Ruth Shack, the wary sponsor of the amendment, felt the rage right away. She got so many anonymous threats over the phone that the police chief offered her protection. A woman followed her into a private dressing room in Saks Fifth Avenue department store and called her a lesbian. So did a man standing next to her in a crowded elevator. “Your mother must be a dyke,” high school classmates taunted her youngest daughter. “I didn’t have to be black to support black civil rights,” Shack defended herself by saying. But that wasn’t enough. She had her picture taken with her husband and three daughters for a full-page ad that she placed in the Miami Herald. It thanked Dade County for having helped the Shacks enjoy twenty-five years of married life.1
• • •
The Dade County Coalition for the Humanistic Rights of Gays had been lulled to confidence because it had believed, as Ruth Shack had, that Miami was “a very liberal community.” When told by reporters of the drive to repeal the amendment, Bob Kunst said on behalf of the coalition that he was certain that even if enough petition signatures were gathered to qualify a repeal measure for the ballot, it would “fail miserably” because the people of Dade County favored equality for all.2 The coalition could surely have made an effective preemptive strike on Save Our Children. It could have disseminated dramatic stories about poster gays and lesbians—innocent, upstanding citizens who’d suffered discrimination in housing and employment and who now would be safe because of the amendment. Evidence of past discrimination wouldn’t have been hard to find. But the coalition made no preemptive strike. It took weeks before its members even understood that war was being waged.3
The Dade County Coalition for the Humanistic Rights of Gays had, in fact, never really thought out its purpose in getting Commissioner Shack to sponsor the amendment. Its members had hoped primarily to “raise consciousness,” as Bob Kunst had testified, in 1970s idiom, at the commission hearing: “We are there now [in Dade County jobs and housing], and what we want to do is tell you where we’re at.” It was not a goal that could make many gays and lesbians feel, as their enemy did, that they were “not only aflame, but on fire.” And so when Bryant and her Save Our Children team began to dominate the media, the coalition was, for a time, dumbstruck and inert.
Save Our Children, however, was in active mode from the beginning and never let up. The organization bought full-page newspaper ads, such as one in the Miami Herald that proclaimed, referencing the name “Coalition for the Humanistic Rights of Gays,” “There is no ‘Human Right’ to Corrupt Our Children.” Save Our Children ads prominently featured bits of articles from newspapers around the United States: stories of homosexual pornographers who took dirty pictures of young boys, scoutmasters who had sex with the scouts in their charge.4 Save Our Children ran a Mother’s Day ad warning mothers that homosexuals were out to get their kids—even the youngest of them—by scheming to abolish age-of-consent laws.5 Bryant gave frequent radio and newspaper interviews in which she claimed to have files stuffed with evidence “confirming that children are lured into homosexual activity in schools by homosexual teachers.”6 She emphasized always that the amendment said that no one could be fired from a job because of sexual preference, and so it would protect the “rights” of homosexual teachers to continue to ruin the young.
Bryant dubbed her fight a “Christian Crusade,”7 and she starred in huge prayer rallies alongside fanatical preachers such as youth evangelist Jack Wyrtzen—who in 1957 told Billy Graham he was breaking fellowship with him because Graham was not sufficiently strict in his fundamentalism. Wyrtzen flew to Florida from his Word of Life ministries headquarters in upstate New York in order to appear with Bryant at the Miami Beach Convention Center, jammed with ten thousand believers, to share in an antigay hate fest. “If this bill passes in Dade County in favor of the gay crowd,” Reverend Wyrtzen told the masses in rhetoric that matched Bryant’s for hysteria, “it could be the end of the United States of America.”8
• • •
Jack Wyrtzen’s journey from New York for a minor amendment issue in a Florida county, the big crowd that avidly affirmed the evangelist and the singer’s homophobia, the wild enthusiasm that greeted their claim that homosexuality endangered not only Dade County but also the entire nation—these fueled Save Our Children’s larger but not-yet-articulated goal: Why should their antigay crusade be limited to battling a little nondiscrimination amendment in South Florida when hordes of homosexuals were, or might soon be, demanding rights in cities and towns all over the United States of America? While the Dade County referendum campaign still raged, Bryant and her advisors were already dreaming of spreading Save Our Children far beyond Dade County.
