David Mixner:
People in the Democratic Party who I had worked with side by side all my life, turned their back on me. People who I had contributed to sent their cheques back, said, We can no longer even be identified with you.

Jerry Brown:
There are code words, there are innuendoes, but basically people don't like the fact that I've had a record of enfranchising the disenfranchised and representing the unrepresented in the corridors of power.

Tom Hayden:
And the major point he made in the first speech just two or three days after the trial, was summarized in a speech in a high school gymnasium in which he said, Our children are being lost to the freaking fag revolution.

Geraldine Ferraro:
when we fight prejudice based on sexual orientation, we not only protect the victims, we also heal the sickness that breeds irrational hatred. And that will be good for all the American people.

David Hunt:
You’ve probably never heard of MECLA: the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles. But in its heyday — in the 1980s — it was a political powerhouse, raising large sums of money and using it to reward local, state and national politicians whose interests aligned — at least some of the time — with its own.

MECLA was a “special” special interest. The first political action committee organized to advance the cause of gays and lesbians in the United States. 

This, at a time when gays were largely closeted. And for good reason. Legally, they were outlaws, socially, outcasts, and politically, outmatched and outspent by the New Right, a broad coalition of Christian fundamentalists and social conservatives. 

With the rise of MECLA, gays and lesbians wielded a new tool in the fight for equality. What a California politician once called: The mother’s milk of politics. Money.

Join me now for a deep dive into the rise and fall of MECLA — A Queer Story of Power Politics in the Reagan Era. On Tell Me, David.

I’m David Hunt. It’s April 23, 1983. David Bowie’s Let’s Dance is moving up the music charts in the United States. And that’s exactly what the crowd at the Hollywood Palladium has on its mind this evening. They’ve turned out in black tie, tuxes and designer gowns — and shelled out $175 apiece — to drink, dine and dance in the Palladium’s art deco ballroom. 

It's a legendary Los Angeles venue: Where Frank Sinatra sang with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra in the 1940s and where the Lawrence Welk Show had its television debut in 1955.

But before they can show off their moves on the dance floor, attendees turn their attention to the guest of honor, who just happens to be a leading candidate for president.

Gary Hart:
Now, I may be naive, but I believe any candidate for the presidency should welcome the opportunity to speak to any group of Americans who believe in the first principles of this country equality and justice, freedom of speech and freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and freedom of expression.

David Hunt:
Gary Hart, a U.S. senator from Colorado, is anything but naïve. He’s an “Atari Democrat,” numbered among a group of young, tech-savvy lawmakers who champion computer technologies, like the semiconductor chips used in Atari game consoles. He’s a veteran campaigner, as well, the man who spearheaded Democrat George McGovern’s 1972 presidential run. His own run for the White House is just getting started. The first primary, in New Hampshire, still nine months off.

To build momentum in a crowded field, Hart needs money and visibility. The sponsor of the event at the Hollywood Palladium, MECLA, has plenty of cash: it will spend upwards of $300,000 in 1983 to support candidates — like Hart — who support gay rights. 

But Hart’s support comes at a price in the form of negative publicity. A national syndicated columnist rages against the senator for daring to legitimize what has been a marginalized minority. 

“When self-described Christian Gary Hart steps to the podium at the Hollywood Palladium on April 23rd to make common cause with a group of homosexual rights advocates and their supporters,” the columnist wrote. “This will be a spectacle so bizarre that even Warner [brothers] could not have envisioned it.”

But Hart is short on money. There are rumors his campaign is failing to meet payroll. So, he turns to Hollywood — Hollywood homosexuals no less — to boost his campaign coffers. And Hart, who has a degree in divinity from Yale, isn’t about to let his political opponents smear his faith.

Gary Hart:
The criticism made against me by this columnist is that I am not a true Christian if I attend this dinner. Let me give you my at least partial definition of what I believe Christianity, for that matter, Judaism to include the love of God, to love tolerance and respect for others as for ourselves. And it includes the admonition, judge not lest you be judged. Also, this attack for making this one speech suggests how difficult the daily life of every gay and lesbian American must be. If I am attacked for one speech, you're under attack every day. It suggests that you are under constant siege from narrow minded, judgmental zealots of the right. It suggests the forces of the right are unceasing in denying you your full rights as American citizens to make a living secure your safety and protect your health … Democracy can only flourish when all Americans can affirm themselves as citizens by full participation in our political process. And that's why I'm here. Your country needs you. America needs your skill, your talent, your energy, your intellect. Your commitment as citizens to make America the democracy we all want it to be … And I pledge to you tonight that I will work to remove every barrier that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for this group or any group that's discriminated against to participate fully in this nation's public life.

