San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade, 1977 (© Rink Foto, reprinted with permission)
The ascent of modern conservatism was one of the most important political developments of the late twentieth century, and sexual politics played a significant driving role in the mobilization of what became known as the New Right. In particular, hostility to LGBT rights and visibility has occupied a central position in the platform of the modern conservative movement. Although Anita Bryant’s 1977 Save Our Children campaign in Miami–Dade County often receives credit for the birth of modern antigay politics, in fact political homophobia runs deeper, and longer, than might first be evident. Although a devastating New Right backlash to the queer advances of the 1970s coalesced around Bryant and ran all the way through the presidency of George W. Bush, the roots of the backlash predate the New Right—and, indeed, play a formative role in its emergence. To teach the history of the New Right, then, one must situate it within the broader currents of national homophobia and show how the harnessing of this widely shared sentiment paid political dividends, particularly for the Republican Party. Important to note too, however, is the persistent acquiescence and complacency of the Democrats on matters of antigay politics; indeed, sexual politics provides an extremely useful avenue for encouraging students to think critically about the ways heteronormativity as a social force has crossed party lines, even as the harshest political homophobia has undeniably emanated from the Right. Put plainly, homophobia has been a crucial foundation of modern conservative politics, even as heteronormativity has remained largely unchallenged by liberal politics.
As David K. Johnson shows in his essay on Cold War sexual citizenship in this volume, the heteronormativity of the 1950s was never a strictly conservative disposition but rather was deeply embedded in the sexual politics of postwar liberalism. As the sexual revolution of the 1960s forced liberals to confront and often transcend the boundaries of their oppressive framework, however, increasing polarization set in. The crucial lesson for students here is that homophobia was not new, but sexuality took on newly partisan hues. On gay rights, the Democratic Party moved tentatively toward increasing support. By the 1972 election cycle, the Democratic National Convention in Miami allowed thirty-two-year-old lesbian Madeline Davis the unprecedented opportunity to address the crowd and advocate a gay rights platform. Despite the plank’s failure, the very fact of Davis publicly describing the “gamut of oppression” faced by gay people powerfully signaled advancing gay visibility.1 Discernibly wary of embracing gay rights, Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern conveyed a general opposition to discrimination that nevertheless could be understood as gay friendly.
McGovern lost the general election to incumbent Richard Nixon by a landslide, one early sign of the Republican Party’s rebuilding through conservative sexual politics. The Democrats had lost their Solid South after embracing African American civil rights, and, although the Republicans picked up alienated white voters, progress in black voting rights precluded the overt fanning of racial flames. Meanwhile, growing public ambivalence over the military quagmire in Vietnam made 1950sstyle anticommunist rhetoric a tougher sell. The greatest continuity in the Republican Party was opposition to the New Deal social welfare programs and organized labor; however, neither of these was an optimal campaign issue. Thus sexual and gender politics moved into greater prominence as conservatives regrouped around them.
By the time of Richard Nixon’s first successful campaign in 1968, conservatism was increasingly associated with resistance to the sexual revolution, as embodied in feminism, abortion rights, and pornography. Antipathy toward homosexuality saturated much of this rhetoric. Contemporary students can dig through the primary documents of the era and see that concerns about homosexuality were never far from the surface of conservative sexual politics. For instance, in Perversion for Profit, a short 1963 propaganda film by the antiporn group Citizens for Decent Literature, narrator George Putnam frequently invokes homosexuality as one of the dangers posed by smut, warning of “your daughter, lured into lesbianism.” Surveying a rack of male physique magazines, he also notes that “prolonged exposure” to their images can “pervert” even the “normal male adult.”2 Available on YouTube and the Internet Archive (Archive.org), Perversion for Profit makes an excellent teaching resource; students inevitably begin by laughing at its perceived campiness but can then unpack its ideological assumptions and sexual politics.
