Gillian Frank. Journal of the History of Sexuality. Volume 22, Issue 1, January 2013.
On 18 January 1977, at a public hearing in Miami before the Board of Commissioners of Dade County, Florida, opponents and proponents of an ordinance that would prohibit discrimination against lesbians and gay men in the areas of housing, public accommodations, and employment squared off. The small contingent of gay rights activists supporting the ordinance was vastly outnumbered by hundreds of Baptists who arrived on buses chartered by two local churches. Bearing signs such as “God Says No. Who Are You to Be Different?” and “Protect Our Children, Don’t Legislate Immorality for Dade County,” these activists packed the Dade County Courthouse Commission chambers and filled the hallway outside, loudly jeering at those with whom they disagreed. Both the conservative evangelical Christians and the gay rights advocates were in agreement about one thing: the consequence of the antidiscrimination ordinance would shape the ability of gay men and lesbians to be integrated into public life—and thus, the very definition of citizenship was at stake.
“It is a peril to the nation,” argued those challenging the gay civil rights ordinance, including celebrity Anita Bryant, renowned at the time as the national spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission and for her bestselling pop albums. At the hearing, Bryant claimed her right to control “the moral atmosphere in which my children grow up” and insisted that the state’s support of gay civil rights infringed upon her status as a parent. She declared to the Metro Dade commissioners: “God gave mothers the divine right to reproduce and a divine commission to protect our children, in our homes, business, and especially our schools.” Children, homes, and schools were endangered, she later asserted, because “homosexuals cannot reproduce—so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America.” Robert Brake, a Catholic and a conservative Coral Gables city commissioner, concurred with Bryant. Making clear his stance that homosexuals deserved no public visibility or rights, Brake averred that homosexuals ought “to go into their closets, in their bedrooms, in their privacy and take care of themselves there.” Together their statements appealed to the powerful belief that all children ought to be heterosexual and that society had a stake in preventing homosexuality in children.
Appropriating civil rights rhetoric and conflating it with the rhetoric of child protection, these antigay activists described their own investments in the following way: “The civil rights of parents: to save their children from homosexual influence.” This language signals a connection that historians have only begun to excavate: conservative opposition to gay rights evolved alongside its opposition to African American civil rights in the 1970s. A strong emphasis on child protection ran through white conservative opposition to both racial and sexual minorities that helped legitimize and popularize conservative ideas and activism. In contrast, gay activists’ minority rights-based claims operated in tension with analogous claims made by African Americans—a tension that derived from two factors: a church-based sexual conservatism among African Americans; and the supposed ability to publicly recognize racial identity, but not sexual identity, based on visible markers. These dynamics underpinned the dramatic repudiation of gay rights in Dade County in 1977 and have framed debates on sexual rights since.
Anita Bryant and the organization to combat gay rights that she represented, called Save Our Children (SOC), are infamous as catalysts for the backlash against gay rights in the 1970s, but the history of this group, which is used as a touchstone in histories of conservatism and sexuality, is only beginning to be understood. Analyzing the racial origins of SOC’s activism and the gay rights response to it in the 1970s reveals a migration of conservative ideas and activists from race-based conflicts to gender- and sexual-based conflicts. SOC’s discourse of child protection embodied a protean logic of family privacy against queer sexuality. That strategy was, in part, learned from southern US resistance to desegregation, dating back to the Civil War, which used the language of privacy and family protection to address issues of race. In Florida, popular resistance to the court-ordered busing of children to achieve racial integration in schools saw a continuation of long-standing fears about interracial sexual contact among youth and set the stage for battles over racial equality that would directly inspire SOC’s 1977 antigay campaign.
To trace the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, it is necessary to study the Save Our Children campaign within three overlapping contexts: antibusing campaigns, anti—Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) struggles, and antigay campaigns. Historians of conservatism have noted how, during the 1970s, conflicts over racial integration and the ERA movement, which sought unsuccessfully to enshrine women’s equality in the US Constitution, enabled a white constituency to imagine themselves as part of a “silent majority” opposed to such changes. The racialized and gendered identity of the silent majority also formed the bedrock of antigay movements, as did the claim that these groups were saving “our children.” The language of child protection and majoritarianism acted as ballasts to the civil rights claims of women, gays, and African Americans by allowing conservatives to undertake a rearguard action against minority rights and broaden their appeal to a growing cadre of fellow travelers by linking four issues: parents’ rights, sexuality, race, and gender.
SOC was successful in Dade County and nationwide because it drew energy, ideas, and activists from contemporaneous conflicts over school integration and the ERA that rocked Florida and the nation in 1977. The group’s ability to forge together racial and sexual politics was profound: within six months of its founding, SOC defeated the gay civil rights ordinance in Dade County and helped to defeat the ratification of the ERA in Florida. Within a year, antigay rights campaigns in three cities, all of which were endorsed by SOC, based their rhetoric and strategies on the SOC template and successfully overturned municipal gay civil rights ordinances. SOC’s activism informed countless other attacks on gay rights, most notably the 1978 Briggs Initiative, which sought to prevent homosexual teachers from working in California schools. This backlash against gay rights occurred at the moment Dade County schools and schools nationwide were being resegregated. Though SOC’s activism invoked racial conflicts, its appeal was not simply confined to white communities or to a single religious denomination. Antigay activism also crossed racial lines to African American and Latino communities, allowing for the formation of multiracial and multifaith conservative coalitions around narrowly defined issues of sexual morality. This tactic, moreover, became a template for emerging conservative coalitions in the 1970s. Following SOC’s lead, these coalitions placed the maintenance of sexual boundaries at the center of a political agenda that in the 1980s came to be known as “family values politics.”
In September 1970 R. A. Mcavoy, president of the Miami Springs Civic Association, wrote a telegram to President Richard Nixon and implored him to “send a personal representative to Dade County, Florida to sense the temper of what was once the Silent Majority. There is truly no prejudiced racist people. The conditions in the predominately black schools are absolutely unacceptable to a people whose moral standards are so vastly different. The people really will not send their children into such an environment, not even when the environment has been created in a neighborhood school which was once respectable.” In the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court decision, courts nationwide had implemented busing students to schools outside of their neighborhoods as a means of integration. The above letter signals how, in Florida, busing set the stage for legal and cultural conflict over the meaning and implementation of racial equality in the 1970s. Mcavoy’s letter, indicative of the racial politics of the day, begins to reveal how the rhetorical force of SOC’s campaign against gay rights was over a decade in the making. This plea to Nixon was also emblematic of how white Americans symbolically used children to erase accusations of racism by moving the discussion of busing away from systemic inequality and toward the putative best interest of a child’s education, which coincided with maintaining the status quo. The image of the imperiled child also gave force and direction to SOC’s antigay rhetoric. Battles over busing, as Mcavoy’s letter indicates, were articulated through the idea of the “silent majority,” a term coined by Richard Nixon in 1969 in his attempt to define a new conservative electorate and subsequently taken up by antibusing, anti-ERA, and antigay activists hoping to convey that their privileged status was being unfairly imperiled while helping to constitute a conservative white heterosexual identity.
