Out For Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America - Softcover

Clendinen, Dudley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684867435 ISBN 13: 9780684867434

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

The definitive account of the gay rights movement, Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney's Out for Good is comprehensive, authoritative, and excellently written.

This is the definitive account of the last great struggle for equal rights in the twentieth century. From the birth of the modern gay rights movement in 1969, at the Stonewall riots in New York, through 1988, when the gay rights movement was eclipsed by the more urgent demands of AIDS activists, this is the remarkable and—until now—untold story of how a largely invisible population of men and women banded together to create their place in America’s culture and government. Told through the voices of gay activists and their opponents, filled with dozens of colorful characters, Out for Good traces the emergence of gay rights movements in cities across the country and their transformation into a national force that changed the face of America forever.

Out for Good is the unforgettable chronicle of an important—and nearly lost—chapter in American history.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Dudley Clendinen (1944–2012) wrote for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many other publications. He was the editor of a book of essays, The Prevailing South; author of A Place Called Canterbury; and author of the text of a book of photographs, Homeless in America.

Adam Nagourney has been a reporter for The New York Times since 1996. He served as the newspaper’s chief political correspondent from 2002 to 2010, and is currently the chief of its Los Angeles Bureau. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Chapter 22

MIAMI: THE FUNDAMENTALISTS AWAKE

March 1977

It was such an exhilarating moment, standing in the White House driveway, talking into the microphones of network correspondents, that no one paid much attention to the questions about Anita Bryant. After three hours in the Roosevelt Room, her campaign to repeal a Dade County homosexual rights ordinance seemed distant and inconsequential. Troy Perry felt a little annoyed when a reporter asked him what Bryant would think of fourteen homosexual leaders being granted an audience in the White House: Why should Anita Bryant care about what was going on in Washington? And why should they care what she thought?

By the next afternoon, the reporter's question was answered. From Villa Verde, the thirty-three-room Spanish stucco mansion on Biscayne Bay where Bryant lived with her husband and four children, the woman known for her Florida orange juice commercials issued a statement demanding to know why the White House was "dignifying these activists for special privilege with a serious discussion on their alleged 'human rights,'" and permitting them to "pressure President Carter into endorsement of a lifestyle that is an abomination under the laws of God and man.

"What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that there is an acceptable alternate way of life," Anita Bryant declared after services at Northwest Baptist Church in Miami, where she taught Sunday school. "No one has a human right to corrupt our children. Prostitutes, pimps and drug pushers, like homosexuals, have civil rights, too, but they do not have the right to influence our children to choose their way of life. Before I yield to this insidious attack on God and his laws, and on parents and their rights to protect their children, I will lead such a crusade to stop it as this country has not seen before."

That statement displayed for the nation a political force that had been quietly gathering in the four months since a gay rights ordinance had appeared on the calendar of the Dade County Metro Commission. Anita Bryant had made a career of singing at conventions and selling orange juice, and she had never before shown any interest in politics. But in those four months, she had become the symbol for a political crusade, fired by religious passion and single-minded intensity. Bruce Voeller did not even recognize Bryant's name when he first read that she had forced the Dade County Metro Commission to submit the new gay rights ordinance to public referendum. But that said more about the head of the Task Force and New York than it did about Bryant and Florida. In the South, across the Bible Belt, and among the 13 million Southern Baptists who shared Anita Bryant's faith and celebrated her emerging leadership, she was nearly universally admired. Each time she closed her eyes and threw her head back to sing a hymn or a patriotic anthem -- her face scrubbed, red and glowing; her black-red hair shining; her high, handsome cheekbones a reminder of the beauty queen she had once been -- Bryant embodied an idealized vision of American motherhood. She was the kind of woman whose 1959 official biography reported that the nineteen-year-old Miss Oklahoma and Miss America second runner-up "eventually hopes to marry and have a family of six children." Anita Bryant was a local treasure in Miami: The premature birth of her twins was a running story in the newspapers. At Christmas, the newspapers ran a photograph of the Anita Bryant family, posed in front of the Christmas tree.

She was born in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, the daughter of an oilfield worker, and she decided to become a performer after she "met the creator of Stars, Jesus Christ Our Lord," at age eight, and He told her to become a singer. Arthur Godfrey made her famous, after his talent scouts discovered her singing on the Tulsa television stations and invited her to perform in New York. By her mid-twenties, Anita Bryant had three gold records, but even then she was more than just another popular performer. Bryant toured seven times with Bob Hope and the USO, entertaining troops at Christmas, and appeared at Billy Graham rallies in Madison Square Garden. Bryant sang at the Super Bowl, and was part of the team of network commentators at eight Orange Bowls. President Lyndon B. Johnson had her to the White House fourteen times during his five years in office. He led a standing ovation to her after she dedicated an emotional "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the troops in Vietnam during a 1966 state dinner honoring the United States ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge. Variety said it was the first time in memory a performer in the White House had been given a standing ovation. Anita Bryant returned the favor; she was unstinting in her support of the president's Vietnam policy, likening it, not surprisingly, to a crusade. "I feel very strongly that this is a war between atheism and God," she declared, and when Johnson died she sang "Battle Hymn of the Republic" one more time for her friend the president, at his graveside.

Anita Bryant was a registered Democrat, but both parties embraced her. In 1968 she sang "Battle Hymn of the Republic" at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Republican convention in Miami. By 1977, she was best known for her employment by the Florida Citrus Commission, which pressed her smile and voice into the service of selling Florida orange juice. "Come to the Florida sunshine tree! Florida sunshine naturally!" she'd sing, proclaiming, "A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine." The citrus commission paid her $100,000 a year. Her total annual income was four times that, from appearances at religious conferences and corporate conventions. She was paid $7,500 a night at the conventions, and had made $700,000 in 1976, the Bicentennial year, because, according to her agent, Dick Shack, Bob Green had encouraged his popular wife to accept every one of those $7,500 invitations.

There had not been much interest in politics among Miami's sizable homosexual community, either, at least until the summer of 1976, when Jack Campbell, forty-five years old, assembled a group of gay men and lesbians in his home in Coconut Grove to talk about creating a gay rights lobbying organization. Campbell, a former president of the University of Michigan Young Democrats, joined the Cleveland Mattachine Society in the mid-1960s, and soon put his own singular stamp on the movement. In 1965 he and a group of investors paid $15,000 for an out-of-business sauna in downtown Cleveland. He turned it into a homosexual bathhouse, and business was so good he opened up a second one within the year. The Club Baths were a source of an enormous personal fortune but, Campbell argued, they were also an expression of gay and sexual liberation. His sizable contributions earned him a seat on the National Gay Task Force board, where Campbell would make a point of sitting next to Troy Perry at its meetings. Perry would introduce himself as the founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, where "we have a hundred churches and a total of 30,000 members." And Jack Campbell would always follow the same way: "Well, although we only have thirty churches, we have 300,000 members."

The Club Miami, which he opened in 1970, was the twentieth in what would become a forty-two-bathhouse empire. Campbell was openly gay in everything he did, which was unusual in Miami then. He ran for Miami City Commission in 1975, and he campaigned against vestigial laws that prohibited homosexuals from working in or owning bars. In the midst of the race, the city commission abolished the ordinance, leaving Campbell without an issue, and he finished a distant second in a field of four. The next year he donated $1,800 to the Carter...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0684867435
• ISBN 13: 9780684867434
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 752
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande