"The Civil Rights of Parents" - Race and Conservative Politics in Anita Bryant's Campaign

"The Civil Rights of Parents": Race and Conservative Politics in Anita Bryant's Campaign
against Gay Rights in 1970s Florida

Author(s): GILLIAN FRANK
Source: Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 22, No. 1 (JANUARY 2013), pp. 126-160
Published by: University of Texas Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23322037
Accessed: 18-05-2020 08:04 UTC
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"The Civil Rights of Parents": Race and
Conservative Politics in Anita Bryant's
Campaign against Gay Rights in 1970s Florida
GILLIAN FRANK
Stony Brook University
On 18 January 1977, at a public hearing in Miam

the Board of Commissioners of Dade County, Florida, opponen
ponents of an ordinance that would prohibit discrimination again
and gay men in the areas of housing, public accommodations, and
ment squared off. The small contingent of gay rights activists su
the ordinance was vastly outnumbered by hundreds of Baptists w
on buses chartered by two local churches. Bearing signs such as "G
No. Who Are You to Be Different?" and "Protect Our Childr
Legislate Immorality for Dade County," these activists packed
County Courthouse Commission chambers and filled the hallw
loudly jeering at those with whom they disagreed. Both the co
evangelical Christians and the gay rights advocates were in agreem
one thing: the consequence of the antidiscrimination ordinance w
the ability of gay men and lesbians to be integrated into publi
thus, the very definition of citizenship was at stake.1
I would like to acknowledge the generous feedback of Beth Bailey, Mari Jo B

Canaday, Alex Carp, Thomas Chen, Nathan Connolly, Lauren Jae Gutterman, Ka
Richard Meckel, Ani Mukherji, Gosia Rymsza-Pawlowska, Robert Self, Susan Sm
Stein, Whitney Strub, Aiko Takeuchi-Demircri, Sarah Wald, and Heather Whit
drafts of this article. My research benefited from thoughtful comments from audie
at the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities, participants in the D
American Civilization's research colloquium at Brown University, and the Depar
tory's research colloquium at Rowan University. Mathew Kuefler and readers at
the History of Sexuality provided me with valuable suggestions as I undertook revisi
grateful for a Phil Zwickler Memorial Grant, which enabled me to conduct importa
for this article at Cornell University's Human Sexuality Collection, and an Ame
of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellowship, which allowed me to complete thes
1 Theodore Stanger, "Dade Approves Ordinance Banning Bias against G
Herald, 19 January 1977, 1-A, 18-A; "Miami Gay Bill Passes as Celebrities Le
Community News, 29 January 1977, 1.
Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 22, No. 1, January 2013

© 2013 by the University of Texas Press
DOI: 10.7560/JHS22106
126
"The Civil Rights of Parentsx 127
"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 best
selling 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."2 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."3 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."4 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.3
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."6 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.7 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 fac
tors: a church-based sexual conservatism among African Americans; and
the supposed ability to publicly recognize racial identity, but not sexual
2 Anita Bryant, The Anita Bryant Story (Old Tappan, NJ: F. H. Revell, 1977), 89, 24.
3 "Gay Law Foes to Plan Vote Drive," Miami Herald, 26 January 1977, 3-B; Bryant, The
Anita Bryant Story, 62.
4 Stanger, "Dade Approves Ordinance," 18-A.
5 "Miami's Gays Gear Up for Referendum Battle," Gay Community News, 12 February
1977, 1; The National Gay Task Force (NGTF) had a similar analysis. See "National Gay
Task Force Announces 'We Are Your Children' Educational Campaign," 13 June 1977,
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Records #7301, box 36, folder 35, Division of Rare
and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY (cited hereafter as RMC).
6 Advertisement, Miami Herald, 20 March 1977, 9-D; advertisement, Miami News, 21
March 1977, 3A.
7 For an example of innovative work in this vein, see Whitney Strub, "Black and White
and Banned All Over: Race, Censorship and Obscenity in Postwar Memphis," Journal of
Social History 40, no. 3 (2007): 685-715.
128 Gillian Frank
identity, based on visible markers.8 These dynamics underpinned

matic repudiation of gay rights in Dade County in 1977 and hav
debates on sexual rights since.
Anita Bryant and the organization to combat gay rights that
resented, called Save Our Children (SOC), are infamous as cata
the backlash against gay rights in the 1970s, but the history of thi
which is used as a touchstone in histories of conservatism and sexua
only beginning to be understood.9 Analyzing the racial origins
activism and the gay rights response to it in the 1970s reveals a mi
of conservative ideas and activists from race-based conflicts to gen
sexual-based conflicts. SOC's discourse of child protection emb
protean logic of family privacy against queer sexuality. That strate
in part, learned from southern US resistance to desegregation
back to the Civil War, which used the language of privacy an
protection to address issues of race.10 In Florida, popular resistance
court-ordered busing of children to achieve racial integration in
saw a continuation of long-standing fears about interracial sexua
among youth and set the stage for battles over racial equality that
directly inspire SOC's 1977 antigay campaign.
To trace the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, it i
sary to study the Save Our Children campaign within three ove
contexts: antibusing campaigns, anti-Equal Rights Amendmen
struggles, and antigay campaigns. Historians of conservatism ha
how, during the 1970s, conflicts over racial integration and t
movement, which sought unsuccessfully to enshrine women's eq
the US Constitution, enabled a white constituency to imagine th
as part of a "silent majority" opposed to such changes.11 The ra
and gendered identity of the silent majority also formed the be
antigay movements, as did the claim that these groups were sav
8 For a related discussion on tensions between gay rights activists and black
conservatives and civil rights activists, see Kevin J. Mumford, "The Trouble with G
Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia, 1969-1982," Journa
can History 98, no. 1 (2011): 49-72.
9 To date, the best published work on this subject is Fred Fejes, Gay Rights
Panic: The Origins of America's Debate on Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave
2008). For an excellent dissertation that extensively details the struggle over gay
Dade County, see Patrick McCreery, "Miami Vice: Anita Bryant, Gay Rights,
Protectionism" (PhD diss., New York University, 2009).
10 See Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (
University of California Press, 1991); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and J
Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chape
versity of North Carolina Press, 1996); Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Ch
Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
11 See, for example, Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the
South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Robert Mason, Richard N
the Quest for a New Majority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 20
"The Civil Rights of Parents" 129
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 denomi
nation. 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."
Silent Majorities: The Sexual Politics of Antibusing Crusades
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 abso
lutely 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."12 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
12 R. A. Mcavoy to Richard Nixon, White House Central Files, HU Education, box

14, folder "Schooling Florida 2 of 2," Richard Nixon Library, National Archives, College
Park, MD.
130 Gillian Frank
integration. The above letter signals how, in Florida, busing set

for legal and cultural conflict over the meaning and impleme
racial equality in the 1970s. Mcavoy's letter, indicative of the raci
of the day, begins to reveal how the rhetorical force of SOC's
against gay rights was over a decade in the making. This plea
was also emblematic of how white Americans symbolically use
to erase accusations of racism by moving the discussion of bu
from systemic inequality and toward the putative best interest of
education, which coincided with maintaining the status quo. The i
the imperiled child also gave force and direction to SOC's antigay
Battles over busing, as Mcavoy's letter indicates, were articulated
the idea of the "silent majority," a term coined by Richard Nixon
in his attempt to define a new conservative electorate and sub
taken up by antibusing, anti-ERA, and antigay activists hoping to
that their privileged status was being unfairly imperiled while he
constitute a conservative white heterosexual identity.
President Nixon's carefully constructed opposition to busing inf
how antibusing activists in Florida articulated what Matthew L
scribes as a '"color blind' discourse of suburban innocence that dep
dential segregation as the class-based outcome of meritocratic indi
rather than the unconstitutional product of structural racism."13
1970 Nixon addressed the nation and railed against court-impos
He demanded from Congress legislation that would put a mora
new busing practices.14 Nixon's address on busing, timed to i
midterm elections, borrowed from antibusing activists a specific
that helped solidify the perception that white middle-class en
and lifestyles were imperiled by civil rights and by court interfe
characterized busing as "forced," while desegregation was assoc
the "massive disrupting of existing school patterns" and "the doom
neighborhood school."15 Opponents of busing in Florida, like t
terparts nationwide, countered the language of the courts and civ
activists who named racial inequalities. They did so through their
phasis on child protection, parents' rights, and preserving neighb
language whose racial logic was as conspicuous as the absence o
racial terminology.16 Nixon's remarks, which were echoed by whi
across the United States, thus furthered a process, described by L
one whereby "millions of white homeowners who had achieved a re
13 Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 1.

