Morris Kight, by now the white-haired éminence grise of gay Los Angeles, kept close tabs on the Dade County massacre. Two days after the landslide vote, Kight sprang into action. He called a meeting of local gay leaders at his home on McCadden Place. Sixty men and a handful of women packed his living room as Kight stood in the center and told them, “We need to get the grassroots together, right now. No time to waste. We need a broad coalition that’s ready for the fight: gays, feminists, ethnic minorities, straights. We need to be ready for the Orange Juice Lady when she comes. And she will come.” Kight had already picked a name for the group he wanted to form: the Coalition for Human Rights.1 He’d already decided on its first action, too: a march down Hollywood Boulevard.
The march that summer of 1977 was 9,500 strong, including a contingent of middle-aged straight men and women who, influenced by Jeanne Manford’s founding of a group of mothers and fathers of lesbians and gays,2 addressed Anita Bryant’s ploy to save children from homosexuals with placards exhorting “Parents of Gays—Join in the Fight for Your Children’s Rights” and “We Love Our Gay Children.”3 It was a tactic that would become essential in the rights fight for the next decades: take the rhetoric the enemy uses against you (“Homosexuals are a threat to our children”) and make it your own (“These gays and lesbians are our children!”).
• • •
It was just about the time of the march that California state senator John Briggs, from ultraconservative Orange County, sprang into action, too. During Anita Bryant’s campaign, Briggs, son of a minister and a self-proclaimed born-again Christian, paused in his work on a measure to broaden the number of offenses punishable by the death penalty and flew to Miami with his Spanish-speaking wife. They were there to help Save Our Children win the Cuban vote. Briggs saw for himself the fanatical fervor with which the evangelical Right fought the gay amendment and the ease with which they achieved victory over liberal Miami, and he believed he’d discovered his main chance, a way to the governorship of California. His first step was to go before the California Senate Rules Committee to propose a laudatory resolution like one that had passed in Arkansas, commending Anita Bryant for her “courageous stand to protect American children from exposure to blatant homosexuality with resultant pornographic exploitation.”4
The California Legislature, however, was not as gung-ho about putting homosexuals in their place as their Florida and Arkansas counterparts had been. “The legislature has enough business to conduct without debating topics beyond its responsibility,” the Rules Committee chair, James Mills, told Briggs curtly. Briggs, whose short fuse was notorious, exploded: “This committee routinely approves laudatory resolutions. I’m the victim of a double standard!” He took his resolution directly to the Senate floor. “The members of the rules committee are shallow people, interested in protecting special interests,” Briggs railed at the senators. One of them rose to object. “Shut up,” Briggs told him and continued his tirade, at the end of which he moved for the resolution’s adoption. He was seconded by Republican senator H. L. “Wild Bill” Richardson,5 who’d voted against the bill to repeal the California sodomy law in 1975 with the argument that in Leviticus 20:13, God declared that sodomy should be punishable by death.6 Richardson was ignored this time around, too. The resolution was defeated by a vote of 36 to 2.7
• • •
Briggs could not believe that most voters in the state shared the legislature’s tolerance. Soon after being crushed in the Senate, he announced he would introduce a bill that would require all prospective teachers to swear they never engaged in homosexual behavior. The bill would also allow any school board to suspend employees charged with homosexual acts, and those found guilty at an administrative hearing would be dismissed within thirty days. If the legislature wouldn’t pass the bill, Briggs vowed, he would lead a petition drive to bring the issue to the voters.8
Briggs was an unabashed opportunist, so it’s hard to know what he really thought of homosexuals.9 But he had no compunction about sacrificing them to his ambitions. “It’s the hottest social issue since Reconstruction,” he declared of the movement against gay rights,10 and he announced he would run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination at the same time that he announced he was sponsoring two bills, one to expand the death penalty, and another to get rid of homosexual teachers.
Briggs hired a campaign consultant, Don Sizemore, who told the press that the senator received letters and phone calls every day from religious groups, “Mormons, Jews, Roman Catholics, Baptists, Presbyterians—you name it,” who agreed with him that “taking homosexual influence out of the classroom is just one step to eliminating moral decay.” Sizemore hoped to help his man profit from the notoriety of the woman who had started it all. He boasted of Briggs’s “fairly good contact with Anita Bryant and Bob Green in Miami” and promised that both of them would come to California “after they rest up from their Miami campaign.”11
Bryant and Green, busy with their own worries by then, stayed in Miami, and Briggs dropped out of the race when early polls showed that his chances were slim. But he still believed he’d hit on the hottest issue since Reconstruction, and he wasn’t giving it up. If it wouldn’t help him to the governorship, he’d use it in a run for the US Senate. To that end, he announced that the California Legislature had been derelict in refusing to prevent homosexual teachers from endangering children, and he was leading a petition drive that would let citizens decide for themselves at the ballot box if homosexuals ought to have such easy access to innocent youth. Oblivious to Anita Bryant’s diminished prestige, he continued to use her name, printing petition-drive ads showing him with sleeves rolled up, sitting side by side with the singer as they talked on telephones in the service of the Save Our Children campaign.12
Briggs’s focus on teachers was shrewd. Why would most people in liberal California care about what the other guy did, as long as it didn’t hurt anyone else? So what if gay men moved in next door? So what if lesbians worked behind a desk or counter? A Gallup poll taken in summer 1977 had even shown that the majority of Americans approved of equal job rights for homosexuals in general—but 65 percent of them said they were opposed to homosexuals being allowed to teach children.13 Briggs had cherry-picked the most explosive issue of all regarding gays and lesbians.
He needed 312,404 signatures in order to qualify his initiative for the ballot. He had no trouble getting that number and almost 50,000 signatures more. Proposition 6, the Briggs initiative, as it came to be called, was validated by the secretary of state for the November 7, 1978 ballot.14 It said that any teacher, administrator, counselor, or teacher’s aide would be discharged for “advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging, or promoting private or public sexual acts defined in the penal code between persons of the same sex in a manner likely to come to the attention of other employees or students, or publicly and indiscreetly engaging in such actions.”
