Wesley G Phelps. Journal of Southern History. Volume 84, Issue 2. May 2018.
On a warm, humid October afternoon in 1985, former Houston mayor Louie Welch stood outside Kaphan’s Restaurant, near the Astrodome. As crew members from the local ABC affiliate Channel 13 set up equipment, Welch chatted jovially with the men, anticipating the interview that would run on the station’s 5:00 p.m. broadcast. Nineteen eighty-five was an election year in Houston, and Welch, who had served as Houston’s mayor from 1964 to 1974, eagerly sought to get back into the game. His decision to return to politics after a profitable decade in the private sector centered on challenging the popular incumbent, Kathy Whitmire, who in 1981 had become the first woman elected to the mayor’s office in Houston’s history. Welch hoped to build on his earlier political career, which had focused on the sunny and bipartisan theme of promoting the city’s growing economy and business-friendly environment. In this new chapter, however, he also hoped to combine that earlier economic focus with the current reality of a city divided by volatile social issues.
During this particular television interview, Welch planned to discuss his four-point plan to combat the spread of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in Houston. As the former mayor stood in front of the camera waiting for the broadcast to begin, he continued to engage in small talk with the camera operator, even joking that he could only remember two of the four points in the proposal. When another off-camera individual laughed and asked him to try to remember just one of his points, Welch quipped that the first point in his plan to curb the spread of AIDS would be “to shoot the queers.” Little did he know that the broadcast had just gone live to his remote location, and his gaffe was televised across the city of Houston.
Welch’s public blunder was certainly not the first antigay remark uttered during the campaign. Houstonians had been involved in an intense and emotional debate about sexuality and citizenship since the previous year, when the city council approved amending the city’s nondiscrimination and affirmative action ordinances to add sexual orientation to the list of reasons a person could not be denied employment. During the ensuing months, there had been a campaign and public referendum to overturn the council’s action. Antigay activists had likewise launched a political campaign, known as the Straight Slate, aimed at unseating Mayor Whitmire and all the city council members who had voted in favor of the amendments. Despite it being said as a joke, Welch’s utterance reflected just how hate-filled the campaign had become by the fall of 1985.
An analysis of this episode in Houston’s recent history is critical to a fuller understanding of the role sexuality has played—and continues to play—in municipal politics. In 1970 New York City activists introduced the nation’s first municipal bill to protect the employment rights of gays and lesbians, sparking a wave of activism supporting similar initiatives in cities and small towns across the country. Despite the significance of this political movement, as historian Kevin J. Mumford has recently argued, historians have not paid enough attention to the ways these local battles played out over the subsequent two decades. This lack of analysis seems particularly true for this period in the American South, where there remains a need for more work on gay and lesbian political activism generally, and particularly in the post-1970s period. An examination of Houston’s own battle over a pair of nondiscrimination amendments in the mid-1980s reveals not only the contours of local politics but also the significant influence that gays and lesbians have had on the development of the city. As historian Timothy Stewart-Winter has argued in his groundbreaking study of Chicago, gays and lesbians have exerted significant influence on the reshaping of American cities in the second half of the twentieth century. This has certainly been the case in Houston. Moreover, Houstonians continue to battle over the politics of sexuality. In 2001 and again in 2015, additional protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender citizens that had been approved by Houston’s city council were overturned by public referenda following vicious opposition campaigns. During the most recent debate, opponents attacked a provision protecting the right of transgender persons to use public restrooms that matched their gender identity. By playing up fears of rapists and pedophiles gaining access to women’s restrooms, opponents marshaled public support to overturn the provision. Despite the glaring absence of evidence that the adoption of similar protections in other cities had led to increased crime rates in women’s restrooms, opponents dubbed the equal rights ordinance the “Sexual Predator Protection Act” in their successful effort to repeal the law. As a result, despite being the largest American city to have had an openly gay or lesbian mayor in Annise Parker, Houston also remains the largest city in the nation with no municipal protections to prevent private employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender expression.
A common narrative theme uniting these battles over the past three decades illuminates the particular ways neoliberalism has affected the political landscape of the urban South during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As an ideology, neoliberalism gained traction in the United States during the 1970s as Americans displaced by a faltering national economy and the global disruption of resources cast blame on New Deal/Great Society social and economic policies. Described by historian Lisa Duggan as a “secular faith,” neoliberalism exalts the mythic free market, shuns progressive taxation and government regulation of industry, urges the privatization of public services, and reduces citizens to consumers whose rights and interests can most effectively be pursued in the capitalist marketplace. Anthropologist and geographer David Harvey has argued that neoliberalism “proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” In the neoliberal worldview, inequalities are simply the natural result of hardworking and industrious individuals appropriately reaping the rewards of the free market while the lazy and idle fall behind. As a result of neoliberalism’s development, the distribution of wealth and power has shifted upward, concentrating these resources into the hands of a relatively small group of elites.
An important social and cultural component of the development of neoliberalism is directly relevant to the fight over gay and lesbian employment discrimination in Houston during the 1980s. In his recent study of the transformation of American democracy since the 1960s, historian Robert O. Self links the rise of neoliberalism to the politicization of the American family. As an increasing number of minority groups demanded equal citizenship rights beginning in the late 1960s, Self shows, a countermovement emerged in the 1970s determined to defend what its members perceived as traditional moral values. While many observers have referred to this conflict as the culture wars, Self reveals how these debates over family values intersected with neoliberal economic goals. According to Self, “The conservative notion of family values fundamentally changed the frame of debate about rights, public policy, and citizenship and. … legitimated the transition to a neoliberal ethos in American life. … The result was a political culture for a new age, one defined by the resurgence of laissez-faire market principles, a diminished welfare state, and a citizen whose nominal ‘freedom’ was in no need of measures to protect that freedom.” An important and lasting consequence of this new neoliberal ethos, which was being fashioned in the midst of Houston’s battle over employment protections during the 1980s, was “to subject more and more aspects of national life to market forces,” including even the desirability of full equality for gay and lesbian Americans.
In a related way, much of the rhetoric about gay and lesbian equality in the past few decades has focused on the relative meaninglessness of sexual orientation in the public sphere, a shift many historians have missed. This strategy, used frequently by both gay and lesbian rights advocates and their opponents, serves to downplay any significant differences between sexual minorities and the larger society. Such an approach certainly mutes any direct challenges to mainstream heteronormative culture and accordingly mirrors a larger trend in American politics that some historians have noted primarily with regard to race. According to historian Matthew D. Lassiter, many white Americans in the 1960s and 1970s developed a color-blind ideology in their attempts to resist the goals of the civil rights movement, particularly the use of busing to achieve school desegregation. This moderate path (as opposed to a path of massive resistance) assumed that race simply no longer mattered—or should not matter—in American politics. Lassiter has shown that “the suburban parents who joined the antibusing movement charted their own middle path between the caste framework of white supremacy and the egalitarian agenda of redistributive liberalism.” Even southern progressives adopted this color-blind ideology in order to appeal to white moderates.
Reflecting a similar motivation, the debate over the nondiscrimination amendments in Houston shows the emergence of a sexuality-blind ideology, or what I am calling an ideology of queer disidentification, based on the presumption that one’s sexual orientation simply was no longer relevant in the mythical free market. Just as the color-blind ideology that Lassiter has identified provided white moderates a middle course between massive resistance and full racial equality, this new sexuality-blind ideology of queer disidentification charted a moderate path between extreme hatred of gays and lesbians on one hand and the full acceptance of them as queer individuals on the other. Many moderates who subscribed to this ideology were willing to accept gay and lesbian individuals in the public sphere, and some were even open to guaranteeing certain specific legally protected rights, but in return they demanded that these individuals disidentify with their queerness. In an attempt to reprivatize sexual identity, moderates wished to make the personal less political and to push gay and lesbian people back into their metaphorical closets. Many also simultaneously wanted to appear as allies to the movement for gay and lesbian civil rights. The limitations of both ideologies were also similar: the color-blind ideology failed to account for structural and institutional racism, while the queer disidentification ideology did not anticipate the structural and institutional biases inherent to a heteronormative society. Both ideologies also served to maintain the status quo of discrimination and privilege. While the color-blind ideology effectively shut down conversations about racial justice and helped prop up white privilege, the ideology of queer disidentification closed off discussions of social justice and human rights and worked to perpetuate heterosexual privilege.
