Chelsey Weber-Smith
Chelsey Weber-Smith: On this season we'll be exploring the moral panics, urban legends and conspiracy theories that shape our psychology and culture and why we end up believing them. I'm your host Chelsea Weber-Smith and this is American Hysteria.
Speaker 3: And our pastor said that he would even burn the school rather than allow them to be taught at home with them.
Speaker 2: I think we could all get along, but the reality is we can't. The homosexual lobby will not rest until they have silenced the last force of sexual normalcy and punish the last surviving Christian.
Speaker 5: The second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: It's likely that most of us have at least some memory of the juiciest celebrity scandal of 1999, when after spending his life in the closet, this children's entertainer was shamefully outed and held up to public scrutiny. Flouncing about to both cheers and jeers. That flagrant homosexual was of course, gender traitor and satanic secret agent, the flamboyant shameless sodomite, Tinky Winky, the purse carrying purple Teletubby.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: As funny as gay Tinky Winky was then and still is. This real conservative outrage came on the tail end of a rash of explicit antigay videos and books that fashioned throughout the 1990s what we now call the Gay Agenda, a conspiracy theory that turned gaze into active agents of moral destruction. These works consolidated and updated the image of the homosexual threat, an Illuminati-esque secret elite that planned to normalize homosexuality through indoctrinating and recruiting the young, accused of using kids shows in public schools to influence impressionable minds.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: The gay militants were aggressive, sexually deviant, sexually dangerous, secretly powerful agents of a massive conspiracy to bring down democracy, Jesus, God fearing Christians and the happy heavenly futures of their heterosexual children, which they believed could be suddenly struck gay by just the mere mention of homosexuality. But how exactly did the Christian right of the 1990s transform queer people, those who disproportionately faced violence and bullying, job discrimination, depression, and suicide into a national security threat?
Chelsey Weber-Smith: They borrowed from a long history of dark rumors and slander of both religious and scientific misinformation and a long history of organized efforts to rid America of this dangerous moral disease by any means necessary. You might even call it an agenda. One that started as the first Puritan settlers set foot on the Eastern most shore and one that rang in my queer little ears centuries later as I hoped, nervously and in secret for proof that I wasn't alone. Chelsey Weber-Smith: Teletubbies was a UK import, a Technicolor world of rolling green hills and a baby faced sun, a psychedelic home to four doughy aliens with TVs on their stomach and their own babbling toddler like language.
Jerry Falwell: He is purple, the gay pride color and his antenna is shaped like a triangle, the gay pride symbol.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: Our dear friend, Moral Majority founder, Jerry Falwell wrote in an issue of his magazine. "The character had a boy's voice." He continued "but he often carried a red purse and wore a Tutu." On the Today Show. He told Katie Couric:
Jerry Falwell: To have little boys running around with purses and acting effeminate and leaving the idea that the masculine male, the feminine female is out and gay is okay, is something Christians do not agree with.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: Tinky Winkys outing came a few years after a lurid video series titled The Gay Agenda was produced by the Springs of Life ministries in California. It was an almost pornographic documentary showing the truth about the gay lifestyle, making claims that, in general homosexuals have between 300 and 500 sexual partners and that 90% of them routinely ingested fecal matter. It also taught Christian America about such sexual practices as fisting, rimming, and golden showers, but these videos weren't just marketed to the fringe. In fact, this video series made it to the highest government offices in the nation, truly influencing future policy, even leading Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to claim that the courts were signing on to the homosexual agenda.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: To be fair, it wasn't Falwell himself who came up with a queer Tinky Winky, a well known gay gossip columnist named Michael Musto had said in Entertainment Weekly that the Teletubby offered a great message. Not only that it's okay to be gay, but the importance of being well accessorized. The advocate called Tinky Winky, "a big fabulous fag" and said that he helped kids know that it's okay to take an interest in accoutrements of the opposite gender. Falwell and others read deeply into the tongue in cheek quips made by gay writers, believing that the Teletubby show was purposefully influencing children into gender abnormal and even homosexual behavior.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: This is a good chance to be clear for those of you who may not be fully educated on this subject. Tinky Winkys gender identity, just like those who identify as transgender or gender non binary is not, contrary to popular belief, related to his sexuality. The way that someone identifies gender is distinct from the people they choose to be intimately involved with, but our society has long linked these two things together, illustrated by the suspicions we had in 1999 as my three year old brother, inspired by Tinky Winky, began carrying around his toy cars in a purse.