Column: She helped win an early fight for gay rights. Now it feels like history is repeating

Gwenn Craig made her manner slowly via the foyer of a beachfront landmark, previous the colourful Melancholy-era murals to the elevator and a desk upstairs for 2.

She got here to debate historical past of a newer and private nature, and how one can prevail in sure battles however by no means cease having to battle.

“That’s what leaves me typically so exhausted,” the 70-year-old Craig stated, as waves unfurled within the ocean beneath. “It doesn’t matter what, it’s fixed. You possibly can’t simply say, ‘We gained the battle, and now we will relaxation.’”

In 1978, Craig helped lead the battle in opposition to Proposition 6, a California poll measure that may have banned gays and lesbians from working in public faculties. Although it began out main in polls, the measure misplaced overwhelmingly in one of many first main electoral victories for the homosexual rights motion.

Now, with lawmakers throughout the nation passing legal guidelines to limit what academics can say about sexual orientation and the way mother and father can have interaction with their transgender kids, it appears as if occasions, if not precisely repeating, are touring full circle and touchdown with blunt pressure.

“There’s a good portion of the nation that simply desires to show again the clock,” Craig stated, “to make issues like they was, and that features how they used to have the ability to deal with homosexual folks and the way homosexual folks was considered, the place homosexual folks was in, which suggests subordinate, hidden, repressed.”

Like many, Craig got here to San Francisco within the mid-Nineteen Seventies to search out herself.

She was born in Atlanta, went to school in Chicago and was drawn to San Francisco by, along with the not-snowy climate, its popularity for tolerance and openness. It was, Craig stated, “a spot the place you might be whoever you wished to be,” together with, in her case, a 24-year-old simply starting to discover her sexual orientation.

At the moment, same-sex marriage is enshrined in legislation. An brazenly homosexual man, Pete Buttigieg, serves as Transportation secretary within the Biden administration. There are brazenly homosexual members of Congress, homosexual chief executives, homosexual sports activities stars, and on. So it might be laborious, Craig stated, for many who weren’t round to understand the way it was for somebody like herself.

“The overwhelming majority of homosexual folks weren’t out of the closet,” she stated. “They weren’t out to their employer, they weren’t out to their co-workers, they weren’t out to their household. They usually had been very petrified about folks discovering out.”

In 1977, in Dade County, Fla., singer and citrus-industry pitchwoman Anita Bryant led a profitable effort to repeal an ordinance barring discrimination primarily based on sexual orientation. She drew nationwide consideration and stoked the fears of Craig and others who informally gathered to debate copycat efforts and methods to battle again.

Craig was loud and passionate, she stated, so she was chosen to function one of many spokeswomen for San Francisco’s homosexual group. Not realizing what that meant, Craig turned to an up-and-coming political activist with a penchant for grabbing publicity.

She recalled visiting Harvey Milk at his digital camera store within the Castro District, town’s homosexual haven, and the way “he swept me into the again room and, boy, began giving me tons of knowledge. He started mentoring me.”

By the point Proposition 6 certified for the November 1978 poll, Milk was a member of the Board of Supervisors, the primary brazenly homosexual elected official in California historical past. He turned a statewide chief of the “No on 6” effort and made Craig co-chair of the San Francisco marketing campaign.

The initiative was the work of John Briggs, a far-right state senator from Orange County who — armed with Bryant’s contributor record — hoped to launch himself into the governor’s workplace.

The marketing campaign he waged was scathing and uncooked. Briggs claimed that being homosexual was a way of life selection, and an odious one at that. He stated homosexuality, because it was then recognized, was worse than communism as a result of it unfold “like a most cancers” via society and destroyed civilizations. He claimed that massive numbers of academics had been secretly homosexual and baby predators.

The measure was defeated, 58% to 42%, thanks in no small half to the opposition of former Gov. Ronald Reagan, who joined President Carter, former President Ford and Gov. Jerry Brown in urging Californians to vote “no.”

“Homosexuality shouldn’t be a contagious illness just like the measles,” Reagan wrote within the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner days earlier than the election. “Prevailing scientific opinion is that a person’s sexuality is set at a really early age and {that a} baby’s academics do probably not affect this.”

(An embittered Briggs blamed the measure’s defeat on “cocktail Republicans” with homosexual mates in Hollywood and predicted that Reagan was “completed as a nationwide politician.”)

However the celebration for Craig and different Proposition 6 opponents was short-lived. Lower than a month after its defeat, Milk was assassinated by former Supervisor Dan White, who embodied the forces resisting the rising clout of gays, lesbians and others lengthy denied energy and illustration at Metropolis Corridor.

It took a very long time, Craig stated, earlier than she may watch information footage of that day with out crying.

Outdoors, the solar broke via the late-morning fog shrouding the Seashore Chalet on the sting of Golden Gate Park.

Milk would have been amazed on the progress the homosexual rights motion achieved over the previous 40 years, Craig stated, as she stirred cream in her espresso. He additionally would have been disheartened, she stated — if not altogether stunned — at how the LGBTQ+ group is once more being focused and stigmatized by politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Texas counterpart, Greg Abbott, who’ve eyes on greater workplace.

Milk would have believed, she stated, that the battle for recognition and respect was gained, however not over. He thought that by popping out folks would notice that gays and lesbians “are your little kids, your pals and neighbors … the folks sitting subsequent to you in church pews and on the bus, not the devils we had been made out to be.”

“Individuals have seen ‘Will & Grace,’ and that was a very long time in the past,” Craig stated with a deep giggle, referring to the TV sitcom with two beloved homosexual characters. “They’ve seen the films and the TV exhibits. They’ve learn the books. It’s too late. I don’t assume persons are going to return.”

Even when some politicians consider that’s the best way to maneuver themselves ahead.