This episode in Houston’s past represents a vivid example of how neoliberalism constrains social justice movements and illustrates the corrosive effects of an ideology of queer disidentification on struggles for gay and lesbian equality. Most important, it reveals a larger point about the nature of American politics and the potential for social change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The ideology of neoliberalism and the primacy of market concerns serve to limit both the stated goals and the proposed tactics of movements for social justice by confining the desired outcomes within the boundaries of economic efficiency and business profitability, often drowning out radical voices and privileging moderate-conservative solutions that fail to address root causes. At their core, these neoliberal and disidentification appeals for rights couched in terms of the free market are conservative in that any changes effected would be limited to those benefits business leaders and economic elites could reap without upsetting the status quo too much. To be clear, the neoliberal rhetoric used during the Houston campaign most likely did not cause the amendments to fail, particularly because an employment non-discrimination ordinance was itself primarily a goal that fit neatly into the neoliberal framework. What is significant, however, is that even had amendment supporters emerged victorious, their acceptance of the dominant neoliberal framework and an ideology of queer disidentification already precluded any chance of transforming the limited goal of public employment protections into a larger struggle for justice and a broader movement for equality. As this episode in Houston’s recent history shows, the relentless force of neoliberalism and the ideology of queer disidentification placed severe constraints on what social justice and human rights advocates even imagined to be possible or desirable.
Related to the constraints of neoliberalism and queer disidentification, Houston’s gay and lesbian activists and their allies succumbed to what historian John D’Emilio has termed a “retreat to respectability.” In his classic work Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, D’Emilio explores early gay and lesbian political activists, such as those who joined the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, finding substantial tension between those who highlighted their differences from and minority status within the larger culture and those who emphasized assimilation and accommodation. This tension reached the breaking point in the mid-1950s, when Mattachine leaders settled on a strategy of respectability and accommodation. “In sum,” D’Emilio concludes about this turning point, “accommodation to social norms replaced the affirmation of a distinctive gay identity, collective effort gave way to individual action, and confidence in the ability of gay men and lesbians to interpret their own experience yielded to the wisdom of experts.” To be sure, as D’Emilio hastens to point out, a more confrontational brand of gay and lesbian activism emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, when his study ends. In a study of gay and lesbian activism in Philadelphia, historian Marc Stein labels this new post-1960s approach “a politics of militant respectability,” which meant a continuing dedication to social acceptance and accommodation while simultaneously engaging in direct action. During the 1980s, however, with the important exception of radical tactics adopted by some AIDS activists, there seemed to be a retreat to the politics of respectability that had guided homophile organizations during the 1950s. The consequence of this retreat, according to historian Lisa Duggan, was that “lobbying, litigating, and fundraising replaced mass mobilization and public dissent as primary modes of activism for equality, even as the operative definition of ‘equality’ narrowed dramatically enough, in some liberal reformist circles, to make peace with neoliberalism.” The struggle over the nondiscrimination amendments in Houston illustrated this return to the politics of respectability among gay and lesbian activists, reflected the acceptance of a more limited interpretation of equality, and marked the adoption of a circumscribed set of tactics.
The development of the neoliberal ethos and the reverberations of the politics of respectability had a significant impact on cities in the American South, where by the 1970s boosters were fully engaged in the process of changing the image of their region, leaving behind what President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938 had called “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem” and embracing the Sun Belt, a place of low taxes, few regulations on industry, and a hostile attitude toward labor unions. In this process, southern urban boosters participated in what historian James C. Cobb has termed a deliberate “selling of the South” to lure potential business investment. This approach did not necessarily make southern cities exceptional, as public officials in cities across the United States had a long history of trying to attract outside investment as part of municipal economic development plans. Yet southern boosters seemed to be willing to go to extra lengths to convince outsiders to invest in the Sun Belt South.
Although Cobb does not include Houston in his analysis in any substantial way, the Texas city certainly fit the model. As many historians have observed, an elite group of local businessmen exerted a remarkable amount of influence over the character of Houston, infusing the populace with a near obsession with economic growth and attracting new business investment. It was no accident that Louie Welch, whose most recent position had been president of Houston’s chamber of commerce, emerged as the most visible spokesperson for the Straight Slate. As historian Robert Fisher has argued, Houston’s “development has been closely tied to the growth of the oil industry, the acceptance of an ideology of laissez-faire capitalism, and the leadership of a business oligarchy which has guided urban growth with the tacit support of most citizens.” Despite overwhelming support for this business-friendly approach, according to Fisher, “[s]erious social and public costs have accompanied the narrow focus on economic expansion and profit maximisation,” and as a result “alternative visions of urban policy have been dramatically limited in Houston.” Historian Barry J. Kaplan has stated the case more directly: “The private sector is the driving force in the city.” Fueling this growth-at-all-costs mentality has been a simmering anxiety among Houstonians about what sort of image of their city is projected to the rest of the nation, because, as Cobb has shown, controlling the national perception was required for successfully selling a southern city as hospitable to outside investors. By the 1980s, presenting a family-friendly city became an important part of selling Houston.
Both proponents and opponents of the nondiscrimination amendments used these anxieties about Houston’s national image in their respective campaigns. Opponents of the nondiscrimination ordinances who supported the Straight Slate warned that the business investment essential to the local economy would slacken if Houston became known as a haven for gays and lesbians. Supporters of the amendments used the same rationale to argue the opposite point. Failure to pass the amendments would send a message to potential business investors that Houston endorsed employment discrimination. Rather than focusing the terms of the conflict on the real and festering issues of hatred and discrimination, nearly all parties involved reduced the debate to a watered-down squabble about the city’s economic image in the eyes of the nation and its ability to attract new investment. Ultimately, this episode represented a missed opportunity for Houston’s gay and lesbian activists to break free from the constraints of neoliberalism, transform their struggle for a narrow vision of equality into a foundation for further political mobilization, and chart a future for the city focused on social justice and human rights.
The anxiety about Houston’s image and its ability to attract new business investment was particularly acute during the 1980s, when global economic changes caused a downturn in the city’s economic fortunes. Houston had a reputation by the early 1980s as being immune to the effects of economic volatility, since the city’s booming oil and gas industry had offered significant protection from market fluctuations since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Two developments in the early 1980s, however, shattered this economic complacence. The first shock came when the price of oil sharply declined in 1982-1983, mostly due to the decision of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to increase production, which drove down prices. By 1985, the price of a barrel of oil had fallen 32 percent, which had a negative ripple effect throughout the local Houston economy. Simultaneously, the U.S. dollar had become overvalued in international currency markets, rendering it difficult for Houston’s producers of oil-related machinery and equipment to compete. As urban sociologist Joe R. Feagin has demonstrated, “As a result of declining oil prices and the high dollar, local companies saw their balance sheets deteriorate significantly.” With earnings declining and investment dropping off, Houston businesses resorted to employment layoffs. In the oil tools and supply industry, for example, the number of total employees fell 46 percent in 1982-1983. By 1983, Houston’s unemployment rate reached 9.7 percent and was growing faster than in the rest of the nation. With the sharp downturn in the economy, it became especially crucial for Houston to attract new businesses in order to revive investment, reverse the unemployment trend, and diversify the local economy. It was into this political and economic milieu that gay and lesbian activists launched their effort to persuade the city council to add employment protections to the city’s existing nondiscrimination ordinance.