President Nixon’s carefully constructed opposition to busing informed how antibusing activists in Florida articulated what Matthew Lassiter describes as a “color blind’ discourse of suburban innocence that depicted residential segregation as the class-based outcome of meritocratic individualism rather than the unconstitutional product of structural racism.” In March 1970 Nixon addressed the nation and railed against court-imposed busing. He demanded from Congress legislation that would put a moratorium on new busing practices. Nixon’s address on busing, timed to impact the midterm elections, borrowed from antibusing activists a specific language that helped solidify the perception that white middle-class entitlements and lifestyles were imperiled by civil rights and by court interference. He characterized busing as “forced,” while desegregation was associated with the “massive disrupting of existing school patterns” and “the doom of the neighborhood school.” Opponents of busing in Florida, like their counterparts nationwide, countered the language of the courts and civil rights activists who named racial inequalities. They did so through their own emphasis on child protection, parents’ rights, and preserving neighborhoods—a language whose racial logic was as conspicuous as the absence of explicit racial terminology. Nixon’s remarks, which were echoed by white parents across the United States, thus furthered a process, described by Lassiter, as one whereby “millions of white homeowners who had achieved a residentially segregated and federally subsidized version of the American Dream forcefully rejected race-conscious liberalism as an unconstitutional exercise in social engineering and an unprecedented violation of free-market meritocracy.”
Between 1970 and 1972 Florida became the stage for a national battle over school busing, one that placed child protection at the center of debates over racial integration and the sanctity of white neighborhoods. In Florida school desegregation had taken place slowly and partially, and by 1970 Dade County schools remained largely segregated. Like other urban centers around the nation, Miami had undergone a process of “white flight.” Many white families in Miami had migrated from urban centers to all-white suburbs in response to a growing African American presence and waves of Cuban and Caribbean immigration during the 1960s and 1970s. Busing threatened to upend these racial divides between suburban and urban neighborhoods. As with other cities, class inflected busing debates. Working-class parents in Dade County often bore the burden of school integration plans. In turn, parents’ resistance to busing in Florida and elsewhere aimed at maintaining these neighborhood boundaries, which meant preserving suburban separation from urban centers and, equally, preserving white enclaves from minority intrusion.
Politicians actively buttressed parental resistance to busing. In 1970, in an act of defiance to court-ordered desegregation, Florida governor Hayden Kirk assumed control of the Manatee County School Board to prohibit busing. Kirk, who was up for reelection that year, described busing as an “insidious disease,” and his actions made national headlines. A New York Times columnist gestured to the politics of child protection inherent in Kirk’s antibusing politics by noting that the governor announced his opposition to court-mandated busing “from a maternity ward where his wife had just given birth to their second child … surrounded by blushing nurses, gurgling babies and television cameras.” The columnist wryly pointed out that in Florida “the issue of forced busing has superseded motherhood as the quickest path to the voter’s heart.” “Superseded,” was the wrong descriptor of public sentiment, for the politics of child protection closely tied parents’ rights and motherhood to “forced busing” in rhetoric and in practice, as was evidenced by the fact that Kirk later led a group named Parents against Forced Busing. Embodied in Kirk’s carefully staged photo opportunity was a message that the reproduction of racial norms and privileges was tied to sexual reproduction and to the physical reproduction of all-white social spaces. Surrounded by newborns, Kirk deployed the powerful symbolism of racial innocence and invoked long-standing fears of mixed-race children.
Kirk’s stance provoked a flood of correspondence from parents across the United States who opposed busing and integration. While many correspondents approvingly wrote to Kirk and stated that their opposition to busing was not “a matter of race” even while using shared racial codes, many of his endorsements also came from avowed segregationists who overtly opposed “race mixing” of any kind and feared forced sexual contact between white and black children. These more explicit sentiments created a strong undercurrent of antibusing opposition and formed a continuum with the color-blind logic of some opponents. Drawing these sentiments together was the recurring claim that opponents of busing were members of the silent majority whose will was being impinged by the “loud minority.”
A statewide referendum on busing harnessed populist anger and caused integration to remain a divisive issue in Florida through the 1970s. Despite Kirk’s appeal to antibusing sentiments, Democratic busing supporter Reubin Askew defeated Kirk in the gubernatorial election. However, national events reinserted busing in Florida politics. In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg that busing was necessary to desegregate schools, a ruling that inflamed state politicians and antibusing activists who emphasized the right of parents to raise their children and choose their schools without government interference. Legal and extralegal challenges to busing took place in Florida and around the country, and there was widespread discussion of amending the US Constitution to prohibit busing. Seeking to override the courts and capitalize upon constituent anger over the Swann decision, the Florida legislature placed the busing issue on the 1972 Democratic presidential primary ballot and asked voters, using strategically deracinated language, if they favored a constitutional amendment that “would prohibit forced busing and guarantee the right of each student to attend the appropriate public school nearest his home.” Many political commentators attributed great importance to the Florida vote, believing that it would determine the course of the national debate on racial integration.
Over 50 percent of Florida voters cast ballots, and 74 percent approved the busing amendment proposition. Every county in Florida supported banning busing by wide majorities. A second question, placed on the ballot by Governor Askew, who opposed the plebiscite, sought to ameliorate the first question by asking voters if they favored “providing equal opportunity for quality education for all children regardless of race, creed, color or place of residence and oppose[d] the return to a dual system of public schools.” This question was also strongly endorsed by a large margin. The results of the straw votes revealed that voters, although overtly against the legal segregation of “separate but equal,” would not endorse remedial steps to overcome racially divided neighborhoods. Instead, they chose to affirm equal educational opportunities in theory but not in practice. This plebiscite on busing informed the 1977 Dade County vote on sexual rights, creating a symbolic precedent whereby the public voted upon complex issues of civil rights, which were themselves framed through the issues of children’s education and well-being.
“No single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control over the operation of schools,” declared Chief Justice Warren Burger in the 1974 Supreme Court decision Milliken v. Bradley. The Milliken decision set the stage for the resegregation of schools in Dade County in 1977, an action that coincided with and informed debates over gay civil rights. Milliken overturned a busing plan in metropolitan Detroit by ruling that efforts to desegregate public schools could not be extended beyond municipal boundaries. The decision curbed the impact of the earlier Swann decision and made clear that the political boundaries between urban and suburban were constitutional and thus allowed for de jure school segregation.
