Excerpt from Chapter 15: Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, by John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman (Harper and Rowe, 1988)

..In 1984, at the Democratic Party convention, gay activists led the way to a new Party plank: condemning “violent acts of bigotry, hatred, and extremism” aimed at gay men and lesbians”. Another plant put the party on record as recognizing “reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right.” Though the platform avoided any mention of abortion, Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic nominee for vice president, spent much of the campaign verbally dueling with the Roman Catholic hierarchy which condemned her defense of women’s right to have abortion as an option.

Meanwhile Ronald Reagan…returendd to issues of sexuality again and again. . [condemned pornography’s availability..For Reagan] the liberal dominated media [provided that] sex was everywhere. What was once "a sacred expression of love" had now become "casual and cheap." Reagan and the Republicans returned to these themes again and again. In August, he assured the publisher of the Presidential Biblical Scorecard that he would "resist the efforts of some to obtain government endorsement of homo- sexuality," and identified the sex act as "the means by which husband and wife participate with God in the creation of a new human life." As if to affirm these views, and in order to position itself against the Democratic call for reproductive freedom, the Republican party adopted a platform plank opposing abortion and endorsing legislation to make clear that "the 14th Amendment's protections apply to unborn children."

For any who doubted, the 1984 presidential season made clear that whatever consensus existed in the mid-twentieth century about sexuality had dissolved by the 1980s. The debates about sex, rather than remaining the province of feminists and gay liberationists, were polarizing the nation's politics. The contentious quality of the debates stemmed not only from the demands of radicals, but also from the response of conservatives distressed by the reorientation of sexual values that had occurred since the 1960s. The sexual politics of the New Right, as well as the more recent controversies generated by the AIDS epidemic, attest to how deeply sexuality had infiltrated national politics by the 1980s.

Sexual Politics and the New Right

The rapid pace of change and the dissolution of the liberal consensus about sexuality encouraged a political response from the right. As the 1970s ended, the latest in a long line of purity movements took shape. Reacting to the gains of both feminism and gay liberation, and distressed by the visibility of the erotic in American culture, sexual conservatives sought the restoration of "traditional" values. In its rhetoric, this contemporary breed of purity advocates echoed its predecessors by attributing to sex the power to corrupt, even to weaken fatally, American society. But in other important ways, its efforts departed from the past. It plunged directly into politics, as religious fundamentalists joined forces with political conservatives to make the Republican party the vehicle for a powerful moral crusade. Availing themselves of modern technology, these New Right proponents used computerized mailing lists, direct-mail fundraising, and telephone banks to reach deeply into the population and mobilize a constituency. By the early 1980s, journalists and political analysts were giving them credit for the turn to conservatism in American life.

Although feminism and gay liberation seemed to spark the resurgence of the purity impulse, the conservative sexual politics of the 1950s had never fully died. Placed on the defensive by the decisions of the liberal Warren Court, groups such as Citizens for Decent Literature struggled on. In the 1960s, much of the battle focused on the issue of sex education in the public schools. Distressed by the court-decreed elimination of school prayer, some conservatives banded together in an effort to draw the line at sex instruction. Toward the end of the decade, the John Birch Society began targeting Mary Calderone,

the renowned sex educator. In Racine, Wisconsin; Anaheim, California; Minneapolis, and other places, parents fought to keep discussions of sex out of the classroom. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, pushed legislation prohibiting required attendance in sex education classes. Calderone's organization, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), counted over three hundred organizations opposing sex instruction in the public schools.' By the early 1970s, the victories of feminism and gay liberation, the Supreme Court decision on abortion, and the new visibility of pornography were fueling the fears of moral conservatives. From every side, traditional family values and sexual ethics seemed threatened.

Two events in 1977 provided the opportunity to weld scattered efforts around diverse issues into a more militant, cooperative national effort. In Dade County, Florida, passage of a gay rights ordinance led the entertainer Anita Bryant to spearhead a repeal campaign. Bryant's celebrity status propelled this local event into the national spotlight. In the same month as the Florida vote, the Supreme Court ruled that though abortion could not be prohibited, government had no constitutional obligation to fund the medical procedure. The decision gave abortion foes hope, as well as a tactic they could use to chip away at the availability of abortion.

Since the early 1970s, an important item on the gay movement's agenda had been the extension of civil rights statutes to include provisions prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Activists devoted much of their energy to securing passage of municipal and county ordinances as a foundation for later efforts at the state and national level. By 1977, they had achieved upward of three dozen victories, of which the law in populous Dade County was one. But, for the first time, they encountered an outspoken opposition, ready to fight back, in Florida. Anita Bryant, who led the campaign to repeal the law, was a foe to reckon with. A former Miss Oklahoma and a popular singer in middle America, she remained in the public eye through her commercials for Minute Maid orange juice, where she projected an attractive, motherly wholesomeness. Bryant was outraged that local legislators had seemed to endorse the lifestyle of homosexuals, whom she described as "human garbage."' With the aid of her business-manager husband, she formed Save Our Children, Inc., and succeeded in placing a repeal initiative on the ballot.