Houston’s gays and lesbians first ventured into city politics in the early 1970s with the founding of both a chapter of the Gay Liberation Front at the University of Houston in 1971 and a short-lived support group called the Promethean Society. It was not until local gay and lesbian activists created the Gay Political Caucus (GPC) in 1975, however, that local political elites began taking gays and lesbians seriously in municipal politics. By 1976, local political candidates had begun to seek the caucus’s open endorsement, and in that year’s election nineteen out of the twenty-eight GPC-endorsed candidates won their races. In 1981 Kathy Whitmire aggressively pursued the GPC endorsement in her mayoral campaign. Whitmire was running as an outsider against the elite business dominance of Houston’s municipal government, and she attempted to assemble an alternative political coalition that included African Americans, Latinos, white urban progressives, and gays and lesbians. Historian Timothy Stewart-Winter has revealed an earlier yet similar phenomenon in Chicago, as the breakdown of that city’s urban political machine after the debacle of the 1968 Democratic National Convention opened up a space for politicians who were willing to advance gay and lesbian rights. Stewart-Winter credits the black-gay coalition in particular for delivering a victory for Harold Washington in his 1983 mayoral run. Washington, like Whitmire, subsequently supported a municipal gay rights ordinance. After Whitmire’s victory, gay and lesbian Houstonians justifiably boasted that they had made a significant contribution to transforming local politics. It seemed a new day was dawning for Houston’s gay and lesbian community by the early 1980s, in which the politics of homo-phobia and hate might be safely left behind. “The endorsement of the Houston Gay Political Caucus now is sought by many candidates,” political reporter Nene Foxhall wrote in the Houston Chronicle in 1981, “and few, if any, officeholders or candidates risk public attacks on the homosexual lifestyle.” Even the New York Times took notice, marveling at how gay and lesbian Houstonians were now “a major political force in this city, whose image is so often associated with the Wild West.…[V]irtually all the major candidates take homosexuals’ political power seriously.”
During the 1970s, gay and lesbian political activists across the country began using their newfound power to persuade local government officials to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. Beginning with college towns in the early and mid-1970s, including the southern towns of Austin, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and continuing in large cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. local city councils approved employment protections for gays and lesbians, often with little public opposition. In a handful of large northeastern cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, where municipal unions resisted such efforts, mayors simply issued executive orders banning discrimination against gays and lesbians in city employment. Even public officials in the traditionalist stronghold of Tulsa, Oklahoma, passed a resolution in January 1977 stating that it was the policy of the city not to discriminate against employment applicants because of “sexual preference.” It seemed there was a growing trend to extend the protections afforded to other minority groups to a newly discovered minority—the gay and lesbian community.
As a result, when gay and lesbian activists in Miami pushed for a similar ordinance in their city, they anticipated little opposition. On January 18, 1977, the Dade County commissioners, the governing body for the county in which Miami was located, voted 5-3 in favor of adding “affectional or sexual preference” to the county’s ordinance that protected certain classes of individuals from discrimination in employment and housing. Contrary to what activists expected, however, an explosion of outrage emanated from the local media and a large group of Miami residents. Anita Bryant, a former Miss America beauty pageant contestant and the current celebrity spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission, fired off a letter condemning the changes to the ordinance. She argued that rather than ending discrimination, the new language would in fact “discriminat[e] against my children’s right to grow up in a healthy, decent community.” Within weeks she had created the Save Our Children campaign, dedicated to overturning the commissioners’ action. Using the public referendum process, Dade County voters rejected the commissioners’ action during a special election in June by a margin of more than two to one. Encouraged by the successful campaign, Bryant announced, “All America and all the world will hear what the people have said, and with God’s continued help, we will prevail in our fight to repeal similar laws throughout the nation which attempt to legitimize a lifestyle which is both perverse and dangerous to the sanctity of the family, dangerous to our children, dangerous to our freedom of religion and freedom of choice, dangerous to our survival as ‘one nation under God’!” The following year, Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign was instrumental in overturning nondiscrimination ordinances that protected gays and lesbians in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Wichita, Kansas. It seemed the optimism of the mid-1970s had been misplaced.
As many other cities were in the process of adding sexual orientation to their nondiscrimination policies, many Houstonians were beginning to become aware of the problems of employment discrimination and wrongful termination of gay and lesbian public employees in their own city. In June 1975 Harris County assistant treasurer Gary J. Van Ooteghem was closely following the newspaper coverage of Leonard Matlovich, an Air Force sergeant who had recently informed his military superiors that he was gay. After military officials discharged Matlovich because of his sexuality, editors at Time magazine published a lengthy piece on the rise of gay activism and made Matlovich the first openly gay man to appear on the magazine’s cover. As a gay man with a public sector job, Van Ooteghem was so moved by Matlovich’s story that he contacted him, traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet him, and even accompanied him to meetings with various members of Congress to discuss the constitutionality of the military’s ban on gays and lesbians. Upon his return to Houston, Van Ooteghem, who was then closeted at work, decided it was time to come out to his colleagues and superiors in the county government. In July 1975 Harris County treasurer Hartsell Gray fired Van Ooteghem after Van Ooteghem informed his supervisor that he was gay and expressed his intention to advocate for the civil rights of gays and lesbians during his regular meetings with the county commissioners. Undeterred, Van Ooteghem made his statement to the commissioners court that he was gay and urged officials to help protect gays and lesbians from discrimination. “Gray told me,” Van Ooteghem later reported, “that if I went and gave a speech—if I were then a known homosexual—that it would endanger his budget and he would lose staff over it. He thinks the commissioners are not going to tolerate county funds being paid to a homosexual—especially one in such a high position.” The American Civil Liberties Union represented Van Ooteghem in his subsequent court challenges demanding reinstatement, back pay, and legal fees, arguing that Gray had violated Van Ooteghem’s First Amendment right of free speech. Although a federal court ruled in Van Ooteghem’s favor in 1978, the case continued to bounce around the lower courts for several years. In 1985 a federal judge ordered Harris County to pay Van Ooteghem back pay and legal fees but did not order reinstatement because Hartsell Gray was no longer the county treasurer.
While Van Ooteghem’s case was working its way through the courts, another incident pointed to the discrimination many gays and lesbians faced in city employment. In June 1980 the general manager of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Council informed Lee Harrington, the council’s visitor development specialist, that he would be terminated from his position if he continued to pursue the presidency of the Gay Political Caucus. When Harrington went ahead with his campaign and was fired, he took his case to the Houston city council. Invoking the same justification used by Van Ooteghem, Harrington argued that city officials had violated his free speech rights. Many council members agreed and even delayed approving a $564,000 grant to the convention and visitors council until the problem was resolved. Harrington never returned to his position, but the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Council, under pressure from several city council members, modified its policy to discourage, rather than prohibit, employees from engaging in political activities.
Members of the GPC interpreted the Van Ooteghem and Harrington cases as victories for the city’s gay and lesbian community. Yet some caucus members worried about the free speech justification for these successes. These were only Houston’s highest-profile cases of employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, yet there were undoubtedly many more instances that went unreported because there was no formal policy protecting gay and lesbian employees and no established avenue to lodge a complaint. Should there not be a municipal ordinance banning discrimination against gays and lesbians in city employment and establishing a clear method to file charges and handle violators? Many GPC members thought so, although there was by no means a consensus within the caucus about the proper timing for introducing a nondiscrimination ordinance in Houston. Despite disagreements, in March 1983 GPC president Larry Bagneris met with Mayor Whitmire to discuss a possible amendment to add sexual orientation to the city’s equal opportunity statement. Despite Whitmire’s warning about a possible backlash, GPC member and longtime Houston activist Gregg Russell, acting without the support of the full caucus, drafted a proposal that summer for amending the city’s civil service ordinance to prohibit discrimination based on marital status and sexual orientation. Once Russell and other activists had introduced the idea, many GPC members who disagreed with the timing found themselves in an uncomfortable position. In April 1984 the entire slate of GPC officers and the board of directors, not wishing to appear to be against the idea of employment protections, presented the mayor with this proposal. Whitmire voiced support for the amendment and promised to bring it before the city council as soon as she could be certain there would be a sufficient number of votes to ensure passage.
Such support seemed to build over the next few months. On June 19, 1984, city council member Anthony W. Hall Jr. one of the four African American council members, introduced a proposal to amend the city’s civil service and affirmative action ordinances, adding sexual orientation to race, color, religion, age, disability, sex, and national origin as groups protected against discrimination in city employment. This pattern of strong African American support for gay and lesbian employment protections paralleled campaigns in other large cities, such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The support Whitmire had wanted materialized among the members of the city council; the amendment to the civil service code passed 9-6, and the amendment to the affirmative action ordinance passed 8-7. Many supporters were in attendance during the vote and expressed their approval, including former GPC president Lee Harrington, whose firing from the city’s visitors council had helped prompt passage of the amendments. “I’m gratified that the system worked,” Harrington said. “We worked hard on this trying to overcome the many, many myths about gay people.” A few days later, GPC vice president Thomas J. Coleman Jr. wrote an op-ed for the Houston Post in which he stressed the vital need for the amendments in the city of Houston, citing the Van Ooteghem case as a glaring example of why some form of employment protection for gays and lesbians was necessary. Coleman argued that “the reason for the long delays in resolving the Van Ooteghem case, as well as the strident opposition to the Houston City ordinance amendments, is the same: It is homophobia—the irrational fear of homosexuals and homosexuality. Regardless of the cause of homophobia—ignorance, religious fanaticism or anxiety about one’s own sexual identity—the effect on government employees is the same: justice delayed, justice denied.” This seemed to be another victory chalked up to the GPC and the gay and lesbian activists in Houston.
Yet newspaper accounts estimated that of the more than four hundred people packed into the council chambers on the day of the vote, most appeared to oppose the amendments. Several were members of the Ku Klux Klan, identified by their KKK T-shirts, who chanted “kill the queers” and “gas fags.” Another group held Bibles and sang renditions of “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “America the Beautiful.” A few opponents held signs that read “Did the City of Sodom Pass a Similar Ordinance?” and “Homosexuals are Evil.” Several protesters not only chanted slogans and wielded signs but also addressed the council directly. One opponent, Margaret Hotze, accused council members of being engaged in “an arrogant ploy to buy support from a particularly vocal element of Houston citizenry.” She argued that the passage of the amendments would encourage “pornographers, topless dancers, child abusers and necrophiliacs” to seek similar protections. Council member John Goodner, an opponent of the amendments, agreed with supporters that the city should not ask employment applicants about their sexual orientation. If the position included contact with children, however, Goodner was ready to draw the line. “I don’t want homosexuals being role models for our children,” he said. Opponents quickly launched a petition drive, collected many more than the necessary 30,000 signatures, and forced city officials to schedule a special referendum election for January 19, 1985, to decide the fate of the nondiscrimination amendments and potentially overturn the council’s action.
Local groups organized immediately for and against the propositions. Some of the most vocal supporters of the amendments were the city council members who had voted in favor of their passage. Council member and amendment supporter Eleanor Tinsley certainly believed the council had taken the proper action. “The central question is whether under our system of laws, should we afford equal protection of law to all persons, and I believe we should,” she commented. Her colleague Anthony Hall, sponsor of the amendments, stated, “The bottom line is that the city shouldn’t discriminate against anyone.” Council member George Greanias, whose district included the predominantly gay and lesbian Montrose neighborhood, spoke more explicitly of the economic ramifications of the amendment. Houston, he said, was “an open town” that should “value people for their ability to produce, to make money” regardless of an individual’s sexual orientation. This type of supportive rhetoric pleased many local gay and lesbian activists, who had come to expect that their political allies would advocate for an expansion of their rights in return for their community’s electoral support.
Yet in their exuberance over this support from public officials, activists failed to recognize that council members had defended the nondiscrimination amendments, already limited in scope, with a very circumscribed argument. Protecting gays and lesbians from employment discrimination, while certainly a worthwhile goal and capable of advancing the movement, however slightly, toward full equality, fit comfortably within the neoliberal framework because it ignored larger structural inequalities, particularly with regard to race and class. The fact that the sequence of events that prompted the introduction of the nondiscrimination amendments began with the firing of two white middle-class men from white-collar professional jobs reveals just how narrowly activists were conceptualizing the meaning of equality and justice. This was not the case in at least two other large cities—Chicago and Philadelphia—where gay and lesbian activists recognized the necessity of creating multiracial and multiclass coalitions in order to build support for their movements for justice. Activists in those cities successfully tied their grassroots movements to the larger black freedom struggle, attracting broad-based groups of supporters and laying the groundwork for further organizing after securing employment protections. Even in Atlanta, a city with many similarities to Houston, advocates for a gay and lesbian rights ordinance recognized the benefit of building their movement on the achievements of the African American civil rights struggle in the city. When Houston public officials justified their support of the amendments in circumscribed ways, perhaps activists were unable to recognize how that narrow language might constrain the entire movement for gay and lesbian rights in the city. Greanias’s statement of support, in particular, was limiting because the Montrose councilperson appealed most blatantly to a neoliberal market-driven argument and used the ideology of queer disidentification to make his point. The language public officials used to support the amendments, therefore, further constrained what was already a limited goal in the struggle for justice.
The stringent limitations of the pro-amendment campaign and the consequences of the advocates’ narrow language became increasingly apparent in the following weeks. As Whitmire and other elected officials placed more political capital behind protecting the amendments, professional political operatives and trained spokespersons quickly assumed leadership roles in the campaign. As a result, the pro-amendment rhetoric grew even more overtly moderate, particularly with regard to appeals for the inherent rights of gays and lesbians. The most important step in this moderating process occurred when Mayor Whitmire temporarily reassigned her primary political adviser and campaign manager, Clintine Cashion, to the project of encouraging Houston voters to approve the amendments. By the end of the year, Cashion was devoting the majority of her time to solidifying a campaign strategy that fit within the parameters of the neoliberal ethos and rested on an ideology of queer disidentification. In a memorandum drafted in December, Cashion laid out a clear strategy to guide the campaign. In Cashion’s view, there were three equal groups of potential voters in the referendum election: (1) staunch pro-amendment voters; (2) equally staunch anti-amendment voters; and (3) indifferent voters who were uncomfortable being asked either to support or to oppose gays and lesbians. Beyond mobilizing the first group and making sure they showed up at the polls, Cashion argued for prioritizing the third group of potential voters. “Those voters in the one third of likely voters that is indifferent to and uncomfortable with the issue,” Cashion stated, “must be persuaded that, on balance, their most appropriate vote is to support” the amendments. How could these voters be convinced, though, despite their discomfort? Cashion made it clear that supporters of the amendments needed to frame the debate delicately to avoid the controversial issues of homophobia and gay rights. As Cashion stated in the memo, “A substantial portion of these voters are not pro-gay. They are, however, likely to be dismayed and disillusioned by anti-gay rhetoric.” These voters, in other words, resembled the white moderates Matthew Lassiter has written about, who fashioned an ideology in the late 1960s and early 1970s in opposition to the goals of the African American civil rights movement. By adopting a color-blind ideology, these whites were able to avoid the extreme racism of massive resistance while remaining opposed to what they viewed as forced integration initiatives such as busing. In a similar way, these voters identified by Cashion fashioned a sexuality-blind ideology of queer disidentification that viewed hateful antigay extremism as distasteful yet remained fundamentally opposed to voicing their approval of homosexuality by granting gays and lesbians equal rights. The direct message to deliver to these undecided voters, according to Cashion, centered on Houston’s economy. Rather than forcing voters to wrestle with the question of protecting the rights of gay and lesbian Houstonians, the campaign theme would be simple and uncluttered: “Bigotry is bad business. Even if you are not a bigot yourself, to be against this simple amendment hurts Houston’s national image and our economic development efforts.” An important component of this economic development involved cultivating an image of tolerance for prospective industries thinking of relocating to Houston. “To vote in support of [the amendments] does not make you a gay rights activist or even a supporter of gays. … A pro-[amendment] vote confirms you as a tolerant person. You may not—in fact, probably do not—like the gay lifestyle. But you do believe in mutual tolerance.”
Despite all the talk of tolerance, there seemed to be little of it to go around in Cashion’s campaign when it came to the actual participation of gays and lesbians. In attempting to distance the amendments from the issue of gay rights, Cashion and her team made a tactical decision to exclude gays and lesbians from the front lines of the campaign, privileging more moderate strategies and effectively silencing radical and confrontational alternatives that might have been circulating in the gay and lesbian community. Only “straight Houstonians of recognized stature … [or] of acknowledged debating ability,” according to the strategy memo, should be allowed to speak or write publicly about the campaign. In short, the campaign would be led, directed, and publicly represented not by those gay and lesbian citizens who would be most affected by the election’s outcome, but by individuals who Cashion deemed were more palatable to the general public. This decision marked a critical turning point; not only would the campaign to persuade voters to approve employment protections for gays and lesbians avoid discussion of gay and lesbian rights, but it would also exclude gays and lesbians from the conversation. Silence and obfuscation were what Cashion had in mind, it seemed, when she advised promoting tolerance. In many ways, this turning point in the campaign mirrored developments in the early homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s. As historian John D’Emilio has shown, by the mid-1950s Mattachine Society leaders had shed the radicalism and confrontational tactics of the group’s early years and opted for a strategy of respectability politics by approving a resolution directing the organization to “limit its activities to … working with and through … persons, institutions, and organizations which command the highest possible public respect.” Houston gay activist George F. Barnhart later identified the acquiescence of politically active gays and lesbians to this campaign tactic—what he termed “aself-imposed gag-order”—as a fatal strategic flaw. “Exclusionary politics seemed to be the order of the day,” Barnhart concluded.
