WASHINGTON — While gay leaders evaluated dozens of national strategies to consider in the fight for gay rights during the Creating Change conference earlier this month in St. Louis, many advocated for a greater focus on state and local issues.

The 17th annual conference, held Nov. 11-14 by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, included about 2,500 organizers from gay rights groups across the country reviewing legislative strategies for the upcoming years.

The conference came on the heels of a national election in which 11 state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage — and in some instances any legal recognition of gay relationships — were overwhelmingly approved by voters.

Gay activists said similar amendments are likely in Mississippi and Florida, and the Massachusetts Legislature will once again debate and vote on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which is currently legal in that state.

Lorri L. Jean, executive director of the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center, said the greatest gains for gay rights over the years came at the state and local level and in the courts.

Jean, a former executive director of the task force, offered up California’s General Assembly and new Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a model of a state government favorable to gay rights.

“Our assembly is primarily comprised of Democrats and moderate Republicans, and there’s not a ton of anti-gay fervor,” Jean said. “We have an unprecedented gay caucus in our assembly, and we have a Republican governor who is not anti-gay and has shown himself to be more responsive to our issues than our former governor, Gray Davis, even though [Davis] had courted us for years.

But Jean added that she is concerned an anti-gay marriage amendment might be introduced and put to California voters in 2006.

Some activists pointed to Connecticut as another example of a state taking on gay rights issues in a local and measured way. The Connecticut Legislature may consider a civil unions bill when it reconvenes in January.

Anne Stanback, president of Love Makes a Family, a Connecticut-based gay rights group, said she also expects to see a marriage bill introduced. Stanback said same-sex marriage bills have been introduced in previous years but have never made it out of committee.

“While Connecticut has a long history of providing equality for all its minority citizens, we began the debate over gay rights in the legislature and that has been helpful to us,” said Stanback, who attended the weekend conference.

“But every state has to look at its political realities and given what we thought we could do in Connecticut, we thought ours was a very productive strategy in part because it is an opportunity to involve constituents in terms of building a grassroots movement. It’s hard to do that when the issue is being played out in the courts,” she added.

Keith Boykin, a White House special assistant in the Clinton administration and a member of the National Black Justice Coalition, said it’s critical for gay activists to have a multi-pronged strategy — pushing for marriage, fighting for civil unions — similar to tactics employed during the black civil rights struggle of the 1950s and ‘60s.

“Pushing for civil unions, some would say, seems like accepting second-class citizenship, but we need a multi-pronged strategy,” said Boykin, who attended the meeting.

“It’s not an either-or strategy. During the civil rights struggle, Dr. King pushed for a more moderate agenda than Malcolm X, but both men needed each other in many ways. For civil unions to have been taken seriously, marriage had to be pushed to the agenda,” he added.

Transgender issues were also addressed during the conference. Mara Keisling, the founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, credited trans rights activists with keeping a grassroots focus, adding that she hoped to see a continuation of that approach next year.

“While it is important, we don’t believe that Washington is where it all happens,” said Keisling, who attended the meeting. “Next year, we would like to see a lot of local activists working on access to homeless shelters for trans people and we’d like to see people working on transgender prisoner issues.”

Keisling added that she would like to see transgendered people and their allies work to include protections based on gender identity and expression into the sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws of 10 states. Currently, 14 states prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and only four offer protections based on gender identity and expression.