14 "Text of the President's Statement Explaining His Policy on School Dese
New Tork Times, 25 March 1970, 26.
15 Joseph T. Durham, "Sense and Nonsense about Busing," Journal of Negr
42, no. 3 (1973): 322-35.
!6 For examples of the deployment of such racial codes in familial language,
minous correspondence to Claude Kirk in series 92, box 15, folders 1-16, "Bu
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."17
Between 1970 and 1972 Florida became the stage for a national battle
over school busing, one that placed child protection at the center of de
bates 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.18 Like other ur
ban 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.19
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 else
where 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.20 A New Tork
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
Incoming," Florida State Archives, Tallahassee, FL (cited hereafter as FSA). For examples of
contemporary commentary about the use of racial codes in Florida, see Jeffrey L. Brezner
and Herbert Cambridge, Facts about Busing (Coral Gables: Florida Desegregation Consult
ing Center, 1972), series 126, box 3, folder "'Bussing' Articles and Correspondence," FSA.
17 Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 2.
18 "Racial Composition as of September 28, 1970," series 923, box 102, folder "Dade
County—Desegregation Case 1970," FSA; David Colburn and Richard Scher, "Race Re
lations and Florida Gubernatorial Politics since the Brown Decision," Florida Historical
Quarterly 55, no. 2 (1976): 153-69; Marvin Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 231.
19 For a detailed firsthand account of white flight resulting from busing across Florida, see
League of Women Voters of Florida, "Human Resources Desegregation Report" (1971), se
ries 126, box 7, folder "Human Resources Desegregation," FSA. For histories of the impact
of immigration on Miami, see also Melanie Shell-Weiss, Coming to Miami: A Social History
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 207; Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, City
on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
20 Claude Kirk, "Addendum to State of the State Legislative Opening Day Address of
Governor Claude R. Kirk, Jr., April 6, 1970" (news release), series 960, box 3, folder "April
1970," FSA.
132 Gillian Frank
given birth to their second child ... surrounded by blushing nurses,

babies and television cameras." The columnist wryly pointed o
Florida "the issue of forced busing has superseded motherhood as
est path to the voter's heart."21 "Superseded," was the wrong desc
public sentiment, for the politics of child protection closely tied
rights and motherhood to "forced busing" in rhetoric and in p
was evidenced by the fact that Kirk later led a group named Paren
Forced Busing.22 Embodied in Kirk's carefully staged photo op
was a message that the reproduction of racial norms and privilege
to sexual reproduction and to the physical reproduction of all-whi
spaces. Surrounded by newborns, Kirk deployed the powerful s
of racial innocence and invoked long-standing fears of mixed-race
Kirk's stance provoked a flood of correspondence from paren
the United States who opposed busing and integration. While
respondents approvingly wrote to Kirk and stated that their oppo
busing was not "a matter of race" even while using shared racial cod
of his endorsements also came from avowed segregationists who o
posed "race mixing" of any kind and feared forced sexual contact
white and black children.23 These more explicit sentiments create
undercurrent of antibusing opposition and formed a continuum w
color-blind logic of some opponents. Drawing these sentiments
was the recurring claim that opponents of busing were members of
majority whose will was being impinged by the "loud minority."2
A statewide referendum on busing harnessed populist anger and
integration to remain a divisive issue in Florida through the 1970s
Kirk's appeal to antibusing sentiments, Democratic busing support
Askew defeated Kirk in the gubernatorial election. However, natio
reinserted busing in Florida politics. In 1971 the Supreme Cour
Swcrnn v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg that busing was necessary to de
21 John Nordheimer, "Kirk Is the Name of the Man in the Door," New Tork
April 1970, E2.
22 Colburn and Scher, "Race Relations and Florida," 161.
23 For representative correspondence on miscegenation, see Edwin Watson Jr
Kirk, 27 January 1970, series 92, box 15, folder "Bussing Schools Incomi
FSA; Mary Jane Smith to Claude Kirk, 25 January 1970, series 92, box 15, fold
Schools Incoming 13 of 16," FSA. For a discussion of how racial and sexual fears
in earlier struggles over desegregation, including the famous 1957 integratio
High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, see Phoebe Godfrey, "Bayonets, Brainw
Bathrooms: The Discourse of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Desegregat
Rock's Central High," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2003): 55
parative sense of how fears of sexual contact informed antibusing rhetoric,
Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 118-20.
24 See, for example, Ruth Reid to Claude Kirk, undated, "Will You Take a Sta
Rights of the Majority?," series 92, box 15, folder "Bussing Schools Incomin
FSA.
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 wide
spread discussion of amending the US Constitution to prohibit busing.20
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 stra
tegically 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."26 Many political
commentators attributed great importance to the Florida vote, believing that
it would determine the course of the national debate on racial integration.27
Over 50 percent of Florida voters cast ballots, and 74 percent approved
the busing amendment proposition. Every county in Florida supported ban
ning busing by wide majorities.28 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 op
portunities 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.29
"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.30 The Milliken
25 Abel Bartley, "Reading, Writing and Racism: The Fight to Desegregate the Duval
County Public School System," Journal of Negro History 86, no. 3 (2001): 336-47.
26 John Nordeimer, "The Real Candidate Is Named 'Busing,'" New York Times, 27
February 1972, E3; Martin Waldron, "Race Flare-Ups Mar Campaign in Florida," New Tork
Times, 10 March 1972, 20.
27 Gordon E. Harvey, A Question of Justice: New South Governors and Education, 1968
1976 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 68; Douglas Robinson, "Busing Ban
Wins by Large Margin," New Tork Times, 15 March 1972, 1.
28 Harvey, A Qttestion of Justice, 84.
29 While it was the most immediate precedent, the 1972 referendum was not the first time
Florida voters placed issues pertaining to race and housing on the ballot. See Raymond A.
Mohl, "Elizabeth Virrick and the 'Concrete Monsters': Housing Reform in Postwar Miami,"
Tequesta 1, no. 61 (2001): 5-37.
30 Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).
134 Gillian Frank
decision set the stage for the resegregation of schools in Dade

1977, an action that coincided with and informed debates over gay c
Milliken overturned a busing plan in metropolitan Detroit by ruli
forts to desegregate public schools could not be extended beyond m
boundaries. The decision curbed the impact of the earlier Swann dec
made clear that the political boundaries between urban and suburb
constitutional and thus allowed for de jure school segregation.31
On 23 February 1977 the effects of Milliken v. Bradley were, felt
County, Florida, when antibusing protesters at a public hearing, d
a by now common language of child protection, successfully lobbi
busing in their community. Most of the speakers and the majorit
audience at the hearing endorsed returning the school to their "n
hood" status—a code word for segregation. Using the vivid emo
also characterized SOC's campaign against gay rights, one whi
tellingly declared at the hearing, "We don't want to lose cont
children, and that is what happens when they are bused."32 A nar
sexual danger underwrote such political activism, and request
trol" of white children, which depended upon preserving the
were rooted in attempts to influence the sexual values of white ch
limiting their contact with black children. On 16 March 1977, aft
of debate, the Dade County School Board allowed junior high s
high schools effectively to reverse the desegregation plan ordered
federal courts. Legislators and the Miami Herald justified the d
stating that it provided students with "a more stable attendan
with fewer schools to attend in their career and less busing."33
Key figures in the Save Our Children campaign, which had begu
date, had also participated in these antibusing struggles. SOC's
Robert Brake, had already lobbied for funding to private religiou
(described by opponents as white flight schools) back in 197
voluntarily acted as a lawyer in the Miami Springs City Council's
which challenged the Dade County School Board's integrat
SOC's media director, Mike Thompson, who was Brake's neig
run for lieutenant governor of Florida in 1974 on a conservati
ing platform.34 Thompson was also chairman of the Florida Co
31 David L. Kirp, "Retreat into Legalism: The Little Rock School Desegregat
Historic Perspective," PS: Political Science and Politics 30, no. 3 (1997): 443-47; L
McAndrews, "The Politics of Principle: Richard Nixon and School Desegregati
of Negro History 83, no. 3 (1998): 187-200.
32 Steve Strasser, "School Board Postpones Final Vote on Boundaries," Mi
24 February 1977, 2-B.
33 Steve Strasser, "Race Quotas Ended for Junior Highs," Miami Herald
1977, 1-B.
34 Thompson was the running mate of Jerry Thomas, a staunch opponent of busing and
the ERA. See advertisement, Panama City News-Herald, 3 November 1974, 4-C; advertise
ment, Palm Beach Post, 1 October 1974, C3; "State Funds Sought for Private Schools,"
Union (FCU), which formally opposed busing and the ERA and helped
migrate conservative ideas and activists to these conflicts.35 At the moment
that antibusing campaigns secured white control over suburban schools,
antigay campaigns would employ a nearly identical set of tactics and lan
guage to preserve control over sexual mores within this very same space in
a campaign against gay teachers.
Defending the Family: Antifeminism, Race, and Sexuality
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.36 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. Flowever, the ratifi
cation 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.37
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
Ocala Star-Banner, 22 April 1971, 8A; "Black Cuts Asked at Springs Jr. High," Miami News,
7 July 1971, 2-A; Nicolette Handros, "Miami Springs Picks Attorney to Study Planned Suit
on Race Balance in School," Miami News, 9 November 1971, 6-A.
35 S. S. Sawyer to M. Stanton Evans, 11 January 1972, American Conservative Union
Papers, MSS 176, box 54, folder 4, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library,
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT (cited hereafter as ACU); Florida Conservative Union,
"Legislature in Session," Florida Perspective 2, no. 1 (1976): 1,4, MSS 176, box 55, folder 8,
ACU; Mike Thompson to Jim Roberts, 24 March 1977, MSS 176, box 55, folder 19, ACU.
36 See, for example, Laurie Perrero to Dan Scarborough, 15 February 1973, and Grace C.
Smith to Dan Scarborough, 12 February 1973, series 18, box 303, folder "ERA Correspon
dence—Con," FSA; Donald G. Mathews and Sharon de Hart, Sex, Gender; and the Politics of
ERA: A State and the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 165-67. For racial
antecedents, see Godfrey, "Bayonets, Brainwashing, and Bathrooms," 62-65.
37 For a discussion of the legislative history of the ERA in Florida, see Joan Carver, "The
Equal Rights Amendment and the Florida Legislature," Florida Historical Quarterly 60, no.
4 (1982): 455-81.
136 Gillian Frank
politics were sewn closely together in a widespread and bitter debat