On 23 February 1977 the effects of Milliken v. Bradley were felt in Dade County, Florida, when antibusing protesters at a public hearing, deploying a by now common language of child protection, successfully lobbied to end busing in their community. Most of the speakers and the majority of the audience at the hearing endorsed returning the school to their “neighborhood” status—a code word for segregation. Using the vivid emotions that also characterized SOC’s campaign against gay rights, one white mother tellingly declared at the hearing, “We don’t want to lose control of our children, and that is what happens when they are bused.” A narrative of sexual danger underwrote such political activism, and requests for “control” of white children, which depended upon preserving the color line, were rooted in attempts to influence the sexual values of white children by limiting their contact with black children. On 16 March 1977, after years of debate, the Dade County School Board allowed junior high schools and high schools effectively to reverse the desegregation plan ordered by the federal courts. Legislators and the Miami Herald justified the decision by stating that it provided students with “a more stable attendance pattern with fewer schools to attend in their career and less busing.
Key figures in the Save Our Children campaign, which had begun by this date, had also participated in these antibusing struggles. SOC’s secretary, Robert Brake, had already lobbied for funding to private religious schools (described by opponents as white flight schools) back in 1971. He also voluntarily acted as a lawyer in the Miami Springs City Council’s lawsuit, which challenged the Dade County School Board’s integration plans. SOC’s media director, Mike Thompson, who was Brake’s neighbor, had run for lieutenant governor of Florida in 1974 on a conservative antibusing platform. Thompson was also chairman of the Florida Conservative Union (FCU), which formally opposed busing and the ERA and helped migrate conservative ideas and activists to these conflicts. At the moment that antibusing campaigns secured white control over suburban schools, antigay campaigns would employ a nearly identical set of tactics and language to preserve control over sexual mores within this very same space in a campaign against gay teachers.
The ongoing backlash against African American civil rights and racial integration in Florida influenced anti-ERA activism, which asserted that among the ERA’s consequences would be gay marriage and mixed-gender bathrooms. These two issues blatantly invoked specters of the civil rights struggles, for which the legalization of interracial marriage and integration of public accommodations in the 1960s were central. After the United States Senate passed the ERA in 1972 and turned it over to the states for the necessary ratification, there ensued a national debate over the meaning of gender roles and whether women ought to be granted equality under the law that overlapped with battles over busing and gay rights in Florida. By 1973 twenty-eight states had ratified the amendment. However, the ratification process stalled at the end of that year after meeting fierce resistance from a grassroots coalition of anti-ERA activists led by Phyllis Schlafly, an Illinois author and national leader of the conservative movement, and the organization she founded, STOP-ERA. Nonetheless, by 1977 thirty-five of the necessary thirty-eight states had ratified, leaving the amendment to be fiercely contested in states such as Florida.
The connections between anti-ERA and antigay activism in Florida were forged during three Florida legislature votes on the ERA between 1972 and 1977. By 1977 the connections between racial, sexual, and gender politics were sewn closely together in a widespread and bitter debate about the limits of civil rights. These campaigns also saw future SOC activists and supporters play prominent roles in opposing the amendment. The conflation of racial danger with homosexual danger in Save Our Children’s antigay rights campaign derived, in part, from the anti-ERA activism of Schlafly’s national movement and its affiliated organization in Florida, Women for Responsible Legislation (WFRL), led by Texas transplant, conservative radio host, and member of the FCU Shirley Spellerberg. Both groups associated the ERA with the dangers of “sex mixing,” “homosexual marriage,” and the threat of “homosexual schoolteachers.” Overlapping chronologically and geographically with antibusing campaigns (at least one Dade County antibusing group, Citizens in Favor of Neighborhood Schools, became an anti-ERA lobbying organization), anti-ERA activists also shared with antibusing activists the belief that they were members of the silent majority who were “now speaking out!” This public claim of being a silent majority performed political labor, empowering a reactionary politics and defining a constituency that was familial, normative, and indicatively white.
The danger of homosexuality to children and the family was a dominant WFRL concern. As early as 1973 its literature warned that the ERA “would legalize homosexual marriages and open the door to the adoption of children by legally married homosexual couples.” By 1977, as SOC campaigned against gay rights, WFRL continued to invoke the threat of gay marriage and adoption. To convince politicians that gays and lesbians sought to marry and adopt, WFRL circulated a 1970 legal decision that revoked the marriage license of two women in Hillsborough County, Florida, who had sought to marry each other in 1969. The ERA, it argued, would upend legal codes and traditional values. The homophobia that informed both anti-ERA and antigay campaigns crystallized in 1977 with the concurrent defeat of the ERA and gay rights laws and the implementation oflegislation prohibiting gay marriage and adoption by gay parents.
Defending the family was a prominent concern of ERA opponents who maintained that the amendment would undercut cherished traditions. Not only would the ERA allow gay marriage, worried Schlafly, but the heterosexual family would also lose its esteemed place in American life. ERA opponents in Florida echoed these concerns in correspondence to politicians where they claimed that the ERA “could destroy the American family as the very building block of our civilization.” Linking the defense of family with the defense of heterosexuality in schools—a theme that would be taken up by antigay activists—Schlafly asserted that the ERA would “interfere with the right of parents to have their children taught by teachers who respect the moral law.” Schlafly’s profamily position represented what would become the core ideology of social conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s: privileging the rights of (white) parents over any other social group and viewing any deviation from heterosexual two-parent families as a political threat of perilous proportions.
Among the strategies deployed by anti-ERA activists was the invocation of race-based conflicts over school integration, sexual mores, and public accommodations in Florida. STOP-ERA and VVFRL literature claimed that the ERA would invalidate “laws outlawing wedlock between members of the same sex” just as civil rights laws had invalidated “laws forbidding miscegenation.” A booklet distributed by another of Phyllis Schlafly’s anti-ERA organizations, the Eagle Forum, posed the following question meant to incite negative comparisons between the ERA and civil rights: “Do you want the sexes fully integrated like the races?” This question formed the heart of anti-ERA rhetoric and deliberately provoked anxieties about racialized sexual violence against women and the elision of gender roles. Florida’s miscegenation laws had been overturned in 1964, and VVFRL likewise invoked this legacy of racial and sexual boundaries when it spoke of the impending dangers of homosexual marriage. A carefully constructed VVFRL statement read: “With the advent of the Civil Rights Act laws forbidding interracial marriages were struck down as being RACIALLY DISCRIMINATORY as indeed they were. The intent of the ERA is to eradicate SEXUAL DISCRIMINATION.” Tellingly, WFRL endorsed sexual discrimination without disavowing racial discrimination, which signaled how ERA opponents in Florida tacitly fused anxieties about interracial marriage with homosexual danger to the heterosexual family.