As had the Reverends Angwin and Adrian in Saint Paul and Wichita, Briggs replicated Anita Bryant’s campaign in California, replete with her outlandish accusations and hysterical rhetoric. “One-third of San Francisco teachers are homosexuals. I assume most of them are seducing young boys in toilets,” Briggs told one reporter.15 He told another why Governor Jerry Brown would not support Proposition 6: “Let’s face it, homosexuals have a tremendous amount of money. Jerry Brown knows that, wants it, and respects it.”16 Money poured into Proposition 6 coffers not only from fundamentalist churches, but also from groups as diverse as the California Farm Bureau, the San Diego Board of Realtors, and the Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs Association. It paid for panic-inducing advertising like a widely distributed flyer that was illustrated by a Norman Rockwell–style picture of little children, school books under their arms, bidding their parents good-bye. In large, bold type, the ad read: “Preserve Parents’ Rights to Protect Their Children from Teachers Who Are Immoral and Who Promote a Perverted Lifestyle. Vote ‘Yes’ on 6!”17
Briggs’s rhetoric seemed well pitched to a surefire issue. Polls showed that 61 percent of the electorate would vote for the initiative. Only 31 percent opposed it. California voters, like those in the other states where antigay initiatives and referenda had passed, seemed set to send the message that to them, too, homosexuals were outcasts, outlaws, and disgusting.
California gays and lesbians had to find ways to fight better than had their counterparts in the four locales that had already fallen. But they were as wildly disparate as gays and lesbians everywhere else. Never in their entire history—as homophiles, gays, lesbian feminists—had the various factions put aside their differences and pulled together. They’d distrusted and disdained each other, though their enemies didn’t distinguish among them: gay, lesbian, radical, liberal, conservative, working class, middle class, wealthy, black, brown, yellow, white, or purple—they were all child molesters, lawbreakers, and sick sinners.
Now, though, the threat was enormous. After almost a decade of progress, they could be set back to the dark ages of the midcentury or worse. They had to cooperate, if only like fingers of a hand, separate yet working together. Everything depended on it.
Advocate publisher David Goodstein had nervously predicted in early 1977 that if Anita Bryant won in Dade County she would take her campaign everywhere. Events were proving Goodstein right. She was now on his doorstep in the guise of Senator John Briggs. Goodstein knew that a big gay loss in the liberal state of California would be far more disastrous than all the losses thus far. It would topple every domino of gay progress all over America. He feared, as he readily admitted, that Briggs was unstoppable, just as Bryant had been; but he believed that as owner of the biggest gay magazine in America he had responsibility for assuring that at the least the California defeat wouldn’t come in a mortifying 5 to 1 landslide as it had in Wichita.
Goodstein was the man to whom Jack Campbell had turned for advice about how to defeat Anita Bryant in Dade County. Goodstein had recommended that the grassroots types and the gays who were too gay be kept out of the Miami battle; and he thought they needed to be made invisible in California, too. He was furious when, hours after the loss in Dade County, thousands of angry gay radicals in San Francisco assembled on Castro Street and marched through the city threatening to riot, screaming, “Civil Rights or Civil War!”18 The radicals were “their own worst enemy,” Goodstein proclaimed. He cautioned in the editorials he wrote for his magazine that a huge loss would be guaranteed “if gay activists or hedonists choose to be outrageously visible.” If they take any role at all, it should be only to register other gay voters or to stuff envelopes at headquarters.19 Goodstein’s attempts to muzzle radical gays were exactly what they expected of him. They disdained him as much as he disdained them. They disdained his magazine, too—a People for gays, they called it.
During the Bryant battle, Goodstein had bankrolled Jim Foster—the best gay political maven he knew—to go to Dade County and help lead the fight. That had failed miserably, of course, but now, panicked by the threat of the Briggs initiative, Goodstein went back to Foster, and together they formed Concerned Voters of California. They were sufficiently unnerved by the threat, though, to agree that for a statewide issue as hugely important as this one, they needed help from someone with broader professional experience than Foster’s. Someone who’d know how to procure endorsements from the famous and powerful—a heterosexual who’d be able to communicate the message that straights, too, opposed Briggs. Don Bradley, who’d headed the winning California campaigns of presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, agreed to take the job. Goodstein and Foster were thrilled: in 1977 there weren’t many heterosexual professionals who would have said yes.
• • •
The only out elected gay politician in San Francisco, Supervisor Harvey Milk, distrusted Goodstein and his role as a power broker as much as the radicals did. “Aunt Mary,” Milk called him.20 At a Concerned Voters of California meeting to which San Francisco notables were invited, Milk showed up and heard Congressman Phil Burton earnestly read aloud from a brochure that CVC had paid for. It talked about human rights and why gays deserved them just as much as any citizen, and it sounded very much like the failed rhetoric of the Dade County Coalition for Human Rights. “Masturbation!” Harvey Milk cried. “It’s tepid!”21 And he went off to form his own group, San Franciscans Against Prop 6.
