Bob Basker, a fifty-four-year-old transplant from New York and Chicago, arrived in Miami a couple of years after the Stonewall riots and was appalled that South Florida gays seemed to spend their time lolling under the palms or frolicking on the sand instead of rolling up their sleeves and advancing the cause. Basker’s conservative, mild-mannered appearance belied his long history of political activism, which began in 1935, when, at the age of seventeen, he threw himself wholeheartedly into a peace strike. He’d also protested the Vietnam War. He’d worked for black civil rights—his house had been firebombed because he helped a black family move into an all-white neighborhood of Skokie, Illinois. And in Chicago, he’d cofounded Mattachine Midwest, which he led in a successful campaign to fight police roundups of homosexuals (“The Harvest of the Fruits,” Basker sardonically called such harassment).1 In the midst of all this, he’d married a woman because he wanted children. When she divorced him and took the children to live with her and her new husband in Communist Cuba, he followed to be near them. He had to flee Cuba after he protested government persecution of two lesbian teachers.2 Now he was ready to stir things up again in Miami.
He finally ran into others who’d join with him in a Miami Gay Activists Alliance, and they found a meeting place at St. John’s Lutheran Church, which had long been a hub of progressive activity. The pastor of St. John’s, Reverend Don Olson, even made the church’s Center for Dialogue available to them for open meetings to organize protest demonstrations at the upcoming 1972 Republican and Democratic Conventions.3 Another member of the Gay Activists Alliance, Steven Wayne Foster, asked Reverend Olson if it would also be possible to have a gay library at St. John’s. “Certainly,” the reverend said. They could make a library on the second floor of the church building, right next to the Center for Dialogue. Basker and Foster and other Gay Activists Alliance members were soon lugging boxes of gay books and art up to the second floor of St. John’s Lutheran Church, and Florida’s first gay library was born.
It didn’t last long. Less than three weeks later, the reverend passed the open door of the library. From the corridor, anyone could see posters of bare-chested men on the walls, and in prominent display on the shelves, among titles such as The City and the Pillar and The Lord Won’t Mind, other titles like The Leather Boys, Gay Whore, and Hollywood Homo. The reverend was uncomfortable. “Keep the library door closed at all times,” he told Foster, who, insulted on behalf of the Gay Activists Alliance, put all the books back into boxes, wrapped up the art, and carried everything down the stairs again.4 In its rapid rise and fall, the infant gay library at St. John’s Lutheran revealed not only the limits of liberal Miami in the early 1970s, it foreshadowed the surprising betrayal of gays and lesbians by liberal Miamians in 1977.
During World War II, an air force training base was located in Miami, and gay soldiers from colder climes were introduced to the paradise of laid-back sophistication and weather that stayed balmy even at winter’s height. After the war, many returned, just as they did to other cities where they’d been stationed or had gone for R & R, and had found to be more copasetic than their hometowns.5 A gay community burgeoned in Miami, and gay hangouts flourished. Police harassment soon grew, too. When a seven-year-old girl was abducted, raped, and murdered in 1954, one of the first targets of police investigation (under the logic that “sexual perverts” were capable of any perversion) was Miami’s “Powder Puff Lane.” Police en masse swooped down on the gay bars and hauled everyone off for questioning. Needless to say, the little girl’s homicidal rapist was not found among the gay bar patrons; but the homosexual nature of the bars and the names of the arrestees, along with their addresses and places of employment, were printed in the papers—by now a common occurrence in American cities. Miami Herald headlines in the summer of 1954 were screaming almost daily about gays: “5,000 Here Perverts, Police Say,” “[Homosexuality,] a Disease ‘Worse Than Alcohol,’ ” “Pervert Clean-Up Starts Tonight.”6
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Miami police kept trying to “clean up the perverts.” In 1972 the Gay Activists Alliance decided to take them on: “What precisely constitutes an ‘indecent, lascivious, or lewd proposal?’ Does dancing between two members of the same sex automatically violate the prohibition against ‘any indecent or lewd act’? How about rock n’ roll dancing where no bodily contact takes place?” they demanded of Police Chief Eugene Gunn.7 He did not dignify such questions with answers.
