From Neighbors to Outcasts: Evangelical Gay Activism in the Late 1970s

T h e y k n e w T h e T i m e wa s r i p e , even though much of the fruit was bitter. A few weeks after the repeal of Dade County’s gay rights ordinance in June 1977, Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott mailed cover letters to twelve publishers for their book manuscript Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? Another Christian View. Published by Harper & Row in the spring of 1978, the book opened with references to Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign in Dade County and portrayed its own message of neighborly love as a necessary alternative to Bryant’s stance. Scanzoni and Mollenkott knew that the Dade County vote might seem “representative of a basic attitude in this country.” In the late 1970s, as antigay and antifeminist sentiment swelled both within and beyond evangelicalism, public appeals to “the family”—from Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign to President Jimmy Carter’s plans for the White House Conference on Families—became more frequent and more potent. Even so, Scanzoni and Mollenkott believed that “many Christian people take a more moderate view of the issue.” Moreover, they believed that “the more moderate majority” included many evangelicals. Thus, their book was aimed, as their cover letter to Harper & Row put it, “particularly toward those in the evangelical tradition.”1