This is an essay on Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs. Listen to the season here.
It’s hard not to feel a little jealous of gay San Francisco in the 1970s. Those years were a time of rapid growth for the queer mecca of the Western world: Between 1972 and 1977, the city gained 100,000 new LGBTQ+ residents, about a seventh of its entire population. Centered in the Castro, a neighborhood that quickly evolved into a hub of gay life, the queer community in San Francisco was robust enough, dense enough, and resourceful enough to create its own small city within a city.
In the 1970s, TV networks were running some of the first big reports on gay people (and growing gayborhoods like the Castro). They had the vibe of a National Geographic safari. At that time, the concept of gay rights was so new to most Americans that reporters still had to explain to their audiences what it meant. But curiosity was starting to replace the previous decades’ contempt.
The mainstream coverage had one major benefit: Gay people across the country were learning that there were places where they could live full, integrated lives, with friends and art and love and sex and some hope of an eventual approximation of civil rights. On any given night in San Francisco, you could visit one or more of the dozens of lesbian and gay bars, women’s cafés, and bathhouses in the city. You could order a cheese omelet at a diner at 3 a.m. and end up sitting at a table with Sylvester, the gay disco icon. The Cockettes, a psychedelics-fueled drag ensemble, were doing midnight shows with glitter in their beards and their genitals hanging out. People attempted new methods of mutual aid and new structures for their sexual relationships. There was a sense that whatever gays were doing in San Francisco would shape a broader American gay culture and, quite possibly, change the world.
But gay life in the 1970s was also difficult, to an extent that is hard to imagine for queer people like me, who came of age in the 21st century. Gay sex wasn’t just viewed by some with scorn and disgust—it was illegal in most U.S. states (including California, until 1975). These sodomy bans provided the rationale for rampant police harassment and mass arrests. And entire professions were closed off to openly gay people, who were presumed criminals as long as the laws were in place.
In those years, there were lots of gays in heterosexual marriages, leading double lives. Queer kids in small cities could grow up not even knowing that there were others out there like them. Suicidality was extraordinarily common, even in the gayest city in America. And groups of straight men would routinely descend on the Castro and its surrounding neighborhoods to assault gay people for sport—and occasionally kill them, as in the case of a 33-year-old gay man named Robert Hillsborough, who was murdered in 1977.
There were two sides of the gay experience in 1970s San Francisco: a sense of fear and persecution on one hand, and a sense of growth, power, and possibility on the other.
In this season of Slow Burn, I tell the story of an event that brought those two sides crashing together: the campaign against the Briggs Initiative. The ballot proposition sought to ban lesbians and gays from working in California public schools, and the danger it posed to gay life became a rallying cry for a sprawling, infighting, joyous, making-it-up-as-we-go movement, led in part by Harvey Milk, that coalesced in an attempt to defeat it.
The Briggs Initiative—named for John Briggs, the conservative state senator who proposed it—was born of the pernicious lie that gay people are predisposed to abuse children or recruit them into a lifestyle of moral depravity. It would turn out to be a critical crossroads for the gay liberation movement, and not just because it triggered the first statewide vote on gay rights.
The proposition came in the midst of a rising anti-gay backlash that was sweeping the country, stirred up by social conservatives in response to the growing political power and cultural visibility of gay people. As it was put to a popular vote in the biggest and gayest state in the country, the Briggs Initiative was seen by the religious right and gay activists alike as a trial balloon that would test how far that backlash could go. The urgency of the threat forced thousands of gay people who’d never previously considered themselves political to get angry and get active in defense of their own rights. It inspired thousands more to come out of the closet—as a political act in a bid for equal treatment, and as a personal act in pursuit of a full, vibrant life.