The acquiescence in this strategy of silence created a missed opportunity for gay and lesbian activists in Houston, particularly since events transpired much differently in other locations during the same general time frame. In Chicago, for example, gay and lesbian activists used the public debate over a proposed nondiscrimination ordinance during the late 1970s and early 1980s as an opportunity to testify about the many forms of discrimination they faced. As historian Timothy Stewart-Winter has shown, Chicago gay and lesbian activists, by speaking in multiple public forums about their own oppression, successfully expanded the notion of discrimination to include sexual minorities as deserving of protection. Similarly, Philadelphia’s gay and lesbian activists, fighting for a nondiscrimination ordinance in 1982, testified repeatedly about rampant discrimination against them and used the language of social justice and human rights to secure its passage. In Houston, in contrast, there were neither opportunities to testify about the many forms of discrimination gays and lesbians faced nor voices to couch the argument in terms that could break free of the confines of neoliberalism, because the city’s gay and lesbian activists accepted a strategy that eliminated them from the conversation.
With the strategy thus defined, the terms of the debate sharply curtailed, and gay and lesbian Houstonians effectively silenced, the pro-amendment campaign began implementing in the weeks leading up to the election the strategic points outlined in Cashion’s memorandum. “We believe,” campaign spokesperson Diane Berg stated in a letter mailed out to Houston voters, “the city of Houston should hire and fire its employees based on qualifications and job performance, not on the basis of ethnic background, gender, religion, race—or sexual orientation.” Berg made it clear that the proposed amendments only protected city employees and would have no effect on private employers. She also emphasized that the proposed amendments would not create hiring quotas for gays and lesbians. The issue at hand, according to Berg, was whether Houstonians would “join us in reaffirming this city’s reputation as a forward-looking business-oriented city that is ready to take its place as one of the world’s great cities.” In a pamphlet published in the weeks right before the election titled “Let’s Talk Sense about January 19th,” amendment supporters attempted to explain clearly and concisely what effects the amendments would and would not have on the city. “What Council did,” the pamphlet read, “was to assure equal employment opportunities in city jobs to all Houstonians, as have over forty other cities and 150 private corporations throughout the country. It’s that simple.” Echoing Berg’s letter, this circular reminded readers that the amendments would not create hiring quotas, require recruitment, extend to city contracts, or issue special privileges to anyone. The pamphlet ended with several quotations from city leaders, including Mayor Whitmire. “Houston’s great strength,” the mayor wrote, “is that we are a city of opportunity, open and accessible to people and businesses from all over the world. We can’t risk that reputation by denying equal opportunity in public employment.” The campaign’s reliance on an ideology of queer disidentification that fit within the confines of neoliberalism effectively curtailed any potentially larger societal critiques. The ideas that the free market tends to leave certain groups vulnerable to discrimination in the first place, that Houston’s recent economic downturn disproportionately harmed those near the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, and that there were severe structural and institutional biases in a heteronormative society were not considered. All these alternatives were drowned out in favor of an argument that campaign spokespersons deemed better suited for Houston.
While amendment supporters relied on neoliberal, market-driven, and queer disidentification arguments to support their position, opponents of the propositions used similar rhetoric to argue the opposite point. According to those activists opposed to the amendments, special employment protections for gays and lesbians would inflict great harm on Houston’s national image and, by extension, damage the local economy. What was especially troubling about the nondiscrimination amendments, according to many opponents, was that they would give the impression that Houston was becoming a gay mecca or, worst of all, another San Francisco. Dr. Steven F. Hotze, a general practitioner in Houston, took a leadership role in the anti-ordinance campaign when he created an organization called Campaign for Houston. In a fund-raising letter dated December 22, 1984, Hotze and several members of his organization expressed their fear of where the passage of the amendments would lead. “Families have been driven out of San Francisco by the gay community,” the letter stated, “and the deterioration of the city as a result. San Francisco schools teach homosexuality in the classroom as an ‘acceptable’ lifestyle. Gays engage in open sex in public parks. Sado-masochism bars are legal and widespread. …We can’t let what happened in San Francisco happen here.” The letter closed by asking individuals to contribute money to defeat the proposed amendments in the referendum, concluding that the “traditional values and community standards we have all worked for will be significantly eroded if the homosexuals are successful.”
In a flier published by the Campaign for Houston titled “Don’t Discriminate Against the Rest of Us,” opponents of the amendments argued that the 90 percent of Houstonians who were not gay or lesbian would be harmed by the proposed changes to the city’s nondiscrimination and affirmative action ordinances. That harm, according to the flier, would mirror what had occurred in San Francisco. “Do you really want your schools to teach your children that homosexuality is an acceptable lifestyle?” the flier asked, before concluding, “That’s ultimately what you’re voting about on January 19th.” Next to a drawing of a school-age boy getting off a school bus, the authors of the flier implored readers to think about how the amendments would affect Houston children instead of being concerned about how others characterized their opposition. “People may accuse you of being biased or bigoted for voting against the so-called gay rights proposal,” the flier proclaimed. “But remember: you are joining tens of thousands of other Houston residents from every walk of life: rich, poor and middle-class; black, white and Oriental; Hispanic and Anglo, in protecting our children and our city.” A telegram sent to many Houston residents from another group of opponents to the amendments stated, “San Francisco is already fighting hard to overcome the stigma of being the seat of national gay power. A victory for gays in this election will tell the nation that Houston approves and open the door for special treatment of gays in City hiring policies.”
Much of the fear that approval of the amendments would turn Houston into a clone of San Francisco centered on anxieties about the local economy. As one piece of opposition literature phrased it, “Passage of the propositions would add legal status to the homosexual lifestyle and further expand gay political influence at the expense of Houston’s economic development, jobs and national image. … If the gays win, our economy and national image suffers [sic]. If they win, we all lose.” Members of Houston’s chamber of commerce agreed. Business leaders contributed $400,000 for television and radio advertising spots opposing the amendments, worried that passage would turn Houston into a “gay ‘mecca.'” Chamber president and former Houston mayor Louie Welch led the opposition to the nondiscrimination amendments, basing his argument on their potential economic effects. During a speech to the Houston Rotary Club, Welch showed that the opposition also employed the rhetoric of queer disidentification when he announced his belief that the proposed amendments were unnecessary because existing employment protections were sufficient. “The chamber feels the current city administration’s policies provides [sic] adequate employment protection and privileges to individuals and minorities,” and that there was “‘no reason to create an atmosphere to deter’ economic expansion in the city or grant special status to homosexuals.” Mayor Whitmire, undoubtedly believing her economically driven argument supporting the amendments would find a receptive audience among chamber of commerce business leaders, even spoke personally with several chamber leaders in an attempt to persuade them, at the very least, to withdraw their vehement opposition to the amendments. The chamber, particularly Welch, was unmoved; the organization remained at the forefront of the opposition for the duration of the campaign.