The following year, Gay Activists Alliance members filed a class-action suit. They complained to the US District Court that in Miami Beach’s gay neighborhood during the previous month four hundred homosexuals had been hauled off to jail for no substantial reason. Police officers who prowled the area hurled verbal abuse at gay people, calling them animals, faggots, fairies. Police cars regularly sat in front of a gay discotheque with their lights turned on high beam while officers videotaped all those who entered or left. One Saturday night in May, a paddy wagon backed up to the door of the disco and patrons, who were doing nothing but talking and drinking or dancing, were pulled out, shoved into the van, and carted off to the police station. Four years past the Stonewall riots, nothing had changed in the Miami area since the 1950s—and nothing came of the class-action suit. It was dismissed.
Having met only frustrations, the Miami Gay Activists Alliance fizzled out, but Bob Basker was not ready to give up. When the Florida Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights convened in Miami in 1975, he showed up to testify. Miami police were abusing gay people and violating their civil rights, he complained. He described a raid a few months earlier at a private gay bathhouse, Club Miami. Undercover policemen had bought memberships so they could return night after night to spy on what the patrons were up to. Then they pounced. They seized the club’s membership records, and they demanded a pass key from the manager. They barged into private rooms. Even those found simply sleeping were hauled out into the corridor and made to stand there totally nude. When one man asked to be allowed to cover himself, the policemen yelled antigay insults at him. Sixty-four patrons were arrested for “unnatural and lascivious conduct.” They were dragged out of the building amid the glare of television lights and cameras and were taken to jail. The “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” gays called it. Eventually all charges against them were dismissed because the judge acknowledged that what they were doing was between consenting adults, without any effect on or interference with the general public. But, Basker testified to the committee, though the men were exonerated under the law, they had suffered trauma and public exposure, for which there was no remedy. The Florida Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights did not think there needed to be one.8
Basker would not give up. The following February he tried to bring together the various Miami lesbian and gay groups, such as the Lesbian Task Force of the National Organization for Women and the Metropolitan Community Church, and unite them under the banner of the Alliance for Individual Rights. He asked representatives of those groups to come with him to an Issues Convention of the Democratic Party of Dade County, which includes Miami. There Basker testified that dozens of cities all over the country now had inclusive antidiscrimination ordinances. They protected people not only on the basis of race and religion, as a Dade County ordinance already did, but also on the basis of “personal appearance, affectional or sexual preference, family responsibilities, matriculation, political affiliation, or source of income,” he told the convention. He added that even Washington, DC, the nation’s capital, had such an ordinance, “and Washington, DC, is still in existence!” he quipped.
The convention delegates rejected his resolution, but the vote had been remarkably close: 42 to 38. Basker thought that Miami’s lazy and apolitical gays and lesbians were to blame for the loss. He’d gotten delegate status to the convention for several members of the Alliance for Individual Rights, but not one of them showed up for the vote. He was barely able to contain his anger when he wrote them, “I believe that this is a time for some serious self-examination. Had only five delegates from the Alliance for Individual Rights been there, we would have won a great victory. Just their presence would have made the difference . . . I have run out of steam,” he concluded. “It’s now up to you.”9
Though Basker was puzzled by gay and lesbian Miami’s apathy, it’s not hard to surmise the feelings of hopelessness behind it and the cultivated modus vivendi of “keeping one’s head down,” which had allowed Florida’s homosexuals to survive. Miami, Florida’s most liberal city, was no New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco. Gays and lesbians had yet to see any reason to believe that hostility toward them would be reversed by fiat of law anywhere in the mid-1970s South. Why should they spin their wheels at a Democratic Party Issues Convention?