To that end, Bryant started writing The Anita Bryant Story, which explained to a national audience the urgency of her message: Gay people are dangerous. “Gays can’t reproduce, so they have to recruit,” her book warned, reminding her readers often that God was most certainly against homosexuality, and that “Hell will be populated [by unrepentant homosexuals] who are proud they are gay.”9 In the spring, before the June special election in which the amendment would be voted on, Bryant was flying all over America to deliver her message to rallies, talk shows, and newspaper reporters. “Do you know how God punishes homosexuality?” she asked reporters. “A Southern California town passed an ordinance for them, and now California is having its worst drought in history.”
In pushing beyond Dade County, Bryant and her team understood what it took Dade County gays a dangerously long time to comprehend. As Robert Brake, who dreamed up Save Our Children, observed jeeringly: “If [gays] can’t win in Dade County—as liberal a community as this is—then they can’t win elsewhere.”10 The referendum to repeal a South Florida amendment was to become no less than a testing ground for the future of gay rights in America.
It was quickly apparent that Bryant’s campaign struck a chord not only among fundamentalists and the fringe types who rode around Miami with “Kill a Queer for Christ” bumper stickers on their cars,11 and not only among the testosterone laden, such as the entire Miami Dolphins football team, which passed the hat for a Save Our Children kitty,12 but also among those who were politically progressive. “New South” governor Reubin Askew, for example, supported school busing to achieve desegregation and also appointed an African American as his secretary of state (the first black person to hold a Florida cabinet-level position since Reconstruction). He was so liberal that in 1972 George McGovern asked him to be his vice presidential running mate (which he declined), and he was named US Trade Representative in the Carter administration. Yet Askew proclaimed in 1977 that if he could vote in the Dade County election, he would definitely vote to repeal the amendment.“I have never viewed the homosexual lifestyle as something that approached a constitutional right,” the governor told the media. “I do not want a homosexual teaching my child.”13
But it was not just southern governors who felt no compunction to hide their prejudice. Even the most sophisticated and intellectually elite were not ashamed to be homophobes in 1977. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, for example, admitted that he had tried hard to write a column saying that Anita Bryant “should shut up and stick to pushing orange juice,” but he simply couldn’t. “In my head, I’m anti–Anita Bryant. In my heart, I’m not so sure,” he confessed. Though he decried the “hateful” language that Bryant and her camp employed, nevertheless he championed the “normal” and “healthy” and admitted in his column to repulsion at things homosexuals did, citing as an example “a man who’s been going to work at the Smithsonian Institution dressed as a woman.” (Thirty-five years later, in a very different social climate, Cohen, who’d “evolved,” roundly criticized the Boy Scouts of America for their unfounded fears that gays in the Scouts “will Pied Piper the boys of America into the gay life.”)14 With so much ignorance coming from a left-leaning public intellectual in Washington, DC, in 1977, what could gays of Dade County expect from their run-of-the-mill Florida neighbors?
Once they realized the enormity of the attack on them, gay people of Dade County—a few of them, anyway—got in gear. Bob Basker, now executive director of the Coalition for the Humanistic Rights of Gays, understood that the amendment vote would be a do-or-die issue for gay people. “It will send ripples across the country either way. If this is defeated, we’re looking at a witch hunt against gays,” Basker told the Miami Herald.15 He set himself to directing the pro-gay campaign as though his life depended on it, as did Bob Kunst, who dreamed up an apt and pithy response to “Save Our Children” bumper stickers: “We Are Your Children.”
For a while, the coalition was attracting an increasing number of gays (almost all men), and because the size of the Tuesday night membership meetings had outgrown Bob Stickney’s Candlelight Club, the venue was changed to another Stickney club for gay men, Warehouse VIII, which had a disco downstairs, a cruise bar upstairs, and a Levi’s-and-leather back room. The meetings were held at the back of the very noisy disco, and they became at least as much a social event as a political one.16 The coalition board finally got another lesbian, Edda Cimino, a teacher and one of the organizers of the radicals’ protests at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. But she didn’t stay long: “There’d be guys wandering into the Warehouse VIII meetings from the dance floor so they could cruise. There’d be guys at the meeting who were more interested in getting it on than in what was going on. I didn’t let myself be put on the board to go and see that,” she objected, and in disgust she stopped coming.17 That was the end of lesbians on the coalition board.