the limits of civil rights. These campaigns also saw future SOC acti
supporters play prominent roles in opposing the amendment. The c
of racial danger with homosexual danger in Save Our Children'
rights campaign derived, in part, from the anti-ERA activism of S
national movement and its affiliated organization in Florida, Wo
Responsible Legislation (WFRL), led by Texas transplant, conservativ
host, and member of the FCU Shirley Spellerberg. Both groups
the ERA with the dangers of "sex mixing," "homosexual marri
the threat of "homosexual schoolteachers." Overlapping chrono
and geographically with antibusing campaigns (at least one Dad
antibusing group, Citizens in Favor of Neighborhood Schools,
an anti-ERA lobbying organization), anti-ERA activists also sha
antibusing activists the belief that they were members of the silent
who were "now speaking out!" This public claim of being a silent m
performed political labor, empowering a reactionary politics and de
a constituency that was familial, normative, and indicatively white
The danger of homosexuality to children and the family was a do
WFRL concern. As early as 1973 its literature warned that the ERA
legalize homosexual marriages and open the door to the adoption of
by legally married homosexual couples" (see fig. I).39 By 1977
campaigned against gay rights, WFRL continued to invoke the thre
marriage and adoption. To convince politicians that gays and lesbian
to marry and adopt, WFRL circulated a 1970 legal decision that rev
marriage license of two women in Hillsborough County, Florida, wh
sought to marry each other in 1969.40 The ERA, it argued, wou
legal codes and traditional values. The homophobia that inform
anti-ERA and antigay campaigns crystallized in 1977 with the co
defeat of the ERA and gay rights laws and the implementation of leg
prohibiting gay marriage and adoption by gay parents.
Defending the family was a prominent concern of ERA opponent
maintained that the amendment would undercut cherished traditions. Not
only would the ERA allow gay marriage, worried Schlafly, but the hetero
sexual family would also lose its esteemed place in American life.41 ERA
opponents in Florida echoed these concerns in correspondence to politicians
38 Jo Conté, "The New Right in Florida: Who It Is and What It Wants," Florida National
Organization for Women, 23 March 1979, 8, box 156, folder 39, National Organization for
Women Collection, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
39 WFRL to Bruce A. Smathers, 23 March 1973, series M 75-93, box 16, folder "ERA/
Information Against," FSA; WFRL to Bruce A. Smathers, March 1973, series M 75-93, box
16, folder "ERA/Con 1973 Session," FSA.
40 WFRL to Bruce A. Smathers, April 1974, series M 75-93, box 16, folder "ERA/
Information Against," FSA.
41 Phyllis Schlafly, "ERA and Homosexual 'Marriages,'" Phyllis Schlafly Report 8, no. 2
(1974): sec. 2; series 79, box 5, folder "ERA Correspondence," FSA.
the ERA TROJAN HORSE IS PULL OF ABOMINATIONS

legalization of
STATE NURSERIES SO
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Figure 1. Vic Lockman, "The ERA Trojan Horse Is Full of Abominations . . .

in The Equal Rights Amendment: A Trojan Horse. Courtesy of the Hall-Hoag
Collection of Extremist and Dissenting Printed Propaganda, John Hay Library,
Brown University.
where they claimed that the ERA "could destroy the American family as the
very building block of our civilization."42 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."43 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 WFRL 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."44 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?" (see fig. 2). This
42 Joseph Weiss to Dan Scarborough, 13 February 1973, series 18, box 303, folder "ERA
Correspondence—Con," FSA.
43 Mathews and de Hart, Sex, Gender, 154-60.
44 WFRL to Bruce A. Smathers, April 1974, series M 75-93, box 16, folder "ERA/
Information Against," FSA.
138 Gillian Frank
MAKING- AU, FACILITIES COEP?
facilities egceivingr pe.pe.eAL oe sratc

pumps will ge $u9cjecr ro era/
• Coll£6£ Doe*\iToeies • csv/n classes
• grsr zooms • Pe/sovs amp xeroxM schools
• MtLITAeV' POUC& 4/VP /?/#& 0£PAZTAie<VrS
• HOSP/rAC BOOMS
~5 the supreme couer __/3l

t kulec.-in kace
J "serA/TAre- aureQML" fs-d^r~~~X—
o^n ^MOT equal ' ^ky==£=S=~-£
po you want the sexes ruilv inteosatep like the i?aces p
Figure 2. Vic Lockman, "Making All Facilities Coed?," in The Equal Rights Amend
ment: A Trojan Horse. Courtesy of the Hall-Hoag Collection of Extremist and
Dissenting Printed Propaganda, John Hay Library, Brown University.
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 WFRL likewise invoked this legacy of racial and sexual boundaries
when it spoke of the impending dangers of homosexual marriage. A care
fully constructed WFRL statement read: "With the advent of the Civil
Rights Act laws forbidding interracial marriagesv/CK struck down as being
RACIALLY DISCRIMINATORY as indeed they were. The intent of the
ERA is to eradicate SEXUAL DISCRIMINATION."45 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 as
sistant 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.
45 WFRL, "Rebuttal to Attorney General Shevin's opinion on homosexual marriages

under the proposed 'Equal Rights Amendment' to the U.S. Constitution," April 1973, series
M 75-93, box 16, folder "ERA/Information Against," FSA, emphasis in original.
This idea comes from the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954. "46 The
implications of this rhetoric unspooled in private correspondence between
grassroots anti-ERA activists and Florida politicians. Less disciplined in lan
guage 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.47 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 attempting] to rape her."48
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, contrib
uted to its final defeat in the Florida Senate on 13 April 1977.49 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.50
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."51 Newspaper reports also claimed that SOC's campaign
against gay rights was essential to the defeat of the ERA in Florida.
From Silent Majority to Normal Majority
"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 coun
try," wrote one correspondent to the Miami News in April 1977.52 Just as
46 M. A. Galbraith Jr. to Dr. L. Frey, 22 March 1973, series 18, box 303, folder "ERA
Correspondence—Con," FSA.
47 Mrs. Aleen E. Carey to Dan Scarborough, 9 April 1973, series 18, box 303, folder
"ERA," FSA. For a sense of the prominence of the restroom theme, see Shirley R, Roye to
Dan Scarborough, 23 March 1973, series 18, box 303, folder "ERA," FSA.
48 Woman Constitutionalist, series 79, box 5, folder "ERA," FSA.
49 Virginia Ellis, "Senate Defeats ERA; Backers 'Won't Quit,'" Miami Herald, 14 April
1977, 1-A; "Longtime Supporter of ERA in Senate Will Switch Vote," Miami Herald, 17
March 1977.
50 Bill Rose, "Stop-ERA Leader Found a Seat," Miami Herald, 14 April 1977, 20-A.
51 Ellis, "Senate Defeats ERA," 1-A.
°2 Lilian Holmes, "Fight Gay Rights," Miami News, 29 April 1977, 10A.
140 Gillian Frank
coinciding struggles against busing and the ERA attempted to

