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    MCC Singspiration Songbook from the 1970s)
    Wagaman recording of 2nd Annual Gay Rights Speakers
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    Marvin Kabakoff (Midcontinent Life Services Center)
    Galen Moon (Midcontinent Life Services Center)
    Rev. Carol Cureton (MCC St. Louis)
    Rev. L. Troy Perry(United Federation MCC)
    Very Natural Thing Screening
    Jan 77 Prime Time
    Questions and Answers about MLSC (PT.01.77)
    Directory, Gay Organizations and Services (PT.01.77)
    Mar 77 Prime Time
    Here's What's Happening—Missouri Gay Caucus (PT.03.77)
    Working Together (PT.03.77)
    May 77 Prime Time
    Latest Developments in Dade County (Miami) (PT.05.77)
    St. Louis Fights Anita Benefit (PT.05.77)
    Jun 77 Prime Time
    Rick Garcia and the Task Force for Human Rights (PT 06.77)
    TFHR vs. Globe Democrat (PT 06.77)
    A Natural Thing by M. Kabakoff (PT 06.77)
    A Gay Evening on the Riverfront (PT 06.77)
    MCC ST. Louis Hosts Mid-Central District Conference: Prelude to Troy Perry's Visit June 9th (PT 06.77)
    Jul 77 Prime Time
    Rally at MCC June 9: Troy Perry(PT 07.77)
    St. Louis Gay Coalition Emerging (PT 07.77)
    NGTF Preparing a "We are your children" campaign (PT 07.77)
    Statement for the Missouri Gay Caucus: After Miami, What? (PT 07.77)
    Being Gay in St. Louis (PT 07.77)
    Aug 77 Prime Time
    Kansas City Gay Rights Rally (PT 08.77)
    Report from the Task Force(PT 08.77)
    Gay Coalition Meeting at MLSC (PT 08.77)
    Lesbian Rights Alliance (PT 08.77)
    Second Michgan Women's Music Festival (PT 08.77)
    NGTF Holds National Civil Rights Conference at Capitol (PT 08.77)
    Sep 77 Prime Time
    Benefit for TFHR (PT 09.77)
    Bar News (PT 09.77)
    Oct 77 Prime Time
    Supreme Court Ruling (PT 10.77)
    Nov 77 Prime Time
    Anita in Joplin (PT 11.77)
    News (PT 11.77)
    Christian Social Action Committee
    Ray Lake Letter of Appointment
    February 77
    March 77
    Letter to Ray Lake from James Conway
    Missouri Gay Caucus Letter May 77
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Jim Andris, Facebook

Gay Rights in St. Louis, Missouri in 1977

Jim Andris © 2013

1977 was a pivotal year in the U.S. struggle for gay and lesbian rights. The year began with great promise and ended with disheartenment and frustration. This was the year that Anita Bryant became the front person for a campaign of terror waged against gays and lesbians.

Background on the Save our Children Campaign

During the decade of the 1960s, a voice for gay liberation emerged as a clear harmonic in the general chorus which was crying out for civil rights for women and minorities. In June of 1970 organized demonstrations by thousands of gay and lesbian people occurred in several major U.S. cities on the one year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots on June 28, 1969. Gay liberation organizations formed during this period, notably the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance. In particular, "GAA members performed zaps, public peaceful confrontations with officials to draw media attention." Their goal was simply full civil rights for all gay people, but there was an additional element of sexual liberation in their call. As the first half of the 1970s passed by, more and more the general public was exposed through TV and print media to both demonstrations by gay activitsts and by exhibitions of pride by gay people.

Notable milestones were achieved in the early to middle 1970s as a result of these calls for gay rights and gay liberation. The number of gay organizations exploded in a period of two or three years from a few to thousands nationwide. As early as 1972, the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, through actions of the left wing Human Rights Party, enacted a city-wide anti-discrimination ordinance that included sexual orientation. Other cities followed suit. Gay activists sought to alter the existing legal and professional structure which viewed homosexuality in a negative light. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. The American Psychological Association Council of Representatives followed in 1975. Gay publications depicting positive views of living an openly gay lifestyle and of gay and lesbian history and contributions to society were increasingly available on the news stand and by subscription. The Advocate was one such publication that had a dramatic influence on gay men. This magazine included an extensive section of ads mainly by men seeking other men for social and sexual relatationships.

