Consumer culture began to change in response to a new source of demand. As gays and lesbians came out of the closet, countless private entities sprouted to meet the needs of a newly identified clientele: bars and restaurants, law firms and travel agencies, churches and synagogues, and on and on. In some cities, the breadth of personal and professional services that catered to gay and lesbian customers was such that a gay man in New York City joked he could now “do anything and never see a straight person again.” As consumer options spread, gays and lesbians became a more visible presence in the business and professional world as well. A Time cover story in 1975 titled “Gays on the March” breathlessly reported the “spread of unabashed homosexuality, once thought to be confined to the worlds of theater, dance, fashion.” Pushing aside such stereotypes, gays and lesbians soon formed their own caucuses within major professions like teaching, health care, and banking. By the end of the decade, there were several thousand gay and lesbian organizations in America, with new groups mirroring virtually every type of straight organization. One reporter informed readers about a gay Nazi group and the lesbian Jewish organization that had formed to fight it.32
As gays and lesbians came out and claimed their place in society, they forced heterosexuals to reconsider their own attitudes and actions. In a significant step, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders in 1974, taking away a foundation of homophobia. The following year, the Pentagon issued the first security clearance for an openly gay individual, while the US Civil Service Commission ended the policy that barred gays and lesbians from working for the federal government. The United Church of Christ decried “the use of scripture to generate hatred and the violation of the civil rights of gay and lesbian persons” in 1977 and, two years later, the United Methodist Church announced that gays could be ordained as ministers in the denomination. During this period, gays and lesbians made their mark in the political realm as well. In 1972, two gay and lesbian delegates were invited to address the Democratic National Convention; in 1980, the party formally adopted a gay rights plank to its platform. Over the course of the decade, sodomy laws were removed from the books in twenty-two states. Meanwhile, several dozen cities—including major metropolises like Boston, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC—added sexual orientation to the list of categories protected from discrimination by their civil rights ordinances.33
Despite the changes in the political world, popular culture only haltingly began to discuss gay and lesbian issues. On TV dramas, gay characters often appeared in a negative light, especially early in the decade. Police dramas like The Streets of San Francisco (1972–1977) portrayed gays and lesbians as deviant criminals, while medical shows like Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969–1976) advanced an image of gays as sexual psychopaths and child molesters. In sharp contrast, gay and lesbian characters found more positive portrayals on sitcoms, but still only infrequently, in supporting roles or on single episodes. Still, some progress was made, as hit shows like All in the Family, Maude, and Barney Miller (1975–1982) had multiple episodes that featured both sympathetic portrayals of gay and lesbian characters and mockery of homophobic ones. Later in the decade, the comedy Soap (1977–1981), a spoof of daytime soap operas, included Billy Crystal in its cast, playing an openly gay character. Not all Americans welcomed such changes, of course. Just as with feminism, the new public profile of gays and lesbians prompted a backlash. Companies whose ads appeared in the broadcast for Soap, for instance, found themselves subjected to a letter-writing campaign that threatened a boycott before its September 1977 debut. (Notably, the complaints centered not just on the show’s portrayal of an out-of-the-closet gay man but also its larger themes of heterosexual promiscuity as well.) As a result, several ABC affiliates announced they would refuse to air the show entirely. The controversy, of course, only drew attention to the program, which premiered as the fourth-highest-rated show in the country and continued to run for four years.34
In the realm of politics, the backlash against gay rights was more prolonged and pronounced. After commissioners in Dade County, Florida, voted to extend civil rights protections to gays and lesbians in their jurisdiction—which included much of metropolitan Miami—conservatives mounted a major protest. Anita Bryant, a devout Southern Baptist who then served as the spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission, believed that county officials had given the government’s formal approval to gays and lesbians, whom she regarded as “human garbage.” She soon founded an organization called Save Our Children, Inc., to organize conservative opposition to the ordinance and to place a repeal measure on the next ballot. Portraying “homosexuals” as a threat to heterosexual families, Bryant warned Floridians that gays and lesbians were literally coming to take their kids away from them, because they could not biologically bear their own. “They can only recruit children, and this is what they want to do,” she told terrified parents. “Some of the stories I could tell you of child recruitment and child abuse by homosexuals would turn your stomach.” Duly alarmed, residents voted to repeal the ordinance by an overwhelming margin of 71 percent to 29 percent. “The people of Dade County—the normal majority—have said ‘Enough! Enough! Enough!’ ” Bryant cheered in celebration. “They have voted to repeal an obnoxious assault on our moral values.” Basking in the national spotlight, she promised to launch a massive effort “to repeal similar laws . . . which attempt to legitimize a life-style that is both perverse and dangerous.” 35