Into leadership positions in San Franciscans Against Prop 6, Milk put his trusted followers—such as former Methodist minister Harry Britt, president of the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club, which had been formed in 1976 to get Milk elected to the board of supervisors. Though Milk had his detractors—Jim Foster considered him “a fast-talking, long-haired political novice”22—he did know how to build coalitions, and he never underestimated the vital role of grassroots volunteers. The campaign needed people to stand on street corners and do voter registration, to ring doorbells and talk with voters face-to-face, to get them to the polls. Milk hired a young graduate student from Berkeley, Bill Kraus, and a black lesbian activist, Gwenn Craig, as campaign directors; and their job was to find people like them—young, minority, female—who would go out and make sure sympathizers from those demographics didn’t only nod in agreement but actually cast their ballots. He also put his new protégé, a smart, spirited, boyish twenty-three-year-old by the name of Cleve Jones, to work: Jones, who was then an undergraduate poli-sci major at San Francisco State University, was assigned the job of locating all the gay college student groups in the state and mobilizing them for the battle.23
Milk knew, too, that San Francisco’s big lesbian-feminist community was resentful that Concerned Voters of California was oblivious of them. To defuse lesbian-feminist suspicions and make them fight the real enemy, he needed to have a prominent lesbian-feminist sidekick. Cleve Jones found him the perfect one—a Speech and Women’s Studies professor at San Francisco State University, Sally Gearhart, who, Jones told Milk, “exuded dignity.”24 Gearhart, a tall and handsome Virginian with a slight southern accent, became Milk’s partner in a high-profile public-television debate against John Briggs and crusading minister Ray Batema. As a radical lesbian feminist, Gearhart usually dressed in relaxed, androgynous fashion; but she and Milk agreed that she would match his newly cultivated well-turned-out conservative appearance, so that together they’d present themselves to the straight voter as “Mom and Pop of Middle America.” Parodying their efforts even as he embraced them, Milk called Gearhart just as she was leaving her home to go to the TV studio for the debate. “I’ve lost my earrings, dear! Whatever shall I do?” he cried.25
They were a good team. In their TV debate, they overwhelmed John Briggs’s hysterical rhetoric with facts, pointing out, for instance, that studies showed heterosexual men were far more likely than homosexuals to be child molesters. They appeared together, too, at San Franciscans Against Prop 6 rallies where Milk habitually raised Gearhart’s arm and called her “San Francisco’s next Supervisor!” tacitly promising that he’d help bring a lesbian feminist into mainstream politics.26 Lesbian-feminist devotion to San Franciscans Against Prop 6 was clinched.27
But not that of the most radical gays and lesbian feminists, who distrusted Milk almost as much as they distrusted Goodstein. “He’s promoting himself,” they complained. “This is another Harvey Milk power grab.”28
• • •
San Francisco radicals formed their own groups, such as the Bay Area Committee Against the Briggs Initiative (BACABI), in order to do what Goodstein was uninterested in doing and what they believed Milk could not do as well as they.29 They were far more skillful than Goodstein gave them credit for being. For instance, they put together a “Third World Outreach Committee” that sent lesbians and gays of color out to do public speaking to straight people of color and to distribute brochures that hammered home points tailored to such audiences. Senator John Briggs has one of the worst records in the State Senate on issues concerning minorities, they said, and pointed to his support of the death penalty, which affected third world people disproportionately. “This Is What Third World Leaders Are Saying About Proposition 6,” their brochures announced and quoted black militant heroine Angela Davis, board of supervisors member Gordon Lau, community activist Jim Gonzales, even Native American and Filipino leaders who opposed the Briggs initiative.30 BACABI tailored messages to unions, too: “The Briggs initiative endangers the job security of all public school workers; destroys the right of unions to protect workers from discrimination; threatens to erode collective bargaining and the right to organize for public employees.”31
When BACABI speakers addressed these groups they emphasized that Briggs was bad for all sorts of people, but they understood that sometimes the gay issue must be addressed directly. One of the most prominent outreach speakers was Amber Hollibaugh, a very blond young woman who billed herself as a working-class high-femme dyke. Hollibaugh was sent to rural areas of California where many people never knew they’d met a gay person before. Her job was to make them see her humanity and, by extension, the humanity of all gay people. Speaking to a teamsters local in rural California, she told them not only that Briggs was antilabor but also that his initiative would push people into denying an essential part of their lives: “There are gay people in this room, in your union, that you will never know are gay,” she told them, and then pulled empathy out of them, asking: “What does it mean not to be able to acknowledge the primary things in your life? What would it mean to you not to be able to acknowledge your children, your primary relationships, your parents?”32
In Redding, California, Hollibaugh was invited to debate Pastor Royal Blue, founder of Shasta Bible College and a local Christian radio station. A buddy of Jerry Falwell, Pastor Blue took credit for prodding Falwell to establish the Moral Majority. He himself was active in Californians for Biblical Morality, through which he lobbied the legislature in Sacramento on issues such as school prayer, abortion, and homosexuality. A few days before the debate he’d conducted a rally attended by twenty-five hundred people. It had been a patriotic, homophobic spectacle—fifty children on stage waving little American flags in front of Statues of Liberty whose eyes blinked green lights as the pastor preached hellfire. The debate with Hollibaugh was held at Pastor Blue’s North Valley Baptist Church, and much of it was devoted to his spouting the biblical condemnations of homosexuality. During the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience asked the pastor, “Do you think homosexuals should be imprisoned if they’re that unsafe?”
“Well, let me put it this way,” he answered, smiling all the while. “I think Hitler was right about the homosexuals. I think we should find a humane way to kill them.”
Hollibaugh sized up the audience and saw that many there were over fifty, and she realized how she could isolate the pastor. “Well, you know, Reverend Blue,” she said, “my guess would be that most of the people in this audience fought against someone who had that position in World War II, and my guess is that the audience does not support genocide. I may be wrong, but I suspect that most people don’t feel that mass murder is an answer to a sexual question.” She’d made the audience chagrined by Blue’s horrifying “final solution,” and a small crowd came up to her to apologize for their pastor.33 Neither Goodstein with his expensive ad campaigns nor Milk with his army of volunteers stood a chance of getting these fundamentalist Christian voters on their side. Hollibaugh reached at least some of them.