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: He ended up a heterosexual man. As we learned with the satanic panic, fundamentalists had long been on the hunt for these indoctrinating forces in children's entertainment. Take this quote from a 1987 essay called "The Cereal Box Conspiracy Against the Developing Mind" that says, of a Barbie breakfast cereal, "The image of a scantily clad Barbie showing lots of plastic flesh might be just the ideal breakfast companion for the developing heterosexual boy. The result of this may be to confuse the young boys sexual orientation, and this may be welcomed by food manufacturers for market surveys have found gay men to be more avid shoppers than their hetero counterparts." Maybe you'll also recall my favorite guy from the mid 1980s, Phil Phillips, who wrote "Turmoil in the Toy Box", all about satanic cartoons and toys while he also charged to the Smurfs with being a homosexual commune and Smurfette with being a transgender woman.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: And then we can go back even further to 1954 when a psychologist named Frederick Wortham published his book called "Seduction of the Innocent" about the dangers of comic books on the minds of the young. Can you guess who Wortham outed? None other than that beef cake Batman ann his Twinkie sidekick Robin, pointing to several apparent examples that proved a gay subtext, showing what appeared to be a secret sexual relationship between the heroes. Wonder Woman was presented as a kind of militant feminist lesbian with scores of young female concubines. According to Wortham, the Batman and Wonder Woman type story could stimulate children into homosexual fantasies, endangering their normal heterosexual futures as members of their respective nuclear families. And because of that threatening the entire social order and even American capitalism and democracy itself.
Jerry Falwell: Make no mistake, these deviants seek no less than total control and influence in society, politics, our schools and in our exercise of free speech and religious freedom. If we do not act now, homosexuals will own America.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: That was Jerry Falwell again. If you remember our episode on the Illuminati, some of the stuff is going to sound suspiciously familiar. The Gay Agenda Conspiracy Theory uses a similar template, flipping the script so that the oppressed become the oppressors. This is well represented by a controversy that exploded in New York City in the mid nineties over a multicultural curriculum designed to foster a sense of understanding between students of different cultures. This included a small section of advice to educators and parents that they teach their students simply that gay people exist and deserve respect. But the president of district 24's board called the guide quote, "dangerously misleading lesbian, homosexual propaganda" and accused the chancellor of perpetuating quote "as big a lie as any concocted by Hitler or Stalin" likely referencing "The Pink Swastika", written in 1995, which claimed that homosexuals had in fact not been targeted during Nazi Germany's reign and that instead Hitler and the other high-ranking Nazis were all gay men themselves, mirroring the kind of Holocaust denial that says that Jews are faking their oppression to posture as victims.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: A lot of this got started back in 1948 when psychologist Alfred Kinsey published the results of his research into homosexual behavior, which said that one in 10 people were gay and that gay men did not have to appear a feminine and gay women did not have to appear masculine. In fact, more often than not, they didn't. Meaning that there was no way to outwardly tell the difference. The common conception of homosexuality at the time was that it was essentially contagious and one could be influenced into the lifestyle, and on the flip side influenced out of it. In 1952, scientists bolstered these religious fears when psychologists named homosexuality a pathology, and it was listed under the banner of sociopathic personality deviation. Though an improvement to it being seen as a criminal offense, the mental illness angle is where we see conversion therapies begin, with the intent of converting homosexuals back to heterosexuality. With the most extreme examples being neurologist Walter Freeman, who used icepick lobotomies to cure almost 1500 homosexuals and most of those he operated on, with no formal training by the way, were left severely disabled for the rest of their lives.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: Other forms of conversion therapy last to this day and have included forced hospitalizations and electroshock therapy. This idea that gay people were more common and more hidden than the nation previously knew led to this feeling that homosexuals could be this kind of invisible agent. Suddenly everyone was a suspect and everyone was vulnerable.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: In the 1950s, the TV dinner, buttoned up, family obsessed American Pleasantville was shot through with a chilling Cold War paranoia, the threat of the Soviet Union and its spies. At the beginning of the decade, Senator Joseph McCarthy started what is now called The Red Scare, leading a witch hunt for a supposed spiring of communists and positions of influence as well as whoever fit his own agenda, like black civil rights leaders, left wing protesters, university professors, and Hollywood actors. McCarthy also led another purge, a lesser known but even more devastating panic called The Lavender Scare in which the FBI fired 425 suspected gay men and women from US government employment. They did this, they said, because these quote sexual perverts were susceptible to blackmail by the communists. McCarthy also intimidated those who spoke out against him by threatening to out them as homosexuals and often said explicitly to reporters, "If you want to be against McCarthy boys, he got to be either a communist or a cock sucker."