David Hunt:
This full-throated endorsement of gays and lesbians was something new in American politics. When nine gay men launched MECLA six years earlier, in 1977, the political landscape was much different and far less welcoming for an emerging interest group with little public support and no record of success in electoral politics. Industry groups, labor unions, blacks, even women could deliver votes and dollars to friendly candidates. Gays couldn’t even get politicians to take their money.

In a 1983 interview with the Los Angeles Times, MECLA board member Steve Smith recalled: “Politicians were reluctant to go on the record as receiving contributions labeled ‘gay money.’ We had to go around begging people to take money from us” in the beginning.

In 1977, America’s age-old conflict between conservatives and liberals was heating up again. Conservatives had lost political ground after the Watergate scandal toppled President Richard Nixon and brought a Southern peanut farmer — and Sunday school teacher — Jimmy Carter, to the White House.

Republicans were eager to retake the moral high ground. Battle lines were soon drawn and gays and lesbians were at the very center of the battle. In June of that year, while MECLA celebrated its first electoral success, helping elect 10 pro-gay candidates to city offices in Los Angeles, an electoral defeat of seismic proportions shook the gay and lesbian community.

It happened on the other side of the country, in Dade County, Florida.

Anita Bryant:
Tonight, the laws of God and the cultural values of man have been vindicated. 

David Hunt:
Singer Anita Bryant.

Anita Bryant:
I thank God for the strength he has given me and my family. And I especially thank my fellow citizens who join me in in what at first was a walk through the wilderness. The people of Dade County, the normal majority, have said enough, enough, enough.

David Hunt:
Bryant, second runner-up in the 1959 Miss America pageant, was a popular singer in the 1960s. She performed with Bob Hope on USO tours, entertaining America’s troops around the world. She had two top-10 hits on the Billboard charts: Paper Roses and My Little Corner of the World. 

In the 1970s she was better known for her television commercials touting Florida orange juice on behalf of the state’s citrus commission. Come to the Florida Sunshine Tree, she sang in 86 commercials over the decade. 

Then, in 1977, Bryant led a different kind of crusade, this time selling outrage instead of orange juice. Her target was a new county ordinance protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination in housing and employment. She labeled those protections “special rights” for a “radical” group that flaunted its sexuality and was trying to recruit young children into a deviant lifestyle. It sounds silly now, but it’s the same kind of rhetoric used today to stir up outrage over trans girls competing in high school sports or libraries hosting drag queen story hour.

In fact, Bryant’s campaign, under the banner “Save Our Children,” was the opening salvo of what would become America’s culture wars. When the votes were tallied on June 7, 1977, it was clear conservatives in Florida and beyond had found a winning message — and an easy target. Voters struck down Dade County’s pro-gay ordinance by a vote of 69% to 31%. 

Overnight, the political landscape was transformed. The national media was breathless.

Bill Wordham:
As Anita Bryant received congratulatory kisses last night. She too, knew that the war would still be going on. She is prepared for it. Her victorious organization, Save our Children, she pointed out, is a national organization. 

Bryant:
We have three national bills to contend with that would not only allow flaunting homosexuals to be in a private religious school, but the national bills put it into the public schools. It's a national problem now. 

Wordham:
So the issue will leave Miami now to be thrashed out on a national level by Congress, by the courts, or by the people, and it is a question which troubles liberals who say few civil rights would ever have become law had they been put to the test, first, in a public vote.

Bill Wordham, ABC News Miami. 

David Hunt:
Bryant took her crusade on the road, often teaming up with a segregationist Baptist minister, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who would rebrand Bryant’s normal majority into a right-wing lobbying organization, the Moral Majority.

One by one, laws protecting the civil rights of gays and lesbians were repealed, in towns like Eugene, Oregon, St. Paul, Minnesota and Wichita, Kansas. Oklahoma and Arkansas passed state laws barring gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools.

In California, State Senator John Briggs decided that a crusade against gay teachers would energize his run for California governor. Since Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature, Briggs opted to go straight to the voters, collecting enough signatures to place Proposition 6 — the Briggs Initiative — on the statewide ballot in the November 1978 general election. The proposed law would have barred gays and lesbians — and even their allies — from working as teachers, classroom aides or school counselors.