Setting the stage for the 1977 backlash against gay rights, anti-ERA activists applied widely shared racial codes to the Equal Rights Amendment, particularly in their idea that the sex integration of bathrooms and prisons would lead to sexual violence against women and children. Referring to the ERA as enabling “sex mixing,” anti-ERA literature offered a not so subtle appeal to antimiscegenation and anti-integration discourses. This racial appeal was apparent to ERA proponents, including the legislative assistant to Governor Askew, who explained in a letter to one ERA-opponent: “Many critics of the Equal Rights Amendment have used the idea of an ‘integrated’ restroom to illustrate their fear of the proposed Amendment. This idea comes from the Brown v. Board of Education case of1954.” The implications of this rhetoric unspooled in private correspondence between grassroots anti-ERA activists and Florida politicians. Less disciplined in language than the official movement literature, these letters often articulated the racial and sexual implications of official rhetoric, making connections that were too politically volatile for public utterance. “I do not want to share a public restroom with black or white hippie males,” wrote one Floridian woman in 1973 to a Florida state senator, signaling her various sources of fear. Another newsletter that circulated in Florida claimed that the “ERA could create havoc in prisons and reform schools by preventing segregation of the sexes” and told the disturbing story of how innocent white women were being “put in the cells with black men,” which resulted in “the negro accost[ing] the White woman in the cell and attempt[ing] to rape her.” Recycling narratives of black rapists that dated back to the nineteenth century, these texts expressed the idea that the ERA would force women into intimate contact with black men.
Fears of gay marriage and adoption, which were centerpieces both of Schlafly’s national and Spellerberg’s local campaigns against the ERA, contributed to its final defeat in the Florida Senate on 13 April 1977. Florida thus became the third state in 1977 to block ratification. Among those cheering the defeat of the ERA in the galleries of the Florida Senate was Anita Bryant. Just weeks after voting down the ERA, Florida’s government also outlawed gay marriage and gay adoption. Summarizing the defeat of the ERA, the Miami Herald concluded that “the fear of legalized homosexual marriages and the alleged threat to state’s rights was the common thread that ran through the opposition’s debate.” Newspaper reports also claimed that SOC’s campaign against gay rights was essential to the defeat of the ERA in Florida.
“Our clear-thinking senators kept ERA out of Florida. Now let’s keep the gays’ rights out of Dade County and, hopefully, out of the rest of the country,” wrote one correspondent to the Miami News in April 1977. Just as coinciding struggles against busing and the ERA attempted to demarcate the boundaries of the nation-state by using images of the traditional family and the concept of the silent majority to reconsolidate white and male power, SOC deployed the image of the child to rationalize excluding sexually variant populations from full citizenship. Borrowing from these overlapping struggles, SOC claimed to be representative of the silent majority and of the “normal majority” in its quest to defend children and the future of the family. The notion of the silent majority was not explicitly racialized or gendered when Nixon first articulated it in 1969, but its subsequent use by reactionary movements throughout the following decade firmly established these meanings. The same identity was also central when SOC sought to imagine a normative and majoritarian identity in opposition to homosexual rights. The group did so by warning that if gays were to be granted “special rights,” the private and religious schools where they sent their children and that had emerged to avoid racial integration would be forced to hire “flaunting homosexuals.”
The introduction of the gay rights ordinance in Dade County in 1976 and the subsequent conflict over it in 1977 were direct consequences of prior conservative movements and also the accelerated growth of gay and lesbian social movements, commercial institutions, and publications in the 1970s. By 1969 a homophile movement had intersected with the radical currents from New Left and civil rights movements. In the 1970s, as a result of the formation and proliferation of local and national organizations and the rapid expansion of the gay press, gays were increasingly able to define themselves as part of a national community with shared social and political interests. By the mid-1970s liberal organizations such as the National Gay Task Force (NGTF) eschewed more radical politics and instead aggressively fought for the recognition of gays and lesbians as citizens with equal rights under the law. Orienting themselves toward mainstream politics, the NGTF built political alliances with the Democratic Party and sought to implement gay rights laws. In so doing, it provided a model for local liberal gay rights groups who set reform-oriented goals even as both national and local organizations remained vexed over what the meaning and form of a public and respectable gay identity ought to be. A significant number of local gay organizations followed the NGTF’s lead and worked to expand the purview of newly enshrined civil rights ordinances addressing race and gender to include same-sex sexuality. Between 1972 and 1975 thirty-six municipal and two county legislatures in the United States broadened their civil rights laws to include protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual preference. These bills principally addressed municipal employment, housing, and public accommodations.
In Dade County, Florida, eleven gay and lesbian organization united to found the Dade County Coalition for the Humanistic Rights of Gays (DCCHR), taking “a moderate approach to gay rights, with emphasis on working within government structures to effect changes beneficial to the community as a whole.” The coalition’s top priority was passing a civil rights ordinance because it believed that without legal rights gays and lesbians would continue to live in fear of blackmail, firing, loss of child custody, and eviction. Its members further believed that such a law was a natural and necessary extension of civil rights recently granted to African Americans and women and modeled its proposed ordinance upon the US Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Because of the DCCHR’s extensive involvement in Dade County politics, its strategic lobbying, and its collaboration with the NGTF, it was able to pass a civil rights amendment banning discrimination based on “sexual and affectional preference.” The DCCHR’s amendment was introduced at the 7 December 1976 Dade County Commission meeting, where commissioners voted unanimously to put the bill to a second and final vote on 18 January 1977. Despite vocal opposition from a coalition of religious groups, anti-ERA activists, and celebrities such as Anita Bryant, the county commissioners passed the ordinance, making Dade County the thirty-eighth community in the United States to extend such legal protection.
Corning on the heels of a decade’s worth of legal recognitions for gay and lesbian rights, the ordinance was groundbreaking not in its passage but rather in the massive resistance it engendered from religious groups and conservatives. Under Dade County law, if citizens gathered ten thousand signatures in less than thirty days, the Metro Commission would have to either reverse itself or call a special referendum on the issue. So on 26 January 1977 a group of prominent local religious leaders and other conservatives formed SOC. They came from churches, including African American and Latino congregations of various denominations, and synagogues and were led by activists within the FCU who had strong ties to antibusing, anti-ERA, and antiabortion causes. The rank and file of SOC included a number of celebrities and prominent activists in women’s organizations who came from a number of different religious backgrounds. For example, Marie Palmer, the former chairman of the National Council of Catholic Women and the legislative chair of Florida Stop-ERA, joined SOC and actively supported its goals. Many male rank-and-file members also were veteran political campaigners and organizers coming from various conservative organizations. The bedrock of SOC’s membership consisted of white women who were active in churches and who self-consciously identified as parents. These women shouldered the brunt of the repeal effort. In less than four weeks they gathered close to sixty thousand signatures, six times the required number necessary to overturn the ordinance. Consequently, SOC was able to formally present its petition to the commission on 22 February 1977. Despite tremendous public and media pressure to reverse themselves, Dade County commissioners voted to uphold the ordinance on 15 March 1977, thereby putting the issue to a referendum on 7 June 1977.