This antigay sentiment reverberated through other forms of conservative sexual and gender politics as well. Debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) provided one such venue. Passed by Congress in 1972 a half century after its first appearance, the ERA was intended to write gender equality into the U.S. Constitution. Although states initially rushed to ratify it, a strong backlash developed, spearheaded by activist Phyllis Schlafly and her group STOP ERA. Opponents of the ERA used a multitude of arguments: it would force women into military combat duty, it would undermine traditional gender roles, and it would mandate unisex bathrooms in schools. Another tactic was to link the ERA to “homosexual marriage,” as Schlafly did in her 1977 book The Power of the Positive Woman. 3 Indeed, students today are often interested to learn that President Nixon himself had already stated his opposition to same-sex marriage in 1970, forecasting, somewhat prematurely, “that’s [for] the year 2000.”4 The political cartoons in conservative newsletters such as The Phyllis Schlafly Report can easily fit into classroom lectures, providing not only vivid examples of this discourse but also useful reminders to students of the sites where important political contestations were played out. Short analytical assignments based on surveying political cartoons in mainstream media outlets such as Newsweek or the New York Times can be effective exercises in identifying sexual norms, since homosexuality was a frequent motif in the 1970s.
A more overt and aggressive attack on gay and lesbian rights and visibility emerged in South Florida, where the Save Our Children crusade began a mass mobilization of homophobic sentiment. After Dade County passed a nondiscrimination ordinance protecting sexual orientation in 1977 (reflecting the advances gays and lesbians had made since Stonewall), country singer Anita Bryant was selected to serve as the public face of the opposition group, spearheading a repeal movement. Invoking long-held antigay tropes, Bryant focused on the alleged risks of employing gay teachers. “A particularly deviant-minded teacher could sexually molest children,” she claimed, while even mere public acceptance could “encourage more homosexuality by inducing pupils into looking upon it as an acceptable life-style.”5 Bryant’s scare tactics worked, and the antidiscrimination ordinance was decisively repealed by a two-thirds majority later that year.6
San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade, 1977 (© Rink Foto, reprinted with permission)
Bryant’s activism built on preexisting antigay sentiment but also pointed toward the future; in the wake of Save Our Children, local sexual orientation nondiscrimination laws came under attack across the nation. The most visible backlash took place in California, where state legislator John Briggs, a conservative Orange County Republican, sought to ban gays, lesbians, and vocal allies from holding teaching positions in the state’s public schools. The Briggs Amendment, as it became known, seemed slated to pass in polls leading up to the 1978 election.
Opposition to the Briggs Amendment was organized by several prominent gay and lesbian activists, including, most famously, San Francisco County Supervisor Harvey Milk. Thanks to the amendment’s harsh stance, the opposing coalition was able to find bipartisan support that ranged from Democratic president Jimmy Carter to Republican ex-governor Ronald Reagan and managed to turn public opinion around. In November 1978, the Briggs Amendment was defeated by a nearly twenty-point margin. Its defeat nonetheless marked the arrival of an antigay backlash that would be sustained for three decades. Perhaps more telling were the contemporaneous repeals of gay rights ordinances in Wichita, Saint Paul, and Eugene, Oregon, all modeled on the Florida Save Our Children mobilization.
For contemporary students, the rhetoric of the antigay backlash can be both jolting and instructive. Although in later years such efforts would avoid language and claims that could be labeled homophobic, in its early years the movement bore no such self-awareness. The subtitle of The Anita Bryant Story, the activist’s 1977 account of the Dade County struggle, situated her work as The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality. Militant, to Bryant, was any and all publicly visible homosexuality. Legal protection in housing, public accommodations, or employment constituted “special privileges,” a phrase that would circulate for decades. She even suggested that gay rights laws might discriminate against her own children’s rights to “grow up in a healthy, decent community.”7 This was a critical aspect of the antigay backlash: inverting social power dynamics so that heterosexuals were the victims of so-called militant homosexuals.