But Basker was from New York. He was friends with Frank Kameny, who kept him informed about the progress gays and lesbians were making in Washington, DC. And in Chicago, he’d witnessed how political activism could stop “the Harvest of the Fruits.” A few weeks after his peeved declaration that he’d run out of steam, he was again raring to go. Basker convinced Jack Campbell, the proprietor of the recently raided Club Miami, to help him set some fires. Campbell (a putative descendant of Queen Victoria, to whom he bore a slight resemblance) was the wealthy owner of not only Club Miami but also a long string of gay bathhouses all over America. In 1975 he’d run for the Miami City Commission, hoping to unseat J. L. Plummer, a right-wing moralist who’d purportedly pressured the police chief into raiding Club Miami. But running as an out gay man, Campbell received only 20 percent of the vote, for which he, too, angrily blamed apathy within the gay community.10 The two men agreed: the gay community had to be shaken up.
In the spring of 1976, Campbell and Basker arranged a meeting with Dr. Alan Rockway, a clinical psychologist, and Bob Kunst, an energetic and handsome thirty-four-year-old who’d been fired recently from his job as publicist for the soccer team the Miami Toros after a brochure for a gay retreat was spotted on his desk. Kunst and Rockway were now codirectors of the Transperience Center, a small operation on the second floor of a building above a marine supplies shop. The Transperience Center offered very 1970s “alternative counseling” and encounters in the nude, meant to put people in touch with their sexuality and confirm to straight and gay participants alike that everyone is naturally bisexual. The four men sat in the elegant living room of Campbell’s Coconut Grove home and brainstormed. Surely there were others in Miami who might be interested in demanding gay rights. Who were they? What rights should be demanded? How exactly should they go about it?
By early summer, Basker, along with Campbell, Kunst, and Rockway, managed to pull together a few representatives of various lesbian and gay groups, none of them very political: the Theban Motorcycle Club, the Metropolitan Community Church, and the gay and lesbian synagogue, Etz Chaim. They would form a coalition. In anticipation of predictable lesbian-feminist criticism that the group was largely male, Lisa Berry, the assistant pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church, was made a cochair, along with Jack Campbell and Bob Kunst. But after some weeks, Berry dropped out, which confirmed lesbian feminists in their conviction that lesbians couldn’t work with gay men. Since there were no more women in the group, the general meetings were now held at the Candlelight Club, a lushly landscaped private club in Coconut Grove that catered primarily to wealthy, white gay men and was owned by Bob Stickney, who headed the Bar Association, an organization formed recently to fight police harassment of gay bars.11
In August the group struggled to name itself. Bob Kunst suggested the Sexual Civil Liberties Coalition. Someone else suggested the Dade County Coalition for Gay Rights. Another person suggested the Dade County Humanistic Coalition for Gay Rights. The secretary who took the minutes crossed out one name after another.12 Jay Pryor of Etz Chaim came up with the pompous but somewhat less threatening Dade County Coalition for the Humanistic Rights of Gays. That was the name they finally agreed on.13 Then they struggled to define their purpose. They would figure out which local political candidates they should be supporting and then get those candidates to pass legislation that would help the gay community. . . . Their first goal would be to get a bill passed that would ban antigay discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations.14 They would dangle before the politicians the promise of the “gay vote,” and they would invite them to be vetted to appear on an “election recommendation flyer.”
An important local race was coming up. All the Dade County Commission seats were in contest for that fall’s election; and several of the candidates agreed to be vetted. What was there to lose? Despite police prejudice, 1976 Miami was, after all, fairly liberal, with its many transplants from New York and other big eastern cities. And anyway, who but other gays would pay attention to the fact that a politician was being endorsed by a gay group?
