham Altman III. Often referred to as the "Jesse Helms of South Carolina," Altman has sponsored antigay legislation and publicly denounced gays. He defeated Smith for the stone seat in 2002. But Smith, a 44-year-old Charleston-based real estate developer, is confident that history won't repeat itself. "I got 41% of the vote last time, and we're actually already polling a little bit higher than that," he says. "For those who try to use [my sexual orientation] as a weapon against me, that's all they want to talk about. But those are not folks who'd vote for me anyway, so we really don't worry about that too much."

Red Wing says she's not worried either. "Being gay is just something that's a part of who you are; it's not the issue for voters," says the onetime Advocate Person of the Year. "I think that's a revolution, isn't it?" And it's an important one because it's taking place at the state level, she says. Surprisingly, for someone whose activism has garnered her "most dangerous" status in the eyes of many far-right politicians and organizations, Red Wing gives kudos to ultraconservatives, from whom she says we can learn a thing or two. "I hate to do this, but to take a page from the playbook of the Christian Coalition, 20 years ago they started running people for school boards and town councils," she says. "That's where they nurtured and grew politicians. Politics has to be from the grass roots up."

Allen is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.