It was the power of Anita Bryant’s celebrity that catapulted the group to national attention and established the tenor of its cultural politics. SOC leaders strategically selected Bryant as its spokesperson because her celebrity status guaranteed media coverage. Bryant’s previous forays into cultural politics marked her as wholesome, religious, and maternal. She had sung at a Youth for Decency rally in 1969 to protest indecency in rock and roll music—an event prompted after the rock band the Doors performed in Miami and local police charged their lead singer, Jim Morrison, for exposing himself to the crowd. In 1973 Bryant had appeared in Fort Lauderdale with Billy Graham for his youth crusade, a mass event organized to spread the evangelical gospel. Bryant also participated in numerous events with Bob Hope during the Vietnam War tours for the military’s United Service Organization (USO) and had sung at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 1968. These cultural performances emblema-tized a conservative cultural ethos that was associated with Nixon’s “silent majority.” Despite media coverage and the perception of gay activists that depicted Anita Bryant as the leader and driving force behind SOC, she is better viewed as its spokesperson. Because she was a famous celebrity, media narratives often reduced complex conflicts to biographical pieces about Bryant. A significant degree of misogyny among gay men, who singled Bryant out for ridicule, also contributed to the subsequent elision of SOC as a pioneering conservative coalition with deep connections to antibusing, anti-ERA, and antiabortion as well as antigay causes.
SOC’s campaign restaged busing and ERA battles with its positioning of schools as erotically charged sites of conflict. It also drew from Floridian antigay discourses dating back to the 1950s and from a contemporaneous panic over child pornography. The image of the child molester in Florida arose from Cold War conservative paranoia about Communism and African American civil rights. In 1956, two years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Florida state legislature founded the Florida Legislative Investigative Committee, known as the Johns Committee, led by state senator and white supremacist Charley Johns. The Johns Committee sought to undermine African American civil rights organizations by exposing them as Communist fronts. Stymied temporarily by lawsuits from these groups, the committee expanded its purview to investigate lesbian and gay teachers, thereby associating the threats of homosexuality, African American civil rights, and Communism. In 1964 the committee published a report entitled Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida, which elaborated how homosexuals—especially homosexual teachers—were a threat to children. Generating widespread controversy over its explicit content, the report was widely read. The report claimed that homosexuals were a great danger to youth because of a “desire to recruit” them and the belief that “homosexuals are made by training rather than born.” These beliefs, articulated alongside of the Johns Committee’s concerns about racial integration, reappeared in SOC’s antigay campaign?’
The imprint of these racial and sexual conflicts was apparent in SOC’s use of the language of child protection and parents’ rights. SOC’s power depended upon a narrative in which homosexuals recruited children. To understand how SOC’s discourse about homosexuality was racialized, it is necessary to explore how schools and childhood became central to the group’s politics. SOC repeatedly claimed that the gay civil rights ordinance was “forcing our private and religious schools to accept them as teachers, by forcing property owners and employers to open their doors to homosexuals no matter how blatant their perverted lives may be.” The word “force,” ever present in antibusing rhetoric and evoking powerful fears of black men as rapists, became equated with the rape of children in antigay rhetoric. This language was not simply a casual mimicking but harked back to racial antagonisms. The focus on schools was also deliberate, for SOC’s anxieties bespoke an equally important southern white strategy of avoiding integration: the creation of private and religious schools throughout the South. The racial desegregation of public schools in the 1950s had spurred the rapid growth of white schools—called Christian schools—and the racial logic of SOC’s antigay activism became apparent in its investment in protecting these private schools from homosexual teachers. Some of SOC’s leaders who were prominent religious figures in Miami ran such religious private schools and sought to maintain control over them. Anita Bryant’s own children attended a private Baptist school that was run by their minister. SOC secretary Robert Brake sent his four children to “church-affiliated schools” and had strongly advocated a bill—criticized by opponents as subsidizing segregation—supporting the public funding of private schools. Thus, SOC worked within a tradition of conservative resistance to school integration. Like many other religious conservatives, SOC advocated on behalf of the right of parents and of religious schools to define their own curriculum, restrict their membership, and discriminate according to their beliefs. The focus on schools also drew support from some Catholic and Jewish leaders who opposed homosexuality and were concerned with preserving control of their parochial schools. Adding intensity to these anxieties were concurrent conflicts over prayer in public schools and the tax-exempt status of religious schools, which promoted a siege mentality among conservative proponents of these institutions and spurred them to political action.
A simultaneous child pornography panic energized SOC’s claim that homosexuals molested children, which allowed the group to associate gay civil rights with sexual danger. In January 1977, as Dade County commissioners were passing the gay rights ordinance, the national media began to publish extensively about child pornography. The activism of Judianne Densen-Gerber, a social worker who ran a prominent drug addiction treatment center in New York City, prompted the media coverage. Densen-Gerber claimed that child pornography was a national and unacknowledged epidemic, and she captured the attention of politicians and the media with her lurid descriptions of it as a lucrative and powerful industry that preyed upon tens of thousands of children. Her sensationalistic displays of actual child pornography in press conferences and public presentations aroused further indignation and concern. The torrent of media reports on child pornography frequently cited her but turned to other so-called experts who propagated long-standing and erroneous associations between homosexuality and child molestation. In response to public and media outcry, politicians at the state and federal levels amplified the discussion and concern over child pornography by passing new laws and staging hearings on the issue.
SOC capitalized upon local and national media coverage of child pornography to link child molestation with homosexuality. Between January and June 1977 Miami papers reprinted news reports and commentary about child pornography from other newspapers and deepened perceptions that gay rights would allow gay men to molest male children with greater frequency and ease. SOC, in turn, incorporated these newspaper articles into its campaign literature. In several full-page SOC advertisements that appeared in the Miami Herald and the Miami News between March and June 1977, SOC created pastiches of newspaper reports about child pornography and child molestation. These advertisements were direct about their intent: SOC instructed voters in uppercase letters to “SCAN THESE HEADLINES FROM THE NATION’S NEWSPAPERS—THEN DECIDE: ARE HOMOSEXUALS TRYING TO RECRUIT OUR CHILDREN?” SOC represented these newspaper accounts as factual descriptions of normal homosexual behavior and claimed that gay rights would enable gay schoolteachers to assault the children of Dade County parents.
Even as SOC claimed that gay teachers would molest children in private religious schools, it used racial analogies to describe homosexuals as ineligible for state protection. SOC and members of the media compared gays to African Americans only in order to emphasize their differences and to assert that gays had no rights to legal protection as a group. SOC member Robert Brake claimed that “unlike sex, race or color, which is a God-given condition which is apparent and cannot be changed, homosexuals are different from heterosexuals because of their conduct, which can be changed or hidden.” Brake strategically denied the naturalness of homosexuality, assumed the naturalness of race and sex, and framed sexuality as a choice in order to refute the existence of discrimination. This tactic of affirming the rights of African Americans and women was disingenuous, given leading SOC members’ opposition to the racial integration of schools and the ERA. In making these claims, though, Brake effectively separated homosexuals from a valid claim to civil rights. So too did Anita Bryant, who averred that homosexuals were no more a minority group than “nail biters, dieters, fat people, short people and murderers.” SOC’s idea that women and racial minorities were authentic because they were biologically based—and that a biological divide was visible and stable—was reiterated by numerous commentators in the media, among them Charles Whited of the Miami Herald, who had previously endorsed the gay rights ordinance: “Gay rights spokesmen have got a lot of gall comparing their efforts to the civil rights struggle of blacks, or the human rights pronouncements of the Carter Administration or the equality movement for women. As one black friend of mine put it: ‘If I’m black, I can’t hide in the closet.’ Homosexuals—male or female—can go through life hidden. What might seem earthshaking to a gay activist is really pretty small potatoes compared to other anti-discrimination battles.” Commentaries of this sort by SOC and the media encouraged other minority groups to view homosexuals as distinct from themselves and to vote against civil rights for homosexuals even as it advanced the erroneous claim that African Americans were always recognizable as such.