From the start, the rhetoric of the campaign was overblown and appealed to people's most irrational fears. Bryant and her cohorts made the safety of children the centerpiece of the campaign. "They can only recruit children, and this is what they want to do," she warned Dade County parents. "Some of the stories I could tell you of child recruitment and child abuse by homosexuals would turn your stomach." George Will, the conservative columnist, saw the Miami ordinance as one more step in "the moral disarmament of society," with the right of homosexuals to marry coming next. In a foreshadowing of the direction the purity movement would take, Protestant fundamentalist ministers assumed a highly visible role. A local evangelist told reporters that "homosexuality is a sin so rotten, so low, so dirty that even cats and dogs don't practice it." Jerry Falwell, a Baptist preacher from Lynchburg, Virginia, and soon to become a national figure, flew in to help the repeal forces. "So-called gay folks," he intoned, would "just as soon kill you as look at you." Backed by the Catholic hierarchy, conservative rabbis, and Miami's daily newspapers, the Bryant campaign won a resounding victory as voters rejected the ordinance by a two-to-one majority.'

The media publicity that the Dade County battle received guaranteed that its influence would extend beyond its locale. Over the next year, conservatives mounted similar campaigns in St. Paul, Wichita, and Eugene, Oregon; in each case, citizens defeated gay rights in overwhelming proportions. In California, lesbians and gay men faced an even more serious threat. There, inspired by Bryant's success, an ultraconservative state senator from the Los Angeles suburbs, John Briggs, succeeded in placing an anti-gay measure on the state ballot. The Briggs initiative authorized school systems to fire gay employees, as well as anyone who publicly or privately advocated or encouraged homosexual conduct. Throughout 1978, the gay communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities put together a well-organized grass-roots campaign against the measure. Winning the support of labor unions protective of their members' jobs, large-circulation newspapers in the state, and even conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan, who objected to the constraints on free speech, gay activists succeeded in defeating the initiative. Yet even this victory turned sour. Less than three weeks after the November vote, Dan White, a local San Francisco politician, assassinated George Moscone, the mayor, and Harvey Milk, the city's only openly gay supervisor. Milk had assumed a highly visible role in the anti-Briggs campaign. His murder, at the hands of a man who was a veteran, ex-cop, and former firefighters who had espoused traditional family values and a conservative moral politics, seemed to symbolize the fragility of the gay community's gains

Meanwhile, a movement to curtail the right of women to choose abortion was developing. For Americans who objected to abortion, the Supreme Court's ,Roe decision in 1973 had appeared as a "bolt from the blue," catching them off-guard and unprepared. Though local anti-abortion groups formed almost immediately, the Court's ruling seemed clear and incontrovertible, leaving little room for action. Then, in 1976, Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois succeeded in attaching a rider to an appropriations bill, prohibiting the use of federal dollars to fund abortions. The next year, the Supreme Court ruled that government had the authority to bar the financing of abortion with tax dollars. Congress responded with alacrity, and by 1978, the number of federally funded abortions had fallen from 295,000 to 3,000. States, too, cut back on their coverage; by the summer of 1979, only nine states still paid for abortions. Though the constitutional right to abortion remained intact, anti-abortion forces had succeeded in sharply restricting the access that poor women had to it.

The victory over funding also spurred the movement forward. Local groups became part of national organizations such as March for Life and the National Right-to-Life Committee. They registered voters and made abortion the litmus test of political acceptability, campaigning against candidates based on the single issue of abortion. As Nellie Grey, of March for Life, explained, 16on a fundamental issue, you can't strike a bargain. You are either for killing babies or you're not. You can't be for a little bit of killing babies."' Anti- abortionists such as Dr. C. Everett Koop, who later became the Surgeon General under Reagan, toured the country with films that likened abortion to the Holocaust. Soon the inflamed passions of the anti-abortion movement were having more than rhetorical expression. By the end of the 1970s, clinics performing abortions were being torched and bombed across the country.