Not only did Save Our Children launch a national antigay political movement, but it generated a torrent of discourse as well. San Diego–based minister Tim LaHaye’s 1978 The Unhappy Gays best exemplified the emerging framework. A two-hundred-page litany of perversions and moral turpitude, the book rejected even the very label gay in its third chapter, “Gay It Isn’t!” LaHaye offered a compendium of antigay beliefs, attributing the “cause” of homosexuality to such factors as “a passive or absent father,” “permissive childhood training,” “childhood sexual trauma,” and even youthful masturbation. Some of these ideas reflected Cold War ideas of only a few decades back, while others reached back to Victorian sexual anxieties.8 Homosexuality was a sin, something to be overcome, and it was marked by extreme promiscuity, venereal disease, and, as Bryant had warned, an interest in “the recruitment of children and young people into homosexuality.” As LaHaye nonsensically but confidently wrote, “[I]f some homosexuals didn’t recruit, they would become extinct because they do not procreate.” So intense was LaHaye’s fear that he opened the book with the explicit claim that rape by a male teacher would be less detrimental to the development of a young girl than a “conditioning process” by a gay teacher, which might lead her to “think favorably about homosexuality.”9
Because LaHaye went on the next year to become a founding member of the New Right evangelical group the Moral Majority, The Unhappy Gays merits close scrutiny, both as a foundational text and because its empirical claims were so frequently demonstrably false. As with Bryant’s book, this makes an excellent primary source with which students can engage. Critical thinking exercises about how these discourses work—their logic, rhetoric, and affective appeals—help students understand why antigay positions proved so effective. Although the Reverend Jerry Falwell would become the public face of the Moral Majority, the group’s entire history embodied LaHaye’s casual assertion, “Homosexuality is not just a sexual experience; it is a total life style. Homosexuals think differently than straights, they act differently.”10 Making this distinction a social reality became a centerpiece of the Moral Majority’s policy agenda.
The Moral Majority helped create what observers labeled the Christian Right against the backdrop of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Elected in 1976 as the first born-again Christian president, Carter had nonetheless alienated conservative evangelicals with his relatively liberal social politics, including his tenuous endorsement of abortion rights. On matters of gay rights, Carter allowed quiet but unprecedented administration communications with the National Gay Task Force, but even the most tentative of presidential gestures met with Christian Right outrage, as when the president shifted the name of a planned White House Conference on the Family to the plural Families in 1978. Reading it as a subversion of the monolithic heterosexual nuclear family that validated other social arrangements, including, possibly, queer ones, Christian Right leaders loudly condemned the conference.11
More to their liking was Ronald Reagan, whose defeat of Carter in 1980 heralded the political maturation of the New Right. The Reagan administration commenced almost simultaneously with the first recognition of the AIDS epidemic, and the two would remain interwoven throughout the decade. Although Reagan had little personal affinity for evangelical Christianity, and no deep political ties to the movement during his earlier tenure as California governor, his advisers recognized the growing political power of the Christian Right. His administration was far less responsive to gay activists and lobbyists than Carter’s had been. Notwithstanding his 1978 public opposition to the homophobic Briggs Amendment, Reagan moved quickly to consolidate the support of the Christian Right, repeatedly endorsing its so-called family values agenda.
“Family values,” in this context, entailed a bundled set of sexual politics: opposition to feminism, reproductive rights, and pornography; and support for abstinence-based sex education (which received massive boosts in funding under Reagan). Hostility to homosexuality, too, occupied a dominant position in this constellation. While hosting his popular Old Time Gospel Hour show, before establishing the Moral Majority, Falwell sent out mailings in 1978, which began by asking, “Do you approve of known practicing HOMOSEXUALS teaching in public schools?” before moving on to ask about abortion and pornography.12
Understanding family values is absolutely central to understanding the New Right. While the substantive concerns of the Reagan administration focused primarily on his economic agenda of deregulation and the upward redistribution of wealth that marked the 1980s, the family values agenda was on abundant display as well. One early New Right congressional effort, the Family Protection Act, would have reasserted parental control over school curricula, in addition to other matters such as promoting husbands as heads of households and opposing federal action against domestic violence, which was seen as an intrusion into family privacy. As first proposed in 1979, the act would have denied federal funding for any educational efforts that deemed homosexuality “an acceptable lifestyle.” It also would have explicitly removed homosexuals and those “who proclaim homosexual tendencies” from the antidiscrimination protections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Even though the Family Protection Act failed, it reflected the fundamental sexual politics of the New Right. More successful was the Adolescent Family Life Act of 1981, which initiated federal funding for abstinence-based sex education. By restricting proper sex to marriage, of course, queer sex in toto was simply written out of legitimate existence.13 Integrating such efforts into our memory of the 1980s encourages students to recognize the political importance of—and sheer work that goes into—defining and protecting “normalcy” and preserving its dominance.