Discrimination, SOC argued, echoing antibusing discourses, was the fault of the aggrieved minority, not of the majority. SOC thereby advanced a willful ignorance of antigay prejudice in the United States, which in turn permitted the organization to oppose government legislation that sought to remedy inequalities. SOC claimed: “Homosexuals do not suffer discrimination when they keep their perversions in the privacy of their homes.” Anita Bryant asserted that homosexuals “can hold any job, transact any business, join any organization—so long as they do not flaunt their homosexuality.” Within Brake’s assertion that homosexuals “are not now being discriminated against in employment, public accommodations and housing because they keep their homosexuality concealed” was SOC’s demand to homosexuals that they remain invisible and the equally powerful claim that homosexuals did not need rights because discrimination did not exist.
At stake for conservatives repudiating gay rights was the maintenance of public sexual norms. Conservatives saw their activism as delimiting publicly sanctioned and state-protected sexuality to a familial heterosexuality. Conversely, SOC members asserted that nonfamilial and nonheterosexual practices ought to be kept private and remain unprotected. The well-being of children became the arbiter of these boundaries. SOC believed that a publicly visible homosexuality would inculcate the young into sexually deviant practices and warned that the ordinance would put homosexual teachers “in close contact with children, especially young adolescents who are just becoming fully aware of sex. These young people,” they feared, “can be seduced by word, deed, or example.” SOC’s repetitive use of the word “flaunting” to describe gay teachers further indicated that homosexuality constituted a public transgression that was defined against parents’ right to shape children’s morality. In this vein, SOC secretary Robert Brake claimed in language that mirrored antibusing discourses that “the issue is not homosexuality or homosexual acts. What we are talking about is the right of parents to control the environment in which they rear their children.” SOC thus placed sexual education at the center of the debate of gay rights. Even as they delineated the relationship between private and public, SOC raised the question about the origins of sexual identity. Moreover, because these questions were posed within the context of a voter initiative, the meanings of sexuality were intimately tied to questions of social norms and legal citizenship.
The DCCHR, which continued in existence during the efforts to repeal the Dade County ordinance, understood its conservative opponents to be “the same individuals and groups” that sought to “deny blacks their just rights” and who “are also currently involved in the battle to deny women equal rights under the law.” Faced with this opposition, the DCCHR sought initially to broaden its coalition with new members from “the liberal Jewish vote, the student vote, the Women’s Movement, the Black community, the liberal churches and the liberal Democrats in Dade County.” With low expectations of African American voter turnout, the DCCHR directed its message mostly at white liberals, arguing that homosexuals regularly experienced discrimination, that they were entitled to civil rights and state protections, and that they were not child molesters. The group also sought to explain the causes of homosexuality and argue that sexual variance was both natural and socially benign. The DCCHR, in other words, was placed in the unprecedented position of waging a political campaign that had to make homosexuality socially legible and palatable to voters. To do so, the DCCHR answered questions raised by SOC and the media about identity, civil rights, and citizenship through racial and human rights frameworks in hopes that liberal voters would sympathize with sexual minorities.
With child molestation, corruption, and homosexuality linked by conservatives, the DCCHR attempted to represent homosexuality to white audiences as they imagined race to be, as “part of nature’s plan.” Departing from some gay liberationists and radical lesbians of the day who described sexuality as a choice, the DCCHR cited numerous legal and medical studies to emphasize that molestation was primarily a heterosexual problem. The DCCHR also held a press conference with noted medical professionals who explained that homosexuality was either inborn or a condition acquired in early childhood. The medical perspectives, which often contradicted each other, reflected the growing, albeit uneasy, consensus that had been reached by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973, which removed homosexuality from its listing of mental illnesses. The DCCHR cited all of these views and emphasized in its own literature that “no child or person can be recruited into a homosexual lifestyle” and averred that a “person is either born a homosexual or acquires his or her homosexuality through his or her environment during the early years.” Through these claims, the DCCHR shored up the boundaries of heterosexuality and homosexuality by underscoring that sexual acts and sexual identities were coterminous and that sexual identities were stable and internally homogeneous. The medicalization of homosexuality in this manner was meant to make voters see homosexuals as a minority group akin to racial groups.
By making the campaign a human rights issue, the DCCHR tried to offer a broad category of identification so that people who did not identify with gay issues could sympathize with its campaign. A candid memo from the group’s organizers asserted that “a gay rights campaign had no way of winning. Most people just don’t care about gay rights. They are too removed from it.” The group also tried to deemphasize homosexuality altogether and excluded those that might appear sexually threatening. Newsweek callously described the DCCHR’s campaign as one “designed to play down the more freakish aspects of gay life. They discouraged public participation by transvestites or leathery extremists.” Among those objecting to the organization’s liberal trajectory was Robert Kunst, a former DCCHR leader who formed a much smaller and more radical group, the Miami Victory Campaign (MVC). Unlike the DCCHR, which carefully deemphasized queer sexuality in public, the MVC believed that it was integral to unapologetically project “what is positive and joyful in the same-sex experience” even as it expressed in its publications the liberationist belief in the innate bisexuality of all human beings and the necessity of exploring this bisexuality to realize one’s full potential. SOC in turn used Kunst’s language to portray the gay rights ordinance as a radical and dangerous project. This group garnered substantial press coverage thanks to Kunst’s bombast and media savviness. Because of Kunst’s history with the DCCHR, the media often collapsed the two groups’ diverging positions, much to the chagrin of the leadership of the DCCHR. Of the two organizations, nonetheless, the DCCHR had far greater political and financial support.
Race structured structured the campaign of liberal gay rights activists and their opponents. DCCHR members distributed buttons, campaign literature, and close to a quarter of a million pamphlets that conveyed the idea that homosexuals deserved protection against discrimination. DCCHR volunteers wrote letters to local newspapers and politicians and raised funds through the use of human rights rhetoric. Yet, rather than deploying positive images of gays and lesbians, the DCCHR called upon more widely recognized forms of injustice to gain favor for its cause. The DCCHR’s campaign slogan, “Which minority will be next?,” embodied this strategy. Much of the campaign compared gay oppression to that experienced by Jews during the Holocaust. The civil rights struggles of African Americans further enabled the DCCHR to make gay grievances and identities politically legible and in particular informed the group’s expectations about political success.