MECLA — little more than a year old — jumped into the fight feet first. 

One of the group’s founders, David Mixner, was a seasoned campaign consultant who became the manager of the No on Six campaign. He was joined by several longtime gay activists, including openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, lesbian activist Ivy Bottini and fellow MECLA members Diane Abbit and Roberta Bennett. 

Mixner reminisced about the 1978 campaign to defeat the Briggs Initiative in a 2014 interview with Steve Pride for This Way Out.

Mixner:
A lot of people came to me and asked me if I'd run the statewide campaign. And I said, But I'd have to come out politically. I had just finished running the campaign for mayor Bradley, got him re-elected by two thirds of the vote, which was extraordinary. had worked on the Tunney campaign and worked on a number of campaigns up to that point. So I came out and people in the Democratic Party who I had worked with side by side all my life, turned their back on me. People who I had contribute it to sent their cheques back, said, We can no longer even be identified with you.

David Hunt:
Ironically, Anita Bryant faced a similar problem. Opposition to gay rights looked a lot like bigotry, especially in the days before right-wing media set the terms of the national narrative. If gays and lesbians were an inviting target for the right, Anita Bryant was a villain straight out of central casting for the left. A Bible belt beauty queen serving up overheated rhetoric and warmed over stereotypes with a smile and a side of fresh squeezed orange juice. 

A public boycott of Florida orange juice prompted the Florida Citrus Commission to drop the singer as its spokesperson. Bankruptcy and divorce followed, accompanied by hate mail, death threats and even a pie in the face. 

You’re listening to Tell Me, David. Queer Stories Past & Present. I’m David Hunt, continuing my look at MECLA — the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles.

With the battle over the Briggs Initiative — a California ballot measure that would have barred gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools — the culture wars were off to a rousing start. The campaign galvanized gays and lesbians in California and elsewhere, who rallied to the call: Out of the closets and into the streets. 

David Mixner, one of the founders of MECLA and head of the No on Six campaign, put his political skills to work, eventually helping to line up leading conservative politicians — including former California Gov. Ronald Reagan — against the Briggs Initiative. It was a brilliant strategy, casting the measure as government overreach. The nanny state on steroids.

On election night, Mixner addressed an optimistic overflow crowd at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. 

Mixner:
I think tonight proved one thing that a lot of us said 15 months ago, that even though things may look dark, in this system of government in this country, if you will stand up and you will make yourself heard and you will fight for your rights, you will eventually win your freedom.

David Hunt:
When the results came in, Mixner was exultant.

Mixner:
State Sentor John Briggs has just conceded the election. [cheers]

David Hunt:
The come-from-behind victory against the Briggs Initiative put David Mixner and MECLA in a new light. Nothing succeeds like success, as they say, and America’s first gay and lesbian political action committee had a success story like no other. While the gay and lesbian movement might be struggling across the country, in California it was a force to be reckoned with. The Briggs Initiative wasn’t just voted down. It was crushed, opposed by 58% of voters. Losing, even in conservative Orange County, California, birthplace of Richard Nixon and a GOP stronghold since 1896.

After Briggs, politicians no longer turned away MECLA’s “gay money.” In fact, they clamored for the chance to attend the group’s events, and to tout their pro-gay and feminist credentials to MECLA’s influential and affluent members. 

MECLA began holding monthly breakfast meetings at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel featuring local, state and even national politicians. And its annual dinner drew a Who’s Who of elected officials — mostly Democrats — eager to stand with a new brand of rich and respectable gays and lesbians.

The Rev. Troy Perry, a longtime gay activist and founder of the Metropolitan Community Churches, captured the spirit of the times: “It’s out of the closets and into the Beverly Wilshire,” he quipped.

MECLA’s demands were relatively modest. Board member Peter Scott told the Los Angeles Times in 1978, “We’re not asking for any special treatment. We’re just asking to be allowed to express affection, like any heterosexual would … without fear of losing our livelihoods.”

MECLA, the Times reported in 1979, does not publicly endorse candidates or lobby for legislation as its principal activity. It simply gives money to candidates who, in the group’s words, “are supportive of human rights in general and gay rights in particular.”

