Abstract
For lesbians and gay men throughout the country, the outcomes in California and Seattle were greeted with joy and relief. In Boston a crowd of five hundred gathered at the City Hall Plaza for a rally celebrating the victory. In New York, Jean O’Leary, coexecutive director of the National Gay Task Force (NGTF), called the outcomes “absolutely terrific and heartwarming. The votes are equivalent in significance to the Dade County defeat and have stemmed the tide running against gay people.” Yet for many, the sense of elation was tempered with the awareness that in California and Seattle, lesbians and gay men had won, at best, defensive victories, beating back two attempts to further legally restrict and stigmatize lesbians and gay men.1
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Notes
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991), 6.
Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Our for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (New York: Simon Schuster, 1999), 372–83; “The End of the Experience,” Advocate, April 10, 2001, 14–15.
Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 250.
Steve Endean, Bringing Lesbian and Gay Rights into the Mainstream, ed. Vicki L. Eaklos (New York: Harrington Press, 2006), 51–52; “National March on Washington: History,” National (Lesbian and) Gay Task Force Papers, Collection 7301, Box 140, Human Sexuality Collection, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
James Saslow, “1970,” in Long Road to Freedom, ed. Mark Thompson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 178; “75,000 Attend Gay Rights Rally at the Monument,” Washington Post, October 15, 1979; “75,000 March in Capital in Drive to Support Homosexual Rights,” New York Times, October 15, 1979; Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 407–9.
David Snowball, Continuity and Change in the Rhetoric of the Moral Majority (New York: Praeger, 1987), 63.
“75,000 March in Capital in Drive to Support Homosexual Rights,” New York Times, October 15, 1979; Snowball, Continuity and Change, 49–53, 64–65; William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996), 202–5.
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© 2008 Fred Fejes
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Fejes, F. (2008). The Gay Rights Debate. In: Gay Rights and Moral Panic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614680_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614680_8
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