DCCHR activists frequently emphasized the historical connections between oppression of gays and oppression of African Americans and drew analogies between sexual and racial identity. So powerful was the legacy of African American civil rights that when a Latino gay activist’s car was firebombed in Miami, the DCCHR issued a press release comparing “this terrorist attack” to “violence perpetrated in Selma Alabama … prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1965,” thus linking gay rights with a widely renowned civil rights battle. When some black leaders in Dade County spoke on the DCCHR’s behalf and affirmed that gays faced similar oppression to blacks, they displayed two images: a photograph with a sign that read “Save Our Children from the Black Plague” and an SOC repeal poster reading “Save Our Children from Gays.” The DCCHR’s literature used similar graphics that juxtaposed images of SOC’s homophobia with images of racism and that warned fellow citizens that bigots might also target them. Despite some African American support and the use of these strategies of representation, and even as DCCHR members compared SOC’s child protection rhetoric to racist “speeches and statements that were heard during the black civil rights campaigns of the 1960’s,” they wondered about the comparison, noting in their official policies and guidelines that “a black is recognizable as a black whereas a homosexual cannot be discerned by sight alone.”
The DCCHR asserted gays’ political presence and civil rights in a public venue and forged public identities for gays not in their own specificity but linked with other minority experiences. This strategy of asserting a public gay identity, however, was troubled by the fact that the DCCHR had been mostly ineffective at creating alliances with and garnering support from racial minorities in Dade County, whereas SOC was able to forge a multiracial religious coalition. DCCHR’s visible leadership was white, and the group imagined its political audience to be white. Despite the request by the Latin Committee of the DCCHR that the group make the case for gay rights in the Cuban community, white gay leaders strategically chose to ignore Latino voters, whom they believed to be too antigay to support them. SOC, in contrast, campaigned heavily in the Latino community, working closely with local Cuban community leaders, holding rallies in Miami’s “Little Havana” neighborhood, and distributing bilingual literature.”
The DCCHR’s relationship with African American voters was similarly troubled. From the outset, DCCHR strategists predicted that African American voter turnout would be negligible: they expected only 5 percent of registered black voters to show up at the polls and aspired to mobilize 10 percent of the black vote. The DCCHR counted on the black voting bloc’s total support for gay rights, believing that African Americans’ historical experiences with discrimination and their investment in the civil rights movement would make them natural supporters of gay rights. To some extent they were right, and the group attracted secular African American leaders who deployed the language of the civil rights movement. The Miami Times, a widely circulating black weekly newspaper, also editorialized in favor of gay rights and advised its readers that “black people should not be party to endorsing any policy that will discriminate against anyone.” The DCCHR, however, failed to understand how black churches fostered heterosexual respectability and an overt homophobia in order to achieve civil rights in Dade County and elsewhere. Likewise, it did not appreciate divisions among African Americans over homosexuality and a long-standing sexual conservatism that was autonomous from but overlapped with white social conservatism.
White gay activists soon learned that many blacks distinguished race-based struggles for social justice from sexuality-based struggles for social equality and opposed gay rights on religious grounds. So although the Miami Times editorialized for gay rights, there was substantial debate among its readers about the issue, and the paper published two lengthy letters from readers who opposed gay rights and any comparisons of black and gay oppression. SOC targeted black voters with mailings and commercials in zoned sections of the Miami Herald, stating that “it was unfair to equate behavior with the color of one’s skin. SOC meanwhile continued to court black ministers by sending Anita Bryant and others to prayer breakfasts in the black community. During Bryant’s appearance before an audience of black voters and ministers at Saint John’s Baptist Church in Miami, she was applauded for her sermon and singing. DCCHR members, on the other hand, received a hostile response from those few church members who showed up to hear them when they came to make their case for gay rights. One black leader who supported gay rights pointed to his community’s divisions over homosexuality and explained to the Miami Herald that “a great number of black people see this as a religious issue (rather than a civil rights issue).” In the wake of these debates, the African Methodist Episcopal Church denounced homosexuality even as it voiced its support for court-ordered busing. Based on a shared homophobia that traversed the color line, SOC was able to form a broad multiracial religious coalition, which included African American and Latino ministers who dissociated sexual and racial liberalism.
As these overlapping dynamics played out in Dade County, SOC attracted support from right-wing luminaries with national exposure such as Jerry Falwell and James Kennedy, both of whom participated in a Christians for God and Decency Rally in Miami on 22 May 1977 that drew ten thousand SOC supporters. Their participation in the gay rights struggle portended the institutionalization of antigay rhetoric and its coupling with child protection rhetoric within religious conservative coalitions nationwide, including groups such as Christian Voice and the Moral Majority, both founded in 1979. Gay magazines and newspapers across the United States also nationalized the struggle. Responding enthusiastically to DCCHR appeals for financial assistance, supporters outside of Florida held fundraisers and staged political activities that integrated the human rights theme with queer cultural practices. Gay and lesbian communities raised money through events that included drag shows, Anita Bryant look-alike contests, and “discos for democracy,” and they rapidly raised large amounts of money. Gay newspapers meanwhile advertised items such as toilet paper and dartboards emblazoned with Anita Bryant’s face. By 7 June 1977 the DCCHR had raised and spent over $370,000, with $129,000 spent on advertising alone—five times as much as pro-ERA forces in Florida had raised and nearly three times as much as SOC had raised.
By June 1977 residents of Dade County had been inundated with advertisements by SOC and the DCCHR and subjected to the opinions of political pundits, scientists, and religious leaders, and they had heard the analysis of a variety of experts. SOC and the DCCHR had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to persuade residents of Dade County to vote in a referendum that became less about “affectional or sexual preference” than about whether homosexuals were child molesters or a valid minority deserving of human rights. Concurrent struggles over race and gender formed the parameters in which the DCCHR, SOC, and Dade County voters debated the meanings and limits of civil rights.
To the DCCHR’s dismay, many members of the local media, politicians, and religious authorities continued to dismiss the legitimacy of gay rights and the existence of antigay discrimination despite the fact that DCCHR members experienced physical violence and numerous threats over the course of the campaign. Many Catholic priests, at the behest of the archbishop of Miami, instructed their congregations at Sunday masses in the run-up to the referendum to vote to repeal gay rights. Baptist ministers in African American, white, and Latino churches likewise urged their congregations to vote for repeal. The Miami Herald, which had tremendous power to shape local opinion, printed an editorial on 5 June 1977 declaring that the ordinance was unnecessary and that the upcoming referendum was more about “whether society should be asked to give its apparent approval to aberrant behavior which most of its citizens do not consider a desirable way of life for themselves or their children.” Finally, the governor of Florida, Reubin Askew, who had been a staunch supporter of busing and the ERA, declared that he would not want a “known homosexual teaching my children.” These voices, multiracial and cross-denominational, all furthered SOC’s drive to repeal the ordinance and granted the organization an increasing legitimacy among opposing constituencies in Miami’s racial struggles.