Lesbian disaffection was far from the coalition’s only problem. Bob Basker and Bob Kunst were committed to the same goal, but they could not work together. Their styles clashed. To Basker, Kunst was a loose cannon: he endangered the coalition’s campaign by ranting to the media about the opposition’s “sexual hang-ups” and spewing pronouncements about “gay rights” and “sexual freedom.” Basker was convinced that in order to win, the coalition must be circumspect, even a little duplicitous. He supported a name change that emphasized the new tack. Dade County Coalition for the Humanistic Rights of Gays would become Dade County Coalition for Human Rights (DCCHR), because “Straight people preferred not to think about homosexuality.” Most of the coalition’s steering committee agreed and thus erased from their campaign for gay rights all references to “gay.” Kunst, however, was still going about proclaiming the word everywhere. “There are probably three hundred thousand gays in Dade County, twenty percent of the population. Gays like the sun,” he told a National Observer reporter.18
Finally, at a coalition strategy meeting at Jack Campbell’s home, Kunst and Basker sat in deep sofas surrounded by expensive gay erotic art and political memorabilia (including a silver peanut that Campbell was given for donating generously to Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign), and they duked it out. In his usual fervent style, Kunst presented a daring proposal. Gays need to stand up and show their numbers and power, and it could be done with drama and great effect if they would boycott orange juice, which would pressure the Florida Citrus Commission to fire Anita Bryant as its spokesperson. Just as the 1950s Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott by black people turned all eyes to their civil rights struggle, an orange juice boycott could do the same for gay people.
“No!” Basker jumped in to say. An orange juice boycott would do nothing to stop repeal—just the opposite. It would hurt the workers hired to pick the oranges, which would backfire against the campaign. Jack Campbell, the meeting’s host, who was expected to be a top financial donor in their fight against repeal, agreed. A boycott would hurt the minorities who worked in the groves as much as it would hurt the growers. Obviously, the coalition couldn’t control orange juice boycotts elsewhere, but it must not call for one in Miami. Everyone but Kunst concurred. And the coalition must be mum on the subject of gay numbers and gay power and anything else gay, too, they agreed again. Bob Basker had won the bout.19
Kunst went home angry and defeated. To him it seemed that Basker and the coalition had become dishonest, timidly conventional, conservative (an especially annoying insult to Basker, a lifelong Marxist). Kunst resented that most of the leadership seemed to want to put a Band-Aid over his mouth: that they thought he was “too radical, too hot to handle.”20 Yet he had some passionate supporters, such as Jack Nichols, who’d been one of the most creative thinkers in Mattachine Society Washington and who was now a Florida resident. Kunst, Nichols said, was a heroic warrior, “a shining knight on the horse, attacking the enemy.”21 It was true that Bob Kunst had colorful ideas and wasn’t afraid to push them. At one point, he purchased a thousand big orange and yellow shopping bags with the logo “Tell Anita You’re Against Discrimination!” and he distributed them to shoppers on Washington Avenue, relishing the idea of “a thousand little old ladies walking up and down the street, supporting us!”22
But as the opposition gained ground, Kunst and Basker wasted valuable time fighting each other instead of fighting Anita Bryant. Although Kunst ate and slept the cause—devoted his youth and his life to it—he seemed always to be blamed for creating discord. So after the strategy meeting, with less than two months left before the vote, he quit the coalition and started a rival group, the Miami Victory Campaign, which he ran with Alan Rockway out of their Transperience office. This unhappy split was in keeping with a long tradition in gay politics: the virulent schism between “radicals” and “conservatives” that dated back a generation earlier to the clash between Harry Hay and Hal Call. It would continue into the twenty-first century.
• • •
Finally, the Dade County Coalition for Human Rights opened a campaign office with a phone bank and a few committed people to run it. Jesse Monteagudo, an earnest young college student and Cuban refugee, was one of them. He’d been an avid member of the coalition since its earliest meetings at the Candlelight Club, and now he began looking high and low for volunteers to man the phones and pass out flyers. At Sears, Roebuck, where he worked part-time, he tried to convince a gay manager to join the campaign. “What for?” the man asked. “We’re doing fine without an ordinance. It’ll just bring out the screamers and the flamboyant queens, and then there’ll be a backlash.” Monteagudo tried to enlist other gay coworkers at Sears—he tried to enlist gays anywhere he met them—but the response was almost always negative. He found, as Basker had a few years earlier, that gays just wanted to be left alone “to do their thing”: hooking up in Miami’s wild gay scene.23
With so little political fervor in the gay community, the DCCHR counted it an excellent evening when a few hundred people showed up for a pro-amendment fund-raiser. A rally at Miami Dade Junior College just weeks before voters would go to the polls brought out about a hundred people; but at the same time, ten thousand people were jamming into the Miami Beach Convention Center for an antiamendment prayer rally.24 Jesse Monteagudo, sapped by what had seemed a hopeless cause, blamed the coalition. The leadership naively believed that a campaign that used tame buzzwords such as human rights and equal opportunity could defeat an opposition that talked of “the destruction of civilization” and “a war for the nation’s soul.”25
Discord continued in the coalition even after Kunst left. The coalition wanted to run a centralized operation, which meant that volunteers had to be willing to take orders from those on top. Not many were. “It’s like a big powwow where all the chiefs come out, but the warriors stay at home,” Jack Campbell lamented. “We need the warriors!”26 But those at the top lacked credibility. They had no experience in managing a major campaign.