As it happened, five of the Dade County Commission’s nine seats were won by candidates that the coalition endorsed. “Okay! We did the work, and now it’s time to collect our chips,” Bob Kunst urged.15 They decided to invite a heterosexual University of Miami professor of law and psychiatry, Bruce Winick, to help draft a statement. They’d request that the board of county commissioners declare itself “sensitive to the fact that many persons who have homosexual preferences often experience great difficulty in finding suitable employment and housing accommodations,” and they’d ask the commissioners to add the words “affectional or sexual preference” to the existing Dade County nondiscrimination ordinance.16
The coalition’s next step was to decide on the most effective sponsor for the revised ordinance. Of the candidates they vetted, Ruth Shack impressed them most. She was another New York transplant who’d been an activist for all sorts of progressive causes: black civil rights, elder rights, legalized abortion, the ERA. She was forty-five years old, the mother of three grown daughters, and married to a successful theatrical agent with clients such as the Arbors Quartet (“Up in the valley of the Jolly Green Giant!” “When you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer!”), who pitched jingles for advertising heavyweights. Ruth Shack was straight, but she’d been a rebelliously ambitious daughter of the Depression, and she spoke of her struggles against conforming to gender roles. She understood those who were different. She made it clear she was very sympathetic to gay people.
Basker and Campbell met with her again. Of course she’d be delighted to sponsor an amendment to the county’s nondiscrimination ordinance, she told them. But the language they wanted to use in the amendment made her a bit uncomfortable. “Why does sex have to be mentioned? Why not substitute a word like gender instead?” she suggested.
Jack Campbell said that gender was ambiguous in this context. Bob Basker assured her that nearly forty cities in America had nondiscrimination ordinances with a phrase like “affectional or sexual preference.” It was the accepted language; it created no problem in other places, he said. Shack finally agreed to sponsor the amendment with the four words intact.17
But, as she feared, those words waved a red flag. “You’re sponsoring a gay-protection law?” a reporter from the Miami Herald asked. “The amendment is about nothing but human rights,” she insisted. The reporter implied that she was in thrall to the “strength of the gay lobby.” Untrue! she answered; she was sponsoring the measure only because she believed in its appropriateness. “Wherever there is discrimination, it is inappropriate,” she kept reiterating.18 She’d been certain, she said later, that the citizens of Miami shared her conviction that everyone deserves human rights, “because Miami is a very liberal community.”19 But she and the coalition had misjudged. By the seventies, most Americans, not just liberals, would agree heartily that “everyone deserves human rights”—except for homosexuals, the one group it was still “appropriate” to hold in utter contempt.
• • •
Ruth Shack presented the bill for a first reading on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1976. The Dade County commissioners were told that many other American cities already had ordinances that prohibited discrimination against people for their affectional or sexual preferences. Commissioner James Redford raised his hand to object: under Florida’s antisodomy laws, homosexual sex was illegal. “I’m a landlord myself, and I want to protect other landlords’ rights against having illegal acts performed on their premises.”
“Of course,” Shack agreed. They could insert a provision. Landlords would remain free to impose lease clauses prohibiting “illegal acts.”
Stuart Simon, the county attorney whose job it was to advise the commissioners, assured them that the amendment did nothing but ban discrimination in housing and employment. Under the amendment, a person wouldn’t be discriminated against if he or she had homosexual preferences, but there was nothing in the amendment that legalized acting on those preferences.20 A comparison could be made to President Carter admitting in the pages of Playboy that he sometimes experienced “lust in his heart”: acknowledging his lust was not the same as acting on it.21 That was assurance enough to several commissioners who’d been wrestling with the fact that sodomy was criminal in Florida.
There were no further objections. Perhaps as new commissioners, they didn’t want to be responsible for making Miami look more provincial than, for instance, East Lansing, Michigan, which had adopted such an ordinance in 1972.
But Miami media seemed unconcerned about “provincial” and uninterested in fine distinctions between the status of being homosexual and the act of homosexuality. They were shocked by what the commission had done. The Miami News editor wanted to know, “If homosexuals are accepted as a legitimate minority, then why not people with long hair? . . . Why not nail biters?”22 Steve Daily, radio host at Miami station WINZ, opined with loathing: “To say that county commissions have any obligation to ease the life of homosexuals is to say that the same attention is deserved by drunks, drug addicts, and habitual criminals.”23 The new Dade County commissioners were caving in to the demand of outlaws, it seemed. How might they be brought to their senses?