the boundaries of the nation-state by using images of the traditio
ily and the concept of the silent majority to reconsolidate white a
power, SOC deployed the image of the child to rationalize excludin
variant populations from full citizenship. Borrowing from the
ping struggles, SOC claimed to be representative of the silent maj
of the "normal majority" in its quest to defend children and the f
the family. The notion of the silent majority was not explicitly r
or gendered when Nixon first articulated it in 1969, but its s
use by reactionary movements throughout the following decad
established these meanings. The same identity was also central
sought to imagine a normative and majoritarian identity in opp
homosexual rights. The group did so by warning that if gays w
granted "special rights," the private and religious schools where th
their children and that had emerged to avoid racial integration
forced to hire "flaunting homosexuals."53
The introduction of the gay rights ordinance in Dade County
and the subsequent conflict over it in 1977 were direct conseq
prior conservative movements and also the accelerated growth of
lesbian social movements, commercial institutions, and publication
1970s. By 1969 a homophile movement had intersected with t
currents from New Left and civil rights movements. In the 1970s,
of the formation and proliferation of local and national organizati
the rapid expansion of the gay press, gays were increasingly able
themselves as part of a national community with shared social and
interests. By the mid-1970s liberal organizations such as the Natio
Task Force (NGTF) eschewed more radical politics and instead
sively fought for the recognition of gays and lesbians as citizens
rights under the law. Orienting themselves toward mainstream po
NGTF built political alliances with the Democratic Party and s
implement gay rights laws. In so doing, it provided a model for lo
gay rights groups who set reform-oriented goals even as both nat
local organizations remained vexed over what the meaning and
public and respectable gay identity ought to be. A significant n
local gay organizations followed the NGTF's lead and worked t
the purview of newly enshrined civil rights ordinances addressing
gender to include same-sex sexuality.54 Between 1972 and 1975
53 SOC, advertisement, Miami Herald, 20 March 1977, 9-D; "Singer An

Coming," Baptist Beacon 25, no. 4 (1977): 2.
54 On liberal and radical strands of gay liberation politics, see David Eisenbach,
An American Revolution (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006); Dudley Clendine
Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (New York: Simo
1999). For recent scholarship on the politics of respectability and debates o
public images for gay men, see Brian J. Distelberg, "Mainstream Fiction, Gay Re
"The Civil Rights of Parents3' 141
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."55 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.56
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 of1964.'7
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."58 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.59
Coming 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 ei
ther reverse itself or call a special referendum on the issue.60 So on 26 January
Gay Male Cultural Politics in the 1970s," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16,
no. 3 (2010): 389-427; David K. Johnson, "Physique Pioneers: The Politics of 1960s Gay
Consumer Cultur c" Journal of Social History 43, no. 4 (2010): 867-92.
55 DCCHR, press release, 1 August 1977, Mark Silber Collection, Stonewall Library and
Archives, Fort Lauderdale, FL (cited hereafter as MSC).
56 Robert S. Basker, "Re: The Rights Amendment to the Dade County Ordinance on
Discrimination," 18 January 1977, in James M. Foster Papers, #7439, box 11, folder 10,
RMC.
57 "Vote," Miami Herald, 8 June 1977, 1-A; "The Gay Issue: Whose Rights Prevail?,"
Miami Herald, 4 April 1977,1-A.
58 John Arnold, "Gay Rights Battle Lines Are Drawn," Miami Herald, 27 March 1977,
D-l; #7301, box 36, folder 20, RMC.
59 "Battle over Gay Rights," Newsweek, 6 June 1977, 19-20.
60 Theodore Stanger, "Dade Approves Ordinance Banning Bias against Gays," Miami
Herald, 19 January 1977, 18-A.
142 Gillian Frank
1977 a group of prominent local religious leaders and other con

formed SOC. They came from churches, including African Am
Latino congregations of various denominations, and synagogue
led by activists within the FCU who had strong ties to antibusing,
and antiabortion causes.61 The rank and file of SOC included a
celebrities and prominent activists in women's organizations who
a number of different religious backgrounds.62 For example, Mar
the former chairman of the National Council of Catholic Wom
legislative chair of Florida Stop-ERA, joined SOC and actively
its goals.63 Many male rank-and-file members also were vetera
campaigners and organizers coming from various conservativ
tions. The bedrock of SOC's membership consisted of white w
were active in churches and who self-consciously identified as paren
women shouldered the brunt of the repeal effort.64 In less than f
they gathered close to sixty thousand signatures, six times th
number necessary to overturn the ordinance. Consequently, SO
to formally present its petition to the commission on 22 Febr
Despite tremendous public and media pressure to reverse themselv
County commissioners voted to uphold the ordinance on 15 M
thereby putting the issue to a referendum on 7 June 1977.6d
It was the power of Anita Bryant's celebrity that catapulted the
to national attention and established the tenor of its cultural poli
leaders strategically selected Bryant as its spokesperson because her
status guaranteed media coverage. Bryant's previous forays int
politics marked her as wholesome, religious, and maternal. She
at a Youth for Decency rally in 1969 to protest indecency in rock
music—an event prompted after the rock band the Doors per
Mami and local police charged their lead singer, Jim Morrison, fo
himself to the crowd.66 In 1973 Bryant had appeared in Fort
with Billy Graham for his youth crusade, a mass event organized
61 Arnold, "Gay Rights Battie Lines"; Joel Greenberg, "Anita Bryant Starts
to Void County Gay Ordinance," Miami Herald, 12 February 1977, 1-B; Cl
Nagourney, Out for Good, 298.
62 For information on SOC women and their prior activism, see Bryant, The A
Story, 44.
63 Conte, "The New Right," 11; "Anti-Chiles Smear Campaign Is Denied," Nevps Tri
bune (Fort Pierce, FL), 3 November 1970, 2.
64 See Bryant, The Anita Bryant Story, 21, 50.
65 Carl Hiaasen, "Grim Moms March against Gay Law," Miami Herald, 19 February
1977, 1-B; John Arnold, "Gay-Law Foes Say Petitions Insure a Vote," Miami Herald, 23
February 1977, 3-B; Susan Burnside, "Gay-Law Foes Claim 59,918 Back Views," Miami
Herald, 2 March 1977, B-l; John Arnold, "Metro Must Reconsider Gay Law," Miami Her
ald, 15 March 1977, B-l; John Arnold, "Dade Will Be Gay-Rights Battlefield," Miami
Herald, 20 April 1977, 1-A.
66 "Teen-Age Decency Rally," Panama City (TL) Herald, 28 March 1969, 2.
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, me
dia 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 Afri
can 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.67
The Johns Committee sought to undermine African American civil rights
organizations by exposing them as Communist fronts.68 Stymied tempo
rarily 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.69 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
67 Fred Fejes, "Murder, Perversion, and Moral Panic: The 1954 Media Campaign against
Miami's Homosexuals and the Discourse of Civic Betterment," Journal of the History of
Sexuality 9, no. 3 (2000): 305-47. See also Eric Tscheschlok, '"So Goes the Negro': Race
and Labor in Miami, 1940-1963," Florida Historical Quarterly 76, no. 1 (1997): 42-67.
68 See "Remarks of Appreciation before the Sons of the American Revolution," March
1961, series 1486, box 1, folder "Speeches—Florida Legislative Investigative Committee,"
FSA.
69 See Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, "Report of the Florida Legislative

Investigation Committee to the 1959 Session of the Legislature," 2, series 1486, box 1,
folder "Report to Legislature," FSA; Stacy Braukman, '"Nothing Else Matters but Sex':
Cold War Narratives of Deviance and the Search for Lesbian Teachers in Florida, 1959
1963," Feminist Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 553; Karen L. Graves, And They Were Wonderful
Teachers: Florida's Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2009), 1-19; James A. Schnur, "Closet Crusaders: The Johns Committee and Homophobia,
1956-1965," in Carryin' On in the Lesbian and Gay South, ed. John Howard (New York:
New York University Press, 1997), 132-63.
144 Gillian Frank
over its explicit content, the report was widely read.70 The repor
that homosexuals were a great danger to youth because of a
recruit" them and the belief that "homosexuals are made by train
than born."71 These beliefs, articulated alongside of the Johns Co
concerns about racial integration, reappeared in SOC's antigay cam
The imprint of these racial and sexual conflicts was apparen
use of the language of child protection and parents' rights. SO
depended upon a narrative in which homosexuals recruited ch
understand how SOC's discourse about homosexuality was ra
is necessary to explore how schools and childhood became cent
group's politics. SOC repeatedly claimed that the gay civil rights
was "forcing our private and religious schools to accept them as t
forcing property owners and employers to open their doors to h
no matter how blatant their perverted lives may be." The wor
ever present in antibusing rhetoric and evoking powerful fears of
as rapists, became equated with the rape of children in antigay
This language was not simply a casual mimicking but harked back
antagonisms. The focus on schools was also deliberate, for SOC
bespoke an equally important southern white strategy of avoidin
tion: the creation of private and religious schools throughout
The racial desegregation of public schools in the 1950s had sp
rapid growth of white schools—called Christian schools—and the
of SOC's antigay activism became apparent in its investment in p
these private schools from homosexual teachers.73 Some of SO
who were prominent religious figures in Miami ran such religiou
schools and sought to maintain control over them. Anita Bryant's
dren attended a private Baptist school that was run by their minis
70 See WJXT, Television 4, "WJXT News Editorial Comment, March 20