Chelsey Weber-Smith: From here, this fear of the homosexual shifted into something more actively sinister when, yet again, conservatives didn't get the gay joke. Anti-gay groups freaked out over the discovery of a collective of artists from the 1930s that called themselves the Homintern, a joke name inspired by a communist term called The Comintern, an organization who wanted to spread communism to the West. The Homintern, however, was just a friendly gathering of queer artists and writers who had a pipe dream of living open lives and helping others to live them too, but to those embroiled in Cold War anxiety, the existence of a Homintern signaled none other than quote "an international homosexual conspiracy that mirrored the communist one with the single goal of destroying traditional American values." Three years after The Lavender Scare, President Eisenhower would sign an executive order which barred homosexuals from working for the federal government. Approximately 5,000 gay people were forcibly outed and fired from federal employment, including those in the military. In addition, many public school teachers lost their jobs and many were publicly outed. These actions certainly forced gay folks deeper into the closet, but nonetheless, they continued to find ways to find each other.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: Since the 1920s, gay bars had served as the only public meeting place to meet other queer people and many gay folks at the time referred to it as their version of church, a place to belong, to be as you really are, a place to no longer feel alone and maybe even find love. As the sexual revolution began in the 1960s, these bars were routinely raided by police who often beat and even sexually assaulted patrons before arresting them and publicly outing them in the newspapers, which ruined careers and families. On one particular night in 1969, police raided New York City's Stonewall Bar, lining everyone up and asking for their IDs like they usually did.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: The police began groping the lesbians in sight of everyone else and then as the patrons were slowly loaded by police into the Paddy wagons out front, a crowd began to grow around them. Many reports say that a mixed race, butch lesbian and drag King named Stormy [inaudible 00:14:43] was hit over the head with a police baton. She turned to the crowd and implored them to do something, right before turning and punching the cop in the head. With that a riot ensued, lasting six days with queers of all stripes throwing bottles and bricks reportedly led by drag Queens and trans women of color like Marsha P Johnson. The Queens formed singing kick lines and faced off directly with rows of armed police. When the cops captured one of the rioters, the crowd surrounded them until they gave the rioter back. The NYPD was actually forced to retreat from the swarm of limp wristed deviants and the strength that it inspired in a group that had been forced into fear for so long was overwhelming.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: In the years after Stonewall, things were actually looking up for the gay community and with the liberal changes of the 1970s, laws against same sex activities were removed from the books in many States. As the media spread the news of the success of Stonewall's gay resistance, gay rights groups popped up in every major city. In December, 1973, the APA voted unanimously to remove homosexuality from the DSM. Gay folks finally had reason to hope for a better future. That is until one former Miss America runner up Christian Singer, Florida Orange Juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant was given word from her husband, her pastor and God that it was time for her to stand up for her rights to fight against these militant conspiratorial queers in the name of her faith to protect who else, but those impressionable and easily exploitable children.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: In 1977 in Dade County, Florida, the home of the city of Miami, a group of gay men worked with the local government to propose an ordinance to end housing and employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, which included local schools and churches. At first, Anita quietly wrote to the commission to voice her concerns to say that it was actually her and all good Christians that were being discriminated against with this new law, their rights to protect their school age children from the knowledge of sexual deviants completely revoked. When the ordinance still passed. Among lawmakers, Anita turned up the heat, taking private meetings with her husband and other right-wing activists, including Jerry Falwell, to concoct a new, more consumable media strategy.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: They soon realized that they could use the oldest trick in the moral panic book, naming their organization Save Our Children with Anita swooning.