Meanwhile, Reagan effectively ignored the growing AIDS crisis for the first several years of his presidency, not meaningfully mentioning the epidemic until 1987, by which point well over ten thousand deaths had already occurred in the United States. Yet others with ties to his administration used the crisis as grounds for moralistic and homophobic assertions. Longtime Republican insider Pat Buchanan offered mock pity in a 1983 newspaper column about “the poor homosexuals.” “They have declared war on nature,” Buchanan wrote, and “now nature is extracting an awful retribution.”14 Buchanan went on to join the Reagan administration as White House communications director in 1985. As Jennifer Brier notes in her essay in this volume, and also in her book Infectious Ideas, some Reagan administration members, particularly Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, took sensitive and nuanced positions on AIDS. Reagan, however, was greatly influenced by distinctly antigay advisers such as Secretary of Education William Bennett and his undersecretary, Gary Bauer, who aggressively prioritized “morality” over public health.15
With so much antigay work being done within the administration, Reagan could appease Christian Right voters without himself taking a visible stand. Indeed, just as he kept quiet about AIDS, he also said little about LGBT rights. A 1986 interview, however, proved telling; asked about housing and employment antidiscrimination laws, Reagan turned the issue on its head and asked “whether they are demanding an acceptance of their particular lifestyle that others of us don’t demand.” Taking a direct cue from the Anita Bryant rhetoric, he asked as an example, “[S]hould a teacher in a classroom be invoking their personal habits and advocating them to their students as a way of life?”16 Once more, it was heterosexuals threatened by homosexual demands, a framework that resonated with Reagan’s conservative white voting base, which likewise opposed affirmative action measures to facilitate racial equality as “reverse racism.” Again, this is where sexual politics proves instructive on a larger level: we see how sexuality and race both become venues through which a straight white majority whose demographic, political, and financial dominance is unquestionable repositions itself as the aggrieved party and civil rights becomes a zero-sum game in which advances by marginalized groups are rendered legible only as losses by dominant groups.
The sheer volume of Reagan’s invocations of family values across the decade can be contrasted with his quite few direct references to gays, lesbians, homosexuality, or AIDS at the website of the American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, an excellent teaching resource where students can track presidential discourse through targeted word and subject searches.
One of the main architects of the New Right antigay backlash was North Carolina Republican senator Jesse Helms. Like Falwell and many other key southern figures in the movement, he was a longtime opponent of African American civil rights until that stance became untenable in the wake of 1960s advances. Helms had found new political sustenance in the various moral positions of the 1970s and 1980s, even supporting his first-ever civil rights legislation, for the unborn, in 1984. Vocal homophobia became increasingly central to Helms’s political position in the 1980s, and he led two of the decade’s strongest antigay efforts. Most famously, in his 1989 war against the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Helms considered the homoerotic inherently obscene and, in a proposed amendment to the annual NEA funding appropriation, would have barred any federal funding for homoerotic material on those grounds. A slightly weakened version of the Helms Amendment passed into law. Such was the political storm that he created, particularly in his campaign against gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, that when the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati held a Mapplethorpe exhibition in 1990, criminal obscenity charges ensued for the museum’s director, Dennis Barrie.17
The Helms/NEA/Mapplethorpe controversy became an iconic moment in the so-called culture wars of the 1980s, and it provides a treasure trove of primary source material for students to excavate and explore. The national press covered the Cincinnati trial and Barrie’s ultimate acquittal, which can be fairly easily recovered and reconstructed. As well, the bluntly homophobic comments made by Helms and other New Right congressional colleagues, particularly California Republicans William Dannemeyer and Robert Dornan, make the transcripts of the Congressional Record another rich source for student research.
Less iconic than the NEA wars but of more momentous impact was another Helms amendment, which derailed public health measures related to HIV and AIDS. Two years earlier, in an amendment to the 1988 fiscal year federal appropriations bill for AIDS research and prevention, Helms had initiated a gag order against Center for Disease Control (CDC) funding of any materials that might “promote, condone, or encourage homosexual activities.” He thereby brought an immediate end to federal funding for explicit, affirmative, safer-sex materials, which often eroticized condom use, at the precise instant when AIDS fatalities were skyrocketing in the United States. Public health officials were effectively unanimous in agreeing that the graphic, blunt, erotic, and pro-queer pamphlets and videos of such groups as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis were effective in expanding safer sex practices. Under this Helms Amendment and its blanket disregard for public-health empiricism, such efforts were defunded and had to seek private funding in order to continue. Placing Helms’s interventions in the CDC and NEA alongside one another helps show the ways in which abstract, ideological homophobia can translate from the political arena into very direct, tangible human costs.18 Notably, ninety-four senators voted in favor of the Helms Amendment for the CDC—a powerful reminder that, while overt political homophobia tended to concentrate in the Republican Party, the Democrats often remained quietly complacent and complicit in this backlash.