The six months I spent immersed in this story transformed my relationship to queer history. For one thing, it’s given me a much more intimate understanding of what gay life was like for the people who fought the Briggs Initiative. When some of them first realized they were gay, they had heard about gay people only in the context of criminal behavior reported in the news. In pop culture, lesbians and gays were either malicious abusers or tragic figures leading sad, isolated lives. Few people in positions of high regard—doctors, lawyers, teachers—were out as gay. Young gay people often found it impossible to imagine a life for themselves. Their futures looked empty.
This is all fairly recent history. Some of the people you’ll hear from in Slow Burn are younger than my parents. But the gay worlds we came up in feel lifetimes apart.
I remember the exact moment in college when I realized that this thing I’d thought I was just trying on for size—dating women—might actually be a thing I wanted to do forever. The future I had imagined for myself since childhood suddenly seemed less solid, then started to slip away. But despite the abrupt sense that I was coming unmoored from my own life—and despite all the hard things I immediately knew I’d have to do, like come out to a family whose reactions I could not predict—my strongest emotion in that moment was excitement. This was about 15 years ago; there were fewer gay rights then, and queer women were not yet the hypervisible, pop culture–shaping force we are today. Even so, I trusted that I’d find my place. I knew I’d be able to make a life for myself that felt fulfilling and free.
There are a lot of reasons for the rapid pace of change that created such different experiences for me and the people I interviewed in the making of this podcast. The fact that the gay community is represented across every race, gender, and class—and, thus, includes wealthy white men—is one thing that led to the shift in public opinion, the statutory changes, and the court victories that have made it safer and easier to be gay. But it is also because of the relentless, risky, oftentimes punishing work of queer activists in the 1970s that some part of me knew in the 2000s, in my destabilizing moment of gay revelation, that I’d get to live my big, beautiful gay life today.
Making this season of Slow Burn also gave me a more intimate connection to the people who made that life possible. In the hours I spent listening to archival tape, there were times when I felt a deep recognition of and kinship with the gay people speaking to me across the distance of 45 years. The droll one-liners. The fiery speeches. The cheeky protest chants. (“Ho-ho-homosexual / The ruling class is ineffectual!”) The capacity for self-knowledge that comes only with asserting an identity you’ve claimed outside the norm, rather than one you’ve passively received through social conditioning. It’s all part of a lineage that has connected generations of queer people, and outlived many of the voices I heard in those tapes, even as so much else has changed, including the very words we use to label our community and describe who we are.
I was particularly charmed by one coincidence that seemed to shrink the timeline between the Briggs era and today. It happened this January, when I took a trip San Francisco to visit the GLBT Historical Society’s archives, the source of much of that precious archival tape. I’d also scheduled an interview with Cleve Jones—a longtime activist, a magnificent storyteller, and Harvey Milk’s former intern.
When Cleve and I sat down to talk, he told me about all the San Francisco gay bars he remembered from the 1970s: a cowboy bar for line dancing; a place where lesbians played pool and got in fights; a “whole district” of leather bars; and his favorite, the Stud, where the hippie kids hung out. He also mentioned a bar called Twin Peaks in the Castro. It’s still open today—one of the oldest gay bars in the country and supposedly the first to have plate-glass windows facing the sidewalk, revealing the patrons to passersby.
“I used to make fun of that bar because it was full of older men, and we would call it ‘the Glass Coffin’ or ‘the Wrinkle Room,’ ” Cleve told me. “And, of course, now it’s one of my favorite watering holes.”
I told Cleve that I’d actually had a drink with a former lover at Twin Peaks the night before. (Staying friends with our exes: another element of the queer tradition that’s still going strong.) It turned out that he’d been there at the same time, probably just down the bar from me. We didn’t clock each other because we’d never met, but 16 hours later, we were shedding tears together, reliving some of the most tender, painful, and celebratory memories of Cleve’s life.
It was a silly little happenstance. But to me, it felt like a reminder. Physical spaces where the gay past lives on in the present, like Twin Peaks, are precious. And also: The echoes of queer history are all around us, all the time, even when we don’t know they’re there.
Listen to Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs
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