David Mixner, MECLA’s well-connected strategist, had been operating behind the scenes, lest his coming out interfere with his day job as campaign manager for Tom Bradley’s reelection bid. But in June 1977 Mayor Bradley was reelected in Los Angeles, and gays lost their rights in Miami. When John Briggs began to threaten California by channeling Anita Bryant, Mixner decided he could no longer work from the closet. He came out to everyone. He wrote all his good friends in politics, and in the entertainment industry, too, to tell them first that he was gay and then that he intended to wage war on Briggs and that he was asking for their support. Most of them, including his old friend Bill Clinton, said yes. Clinton called as soon as he received Mixner’s letter to assure him, “Hillary and I will always be your friends and you can count on us . . .You’re doing the right thing.”34
With Peter Scott and the two founding women of MECLA, attorneys Diane Abbitt and Roberta Bennett, Mixner called a press conference to announce that “Los Angeles will be ready for Bryant or her friends,” and that they were forming New Alliance for Gay Equality—New AGE—to lead the battle.35 To pull in lesbians, they knew, a lesbian needed to be prominent in the leadership of the group. Roberta Bennett agreed to be cochair. They opened an office, and Scott and Mixner were hired by New AGE at $2,000 a month to devote all their energies to organizing the diverse lesbian and gay communities to fight against Proposition 6.
They scrambled to find big money to kick off the kind of anti-Briggs campaign they hoped to run. Reverend Troy Perry was the first to come to their rescue. In 1970 the reverend had used dramatic means to challenge the abuse of gay people by the Los Angeles Police Department. He’d sat himself down in front of the LA Federal Building and commenced a fast and prayer vigil, taking no sustenance but water for over a week, until he got commitments from city attorney Bert Pines, and city councilmen Bob Stevenson and Tom Bradley (the future mayor) to pressure the LAPD to clean up its act.36 Now, seven years later, when David Mixner came to Perry to say that the anti-Briggs campaign needed money to begin its operations in Southern California, the reverend promised to raise $100,000 by reprising his successful 1970 performance.
Perry called a press conference to announce that he’d go on a hunger strike in order to raise the money and simultaneously to educate the American public about “the harm done by bigots like Senator Briggs and Anita Bryant”: “I am preparing to fast to death if necessary,” he declared.37 Then he sat on the steps of the Federal Building and fasted and prayed once again. He subsisted on water and vitamin capsules. The LA police drove their patrol cars by to be annoying; they kept sounding their sirens late at night to deprive him of sleep. But Reverend Perry would not budge. Throngs came to keep him company, and money came pouring in like the abundant loaves and fishes. A couple of weeks into the fast, a Metropolitan Community Church parishioner in Kansas City telephoned Perry’s office to ask how he was doing. When told the reverend was very weak, the parishioner sold two thousand shares of stock in her business and sent him $20,000, which put the total Perry had raised to $107,000. On the sixteenth day of fasting, the reverend, twenty pounds lighter, packed up his water bottles and vitamin vials and went home.38
Mixner and Scott found fancier ways to bring in money, too. Mixner had been friendly with Senator George McGovern since 1969 when he invited the senator to be the keynote speaker at the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. Now Mixner and Peter Scott flew to DC, paid McGovern a visit in his office, and asked him to do what no US senator had ever done before: speak at a big openly gay fund-raiser. Much to Mixner’s surprise, McGovern needed no convincing. “I’d be delighted to do it,” he said.39
Affluent gay people packed the grand ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, whose management had absolutely not wanted to host a gay event—but wanted even less to insult a US senator.40 Over foie gras and champagne, six hundred gay people listened to George McGovern talk about the battle against Briggs as a fight for human dignity. For many of them it was a coming-out party, the first public gay event they’d ever attended. The anti-Briggs campaign—supported by a US senator speaking to gay people in the ballroom of a world-class luxury hotel—had suddenly made it respectable to be gay, and safer to come out.
But the polls were still favoring Briggs two to one. Mixner worried that if gays lost, their victimhood would know no end.41 More money was needed to counter Briggs’s barrages such as the lurid antigay billboards and flyers in which the old nemesis of Los Angeles gays, former police chief Ed Davis, proclaimed, “There is no question that homosexuals are a threat to children.”42 In the past, when MECLA supported the campaigns of the politicians they favored, it was largely “the boys north of Franklin”—as grassroots gays wryly referred to wealthy gay men who lived in the Hollywood Hills, north of Franklin Avenue—who supplied the money. But New AGE had to find ways to expand the donor base.
• • •
Gayle Wilson, a lesbian Realtor, was a familiar and glamorous image in West Hollywood, driving around town in her Corniche Rolls-Royce convertible, wind blowing through her stylishly bobbed blond hair. “The pioneer of the lipstick lesbians,” David Mixner dubbed her. The closest she’d gotten to gay politics had been to join the West Hollywood Community Guild—a sort of gay Chamber of Commerce—because it was good for business.43 But now Mixner and Scott came to her to say that if Briggs succeeded, all lesbians and gays would be victims of the fanatical Right, and she had to use whatever clout she had to help defeat him. Wilson tapped her client list, which included wealthy Hollywood heterosexuals as well as gays; and then she tapped her wealthy lesbian acquaintances, most of whom had never before given even a dollar to a lesbian or gay cause. Then Wilson organized a luncheon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. She invited her entertainer friends Cher and Donna Summer to sing, and Midge Costanza, who’d just left her White House post, to speak about the snowballing threat that would eventually hit all lesbians if California should fail to stop Briggs.
Probably for the first time in the history of the world, hundreds of lesbians, dressed to the nines, drove up to a posh hotel in their Mercedes and BMWs and Cadillacs, asked the doorman the way to the dining room where a lesbian luncheon was being held, and there joined an overflowing crowd of other affluent lesbians for a public lesbian event whose purpose was to raise money for a gay and lesbian cause.44 They donated about $50,000 that day, which was used to help run the New AGE campaign office and to pay for anti-Briggs ads.