These positive achievements notwithstanding, there was a growing swell of resentment in more conservative elements of the country, by people who were, in fact, revolted by this open display of pride by gay and lesbian people and were staunchly opposed to removing legal and other barriers to full acceptance. These forces began to more and more find their own effective voices and organize opposition to all forms of gay liberation. They sought, in fact, to demonize any and all public and open displays of pro-homosexual thought and behavior.

It was the 1977 campaign of the organization Save Our Children, Inc. that finally galvanized these homophobic social forces and welded them into high voltage cables of hate and fear that crisscrossed the country. In January of 1977 in Miami-Dade County, Florida—home to an increasingly liberated homosexual community—the Metro Dade County Commission met to amend the Dade County antidiscrimination ordinance by adding a prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. To their surprise, they were met by a large number of residents opposed to the legislation. While the Commission decided to pass the amendment anyway, organized opposition grew in the form of Save Our Children. Led by singer-entertainer Anita Bryant as their president, Save Our Children, Inc.—formed by a coalition of over thirty conservative political professionals and ministers from various faiths—set out to change the minds of Miami voters by spreading outright lies about homosexuality. They called homosexuality immoral, and charged that homosexuals were promiscuous, defiant of traditional gender roles, and child molesters. The public campaign was a prime example of fear-driven hate mongering in the extreme. They gained enough signatures to force a referendum, and the amendment was defeated on June 7, 1977.

That might have been just a local defeat, but Anita Bryant and her cause began to attract national attention: both support and opposition. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina is an example of a conservative person who had mobilized anti-liberal resources and lent aid to the nationalization of the Save Our Children campaign. He was staunch enemy of liberal forces during the Civil Rights Era of the 1960's, and when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1974, Helms and others immediately lobbied for a constitutional amendment enshrining a constitutional right to life from conception on. Another such person who joined forces with Bryant in 1977 was Jerry Falwell, a founding member of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in 1952, the radio and television ministry Old Time Baptist Church in 1976, and Liberty University in 1971. Energized by the Save Our Children struggle, he and Paul Weyrich founded the Moral Majority in 1979, and organization which had a tremendous anti-liberal effect in the subsequent decade.

Bryant led several more campaigns around the country to repeal local anti-discrimination ordinances including St. Paul, Minnesota, Wichita, Kansas, and Eugene, Oregon. Eventually, she parlayed her campaign into becoming a nationally known spokesperson for "traditional family values," appearing on "Christian" TV and radio shows hosted by Pat Roberson and by Jim and Tammy Faye Baker. In Arkansas and Oklahoma, the state legislatures banned gays and lesbians from serving in the classroom.

But just as Save Our Children gave form and structure to opposition to gay rights, so did it generate a tremendous amount of resentment and resistance. By June of 1977, when Anita Bryant arrived to entertain at a banquet in Houston, Texas, a protest demonstration of 6,000 gays, lesbians and supporters marched through downtown.

St. Louis Gays and Lesbians Organize against
the Save Our Children Campaign

There were existing organizations in St. Louis that marshalled individuals and resources into a front of resistance to the Save Our Children campaign. Rodney C. Wilson has carefully documented the rise of two such organizations in his article "The Seed Time of Gay Rights: Rev. Carol Cureton, the Metropolitan Community Church and Gay St. Louis, 1969-1980." When MCC arrived in St. Louis late in 1973 "the city's landscape was practically barren. After a seven-year role as a creating and sustaining institution of the gay community, MCC backed away. Nevertheless, the "children" of MCC lived on and struggled for gay rights throughout the 1980s." The Metropolitan Life Services Corporation was a secular organization that was born within and grew out of MCC as St. Louis' first true gay community center. It published several issues of a newsletter called Prime Time for the period 1975-8, established and maintained a gay hotline, and sponsored community-oriented activites.

