Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution by Linda Hirshman

Author:Linda Hirshman [Hirshman, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Social History
ISBN: 9780062202253
Google: MYgyFwgsk8sC
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2012-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Long Way

What a way it had been. Mixner, raised in the 1940s on a farm in rural New Jersey, like Clinton in Hot Springs, Arkansas, grew up without indoor plumbing. Being gay, he always knew he was different; he thought he was bad and he desperately feared being caught. For a poor rural boy, getting away even to a modest college like Arizona State was like escaping from jail. When he met Clinton on vacation from Oxford at an antiwar retreat in 1969, he had a moment’s pause. “If I weren’t gay,” he asked himself, “would I have thought I could go to a fancy college too? Be a Rhodes scholar?”

As with so many refugees from “Amerika,” when the Sixties receded, Mixner took refuge in California. Closeted and well connected from his antiwar activism, he soon got to be a player in Los Angeles, making a living as a political consultant. Little by little, he let people in on his secret, until, finally, in the heat of the battle against the Briggs initiative in 1978, he came out. His friends Bill and Hillary were totally okay with it, they said.

Mixner had come to Los Angeles politics at just the right time: by the midseventies in the city of glamour and power, glamorous, powerful gay men had decided to make their cause fashionable. Not for them the “hippies” of the Stonewall-era gay and lesbian center. In 1976, Peter Scott, a successful lawyer and the love of David Mixner’s life, gathered the men in his consciousness-raising group and added a few more A-gays to start the first gay political action committee. The PAC became the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA), a nice neutral name like Human Rights Campaign. In a stunning debut, MECLA took down the entrenched, rabidly antigay Los Angeles City Council president John Gibson. Since the presidency of the city council always went to the leading vote-getter in the council elections, MECLA simply gave Gibson’s hapless opponent five thousand dollars, and the nonentity took a third of Gibson’s vote, relegating Gibson to the relatively powerless position of just another councilman.

Even in the eighties, as AIDS devastated their community, the wealthy, connected gays and lesbians of California were creating the institutions of what would ultimately become the gay establishment. The new organizations revealed their financial power almost immediately. LA gays, led by the omnipresent David Goodstein, had created the Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRC-F), modeled on MECLA, in 1980. A mere two years later, the gay campaign fund gave almost two hundred thousand dollars to Democratic candidates. The same year, Senator Edward Kennedy was the keynote speaker at the MECLA dinner.

The gay political organizing benefited greatly, as it always does, from competition within the Democratic Party, this time in the run-up to the presidential election in 1984. Not only did they have money to spend, but California, the last big primary state, made California Democrats disproportionately powerful in the nominating process. Democratic presidential aspirant Walter Mondale grudgingly signed

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