Coaxing young gays to the polls: a new kind of gay-straight alliance hopes to get young voters involved in the 2004 presidential race.

As rapper Chuck D. entertained the crowd at the National Hip Hop Political Convention this summer in Newark, N.J., Dave Noble stood inside a nearby tent trying to convince a dozen young gay African-Americans that they are a powerful bloc who could make a noticeable impact in the 2004 presidential race. It wasn't going well.

"Wily are people of color not visible in the large national gay rights organizations?" he asked, crystallizing one of the young blacks' chief concerns. "Is it that [the groups] just don't speak to them, or are our national organizations that mistrusted?"

"I would vote for the latter," said Simone-Nicole Sneed, a dread-locked, pierced-lipped intern for the Young Voter Alliance.

"Nobody's talking about AIDS," offered Jonathan Kidd, a recent graduate of Yale University.

By the end of the event, which attracted 3,000 participants, it was clear to Noble, executive director of the gay political group National Stonewall Democrats, that gay rights groups have their work cut out for them if they want to convince young gay men and lesbians to become a political powerhouse in 2004.

Gay activists are not alone in the effort to register young votes. Stonewall has joined several other voter mobilization groups--including the National Hip Hop Action Committee and the League of Pissed Off Voters--in the Young Voter Alliance, a group using its $1.3 million budget to fan into a handful of battleground states with a combined 18-to 35-year-old voting population of more than 9 million. If just 3% of those young people had voted Democratic in 2000, Al Gore would have become president.

The benefits of activating younger voters are clear to gay activists like Noble. Older teens and 20-somethingss are far more supportive of equal rights for gay Americans than the electorate as a whole. A Harvard University study found that while 61% of the general population opposed same-sex marriage, 57% of college students supported marriage quality.

"Doesn't it give you hope?" asks Noble, referring to the small but determined movement of politically active gay and gay-friendly youths. "It gives me hope, free way that we can take advantage of the fact that we're being attacked to create all this coalition and goodwill. We're going to win this fight."

Noble confidently declares that by the fall Stonewall alone will have 100 college campuses tuned in to its Student Network within 11 battleground states: Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The network also hopes to make connections between straight and gay students, Noble says. "Young people's personal stories rids election year can bring pod ties out of the hypothetical," he says. It's a daunting task: A June poll by the Leon and Sylvia Panetta Institute in California found that only 19% of college students say that politics is "very relevant" to their lives.

Stonewall Student Network activists Allison Waith and Jon Hoadley say they believe both gay and straight students can be convinced to become involved due to the tortured outcome of the 2000 election. "I really felt, cheated, I really did," says Waith, "because my father had just become a citizen of the United Slates; it was his first vole." Hoadley recalls sitting on the living room sofa hack home in Vermillion, S.D., with his mother, to whom he was not yet out, eyes glued to the TV. "Having the win taken away, really, I felt seared," he says, "because I knew that this wasn't just insider politics in Washington; this was going to have an impact on me."

The Young Voter Alliance's strategy is highly sophisticated, involving an accessible central database of likely voters, another database of volunteers, peer-to-peer activism such as calling friends to get them to the polls, and street teams to reach out to other young people, particularly in economically depressed and minority communities. A team of Yale academics studying the effort says significant results are possible: In 2000 researcher Donald Green measured at, 8% to 12% increase in young-voter turnout In four university towns where young activists phoned their peers, asking them to get to the polls.

Ryan Friedrichs, 27, the Young Voter Alliance's campaign director and the only straight white male on his staff, knows that coalition-building is no picnic. "It's the most difficult kind of work, and we've been not nearly as good [at it] on the Left as they have been on the Right," he says.

Noble sees the alliance as an opportunity to move gay voters and their is sues "closer to the core" of the progressive and liberal movements and as a way to battle the Right's use of gay equality as a wedge issue.

Activating young voters may aim be a boon to older gay men and lesbians, says Adrienne Maree Brown, 25, program director for the League of Pissed Off Voters. "It" I was in that [baby boomer] age group, the first thing I would think is, Who am I writing my checks to?" says Brown, making a pitch for older voters to support the alliance's efforts, "I'm not going to write checks to John Kerry if he's not going to step up on my issues. But there are organizations that are galvanizing people to step up on their issues. You know, it's important to work with young gay people and make sure that they have all the resources that they need to do their work."

Stan has written for Ms., Mother Jones, arm The Washington Post.