The defeat of the Dade County ordinance marked a turning point in the struggle over gay rights. The Miami measure had attracted national attention, and in its wake conservatives launched successful campaigns to defeat similar gay rights measures in cities like St. Paul, Minnesota; Wichita, Kansas; and Eugene, Oregon. The most significant campaign against gay rights came with the Briggs Initiative, a 1978 proposal to ban gays and lesbians from teaching in the public schools of California. Its sponsor, Republican state senator John Briggs, had taken part in the Dade County campaign and sought to replicate it in his home state. Like Bryant, he argued that “homosexual rights” represented a direct threat to heterosexual family life. “In San Francisco,” he repeatedly claimed, “they actually require that they teach a life-style class about homosexuality as an alternative to family life.” The local school board repeatedly denied that such a class actually existed, but Briggs nevertheless repeated the rumor to crowds that ran, in his estimation, to “hundreds of thousands” of people. Though he won significant support for the measure, some conservatives believed the initiative went too far. Notably, former governor Ronald Reagan came out against it, stating that its intrusion on the “basic rights of privacy” ultimately had “the potential for real mischief.” In the end, the Briggs Initiative failed at the polls by a margin of a million votes.36
In San Francisco, the fight over the proposition inflamed all sides. A week after Briggs announced his plan at San Francisco’s City Hall in June 1977, the city’s streets erupted in violence as gay activists and conservative opponents clashed. Robert Hillsborough, a gay man, was stabbed fifteen times by four straight men who screamed “Faggot! Faggot!” and “Here’s one for Anita!” His murder prompted the largest gay rights demonstration yet that summer; that fall, Harvey Milk won election as San Francisco’s first openly gay city supervisor. Milk proved an able activist for the cause, convincing his colleagues to pass one of the country’s strongest municipal measures for gay rights by a margin of 10–1 in early 1978. He then turned his attention to rallying opposition to the Briggs Initiative, helping to turn public opinion around and securing its defeat in November 1978. Just a few weeks later, however, tragedy struck San Francisco again. Dan White, a conservative former police officer and the lone commissioner to vote against the city’s ordinance, resolved to use bullets where ballots had failed. On November 27, he assassinated Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in their offices at City Hall.37
The aftermath of the assassin
ations showed how far the cause of gay rights had come, and how much further it had to go. As the first “avowed homosexual” to win election to a major political position, Milk had drawn a great deal of hate mail. He understood he might well be the victim of violence, but hoped such a moment could lead to some good. “If a bullet should enter my brain,” he said in a recording before his death, “let that bullet destroy every closet door.” A massive candlelight vigil of gays, lesbians, and sympathetic straights seemed to suggest that it had. “Several people, right that following week, came out of the closet because they had been there,” a friend later reflected. Changes in the legal landscape, wrought by Milk and others, had encouraged a new spirit of openness. “That’s what Harvey stood for,” his friend continued, “and it took his death for them to realize it. They just came out. No one would fire them from their jobs because it’s against the law, and . . . that part of our society that’s very closed could open.” The trial that followed, however, showed that much of society was still very much closed to gay equality. White had confessed to the two murders soon after the fact, but his attorneys argued that he had been driven temporarily insane due to excess consumption of junk food. On the basis of this so-called “Twinkie defense,” White received a light sentence of just over seven years for the two assassinations, with the possibility of early parole. The verdict stunned the gay community and sparked a night of violent rioting across San Francisco. “Dan White’s getting off is just one of a million things that happen in our lives: the beatings, the murders, the people driven to suicide by the hostility of the straights,” one rioter explained. “Dan White’s straight justice is just the last straw.” 38
Faced with such setbacks, gay and lesbian activists redoubled their efforts to defend their rights. In March 1977, the first delegation of gay and lesbian leaders was welcomed to the White House for a meeting. “This is the first time in the history of this country,” noted Jean O’Leary of the National Gay Task Force, “that a president has seen fit to acknowledge the rights and needs of some 28 million Americans.” President Carter did not attend the meeting, sending an aide in his place, but he soon made his sympathies clear. Though he was a devout Southern Baptist who had reservations about gays and lesbians, the president noted that he did not share the larger concerns of many of his fellow religionists. “I don’t see homosexuality as a threat to the family,” he said in a Father’s Day interview in 1977. “I don’t feel that society, through its laws, ought to abuse or harass the homosexual.” Hoping to make that attitude more commonplace, gay rights advocates—again taking a page from the playbooks of civil rights and women’s rights campaigns—worked to build up an organizational capacity in Washington, DC, that would match the energy at the grass roots. In 1978, they placed their first full-time lobbyist in the Capitol to stand guard against legislation that might affect their interests. In 1980, more than three dozen gays and lesbians served as delegates to the Democratic National Convention; even the Republican National Convention had two. As O’Leary put it, “We’re taking advantage of the most powerful closet we have: the voting booth.” 39
The feminist and gay rights movements radically transformed American society in the 1970s. For individual straight women, lesbians, and gay men, the social and legal changes brought about by such movements were nothing short of revolutionary: a new world of openness and opportunities that transformed their lives in countless ways. But those who seemed outside the movements were likewise impacted. In the eyes of some, yet another traditional institution from the Cold War era—the nuclear family—had been significantly transformed and weakened, just as the government and economy had been before them. As a result, some Americans grew increasingly disturbed by a new set of fault lines, unfolding before them in ways that resembled the new fracturing of society along lines of race and immigration. As their sense of a “traditional America” slipped away from them, they resolved to act.