State and local iterations of the backlash recurred frequently throughout the 1980s and 1990s, often utilizing the pseudoscientific arguments of family-values-oriented organizations and think tanks, such as Paul Cameron’s Family Research Institute. Despite his formal repudiation by leading psychological and sociological groups, Cameron’s prolific publications continuously spread harmful misinformation: gays were sexual predators, mentally imbalanced, and prone to perverse sexual practices and child molestation. As well, the language of “no special rights” continued to reverberate, with more local gay rights ordinances repealed in the 1980s. A California state proposition in 1986 that would have opened the door to quarantining people with AIDS received approximately 30 percent of the vote, and a 1992 Oregon ballot measure that defined homosexuality as “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse” drew over 40 percent support; more successful was a Colorado constitutional amendment passed that same year, which repealed all gay rights ordinances in the state and barred any new ones. (See Marc Stein’s essay in this volume for a discussion of the Supreme Court case that invalidated this amendment.)
Colorado’s Amendment 2, as it was known, passed with 53 percent of the vote, delivering one of the most powerful backlash moments of the New Right era; as a state constitutional amendment, it carried more legal weight than a mere law, and its sweeping nature ensured protection for homophobic discrimination in housing, jobs, and other areas of public and private life. The group that sponsored Amendment 2 reflected its origins in New Right discourse in its name, Coloradans for Family Values. That same year the city of Cincinnati passed a similar measure, Issue 3, by an overwhelming 67 percent.19 Videos such as The Gay Agenda (1992) circulated widely in evangelical communities and continued to link gays and lesbians to child molestation and sexual practices deemed perverse.20 It is important to convey to students the insular informational structures that helped shape public perceptions within conservative social groups, particularly in the pre-Internet era. Emphasizing the competing definitions of equality and special rights also helps link antigay politics to the larger rhetorical frameworks of the New Right.
While the presidential administrations of Bill Clinton replaced the overtly antigay policies of the 1980s with far more socially liberal stances, Clinton often offered more rhetoric than substance, as Aaron Belkin’s and Shannon Weber’s essays in this volume, on gays in the military and the Republican-sponsored but Clinton-signed Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), show. Although he increased funding for AIDS research, he opposed measures such as clean needle exchanges, uncontroversial among public health experts as lifesaving interventions, for fear of drawing moral objections.
If the antigay backlash seemed to recede somewhat under Clinton, it reappeared vigorously under the presidency of George W. Bush. Deeply beholden to conservative white evangelical voters, Bush seemed eager to avoid LGBT issues as much as possible during his first years in office, instead catering to his voting base through other social issues, such as antichoice measures and an amplification of adult obscenity prosecutions. But as the 2004 election season heated up, Bush endorsed and promoted the Federal Marriage Amendment, an attempt to inscribe DOMA in the U.S. constitution. Although the amendment never passed, it served to invigorate conservative voters, and well over half of the states ultimately passed state-level constitutional amendments barring legal recognition of same-sex marriage. The centrality of antigay politics to conservative mobilization thus persisted well into the early twenty-first century.
Like Reagan and George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush himself strove to avoid overt homophobic discourse, but others in the Republican Party carried backlash rhetoric into the new century. Most famously, Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum linked “man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be” to same-sex marriage in a 2003 interview.21 The Republican Party continued to take strong stands against LGBT rights throughout the 2012 presidential election campaign. Only in 2013, when Democratic president Barack Obama endorsed marriage equality and polls showed for the first time that a majority of the American public supported it, did some Republicans begin questioning the party’s stance.
