A Queer History of the United States (31 page)

By this time, however, conservative psychoanalysts had lost their battle. In December 1973—six months before the
Time
article—the American Psychiatric Association, after being lobbied by lesbian and gay activists and professionals within the organization, voted to formally drop homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The twenty thousand members were deeply divided, but the board voted 13–0. The
New York Times
headline stated, “Doctors Rule Homosexuality Not Abnormal.” A highly public discussion ensued. In a December 23, 1973,
New York Times
roundtable, psychoanalyst Irving Bieber, who disagreed with the APA vote, stated that he was “interested in the implications this has for children. . . . I can pick out the entire population at risk in male homosexuality at the age of five, six, seven, and eight. If these children are treated, and their parents are treated, they will not become homosexual.”

It was in this ambivalent social context, in which homosexuality was being simultaneously depathologized and viewed as the source of newly articulated threats to the family, that legal change began to happen. Mattachine members had picketed the White House and other federal buildings from 1965 to 1969, no doubt inspired by the African American civil rights marches. (Mattachine leader Frank Kameny’s use of the phrase “Gay Is Good” in a 1968 speech was clearly resonant of “Black Is Beautiful.”) But after Stonewall, gay rights activists—gay liberationists had little interest in specific legal issues—began to lobby to repeal sodomy laws and pass statutes outlawing discrimination against gays. By 1979, twenty states had repealed their sodomy laws, some willingly and others after legal battles. Arkansas did away with its sodomy law during a general revision of the state’s penal code, but outcry from clergy and conservatives was so great that it was reinstated. State senator Milt Earnheardt, arguing to reinstate the sodomy law, told the senate, “This bill is aimed at weirdos and queers who live in a fairyland world and are trying to wreck family life.” The new law criminalizing sodomy was passed unanimously.
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In 1975, voters in Massachusetts elected Elaine Noble to the state’s House of Representatives, making her the first openly lesbian or gay state legislator in U.S. history. Around the same time, activists were introducing nondiscrimination bills, misnamed by the press as “gay rights bills,” in towns, cities, and counties around the country. These laws—modeled on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, [or] national origin”—targeted discrimination based on actual or perceived sexual orientation. Liberal university cities passed the first such laws, starting with East Lansing, Michigan, in March 1972 and Ann Arbor, Michigan, in August. Larger cities, such as Seattle, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C., followed. By 1976, twenty-nine such laws had been passed in the United States.

The fight over the “gay rights” bill in Dade County, Florida, which includes Miami, became a pivotal turning point. On January 18, 1977, the county commission passed, by a 5 to 3 vote, an ordinance that would make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in employment, housing, or public services, including both public and private schools. Local Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Jews, along with other conservative groups, immediately rallied a movement to fight for repeal. Included in this coalition was Save Our Children, a newly formed Christian group founded by Anita Bryant. Bryant was a minor celebrity—a singer, entertainer, and former Miss America runner-up—and deeply religious. At Save Our Children’s first press conference on February 11, Bryant, backed by clergy from all of Miami’s major churches, announced she had proof that gays were “trying to recruit our children to homosexuality.”
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Because this was the first time that an ordinance prohibiting discrimination against gays was under appeal, and because Bryant was a colorful figure whose statements became increasingly outrageous, the fight in Dade County gained national attention. On June 7, in a special referendum with record-breaking voter turnout, the ordinance was repealed, 69.3 percent to 39.6 percent.
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After the win, Bryant announced she was going to start a national campaign against “gay rights laws.” But the energy generated by the Bryant campaign had already begun to spread. In April and May 1978, laws protecting gays from discrimination were repealed in St. Paul, Minnesota; Wichita, Kansas; and Eugene, Oregon, even though Bryant did not personally campaign for their repeal.

The tide turned a bit, back to favoring the rights of lesbian and gay people, when in November 1978 California’s Proposition 6—also known as the Briggs initiative, after its author, state senator John Briggs—was defeated. While the referendums to repeal nondiscrimination laws were reactive, Proposition 6 was proactive. It sought to prohibit lesbians and gay men, as well as any teacher who was found “advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting” homosexuality, from teaching in public schools. Lesbian and gay activists—including Harvey Milk—spent months organizing the “No on 6” campaign, which successfully defeated the proposition by a 58.4 percent to 41.6 percent margin.

The Dade County vote and Proposition 6 vote presented different challenges, but the main reason gay and lesbian activists were victorious in the latter was a striking difference in organizing styles. Pro-gay activists in Dade County brought in outside spokespersons, used a rhetoric of human rights, and countered religious arguments with secular ones. In California, the “No on 6” campaign, using the gay liberation–influenced slogan “Come Out! Come Out! Wherever You Are,” urged lesbians and gay men to explain to their families, neighbors, and fellow citizens how Proposition 6 would affect their lives. Citizens in California responded to a personal appeal that allowed them insight into the lives of lesbians and gay men, whereas the Florida vote was lost when people failed to be persuaded by intellectual or political arguments. The contrast between these two approaches is even more striking given that in both cases, the opposition focused on the threat of homosexuals to children.

These battles were a crucial moment in LGBT history for several reasons. They marked the beginning of a conservative political and religious backlash that is still happening today. This was also the point at which the gay and lesbian movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which was still in the process of defining itself, had to come to grips with two crucial, and connected, issues: its relationship to the new—and often overtly sexual—visibility of lesbians and gay men in political and popular culture, and its relationship to children and young people.