The Wilson article draws on these newsletters as well as interviews with eyewitnesses to build a compelling account of what he calls "St. Louis' Second Annual Gay Pride Rally." This rally occurred at the St. Louis Metropolitan Community Church on June 9, 1977. Just two days before that, June 7, in Dade County/Miami, Florida, the Save Our Children campaign had forced a succesful ballot initiative that struck down the ban on discrimination by reason of sexual orientation that had been put in place by the County Board in January of 1977. Back at MCC St. Louis, in the crowd of over 300 people were many of St. Louis' lesbian and gay leaders, as well as two nationally known leaders. The Rev. Carol Cureton, founder of MCC St. Louis in 1973 and the Rev. Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church itself in Los Angeles in the late 1960s both gave inspirational and encouraging messages, despite the recent setbacks for gay rights. It was not the first or the last time that Troy Perry would make the trip to St. Louis MCC. Also speaking was Catholic Dignity St. Louis' Jim Alexander. Other secular gay leaders spoke at the rally, from the very young to the elder spokesman. Rick Garcia, a young adult who founded the St. Louis Task Force for Gay Rights to raise money for pro-gay forces in Dade County was a speaker, as was Galen Moon, long-time gay activist, founder of MLSC in 1975, and tireless worker for gay and lesbian rights. Many other St. Louis gay and lesbian leaders were present, such as Bill Cordes and Lisa Wagaman. Fund raising events for the Dade County effort were held in St. Louis in 1977. Garcia's organization arranged a benefit screening of the movie A Very Natural Thing at the Maplewood Theatre that was attended by 1000 people.

According to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, a meeting of St. Louis gay leaders, in response to the antihomosexual Save Our Children crusade, occurred on Thursday, June 16, 1977, when "representatives of about half a dozen local gay organizations met to disuss how they can work together. The groups, which have co-operated with one another little in the past, plan to work together in such areas as educational campaigns and lobbying efforts." Mentioned by name are the Metropolitan Community Church, The Midcontinent Life Services Corp., The Gateway Motorcycle Club and the St. Louis Task Force for Human Rights. Persons mentioned by name in the article are Jim Thomas, Fred Kerr and Rick Garcia. This same article claims "women homosexuals here are generally not organized around their homosexuality but are active in feminist groups organized around issues affecting all women."

Bryant's ugly crusade continued to forge ahead across the U.S.A. in the wake of the Dade County defeat, and Missouri saw the Save Our Children campaign coming to it. By the end of 1977, however, there was significant public opposition to Bryant's moralistic harangues, including a full-blown demonstration of 225 people—100 of them bussed in or by car from St. Louis—in Joplin, Missouri on Sept. 24. It is clear that in St. Louis and in Missouri there was significant organizing and resistance to the Save Our Children campaign. The letter from Fred Kerr, then president of MLSC, St. Louis' first gay community center, shows that significant work was going on in that organization.

Equally fascinating is the evidence of lesbian feminist work towards lesbian and gay rights. Rodney Wilson writes in his article that

In the early and mid-1970s, a group called the Lesbian Alliance began promoting lesbian-feminist causes [but] … also folded in the mid-1970s without having successfully focused the attention of St. Louis at large on the needs of the homosexual community.

That may not be the whole story, however. I believe that careful study will show that a strand of lesbian-feminist support for gay and lesbian causes continued throughout the 1970s, and is a part of the picture of the development of pride activities in St. Louis and Missouri. We see this both in the organization of the demonstrations in Joplin, in the continued publication of Moonstorm, and in the work of Glenda Dilley and other women in organizing the Magnolia Committee.

According to an article in the Tuesday, Nov. 22 issue of the Missourian, Anita Bryant returned to Jefferson City, Missouri on a "religious crusade." The Missouri Gay Caucus organized a protest march in Columbia, Missouri. Larry Eggleston, the Executive Director of that organization, spoke to the press about the demonstration. The march started at Ash and went down Broadway to the University. [Eggleston was one of the four students bringing suit at the time against University of Missouri Columbia for the right to meet on campus and receive student funds.] Apparently, there was a peaceful coalition of "Christian churches" whose representatives may have outnumbered the marchers that day. Both sides carried signs.

MCC's Christian Social Action Committee

Led by its founder, Rev. Troy Perry, the Universal Fellowship of the Metropolitan Community Church had been broadly influential in encouraging gay and lesbian people to live their lives proudly and freely. The year of 1977, with its surge of anti-gay hysteria, brought not only Troy Perry to St. Louis in early June, but just before that in late May, Rev. Adam DeBaugh, the Director of the UFMCC Department of Christian Social Action from 1975-1986.

