1978 vs. 2008

[sarars]

30 years ago the Briggs Initiative, or Prop 6, was defeated in California. This is the proposition that if passed would have resulted in the firing of teachers and other school workers who spoke up in favor of gay rights. Harvey Milk worked on it, which is big part of the movie Milk. I'm talking about the Briggs Initiative in my dissertation, and

Comments

[goodall]

WOW. And people still say this stuff over 30 years later to justify all of their homophobic legislation.

[sarars]

yeah, but do you think it's as bad? At least in 1978 the MAIN backer of the Briggs initiative was saying really crazy shit about gay people being child molesters, but those people these days are more on the fringe. Although, yeah, these days there is the implication is that the gays are all into molesting children.

[goodall]

It's as bad. Many straight people have latent homophobia, or have learned that it is politically incorrect to say things about gay people that sound too ignorant.

Hey, since you did work recently at the ONE, would you be willing to fill out a survey about your experience? (Or, at least, be willing to evaluate the survey?) If you would like more info, I will fill you in off-list.

[sarars]

hey, sure, and I plan to do more research at the ONE. I'm going for the rest of this week. And I'll most likely come back to L.A. to do more research at some other point. Should I fill the survey out now or later? Are you associated with ONE right now?

[lovableatheist]

That's crazy. I saw Milk on Thursday and really enjoyed it. I'll admit that I had never heard of Prop. 6 before the movie and wasn't sure how it turned out, so needless to say I was glad to see how it turned out.

I also liked that they talked about the Coors boycott, which was probably the first large-scale cooperation between the labour and gay rights movements.

[sarars]

the coors boycott was cool. I did a research proposal on queer labor history my first year in grad school, which is when I first found out about Briggs and the coors boycott. There's somebody named Miriam Frank, who lives in New York, who is currently writing a book about queer labor history.