The appearance of hundreds of lesbians of means at a public event was not the only first that day of the Beverly Hills luncheon. It was also the first time that Hollywood celebrities had let themselves be seen at a fund-raiser whose express purpose was to support a lesbian and gay cause; and it was the start of a series of such celebrity events in LA. At the next glittering fund-raiser for the anti-Briggs campaign—a black-tie and chic-pantsuit dinner attended by one thousand gays and lesbians—Burt Lancaster, John Travolta, and Lily Tomlin appeared. They raised $150,000 for the war chest.45 When more money was needed, leading cosmetologists all over the state held a “hair-a-thon,” donating all their proceeds from fancy haircuts to the anti-Briggs campaign.46
By then, Mixner and Scott were working with David Goodstein and Harvey Milk in Northern California in an unprecedented cooperative north-south effort. There would be a statewide “No on 6” umbrella entity, they agreed. Don Bradley, Goodstein’s handpicked campaign manager, would be the statewide campaign consultant, working out of No on 6 headquarters on LA’s fashionable Wilshire Boulevard.47 Harvey Milk would coordinate the Northern California campaign. David Mixner and Peter Scott would coordinate the Southern California campaign.
Not all factions let themselves be coordinated. Groups kept proliferating along the usual divides: “Suits” (as New AGE types were called) versus “Streets” (as grassroots types were called); grassroots gay men versus grassroots lesbian feminists. Streets were unwilling to work with Suits, and lesbian feminists were unwilling to work with gay men. Jeanne Córdova, the young firebrand who’d organized a first-ever national lesbian conference at UCLA in 1973, had been one of the five or six lesbians among the sixty men who were invited to the grassroots organizing meeting in Morris Kight’s living room soon after the Dade County victory. Córdova looked around her that night at the artwork on the walls—ephebes and musclemen—and the overwhelming male presence in the room, and she knew that lesbian feminists would scoff at the idea of cooperating with a group so dominated by testosterone. She went home, pulled out of her desk her list of lesbian-feminist contacts, and got to work. A few weeks later they met in a separate all-women’s group, the Ad Hoc Committee for Lesbian Rights. But the splits continued. When Diane Abbitt of New AGE saw Córdova’s knack for organizing, she tried to draw her into New AGE, saying, “Jeanne, you’ve got the gift as a leader, and we have the power to get things done. Join us.” Then she glimpsed the black boots with chains on the heels that Córdova was wearing—definitely grassroots. “But we’d have to make changes in how you present yourself,” Abbitt added. Córdova told her she was sticking with the Ad Hoc Committee for Lesbian Rights.48
David Mixner did eventually succeed in attaining some cooperation among the factions. Ivy Bottini, another leader of grassroots lesbians, had also been one of the few women invited to Kight’s organizing meeting. The fifty-one-year-old Bottini, who’d come from blue-collar roots, was the woman who as president of the New York chapter of NOW had pushed the lesbian issue which triggered Betty Friedan’s Lavender Menace tirades.49 Bottini had moved to Los Angeles in 1971, in shock after Friedan got her booted out of NOW’s leadership. At the time that Kight invited Bottini to the organizing meeting, she was calling herself a lesbian separatist.
Bottini arrived at Kight’s McCadden Place home, looked around as Jeanne Córdova did, and thought, “I’m in enemy territory.”50 She thought of leaving. But Kight, always politically astute, knowing he needed all the hands he could get for his new group and he wouldn’t have lesbian support without lesbian leaders, maneuvered the election of Ivy Bottini as his cochair.
David Mixner was even two steps ahead of Kight. Ivy Bottini could not only bring many more lesbians into the campaign; she also had grassroots appeal and street cred. She knew exactly how to present the Briggs’s problem in a way that would get the attention of the working class. This is a labor issue, and organized labor needs to take it seriously, Bottini emphasized: “This jerk Briggs is talking about firing thousands of workers because of who they sleep with.”51 Mixner offered Bottini—who was struggling to make a living as an artist—a paid position as deputy director of Southern California’s No on 6 campaign. She would be able to attract the volunteers to knock on doors and hand out leaflets, to post No on 6 signs, to register voters and drive them to the polls—and those were not the jobs the Suits did happily or well. “If you come in, the grass roots will come in,” Mixner told Bottini. He sent over Gayle Wilson in her Corniche convertible to convince her, too.52
• • •
Sallie Fiske, who’d been one of the first women in television broadcast journalism in Los Angeles, was another lesbian Mixner hired to be a magnet. She’d been hosting her own afternoon television talk show, Strictly for Women, when Anita Bryant and Save Our Children grabbed the country’s attention. Fiske had always been mum in front of the camera about being a lesbian and was closeted even in her personal life. But now her anger about Bryant pushed her to come out before the eyes of all her Strictly for Women viewers. That was the end of her broadcast career; but as a result she became the best known and most admired lesbian in the city. Mixner made her the public relations director of No on 6, hoping Fiske’s presence would draw in more lesbian volunteers. His ploy succeeded. Eventually even the Ad Hoc Committee for Lesbian Rights worked the phone banks in the No on 6 office. “For this one, we’ve got to let go of our feelings and join the guys,” Jeanne Córdova told her group.53 Before the campaign was done, Suits and Streets and gay men and lesbians were working together in the movement for civil rights—for the first time ever on a large scale.
• • •
Only the far-left radicals held out. They conducted their own campaign in groups such as the Action Coalition to Defeat the Briggs Initiative, a sister group to Oakland’s East Bay Action Coalition Against the Briggs Initiative. Shop steward and trade union organizer Robin Podolsky, a cerebral young woman who wrote for local progressive papers, became an Action Coalition strategist. A “doctrinaire Marxist,” she’d been very interested in questions such as, How does race predetermine class? But she hadn’t thought at all about gay and lesbian rights—until the Briggs initiative qualified for the ballot. With other Action Coalition people, black and white, she walked the precincts in Watts, the major black area of Los Angeles, where they handed out flyers, signed people up to vote, and talked the talk many of them had learned as Marxist activists—but now with a twist: the Action Coalition’s slogan was “Discrimination: Who’s Next?” and their message in Watts was that gays were merely first on Briggs the Bigot’s hit list. After he finished with gays, black people could expect to be next.54
Taken together, No on 6 and the radical campaigns against the Briggs initiative covered every important demographic and technique—men, women, north, south, the Suits, the Streets (grassroots and radicals), big-buck ads, a fortune spent on shoe leather, eloquent speeches in big halls, face-to-face entreaties at the thresholds of front doors. Every group doing its share and doing what the other groups could not have done, or could not have done as well. At the start of Briggs’s campaign, polls had shown that Proposition 6 would win two to one, exactly as the other antigay measures had in presumably liberal places. In the months that followed, the various anti-Briggs groups did an amazing job whittling away at Briggs’s lead. Every poll showed them closer and closer.