The involvement of purity advocates in politics, whether to defeat gay rights, restrict abortion, or curtail the spread of pornography, held an irresistible allure for traditional conservatives. During the 1970s, a new set of right- wing organizations came into existence, determined to turn back the liberal social-welfare policies of the 1960s and to reverse the retrenchment of America's role in the world. Groups such as the Conservative Caucus, headed by Howard Phillips, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, led by Paul Weyrich, and the National Conservative Political Action Committee, chaired by Terry Dolan, saw the discontent spawned by sexual issues as a force that could propel their politics into power. In commenting on the potential of the alliance, Richard Viguerie, the editor of the Conservative Digest and a pioneer in direct-mail fundraising techniques, noted that "if abortion remains an issue, and we keep picking liberals off, this movement could completely change the face of Congress." Paul Weyrich, too, saw issues of sexuality and family life as "the Achilles' heel of the liberal Democrats." In 1979, Phillips and Weyrich helped persuade Jerry Falwell, whose television program The Old Time Gospel Hour reached 18 million viewers weekly, to form the Moral Majority as a vehicle to mobilize the fundamentalist population. They also established the Religious Roundtable to bring together conservative politicians and influential television preachers such as Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim Bak- ker, James Robison, and others.

This religion-based New Right exploded into the nation's consciousness during the 1980 presidential campaign. While Jimmy Carter, a self-avowed born-again Christian, remained aloof from it, Ronald Reagan actively courted the fundamentalist vote, and appeared openly sympathetic to the New Right's position on abortion, school prayer, and pornography. His fervid Cold War rhetoric also appealed to preachers who feared a "godless" Communism. Reagan addressed a national convention of religious broadcasters. In return, evangelists appealed to their congregations and their television viewers to vote for righteousness. Falwell, whose Moral Majority had already enrolled seventy-two thousand ministers and four million lay members, castigated the 4 4minority of secular humanists and amoralists [who] are running this country and taking it straight to hell." He warned the nation's liberals that "the moralists in America have had enough. [We] are joining hands together for the changing, the rejuvenating of a nation." James Robison, a Fort Worth television preacher, even appropriated the language of gay liberation in his appeals. "It's time for God's people to come out of the closet and the churches-and change America."" After Reagan won by a landslide and Republicans captured control of the Senate, many political commentators were quick to attribute an almost invincible power to the moralistic politics of the New Right.

When the new Congress reconvened in 1981, the assessment of the media and the worst fears of feminists and gay liberationists seemed ready to be confirmed. Despite their rhetorical opposition to big government, conservatives were prepared to sanction state intervention in issues of sexual morality and family life. In short order, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Representative Hyde introduced a bill that defined life as beginning at conception, and hence made abortion equivalent to murder. Another anti-abortion politician, Representative Robert Dornan of California, presented to the House a constitutional amendment that identified life as beginning when the sperm fertilizes the ovum, thus including the birth control pill and the IUD as potential abortifacients. Republican conservatives also resurrected the Family Protection Act, which had died an unceremonious death during the Carter presidency. Its thirty-six provisions included one that prohibited federal funds for schools whose curriculum "would tend to denigrate, diminish or deny the role differences between the sexes as they have been historically understood in the United States," and another that denied government benefits, including social security, to anyone who presented homosexuality "as an acceptable alternative life style or suggests that it can be an acceptable life style." Meanwhile, religious leaders kept up the impassioned rhetoric. Falwell aroused his supporters by declaring, "we are fighting a holy war and this time we are going to win." His frequent appeals for funds-by 1981 he was raising over a million dollars a week----enticed contributions with questions such as, "Do you ap- prove of known practicing homosexuals teaching in public schools?" Through its political agenda, the New Right appeared intent on restoring sex to its reproductive moorings and safely confining in to the family."

Despite their apparent power, the purity crusaders of the 1980s made only limited gains at the national level. Although abortion debates proved rancorous, consuming much of the time of Congress, no further restrictions were passed into law. Issues such as abortion or school prayer were too unpredictable, and too threatening to Republican unity, for the Reagan administration to pay much more than lip service to them. Instead, Reagan devoted his energy to expanding the nation's military establishment and dismantling liberal social- welfare programs. Some sops were thrown to the New Right. In 1985, Attorney General Edwin Meese established a commission on pornography that toured the country intent on exposing the social harm allegedly caused by explicit sexual materials. Its 1,960-page report, replete with an alphabetical listing of magazines, films, and books ranging from A Cock Between Friends to 69 Munching Lesbians, reached the conclusion that pornography caused violence and irreparable damage to society. Its exclusion of social scientific evidence to the contrary, and the fact that law-enforcement agents and vice- squad officers comprised the largest group of witnesses, probably made the outcome foreordained." Of greater significance, Reagan also tended to appoint to the federal udiciary men and women sympathetic to the New Right. The five-to-four 1986 Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that sustained the constitutionality of sodomy laws directed against homosexuals was, per- haps, a harbinger of things to come.