The opposition group also politicized the issue of AIDS in Houston to disparage the nondiscrimination amendments. Houston medical professionals began treating patients with what would later be called AIDS in November 1981, a few months after the Centers for Disease Control first identified the presence of rare types of pneumonia and skin cancer in previously healthy gay men in California and New York. By 1984 there remained a great deal of uncertainty, apprehension, and even fear about the disease. Many leaders in the opposition group proved willing to use that fear to advance their political agenda. In early January 1985 an opposition group named the Committee for Public Awareness (CPA) paid Dr. Paul Cameron, a psychologist and the chairman of the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality in Lincoln, Nebraska, to deliver a presentation to the Houston city council based on his research. Cameron linked the proposed nondiscrimination amendments with the potentially rapid spread of AIDS in Houston and advised council members that all gay men should be “confined to their homes” until a cure for AIDS could be discovered. “Homosexuals,” Cameron emphasized, “pose a threat to the public health. They carry fungal, amoebal, and viral infections. What gays do in public is disgusting; what they do in private is deadly.” In a piece of campaign literature handed out at a rally a few days later, Cameron likened homosexuality to a bad habit: “Abandoning homosexual habits, like quitting drinking can be done and is done by tens of thousands each year. … Only a foolish society would tighten the habit’s noose by designating victims of homosexual preferences as deserving special legal protection. We don’t give special preference to alcoholics.” Fearing that Cameron’s views were “too controversial” and offensive to help their campaign, CPA officials decided against hiring him as a full-time consultant.
Even as many members of the opposition groups found Cameron’s ideas too far outside the mainstream to be helpful in their campaign, many opposition leaders discovered a way to adapt his views to fit into the logic of their market-driven argument against protections for gays and lesbians. CPA campaign coordinator Judi Wilson, who had helped orchestrate Anita Bryant’s opposition campaign in Florida’s Dade County in 1977 and traveled to Houston to defeat the non-discrimination amendments, picked up the link between AIDS and job protections for gays and lesbians by invoking the specter of a faltering economy that could be brought about by passage of the amendments. During an interview a few days after Cameron’s appearance in Houston, Wilson stated, “Houston just spent $8 million trying to improve its image to get business to relocate here. I wouldn’t relocate a major corporation to Houston, knowing that it’s a mecca to homosexuals. I wouldn’t want to expose my employees to AIDS and hepatitis.” Dr. Edgar M. Thomason, a family practitioner in Houston, announced the same week the creation of Doctors for Houston, which would join the battle against the amendments. Thomason distanced his group from the idea of quarantine for all gay men, but he was quick to clarify that people with AIDS posed a serious threat to public health and “should be off the streets.” Passing the amendments was likely to produce an AIDS epidemic in Houston, according to Thomason. Campaign for Houston head Steven Hotze seconded the idea, referring to gay men as “walking time bombs once they are infected by the (AIDS) virus and there is no getting rid of it.” Hotze warned of “deadly consequences” if the city of Houston should condone “the homosexual lifestyle” by approving the amendments.
After several months of bitter fighting, Houston voters finally went to the polls on January 19. The results were devastating for Mayor Whitmire, Clintine Cashion, Houston’s gay community, and the many other supporters of the changes to the city’s nondiscrimination and affirmative action ordinances. Voters overwhelmingly rejected both amendments by a 4-to-1 margin. To make matters even worse for supporters, the turnout for the referendum was nearly 30 percent, the highest voter turnout for a single-issue election in Houston’s history. The Montrose neighborhood was the only precinct where the amendments carried.
Opposition leaders celebrated the results. Louie Welch stated that “Houstonians acted ‘with responsibility and wisdom in rejecting these propositions.'” City council member John Goodner, one of the early organizers of the opposition, had a more direct message for Mayor Whitmire and her supporters: “I hope that Mayor Whitmire sees where the real strength of the community is, and this will make a better mayor of her.” Cashion had a different idea about how to interpret the results of the referendum. In a postelection report submitted to the mayor, Cashion identified the problem as failing to frame the issue in a way with which most voters would be comfortable. In other words, the campaign had failed to rely on the ideology of queer disidentification strongly enough. Cashion asserted that most Houston residents had adopted a “live and let live” philosophy when it came to what consenting adults did in their private lives. Yet the referendum, in Cashion’s analysis, forced these otherwise uninterested parties to choose sides in a debate over morality and the gay lifestyle. It demanded that they “say yes or no about whether gays would be given some kind of special treatment. … Reluctantly, they voted against the referendum, not feeling good at all about it, but nevertheless feeling that pushy gays needed to be sent a signal to clean up their act.” These moderate voters had no choice but to take a position against gay and lesbian rights. “In short,” she concluded, “people had no opportunity to mark a ballot saying that they were not opposed to love between consenting adults. They had only the limited means of expressing themselves, and many, many people simply felt that they had to protect themselves against a group of deviants who carry a killer disease.”
Whitmire and many amendment supporters, for their part, tried to downplay the results of the referendum. According to many supporters, Houston voters largely misunderstood what the referendum was about. Whitmire asserted that she was “convinced that the majority of the people of Houston do not believe in discrimination.” According to Anthony Hall, the original sponsor of the two amendments, “The issue that was debated was not the issue that was on the ballot.” Whitmire, Cashion, and Hall were correct, of course, but not for the reasons they thought. They believed opponents of the amendments had hijacked the public debate and transformed the referendum into a statement of approval or disapproval of the gay and lesbian “lifestyle” rather than employment discrimination. What Whitmire, Cashion, Hall, and other proponents failed to recognize, however, was their own participation in obscuring the relevant issues. Their strategy involved appealing to anxieties about Houston’s economy in order to convince voters to approve extending employment protections to gays and lesbians because failing to do so would hurt the city’s public image and provide a disincentive for businesses to relocate there. The debate, therefore, constructed just as much by the proponents as by the opposition, devolved into a shouting match about what outcome would be most beneficial for the local economy. Because they helped create the confining parameters of this battle within a neoliberal framework, proponents like Whitmire, Cashion, and Hall were unable or unwilling to confront the central issues of this campaign—the homophobia and support for overt discrimination against Houston’s gay and lesbian citizens that remained prevalent in the city despite the political gains of the early 1980s.
After such a crushing defeat, many members of Whitmire’s political staff wondered about the effects on the upcoming mayoral and city council elections in November. Whitmire’s strategy over the subsequent weeks was simply to move on to other issues and, in what was perhaps a bit of wishful thinking, to forget about the battle over the amendments.
On June 20, 1985, the mayor appeared on Good Morning Houston, Channel 13’s morning news program, and tried to distance her administration—and her developing reelection campaign—from the amendments. “I think the most important thing about the January 19 referendum is that it is behind us,” Whitmire proclaimed. “It has been decided by the voters, and everyone at City Hall has accepted that decision, so it won’t be coming up again.” As for what her administration would focus on, Whitmire stated that “it is time to move forward, not to go back and continue to rehash the issue. … It is not an issue we are going to deal with over and over in Houston because we have important issues we have to face now in order to diversify the economy and improve mobility.” Rather than continuing her attempt to educate Houston citizens about the need for the nondiscrimination and affirmative action amendments, Mayor Whitmire pulled away from gay and lesbian Houstonians and seemingly expected most people to forget what had transpired in city politics over the previous few months.
The original opponents of the amendments, however, proved unwilling to move on from the battle. During the summer of 1985, Steven Hotze and several other amendment opponents launched the Straight Slate campaign and took aim at Whitmire and all the city council members who had supported the gay and lesbian employment protections. At a press conference in July, Hotze again highlighted the purported link between morality, family politics, and the local economy by stating that his campaign wanted to make Houston the “No. 1 family city and the No. 1 opportunity city in America.” He then introduced the slate of candidates to challenge the “pro-homosexual” city council members in the November election. One of those challengers, Jim Kennedy, echoed Hotze’s sentiments when he asserted that “Houston should be the number one family city of the South and not the Sodom of the South. … We want a government where the officials thank God on Sunday morning and not the homosexuals on Saturday night.” Another Straight Slate candidate was Margaret Hotze, mother of Steven Hotze, who had spoken at the original city council meeting the previous year in which council members approved the amendments. During that meeting, she had compared protecting employment rights for gays and lesbians to granting rights to pornographers, pedophiles, and necrophiliacs. During this press conference to launch the Straight Slate campaign, Margaret Hotze toned down her rhetoric, but the message remained the same. “You know family virtues don’t thrive when vices run rampant,” she claimed, “and vice is rampant in Houston today.”
Steven Hotze also announced that the Straight Slate campaign would endorse former Houston mayor Louie Welch as the candidate to unseat Whitmire. Welch had first toyed with the idea of challenging Whitmire during the referendum campaign, when he led the charge against the proposed amendments on behalf of the chamber of commerce. In the wake of the strong showing for the opposition in that election, Welch “recognized his constituents among the voters who turned thumbs down on a gay-rights referendum,” as one political commentator phrased it. Although the “shoot the queers” quip on a live television broadcast had almost no effect on his polling numbers, Welch trailed Whitmire for the entire campaign. Nonetheless, Welch’s candidacy and his Straight Slate endorsement meant the politics of family, sexuality, and disease—and their feared effect on Houston’s economy—pervaded the mayoral and city council races.