The battle of the sexes also continued to rage. Lesbians, particularly lesbian feminists, abhorred the sexist terms that were being used to characterize Anita Bryant: “bitch” and “whore,” gay men called her. The lesbian feminists were especially riled by an illustration in the Advocate that presented Bryant as a cow with huge udders spewing out hatred: “The Orange Juice Cow,” David Goodstein, publisher of the Advocate, dubbed Bryant.27 Lesbian feminists were no friends of Anita Bryant, of course, but neither were they friends of men who flaunted their disdain for womankind. They were also offended when Jack Campbell offered his Club Miami for a major coalition fund-raiser. Club Miami was a men’s bathhouse, lesbian feminists protested. They would feel weird and unwelcome there.28 But the most dramatic split between the gay men and lesbian feminists was at a fund-raiser at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, where a straight woman vocalist entertained the audience by singing “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” Edda Cimino led the women in a noisy exodus from the theater.29
Class animosity, too, reared its head in the coalition. The nervous and inexperienced strategists of the campaign held the reins very tightly. They scrutinized carefully who could and who could not work on the campaign. Grassroots volunteers from outside Miami were shooed away. John O’Brien, one of the founders of the New York Gay Liberation Front, had fancied that through his left-wing activism he had close ties to African American communities. “Listen, I know people from the South. We worked together on issues,” he called Jack Campbell to say. “I can go into the black churches and deliver the black vote for you.” Campbell asked the former Gay Liberation Front leader to stay home.30 But worried about what the eighty-five thousand black voters of Dade County might do, Campbell and others put up money to hire a professional community organizer, Clarence Edwards (who was known to be “not especially favorable” to the gay cause), to bring in the black vote. Edwards was paid about $10,000, even though local black leaders had already warned not to expect support; the black community was too concerned about black jobs and housing to go to the polls and vote for gay rights.31
Howard Wallace, a part-time truck driver and longtime labor organizer in San Francisco—who played a big role in organizing the boycott against Coors beer for firing gay employees and giving money to antigay groups—also offered to come to Miami as a volunteer. He promised to deliver the labor vote. But he, too, was discouraged from coming, though a couple of weeks before the election, he showed up anyway. Wallace might as well have stayed home, because the coalition leadership kept him muzzled. If coalition volunteers weren’t even allowed to say the gay word, Wallace complained, how could they effectively challenge Save Our Children’s depiction of the maniacal, child-molesting, homosexual boogeyman?32
The jittery coalition leadership was petrified that if grassroots activists and radicals from the outside descended upon Miami, the Right would claim that the coalition was being fueled by a bunch of carpetbaggers; and even worse, the radical carpetbaggers would be sleeping in parks and on beaches and would give Miamians the impression that gays were a scruffy and unsavory lot. Yet the coalition had no confidence in its own ability to run a campaign.33 And there was so much to lose. By April, David Goodstein, owner and publisher of the Advocate, was alarming everyone by writing in the pages of his widely circulated magazine that if Bryant and Save Our Children weren’t stopped in Dade County, they’d export their venom to Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago—gay people would be safe nowhere. A Holocaust was coming, and it could be averted only if the gays of Dade County did the right thing now.34 The coalition panicked. They’d have to call in carpetbaggers after all, political consultants to run the campaign. Campbell and Goodstein agreed to bankroll them.35
But in 1977 there weren’t many gay political consultants to choose from. San Franciscan Jim Foster, Goodstein’s fair-haired boy who’d risen to national prominence when he spoke at the 1972 Democratic Convention, was Goodstein’s choice. Foster knew a lot about winning local elections, Goodstein pointed out to the coalition. He’d brought out the gay vote that gave Dianne Feinstein her margin for victory when she ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He did the same for Richard Hongisto when he ran successfully for sheriff. And he was now serving as assistant to Mayor George Moscone. Jack Campbell’s choice was New Yorker Ethan Geto, who’d been George McGovern’s New York press secretary when McGovern ran for president and had also worked in the New York campaigns of Birch Bayh, Hubert Humphrey, and Jimmy Carter. He’d been married twice, had two children, and was bisexual. (He and Michelle deMilly, his second wife, had married in secret because Geto feared gays would say, “How can you be a gay rights leader if you’re married?”36) Foster and Geto were imported to Miami. “Together these two guys have had a quarter century of experience in running campaigns,” Campbell told the coalition hopefully.
