The Supposed Danger of Gay Educators

"Don't Say Gay" Wasn't the First Bill of It's Kind

This week, I had a super fun time exploring the life of gay activist and dedicated GOP member Reverend Raymond Broshears. If you haven’t heard it yet go listen to it either on your podcatcher of choice or on YouTube.

Sadly, the Broshears archive is sitting undigitized in a box somewhere in California. So today, I thought I would continue the story of the Log Cabin Republicans and the bill that galvanized the group: California Proposition 6, also known as the Briggs Initiative.

The newly founded “Lincoln Republicans” and the “Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights” (CRIR) kicked into high gear to get Prop 6 defeated, alongside older, more lefty organizations like the “Society for Individual Rights” (SIR).

What these gay Republicans might have lacked in organizational history, they made up for in connections. There was (and probably still is) no lack of closeted homosexuals working for the GOP. These were the people the Lincoln Republicans and CRIR could organize. For the most part, that looked like asking Republican lawmakers to neither endorse nor support Prop 6.

It wasn’t entirely absurd to think that there were closeted GOP staffers who would be unwilling to come out of the closet but willing to help the “No on 6” initiative. While the GOP certainly contained culture warriors like Anita Bryant, there were many more libertarian-minded Republicans who believed that small government applied to all aspects of life, even things they might disagree with.

You can have a little Anita Bryant getting a pie in the face. As a treat.

David Mixner, who was a Democrat running the Southern California operations for “No on 6,” is the one who got the most valuable endorsement from the GOP.

Through an absolutely wild chain of “I know a guy,” he got in touch with a closeted staffer for Ronald Reagan, the perpetual presidential candidate.

(This network involved Nancy Reagan’s gay florist, which really shows it mostly about who you know)

This closeted staffer got Mixner a meeting with Reagan, giving him the opportunity to present the future president with all the Republican-friendly arguments against Prop 6 gay Republicans had developed over the past months.

Most of these arguments amounted to pointing out that this vaguely worded bill could put straight teachers in danger should a student want to take revenge for a bad grade or if they spoke in support of gay rights in their private lives. There was also the money argument, that enforcing this would be wildly expensive, especially given that there was already a mechanism in place to punish teachers who behaved inappropriately in the classroom.

The Gipper was the hero of Prop 6, just proving what they say about stopped clocks.

Prop 6 was defeated largely because of Reagan’s open opposition to it, but today, we are seeing a resurgence of this concern around gay teachers in the classroom.

The arguments are different this time around, though. The opposition to “Don’t Say Gay” focused on the health and safety of LGBTQ+ children who wouldn’t see their identities represented. The safety of children is, of course, of paramount concern, but as this fight continues, I have to wonder if we might take a page from Mixner’s book.

Speak the language of the opposition, and find some unexpected allies. More people are reasonable than the internet has led us to believe.

Anyway, just for fun, here is Matt Gaetz getting a drink thrown at him.

Not that I would ever endorse such a thing.