In March 1979 600 gays and lesbians paid $100 a plate to mingle with California’s political power structure. The dinner’s sponsors included Gov. Jerry Brown, Sen. Alan Cranston, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, nine congressmen, 20 state legislators and nine members of the Los Angeles City Council.

Assembly speaker Leo McCarthy, who delivered the keynote address, marveled at MECLA’s growing political influence. He called MECLA, “a sophisticated money giving group that is making gay activism not only politically respectable, but politically powerful as well.”

LA Times reporter Doyle McManus, who attended the dinner, noted that thanks to MECLA, office-seekers no longer viewed gay support as the “kiss of death” for their campaigns. 

“Powerful? You bet they’re powerful,” one politician confided to McManus. “We pay attention, I can tell you that.”

What followed was MECLA’s golden age. Even as the Reagan revolution swept America, turning the country to the right, MECLA thrived.

In 1981, its annual dinner raised $100,000 in a single evening. The LA Times called MECLA, “a network of political clout that is based on converting money and influence into political power rather than electing gays to political office.”

It was called checkbook activism. A clean, quiet alternative to street activism. Let gays and lesbians in San Francisco or New York chant catchy slogans under a rainbow banner. L.A. gays and lesbians let their money do the talking. Green was the color most politicians took notice of.

In a profile of MECLA in July 1982, the LA Weekly reflected, “Goals left unachieved by 60s style confrontation politics may now be won at the cash register.”

By 1982, MECLA was clearly on the radar of both national political parties. Sen. Ted Kennedy headlined the group’s annual dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel. And breakfast meetings featured political heavyweights, including first-daughter Maureen Reagan, GOP congressman and senate hopeful Pete McClosky, former Democratic congresswoman Bella Abzug, and writer Gore Vidal, among others.

 “MECLA’s rise is typical of the newly acquired muscle of gays across the country,” the LA Weekly said. “Once wary politicians have become downright sociable in light of the increasing political and financial resources of organized gays.”

“The men and women who bankroll MECLA represent the economic elite of the Los Angeles gay community,” the newspaper added. “They are businesspersons, realtors, lawyers, and therapists.”

MECLA offered Democrats a friendly forum to defend liberal policies that were increasingly under attack by the Republican Reagan administration — and to flip the script and attack Reagan’s economic agenda. 

Tom Hayden:
I view the Reagan presidency as one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. And I hope that you do, and I hope that the American people do as well.

David Hunt:
Tom Hayden, an antiwar activist who had helped organize protests outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, moved inside the Democratic Party establishment in the 1970s. In 1982 he addressed MECLA as a candidate for the California Assembly — a post he would win with MECLA’s help.

Hayden, one of the Chicago Eight put on trial for inciting violence at the Democratic convention, linked the struggle for gay rights to the social and political fights of an earlier decade.

Hayden:
I didn't quite understand it at the time, but everything that occurred in the 1960s in the social upheavals in this country could not be separated from the emergence of an open alternative gay and lesbian lifestyle. I remember at the Chicago trial, one of the most threatening witnesses to the prosecution was Allen Ginsberg, who insisted upon reciting, uh, not one, but uh, uh, a seemingly infinite number of Walt Whitman's poems. And the prosecution would simply allow him to recite another poem by Walt Whitman, as if that would simply definitively prove the case for our guilt. That's when it really struck me how deeply this lifestyle issue was enmeshed in the issues larger, broader issues of civil rights as a whole and peace. And after the trial, which I had thought at the beginning, was really about dissent against the war in Vietnam, our prosecutor, Tom Foran, uh, another good Irish Catholic fellow like myself, went out to speak in the suburbs, uh, to to tell the people how he had convicted the Chicago eight. And the major point he made in the first speech just two or three days after the trial, was summarized in a speech in a high school gymnasium in which he said, Our children are being lost to the freaking fag revolution. 

And it never occurred to me that that was what the trial was all about. 

But that was the essence from his standpoint, from the prosecutor's standpoint of what was most challenging in that trial to his manhood, to his role as a prosecutor, as a representative of order in America. 

Now, after almost a decade of increased progress towards a more tolerant society, we are once again in the throes of a period in which a president is trying to make America a man again. 

I don't know how long this will last. I think this is dangerous for us all. It's dangerous not only for those of us who depend on the protection of civil liberties, but obviously it is dangerous for those whose life support comes from social service programs. And above all, it is dangerous as hell for all of us who are worried about the prospects for peace on this planet.