But Foster and Geto were overwhelmed. Foster claimed that in sixteen years in politics, he’d never seen such underhanded tactics and lies as those perpetrated by the Bryant camp. And the opposition forces weren’t his sole source of frustration. He and Geto worked assiduously to get liberal politicians such as Ted Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, and civil rights leaders such as Julian Bond, to issue statements in support of the amendment. Not one of them came through.37 The coalition did succeed in raising $350,000: $150,000 from readers of the Advocate who responded to David Goodstein’s panicked appeal; $50,000 from Dade County—a chunk of that sum from the Jack Campbell coffers; and $150,000 from donors all over the country.38 They bought media ads that emphasized justice and liberty: “Freedom in America begins and ends here,” accompanied by a picture of a voting booth; and “Don’t let them chip away at the Constitution,” with a picture of a hammer cracking the Bill of Rights.39 But not a word about “gay” or “sexual.”
While Foster and Geto skirted the gut terms, Bob Kunst laid them bare. Kunst was a perfect embodiment of the Age of Aquarius, and newspaper and TV reporters loved him. He was striking-looking, with a head of thick black curls and a gorgeous white-toothed smile. He had a mellifluous voice, too, and was given to spouting flower-child aphorisms that the media found very quotable, such as, “The only thing that matters is our human capacity to love and be loved.” Kunst had been passionately involved in all sorts of movements. He’d demonstrated for black civil rights; he’d organized for the New Mobilization Against the War; and he’d battled “hang-ups” and “uptightness” as a “human potential” guru in his Transperience Center, which was devoted to exploring “the entire question of human sexuality.”40 Because Kunst was photogenic and colorful, he—and not the coalition—became the public face of the campaign against Anita Bryant.
In their lifestyles, Bob Kunst and Anita Bryant were diametrical opposites. She lived lavishly in her mansion by the bay and drove a Mercedes; he lived in a modest apartment with a succession of roommates to help defray expenses, and because gasoline prices were high, he seldom used the old car he’d inherited from his deceased father. She was usually dressed as though going to church (but never without false eyelashes and peachy-colored foundation makeup); he was usually dressed in Levi’s 501s and colorful shirts, bearded and mustachioed in the 1970s “clone” style. Yet in their fervid zeal for their causes and their fiery rhetoric, Bryant and Kunst were mirror images of each other. “Do you know why homosexuals are an abomination to the Lord?” she asked newspaper reporters. “Hold your stomach. It’s because they’re eating new life. There’s nothing reproductive about it.”41 Kunst, shown a piece of Save Our Children propaganda in the Miami Herald by a reporter, shouted, “Jesus, what a piece of shit!” He called Bryant “a vicious woman.” Bryant called him “a Homosexual,” as though the word itself were an abomination.42 The media had a field day fashioning them into a Punch-and-Judy show.
Despite all the press coverage he received, Kunst was no more able to get local gays and lesbians animated about his Miami Victory Campaign than they were about the coalition. But his call for an orange juice boycott caught fire far beyond Miami. Most gays outside Dade County had not known that the “day-without-orange-juice-is-a-day-without-sunshine” lady was spearheading a movement to repeal gay rights, until Kunst proposed the boycott. He was right about the dramatic value of the ploy. It kindled zealous action. Gay people all over America began to take the struggle against Anita Bryant far more seriously than did gay Miami. Gay bars everywhere—even the only gay bar in Idaho—took screwdrivers off the drink menu and replaced them with concoctions such as vodka and apple juice, called an “Anita Bryant” in her “honor”;43 or for the sake of the cause, they made screwdrivers out of vodka and Tang, a sugary chemical-tasting powder that hinted only vaguely of orange flavor.