1486, box 19, folder "Publications—Homosexuality," FSA.
71 Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, "Report to the 1959 Session,"
Legislature, Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida—a Report of the Florida Le
tigation Committee (Tallahassee: Publications of the Florida Legislature, 1964),
72 For literature dealing with the historic connections among gays and child
Estelle Freedman, '"Uncontrolled Desires': The Response to the Sexual Psych
1960," Journal of American History7A, no. 1 (1987): 83-106; Philip Jenkins,
Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven, CT: Y
Press, 1998).
73 For evangelical anxieties about homosexual teachers, see "Advertisement: M
dinance Will Force Even Religious Schools to Hire Homosexuals," Miami News, 6
8C. Correspondents writing to Florida politicians to oppose busing document
origins of private and religious schools. See, for example, League of Women Vote
"Human Resources Desegregation Report," 1971, series 126, box 7, folder "Hum
Desegregation," FSA. See also Jerrell Shofner, "Custom, Law, and History: T
Influence of Florida's 'Black Code,"' Florida Historical Quarterly 55, no. 3 (1
74 Neil Miller, "Miami's Gays Gear Up for Referendum Battle," Gay Commu
12 February 1977, 1.
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.7' 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.76
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 ad
diction treatment center in New York City, prompted the media cover
age. 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 sensational
istic displays of actual child pornography in press conferences and public
presentations aroused further indignation and concern.77 The torrent of
media reports on child pornography frequently cited her but turned to
other so-called experts who propagated long-standing and erroneous as
sociations between homosexuality and child molestation.78 In response to
75 "Private School Aid Bill Said Help to Public System," Fort Pierce News Tribune, 22
April 1973, 2.
76 See Joseph Crespino, "Civil Rights and the Religious Right," in Rightward Bound:
Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2008), 90-105.
77 "Child Porno Testimony Given State Panel," Chicago Daily Herald, 15 February
1977, 4; Helen Dudar, "America Discovers Child Pornography," Ms., August 1977, 45—47;
"Congress Told to 'Seek Out' Kid Obscenity," Chicago Daily Herald, 15 February 1977, 4.
78 The experts quoted most often by newspapers were Robin Lloyd, author of JFor Money
or Love: Boy Prostitution in America (1976), and Lt. Lloyd Martin of the Los Angeles Police
Department's vice squad. Lloyd was instrumental in providing the news media with a nar
rative that conflated child pornography, child prostitution, and homosexuality. In repeated
interviews, Lloyd claimed that there were numerous organized groups of men in the United
States dedicated to having sex with boys. The media, quoting Lloyd, propounded the belief
that male homosexuals were responsible for making and distributing child pornography and
creating sex rings devoted to abducting children. News reports widely quoted Lloyd's sta
tistic that three hundred thousand boys were prostituting themselves to men every day. This
146 Gillian Frank
public and media outcry, politicians at the state and federal levels a
the discussion and concern over child pornography by passing n
and staging hearings on the issue.79
SOC capitalized upon local and national media coverage of child
raphy to link child molestation with homosexuality. Between Janua
June 1977 Miami papers reprinted news reports and commentary abo
pornography from other newspapers and deepened perceptions that g
would allow gay men to molest male children with greater frequenc
ease.80 SOC, in turn, incorporated these newspaper articles into its ca
literature.81 In several full-page SOC advertisements that appeared
Miami Herald and the Miami News between March and June 19
created pastiches of newspaper reports about child pornography and
molestation (see fig. 3).82 These advertisements were direct about th
tent: SOC instructed voters in uppercase letters to "SCAN THES
LINES FROM THE NATION'S NEWSPAPERS—THEN DECIDE: ABE:
HOMOSEXUALS TRYING TO RECRUIT OUR CHILDREN?"83 SOC
represented these newspaper accounts as factual descriptions of normal homo
sexual 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 ineli
gible for state protection. SOC and members of the media compared gays
same statistic eventually came to inform equally alarming reports by the Los Angeles Police
Department and later by SOC. Members of the gay community and sociologists critiqued
Lloyd and Martin for making links between homosexuality and pedophilia. These authors
faced further criticism for presenting exaggerated statistics about child sex rings and child
pornography based on flimsy empirical data. For an example of a critique of Lloyd, see Laud
Humphreys, "Recent Books on Male Prostitution Reviewed," Contemporary Sociology 7,
no. 1 (1978): 38. For contemporary discussions in gay magazines of the response to child
pornography, see "Michigan Governor Signs Anti-Child Porn Legislation," Gaysweek, 30
January 1978, 5.
79 "Congress Urged to End Sexual Abuse of Children," Greeley (CO) Daily Tribune, 14
February 1977, 19; Myra MacPherson, "House Hearings Set on Child 'Porn' Bills," Wash
ington Post, 23 May 1977, A3.
80 See, for example, Myra McPherson, "Children Are Newest Victims in Growing Por
nography Trade," Miami Herald, 6 March 1977, 1-CW; Ellen Goodman, "'Child Porn'
Poses Clear Moral Issues," Miami Herald, 15 March 1977, 7-A. In May 1977 the Miami
Herald reprinted a series from the Chicago Tribune about child sex rings while covering ex
tensively the story of a Dade County man living in New Orleans accused of molesting male
children and producing child pornography. This article described the man as facing "ho
mosexual charges," thus explicitly linking homosexuality with child molestation. See "Dade
Man Is Linked to Scout Sex Inquiry," Miami Herald, 18 May 1977, 4-C.
81 SOC, advertisement, Miami Herald, 20 March 1977, 9-D; SOC, advertisement, Mi
ami Herald, 3 April 1977, 7-D.
82 Advertisement, Miami Herald, 20 March 1977, 9-D.
83 Advertisement, Miami Herald, 8 May 1977, n.p., MSC.
Figure 3. SOC Flyer, "There Is No 'Human Right' to Corrupt Our Children,"

#7439, box 11, folder 7, James M. Foster Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript
Collections, Cornell University Library.
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 dif
ferent from heterosexuals because of their conduct, which can be changed
or hidden."84 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.8:1 This tactic of affirm
ing 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."86 SOC's idea that
84 "Protests Grow against Law for Homosexuality," Voice, 28 January 1977, 6.
85 "The Gay Issue: Whose Rights Prevail?"
86 Ken Kelley, "Cruising with Anita," Playboy, May 1978, 75.
148 Gillian Frank
women and racial minorities were authentic because they were biolo
based—and that a biological divide was visible and stable—was reiter
numerous commentators in the media, among them Charles Whited
Miami Herald, who had previously endorsed the gay rights ordinanc
rights spokesmen have got a lot of gall comparing their efforts to
rights struggle of blacks, or the human rights pronouncements of th
Administration or the equality movement for women. As one black f
mine put it: 'If I'm black, I can't hide in the closet.' Homosexuals—m
female—can go through life hidden. What might seem earthshaking
activist is really pretty small potatoes compared to other anti-discrim
battles."87 Commentaries of this sort by SOC and the media enc
other minority groups to view homosexuals as distinct from thems
to vote against civil rights for homosexuals even as it advanced the e
claim that African Americans were always recognizable as such.
Discrimination, SOC argued, echoing antibusing discourses,
fault of the aggrieved minority, not of the majority. SOC thereby
a willful ignorance of antigay prejudice in the United States, which
permitted the organization to oppose government legislation that so
remedy inequalities. SOC claimed: "Homosexuals do not suffer di
tion when they keep their perversions in the privacy of their homes
Bryant asserted that homosexuals "can hold any job, transact any b
join any organization—so long as they do not flaunt their homosexu
Within Brake's assertion that homosexuals "are not now being discr
against in employment, public accommodations and housing beca
keep their homosexuality concealed" was SOC's demand to hom
that they remain invisible and the equally powerful claim that hom
did not need rights because discrimination did not exist.89
At stake for conservatives repudiating gay rights was the mainte
public sexual norms. Conservatives saw their activism as delimiting
sanctioned and state-protected sexuality to a familial heterosexualit
versely, SOC members asserted that nonfamilial and nonheterosexual
ought to be kept private and remain unprotected. The well-being of
became the arbiter of these boundaries. SOC believed that a publicly
homosexuality would inculcate the young into sexually deviant prac
warned that the ordinance would put homosexual teachers "in close
with children, especially young adolescents who are just becoming fu
of sex. These young people," they feared, "can be seduced by wo
or example."90 SOC's repetitive use of the word "flaunting" to descr
87 Charles Whited, "Taking a Stand on Gay Rights No Easy Task," Miami H