Anita Bryant: Some of the stories I could tell you of child recruitment and child abuse by homosexuals would turn your stomach. Chelsey Weber-Smith: She popularized the idea that gay people, unable to have children of their own, sought to recruit other people's children into the homosexual lifestyle. Updating the false and devastating stereotype of homosexuals is child molesters for a slightly more empathetic Christian. She shared in an interview with Playboy magazine her belief that.
Anita Bryant: The male homosexual eats sperm, the most concentrated form of blood. They are eating life. As vampires need to recruit donors to survive, so does the homosexual.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: Anita also added in that pesky slippery slope argument that is still parroted today saying,
Anita Bryant: Next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and people who sleep with St Bernard's and nail biters.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: Though she believed in felony status, 40 year prison sentences for homosexual acts and called homosexuals quote human garbage, she also created the spin that the anti gay movement was a movement of love, hate the sin, not the sinner, she said. The group gathered 64,000 signatures and had the ordinance successfully repealed, emboldening them to continue the same work all over the nation.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: The relationship between gay rights groups and Anita's crusade continued to grow more and more antagonistic. Gay bars all over the country began boycotting Florida orange juice, making screwdrivers from Apple juice and vodka and calling it the Anita Bryant cocktail selling shirts that said, "Squeeze a Fruit for Anita" and donating proceeds to gay rights groups. Continuing their creative activism, one man went as far as literally pieing Anita in the face. Fruit pie. I got to be honest, I can't help laughing at that.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: When Anita lost a gig hosting a singer sewing machine sponsored craft show for her controversial political behavior, she went on to claim that she had been blacklisted by a homosexual conspiracy, oblivious to the fact that she herself had been pushing for a national blacklisting of homosexuals. Perhaps most sinisterly, these anti gay activists also played to the complicated relationships between black folks who had just achieved civil rights in the previous decade and homosexuals that they purposely construed as only rich white and powerful and therefore undeserving of the civil rights that black folks had worked so hard for. These were the same Christian groups that had a long history of opposing black civil rights working against the very group that they now exploited. This picture of the homosexual, of course, of racist black queer people.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: The very folks that were said to lead the riots at Stonewall. Through this lens, homosexuals already had the power they needed to protect themselves from their apparent discrimination and instead they were looking for special rights. But why? Why would this group of people fake discrimination and spend so much time working for civil rights that they didn't actually need? It was simple, these early fundamentalists said, that's just what evil people do. They take more and more to satisfy a craven need for power. Victimizing simple, honest Americans at every possible chance. It's just evil for evil's sake.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: These right wing activists and authors that made up the moral majority would go on to have a huge influence on the Reagan administration during a humanitarian health crisis like the US had never seen and the picture they created of the homosexual rich, powerful, militant, well organized, sexually deviant, the unhappy molesting and moral recruiter of children, as well as the continued demand that gay people simply stay hidden, would inform the next decade and unforgivable ways. In one of the most appalling silences ever seen in this country President Ronald Reagan did not address HIV or AIDS publicly until 1987, six years after doctors had named the virus and 22,000 Americans, mostly gay men, had already died. It was called by some in the moral majority, "The Gay Plague.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: Jerry Falwell said it was God's punishment against homosexuals. Televangelist Pat Robertson started claiming that gay people were shaking hands with a special ring that pricked the skin of normal Christians to give them HIV. Why? Because he said, and I quote, "People in the gay community, they want to get people." That news story broke the same year I started college, leaving a town behind where my best friend was the only other queer kid I knew about. Once I got to college, of course, I finally started to see that there were other people like me. I remember sitting and eating ice cream with an older gay man I had become friends with, one of my first gay mentors, and when the subject turned to my own sexuality, he told me kindly, but in no uncertain terms.