T-shirts with sassy boycott messages became fashion statements among gays all over the country: “Anita Sucks Oranges,” “Anita Bryant Eats Lemons,” “Suck a Fruit for Anita.” In New York, they picketed supermarkets, chanting, “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Florida Citrus Got to Go” and “O.J. No Way!”44 Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, which by now had scores of congregations across America, was on a plane from Los Angeles to New York when the stewardess placed glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice in front of all the business-class passengers, including the reverend in his clerical collar. “Take it away. I can’t drink it!” Perry shouted. “I’m a homosexual!”45 Author Barbara Love and her partner, founders and sole members of Gay Guerrillas, invaded New York supermarkets and surreptitiously punctured every carton of Florida orange juice in sight. At the time, Love happened to be an editor for Supermarketing magazine, which reached eighty thousand supermarket retailers. She wrote an article for the magazine warning retailers not to stock Florida orange juice in their stores because the product was attracting vandals.46
• • •
While Kunst got reporters out and ignited people’s imaginations, Geto and Foster kept insisting that the only way to victory was to take a careful human rights strategy. “A gay rights campaign has no way of winning,” Foster kept reiterating. “Most people just don’t care about gay rights. They’re too removed from it.”47 In the ads they bought, they aimed at convincing voters, as Geto said, that “America is all about the majority respecting the rights of minorities, about the right to be different, and that rights are not rewards to be distributed to people that you like but are the birthright of every American.”48 It wasn’t an approach that would capture headlines.
Hoping to capture a few headlines for the coalition, Jack Campbell invited Leonard Matlovich to come to Florida, be his houseguest, and let himself be used as a campaign icon.49 A couple of years earlier, on September 8, 1975, Sergeant Matlovich, sporting his air force cap and numerous medals, had made the cover of Time magazine, the first out gay person ever to appear on a nationally circulated mainstream magazine cover. Sprawled across the picture of an intense-looking air force sergeant were the words “I Am a Homosexual: The Gay Drive for Acceptance.” He was now the most famous homosexual in America. But the hope that Matlovich would grab the attention of the media and supplant Bob Kunst didn’t materialize, since Kunst continued to offer reporters amusingly outrageous copy, such as when he called Reubin Askew, the homophobic governor of Florida, “a sexually insecure lame duck.”50
It was Ethan Geto’s idea that it might give Matlovich more credibility as spokesperson for the coalition if he had prominence in its hierarchy. So the old executive committee was reconstituted into a steering committee that included him. Jack Campbell remained the committee’s president, and Bob Basker remained executive director of the coalition, though he seemed to have diminishing say once Geto and Foster took over. Matlovich was made vice president. The second vice president was Alexias Ramón Muniz. (Jesse Monteagudo, who was by now very disillusioned with the coalition, thought Muniz’s was a “token position to placate the Hispanics.”51) Bob Stickney, owner of the Candlelight Club and Warehouse VIII, was treasurer; and the lone woman on the steering committee, Carolyn Sarnoff, a heterosexual, became secretary. No one seemed to notice that there was no lesbian presence on the steering committee of the Dade County Coalition for Human Rights—except the Dade County lesbians.
Among the coalition’s many problems was the widespread perception (which the makeup of the steering committee did little to correct) that its members were primarily spoiled white men who already had all the rights anyone could possibly use and didn’t need any more. Newsweek magazine said as much in a long cover article on the Dade County referendum. The article featured prominently Bob Stickney’s exclusive Candlelight Club, where gay professional men dined on rack of lamb and Châteauneuf-du-Pape; and Jack Campbell’s mansion, where he kept a gorgeous young lover and a boy who did nothing but tend his oversized swimming pool. Though the Newsweek article wasn’t flattering to Anita Bryant and her fulminations against homosexuals, the ordinary reader must have come away thinking that fat-cat gays certainly had no cause to bellyache about jobs and housing: they were already doing immeasurably better than most Americans.52
In the weeks before the election, a Lou Harris poll found that 62 percent of registered voters of Dade County claimed they supported “antidiscrimination laws.”53 But it was clearly not this antidiscrimination law they supported. Few key institutions or organizations spoke out in favor of the amendment. The United Teachers of Dade, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, did finally declare support—but seventy-five teachers quit the organization in protest.54 Even more worrisome, though, and a harbinger of what was to come on election day, was the viciousness with which the opposition expressed itself. “Listen you S.O.B.,” one listener wrote local radio talk-show host Neil Rogers, who’d supported the amendment on his program. “If you and your ‘lover’ have to corn hole for your kicks, then by God keep it to yourselves, go crawl in a hole some where and quit trying to brain wash people via radio to your sordid way of life, because if you don’t quit you had better lock your doors tight and get yourself a bodygard [sic] because me and my buddies are going to get you some dark night then you will really find out what corn holeing means—with an iron spike [sic].”55
When the handful of Cuban volunteers for the Dade County Coalition for Human Rights decided to form Latinos pro Derechos Humanos (Latinos for Human Rights), hoping to address the Cuban community, they were invited to appear on a Spanish-language radio show and face off against Cuban supporters of Save Our Children. The two sides were supposed to debate the pros and cons of the amendment, but the Save Our Children contingent refused to sit in the same room with the gays.56 So, instead of a debate, each group stated its position, and then the telephone lines were opened to listeners. Homosexuals, one after another said, should be thrown in concentration camps (as they were in Communist Cuba, from which the callers had escaped57), or kicked out of the country, or killed.
