The American 'new right'

Charles Foley

Los Angeles American has no equivalent of Mary Whitehouse to watch over its moral standards: here homosexuals must make do with the likes of Anita Bryant, a former Miss American runner-up who was 'born again' as a Baptist, and went on — God moves in a mysterious way — to win national notoriety as 'the Florida orange juice queen' in,a singing commercial on TV.

Fresh from her triumph in 'the sunshine state', where she persuaded voters to overturn a Miami ordinance guaranteeing civil rights to homosexuals, Miss Bryant now threatens to, as they say, `go national'. Gay activists are rising to meet the challenge all across the land. Task forces are rallying, lobbyists lobbying, a drive to educate the public 'as to who we really are' has begun.

The Bryant forces, too, are setting up offices in Washington DC and devising schemes to take the straight-is-great message to other imperilled cities. Miss Bryant herself even threatens a trip to California, the homosexual heartland, where gay activists suggest she may be made into heterosexuality's first martyr. Bryant has yet to discover an antique blasphemy statute with which to smite the sinners down, but with the aid of a Florida millionaire or two, she's doing her best.

In reality, the lady is little more than a figurehead for a curious new cabal of conservative and far-right organisations which has come to be known as the New Right (shades of the New Left, which grew old around 1972). This movement is led by such bodies as the Conservative Caucus (TCC), the Committee for Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC), and the National Political Action Committee (CPAP), and it has set its gunsights on rather more than gaydom.

'We speak for America's conservative majority,' says TCC director Howard Phillips, 'and our first objective is to take congressional control and taxpayers' money away from those who back women's libbers, the welfare rights people and gay groups.' The New Right is also (did you guess?) against gun control, socialised medicine, the Equal Rights Amendment, and giving the Panama Canal to Panamanians. But most strongly, at present, it is anti-gay rights. Why?

'Because,' says Robert McQueen, editor of The Advocate, the American Gay Newsl 'it's the hot new emotional issue, easy to exploit, with a natural appeal to the far right.' Rep. Elaine Noble, a lesbian who is the sole open homosexual in Congress, believes that 'the Bryant people, the antiERA groups, the New Right generally go for what they think are easy pickings, as the

Nazis did the Jews.'

Not so, says Miss Bryant, who now refuses to talk to unmarried journalists. ('I've had a lot of harassment'.) Once convinced that I was in the state of matrimony and had, further, done my bit for the continuance of the race, she explained that God had called her to this crusade because to legislate gay civil rights 'was an attempt to legitimise a lifestyle that is perverse and dangerous to the sanctity of the family'. If everyone went gay, wouldn't that be the end of our civilisation?

The anti-gay camp appears to have ample. funds. Among its backers is a noted rightwing political kingmaker, Richard Viguerie, a mail-order multi-millionaire who raised $6 million for George Wallace's last presidential bid and in the past two years has garnered a further $4 million for the cause. Mr Viguerie, a Texan, has already helped a group of influential conservatives into Congress, including Senator Tower of Texas, and Senator Hayakawa of California, and he plans to help many more in the 1978 race.

The New Right can also chalk up several legislative' successes. Two states have passed resolutions endorsing the Bryant campaign — Arkansas and Oklahoma — while a federal Bill prohibiting job and housing discrimination against homosexuals now seems doomed to certain failure. Even in the liberal-dominated California legislature, a Bill of similar nature has been dropped by its sponsor because 'we don't have the votes'.

California's Governor Jerry Brown, a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor who is up for re-election next year, is energetically dodging the issue. The polls show his popularity waning in this last year of his first term, and he knows that in the gubernatorial contest his Republican rival may well be Edward Davis, currently Los Angeles police chief, a Vigueric-funded candidate who is a dedicated opponent of gay rights.

Governor Brown is caught in a cross-fire between homosexual groups who want him, as a liberal, to support their struggle, and conservatives who will use it against him it' he does. It's an awkward dilemma, since the gay voting bloc in this state is so large — no one knows how large, but it's estimated at between 5 and 10 per cent of the population. Their support could be crucial to Brown, who was elected last time around by a narrow margin. On the other hand, this is the state that elected Ronald Reagan.

Last year it sent Sam Hayakawa, an elderly professor of languages famous for his toughness with rebel students in the 'sixties, to the US Senate in a surprising victory over a handsome young liberal Democrlit incumbent. And Senator Hayakawa is an outspoken opponent of gay rights. Homosexuals are 'sick people who need . medical or psychological help,' he says. 'Although I guess they have the right to remain sick as long as they like.' The media, he thinks, are at fault for 'exaggerating the important of the gay movement .

And how important is the 'gay movement'? It seems, by all accounts, to be more significant than the seventy-one-year-old Senator thinks. The number of homosexuals in the US is usually put at around twenty million, and the activists among them are highly vocal. Following the Bryant victory in Miami, some 500,000 marchers turned out in at least eight major cities from New York to San Francisco in what Time magazine described as 'the biggest nationwide protest demonstration since the days of the anti-war movement'. New York's Fifth Avenue was jammed for nearly two miles with gay,s and their sympathisers.

In California, businesses catering to or run by gays have become a multi-milliondollar industry. .Homosexual business groups fund homosexual lobbyists working in the state legislature. Homosexual student groups are officially recognised on almost every campus in the state. Churches run or and by gays are flourishing: the Metropolitan Community Church, founded in the late 'sixties, is already an international body, with congregations in every major US city, and abroad in England, Africa and other lands. Politicians in New York, San Francisco and other cities where the gay population is thick on the ground have found it pays to court the homosexual vote. , But America at large is confused and dubious about the issue. Dr Gallup's latest (June) sampling of public opinion reveals that 56 per cent of the population believe homosexuals should have equal rights in employment. But when the question is made more specific, e.g., should they be hired as teachers, 65 per cent say they should not.

'It's the old canard, fostered by Anita Bryant and her crew, that gays are child molesters and proselytisers,' says Jean O'Leary, co-executive director of the National Gay Task Force. 'Statistics show this is false, bat it's the best stick they have to beat us with.'

The NGTF is busy with a campaign, funded by $1 million in donations, 'to tell American who we really are.' It's called 'We Are Your Children, Inc. in answer to the Bryant effort, which was 'Save Our Children, Inc.' Among other things, homosexuals will be lobbying in Congress and state assemblies, meeting with the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters and many other groups to enlist their support, and conducting a letter-writing campaign directed at politicians from President Carter on down. Far from suppressing America's homosexuals, Anita Bryant seems to have lured them into activism as never before.