David Hunt:
Adding to Hayden’s star power was the presence of his wife, actress and activist Jane Fonda. Her association with MECLA founder David Mixner went back to the 1960s and the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, she told the audience.

Jane Fonda:
About 12 years ago or so, I had I had never, never done anything political in my life. And a mutual friend of ours said, well, call David Mixner, who was then organizing the the moratorium and I said, I'm Jane Fonda and I want to do something. And he got me in my first bit of trouble. 

David Hunt:
Jerry Brown, running for the U.S. Senate after two terms as California’s governor, received a warm welcome at a MECLA breakfast meeting at the Beverly Wilshire in the spring of 1982. Brown blasted the Reagan administration’s budget cuts, which had left states like California struggling to fill gaps in social services.

Jerry Brown:
when you walk out of this hotel and you go down the Wilshire Boulevard to the Beverly Hills Hotel, you see standing at a bus stop, someone who obviously looks like they're working is as the maid or some kind of help in Beverly Hills. They're bus fares are being increased so that tax breaks can be created for the people they work for. And so what we have is a redistribution of wealth from the very poorest people and the people who are working at the bottom of the income cycle to those at the highest income level. Now, that was supposed to produce this high level of affluence for everyone. And what it has done has not improve the economy and is tearing apart the social fabric.

David Hunt:
He had taken a fair amount of heat, Brown told the group, for supporting gay and lesbian causes.

Brown:
In many ways, you gathered here this morning are exactly what people are talking about when they start their political assaults on my record and what I've been trying to do in Sacramento. There are code words, there are innuendoes, but basically people don't like the fact that I've had a record of enfranchising the disenfranchised and representing the unrepresented in the corridors of power.

David Hunt:
It's true that, as governor, Brown had appointed gays and lesbians to positions of power in the state. He appointed MECLA board member Sheldon Andelson to the board of regents of the University of California — on the condition that Andelson sell his gay bathhouse, the 8709, in West Hollywood. And Brown appointed the state’s first openly gay judge, Steven Lachs, to the San Francisco Superior Court and the first out lesbian, Mary Morgan, to the San Francisco Municipal Court.

Brown’s appearance at the MECLA breakfast should have been a love fest. Except … someone asked Brown about his controversial decision to shelve a series of public service ads about AIDS, a disease increasingly claiming the lives of sexually active gay men.

Brown waved off the issue, noting that the state was cutting spending across the board, not just in areas that affected gays.

Brown:
given the fact that there has been tremendous retrenchment in state spending, not only in the last couple of months, but about $500 million out, but there's going to be even more in the next couple of months. That is going to be very painful. We're looking at several hundred million dollars of cutbacks in Medi-Cal alone and not to mention other very sensitive areas. It just struck me that that this is not quite the time to be expanding in that area.

David Hunt:
But he was pressed about the ads, which it turns out, were already produced and already paid for. It wouldn’t cost the state anything to spread the word about the emerging epidemic, and it might even save lives. Brown hedged. 

Brown:
I will review this matter carefully and slowly, and we will come up with a satisfactory solution relatively soon. 

David Hunt:
The audience laughed because they understood what Brown was really saying. He didn’t want the ads to air until after he finished his campaign for senate. He might be attacked during the campaign for spending money on gay health care while cutting other health programs. It was fight he chose to walk away from. 

MECLA co-chair Steve Smith — a pragmatist — urged attendees to give Brown the benefit of the doubt, and their support.

Smith:
We tell incumbent officeholders on your behalf that if they stick out their necks for us, that we'll stand by them through the thick and thin. My friends, this is the thick and thin. A few months ago, I confessed to the governor that during the last seven years, I've gone hot and cold on the subject of Jerry Brown. Today, I reflect that we're sometimes hardest on our friends. I remind myself that the time for equivocation and quibbling is fading quickly.

David Hunt:
MECLA’s board of directors voted overwhelmingly to endorse Brown, while recognizing that his support of the gay community had its limits. Brown ultimately lost the Senate race and, despite his promise, the public service ads never aired.

You’re listening to Tell Me, David, Queer Stories, Past and Present. I’m David Hunt.

MECLA, the first gay and lesbian political action committee in the United States, faced criticism in the early 1980s that it was too easy, that it demanded too little of the candidates it supported.

The LA Weekly explained it this way:

The real problem the new gay power structure poses is that it often reduces the political process to check writing — leaving the vast majority of gays disenfranchised. The grassroots can be trampled with such a strategy. 