Much of the campaign rhetoric in the months leading up to the November election echoed what opponents of the nondiscrimination and affirmative action amendments had said the previous year. The main difference lay in the notable absence of voices supporting the gay and lesbian community. Most of the Straight Slate’s continued attacks on Whitmire and the city council members went unanswered in the fall campaign, mostly due to the decisions of Whitmire and other supporters to downplay the issue of gay and lesbian rights and distance themselves from the gay and lesbian community. During a debate in September, Whitmire repeatedly dodged Welch’s questions and comments about her previous support of the nondiscrimination amendments, at one point proclaiming that there was “no advantage whatsoever to continuing a divisive issue.” Whitmire and all of the incumbent city council members also decided not to seek an endorsement from the Gay Political Caucus, reversing a six-year trend of GPC endorsements being some of the most sought-after prizes in local elections.
In a controversial decision, GPC leaders decided to accept their own marginalization in the campaign. The rank and file acquiesced by voting down a proposal to campaign actively for candidates regardless of whether they wanted GPC involvement. According to GPC political activist Ray Hill, endorsements and active campaigning by gays and lesbians would actually be a punishment in the current election, stating, “We don’t think endorsements should be used as weapons.” This decision to remain on the sidelines infuriated former GPC president Gary Van Ooteghem, whose own firing from the county treasurer’s office had done so much to prompt the battle for the nondiscrimination amendments in the first place. Van Ooteghem claimed the GPC had “just gone back into the closet.…Today’s caucus is composed of wimps, cowards and closets. They don’t have the spunk of prior caucuses.” Indeed, this GPC action was remarkably different from what occurred in other cities, such as Chicago and Philadelphia, where gay and lesbian activists responded to political defeats by launching reinvigorated grassroots organizing campaigns and attempting to create multiracial and multiclass coalitions to lay the groundwork for future successes. In Houston, activists tried the opposite strategy; fearful of a backlash, GPC leadership made gays and lesbians less visible in municipal politics and left the movement for gay and lesbian equality weakened, demoralized, and disorganized.
These critical decisions greatly affected the tone and direction of the campaign because they allowed the Straight Slate and their supporters to control the message. For example, Straight Slate candidates announced in September their proposal for a city ordinance that would prohibit anyone with AIDS from working in schools, day care centers, restaurants, blood banks, or medical and dental jobs. To document their AIDS status, individuals working in any of those industries would be required to carry health cards verifying they did not have AIDS. A Straight Slate campaign mailer distributed as the election neared asked, “Are You Going to Vote Pro-Homosexual?,” presenting voters with several items allegedly showing how much power the gay and lesbian community had in Houston politics. Also included were several newspaper articles on the AIDS crisis, including a July 1985 Life magazine cover that stated, “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS.” The mailer concluded with the Straight Slate political platform. “When people think of Houston,” the platform began, “we want them to view it as a wholesome, family city. We are going to accomplish this goal by ridding our city of pro-homosexuals Whitmire and her 8 council supporters, porno houses and homosexual bath houses (where A.I.D.S. is spread), nude dance studios and other such fronts for organized crime.” The campaign mailer concluded, “You Don’t Have to Vote Pro-Homosexual. You Have the Choice.”
During a speech to a group of Church of Christ preachers in Houston, Welch reiterated the Straight Slate’s focus on the politics of AIDS and its influence on Houston’s identity as a city. AIDS, according to Welch, was a “plague of epidemic proportions” and “a way of saying to man, ‘You’d better check your morality.'” Amid frequent shouts of “Amen” from his audience, Welch accused Whitmire of failing to protect traditional family values in Houston. “There has to be a spirit—a sense of responsibility and decency, based upon the laws of God,” Welch argued. “The religious leadership, those who believe in something, are going to have to determine whether or not Houston is a good place to live. … It’s going to have to be the responsibility of those who believe in a moral system that is as old as mankind.” After the speech, one retired preacher praised Welch’s leadership and asserted that his candidacy for mayor must be successful in order “to prevent Houston from becoming ‘another queer city like San Francisco.'”
The danger of Houston becoming another San Francisco was a common theme during the Straight Slate election. A Straight Slate campaign brochure published just before the election showed two side-by-side images: the first was a pair of shirtless men with their arms around each other riding a carnival Ferris wheel with the words San Francisco printed underneath; the second was a group of children on a carousel being supervised by a well-dressed father with the word Houston printed underneath. Beneath the two images the brochure stated in bold letters, “We must not let Houston become another San Francisco!” Authors of the brochure continued, “Under Whitmire and her 8 council supporters, Houston has become the Southwest capital for homosexuality and pornography. Porno houses, nude dance studios and homosexual bathhouses (where A.I.D.S. is spread) have flourished.” A vote for Straight Slate candidates, according to the brochure, would bring about a necessary reversal of this trend and keep Houston the “Number One Family City in America.”
Whitmire’s strategy of inserting distance between Houston’s gay and lesbian community on one hand and herself and her supporters on the city council on the other had the desired effect of removing the memory of the failed amendments from the campaign. In a poll conducted just before the election, only 12 percent of Houstonians agreed that gay rights and morality were the most important issues in the campaign. For the majority of the campaign Whitmire led Welch by about fourteen points, a lead that did not diminish on election day. When the results were tabulated, Whitmire easily held on to the mayor’s office, and the majority of Straight Slate candidates for city council lost by large margins, with candidates sometimes failing to break out of single digits. Two Straight Slate candidates, however, did manage to force incumbent city council members into runoff elections because of multiple candidates in the race, although the incumbent won the subsequent runoff election in both cases.
As several postelection analyses revealed, there were at least two competing interpretations of the results. To many gay and lesbian activists, particularly those affiliated with the Gay Political Caucus, Whitmire’s reelection and the defeat of the Straight Slate candidates represented a great victory. According to GPC president Sue Lovell, the results of the election, particularly the failure of Welch to recapture the mayor’s office, showed the rest of the nation that Houston was neither a bigoted nor a hateful city. GPC political activist Ray Hill also praised the election outcome and reiterated his belief that the GPC’s role on the sidelines in the campaign had been most appropriate. “You are to be congratulated,” Hill told a crowd of election-night celebrants at a Montrose bar, “for your low profile, your restraint and your wisdom.”
There was, however, an alternative—and ultimately more persuasive—way to assess the significance of the election. As political journalist Nene Foxhall stated in the Houston Chronicle, the Straight Slate showing, despite Welch’s defeat, had been “stunning” in that two previously unknown candidates had forced Houston’s only two African American citywide officials into runoff elections. Few would have predicted that Judson Robinson Jr. and Anthony Hall were vulnerable in the 1985 election, but both city council members had unabashedly supported the nondiscrimination amendments before and during the referendum campaign. Once forced into runoff elections, however, both men attempted to downplay their previous support. Hall, the original sponsor of the amendments, even publicly declared that the effort to add sexual orientation to the city’s nondiscrimination and affirmative action ordinances had been “amistake.” Although Robinson and Hall both kept their council seats after the runoff elections, both made it clear they would not soon be introducing any resolutions to protect the rights of gays and lesbians. The “stunning” showing of the Straight Slate candidates, therefore, significantly reduced the support that had existed on the city council for actions to protect the rights of gay and lesbian Houstonians.
