The Right Side of History by Adrian Brooks

Author:Adrian Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Right Side of History
ISBN: 9781627781312
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

* * *

Anita Bryant’s Anti-Gay Crusade

by Jeanne Cordóva

Anita Bryant ruined my softball career. At thirty, my playdates ended in 1978 as the Gay Liberation Movement was compelled to morph from a radical sub-culture into a national civil rights struggle.

Born in 1948, and growing up with eleven siblings in Southern California, I’d left the sisterhood of a Catholic convent by twenty-five and joined the sisterhood of lesbian nation—becoming the president of Los Angeles’s Daughters of Bilitis. Young, angry, and butch, I was the dyke a sexist didn’t want to meet at night: a veteran who had organized two national lesbian conferences and a national newsmagazine, The Lesbian Tide.

By 1977, gays and lesbians were confident. In seven years, we’d won the repeal of sex laws and gay protections in jobs and housing in 19 states and 40 cities. Our latest victory was in Florida, where Dade County Commissioners passed a gay rights ordinance. But Anita Bryant—a Sarah Palin-like 1950s singer, now promoting Florida oranges on TV—led a local protest pledging to overturn Dade’s “evil decision.” The evangelist seemed laughable when she first spoke about “men wearing dresses” teaching in public schools and “the devastation of the moral fiber of the youth of America.”

But six months later the parody turned serious.

Bryant gathered the necessary signatures to put a referendum on Dade’s June 7th, 1977 ballot—one that would repeal the city’s new gay ordinance. Voters sided with her. They repealed our employment and housing rights.

Five days later, gays and lesbians from fifteen cities across America took to the streets. Ten thousand marched in Los Angeles. Five thousand angry San Franciscans protested. Activist Harvey Milk, a newly elected city councilman, was the main rally speaker. Lesbians in Los Angeles marched under a banner proclaiming, “Hitler. McCarthy. Anita.” Speaking to the crowd, I announced Bryant’s new alliance with Phyllis Schlafly, America’s top anti-feminist and an arch-foe of the embattled ERA—equal rights for women.

But Dade County sideswiped our fledgling movement. As Anita moved from Florida to Minneapolis-St. Paul, then to Wichita, Kansas, and then onto Eugene, Oregon, she championed the values of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and her own new nonprofit, Save Our Children, Inc. As she did, gay and lesbian Californians began to realize: she had national plans.

Watching Minneapolis fall was especially depressing. It was a university town, a liberal city. How could they have lost? Worse yet, Bryant convinced her followers to call gay rights “special rights.” Within months, she’d become a national anti-gay spokesperson: an advocate who railed against a woman’s right to choose (abortion) and called the peace movement to end the Vietnam War, “a war between atheism and God.” What we didn’t realize at first was that John Briggs, an ambitious state senator from Orange County (Southern California’s Bible belt), had rushed to Florida to support her. Briggs aspired to higher office. So when Anita came west and joined him, our community went on alert. But where would she attack? Rumors abounded that they’d target San Francisco’s year-old gay rights ordinance or Governor Jerry Brown’s recent decriminalization of sodomy.

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