Anita Bryant was an Oklahoman who’d moved to Miami sixteen years earlier when she married Bob Green, a good-looking teen-idol disc jockey rumored at the time to be the choice for Dick Clark’s successor on American Bandstand. Bryant, who grew up in the tiny town of Velma-Alma, Oklahoma, had been beauty-queen pretty. As an eighteen-year-old, she’d been Miss Oklahoma; and as a nineteen-year-old, she’d been the second runner-up in the Miss America Beauty Pageant. She’d also been a staunch Southern Baptist since childhood and never lost her Old Testament horror of cities as cesspools of depravity. But she’d had ambitions for a theatrical career, and her husband convinced her that they could not be realized if she remained in Velma-Alma.24 Soon after coming to Miami she’d met agent Richard Shack, who was impressed by her stage presence and pleasant singing voice, and he promoted her career. By the 1970s, she was a familiar face and voice all over America, earning $500,000 a year and living in a twenty-seven-room Spanish stucco mansion on Biscayne Bay.
Bryant taught Sunday school and tithed a bountiful 10 percent of her income to the Northwest Baptist Church in Northern Miami, a Southern Baptist congregation. In June 1976, six months before the first reading of the Dade County Commission’s extension of the antidiscrimination ordinance, the Southern Baptist Convention, concerned about the various recent successes of the gay and lesbian movement across the country, had passed a resolution at the national meeting. It affirmed that homosexuality was a sin, and it urged all Southern Baptist congregations “not to afford the practice of homosexuality any degree of approval.” Northwest Baptist Church wholeheartedly supported this resolution.
It was through Anita Bryant’s pastor at Northwest Baptist, the Reverend William Chapman—“Brother Bill,” as his flock called him—that she learned that the county commissioners were revising the nondiscrimination ordinance to protect homosexuals—and that they must be stopped. “As our pastor spoke,” she recalled, “I suddenly started to realize what he was saying. The thought of known homosexuals teaching my children . . . bothered me.”25 The Reverend Chapman was thrilled that she was “bothered,” because he couldn’t have found a more illustrious spokesperson as figurehead for the battle against the county commissioners. Bryant’s recordings of the singles “Till There Was You,” “Paper Roses,” and “My Little Corner of the World” had each sold over a million copies. She did commercials for Coca-Cola, Tupperware, Kraft Foods, Holiday Inn. She was paid $100,000 yearly by the Florida Citrus Commission to push orange juice with her jingle “Come to the Florida Sunshine Tree.” The Republicans had invited her to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” at their national convention. Lyndon Johnson, a fellow southerner, had invited her often to the White House, and she’d sung “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at his graveside. And she had a contract with Singer Sewing Machines to star in a weekly television program for which she was doing a pilot.
But why would a national figure, a much-in-demand pop icon like Anita Bryant, become involved in so minor a local issue as the addition of four words to an existing county ordinance? Because, she said, she’d learned to sing “Jesus Loves Me” at her grandfather’s knee when she was two years old, and she never forgot it. In addition to her singing career, she wrote books that bore titles such as Bless This Food: The Anita Bryant Family Cookbook–An Inspiring Personal Guide to Christian Family Togetherness Through Home Cooking, Faith, and Love and Raising God’s Children. In 1976 she’d toured the country, singing gratis and talking about her Christian beliefs in Baptist churches large and small. Asked in Blytheville, Arkansas, “Which has priority in your life, your commercial career or your evangelical work?” she answered as quick as an eye blink, “No question!” She chose God.26
And now, Bryant lamented, the Dade County amendment to promote homosexuality was at least partly her fault. When Ruth Shack had decided that she would run for a seat on the Dade County Commission, her husband’s client the Arbors Quartet presented her with a gift of a singing commercial to promote her campaign. Soon after the ad aired, Anita Bryant found herself on an airplane with her agent. “Richard, why didn’t you ask me to do a commercial for Ruth, too?” she said graciously. “I’d be happy to.”27 She was also happy to donate $1,000 to Ruth’s campaign.28 So it was Anita Bryant’s good name, talent, and money that had helped Ruth Shack get elected: Christians had voted for Shack because Bryant had vouched for her.