The PR person for Latinos pro Derechos Humanos, Manolo Gomez, who’d arranged the radio “debate,” was beaten and left for dead in an alley. His car was firebombed. He was also fired from his job as an editor for the Spanish-language edition of Cosmopolitan magazine because he’d made public declarations about his homosexuality. Ovidio Heriberto Ramos, a twenty-eight-year-old Cuban immigrant who went by the Americanized name Herb, was another member of Latinos pro Derechos Humanos who’d been on the radio program. Ramos had long suffered from severe bouts of depression and drug use,58 and the hostility of the callers may have been enough to push him over the edge. After the broadcast, he went home and put a bullet through his head. Gay newspapers and even straight liberal journals were soon calling Ramos the “first victim of the Bryant crusade,” renaming him Ovidio Ramos, and emphasizing his immigrant background, to counter the image of gays as rich, complacent white guys.59
But the martyrdom of Ovidio Ramos did nothing to change the conservative Cuban community’s antipathy. Maybe some of their hatred can be explained by their anxiety that they’d fled Communism to end up in a morally lax land to which their kids were assimilating. Anita Bryant also spurred them to panic by playing on their worst fears: “It would break my heart,” she told the Cuban community, “if Miami would become another Sodom and Gomorrah, and you would have to leave again.”60
Still reeling from the horror of the radio program but unwilling to give up, Jesse Monteagudo, who’d been coaxed back to the coalition to help with Latinos pro Derechos Humanos, proposed going door to door in the Cuban community: Maybe if Cubans actually saw gay Cuban faces, their minds would be changed. But Geto and Foster thought that to alert Cubans even further about the issue was a terrible idea. With the sad evidence of the disastrous radio program, Geto and Foster concluded that their best hope was to keep Cubans away from the polls.61 It was a false hope. In every Catholic church with a Cuban congregation, the devout were bombarded by antiamendment propaganda and ordered to go vote.62
In Protestant churches, too, the Sunday before the election, ministers were urging congregations to do the right thing: vote against nondiscrimination of gays. But devout Protestants already knew to “do the right thing.” Two weeks earlier, the most famous Protestant minister in America, Jerry Falwell, had come to Miami to inform a crowd of thousands about homosexuals and their scheme to get a nondiscrimination law passed.
“I want to tell you we are dealing with a vile and vicious and vulgar gang. They’d kill you as quick as look at you,” Falwell told his audience.63 And the faithful weren’t the only ones who got the word. In the days before the election, Save Our Children took out full-page ads in Miami newspapers warning voters that if they didn’t repeal the amendment, there would soon be an “epidemic of child pornography.” Save Our Children blitzed TV channels with ads showing all-American types at the Orange Bowl juxtaposed with drag queens, leather men, and bare-bosomed Dykes on Bikes at the San Francisco Pride Parade. If the amendment was not repealed, the wholesomeness of the Orange Bowl would be replaced by pride in decadence.64
• • •
The same Lou Harris poll that said 62 percent of eligible voters were opposed to discrimination also said that only 15 percent would show up to vote on June 7. But voters flocked to the polls: seasoned precinct workers at one Coconut Grove polling place said they’d never seen such long lines. Some voters, such as Cuban émigré millionaire Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, had self-satisfied expressions on their faces as they waited to cast their votes. Rebozo had been involved in serious money scandals with Richard Nixon and had been investigated for bank fraud the year before. Now he drove up to the polling place at Key Biscayne Elementary School in his white Lincoln Continental, shook hands and grinned broadly at his neighbors, did his duty at the ballot box, and announced he’d voted for repeal. “Why?” someone asked. “Because I felt that way!” he answered.65
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Bob Kunst, in his usual brash optimism, told the newspapers there’d be a landslide in the amendment’s favor: a 60 percent to 40 percent win. The week before, the Dade County Democratic Party had belatedly endorsed the amendment, and Kunst and others had hailed that endorsement as a last-minute push toward victory. Robert Brake, spokesman for Save Our Children, was happy to rain on their parade. “This is not the kind of issue where a political party is going to have that much influence,” he said, meaning that the subject of homosexuality transcended politics—it disgusted Republicans and Democrats alike.66
Brake was right. Of Miami’s 446 precincts, 385 voted for repeal. The amendment was rejected by a margin of over 2 to 1: 89,562 citizens of Dade County had cast their ballots to retain the addition of the words “affectional or sexual preference” in the existing ordinance, which already prohibited discrimination against almost every other minority group. But 202,319 voted to ban those words. Ruth Shack, the county commissioner who’d sponsored the amendment, was flabbergasted. Impossible that all those negative votes should have come out of liberal Miami!67