On a local level, meanwhile, purity crusaders more easily flexed their political muscles. School districts throughout the nation faced increasing surveillance from parents angry over sex education classes or the novels that students were asked to read. In Chicago in 1986, the actions of the Roman Catholic hierarchy succeeded in defeating a gay rights ordinance, the passage of which had seemed certain until church leaders spoke up. An Atlanta campaign against adult theaters and bookstores reduced the numbers of such establishments from forty-four in the late seventies to a mere handful by 198 1. North Carolina legislators enacted a new, tougher pornography law that al- lowed police to seize materials and make arrests without a prior order from the courts. When the law went into effect in October 1985, legitimate book- stores and convenience markets quickly pulled Playboy and Penthouse from the shelves. Though New Right forces could not apparently return the nation to an earlier era of sexual reticence, they did seem to be setting outer limits for sexual permissiveness. The effort to contain pornography reveals how complex the alignments over sexual issues had become. A major focus of feminist energy in the 1970s had been efforts to combat sexual violence-rape, harassment, wife battering, and incest. Whether these phenomena had increased in scope, or feminist campaigns had simply brought them to light, is impossible to determine. But, the eruption of pornographic imagery into the public sphere seemed like the last straw for activists who daily encountered the victims of violence. In Los Angeles, feminists protested the display of a billboard for a record album that depicted a woman bound by ropes alongside the slogan "I'm 'Black and Blue' for the Rolling Stones." In a number of cities local feminists picked up the cue. At first the issue they dramatized was the association of sex with violence, whether in pornography or the mainstream media. But, before long, they telescoped the problem into a single-minded preoccupation with pornography. Organizations such as Women Against Pornography put together slide shows aimed at exposing the brutalizing fantasies that some hard-core materials purveyed, and their members conducted tours of the porn districts that had sprung up in the early 1970s. Anti-porn feminists subscribed to the dictum '.pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." Andrea Dworkin, a leading theorist of the cause, attributed the explosion of pornography to fears of feminist power. "All over this country," she said, "a new campaign of terror- ism and vilification is being waged against us. Fascist propaganda celebrating sexual violence against women is sweeping this land.... Pornography is the propaganda of sexual terrorism." By the early 1980s Dworkin and feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon were drafting their own model obscenity stat- utes, which defined pornography as a violation of women's civil rights, and they found themselves in political alliance with the New Right in Indianapolis and Suffolk County, New York, and other places where the anti-pornography impulse was strong. Some anti-pom feminists were also witnesses before the Meese commission, urging it to take a tough stand against sexually explicit materials.''

Other feminists, meanwhile, bristled at the potential for censorship contained in the anti-porn movement and at the dangers that this unexpected alliance posed to women's exploration of the erotic. Ellen Willis, who had helped launch women's liberation in New York City, acknowledged that pornography could be a "psychic assault," but that "for women as for men it can also be a source of erotic pleasure." For a woman to enjoy pornography, she wrote, "is less to collaborate in her oppression than to defy it, to insist on an aspect of her sexuality that has been defined as a male preserve. . . . [In rejecting sexual repression and hypocrisy-which have inflicted even more damage on women than on men-[pornography] expresses a radical impulse." Willis attacked the "goody-goody" concept of sexuality that anti-porn activists espoused as "not feminist but feminine." It preserved, she argued, the old "good girl-bad girl" dichotomy that denied most women access to erotic pleasure and adventure. Dismayed by the political alliance that anti-porn feminists seemed to be making with right-wing purity crusaders, some women formed groups such as the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force to resist any move toward stricter obscenity laws. Within feminist circles, the 1980s witnessed renewed debates over the meaning of sexuality. Activists dissected its dual nature as a source, in the words of one feminist anthology, of both "pleasure and danger" to women."

Despite the strange alliance over pornography, most ideologues of the Christian-based purity crusade identified feminism and gay liberation as the evils they were organizing against. Yet the reasons for the New Right's rapid growth was both more and less than the existence of radical movements for sexual liberation. Much of the strength of the New Right came from communities that had never encountered an open homosexual and certainly never sheltered a gay bathhouse. Many fundamentalists also moved in a relatively self-contained social milieu in which women remained housewives and mothers, and youth socialized at church-sponsored events. Yet, they could not stay unaware of the vast social changes that were sweeping the nation-the rise in divorce, the entry of women into the work force, the openness of urban gay male subcultures, the commercialization of sex, and the sexualization of commerce. Especially for some women-those for whom mothering was a central task, who did not work for wages, and who remained religiously devout-the values of the post-liberal era seemed to attack the very source of their self- worth. At times, New Right leaders acknowledged that they were attacking not merely a clearly delineated opposition such as gay liberation, but some- thing more amorphous and widespread. Falwell, for instance, in lambasting pornography, called network television "the greatest vehicle being used to indoctrinate us slowly to accept a pornographic view of life. Pornography is more than a nudey magazine," he said. "It is a prevailing atmosphere of sexual license."" In an era when much of mainstream culture was promoting the erotic, little wonder that moral conservatives responded with fury.

