“I think there’s gonna be riots if this
thing passes,” Cleve Jones told his friends in the fall of 1978. Jones
wasn’t alone in his apprehension; other gay political activists in
California were worried about the upcoming election. John Briggs, a
conservative state legislator from Orange County, had succeeded in getting
an initiative on the California ballot that would ban gays and lesbians from
teaching in public schools. Known officially as Proposition 6, it would be
the first statewide initiative on gay rights to confront American voters.
Over the previous 18 months, a host of
antigay ballot initiatives had passed across the country. In Dade County,
Fla., Wichita, Kan., St. Paul, Minn., and Eugene, Ore., voters had
overturned gay rights protections. In Oklahoma and Arkansas, legislators had
already banned gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools. The host
of gay civil rights bills that had passed in the wake of the Stonewall Riots
had met a right-wing backlash. Early polls showed voters were overwhelmingly
in favor of the Briggs Initiative—61 percent to 31 percent.
A former insurance broker, Briggs was an
ambitious politician who hoped to become California’s governor and was
looking to raise his statewide profile. He had sponsored another initiative
on the ballot in 1978 to strengthen the death penalty. His fundraising
letters urged California voters to support both initiatives to protect
themselves, and their children, from criminals. “You can act right now,”
Briggs pleaded, “to help protect your family from vicious killers and
defend your children from homosexual teachers.”
He used not only the mailing list but also
the tactics of Anita Bryant’s successful “Save Our Children” campaign
in Dade County. Briggs claimed that because gays were unable to reproduce,
they recruited children to swell their ranks. He symbolically launched his
campaign in San Francisco, calling it “the moral garbage dump of
homosexuality in this country.”
San Franciscans had recently elected their
first openly gay city supervisor, Harvey Milk, and the Briggs Initiative
elevated him to the national spotlight. As the principal spokesperson for
the opposition, Milk campaigned around the state, challenging Briggs in
numerous lively debates. “I want to recruit you,” Milk provocatively
challenged a large political rally in San Francisco, “I want to recruit
you for the fight to preserve democracy from the John Briggs and Anita
Bryants who are trying to constitutionalize bigotry.”
Vowing that gays and lesbians would not sit
quietly and see their rights evaporate, as he said they had in Nazi Germany,
Milk mobilized grassroots political organizing to make sure the initiative
would fail in San Francisco.
In Los Angeles, the Briggs Initiative
prompted David Mixner, an advisor to Mayor Tom Bradley, to come out of the
closet to his friends (including then Arkansas Attorney General Bill
Clinton) and ask them to oppose the initiative. Mixner helped organize
black-tie fundraisers featuring Hollywood celebrities like Burt Lancaster,
John Travolta, and Lily Tomlin, and he convinced folk singers Joan Baez and
Harry Chapin to put on a benefit concert. Most important, he succeeded in
getting former California governor Ronald Reagan to come out publicly
against the initiative.
In crafting the initiative, Briggs had used
extremely broad language. Any teacher found to be “advocating, imposing,
encouraging or promoting” homosexual activity could be fired. This meant
walking in a gay pride parade, assigning a book by a gay author, or
attending a meeting about gay rights could cost a teacher his or her job.
Casting the issue as a matter of free speech, opponents pointed out that a
teacher could be fired simply for opposing the Briggs Initiative itself.
It was this libertarian argument that
convinced many people who did not necessarily support gay rights to oppose
the Briggs Initiative. Reagan warned the initiative could cause “real
mischief” in the classroom, allowing students to blackmail teachers by
threatening to accuse them of homosexuality.
On election day, the Briggs Initiative failed
by more than a million votes, even losing in Briggs’ own Orange County. It
was the greatest electoral victory yet of the burgeoning gay rights
movement. By galvanizing the gay community, it had prompted many people to
come out of the closet. The movement gained not only new organizations and
leaders but acquired a new level of political sophistication.
Instead of the rioting that Jones had
predicted, there was dancing in the streets of San Francisco. In his victory
speech, Milk promised that this was only the first step. “The next step,
the more important one, is for all those gays who did not come out, for
whatever reasons, to do so now.... The coming out of a nation will smash the
myths once and for all.”
But the celebrations were short-lived. Three
weeks later, Milk would be gunned down in his San Francisco City Hall office
by Dan White, a fellow city supervisor who represented the only district in
the city that voted in favor of the Briggs Initiative.
David K. Johnson, Ph.D., has taught U.S.
history at Northwestern University and Roosevelt University. His book, The
Lavender Scare: McCarthyism, Homosexuality, and the National Security State,
is forthcoming. He can be reached care of this publication or at POcolumn@aol.com.
For
further reading:
Clendinen, Dudley, and Adam Nagourney. 1999. Out for Good: The Struggle to
Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (Simon & Schuster).
Shilts, Randy. 1982. The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of
Harvey Milk (St. Martin’s Press).
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