The social changes that had been unfolding since World War II were speeding up, and many Americans were frightened. The success of Save Our Children is viewed by many social historians as the beginning of the rise of the religious right; Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jim and Tammy Bakker supported Bryant in her campaigns. Some religious historians have even described America in the late 1970s as undergoing a Fourth Great Awakening. The outpouring of religious rhetorical fervor and conservative political activity was largely, as in past awakenings, a direct response to progressive social changes. These changes included not only the new visibility and acceptance of the gay movement, but also the push for equality for African Americans, the rise of feminism (and the bitter fight over the Equal Rights Amendment throughout the 1970s), the increasingly vocal demonstrations against the Vietnam war, the decline of America’s social and political status around the world, and the sexualization of popular culture.

By the mid to late 1970s, the LGBT movement had not only made progress but had radically changed how some Americans thought about homosexuality, heterosexuality, gender, gender roles, sexual activity, children’s sexuality, privacy, and most profoundly, sexuality itself. Other political movements had also made vital strides; although there were still serious problems in the United States, the lives of women and African Americans were better then before. But these changes were often about civil equality and the dignity of the individual. The gay liberation movement, lesbian feminism, and even the gay rights movement (which clearly articulated a politic of equality) were far more threatening to American society because they brought into question the underpinnings of sexual identity and sexual orientation. The idea that there could be “hidden homosexuals,” that a perceived sexual identity might be a mask, or that a person—child, parent, brother, friend—could suddenly “come out” was profoundly upsetting. The concept that heterosexuality and homosexuality might not be stable personal or social categories was even more disturbing. And on some level, homosexuality offered alternatives to heterosexuals that they found intriguing. That was why heterosexuals, caught between fascination and fear, experienced such ambivalence. A poster held by a lesbian at New York’s Gay Pride March in 1971 summed up this irony. It read:
WE ARE YOUR WORST FEAR. WE ARE YOUR BEST FANTASY
.

This ambivalence, starting during World War II and growing quickly, brought the persecuting society—and its most active and effective enforcers, the social purity groups—to the forefront. Bryant’s stated moral superiority was predicated on her being a woman and a mother, and in that context, her defense of the family and children made sense. This paradigm reinforced the stereotype that homosexuality—particularly male homosexuality—was extremely dangerous and threatening to morality and the country. During her Florida campaign, Bryant conjured society’s primal fear of the homosexual: “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children.”
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The enormous success of Bryant’s campaign and its resonance in American culture were due to her translation of the social purity movement’s rhetoric about protecting women from male lust—which no longer made sense now that women had more freedom and sexuality was viewed more positively—into a new moral imperative of protecting children from a more vehement expression of predatory male lust: homosexuality.

There was a reality in this situation that went unacknowledged by everyone involved. The spokespeople for Save Our Children could not mention it, and the lesbian and gay community, under the worst political attack they had ever experienced, did not want to talk about it. The reality was that there were young people, teens and even younger, who saw themselves as being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Their existence had been obvious in many of the novels from the 1950s, in
Rebel Without a Cause,
in the vibrant youth culture of the 1960s, in the writings of radical feminists such as Kate Millett and members of the Gay Liberation Front, and in the more recent gay youth groups. These young women and young men, girls and boys, were acknowledging their own sexuality and coming out at younger and younger ages. It may have been impossible at the time, given the heated social and political climate, but the events surrounding Save Our Children would have taken quite a different turn if the voices of LGBT youth—proclaiming that they were not in danger, but part of a larger LGBT community—had been publicly avowed. Their visibility would have been an antidote to the fear and lies of Bryant and her supporters.

The repeal of the ordinance in Dade County moved the issue of gay rights into the national spotlight, with tremendous antigay effects. After the Dade referendum, the story in
Time
was headlined “A ‘No’ to Gays”;
U.S. News and World Report
titled their story “Miami Vote: Tide Turning Against Homosexuals.”
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The “dangerous” connection between homosexuals and children was looming large in the public imagination, and much of this sentiment was enacted into law. States began passing laws that affected a range of family issues, such as banning lesbians and gay men from adopting children or becoming foster parents. Ironically, although the charges of recruitment and sexual molestation were aimed almost entirely at gay men, legal restrictions on adoption and foster care disproportionately affected lesbians. Bryant’s success with an emboldened religious right helped start a series of conservative policies—including economic, foreign, educational, military, social, and ecological policies under the Reagan administration—that had long-lasting negative effects for gay people.

Bryant and her supporters made no secret that they saw this fight as a religious battle for the Christian soul of America. In her book
The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality
, Bryant wrote: “To think we live in a country where freedom and right are supposed to reign, a country that boasts ‘In God we trust’ and has such a rich spiritual heritage; yet where internal decadence is all too evident, where the word of God and the voice of the majority is sometimes not heeded at all.”
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Many of the “culture wars” since that time—over guidelines for sex education, funding for the arts, decisions about military policies, judicial decisions about family law and, critically important, the federal response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic—have their roots in this basic conflict. It was a battle that pitted LGBT people’s demand for legal equality against mainstream culture’s religiously informed, if ever ambivalent, relationship to homosexuality.

The legal and cultural wars of the late 1970s brought LGBT communities across the nation together in powerful ways, including massive rallies and campaigns against this new wave of political repression. When the repression took a violent turn—as it did with the June 24, 1973, firebombing of a New Orleans gay bar, in which thirty-two people were burned to death, or the assassination of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978—the diverse LGBT community was able to put aside its internal differences to fight a common enemy.