At the same time, the New Right also had its own well-defined symbolic concern that brought its diffuse anxieties together. Whatever the issue-abortion or the Equal Rights Amendment, gay liberation or pornography, sex education or the lyrics of rock music-the sexuality of youth served as the unifying element in its campaigns. Opponents of the purity forces often missed this, instead seeing the New Right through the issues they felt most passionate about, such as gender equality, the dismantling of homosexual oppression, or the protection of civil liberties. But beneath the specific campaigns, the behavior of youth emerged again and again as the central focus of the New Right. Its attacks on pornography, for instance, first took shape around the issue of "kiddie-porn," which easily became the object of new legislation. In mobilizing their forces, Anita Bryant and other gay rights antagonists repeatedly raised the phantom of child recruitment. Faced with an epidemic of pregnant teenagers, parents targeted the schools, not because of a failure to provide the instruction that might allow the young to have sex safely, but because the schools were allegedly giving adolescents too much information. Even issues such as abortion and the ERA, so central to the feminist agenda for women's equality, resonated with concerns about the young. A right-to-life activist in California, for example, saw abortion as one part of a larger problem of youthful sexual expression:

I don't think we would have as many sexually active teenagers, first of all, if contraception weren't readily available and acceptable. . . . There's more of a temptation to participate in sex than we had when we were young ... because you just knew that if you were sexually active you might well get pregnant.

A leader of the anti-ERA forces in New York State also turned to the young in explaining her involvement in politics. "For one thing, it would allow gays to marry and adopt children," she said. "If anything ever happened to me, I don't want to think that gays could adopt my children."

Fears about the sexual behavior of youth give the contemporary purity crusade the historical specificity one would expect to find in a social movement. For of all the changes in sexual mores that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, the spread of sexual activity among the young marked the sharpest break with the past. Certainly some male youth had found sexual release in earlier eras, whether through masturbation or with prostitutes. And, in the mid-twentieth century, young women found sexual expressiveness open to them in the con- text of romance and approaching marriage. But the values and patterns of behavior that had emerged by the 1970s were different. Youth engaged not just in occasional experimentation, nor did they have sex only in the context of a marriage-oriented relationship. The erotic became incorporated as a regular, ongoing feature of their maturation. The visibility of sex in American culture gave them a familiarity with sex and an interest in it regardless of their parents' wishes. The lyrics of the songs they listened to and danced to-"Let's spend the night together" or "I want a man with a slow hand," to name just two- incited desire as well as suggested possibilities. That many of them would not marry until well into their twenties, and that cohabitation was an acceptable option, made the marriage-oriented ethic of sexual liberalism increasingly irrelevant to their lives. It was the ability and willingness of youth to explore the erotic that most signaled the passing of sexual liberalism. It also imparted emotional power to a purity crusade that attacked all the manifestations of the post-liberal era and that sought the restoration of a marriage-based sexual system replete with gendered and reproductive meanings.

The AIDS Crisis

While the New Right vigorously pursued political solutions to the new sexual permissiveness, an argument for retrenchment came from another, unexpected quarter. In 1980 and 1981, a few doctors in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York began encountering puzzling medical phenomena. Young homosexual men in the prime of life were dying suddenly from a rare pneumonia, pneumocystis carinii, or wasting away from an unusual cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma, that normally attacked older men of Mediterranean ancestry who recovered from the disease. By the summer of 1981 it became clear to these doctors, as well as to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that a devastating new disease syndrome had entered the annals of medicine. Acquired Immune Deficiency -Syndrome (AIDS), as it was labeled, destroyed the body's natural defenses against infection, making the victim susceptible to a host of opportunistic infections which the body seemed incapable of resisting. Unlike other recent new illnesses, such as Legionnaire's Disease or Toxic Shock Syndrome, from which most patients recovered, AIDS had no cure. The immune system did not return to normal, and the mortality rate was frighten- ingly high. Moreover, the case load grew at an alarming pace: 225 at the end of 1981, 1,400 by the spring of 1983, 15,000 in the summer of 1985, and 40,000 two years later.