As radical queer critics observe, even endorsing equality within the profoundly heteronormative institution of marriage did not signify the end of the four-decade-long backlash.22 And, while the social, cultural, and political drifts of the twenty-first century reflect an undeniable mainstreaming and normalizing of LGBT identity and visibility, acceptance remains tenuous. Whereas Cincinnati, for instance, repealed its homophobic Issue 3 by popular vote in 2004, after it survived a court challenge in the 1990s, the spirit of Anita Bryant remained alive and well in Anchorage, Alaska, where voters in 2012 decisively rejected an antidiscrimination ordinance that would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the categories protected in housing, employment, and accommodations.23
Among the most important aspects of this narrative for contemporary students are, first, the unbroken line of organic antigay continuity that runs from the Cold War through Anita Bryant and on into the Reagan and both Bush administrations—a legacy the current Right has inherited but shows no willingness to embrace or acknowledge. Next, and related, more contemporary efforts to downplay overt homophobia in favor of more subtle heterosexism and heteronormativity merit close scrutiny. As the American public seemingly embraced mainstream LGBT politics in 2013, longtime enemies of gay equality in the National Review, the Weekly Standard, and even the New York Times worked hard to rearticulate their antiequality positions in language that carefully avoided overt homophobia.24
The historian Peggy Pascoe has written brilliantly of how rapidly the American public erased the blatant racism of the recent past from its collective memory after the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case that protected interracial marriage rights.25 It is imperative that we as teachers do not allow a similar whitewash of antigay history to occur now that homophobia is supposedly a thing of the past. Antigay politics has been central to the modern conservative movement and must be included in the history that we pass on to our students.
1. National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/2012/09/05/160607418/in-1972-davis-blazed-party-trail-on-gay-rights.
2. Perversion for Profit, Citizens for Decent Literature, 1963.
3. Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington, 1977), 90.
4. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin, 2006), 256.
5. Anita Bryant, The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1977), 114.
6. On Bryant, see Fred Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panics: The Origins of America’s Debate on Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Gillian Frank, “‘The Civil Rights of Parents’: Race and Conservative Politics in Anita Bryant’s Campaign against Gay Rights in 1970s Florida,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 22, no. 1 (2013): 126–60.
7. Anita Bryant Story, 13, 16.
8. Tim LaHaye, The Unhappy Gays (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1978), 74–82.
9. Ibid., 193, 21.
10. Ibid., 22.
11. William Turner, “Mirror Images: Lesbian/Gay Civil Rights in the Carter and Reagan Administrations,” in Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights, ed. John D’Emilio, William Turner, and Urvashi Vaid (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 3–28; Claire Bond Potter, “Paths to Political Citizenship: Gay Rights, Feminism, and the Carter Administration,” Journal of Policy History 24, no. 1 (2012): 95–113.
12. Old Time Gospel Hour advertisement, La Crosse Tribune (La Crosse, Wisconsin), July 23, 1978.
13. Rosalind Petchesky discusses the legislative agenda of the New Right in Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), esp. 264–74.
14. Pat Buchanan, 1983 syndicated newspaper column, quoted in Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, twentieth anniversary ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007), 311.
15. Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 78–121.
16. Ronald Reagan, “Interview with R.W. Apple, Jr., Gerald M. Boyd, and Bernard Weinraub of the New York Times,” March 21, 1986, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=37035&st=homosexual&st1.
17. Richard Meyer, “The Jesse Helms Theory of Art,” October 104 (Spring 2003): 131–48.
18. Perhaps the best essay on this, suitable for advanced undergraduates, is Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic” (1987), reprinted in his Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 43–81.
19. Didi Herman, The Antigay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 137–69; John Gallagher and Chris Bull, Perfect Enemies: The Battle between the Religious Right and the Gay Movement, updated ed. (Lanham, MD: Madison, 2001), 161–79.
20. The Gay Agenda, The Report, 1992.
21. “Excerpt from Santorum Interview,” USA Today, April 23, 2003, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-04-23-santorum-excerpt_x.htm.
22. A superb compendium of these critiques can be found at the website of Against Equality, http://www.againstequality.org/about/marriage/.
23. Yereth Rosen, “Anchorage Voters Reject Gay Rights Ballot Measure,” Reuters, April 4, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/05/us-usagays-alaska-idUSBRE83401Q20120405.
24. For representative examples, see Mona Charen, “Why We’re Losing the Gay-Marriage War,” National Review Online, March 29, 2013, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/344221/why-were-losing-gay-marriage-debatemona-charen; and Ross Douthat, “Marriage Looks Different Now,” New York Times, March 30, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/douthat-marriage-looks-different-now.html.
25. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 291–96.