But Shack shouldn’t have been so astonished. An avalanche of propaganda had equated gays with child molesters, and neither the coalition nor the Miami Victory Campaign had been able to create new images in people’s minds, not even in the minds of educated and liberal people. As the chairman of the Politics and Public Affairs Department at the University of Miami told the press, “If you put a moral issue like this one to a vote [in any city, no matter how liberal], the basic question for a lot of people would be, ‘Are we going to protect people who might hurt our children? Such an ordinance might even be defeated in San Francisco.”68
On top of that “basic question,” Catholics had been virtually ordered to vote for repeal by no less an authority than their archbishop. And blacks had been warned by their leaders, too, that homosexuals were trying to “confuse” the black community by comparing the gay “struggle” to the black struggle, attaching themselves to the civil rights movement, and “trying to take it over to the point of equating civil rights with homosexual rights.”69 There were economic reasons also that made black Miamians unhappy about the amendment. They’d had enough to contend with in the huge influx of Cubans who competed with them for jobs; why would they want to help legitimize another group who claimed discrimination—and who weren’t even a true minority? With all due respect to heroic Ruth Shack: what was more astonishing than the fact that over 200,000 Miamians voted against her amendment was that almost 90,000 voted for it.
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The Coalition for Human Rights had rented the Fontaine Room, the grand ballroom at Miami’s premier hotel, the Fontainebleau, for a victory party. It had also paid for a separate room to be set up as a working area for the press, and a two-bedroom suite to function as offices where the poll watchers could call in the early results for tabulation. It had hired a six-piece combo to play disco and oldies for forty minutes out of each hour between eighty thirty and half past midnight. And the coalition had arranged to equip the grand ballroom with three three-foot-wide television screens, so everyone could keep track of the election returns and news coverage all evening.70 It took no more than one hour after the polls closed for those watching the TVs to understand they’d been trounced.71 A thousand gays—many of them more willing to come out for a party than they’d been to come out for campaign work—dressed formally in suits and ties despite the South Florida weather, now stood stunned and tearful, looking up at the screens that told them that most of their neighbors loathed them.
Leonard Matlovich, the good soldier who’d been a recipient of a bronze medal and a purple heart in Vietnam, wouldn’t permit mawkishness. “When you walk out of here tonight,” he took the mic and told them in a strong voice, “you go out of here with your heads high and your shoulders back, and you be proud you’re gay and don’t let anyone put you down.” Matlovich began singing a hymn, and the crowd responded by joining hands and loudly singing with him, verse after verse of “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the 1960s civil rights movement.”72 They understood that what they’d been through was the gay Alamo, and that they must find ways to transform it into the gay Selma. Many of them who’d been in the closet up to that minute, came out right there on the floor, for all the world to see, kissing their same-sex partners in front of live TV cameras.73 But the most striking image appeared the next morning on the front page of the Miami Herald. Gays in the grand ballroom of the Fontainebleau Hotel holding up the American flag.
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Anita Bryant was said to have “danced a jig” when she learned the election results. She and her husband, Bob Green, posed for the media in a lip-lock. “This is what heterosexuals do, fellows,” Green told the newsmen jovially.74 The Save Our Children victory party was held at the Holiday Inn, a hotel just down the street from one of Miami’s most popular gay beaches. With her husband and four children by her side, Bryant, decked out in a powder-blue dress, her auburn hair coiffed in stiff, midcentury proper-lady style, stood before a crowd delirious with its victory. The bulbs of news cameras popped incessantly. “Tonight the laws of God and the cultural values of man have been vindicated!” Bryant shouted. “The people of Dade County—the normal majority—have said “Enough! Enough! Enough!”
She then announced that she was carrying her campaign to Washington, Minneapolis, all over California, wherever ordinances kowtowed to homosexuals. “All America and all the world will hear what the people have said, and with God’s continued help, we will prevail in our fight to repeal similar laws throughout the nation which attempt to legitimize a lifestyle which is both perverse and dangerous to the sanctity of the family, dangerous to our children, dangerous to our freedom of religion and freedom of choice, dangerous to our survival as ‘one nation under God’!” The crowd went wild.75