AIDS revealed how tenuous the progress of gay liberation had been. Because the initial victims in the United States were gay men, and because a majority of the total cases remained within the male homosexual population, AIDS gave those who were hostile, or even ambivalent, toward homosexuality the opportunity to vent their spleen. The New Right quickly recognized AIDS as a vehicle to whip up hysteria and move its political agenda forward. Evangelists proclaimed the disease a just retribution from God. Falwell piously announced that "a man reaps what he sows. If he sows seed in the field of his lower nature, he will reap from it a harvest of corruption." One cover of his Moral Majority Report pictured a white family wearing masks under the headline "Homosexual Diseases Threaten American Families."" In Dallas, a group of physicians formed Dallas Doctors Against AIDS and filed a brief on behalf of a court appeal to restore the state's sodomy statute. In Washington, New Right politicians floated proposals to quarantine carriers and high-risk groups, raising the specter of concentration camps for gay men. The military imposed mandatory testing for the presence of antibodies to the virus believed to induce AIDS, while Congress enacted legislation requiring the test for all immigrants. Both measures involved areas where gay activists had sought relief from discriminatory policies, and thus they transformed the disease into a new weapon to preserve inequality. Even liberal magazines ran stories titled "The Gay Plague." Profiles of the initial victims led doctors to speculate that AIDS was a by-product of contemporary gay male life, a result of sexual promiscuity and "fast-lane" living.

As the medical establishment searched for explanations, some of the mystery dissolved. In France in 1983, and in the United States soon thereafter, researchers isolated a virus that was apparently the culprit. AIDS was infectious rather than contagious. The virus could not be transmitted casually, but seemed to require the exchange of bodily fluids-blood or semen-between one person and another. Rather than a "homosexual disease," it was apparently a quirk that in the United States AIDS first manifested itself among gay men. But once present in that population, it could be passed from partner to partner through anal or oral sex, with the dense web of sexual relationships in the gay male subculture allowing for its rapid spread. Moreover it soon became clear that gay men were not the only high-risk group. Intravenous drug users, whose sharing of needles allowed blood to pass from one to another, accounted for a significant minority of AIDS cases. The virus could also be transmitted through sexual contact from men to women, and from pregnant mothers infected with the virus to their newborn infants. Indeed, by 1986, much media coverage focused on the alleged dangers of the disease spreading quickly through the heterosexual population.

For the gay male community, AIDS provoked fear, anguish, and soul- searching, as well as an upsurge of organization and political involvement. As the caseload mounted, the disease moved beyond large gay centers such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, to cities and towns throughout the nation. Death and dying became endemic, as young men found friends and lovers taken ill, with no prospect of recovery. Initial lack of knowledge about how the disease was transmitted, and the mounting evidence of a long incuba- tion period, made many wonder if they were already harboring the condition in a latent stage. Gay men woke in the morning to check their bodies for the appearance of lesions that signaled Kaposi's sarcoma. The common cold or flu triggered worries about the onset of pneumonia. For some, the fact of AIDS called into question the viability of a nonmonogamous gay male life. As one person with AIDS ruefully commented, "the belief that was handed to me was that sex was liberating and more sex was more liberating." AIDS seemed to be a cruel outcome of the freedom that gay liberation promised. It also shook the pride and confidence that the 1970s had gradually built. "The psychological impact of AIDS on the gay community is tremendous," said Richard Failla, an openly gay judge in New York City. "It has done more to undermine the feelings of self-esteem than anything Anita Bryant could have ever done. Some people are saying “Maybe we are wrong-maybe this is a punishment."" In some cities, activists bitterly fought among themselves over whether gay bathhouses should be closed as a threat to survival or kept open as a hard-won community institution. As with herpes a few years earlier, a dread disease brought an undercurrent of guilt to the surface, transforming a medical condition into a moral commentary.

On the other hand, the gay community also responded to the AIDS crisis with an enormous outpouring of energy and determination. In New York City, the Gay Men's Health Crisis formed in 198 1, at the very start of the epidemic. It drew in thousands of volunteers to help care for the sick and dying, raised millions of dollars for education and research, and lobbied for state and federal research money to unravel the mystery of the disease and find a cure. In city after city where cases appeared, the gay community mounted similar efforts. Formerly apolitical gay men found themselves furious at the callousness of the Reagan administration, whose tepid response to the epidemic suggested a cavalier disregard for the lives of homosexuals. For some, the mobilization of the community in the face of the AIDS crisis promised a return of sorts to the idealism and solidarity of the Stonewall era. "I haven't experienced this kind of caring since the early days of gay liberation," said one GLF activist from the early seventies." It also led to a profound re-examination of issues of sexual behavior and intimacy. AIDS organizations widely publicized "safe-sex" guidelines to cut the risk of transmission. In New York and San Francisco, where AIDS hit first and ravaged the community most severely, the impact of the campaigns in reshaping gay male sexuality could be seen in the large decline in the incidence of other sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea. Men used condoms for anal sex, reduced sharply the number of sexual partners they had, and learned to enjoy practices such as mutual masturbation. Business at gay bathhouses that did remain open fell dramatically. Observers within the community pointed to a new emphasis on dating, romance, and monogamous relationships. One study of urban gay males found that between 1984 and 1987 the proportion who were celibate rose from two to twelve percent, while those in a monogamous partnership jumped from twelve to twenty-eight percent." The group in the population that had most symbolized the new sexual contours of the post-liberal era was cutting another path.