Bella Abzug, the first representative to introduce a gay rights bill in Congress, addressed a MECLA breakfast a few months after Brown. She suggested that the group didn’t have as much power as it thought it did.

Bella Abzug:
I mean, women are not in the system. I mean, gays are not in the system. Minorities are not in the system. I mean, we got a few representatives here and there, but we're not in the system. We're outside of the power structure.

There's no question about it. We're trying constantly to influence it, to push it, to give it money, to push it around to say, listen, we got power, but pay attention to us. But essentially we're out of the system. But anyhow, women are generally not in power. We, we, we know that even in this room, we don't seem to be in too much power. <Laugh>

Laugh, laugh, but take it seriously. Anyhow, you don't mind my saying that, do you?

David Hunt:
Stung by the criticism, MECLA tried to change the impression that it was a boys’ club. I reported on MECLA’s progress for Pacifica Radio after attending the group’s annual fundraising dinner in 1985.

Hunt:
Three years ago, Bella Abzug surveyed a roomful of men at a MECLA breakfast meeting and urged them to involve more women in the organization. Tonight, Geraldine Ferraro surveyed a dining room crowded with men and women at the Century Plaza Hotel and applauded their efforts to work together for human rights for all Americans. This year's dinner, MECLA’S eighth annual, showed how far the organization has come in its efforts to include women as well as men, Republicans, as well as Democrats in its ranks. Republican Assembly member William Ferrante received the Human Rights Award, the first Republican to be so honored. And Ferraro, the first woman to run as a vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket tonight, became the first woman to give a keynote address at a MECLA dinner. Despite the overwhelming defeat of the Democratic ticket last November, Ferraro said the election was a victory for American women. Ferraro talked of her growing awareness of gay and lesbian oppression and the need for oppressed groups to work together for social justice.

Ferraro:
the fight for equal rights as a fight for all Americans. When we enacted the great civil rights laws, we not only helped black and Hispanic people, we liberated whites as well as others from the curse of discrimination. When we fight for the equal Rights Amendment, it's not just because the Equal Rights Amendment is good for women, but because it's good for men and women together. And by the same token, when we fight prejudice based on sexual orientation, we not only protect the victims, we also heal the sickness that breeds irrational hatred. And that will be good for all the American people. 

Hunt:
Ferraro clearly received the largest ovation from the 1300 diners who paid $200 a plate to attend the event. But L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley, locked in a reelection battle with Councilman John Ferraro, received a similar ovation from the crowd. Bradley is a sentimental favorite of MECLA members who remember that he attended the very first MECLA gala dinner eight years ago when the group lacked the political clout it enjoys today. 

MECLA honored ABC commentator Bill Press with the Communications Award for his outspoken support of gay rights and his call for increased AIDS funding. Press told the group he believes it's essential to support equal rights for gays and lesbians.

Bill Press:
We call ourselves the land of opportunity, and we are, but we are not yet the land of equal opportunity for all and those rights that we have fought for and that we have won over so many years can so easily and quickly be eroded away. I know it's easy to forget that. I know it's easy to become complacent living in this fairly open community and particularly enjoying the power and the unity and the numbers of a magic moment like this. It's easy to forget, but we must never forget that our victories are so fragile, are so fleeting, and are still so minimal. And if that's true of many groups of people today, and it is, it is, especially true of gay men and women.

Hunt:
All in all, it was the highlight of the year for MECLA, an evening when they showed off the results of a year of hard work and intense lobbying from the Century Plaza Hotel, this is David Hunt. 

David Hunt:
The limits of MECLA’s power became clear as it struggled to win passage of a gay employment rights bill, AB-1, in the state legislature. The measure had been introduced five times since 1975 by San Francisco Assemblyman Art Agnos. It finally passed the legislature in 1984, only to be vetoed by Gov. George Deukmejian.

It’s also true that for all the media attention MECLA generated, its budget paled in comparison to the dollars raised by rival groups on the right. While MECLA worked to raise $1 million to support friendly candidates in the decade of the 1980s, in one year alone — 1984 — the Moral Majority raised $11 million for its right-wing lobbying efforts.

To make matters worse, MECLA’s board of directors decided to wade into a political battle that would divide the gay and lesbian community in 1985. It sided with conservatives on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and called for the voluntary closure of gay bathhouses.