CHAPTER 5
Turning Right
AS THE OLD INSTITUTIONS OF THE POSTWAR DECADES crumbled in the 1970s, new opportunities arose for the Right.
The movements for feminism and gay rights had disrupted the nation’s norms on gender and sexuality, but in doing so they also helped inspire an intense countermovement. Religious conservatism, once deemed so far outside the mainstream that even conservative Christians themselves thought they had no role to play in national politics, made a strong resurgence in the form of the modern “Religious Right.” At the same time, a “New Right” likewise made inroads in politics, taking positions that had been dismissed as too extreme just a decade before and marketing them anew for the mainstream. Business conservatives made the case for deregulating large swaths of the economy and lowering tax rates, seeking to roll back the massive expansion of the federal government of the previous half-century. Despite their different agendas, social conservatives and capitalist libertarians joined together in a remade Republican Party, where they forged a common cause against the liberal state.
In the new coalition on the right, these forces overcame the traditional fault lines that had long divided them—the doctrinal divisions that had kept the many varieties of religious conservatives from working with one another, for instance, and the ideological differences that had prevented libertarians and social conservatives from making common cause. But patching up those differences was merely the prelude to a larger project in which they singled out new enemies at home—gays and lesbians, feminists, liberals writ large—and drew new lines of division between themselves and their opponents.
To do so, these conservatives forged new ways to circumvent the mainstream media that had, in their eyes, long frustrated their efforts to get their message out. Co-opting old outlets like radio for their own use and innovating new techniques like direct mail, the architects of the New Right and Religious Right advanced an aggressive message together, with the man they called the Great Communicator in the lead: Ronald Reagan.
The Religious Right
For many conservative Christians, the campaigns for feminism and gay rights in the 1970s had represented a direct threat to what they understood as the “traditional” heterosexual nuclear family. Initially, religious conservatives largely reacted to liberal proposals with targeted countermeasures of their own, like Phyllis Schlafly’s lobbying campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment or Anita Bryant’s drive to repeal municipal gay rights ordinances. But as the decade wore on, conservative Christians began to coalesce into larger, longer-lasting coalitions that set their own agendas.
The Religious Right as we understand it, however, was not created overnight. Though conservative Christians shared a common revulsion to the advances of feminism and gay rights, they had long been divided by theological disagreements and denominational rivalries that kept them from finding common political ground. For instance, while opposition to abortion rights would soon become a key issue in the mobilization of conservatives across the religious spectrum, the immediate reaction to Roe showed a more complicated picture. At the start of the 1970s, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians still regarded opposition to birth control and abortion as “Catholic issues” and kept their distance. “In general, I would disagree with [the Catholic stance],” the evangelist Billy Graham announced in 1968. “I believe in planned parenthood.” Southern Baptist leaders shared this perspective. In 1970, an internal survey of ministers and lay leaders in the denomination revealed widespread support for the liberalization of abortion laws. In cases where the woman’s health was threatened by a pregnancy, nearly 70 percent of Baptist pastors and nearly 80 percent of Sunday School teachers supported abortion access; in cases of rape or incest, 70 percent and 77 percent, respectively; and in cases of fetal deformity, 64 percent and 76 percent. Even W. A. Criswell, a fundamentalist firebrand from Dallas who later led the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, initially expressed a fairly liberal stance on abortion. “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had life separate fro
m its mother . . . that it became an individual person,” he noted a month after Roe; “it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.” 1
For fundamentalists and evangelical Protestants, this long-standing belief that abortion was a “Catholic issue” was difficult to shake. Harold O. J. Brown, a prominent evangelical theologian, later recalled that many Protestants had the attitude that “ ‘If the Catholics are for it, we should be against it.’ ” Some worked to change that attitude. In a 1976 editorial titled “Is Abortion a Catholic Issue?” the editors of Christianity Today dismissed the question as a “smokescreen” and urged evangelicals to stop worrying about Catholic political influence and start worrying about “the most fundamental of human rights, the right to life.” Likewise, Dr. C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer advanced the evangelical case against abortion in a best-selling book that was later made into a five-part film series distributed widely by Gospel Films: Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Schaeffer took the show on the road, speaking to large audiences on an eighteen-city tour across the country in 1977.2 Meanwhile, Robert Holbrook, a prominent Southern Baptist minister, won election to the National Right to Life Committee, which had until then largely been a creation of Catholics. Other evangelicals formed parallel pro-life organizations, such as Baptists for Life and the Christian Action Council.3
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