| 'I have a vision and you are
part of it'
In 1988, protestors with ACT-UP, a radical gay rights and AIDS awareness organization, organized one of their most controversial demonstrations. Their members barged into St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York and began pouring wine over the church floor--disrupting a communion service being presided over by Cardinal John O'Connor. Four years later, Bill Clinton was fighting to become the first Democratic president in more than a decade. His challenge was to reach out to a broad coalition of both liberal and moderate interest groups, and to get them to work together in spite of their differences. Given the political circumstances of the day, it might have seemed strange that Clinton would reach out to the gay and lesbian community. They had been favored targets of the right wing during the culture wars of the eighties, and the in-your-face tactics of gay rights groups like ACT-UP could easily have divided the already tenuous Democratic coalition. But Clinton invited gays and lesbians into the fold. He was the first presidential candidate to attend a fundraiser hosted by a gay organization. At a Los Angeles fundraiser in 1992, he made a promise to his gay and lesbian reporters: "I have a vision and you are part of it." It was an unprecedented move. Throughout the nation's history, the political establishment had ostracized gays and lesbians. If the sixties brought free love and opened people to the idea of non-heterosexual love, mainstream society continued to look askance at homosexuality and bisexuality, and no respectable politician would cater to the gay vote. At best, gays and lesbians were perverts; at worse, they were predators out to convert children. Such was the argument that demagogues like Anita Bryant could make, with great success, in her "Save Our Children" campaign of 1977, which overturned an anti-discrimination law in Miami that protected gays and lesbians. The eighties were a time of crisis for gays and lesbians. President Reagan never gave a major speech on AIDS, the epidemic that was decimating portions of the gay male community. Conservative commentators viciously attacked gays and lesbians on the airwaves, calling them a danger to children. Clinton helped change the national outlook. At a time when it was not politically convenient, he made the bold move of including gays and lesbians in his campaign. And early in his administration, he showed a willingness to fight for gay rights--most visibly, in his attempt to allow gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military. That effort soon evolved into a half-hearted compromise--the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy--and has since been widely derided as one of the failures of the Clinton administration; nevertheless, no other president in American history had ever made the attempt. Later in his presidency, Clinton backed away from his support for gay rights. Assailed by the conservative majorities in Congress, he reluctantly signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996--and then proceeded to trumpet this move while campaigning in the Bible Belt later that election year. But to this day, many gay and lesbian political activists continue to hold the former president in high esteem, pointing to the bold steps he took early on in his administration. "Bill Clinton did something no leader in government has ever done before: He put gay and lesbian issues on the national radar. That is a big, big deal," Elizabeth Birch, the director of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), told USA Today. It cannot be denied that gay rights moved mainstream during Clinton's tenure. For the first time, gays and lesbians had a serious place at the table of political power in Washington. And as the mass media became more receptive to stories about gay life, politicians could not as easily dismiss gay and lesbian voters as an immoral group of people seeking special status. Republicans took note of the increasing political visibility of gays and lesbians, and their attacks grew fewer and weaker. In 1996, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole sent back a donation from a gay G.O.P. organization; four years later, Texas Governor George W. Bush agreed to meet with his state's chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans. The move made pragmatic sense for Bush: it did not help his father in the 1992 presidential election when that same group withheld their support, stung by the vicious attacks on gays and lesbians at the G.O.P. convention in Houston that year. 'I have a vision and you are part of it' |