Flash Back

With all these petition flying around about dropping the “T” or the “L” from LGBT and counter petitions because of the loss in Houston, I thought it might be nice to look at it from the historic perspective. So set your “Way Back Machine” to the late seventies and early eighties. This is from the Global Nonviolent Action Database.

Florida Gay Rights Activists Boycott Orange Juice, 1977-1980

On January 18th, 1977 the Dade County Commission of Miami, Florida approved a law that would outlaw discrimination against gays and lesbians in the workplace and housing markets. A gay lobbying group named Dade County Coalition for the Humanistic Rights of Gays, which was formed only a year before, had requested that this bill be brought before the Commission by Commissioner Ruth Shack. The lobbying group was led by gay activists Jack Campbell, Bob Basker, and Bob Kunst.

In early 1977, former American pop star and beauty pageant winner Anita Bryant began campaigning in Dade County, Florida to repeal the local ordinance. She formed the group Save Our Children in 1977 and led an aggressive campaign to amass votes on a public petition for the repeal of the ordinance. As the President of Save Our Children, Anita Bryant claimed that “known practicing homosexuals” were converting children to homosexuality. Dade County Coalition for the Humanistic Rights of Gays and Save Our Children were the key actors in the boycott.

Hmm… sound familiar? It seems to me that the opposition to HERO (Huston Equal Rights Ordinance) in Huston something was said about saving the children.

While organizations that supported the gay rights movement mobilized support for the boycott, the opposition used its own connections to further support for the message of Save Our Children. Newspapers such as the Miami Herald ran recycled stories from previous years about gay sex crimes. From the pulpits on Sunday mornings, local priests urged their congregations to take political action by voting for the repeal of the ordinance. Despite the efforts of the nationwide boycott of Florida orange juice, in June 1977 residents of Dade County repealed the ordinance by a large majority with a margin of 69 to 31.

While this was a massive loss for gay rights activists, in 1980 they celebrated when Bryant’s rapidly diminishing career was highlighted by her firing from the Florida Citrus Commission. Save Our Children’s popularity sank with that of Anita Bryant. While gay activists were happy with the fact that Bryant’s national fame was permanently damaged, their primary goal of upholding the ordinance had failed. Furthermore, the Florida Citrus Commission never formally retracted its support for Bryant and would go on to support openly homophobic spokespeople in the future.

And if you look at the Civil Rights movements in the sixties and seventies, Slate said this about Civil Rights and bathrooms,

The conservative idea that civil rights protections sexually endanger women and children in public bathrooms is not new. In fact, conservative sexual thought has been in the toilet since the 1940s. During the World War II era, conservatives began employing the idea that social equality for African-Americans would lead to sexual danger for white women in bathrooms. In the decades since, conservatives used this trope to negate the civil rights claims of women and sexual minorities. Placing Houston’s rejection of HERO within the history of discrimination against racial minorities, sexual minorities, and women reveals a broader pattern: When previously marginalized groups demanded access to public accommodations, conservatives responded with toilet talk to stall these groups’ aspirations for social equality.

Since World War II, public bathrooms have figured centrally in African-American civil rights struggles for racial integration in the workplace and in schools. Integrating these spaces in the Southern United States meant doing away with Jim Crow laws that mandated, among other things, separate public bathrooms for blacks and whites. Whites defended these segregated spaces with violence. And, with varying degrees of cynicism, segregationists often interpreted demands for racial equality as black male demands for interracial sexual contact with white women. In 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which prohibited “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government,” the government established the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce this order. Historian Eileen Boris has shown how Southern Democrats fought the FEPC, viewing it as an attempt to “saddle social equality upon Dixie,” and lead to, in the words of one senator from Georgia, “social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races.”

So bigots have used bathrooms to justify segregation many times and it worked then but eventually sanity wins out.