But close is not enough if you need to win. In September, with a little over two months left before the election, polls indicated that 55 percent of the electorate still intended to vote in favor of Proposition 6.55 Gays and lesbians had already done everything they could possibly do. Something like a miracle would be needed to get another 6 percent of the voters on their side. The miracle came in the very unlikely form of the most prominent Republican politician in California, the former governor and future president of the United States.
Ronald Reagan was a pure political conservative. The government’s primary goal, he believed, should be to keep law and order, and it ought to stay out of people’s personal lives. David Mixner understood this. If only he could get Reagan’s ear, he thought, he would know exactly what to say to bring him to the side of No on 6. He would not bother to tell the former governor that Prop 6 would violate people’s human rights; Reagan was too hard-nosed to care about that. He would tell him instead that the Briggs initiative would violate the tenets that Reagan held most sacred.
Mixner called his friend David Jones, an upscale LA florist who counted Nancy Reagan among his regular customers. “How do you think the Reagans feel about gays?” Mixner asked Jones. “Well, they like me . . . And they socialize with gay people,” Jones told him.
Then Mixner called his friend Don Livingston, a closeted gay man who’d been on Governor Reagan’s administrative staff. “Do you think that if Reagan were approached in the right way, he might be willing to make a statement opposing Proposition 6?” Mixner asked. Livingston was pretty sure Reagan was in favor of the Briggs initiative, but he agreed to put Mixner in touch with a top Reagan aide.
The aide agreed to meet Mixner—but not in West Hollywood or Beverly Hills or anywhere anyone could possibly recognize them. Feeling as though he’d stepped into a spy movie, Mixner suggested a place where they’d be anonymous, Denny’s in East LA. East Los Angeles was a poor Mexican American area. “The likelihood of a Republican showing up there was minimal,” Mixner thought ironically.
“You’re wasting your time,” Don Bradley, the statewide campaign consultant, told David Mixner when he heard of the plan. “Look, Reagan wants to run for president. There’s no way he’s not supporting the initiative.” When Mixner called Harvey Milk in San Francisco to tell him he hoped to get Reagan’s ear, Milk shouted, “That’s crazy! We shouldn’t be meeting with a criminal!”56
Peter Scott accompanied Mixner to the clandestine rendezvous at Denny’s. The aide, another closeted gay man, had a wife and passed as straight. He’d have to remain anonymous, he told Mixner and Scott over coffee, but he’d try to help. Nancy Reagan might be helpful, too. She had many gay friends. (She even had a lesbian godmother—the silent screen star, Alla Nazimova.) But if the aide set up a meeting, Mixner and Scott had to give their word they wouldn’t badger Reagan.
They promised. Even a brief fifteen-minute meeting would do. They’d merely point out to Reagan how the initiative violated important conservative principles.57
• • •
Months earlier, Mixner had decided to get in shape, and he’d lost so much weight that now nothing in his closet fit. In thanks for the work he was doing to fight Briggs, his movement friends took up a collection and bought him a whole new wardrobe for his birthday on August 16.58 About a week later, Mixner dressed up in his brand-new dark blue suit, and together with Peter Scott, he went to meet Ronald Reagan. The meeting took place in Reagan’s sunlit office overlooking West Los Angeles. The future president offered Mixner and Scott jelly beans from a jar on his desk and made good-humored small talk before he said, “I understand you boys have a case you want to make to me.”
“The boys’ ” opening salvo, tailored to Reagan’s sentiments, was sage: “Governor, you know about Proposition 6 that would allow any school child to file a complaint against any teacher that he thought was homosexual,” Mixner began. Reagan was familiar with the proposition, he said. He’d spent time studying it; he thought he’d probably endorse it. “Well, this proposition would create anarchy in the classroom,” Mixner plowed ahead, though he was quaking. “Imagine a kid getting a failing grade or being disciplined by a teacher or facing expulsion. To get even, all he’d have to do is accuse the teacher of being a homosexual. Teachers will be afraid of giving a low grade. They won’t be able to maintain order in the classroom.”
“Governor, if Briggs passes, the kids are going to run the schools,” Peter Scott chimed in. “Teachers will be terrified of their students. It’ll be chaos.”
Reagan seemed surprised. “Hmm, I never thought about that,” he said. “That’s not what we want for California schools.” Before their fifteen minutes were up, Reagan told them, “This might be a good day for you boys.”59
A few weeks after the meeting, Reagan echoed Mixner and Scott’s statements almost exactly to the press: “What if an overwrought youngster, disappointed by bad grades, imagined it was the teacher’s fault and struck out by accusing the teacher of advocating homosexuality?” He pointed out that the Briggs initiative was not needed to protect children because current laws already protected them from molestation, and that Proposition 6 “has the potential for real mischief.”60
It turned the tide. The Briggs initiative’s 10-percentage-point lead evaporated soon after Reagan declared himself to be against it. On November 7, 1978, Proposition 6 was defeated by a margin of over a million votes—58.4 percent to 41.6 percent. Even Orange County, John Briggs’s hometown and the area he represented in the State Senate, voted against his initiative.
