Mary C. Curtis | (TNS) CQ-Roll Call

WASHINGTON — When it comes to the political history of gay rights in the United States, a lot of people think they have it figured out.

They assume “one party is wholly committed to LGBTQ rights, and the other is completely opposed. And it’s understandable why a lot of Americans think that way,” says historian Neil J. Young.

But it’s not that simple, Young says. In his recent book, “Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right,” he traces a more complex path from the 1950s to the present day.

Young joined “Equal Time” this month to discuss some of the conservatives who stayed true to their values while working toward same-sex marriage and the end of policies like “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The excerpt below has been condensed and edited. For more, listen to the full podcast.

Q: What did early gay rights activism look like before the Stonewall demonstrations in 1969?

A: I begin my book in the Cold War era, the Lavender Scare, which was when both political parties were really committed to rooting out homosexuals from the federal government and making life difficult for gay persons in this country.

I was surprised to discover that there was an activism among a handful of gay conservatives that’s really important to the advancement of a gay rights movement — or at the time, it was known as the homophile movement.

This story has been told mostly from the left, focusing on folks like Harry Hay, who was the leader of the Mattachine Society. But Dorr Legg and other right-of-center gay men, they were making arguments about limiting federal power, constraining the government, as the pathway to freedom for homosexuals.

Q: Who were some other key gay conservatives?

A: Someone I didn’t know that much about, but is a very important character in the book, is Leonard Matlovich. He was an Air Force sergeant, served three tours of duty in Vietnam, was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart and was seriously injured in combat. He came out of the closet in 1975, and he did this in order to challenge the military’s ban against gay servicepersons.

He teamed up with Frank Kameny, who was a very prominent gay rights activist who was challenging the ban. And Leonard Matlovich was in a lot of ways the perfect poster boy, because he was good-looking, he was really masculine, he was from the South and he had all those military honors.

Kameny thought it was important to show that this isn’t some hippie radical who’s trying to revolutionize American society and destroy the American military. This is a conservative Republican, and he is just fighting for the right to die for his country.

And of course, he doesn’t win his legal battle against the military. But he sets in motion a history that takes several decades to resolve and ultimately leads to the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Q: What were some of the conflicts over tactics and priorities back then?

A: The gay Republican organizations I was looking at, they were all absolutely committed to defeating the Briggs Initiative, or Proposition 6, that’s put on the ballot in 1978 and would have made it illegal for any gay person in the state of California to work in the public school system.

But then after that, what’s next? What are we existing for? One of the ongoing debates was this question of, “Am I a gay Republican, or a Republican gay?”

The group that said they were Republican gays, or Republicans who happened to be gay, were much more conservative in their politics, and they didn’t believe in the notion of gay rights. They said, “That’s not something the federal government can grant me. I just want to be left alone.”

And that’s a conservative principle, right? Stay out of my bedroom, stay out of my wallet, stay out of my business. So they opposed any laws on the books that actively discriminated and they wanted to work to eliminate those laws, but they didn’t want any sort of granting of rights, and they didn’t want any sort of identity-based politics tied to their sexual identity.

Q: Many look at the Ronald Reagan years, and the reaction to HIV/AIDS, as an inflection point.

A: A more tolerant attitude was actually beginning to develop in the nation around homosexuality in the early ’80s. That was almost completely wiped away because of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the way that folks like Pat Buchanan and Gary Bauer, these hard-right conservatives within the Reagan administration, really pumped up a homophobic politics based on fears about the disease, to push back against the gay rights movement more broadly.

And so gay Republicans were caught in the crosshairs of that. They had been huge defenders of Reagan, they were big admirers of him both in ’80 and ’84, but by the late ’80s and into the 1990s, a lot of them who were still living were incredibly disillusioned with the Republican Party.

Q: In the 2000s, the marriage equality movement went from divisive to generally accepted.

A: We saw public attitudes changing so quickly, in such a short period of time. One of the things I found fascinating was that gay conservatives, or the larger terrain of gay men on the right — [including] libertarians and classical liberals and other folks who don’t necessarily even identify with a conservative label — were really fundamental in developing the intellectual argument for same-sex marriage. I’m thinking about people like Andrew Sullivan and Bruce Bawer and Jonathan Rauch.

They were talking about the right to same-sex marriage far before any gay Democrat was. They helped move the needle among enough independents and enough Republicans to make this a consensus position in the nation, and this was their strategy all along.

Q: How is the gay conservative movement evolving now, when we see most Republicans adjusting in the image of Donald Trump?

A: When I was finishing the book to go to press, this was when the “Don’t Say Gay” stuff was happening in my home state of Florida and was spreading across the nation. And gay Republicans have been in a lot of ways big supporters of Ron DeSantis on this, because they believe that it’s very specific, targeted legislation that only has to do with underage children. So I [asked people], “OK, maybe that’s the case for this particular legislation, but are you at all worried about where this is headed? Do you think this is the opening wedge of a broader assault on LGBTQ rights, including same-sex marriage?”

And all of them said, “No, no, no. Marriage is completely safe and protected. It’s written in stone.”

We have to secure progress through ongoing action, not taking it for granted and assuming that it’s just written in stone and can never be overturned. I mean, the Dobbs [decision overturning abortion rights] is a great example of this, and hopefully there won’t be more to come.

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