Miami Heat

When the Christian Coalition began to look around three years ago for constituencies to support the repeal of Miami's gay-rights law, they might have cast hungry looks at the area's Cubans. After all, Miami's Cuban-Americans are famous around the world for the degree of their right-wing tilt; on communism and Cuba, if they went much further to the right they would fall over.

Instead, with matters coming to a head and a repeal measure going before voters on September 10, something strange and wonderful has happened: A large number of right-wing Cubans have come out firmly in support of lesbian and gay civil rights.

Miami-Dade County's gay rights law was only passed in 1998, very late for such a big metropolis. The reason it came so late was that Anita Bryant, in one of the worst defeats this country's gay rights movement has ever known, led a campaign that overturned a similar local ordinance here by devastating margins in 1977. Bryant's venomous Save Our Children campaign, which coined the slogan, "Homosexuals cannot reproduce so they must recruit," sparked the repeal of nondiscrimination laws in three other cities, and setbacks and antigay campaigns in many more. Bryant's nationally prominent blitz was the first organized, well-funded opposition to gay civil rights in America. If it dealt a body blow to gay people nationally, it killed the gay movement here for some twenty years.

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