• • •
In the main ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, a Statue of Liberty was draped in a “No on 6” banner. Three thousand gays and lesbians who’d worked for No on 6 had shown up to celebrate. Jeanne Córdova was there in her black boots with the chains across the heels. Ivy Bottini took the microphone to declare, “I loved working with those men! Let me tell you, I will never again be a separatist.”61
On the other side of town, in a large rented room at the American Bulgarian Culture Hall, one thousand gays and lesbians who’d worked with the Action Coalition and other radical groups were also gathered together to celebrate. No fancy dress here. They wore their usual uniforms of jeans and flannel plaid or sweatshirts. A few weeks earlier, the polls had shown that 63 percent of black voters would vote against the Briggs initiative.62 The radicals knew that blacks had been won over because of their strategy of making minority voters a linchpin of their campaign; it was because of them that the anti-Briggs campaign enjoyed a comfortable margin of safety. In the midst of jubilation, they took time to scoff that the Suits had run “an old fashioned election campaign, raising a million dollars and wasting it, telling the activists who did the real work, ‘We’re in charge, we have the money.’ ”63 Not even a glorious victory could heal the rifts between Suits and Streets. But they’d each done what had to be done to make the victory possible.
David Estes, a thirty-two-year-old Mormon with two young children, was a Seattle police officer. He claimed that as a normal concerned parent he was horrified at the city’s acceptance of homosexuality because the inevitable “side effects” of such tolerance were “increased child prostitution, crimes of violence, strange behavior, and so on.”64 Estes organized a petition drive together with another police officer, Dennis Falk, who, along with being a leader in the local John Birch Society, had gotten in a bit of trouble a few years earlier for using brass knuckles on University of Washington students who were protesting the war.65 With 17,626 signatures, Estes and Falk could place an initiative on the November 1978 ballot. It would repeal a 1973 ordinance that promised gays and lesbians they wouldn’t be discriminated against in city employment and a 1975 ordinance that promised they wouldn’t be discriminated against in housing. The two policemen easily got the required number of signatures—plus ten thousand to spare.
Seattle was to be the El Alamein of the gay rights city ordinance battles. If gays could mount a successful campaign to defeat Initiative 13, the juggernaut of losses—Dade County, Saint Paul, Wichita, Eugene—might be halted, and the thirty-five or so remaining gay rights city ordinances around America might be safe. But if Initiative 13 passed in liberal Seattle, there would surely be no stopping repeal drives everywhere.
Estes and Falk called their antigay rights campaign Save Our Moral Ethics (SOME), and they patterned it on Save Our Children’s well-tested strategy. Though Anita Bryant was still too busy with her own problems to attend a prayer rally that Estes and Falk hoped to stage in order to fire up voters,66 Save Our Children contributed several thousand dollars to the SOME campaign. With the money, Estes and Falk could run radio ads, such as one informing the public that because of Seattle’s gay rights laws, normal people and their children risked being “exposed to homosexual behavior in parks, neighborhood theaters, your favorite restaurant, and shopping malls.”67 They also created a “fact sheet” to distribute to reporters and anyone who would take it. The “facts” were that homosexuals were unstable, unable to keep a job, child molesters—and they accounted for half the murders and suicides in American cities and half the nation’s syphilis cases.68 Early polls of likely voters showed Initiative 13 at a 30-point lead.
As soon as Charlie Brydon got word of Estes and Falk’s plan to repeal the city’s gay rights laws, he and members of Seattle’s Dorian Group—an “organization of mainstream gays,” Brydon called it—started Citizens to Retain Fair Employment. Charlie Brydon had come to Seattle in 1974. He’d found that the most visible gay organization at that time was the Union of Sexual Minorities, a radical group headed by zappers Faygele Singer and Paul Barwick. Brydon, who has been described as seeming “always to be wearing a conservative sport jacket, even when he was not,”69 was decidedly not a radical. He’d been an intelligence officer in Vietnam, the recipient of two bronze stars, and then a successful business executive in San Francisco. In Seattle, he was chief of the branch office of an insurance company. He’d started the Dorian Group for people like him.70
When Initiative 13 qualified for the ballot, Brydon studied the repeal fights from Miami to Eugene and decided that gays lost in all those places because their approaches were always wrong. They had argued that gay people shouldn’t be discriminated against because everyone deserved human rights, or that gay is good and deserves respect, or that heterosexuals should like gays because they were nice people. But why would those arguments make most heterosexuals in the 1970s get themselves to the polls to endorse gay rights? Brydon chose a more nuanced approach. Initiative 13 wasn’t just about depriving gays of their rights, he argued; it would usher in a new era in which all citizens could be deprived of their rights. The Citizens to Retain Fair Employment logo was a keyhole with a spying eye looking through it. Television ads showed a family seated around a table—vulnerable to the world because their house was made of glass. Under Charlie Brydon’s top-down direction, the battle that CRFE waged was simply about the right to privacy. If the government can spy on the private behavior of anyone, it can spy on the private behavior of everyone.71
Charlie Brydon masterminded a steering committee for Citizens to Retain Fair Employment that was made up of local politicians, state legislators, clergy, University of Washington professors—almost no one who was openly gay. The day-to-day work of the campaign was done primarily by gay people, but they kept a low profile. Brydon’s approach earned him predictable animosity from Seattle’s various radical lesbian and gay groups. A newly formed Washington Coalition for Sexual Minority Rights, a leftist organization that billed itself as “dedicated to building a united front of gays, women, minorities, and workers,” announced it would sponsor a gay pride parade the summer before the election. Brydon tried to get the group to cancel it. He feared media coverage would focus on the drag queens and the leather men in chaps and bare bottoms, and those would be the images that would stick in voters’ minds when they went to the polls in the fall.
