A Brief History of Homophobic Slander in the U.S.

Renowned homophobe Anita Bryant has a banana cream pie thrown in her face by gay rights activist Tom Higgins in Den Moines, Iowa on October 14, 1977. [AP Photo]

Last year, conservatives created a nationwide panic over “critical race theory,” leading many Republican-governed states to ban honest conversations about American history from public schools. This year, many of those same conservatives have moved on to something equally disturbing.

In schools across the country, according to these moral crusaders, teachers are “grooming” students for sexual abuse by introducing discussions of gender and sexuality into the classroom. These discussions of sex education have been falsely equated to “personal disclosure[s] of adult sexual activity and preferences.” It’s worth noting that conservative activists began lobbing these “grooming” accusations just as the GOP was trying to rescind medical care for transgender children and to prevent them from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity.

Though right-wing pundits, like conservative activist Christopher Rufo and numerous Fox News hosts, have been careful not to explicitly point fingers at gay, queer and trans teachers, the attacks on education related to gender and sexuality are not some brash new invention, but a longstanding right-wing tactic. The right has used moral panics to force queer people out of public life, restrict social programs like childcare, and much, much more.

Here’s a timeline, and reading list, of such homophobic eruptions.

1940s-1960s: Gay federal workers are fired in the ‘Lavender Scare’

Throughout the middle of the century, thousands of gay people (and those suspected of being gay) were fired or forced to resign from the federal government for being a “security risk.” According to the perverse logic of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) the mere fact of being gay made an employee “vulnerable to blackmail.” In two cases involving “known communists,” McCarthy directly linked homosexuality to leftist political beliefs, saying that gay men were especially susceptible to recruitment because of their “peculiar mental twists.”

1964: Florida sets its sights on gay sex with the ‘Purple Pamphlet’

In the 1950s, Florida created a state legislative committee to target civil rights activists for allegedly having communist ties. It soon took on the task of stalking and outing queer people. Known as the “Johns Committee,” the group published a 50-page pamphlet titled “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida,” which accused gay men of being worse than “normal” child molesters and stated that the goal of gay men was to “recruit” “normal” children.

1977: Anita Bryant exhorts the right to ‘Save Our Children’

In response to a Dade County, Florida, ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, singer and former Miss Oklahoma Anita Bryant founded the “Save Our Children” campaign, which promoted the idea that “homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit … the youth of America.” The ordinance was repealed, and states including Oklahoma and Arkansas followed suit by banning gay and lesbian people from teaching in public schools. (Activists responded to Bryant with pies to the face.)

1978: California defeats proposal to ban gay teachers

Following Bryant’s lead, California legislator John Briggs led a ballot proposition to to ban gay and lesbian people from working in public schools. The proposition, called the Briggs Initiative, failed, but still won 41.6% of the vote.

1977-78: The FBI’s “Sex Deviates” program goes up in flames

Between 1951 and 1977, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI collected more than 350,000 pages of personal information about gay and lesbian Americans under the so-called “Sex Deviates Program. Hoover justified this enormous invasion of privacy – and the harassment suffered by its subjects – by claiming that gay men were a threat to children and the FBI had a responsibility to warn Americans about them. Many of these files were destroyed in 1977-8. Though Hoover was rumored to be gay, Hoover’s War on Gays author Douglas Charles has said that there’s a “lack of evidence” to support this theory.

1980s: America's forgotten day care panic

How does a totally baseless fear of widespread child abuse explode into a full-blown moral panic? This is the question Richard Beck poses in his book We Believe the Children, which tells the story of the child abuse panics of the 1980s, focusing primarily on the McMartin preschool trial in California. In that case, prosecutors alleged that the school’s founders had committed hundreds of acts of sexual abuse on the children in their care. Despite lasting for seven years, and being one of the most expensive trials in U.S. history, the trial did not lead to any convictions. Beck blamed the moral panic in part on right-wing conservatives worried about the death of the patriarchal nuclear family. At the time, more women were taking jobs outside of the home, and relying more heavily on child care.

2000s: Bryant’s influence continues in the Defense of Marriage Act and the rise of QAnon

Will Anita Bryant ever fade away as an anti-LGBT icon? In the 2000s, Bryant’s refrain to “save the children” was revived in an effort to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, which ensured the right to marriage for same-sex couples. (According to homophobic critics, marriage equality would lead to more adoptions by gay couples.) Bryant’s tagline was also an early inspiration for QAnon, an online conspiracy movement that maintains (without evidence) that Democrats and Hollywood liberals are trafficking and abusing children.

2016-2020: A viral QAnon-led lie about sex trafficking hurts real kids

First there was Pizzagate, then there was “Save the Children,” and then the Wayfair conspiracy, which maintained that children were secretly being trafficked through a furniture website. They weren’t, but that didn’t mean that nobody got hurt – the incredible speed with which this disinformation spread across the internet ended up ruining people’s lives. As right-wing conspiracies continue to run rampant online, QAnon devotees have doubled down on baseless theories about child sex trafficking as a way of promoting a homophobic agenda.