Close to three hundred thousand Dade County voters went to the polls on 7 June 1977 to vote on gay rights—an exceptionally large turnout. As with the statewide election on busing five years earlier, nearly half of those eligible to vote cast ballots. Before the referendum, progay forces had expected to narrowly win based on seven separate polls taken in May 1977. The results were devastating for gay rights advocates nationwide, however. Voters rejected the ordinance by a wide margin, with 69.3 percent voting against gay rights. The vote reflected the racial dynamics of Dade County. Newspapers reported that Latino precincts had high turnouts, with over 80 percent of these voters rejecting the gay rights ordinance. African American precincts had low voter turnout—approximately 10 percent of registered African American voters came to the polls—and were divided evenly over the gay rights issue.
DCCHR members and their supporters anxiously awaited the results at a hotel on Miami Beach where they had planned a victory party. Their organization had waged an unprecedented national campaign that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and united gay communities and their allies nationwide. Hearing news of the defeat, the somber crowd borrowed music from the African American civil rights movement and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Finally, they sang “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Anita Bryant’s banner song. Their defeat in the polls, like the election campaign itself, was steeped in racial and patriotic imagery. An opposite scene unfolded at another hotel as SOC supporters celebrated the election results. Anita Bryant danced a jig in front of nearly one hundred reporters; her husband happily kissed her on the lips and flauntingly announced: “This is what heterosexuals do, fellows.” Bryant then proceeded to make a victory speech with this interpretation of the results of the election: “The normal majority has said ‘Enough, enough, enough.'” This term, the “normal majority,” which SOC had used throughout its campaign, laid bare the roots of this conservative project.
In the aftermath of the vote, national conservative columnist and former Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan noted that the “clobbering the gay rights movement received in Miami” was unsurprising given voter behavior during the 1972 referendum on busing. During his tenure in the Nixon administration, Buchanan had been obsessed with developing a strategy of using social issues to bring a conservative political majority—the “silent majority”—to power. In the same vein Buchanan stated: “The spectacular turnout is a hopeful symptom. What voters are saying is ‘Give us an issue we care about, where the choice is clear, where our votes can make a difference—and you will not need precinct captains or federal subsidies to get us to the polls.” Foreshadowing antigay voter initiatives that would bring conservative voters to the polls time and again over the next three decades, Buchanan declared: “The silent majority has sent a message to every politician. Freedom of association, the majority has asserted, includes the right to discriminate against those whose conduct the majority considers reprehensible or immoral.”
The Dade County referendum was an important moment in which the sexual equality movements inspired by the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s became dashed upon the shoals of a conservatism that emerged from Christian white privilege and discontent and was anchored by a sexual politics of child protection. An apparatus of the democratic state—voter initiatives—provided conservatives with a crucial political strategy. These short-term political campaigns allowed SOC to actively propagate a fantasy about a heterosexual majority that was both normal and somehow imperiled. This normative majoritarian identity, though provisional, had long-term implications for excluding nonheterosexuals from equal access to housing, public accommodations, and job security—that is to say, from the material underpinnings of American social citizenship. SOC’s success in large part depended upon its ability to separate the quest for gay citizenship from the quest for citizenship undertaken by other minority groups and to obscure the deep historical connections between the backlashes against civil rights and gay rights.
SOC’s Dade County campaign modeled a conservative strategy for opposing gay rights and mobilizing voters that would appear time and again over the next three decades. Antigay legislation and the defeat of a number of gay rights bills nationwide were immediate consequences of this widely publicized struggle. In the months that followed, similar church-driven voter initiatives took place around the country SOC was involved in most of these campaigns, believing that the Dade County vote had given it a national mandate. Local antigay groups applied the SOC blueprint to combat gay rights in each of these campaigns. In response, gay rights coalitions redeployed human and civil rights themes to emphasize why they deserved legal protection.
The triumph of reactionary conservatives speaking in the name of child protection over liberals speaking in the name of civil rights revealed how conservatives neutralized liberal rhetoric in the 1970s. The efficacy of child protection rhetoric was demonstrated not only in conservative victories but also in how liberal gay activists nationwide reformulated their identity and activism. Analyzing the loss in Dade County, DCCHR leader Ethan Geto recommended a new gay rights strategy that was less explicitly based on race. He argued that “we have to start talking to them in terms of We are your brothers and sisters, your sons and daughters, your doctors and lawyers.’ That brings it home. But that means more people must ‘come out’—however painful that may be.” Likewise, the National Gay Task Force decided that its national education program would advocate for gay rights through the theme “We ARE Your Children,” and T-shirts with this slogan were sold in the national gay news magazine, the Advocate, billed as “The Gay Pride Answer” to the growing backlash against gay rights. The shirts, which themselves performed the work of coming out, were highly evocative. These new strategies suggest that, immediately after Dade County, liberal gay politics in the United States were framed by a temporary retreat from race and a triangulation on a different image of the child and the family.
Protecting children and family values, as histories of busing, gay rights, and the ERA reveal, empowered the campaigns of white parents against marginalized groups seeking access to the benefits of full citizenship. In these campaigns, children were called upon to make innocent the violent processes of reinforcing geographical and political boundaries, racial hierarchies, and gender and sexual norms. Both the urgent cry “save our children” and its response “we are your children” depended upon racialized constructions of family and childhood: the conservative appeal rallied possessive white parents who understood themselves to be an endangered racial and sexual majority. The liberal response, directed largely at a white heterosexual audience, constructed a sexual identity within these normative racial contours, reduplicating a process that conflated family with citizenship. The language of family and parents’ rights also appealed to African American and Latino voters whose religious and sexual traditionalism placed them more readily into tenuous coalitions with white conservatives.
The relationship of threatened majoritarian parents to imperiled children reveals how in the 1970s normative heterosexuality was simultaneously constructed through whiteness and also elided racial boundaries. The legacy of such child protection rhetoric can be found in recent battles over gay marriage and gay adoption, which restage debates that are now over forty years old. At this writing, gay marriage advocates in the United States continue to analogize their civil rights struggles to those of African Americans even as adversaries of gay rights claim that gay marriage and gay adoption will harm children and destroy the family.” These opponents simultaneously avow that gays are different from and do not deserve the same civil or marriage rights as African Americans. In these contemporary debates over social citizenship, it has frequently been commented upon how gay rights advocates deploy “like race” arguments. What has largely been forgotten is the racialized process by which conservatives led Americans to believe that they have to choose, just as with busing, between the best interests of their own children and minority rights. This dubious opposition, decades in the making, continues to allow many voters to see sexual rights as antithetical to their own best interests and those of their families. Historians must begin to trace the multiple ways that conservatives’ insistent construction of heterosexuality and defense of so-called family values are enmeshed in the history and meaning of race relations in the United States. It is equally vital to recognize how hegemonic constructions of heterosexuality have crossed sexual and racial borders and have informed the conservative politics of nonheterosexual and nonwhite populations. To do so is to map the complex and manifold paths of conservatism in the final third of the twentieth century.