By the mid-1980s it was also evident that the fear of AIDS was beginning to reach into the heterosexual population. For a generation raised with penicillin and antibiotics, the long historical association of sexual promiscuity with disease had faded as an inhibitor of behavior. Then, at the start of the 1980s, the media gave play to the prevalence of genital herpes. AIDS added a lethal dimension to the disease problem. Especially as it became clear that AIDS could be transmitted through heterosexual intercourse, and after the death of Rock Hudson made AIDS a household word, many heterosexuals took stock of their own sexual habits. On college campuses, health administrators made AIDS a prime focus of their educational efforts. The director of the health service at the University of Southern California thought that students seemed "less willing to have casual encounters than they were four or five years ago." Many universities reported a sharp decline in the cases of venereal disease on campus. Trust and intimacy loomed larger as factors in a sexual relationship, particularly perhaps for women. As one female graduate student phrased her concerns, "it is no longer a question of just you yourself. It's now a question of the commitment of the person with whom you're involved. If he switch-hits, or if he ever has in the last three or four years, it could be a real problem."

As the case load mounted, the potential ramifications of AIDS for reshaping American sexuality spread. Issues as diverse as teenage pregnancy, sex education, and the presentation of sexual behavior in the media were swept UP in the vortex created by AIDS. New, and sometimes unexpected, political alignments formed. The Reagan administration, led by Secretary of Education William Bennett, latched onto the crisis as an opportunity to promulgate a new chastity message among the nation's youth. One federally financed pamphlet, Sex Respect, encouraged teenagers to "just say no." But Reagan's Surgeon General, Everett Koop, who a few years earlier had been a prominent anti- abortion activist, dissented vigorously and urged comprehensive sex education in the schools, including the information that condoms were effective in fore- stalling the spread of the virus. Organizations working on the issue of teenage pregnancy found that AIDS was opening doors previously closed to them. Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, reported that the new sense of urgency created by the epidemic was accomplishing "what one million teenage pregnancies couldn't do: get us talking about sex.... People who were tongue-tied realize that they must address something that is lethal."" On some campuses students campaigned to have condom vending machines installed in dormitories. Remaining taboos in the media fell. Some network affiliates began accepting ads for condoms, prime-time series addressed the issues of birth control and "safe sex," and news anchors found themselves speaking of anal intercourse before millions of viewers.

Although the political activity of the New Right and the threat of AIDS seemed to augur a retrenchment in the behavior of many Americans, as the 1980s drew to a close it was not at all clear what the future would bring. Certainly the outcome of current controversies about sex would have to build upon the complicated set of sexual meanings that had evolved over generations. For instance, in seeking a restoration of sexuality to marriage, replete with reproductive consequences, advocates of the new chastity had to contend with the permeation of the erotic throughout American culture, the expansive and varied roles available to American women, and a contraceptive technology that sustained the nonprocreative meanings of sexual behavior. A new sexual system that harkened back to a vanished world could not simply be wished into existence.

What the current crisis over AIDS and the new conservatism does allow us to do, however, is to take stock of some of the recurring themes that have emerged in the history of sexuality we have surveyed in these chapters. For almost two centuries sexuality has been moving into the marketplace. At first largely restricted to prostitution and located in a marginal urban underworld out of view of the middle class, sex gradually became the province of big-time entrepreneurs and pervaded the entire culture. The concert saloons of the nineteenth century and the dance halls of the Progressive era were the proto- types of the elaborate high-tech disco; the titillating postcards and one-reelers of the turn of the century were but pale forerunners of the glossy sex magazines and feature-length video cassettes of the 1980s. However, not only did modern capitalism sell sexual fantasies and pleasures as commodities, but the dynamics of a consumer-oriented economy had also packaged many products in sexual wrappings. The commercialization of sex and the sexualization of commerce placed the weight of capitalist institutions on the side of a visible public presence for the erotic. Political movements based on sexual issues alone, whether of the right or the left, faced huge obstacles in their efforts to alter this trend, unless they tackled other issues as well. Sex was too deeply embedded in the fabric of economic life for a purity movement to reshape its meaning in fundamental ways. Exploitable as it was for profit, sex had become resistant to efforts at containment that failed to address this larger economic matrix. And, for movements such as feminism and gay liberation that attacked the manipulation of sexuality to sustain social inequality, systems of gender relations as well as economic structures required revision if activists were to achieve their goals.