Reporter Anthony Price and I examined the controversy for Pacifica Radio. Our one-hour documentary in November 1985 started with a brief history of the baths.

Hunt:
In 1914, a Philadelphia bathhouse might draw a crowd of 60 gay men. On a good Saturday night, German sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld reported that at that time there were gay oriented Turkish baths in Denver, New York, Chicago and Boston, as well as Philadelphia. But it was in the 1970s that the bath business flourished. In 1976, Arthur Bell of the Village Voice described the New York bath scene. Bell declared that the baths were gaining respectability. The club baths in New York reportedly clocked in 5000 customers a week. Bell claimed that the average customer was white between 30 and 35, earned $12,000 a year, stayed five hours and climaxed three times. Intrigued by the ritual and secrecy of bath house sex, lesbian author Rita Mae Brown smuggled herself into a bathhouse in 1975 disguised as a man. Her findings were not so startling. In her words, “Everyone pays to get in here to f**k, pure and simple.” Today, as bathhouses have become highly visible symbols of the spread of AIDS, bathhouse sex seems neither pure nor quite so simple. In 1984, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took steps to regulate gay bathhouses. Reporter Randy Shilts, writing in the Bay Area Reporter said the controversy split the gay community there into warring camps with what he called sexual liberationist on one side and pragmatists on the other. It's hard to tell what the true faith of the gay movement is, Shilts wrote. As county supervisors consider taking steps to regulate and possibly close gay bathhouses, Los Angeles now faces the same dilemma that confronted San Francisco in 1984. For gays facing AIDS on a very personal level, it may be a bitter struggle. What seems clear is that the bathhouse, a fixture of gay culture for generations, faces an uncertain future. 

David Hunt:
In MECLA’s view, bathhouses were a public health threat because they fueled the spread of AIDS. Full stop.

That view was shared by many of its supporters and — more importantly — by the California political establishment. Craig Hume, chair of MECLA’s communications committee, explained:

Hume:
MECLA has received I think a very positive response. Obviously, there have been some people who have called the MECLA office and have expressed displeasure with the MECLA call for voluntary closure of bathhouses in Los Angeles County. But, on the whole, we have received an overwhelming number of calls from MECLA supporters and especially from MECLA’s financial supporters, expressing their support for the stance that we have taken and perhaps even more importantly, the response within the California political community has been very, very positive. Many members of the state assembly and state Senate have indicated that they thought MECLA took a very responsible stand, which significantly enhanced the image of the gay community in the eyes of our elected officials. 

David Hunt:
Steve Downard, a bathhouse owner and head of the Silverlake Merchants Association in Los Angeles, was one of MECLA’s sharpest critics. In his view, the group cared more about public image than public health.

Steve Downard:
MECLA became involved because bathhouses were embarrassing to explain to their fabulous West Side friends. Bathhouses were institutions that they did not want to defend because they want to pretend that they're just like all their straight friends who they hobnob with at Bel-Air cocktail parties. Well, maybe they have become like their fabulous westside friends at Bel-Air cocktail parties, but the rest of the gay community isn't. And the rest of the gay community may not have the affluence to defend their civil liberties as easily as the Board of MECLA.

David Hunt:
In the end, the County Board of Supervisors opted to keep L.A.’s 20 bathhouses open, but did require them to take steps to monitor and discourage unsafe sexual activity.

If the controversy hurt MECLA’s standing inside the gay and lesbian community, it boosted its reputation as politically pragmatic to the rest of the world. It helped MECLA court moderate Republicans — those could still be found in the 1980s — like former San Diego mayor Pete Wilson, who had soundly defeated Jerry Brown in the 1982 race for the U.S. Senate in California. Wilson was warmly greeted at a MECLA dinner in July 1987, shortly after he successfully pressured the Reagan administration to create a national AIDS commission.

The next summer, when Wilson addressed a group of gay Republicans in Orange County, he echoed MECLA’s modest position on gay rights. “Most gay Republicans want nothing special,” he declared. “They want equal rights.”

Wilson went on to win reelection to the Senate from California in 1988, beating his Democratic opponent, Leo McCarthy, by nearly a million votes. Then, he surprised everyone by running for governor of California in 1990. He beat former San Francisco mayor Diane Feinstein by about a quarter million votes. 

If MECLA thought it had a friend in the California governor’s mansion, it was wrong. Less than a year into his term, Wilson vetoed AB-1, the employment rights measure that MECLA and other gay organizations had been pushing for over a decade.