March 1977, 1-B; see also "For Repeal," WTVJ, June 1, 1977, MSC.
88 SOC newsletter, undated, MSC; Anita Bryant, At Any Cost (Old Tappan,
Revell, 1978), 62. See also advertisement, Miami Herald, 20 March 1977,9-D.
89 "Protests Grow against Law," 6.
90 First Baptist Church, Baptist Beacon 25, no. 4 (1977): unpaginated; see
advertisement, Miami Herald, 6 June 1977, 8-E.
aThe Civil Rights of Parents* 149
teachers further indicated that homosexuality constituted a public transgres

sion that was defined against parents' right to shape children's morality.91 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."92 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.
Moral Minorities: Gay Rights in the Age of Busing
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."93 Faced with this opposition, the DCCHR sought
initially to broaden its coalition with new members from "the liberal Jew
ish vote, the student vote, the Women's Movement, the Black community,
the liberal churches and the liberal Democrats in Dade County."94 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.
91 See Beth Bailey, "Sexual Revolution(s)," in The Sixties: From Memory to History
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 251-53. Bailey discusses how
the word "flaunting" signaled concerns and struggles over public expressions of sexuality.
For a contemporaneous analysis of how SOC strategically used "flaunting," see William
Raspberry, "Anita Bryant and Gay Rights: Bigotry or Prudence?," Washington Post, 2 May
1977, A23.
92 "The Gay Issue: Whose Rights Prevail?"; First Baptist Church, Baptist Beacon 25,
no. 4(1977).
93 "Official Statement by Robert S. Basker, Coalition Spokesperson," #7439, box 11,
folder 10, RMC. The use of the past tense in DCCHR statements describing civil rights
suggests that the group did not recognize or make connections between its struggle and
concurrent busing struggles.
94 James Foster, "A Campaign Strategy," #7439, box 11, folder 36, RMC.
150 G ILLIAN Frank
With child molestation, corruption, and homosexuality linked by con

servatives, the DCCHR attempted to represent homosexuality to white
audiences as they imagined race to be, as "part of nature's plan."93 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.96 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 remove
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."97 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 th
group's organizers asserted that "a gay rights campaign had no way of win
ning. Most people just don't care about gay rights. They are too removed
from it."98 The group also tried to deemphasize homosexuality altogether
and excluded those that might appear sexually threatening. Newsweek cal
lously 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."99 Among those objecting to the
organization's liberal trajectory was Robert Kunst, a former DCCHRleader
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 unapolo
getically project "what is positive and joyful in the same-sex experience
95 "Official Statement by Robert S. Basker, Coalition Spokesperson."

96 "Official Policies and Guidelines for the Dade County Coalition," MSC.
97 DCCHR, "Release to All Gay Media Publications," 3 June 1977, MSC; DCCHR,
"Psychiatrists Debunk 'Myths & Misconceptions' on Homosexuality: Affirm That Homo
sexuality Is Unrelated to Child Molesting, 'Recruiting,'" 3 June 1977, #7439, box 11, folder
37, RMC.
98 Ethan Geto and Jim Foster, "Memo to Policy Steering Committee: Polling, Media
Analysis and Media Buy," 16 May 1977, #7439, box 11, folder 21, RMC.
99 "Battle over Gay Rights," 22.
aThe Civil Rights of Parents" 151
even as it expressed in its publications the liberationist belief in the innate

bisexuality of all human beings and the necessity of exploring this bisexu
ality 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 sawiness.100 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 the campaign of liberal gay rights activists and their oppo
nents. DCCHRmembers distributed buttons, campaign literature, and close
to a quarter of a million pamphlets that conveyed the idea that homosexuals
deserved protection against discrimination.101 DCCHR volunteers wrote
letters to local newspapers and politicians and raised funds through the use
of human rights rhetoric.102 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.103 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.104
DCCHR activists frequently emphasized the historical connections be
tween oppression of gays and oppression of African Americans and drew analo
gies 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.105
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."106 The DCCHR's literature used similar graphics that juxtaposed
100 Bill Hutchinson and James R Kukar, "Bryant/Kunst: Caught in the Middle," Miami
Magazine, May 1977.
101 "Gay Rights Showdown in Miami," Time Magazine, 13 June 1977, 20.
102 DCCHR, volunteering form, MSC.
103 See, for example, DCCHR, advertisement, Miami Herald, 30 March 1977, 8E.
104 Robert Basker, press conference, 4 March 1977, #7439, box 11, folder 40, RMC;
John Arnold, "Gay Law Vote Set June 7," Miami Herald, 15 March 1977, 2-B.
105 DCCHR, "Latin Gay Activist Car Firebombed," 22 March 1977, MSC; "Battle over
Gay Rights," 16.
106 DCCHR, "Press Release: May 28, 1977—California Black Legislators Blasts Save Our
Children—Dade County Black Leaders Urge Vote against Repeal," #7439, box 11, folder
152 Gillian Frank
America's most respected

leaders - in Government,
in Religion, in Educa
tion - believe that Human
Rights are the due of
every American - Regard
less of sexual preference.
President Jimmy Carter -

"Human Rights Are Absolute"
"i dcYi't t?iink that the government
at the Jpcai, state or federal tevsi
shouk! singfe out homosexuals fat
abuse or harassment, or prosecution
under existing laws, ! favor the end of
:<8scrimitation against homosexuals;."
Figure 4. DCCHR, "Anti-Black Zealots," 1977, #7439, box 11, folder 42

Foster Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell Univers
images of SOC's homophobia with images of racism and that war

citizens that bigots might also target them (see figs. 4 and 5).107 D
African American support and the use of these strategies of repr
and even as DCCHR members compared SOC's child protection
racist "speeches and statements that were heard during the black c
campaigns of the 1960's," they wondered about the comparison, n
their official policies and guidelines that "a black is recognizable
whereas a homosexual cannot be discerned by sight alone."108
The DCCHR asserted gays' political presence and civil rights in
venue and forged public identities for gays not in their own
but linked with other minority experiences. This strategy of
public gay identity, however, was troubled by the fact that
had been mostly ineffective at creating alliances with and gar
port from racial minorities in Dade County, whereas SOC w
forge a multiracial religious coalition.109 DCCHR's visible le
45, RMC; Steve Strasser, "California Lawmaker Urges Blacks to Support Gay
Herald, 29 May 1977, #7439, box 11, folder 45, RMC. The same ideas appe
dated DCCHR pamphlet, #7439, box 11, folder 42, RMC.
107 DCCHR pamphlet, undated, MSC. See also After Dade County: Turnin
Victory (Chicago: Blazing Star, 1977).
108 DCCHR, "Official Policies and Guidelines for the Dade County Coaliti
#7439, box 11, folder 42, RMC; "Gay EX-G.I. Thanks Bryant," Miami Hera
1977, 4-B.
10' In March the DCCHR appointed Ramon Ruiz to its steering committee
the Cuban community. However, Ruiz was invisible in DCCHR campaign litera
i»&iwmwwww
Figure 5. DCCHR, "Don't Be So Sure You Won't Be Next! It's
Many Times Before," 1977, #7439, box 11, folder 42, James M.
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Lib
was white, and the group imagined its political audience

Despite the request by the Latin Committee of the DCCH
group make the case for gay rights in the Cuban communi
leaders strategically chose to ignore Latino voters, whom they
be too antigay to support them.110 SOC, in contrast, campa
in the Latino community, working closely with local Cuban
leaders, holding rallies in Miami's "Little Havana" neighbo
distributing bilingual literature.111
The DCCHR's relationship with African American voters w
troubled. From the outset, DCCHR strategists predicted t
American voter turnout would be negligible: they expected on
of registered black voters to show up at the polls and aspir
10 percent of the black vote. The DCCHR counted on t
ing bloc's total support for gay rights, believing that African
historical experiences with discrimination and their investmen
and May. For a visual depiction of DCCHR leadership as well as the group's p
paign coordinators, se DCCHR, "We're Going to Win!," Miami Sunshine 1
110 Manuel Gomez to Leonard Matlovitch and Ethan Geto, 20 April 19
11, folder 10, RMC.
111 Hilda Inclan, "Latins Join Anita Bryant Campaign to Repeal Metr
Law," Miami News, 22 February 1977, 10A.
154 Gillian Frank
rights movement would make them natural supporters of gay