The contemporary debates over sex also highlight the continuing efforts of Americans to define a place for sex in their lives. The colonial era was the least problematic, with its clear meanings and boundaries and its pervasive methods of regulation. But, at least since the early nineteenth century, when the repro- ductive moorings of sexual relations came loose for the urban middle class, many Americans have had to grapple, in a self-conscious way, with the meaning and purpose of sexual relations. Spiritual union, emotional satisfaction, individual identity: these and other definitions have competed for hegemony. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the values of the white, native-born urban middle class placed a premium on sexual expression within the context of marriage, even as working-class youth, blacks, an emergent gay community, and others pursued alternative sexual ethics. As the dominant middle-class culture has come to attach more value to sexual fulfillment and pleasure, preserving marriage as a privileged site for sexual expression has proven more difficult. Then, too, the easy availability of effective methods of birth control has removed much of the danger that once attached to nonmari- tal heterosexuality. And, as women have moved out of the home and into the labor market, their interest in keeping sex within a marital context has declined. The contrast between feminists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is instructive in this regard. Whereas the former saw contraception as encouraging male sexual license and therefore opposed it, contemporary feminists have championed a full range of reproductive choice for women so that they might have autonomy in sexual matters.

The search for meaning has itself been shaped by the changing forms of economic life and social institutions. The once self-contained farming communities of the colonial era, in which parents maintained control over youth and families existed within a dense web of community ties, have long given way to a complex mass society. Families are left to fend for themselves and, increasingly, the individual has become the economic and social unit of society. Though not free of agencies of regulation, the individual has more autonomy than ever before to make choices about "personal life." And the range of choices is wider than in the past. A permanent monogamous partnership is one, but so is serial monogamy, homosexual identity, singles life, cohabitation, and unmarried motherhood. Were the choices not so varied, the possibility of AIDS spreading through the population would be too remote to evoke such deep concern.

Contemporary events also illustrate the continuing power of sex as a symbol capable of arousing deep, irrational fears. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, female purity most often served as the symbol that mobilized social anxieties, as campaigns against prostitution and the hysteria over white slavery demonstrated. In the South it combined with fears about racial amalgamation to maintain a rigid caste system of race relations. Today, female purity has lost much of its symbolic force. But the response to AIDS certainly proves the ease with which sexual issues can unleash the irrational. And, despite the openness of nonmarital sex in contemporary culture, a public sexual misstep by a political leader can provoke outrage and lead to one's downfall. Gary Hart's fortunes fell much more quickly than did Nixon's in the face of Watergate or Reagan's in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal. Finally, the AIDS epidemic and the politics it spawned emphasize the persistence of sexuality as a vehicle for social control. . . these and other episodes demonstrate how commonly sexuality has fostered the maintenance of social hierarchies. The response to AIDS continued [a] long historical tradition. Gay activists attacked the slow response of the Reagan administration as a sign of how little value it placed on gay lives. The reluctance of government agencies to fund safe-sex campaigns and to provide intravenous drug users with sterilized needles as parts of a comprehensive prevention program allowed the disease to keep spreading not only through the gay male community but also among inner-city black and Hispanic populations where drug use is a serious problem. As in the past, state legislatures targeted prostitutes rather than male customers even though female-to-male transmission of AIDS is much less likely than the reverse. The unwillingness of conservative moralists to make birth control and safe-sex information avail- able to sexually active youth not only perpetuated teenage pregnancy but now threatened the lives of some of the young. Power over sex is the power to affect the life and death of Americans.

Whatever the outcome of the current crisis over sexuality, Americans will have to take account of the legacy of three centuries of sexual change. Birth control is so embedded in social life that a purely reproductive matrix for sex is no longer even remotely possible. Women's role in the family and the public realm has altered so profoundly that a gender-based system resting on female purity is not likely to be resurrected. The capitalist seizure of sexuality has destroyed the division between public reticence and private actions that the nineteenth-century middle class sought to maintain. Perhaps what the study of America's history allows us to say with assurance is that sexuality has become central to our economy, our psyches, and our politics. For this reason, it is likely to stay vulnerable to manipulation as a symbol of social problems and the subject of efforts to maintain social hierarchies. As in the past, sex will remain a source of both deep personal meaning and heated political controversy.