After listening to Brother Bill’s sermon against the amendment to protect homosexuals, Bryant went home and called Ruth Shack. For more than an hour, she begged Shack to withdraw sponsorship. Red leather-bound Bible in hand, Bryant even read Leviticus to her. Shack’s response was to quote the Constitution.29
But Bryant could not drop the issue that had created a “divine disturbance” in her heart because, she claimed, she was “into God’s word more deeply than ever before.” God, with the help of Brother Bill, dictated to her a letter of protest, replete with biblical quotations that called for the death of sodomites, which she sent to the commissioners: “As a concerned mother of four children—ages 13 to 8 years—I am most definitely against this ordinance amendment [because] you would be discriminating against my children’s right to grow up in a healthy, decent community,” she wrote.30
The letter of protest was only the beginning. God also told her, Bryant proclaimed, to go with others from her church to the commission hearing and make her protest known. As she waited for the day of the requisite second reading of the amendment to approach, she spent agonizing hours walking through the house and crying because she did not want to go to the meeting and have to get up there and speak. But, she said, it was Brother Bill and God who “built up my faith and confidence.” In the weeks before the meeting, Bryant agreed to appear on every local radio program that would have her, to alert the public to the dangers of the ordinance that the commission intended to pass.31
• • •
The average January daytime temperature in Miami is 75 degrees; at night it might dip as low as 60. But on January 18, 1977, the day of the Dade County Commission’s second reading of the amendment, the temperature dropped to the low 30s. Busloads of people bundled in heavy coats and scarves, carrying placards that read “Don’t Legislate Immorality for Dade County,” “Protect Our Children,” and “God Says No! Who Are You to Say Different?” stormed the county courthouse. The commission chamber was soon clogged with four hundred churchly people who took up most of the seats and stood three and four deep all around the room. Another hundred kept vigil in the lobby.
Mayor Stephen Clark led the meeting. He announced he would limit the debate to forty-five minutes for each side. The revered senior rabbi of the reform Temple Israel, Joseph Narot, who’d been a champion of black civil rights and a strong opponent of the war in Vietnam, spoke in favor of the amendment: “If God is love, then let it be the love for all mankind,” he said.32 Those who’d come to protest the amendment jeered him. Bob Kunst, speaking on behalf of the Dade County Coalition for the Humanistic Rights of Gays, hailed the amendment as “a breath of fresh air.” (Ruth Shack remembers being mortified because “The first words out of Kunst’s mouth were ‘Oral is moral.’ ”33) He was booed loudly. Mayor Clark banged his gavel and threatened to cancel the hearing if the onlookers didn’t behave.
The crowd became only slightly subdued. Those speakers who made antihomosexual biblical allusions were greeted by loud calls of “Amen!” A representative of the Archdiocese of Miami said that allowing homosexuals to teach children was like allowing a fox in the chicken coop. Alvin Dark, onetime star major-league baseball player and manager—who famously complained in 1964 that black and Hispanic players on his San Francisco Giants team “are just not able to perform up to the white players when it comes to mental alertness”34—waved a Bible at the commissioners and declared homosexuality to be “an abomination to the Lord.” Reverend Charles Couey from the South Dade Baptist Church took the podium, opened his Bible, and read from Romans 1:22–32. Joseph Betsey, a member of the Community Affairs Committee of the Glendale Missionary Baptist Church, testified that his church “had prayed about this situation,” and he was here to say that “God has wrath against those who disobey him . . . The wages of sin is death [sic].”35
It was the Scopes Monkey Trial, replayed in Miami fifty-two years later.