Reaction in the gay and lesbian community was quick — and fierce. Checkbook activism, critics said, was a fool’s game. Judy Sisneros, a member of Queer Nation and Act Up — two groups that embraced street protests — derided MECLA as “gay assimilationists” whose influence was waning. She told the L.A. Weekly, “Direct action and civil disobedience may become the most effective way to fight for broad-based recognition and laws in a society as resistant to gays and lesbians as ours.”

Even establishment figures, such as Torie Osborn, executive director of L.A.’s gay center, could see the writing on the wall: “MECLA is dying a slow death,” she said in September 1991.

That was the problem — literally — not figuratively. A scan of the obituary section of the Los Angeles Times tells the story.

One of MECLA’s top donors, Sheldon Andelson, died of AIDS in December 1987. MECLA’s first chair and one of its co-founders, Peter Scott, died of the disease in May 1989. By the early 1990s, the epidemic had claimed more members, including MECLA founders William Carey, Richard Kaplan and Rand Schrader.

As a result of the losses in its ranks, MECLA faced both a leadership void and what Osborne called “grief overload.” David Mixner told the Los Angeles Times in 1992 that he had lost nearly 200 friends to the epidemic.

MECLA’s finances began to suffer. Co-chair Ryan Nakagawa told the L.A. Weekly that the group’s annual budget had dropped tenfold, from $300,000 or more in the mid-1980s to just $30,000 in 1991.

MECLA veterans resisted Nakagawa’s efforts to expand the group’s focus to include pro-choice issues and the priorities of people of color. MECLA had always been affluent and overwhelmingly white — advocating for issues that mattered to its financially secure base. 

In fact, when Black activist Charles Stewart tried to join MECLA’s board in the 1980s, he was turned away. “It’s not about race prejudice,” MECLA’s Roberta Bennett told Stewart. “It’s about money prejudice.”

Blacks and other racial minorities were not seen as reliable sources of cash.

Nakagawa had a different perspective. He told the L.A. Weekly: “Gay white men have to see that their future is connected with other politically endangered groups. Just by money alone, we have no lasting power.”

That sentiment was echoed by former West Hollywood mayor Steve Shulte. “We may have influence, but we don’t have real power,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “That won’t change until a lot more of us are in elected and appointed office.”

The warnings fell on deaf ears.

By 1992, MECLA was history.

Co-founder David Mixner turned his talents to raising money for an old college friend who just happened to be a leading candidate for president.

On Jan. 20, 1993 — when his friend Bill Clinton took the oath of office at the Capitol — Mixner was there as one of the co-chairs of Clinton’s inaugural committee. He would later feud with the president over the antigay Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. But that’s another story for another time.

Reflecting on MECLA’s demise, Mixner told the L.A. Weekly, “MECLA began to die a slow death as most of us began to turn our attention from gay issues to AIDS.”

But he defended the group’s tactics, believing that courting and supporting gay-friendly candidates was necessary to raising the profile of a long-marginalized movement.

“As long as you believe the political process is important, you need checkbook activism,” he said, “if you want to play politics.”

In its 15-year existence, from 1977 to 1992, MECLA certainly played politics. And in a way no one in the gay community had ever played it before. By the rules of the establishment. By cleaning up, dressing up and sitting down with the politicly powerful. If they didn’t achieve everything they wanted, they at least were taken seriously by serious people.

Morris Kight, the scruffy, old-school activist who organized L.A.’s first gay pride parade in 1970 and founded the Stonewall Democratic Club in 1975, was never invited to a MECLA dinner. I’m not sure he owned a tuxedo. But he knew something about working inside and outside the system.

The movement needed to cultivate a “good cop, bad cop” strategy, he said in 1991, combining street protests and political lobbying efforts. MECLA was needed he said, because “some of us must know how to talk the language of legislators.”

And that language, as anyone can tell you, is money.

MECLA’s legacy lives on today, in organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, the LGBTQ Victory Fund and Equality California.

I’d like to thank the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives for preserving many of the recordings heard on this program. Special thanks to Greg Gordon and This Way Out for coverage of the No on Six victory party. Thanks also to Anthony Price, Steve Pride and Ken Miller for their reporting. Sources also included ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Weekly, Associated Press, News Pilot, the Signal and the book Out for Good by Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney. 

For Tell Me, David, I’m David Hunt.