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: Being gay means being lonely and I knew he was right because the loneliness I had already felt, that I had felt growing up, stretching as far back as I could remember, before I even knew what made me different, was enormous. Sitting there, we were part of a long legacy of sadness, of depression and suicide, that some conservative Christians said was just the natural state of the homosexual, a sad, perverse alien thing that chose this suffering and wanted to spread this suffering to others just because we were that depraved.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: During the industrial revolution in America, when for the first time many people who lived rural lives had began traveling into the city to find new work opportunities, many gay people of the time suddenly realized they weren't alone and told psychologists of this previous rural loneliness when they truly believed they were the only person like this, the only gay person in the world. But when we look back to what this country was like before the white Puritans arrived on its Eastern shore and slowly moved West, we see a very different picture of gender and sexuality.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: The Puritans left England to seek religious freedom, yes, but it was more about the freedom to be even more strict. They saw the British as being too lenient on homosexuality, which did hold a death sentence but was also discussed in public and they hated the fact that it was allowed to be talked about. From their own writings, when Puritans and pilgrims arrived in the new world, they found a wide variety of same sex relationships and gender variants among the different tribes they encountered and unsurprisingly, they didn't like it. Writing about the Crow tribe, one horrified Puritan wrote quote, "Men who dressed as women and specialize in women's work were accepted and sometimes honored. A woman who led men in battle had four wives and was a respected chief."
Chelsey Weber-Smith: There were many examples of "two spirit people", an umbrella term for an identity specific to certain tribes of a third gender that is of a sacred spiritual order. Kids who showed early signs of gender atypical behavior were encouraged to dress and perform the duties of the opposite gender to which they felt more aligned. Though all the tribes had unique perspectives on gender and sexuality, homosexual relationships weren't uncommon and some tribes had four or more gender choices. Without generalizing too much, it's safe to say that the rigidity of the incoming Puritan philosophy was unimaginable to the indigenous communities. In a 1775 diary entry of a Puritan writing of a tribe he encountered in what is now California, he warns that quote, "The sin of sodomy prevails among them more than an any other nation", and then that quote, "There will be much to do when the Holy faith and the Christian religion are established among them", and there was. In the first step of the anti gay agenda, the Puritans would go on to see that America would stay in the closet for many centuries to come.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: Indigenous Americans were frequently killed for sodomy and cross dressing, and those among the Puritans who were caught engaging in those behaviors were beaten, branded, or exiled, and sometimes killed. Through their philosophy, their philosophy that still informs so much of who we are in this country, Puritans forced queers into the very secrecy that would eventually see them accused of conspiracy.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: In the last few years, even more kids' characters are joining Tinky Winky in breaking that Puritan silence. SpongeBob has joined the cast of secret homosexual agents due to his appearance as part of a diversity campaign that included video of gay families, Bert and Ernie, as well as Lafoo from Disney's remake of Beauty and the Beast, have also been outed by queers and conservatives alike. It turned out that Dumbledore has been gay this whole time and Disney's Frozen has been charged repeatedly with promoting a lesbian lifestyle, but kids shows like Steven Universe, The Legend of Korra and Adventure Time all have had either queer main characters or queer subplots in their shows. To many, it's a monumental and important change for modern kids. For others, it's proof of America's slow landslide into hell.