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  • Paths to Political Citizenship:Gay Rights, Feminism, and the Carter Presidency
  • Claire Bond Potter (bio)

In the fall of 1978, President Jimmy Carter stood on a platform in San Francisco, a city where gays, lesbians, feminists, and communities of color anchored California's liberal Democratic vote.1 Carter was there to support the reelection of Governor Jerry Brown, a politician popular with the city's counterculture who was courting an energized and angry gay constituency. Proposition 6, an amendment to the state constitution sponsored by conservative assemblyman John Briggs that proposed to ban homosexuals from teaching, would be on the ballot in November. It was one of several local initiatives around the nation in which conservatives and evangelicals hoped to roll back hard-won gay civil rights achievements that they viewed as a sign of cultural and political decline.2

But Brown needed this crowd of activists. In a few weeks, Harvey Milk would be elected as the city's first openly gay supervisor. George Moscone had been elected mayor of the city in 1975, surviving a recall election the following year in part because of precinct-level work by the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, by Milk's Castro Valley Association (CVA), and by the CVA's political allies in the Asian American and organized-labor communities. Under Milk's leadership, gays and lesbians were pushing for human rights reforms that had resulted in an antidiscrimination ordinance in March 1978, even as other communities around the country repealed similar ordinances.3 [End Page 95]

Those in the audience who subscribed to the newsletter of the National Gay Task Force (NGTF) would have been aware that the Carter administration was in the midst of extensive meetings with this new human rights organization, founded in 1973. The talks, initiated by Carter aide Midge Costanza and her Office of Public Liaison (OPL), sought to end antigay discrimination that had shaped critical federal policies since the turn of the twentieth century through civil service regulations established during the Eisenhower administration.4 Beginning in February, a six-man and six-woman NGTF negotiating team had been meeting with agencies like the FCC to persuade them that they could intervene against forms of discrimination, inside and outside the state, that restricted gay and lesbian economic citizenship. The negotiators took a radically different approach than either feminists, who were seeking legislative action, or local gay rights organizations, which asked voters to enact antidiscrimination policies. Instead, they took the position that the Carter administration could open the door to equality by enforcing existing nondiscrimination policies that spoke to human rights principles already endorsed by the president.5 Although the group publicly suggested that an executive order establishing gay civil rights would be desirable, throughout Carter's single term they pressed gently on this issue, accepting the president's desire to distance himself from them as a constituency.

Nothing illustrates the difference between local and national gay rights strategies better, however, than the moment at the Brown rally when Carter moved to leave the stage without acknowledging the threat to gay and lesbian civil rights that the Briggs Amendment represented. The governor pulled him aside. According to journalist Randy Shilts, "A television microphone picked up Brown telling Carter, 'Proposition 6. You'll get your loudest applause. Ford and Reagan have both come out against it. So I think it's perfectly safe.'" Carter returned to the stage and leaned into the microphone, asking voters already inclined to check No on 6 to do so. The crowd roared its approval.6

Did feminists in the crowd cheer as loudly? By 1978, although they had paid their dues in the Carter campaign, women's groups were unhappy. This distress came to a crisis point that year when the president fired Bella Abzug as co-chair of the National Advisory Committee on Women. Although Carter had made good on his promise to appoint a record number of women to high-level jobs in the administration, including the first Latina cabinet member in Secretary of Commerce Juanita Kreps, feminist organizations perceived a lack of support for their core policy issues: abortion, economic inequality, and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Carter had angered...

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