For their part, the Washington Coalition for Sexual Minority Rights mocked Brydon as classist and antediluvian. They went on with the parade, three thousand people—Radical Women, the Stonewall Committee, Freedom Socialists—marching through downtown Seattle.72 One speaker at the parade rally called Charlie Brydon “Seattle’s Gay Uncle Tom.” Another jeeringly referred to “Anita Brydon.”73
As in California, warring anti-initiative groups proliferated. Some of the marchers in that summer’s parade went on to establish the Seattle Committee Against Thirteen. They chose their name for its acronym, which said “SCAT” not only to SOME but also to CRFE, and announced that they refused to be civil and unSCATological in their fight against Initiative 13. Another group, Women Against Thirteen, was formed because lesbian feminists refused to work with gay men, whether conservative or radical. The acronym WAT (cf. twat) was chosen purposely as an in-your-face reminder that not only did WAT eschew middle-class mealymouthed gentility, but also that WAT was resolutely female.
Charlie Brydon and Citizens to Retain Fair Employment had a lot to worry about in addition to Initiative 13, such as SCAT holding signs over Seattle’s freeways that proclaimed, “Someone You Know Is Gay,” a message that Brydon and CRFE believed was as pointless as a prank. But the most irritating action to them was WAT’s “Blood on SOME” caper. On the night of June 13, WAT members Betty Johanna and Jane Meyerding were apprehended by the Seattle Police for breaking into the offices of SOME and “perpetrating mischief.”74 Meyerding had been arrested several times before: in 1967, when she was seventeen years old and took part in a march on the Pentagon; the following year when she was charged with felony for her disruptions at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago; and in 1971, when she was charged with felony again for her participation in a Vietnam War protest with an angry pacifist group that broke into the Federal Building in Rochester, New York, and tried to destroy draft records and FBI files. For that action she was sent to prison for a year.75
Jane Meyerding was the architect of the SOME office invasion. She and Betty Johanna broke into SOME headquarters with several vials of blood—their own and that of other women—which they poured all over SOME’s initiative petitions and financial records. They left behind not only bloody stacks of paper but also a signed “open letter to the staff, volunteers, and supporters of SOME,” in which they identified themselves as lesbians and declared, “We have brought our blood here to you today for three reasons: to share our lives, our human-ness with you in the clearest, strongest way we can; to challenge your human-ness by showing you that the work you do here imperils our lives and our human-ness; & to disrupt with our lives, with our blood and our human-ness, the anti-life Initiative 13 campaign.”76 They dubbed what they did “an unpatriarchal and pacifist, nonviolent direct action.”77
The two women were picked up in a police car later that night and taken down to the station. Both were booked, tried, and sentenced to eighteen days in the Seattle City Jail for “property destruction.” The metaphorical intent of their action went far over the heads of the likes of David Estes and Dennis Falk, but it captured the imagination of the Left. Meyerding and Johanna became legends and brought other radicals into the battle.78
• • •
Charlie Brydon and his coworkers at Citizens to Retain Fair Employment had to reconcile themselves to the fact that there was no way they could stop SCAT and WAT from doing as they liked; but eventually the three groups figured out how to complement one another.
Brydon’s organization took the initiative. Citizens to Retain Fair Employment hired a young college student, Randy Henson, to serve as liaison to the two radical groups. “We can each go after a different demographic,” he convinced them. They met regularly in the months before the election to share what their groups were doing and brainstorm about what else needed to be done. SCAT and WAT leafleted at workplaces; they focused on getting-out-the-vote drives among “nontraditional voters”—minorities, feminists, the Left, union members, especially like-minded gays and lesbians. CRFE connected with middle-class voters, got support from politicians, appealed to big donors to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to conduct the campaign.79 It worked.
But fate was on their side, too. The anti-SOME campaign was clinched a few weeks before the election by a single fortuitous, though—unlike the Reagan coup in LA—tragic event. One evening, ten weeks before the election, John Alfred Rodney, a twenty-six-year-old black man who’d spent five years in a state institution for the retarded, went on a harmless jaunt in the crime-ridden Rainier Valley neighborhood of Seattle. Rodney, whose IQ was measured at 61, wandered around backyards, and if residents saw him, he offered to mow their lawns; then he ran off. One of the homeowners called the police, and Patrolman Dennis Falk, SOME’s cochair, was sent to investigate. Falk spotted Rodney and chased him by foot for six blocks. As Rodney tried to climb a fence, Falk—keeping his brass knuckles in his pocket this time—shot him, first in the heel and then in the back. Rodney died instantly.80
An investigation showed that he hadn’t stolen anything and that he’d been unarmed. When Falk was acquitted of his murder by a police department inquest panel, hundreds of people from Seattle’s black community marched in protest to the office of the chief of police and stood chanting out their fury. They were joined by members of the Church Council of Greater Seattle. The anger against Dennis Falk was so strong that David Estes asked him to recede into the background in the Initiative 13 campaign.
In Falk’s place, Estes hired a black man, Wayne Perryman, hoping that would calm the black community. Perryman’s idea was to pit black suffering against gay pretensions. Homosexuals didn’t know what they were talking about when they complained about discrimination, Perryman told black church congregations and newspapers. Homosexuals were just copycatting the black civil rights battle. But the outraged black community wouldn’t be distracted from the real issue: Perryman was consorting with racists who shot an unarmed black man. After only a few weeks, he resigned from SOME under pressure.81
• • •
On the night of the election, SCAT and WAT and other grassroots and radical lesbians and gays joined together in a candlelight vigil at the Pike Place Market. Citizens to Retain Fair Employment congregated at the Olympic Hotel, which had the biggest and fanciest ballroom in Seattle. They all waited in their places to see whether Initiative 13 would cast them into the same second-class status as the gays and lesbians of Dade County, Saint Paul, Wichita, and Eugene. As soon as the votes began to come in, it was clear what the results would be. Finally, almost 63 percent of the voters rejected the initiative. The candlelight vigil at the Pike Place Market turned into a victory party. Then, chanting “Two! Four! Six! Eight! Seattle stopped this wave of hate!” two thousand of the celebrants marched from the market to the Olympic Hotel to share victory space with Citizens to Retain Fair Employment, on whose side they’d fought.82