To some extent they were right, and the group attracted secul
American leaders who deployed the language of the civil rig
ment. The Miami Times, a widely circulating black weekly n
also editorialized in favor of gay rights and advised its readers th
people should not be party to endorsing any policy that will discr
against anyone."113 The DCCHR, however, failed to understand ho
churches fostered heterosexual respectability and an overt homop
order to achieve civil rights in Dade County and elsewhere.114 Lik
did not appreciate divisions among African Americans over homos
and a long-standing sexual conservatism that was autonomous
overlapped with white social conservatism.
White gay activists soon learned that many blacks distinguished r
struggles for social justice from sexuality-based struggles for soci
and opposed gay rights on religious grounds. So although the Miam
editorialized for gay rights, there was substantial debate among it
about the issue, and the paper published two lengthy letters from
who opposed gay rights and any comparisons of black and gay oppr
SOC targeted black voters with mailings and commercials in zoned
of the Miami Herald, stating that "it was unfair to equate behavio
color of one's skin."116 SOC meanwhile continued to court black m
by sending Anita Bryant and others to prayer breakfasts in the b
munity. During Bryant's appearance before an audience of black v
ministers at Saint John's Baptist Church in Miami, she was applau
her sermon and singing.117 DCCHR members, on the other hand,
a hostile response from those few church members who showed u
112 See James M. Foster's handwritten notes about voter turnout as well a
#7439, box 11, folders 28, 29, and 46, RMC.
113 "Discrimination of Any Kind Cannot Be Condoned," Miami Times, 2 Ju
114 See Ernesto Longa, "Lawson Edward Thomas and Miami's Negro Munic
St. Thomas Law Review 18 (2005): 132; Thaddeus Russell, "The Color of Disci
Rights and Black Sexuality," American Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2008): 101-28; Jo
Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003
of the complex roles churches have played in the lives of southern black gay
Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (Chapel Hill: Universit
Carolina Press, 2008), 182-255.
115 For letters opposing gay rights and the comparison of black and gay
Aundrella (Bunyan) Syed, "Blacks Must Respond to the Gay Rights Issue," M
19 May 1977, 21; Jo Ann Ingram, "Outraged by Gay Rights Issue," Miami Ti
1977, 40. For letters supporting gay rights, primarily see Ralph Jacobs, "Or
Not Legalize Homosexuality," Miami Times, 2 June 1977, 40; Harold Wilso
Black Struggle of Equal Significance," Miami Times, 26 May 1977, 24.
116 Adam Nagourney interview with Mike Thompson, 27 April 1995, courtes
Nagourney and Dudley Cleninden.
117 Derek T. Davis, "Bryant Ducks Questions in Heated Gay Rights Meeti
Times, 19 May 1977,2.
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 homo
sexuality 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)."118 In the
wake of these debates, the African Methodist Episcopal Church denounced
homosexuality even as it voiced its support for court-ordered busing.119 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.120
As these overlapping dynamics played out in Dade County, SOC at
tracted support from right-wing luminaries with national exposure such as
Jerry Falwell and James Kennedy, both of whom participated in a Chris
tians for God and Decency Rally in Miami on 22 May 1977 that drew ten
thousand SOC supporters.121 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 fund
raisers and staged political activities that integrated the human rights theme
with queer cultural practices.122 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.123 Gay newspapers meanwhile advertised items such as toilet paper
and dartboards emblazoned with Anita Bryant's face. By 7 June 1977 the
118 Strasser, "California Lawmaker Urges Blacks"; "Gay Rights Spokesmen Get Flak at
Minister's Breakfast," Miami Times, 26 May 1977, 48.
119 "AME Zion Church Makes Breakthrough for Women and Youth, but Not Gays," Jet,
3 June 1976, 16-17; "AME 'Black Paper' Assails Homosexuals, Supports Busing," Jet, 8
July 1976, 7. See also "How Should the Church Deal with Gays? Black Ministers Respond,"
Jet, 14 July 1977, 44-45; "Religious Leaders Say Black Church Untouched by Gay Rights
Crusade,"/et, 13 July 1978, 28-29.
120 For discussions of SOC's multiracial campaign, see Jim Foster to Michael Bedwell,
undated letter, 1977, #7439, box 11, folder 29, RMC; Theodore Stanger, "Gay-Rights
Campaign Is Unorthodox to End," Miami Herald, 7 June 1977, 1-A.
121 "Churches Rally against Law on Gays," Miami News, 23 May 1977, 7A; Miguel Perez,
"10,000 Rally for Repeal of Metro's Anti-Gay Law," Miami Herald, 23 May 1977, 1-B.
122 DCCHR, "News Release: Miami Gays Appeal for Support," undated, MSC; Leonard
Matlovich to Lambda, #7439, box 11, folder 18, RMC; John Arnold, "Gay Rights Refer
endum Set June 7," Miami Herald, 16 March 1977, B-l; DCCHR "Press Release to All
Gay Media Publications, Miami Gays Forced to Raise $400,000 to Pay for Election on Gay
Rights," 24 March 1977, MSC.
123 Garry Hoggard to Peter Pender, "My activities during week of 5/2/77," #7439,
box 11, folder 21, RMC. For advertisements of Anita Bryant gag gifts, see Advocate, 10
August 1977, 43.
156 Gillian Frank
DCCHR had raised and spent over $370,000, with $129,000

advertising alone—five times as much as pro-ERA forces in F
raised and nearly three times as much as SOC had raised.124
Plebiscites and Conservative Power
By June 1977 residents of Dade County had been inundated with ad

vertisements by SOC and the DCCHR and subjected to the opinions o
political pundits, scientists, and religious leaders, and they had heard t
analysis of a variety of experts. SOC and the DCCHR had spent hundre
of thousands of dollars to persuade residents of Dade County to vote
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 gende
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 DCCH
members experienced physical violence and numerous threats over the cours
of the campaign.125 Many Catholic priests, at the behest of the archbishop
of Miami, instructed their congregations at Sunday masses in the run-up t
the referendum to vote to repeal gay rights.126 Baptist ministers in Africa
American, white, and Latino churches likewise urged their congregations t
vote for repeal.127 The Miami Herald, which had tremendous power to sha
local opinion, printed an editorial on 5 June 1977 declaring that the or
nance 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."128 Finally, the governor ofFlorida, Reubi
124 DCCHR, "Dade County Coalition for Human Rights Campaign Fund for June 7t
Referendum. Exhibit A Advertising and Consultants for the Period of November 1, 1976
July 21 1977," MSC.
125 See "Save Our Children!—from Pain, Humiliation and Suffering!," Dignity Miami 1
no. 2 (1977): 1; DCCHR, "Press Release: Latin Gay Activist Car Firebombed," 22 Mar
1977, MSC; Jim Foster, "The Human Rights Campaign in Dade County," #7439, box 1
folder 21, RMC; John Arnold, "Gay Rights Battle Lines Are Drawn," Miami Herald, 2
March 1977, D-l.
126 Coleman Carroll, "To the Priests, Religious and Faithful of the Archdiocese
Miami," Voice, 3 June 1977,1; Theodore Stange, "Opinions on Gay Rights Flow from Da
Pulpits," Miami Herald, 6 June 1977, 6-B.
127 See "Spanish Speaking Groups Urge Repeal of Gay Law," Voice, 3 June 1977, 2; Firs
Baptist Church, Florida Baptist Witness 2, no. 21 (1977), untitled article found clipped in M
For a list of Baptist ministers opposing gay rights, see advertisement, "Misguided Ordinan
Will Force Even Religious Schools to Hire Homosexuals," Miami News, 6 June 1977, 8C.
128 "An Unneeded Ordinance," Miami Herald, 5 June 1977, 2-E.
Askew, who had been a staunch supporter of busing and the ERA, declared
that he would not want a "known homosexual teaching my children."129
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 iso 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.131
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 bor
rowed 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.132 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 report
ers; 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.'"133 This term, the
"normal majority," which SOC had used throughout its campaign, laid
bare the roots of this conservative project.
129 "Askew, McKuen Take Sides in Florida Fray," Gay Community News 4, no. 46 (1977): 1.
130 "June, Polls Show Human Rights Election a Virtual Tie—Gay Turnout Crucial,"
Alive, 12 June 1977, 160; Miami Victory Campaign Newsletter, 13 May 1977, MSC.
131 See Florida Gay Liberation News 20 (1977), MSC; Michael Stachell, "Dade County,
Fla., Repeals Rights Ordinance by 7-to-3 Margin," Washington Star, 8 June 1977, #7301,
box 168, folder 65, RMC.
132 Lindsay Van Gelder, "Anita Bryant on the March: The Lessons of Dade County," Ms.,
September 1977, 75-78.
133 Carl Hiaasen, "Dade Gay-Rights Loses, Anita Dances, Calls Result Win 'for God,'"
Miami Herald, 8 June 1977, 1-A.
158 Gillian Frank
In the aftermath of the vote, national conservative columnist and

Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan noted that the "clobbering the gay rig
ment received in Miami" was unsurprising given voter behavior du
1972 referendum on busing. During his tenure in the Nixon admin
Buchanan had been obsessed with developing a strategy of using so
to bring a conservative political majority—the "silent majority"—t
In the same vein Buchanan stated: "The spectacular turnout is
symptom. What voters are saying is 'Give us an issue we care abou
the choice is clear, where our votes can make a difference—and yo
need precinct captains or federal subsidies to get us to the polls." Fo
ing antigay voter initiatives that would bring conservative voters t
time and again over the next three decades, Buchanan declared: "T
majority has sent a message to every politician. Freedom of associa
majority has asserted, includes the right to discriminate against tho
conduct the majority considers reprehensible or immoral."134
The Dade County referendum was an important moment in w
sexual equality movements inspired by the civil rights movements
1950s and 1960s became dashed upon the shoals of a conserva
emerged from Christian white privilege and discontent and was an
by a sexual politics of child protection. An apparatus of the d
state—voter initiatives—provided conservatives with a crucia
strategy. These short-term political campaigns allowed SOC to
propagate a fantasy about a heterosexual majority that was both n
somehow imperiled.135 This normative majoritarian identity, thou
visional, had long-term implications for excluding nonheterosexua
equal access to housing, public accommodations, and job secur
is to say, from the material underpinnings of American social citi
SOC's success in large part depended upon its ability to separate
for gay citizenship from the quest for citizenship undertaken
minority groups and to obscure the deep historical connection
the backlashes against civil rights and gay rights.
Conclusion: Race and Conservative Sexual Politics
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,
134 Patrick Buchanan, "Florida's Vote: Hopeful Symptom," Reno Evening Gazette, 15
June 1977, 34.
135 For popular expressions of the majoritarian view, see "Anita Bryant—from Both
Sides," Miami Herald, 4 March 1977, 6-A.
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.136 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."137 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.138
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 audi
ence, constructed a sexual identity within these normative racial contours,
reduplicating a process that conflated family with citizenship. The language
136 See Gay Community News, 3 December 1977,2; "Wichita Could Be Next," Gay Com
munity News, 31 December 1977,1; Lee H. Solomon, "Miami Post Mortem—Lessons from
Losing, Four Perspectives of Dade County," Advocate, 24 August 1977, 7.
137 Solomon, "Miami Post Mortem," 7.
138 "National Gay Task Force Announces 'We Are Your Children' Educational Cam
paign; 1,000,000 Crash Fundraising Drive," 13 June 1977, #7301, box 36, folder 35, RMC;
#7301, box 36, folder 63, RMC; Harold Ivey, "Gays Lose Battle—Set Out to Win the War,"
Alive!, July 1977, 20.
160 Gillian Frank
of family and parents' rights also appealed to African American a

voters whose religious and sexual traditionalism placed them more
into tenuous coalitions with white conservatives.139
The relationship of threatened majoritarian parents to imperiled
reveals how in the 1970s normative heterosexuality was simul
constructed through whiteness and also elided racial boundar
legacy of such child protection rhetoric can be found in recen
over gay marriage and gay adoption, which restage debates th
over forty years old. At this writing, gay marriage advocates in t
States continue to analogize their civil rights struggles to those of
Americans even as adversaries of gay rights claim that gay marriag
adoption will harm children and destroy the family.140 These
simultaneously avow that gays are different from and do not des
same civil or marriage rights as African Americans. In these cont
debates over social citizenship, it has frequently been commented
gay rights advocates deploy "like race" arguments. What has la
forgotten is the racialized process by which conservatives led
to believe that they have to choose, just as with busing, between t
interests of their own children and minority rights. This dubi
tion, decades in the making, continues to allow many voters to se
rights as antithetical to their own best interests and those of their
Historians must begin to trace the multiple ways that conservativ
tent construction of heterosexuality and defense of so-called fam
are enmeshed in the history and meaning of race relations in
States. It is equally vital to recognize how hegemonic constru
heterosexuality have crossed sexual and racial borders and have
the conservative politics of nonheterosexual and nonwhite pop
To do so is to map the complex and manifold paths of conservatis
final third of the twentieth century.
139 "Ministers Form 'Moral Minority,'" Michigan Daily, 15 November 1980

LA Pastor Declines Civil Rights Post," Pittsburgh Press, 13 September 1981, A
list Gets Backing," Reading Eagle, 19 February 1982, 13.
140 For examples of this debate in the popular press, see "Marriage Is a Co
Right," New Tork Times, 4 August 2010; "Gay Marriage Issue: California Mar
Reverberates in Florida," South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 20 May 2008; Michael J. B
riage lust Isn't a Fundamental Right; Gay Marriage Proponents Are Using an In
Oversimplified Legal Strategy," Newsday, 19 August 2010; Taylor Harris, "Ra
the Battle for Same-Sex Marriage," Washington Post, 28 November 2009.

"The Civil Rights of Parents" - Race and Conservative Politics in Anita Bryant's Campaign

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"The Civil Rights of Parents": Race and Conservative Politics in Anita Bryant's Campaign

against Gay Rights in 1970s Florida

Stony Brook University

On 18 January 1977, at a public hearing in Miam

I would like to acknowledge the generous feedback of Beth Bailey, Mari Jo B

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 22, No. 1, January 2013

identity, based on visible markers.8 These dynamics underpinned

children." The language of child protection and majoritarianism acted as

Silent Majorities: The Sexual Politics of Antibusing Crusades

In September 1970 R. A. Mcavoy, president of the Miami Springs Civic

12 R. A. Mcavoy to Richard Nixon, White House Central Files, HU Education, box

integration. The above letter signals how, in Florida, busing set

13 Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 1.

segregated and federally subsidized version of the American Dream forcefully

given birth to their second child ... surrounded by blushing nurses,

decision set the stage for the resegregation of schools in Dade

Defending the Family: Antifeminism, Race, and Sexuality

politics were sewn closely together in a widespread and bitter debat

the ERA TROJAN HORSE IS PULL OF ABOMINATIONS

Figure 1. Vic Lockman, "The ERA Trojan Horse Is Full of Abominations . . .

MAKING- AU, FACILITIES COEP?

facilities egceivingr pe.pe.eAL oe sratc

~5 the supreme couer __/3l

po you want the sexes ruilv inteosatep like the i?aces p

question formed the heart of anti-ERA rhetoric and deliberately provoked

45 WFRL, "Rebuttal to Attorney General Shevin's opinion on homosexual marriages

From Silent Majority to Normal Majority

coinciding struggles against busing and the ERA attempted to

53 SOC, advertisement, Miami Herald, 20 March 1977, 9-D; "Singer An

1977 a group of prominent local religious leaders and other con

the evangelical gospel. Bryant also participated in numerous events with

69 See Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, "Report of the Florida Legislative

70 See WJXT, Television 4, "WJXT News Editorial Comment, March 20

secretary Robert Brake sent his four children to "church-affiliated schools"

Figure 3. SOC Flyer, "There Is No 'Human Right' to Corrupt Our Children,"

to African Americans only in order to emphasize their differences and to

87 Charles Whited, "Taking a Stand on Gay Rights No Easy Task," Miami H

teachers further indicated that homosexuality constituted a public transgres

Moral Minorities: Gay Rights in the Age of Busing

With child molestation, corruption, and homosexuality linked by con

95 "Official Statement by Robert S. Basker, Coalition Spokesperson."

even as it expressed in its publications the liberationist belief in the innate

America's most respected

President Jimmy Carter -

Figure 4. DCCHR, "Anti-Black Zealots," 1977, #7439, box 11, folder 42

images of SOC's homophobia with images of racism and that war

was white, and the group imagined its political audience

rights movement would make them natural supporters of gay

DCCHR had raised and spent over $370,000, with $129,000

Plebiscites and Conservative Power

By June 1977 residents of Dade County had been inundated with ad

In the aftermath of the vote, national conservative columnist and

Conclusion: Race and Conservative Sexual Politics

SOC's Dade County campaign modeled a conservative strategy for opposing

of family and parents' rights also appealed to African American a

139 "Ministers Form 'Moral Minority,'" Michigan Daily, 15 November 1980

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