Early in 1977, Rev. Carol Cureton informed Ray Lake that the Board of the Metropolitan Community Church for Greater St. Louis had appointed him as the local Chairperson of the Christian Social Action Commission. We are fortunate to have copies of the Minutes of that Committee for most of the months in 1977 and half of the months in 1978. They show many details of the day-to-day life of gay and lesbian activists in many local and national organizations.

One of the details is that these activists were working out effective means of collaborating with one another and with supporting each other's causes, and causes beneficial to a broad range of people. To take one example, one can see clearly how the common effort to counter the Anita Bryant blitz grew into other common efforts, such as an early 1978 benefit with speaker Elaine Noble at Washington University sponsored by the Lesbian Rights Alliance, the Gay People's Alliance (Wash U), and MLSC. Women were very concerned in that time period with the ratification of ERA, set to expire in 1979.

1977 Activities of the National Gay Task Force

The National Gay [and Lesbian] Task Force was founded in 1973 by prominent gay activists at the time. Dr. Bruce Voeller and Jean O'Leary co-directed the organization for a number of years, including 1977. According to It's Time [NGTF newsletter]

"Three events this year should long be remembered as milestones on the way to full gay liberation: NGTF's unprecedented February 8th and March 26th White House meetings with Presidential Assistant Margaret Costanza, [Jimmy Carter took office in January, 1977] which laid the basis for a series of talks with federal agencies that has already produced significant reforms; the June 7 defeat of the Dade County, Florida, gay-rights ordinance, a victory for bigots but one that has served to galvanize the gay movement and produce pro-gay effects all over the country; and the November 18-20 National Conference (in Houston) on the Status and Role of Women in National Life, where large-scale open lesbian participation and effective preliminary work in the earlier state conferences ensured serious consideration for gay issues."

Much can be learned about the issues of the day (1977) from studying this newsletter, but this statement from it is probably fairly accurate: "The White House meeting of March 26 was the culmination of months of quiet planning and negotiating by NGTF, and it was a major step in legitimizing the gay-rights strugge in the eyes of the media, the general public, and governmental officials."

Regarding the effects of the Save Our Children hate campaign, the newsletter says, "Gay-activist organizations have been busily harvesting the gay (and non-gay civil libertarian) rage Anita so effectively generates, and many lesbians and gay men who had never before contributed to the gay movement are joining up, giving money, and donating their time and energy in all sorts of productive ways. NGTF has been one of the major beneficiaries of this new sense of urgency: in only four months our membership nearly doubled." NGTF started a campaign called "We Are Your Children" to counter the negative images being projected by the Save Our Children campaign.

Connection between the Women's Movement and Gay Rights in 1977 Nationally and in Missouri

One of the fascinating offshoots of the meeting of NGTF with the Carter administration was that NGTF co-director, Jean O'Leary was appointed by President Carter to the National Commission for the Observance of International Women's Year (IWY). She was the only openly gay person on the commission, and worked hard to promote and coordinate lesbian participation in IWY. A conference was held in Huston in November. The newsletter writes, "The strong lesbian presence will be a counterweight to the radical-right, anti-ERA forces who have already tried to wreck the conference in advance, and should serve to demonstrate the community of interest between the women's and gay movements."

Even more fascinating is the fact that the Missouri delegation to the IWY conference in Huston was staunchly anti-abortion and mostly anti-ERA. Documentation for this claim—as well as evidence that preparation for the IWY November conference in Houston provided the occasion back in Missouri for a pitched battle between opposing forces—can be found in the International Women's Year, 1977 Collection at UMSL.

References

Wagman, Paul, "Antihomosexual Campaign Challenges Area's Gays," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sunday, June 19, 1977, p. 8A.

"1977: The Year in Review," It's Time: Newsletter of the National Gay Task Force, Vol. 4, No. 3, December, 1977, pp. 1-3.

sl 228 International Women's Year, 1977 Collection, 1975-1978, 93 folders, 32 photographs, 5 oral histories, [guide online at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection at UMSL], http://www.umsl.edu/~whmc/guides/whm0228.htm