Yet the harmful effects of the 1985 election on gays and lesbians did not end with the city council. The Straight Slate candidates, in fact, helped bring about a drastic change in the political atmosphere in Houston. As Straight Slate founder Steven Hotze explained, the campaign against Whitmire and several city council members had helped transform “the social climate” in Houston by forcing the mayor and other elected officials to reconsider their relationship with the city’s gay and lesbian community. Particularly encouraging to Hotze was the complete abandonment of the Gay Political Caucus and the outright shunning of the organization’s political endorsements during the campaign. It was Louie Welch, however, who summed up most succinctly the impact of the Straight Slate campaign. As he told supporters during his concession speech on election night, “During this campaign you have seen the city move in a direction it was not moving.…I’ve seen the administration change its position in a number of areas to the right direction.””If we have changed the course of the city in losing, then the campaign was worthwhile,” he believed. Both Hotze and Welch must have felt reassured that their campaigns were worthwhile when they read newspaper accounts of Whitmire’s victory speech the following morning. Delivered around the same time that Hotze and Welch were ruminating on the ultimate meaning of the Straight Slate campaign, Whitmire’s speech seemed to have stolen a page right out of a Straight Slate campaign flier. Whitmire told her supporters, “I believe tonight we have sent a message to the nation that Houston has made great progress and we are working to make this city the best place in the world to do business and to raise a family.” With that single statement, Whitmire successfully returned to the safety of being concerned primarily with Houston’s local economy and a hardly veiled appropriation of the Straight Slate’s focus on keeping Houston a family-friendly city. A more transparent assurance that the mayor would not prioritize the protection of the rights of gay and lesbian citizens in the future would have been difficult to imagine.
The seventeen-month period between June 1984 and November 1985 turned out to be a critical turning point in the history of Houston. Despite the failure of Straight Slate candidates to win any actual races, the consequences of the 1985 election magnified the elimination of gay and lesbian concerns in municipal politics that had begun during the battle over the nondiscrimination amendments. This shift helped ensure that elected officials avoided taking a public stand on issues of discrimination against this marginalized group. After 1985, Houston’s politically active gay and lesbian community, particularly the Gay Political Caucus, struggled—mostly unsuccessfully—to become relevant again in city politics. As legal scholar Dale Carpenter has argued, “The GPC was $10,000 in debt, its membership fell, and AIDS itself started to take a serious toll. … While things gradually improved for the community, it would not soon regain the perceived influence on city politics it enjoyed in the golden years between 1979 and 1984.” Indeed, by 1987 Mayor Whitmire had made overtures to the GPC to mend their rift, but caucus leaders quickly realized the mayor had no intention of making public their renewed friendship, and she, along with city council members, continued to avoid any mention of gay rights. Two years later, newly inaugurated GPC president Ray Hill reversed his earlier position and vowed to end the silence to which the group had acquiesced during the 1985 referendum: “It’s time for the caucus to come out of the closet.” Yet returning the GPC to a position of political power proved elusive. In a September 1989 public opinion poll conducted by the Houston Chronicle, a mere 5 percent of responders said a GPC endorsement would make them more likely to vote for a particular candidate, while 35 percent responded it would decrease the likelihood they would vote for that candidate. This development was in stark contrast to other cities, such as Chicago and Philadelphia, where gay and lesbian activists used their defeats to launch a new and renewed emphasis on organizing. The Straight Slate had achieved one of its advocates’ most important goals. “Basically, the politicians have heeded our message,” Steven Hotze asserted. “They haven’t pandered to that voting bloc anymore.” Well into the 1990s, commentators continued to point out how little political influence Houston’s gay and lesbian community had. And certainly the failed efforts to persuade the city to adopt a comprehensive nondiscrimination ordinance in 2001 and in 2015 attest to the continued marginalization of the city’s gay and lesbian community in local politics.
There is no single explanation for why Houstonians have rejected the extension of civil rights and equal protection under the law to gay and lesbian citizens three times in the last thirty years. Clearly there has been some discomfort, at least among a majority of the voters who showed up at the polls, with the perception of sanctioning homosexuality. While many voters may disagree with discrimination in an abstract and theoretical sense, when the subject becomes more concrete and attached to a group of people they may view as sinful, immoral, or undesirable, the mental umbrella covering those deserving protection against discrimination shrinks. Relatedly, in all of these campaigns there has existed a powerful opposition group willing to use fear, hatred, and at times willful misinformation to defeat proposals for protections for gays and lesbians. In each instance, those opposition campaigns were well funded, well organized, and included well-placed individuals in Houston’s elite society. Groups of supporters, in contrast, have struggled with raising funds, educating the public, and handling factionalism within the city’s gay and lesbian community, often scrambling to convince a majority of Houstonians that there is a need for nondiscrimination ordinances. Under the best of circumstances, gay and lesbian rights activists would have had to fight an uphill battle to gain acceptance of their position.
Beyond the success or failure of individual initiatives, the larger significance of this moment in Houston’s history lies in what it reveals about the effects of neoliberalism on movements for social justice and human rights. During what was ostensibly a political disagreement about the desirability of employment protections and a struggle to expand the notion of fairness and justice to include more Houston citizens, the role of the free market and local economic performance became paramount. In this confounded battle over the city’s economic future, the core dilemmas facing Houston—persistent homophobia, overt employment discrimination, and outright hatred and persecution—were never resolved. In the end, both proponents and opponents of the amendments prioritized economic growth over the pursuit of equality. Most damaging, however, was the fact that ordinance supporters accepted a strategy based on an ideology of queer disidentification that effectively erased the presence of gays and lesbians in the campaign. In a postmortem analysis immediately following the referendum in January 1985, gay activist George F. Barnhart lamented that the campaign supporting the nondiscrimination amendments failed to address the real issues confronting the city. “Homophobia was the real issue,” Barnhart asserted, and supporters of the amendments, particularly those gay and lesbian political activists who allowed themselves to be silenced during the campaign, “allowed that [homophobia] to defeat us because we chose to ignore the challenges of confrontation it presented, believing blissfully in our political advisors who must have figured that they could sell the public on the proposition that it [homophobia] didn’t exist.” Barnhart believed that to move forward, gay and lesbian activists must “take the issue of homophobia head-on as the political issue, off the shelf, out of the closets, and into the community at large.” Yet most of Houston’s gay and lesbian activists ignored Barnhart’s plea several months later during the 1985 election, providing a vivid illustration of how more radical voices remain unheard under the influence of the neoliberal ideology. Most of Houston’s gay and lesbian activists preferred instead to remain largely silent for fear of provoking an antigay backlash. As a result, Straight Slate candidates viciously attacked the city’s gays and lesbians, while a fair-weather ally like Mayor Whitmire abandoned this group of citizens who had played an important role in getting her elected in the first place, preferring to shift her focus away from the issue of gay and lesbian rights and toward Houston’s economic development. Yet this shift was much more subtle than it appeared. The local economy had always been at the very center of much of the proponents’ arguments supporting the nondiscrimination amendments, limiting any strides toward greater justice and equality solely to those actions that could spur economic growth.
The complexity of Houston’s battle over an employment non-discrimination policy to protect gay and lesbian citizens highlights the need for historians to investigate a broader range of queer activism, particularly in the American South. The effects of neoliberalism on movements for social justice are just beginning to be understood, and the primacy of the free market in struggles for justice for sexual minorities and gender nonconformists merits serious attention. The constraints of neoliberalism seemed to have less effect on similar movements in Chicago and Philadelphia, for example, where activists were not as preoccupied with framing their argument according to what would benefit the local economy. In this area similar studies of other southern cities would shed light on what might have been significant regional variations in the national narrative of gay and lesbian rights during the 1980s. A more complete record of the long battle for queer equality also needs to account for the development of an ideology of queer disidentification that continues to limit strides toward full equality and justice and to reinforce a political economy of heterosexual privilege.
As of 2018, Houston remains the largest city in the United States without formal protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons against the discrimination that still plagues them. In their attempt to improve their city’s image in the nation in order to attract business investment, opponents of adding sexual orientation and gender identity to existing nondiscrimination codes have produced the opposite effect, turning Houston into an outlier. Beyond that unintended consequence, however, is the larger point that the free market economy rarely possesses the proper tools to bring about significant and meaningful advances in social justice and human rights. By its very nature, neoliberalism limits and constrains the scope of any potential social change, places restrictive parameters on any possible victories, and silences viable alternatives that fail to operate within the logic of the “free” market. While opponents of the nondiscrimination amendments of 1984-1985 relied on the market to defeat their passage, supporters capitulated to the subversion of their social justice goals to the worship of the almighty dollar. Rather than confronting the nagging problems of homophobia, hatred, and discrimination, nearly everyone involved participated in transforming this important and necessary debate into a conversation about what was good for the local Houston economy. The fact that these problems have yet to be resolved, therefore, should come as no great surprise.