Race, Religious Conservatism, and the 1977 Struggle over Gay Rights

When Anita Bryant declared in 1977 that it was “The civil rights of parents to save their children from homosexual influence,” and that “God gave mothers the divine right to … protect our children,” she articulated a powerful conservative strategy of yoking anti-gay prejudice, religious freedom, and civil rights rhetoric. Using the landmark 1977 struggle over gay rights in Dade County, Florida as a focal point, this paper explores how the struggle over gay rights evolved within the context of the African American civil rights struggles in the 1970s and a developing Holocaust consciousness. It focuses in particular on the divided responses of Blacks and Jews to gay rights and emphasizes the crosscurrents of racial and sexual liberalism. I expand the growing historiography of conservatism by focusing attention on non-white and non-Christian conservatives. The anti-gay group, Save Our Children—a multi-denominational and cross-racial religious coalition—pried apart a minority coalition that sought to advance sexual liberalism by exposing tensions between religious and civil rights. It would polarize the very groups—Jews and African Americans—with whom gays sought to claim an affinity. Struggles over gay rights became the site for a complex redefinition of liberal and conservative politics, identity and alliances in the 1970s. Tracing the multiple ways that conservatives’ construction of homosexuality and defense of “family values” were enmeshed in the history of race and interfaith relations reveals a longstanding sexual conservatism that was autonomous from but overlapped with white Christian conservatism.