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: In other ways, it's easy to see how the apparent gay agenda is working. Gay marriage was legalized federally in 2015. Don't ask, don't tell was repealed. Cops and politicians dance in corporately sponsored pride parades. In the new generation of teenagers coming of age, queerness and gender variants are seen as much more normal than it was when I was growing up and most people agree that there is a biological element to it all. You don't just turn people gay and you can't make people ungay either. The internet has recently allowed even more connection of queer folks, leading most recently to transgender and non-binary young people who once felt like the only person like them in the world, finding out that we're not alone just as the homosexuals of the industrial revolution once did.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: In that way, my friend and I sitting and eating ice cream together in 2007 were part of another legacy too. A legacy of finding each other, of creating a mentorship, mistaken as recruitment, the honest help we all needed to survive our secret. Because despite the positive changes, the loneliness and suffering still exist in spades. Queer kids and teenagers hear many of the same messages I did and they worry in their bedrooms over the hard life they hear they are in for. Not able to talk to their families or friends, knowing no one like them, seeing no one like them on the shows they are allowed to watch, maybe even in desperation, sitting and praying to a kinder God. Even as of 2014, only 5% of middle and high school students in the United States reported receiving positive discussions of LGBTQ related topics in their health classes.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: Queer youth are still six times more likely to experience major depression or anxiety disorders and four times more likely to attempt suicide. They also experience violence, assault, murder and homelessness at higher rates and can be kicked out by their own families. A far cry from how young two spirit people were treated before the Puritans arrived. It's important as we start to hear these same urban legends about transgender people, as they are accused of child molestation in public bathrooms and kicked out of the US military, to know that there is a history here and despite how it may seem, despite all the talk of "kids these days", these are not new identities. These are identities that were smothered out and now finally the embers are starting to glow again. And so, yes, part of our real gay agenda is to educate kids about LGBTQ issues and to normalize differences of sexuality and gender.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: We want them to know that they too are the normal ones, the ones adhering to natural ways of being as homosexuality exists between thousands of animal species, including those most closely related to humans, and has existed in some form and cultures all over the world since the beginning of recorded history and most certainly on this very land before the true conspiracy, the anti gay agenda began. Homosexual conduct and gender variance has long threatened that strict line between men and women and by extension, that clear difference in power. It does then, as those who fear the Homintern charged, question the institutions of power that we've inherited from the generations before us, and in turn, even the mention of the existence of the homosexual can force people to look beyond their own narrow reality. And for the most part that pisses people off. But the thing is, even in all this deafening silence, all this painful secrecy, we've always found ways to find each other, to fight to change the world for ourselves and for those that come after, to make our own communities.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: I still find them as I walk down the long cement stairs to a basement venue where onstage, under a single light, a flawless drag queen lip syncs a mournful ballad until the record scratches and then she breaks out into a celebratory pop song and hundreds of gay secret agents dance themselves into their own ridiculous heaven, one where we are finally welcome. Many of us like to imagine what our lives could have been like if we had childhood guideposts, even as silly as Tinky Winky, to help us understand ourselves, to help us know that we weren't the only person like us in the world and to help us know that we could accessorize however we wanted. That we could live in the gray areas outside the binaries, that we can question these traditional values that shape our very human rights. That none of us are truly alone. That there are so many people like us and always have been, and that we can, despite all odds, build an existence as bright and vibrant and kind as the Teletubbies Technicolor world.
Chelsey Weber-Smith: This was American Hysteria. American Hysteria is written, hosted and produced by me, Chelsea Weber- Smith, and produced and edited by Clear Comma Studios with voice acting by Will Rogers and Lily Orry. Thanks as always for listening and this Valentine's day, remember to squeeze a fruit for Anita.