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“Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles,” Reagan wrote in a column in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner just before the election. It was probably not the work of Gearhart and Milk that won the day so much as a late-in-the-game statement opposing the ballot measure by a former governor and future president, Ronald Reagan, according to Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney in “Out for Good,” their history of the gay rights movement in America. In the end, the people of California voted down Proposition 6 by a large majority. But before cutting Briggs too much slack, remember that he wasn’t just spouting conventional wisdom he was leading the pack. There’s much heated discussion these days on whether people from earlier eras can be forgiven their backward political views because they were just reflecting what everyone believed in their day. (Interestingly, Gearhart was cut out of the 2008 film starring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, and some of her debate lines were apparently rewritten and given to Milk - in a case of what some have described as “lesbian erasure.”)īriggs died recently too, in April 2020, also at age 90. In a televised debate, Gearhart asked Briggs why he wanted to remove homosexuals from schools “when it is more than overwhelmingly true that it is the heterosexual men … that are the child molesters?”īriggs tried to brush that off as “a myth.”īut Gearhart cited the FBI, the National Council on Family Relations, the Santa Clara County Child Abuse and Sexual Treatment Center, among others. You can write Briggs off as a nut or a Neanderthal, but in fact he represented millions of people in California. “Believe it or not,” said Briggs, “right now in California, a teacher can stand up in the classroom and say he is homosexual and introduce his wife, Harry, and not a single thing can be done about it.” Gearhart and Harvey Milk, the San Francisco supervisor assassinated just weeks after the Proposition 6 election, were the co-chairs of the campaign to defeat it. Briggs, an Orange County Republican, the initiative would have made it illegal for gays and lesbians to teach in California’s public schools. The brainchild, if you can call it that, of State Sen. In 1978, Proposition 6 roiled California, pitting the gay rights movement against the state’s moralists and fearmongers.
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Her death last month at age 90 was also a reminder of the state’s epic battle over Proposition 6 - the so-called Briggs Initiative, which I had mostly forgotten about but in which Gearhart played an outsize role. “Crackpottery,” this newspaper called it. In the 1980s, she championed real-life technologies that might allow women to have babies - girl babies - without the meddling of men. In the 1970s, she published a science-fiction novel about women living apart from men in a rural feminist utopia. Gearhart was a radical feminist separatist, a communications professor, a Bay Area force of nature, a writer and outspoken gay rights activist. Sally Miller Gearhart’s death is a reminder of an era that seems both terribly remote and shockingly recent.