Anita Bryant was, of course, the star of the antis. She spoke in a voice choked with emotion. She opposed the amendment because, she said, “Homosexuals will recruit our children. They will use money, drugs, alcohol, any means to get what they want.”36 As an entertainer, she’d worked with homosexuals all her life, she told the crowd. Her attitude had always been “live and let live.” But, she proclaimed, eyes shiny with tears, the commissioners had absolutely no right to impose homosexuals on the citizenry. Enough was enough: “Now it is time to realize the rights of the overwhelming number of Dade County constituents.”37
Finally, after eighteen impassioned testimonies, the commissioners voted: five ayes and three nays: one nay from Neil Adams, an African American Baptist minister; one from the only woman on the commission other than Shack, Clara Oesterle, who covered her face and wept after she voted; and one from Mayor Clark. Commissioner Barry Schreiber, an Orthodox Jew, had claimed illness and avoided the vote. The amendment to add the words “affectional or sexual preference” to the Dade County nondiscrimination ordinance, Mayor Clark announced, had passed.
Those who’d come to city hall to make the recalcitrant commissioners understand the displeasure of the citizenry chanted loudly, “Recall! Recall! Recall!”38 It was a futile demonstration because the entire commission had been elected the preceding fall, and under Dade County law, no commissioner who had served for less than a full year could be recalled. “Now I’m not only aflame, I’m on fire!” the flushed and furious Bryant told reporters who waylaid her in the corridor. She vowed not to rest till Dade ceased coddling homosexuals.39
There in the corridor, attorney Robert Brake, a staunch Catholic who fought against the legalization of abortion and was now a suburban city commissioner from Coral Gables, stepped up to Bryant where she stood with Brother Bill and her husband. Brake had spoken against the amendment at the hearing so they knew he was on their side. If the Dade County Commission would not reverse its decision, Brake told them solemnly, there were other ways to keep the amendment from taking effect. They must form an organization to defeat the amendment by petition and referendum, and Anita Bryant must lend her famous name to it as its “chairman.” “Absolutely! I will!” Bryant exclaimed. “Absolutely!” Brother Bill and Bob Green agreed.40 They would get started immediately. As the angry mob was filing out of the chamber, Brake pulled pads of blank paper from a briefcase. “Listen, everyone. If you’re against what just happened, sign and give your phone number!” he called above the din. All who signed would be contacted with petitions to put repeal of the amendment on the ballot. Let the voters of Dade County decide if they want to protect the rights of homosexuals.41
That night, during the wee hours, it snowed. As the Miami Herald observed later, snow in Miami was “the equivalent of hell freezing over.”42
• • •
Robert Brake’s collecting of signatures in the corridor of city hall was the beginning. Next Anita Bryant called a press conference. She was flanked by a small army—Brother Bill, the pastors of the First Spanish Presbyterian Church, the Shenandoah Presbyterian Church, St. Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Church, representatives of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of Greater Miami, the Caribbean Baptist Association; and, close to her side, her strapping blond husband, Bob Green (a lukewarm Lutheran who’d been “born again” at her urging on their wedding night).43 She was starting an organization called Save Our Children, Bryant announced, and on behalf of “our children,” she was fighting to overturn the “homosexual ordinance.”44
• • •
The men of the cloth who’d accompanied Bryant to the press conference were only a fraction of those who were passionately supportive of her cause. Week after week, ministers standing in the pulpit urged their congregants to put their signatures on the petitions and, in the name of scripture, make a stand against homosexuality. Save Our Children volunteers stood on street corners and went door to door distributing leaflets in both English and Spanish about the dangers of homosexuality. Spanish leaflets aimed at the Cuban community declared, “Children are the hope of our future!” (quoting nineteenth-century Cuban patriot José Martí out of context).
The Save Our Children campaign—by now comprising a variety of interfaith and interracial individuals who had little in common except homophobia—was a huge success. Only 10,000 signatures were required to place repeal of the amendment on the ballot; 64,304 signatures were obtained in a mere three weeks.45 It was a loud, clear message that to a lot of their fellow citizens, gays were loathsome, bogeymen, a blight on humanity. The war was on. Bryant called it a holy war: “a battle of the agnostics, the atheists, and the ungodly on one side, and God’s people on the other.”46