Think of the (Straight) Children

Written by Kristin Haegelin

Illustrated by Christopher Ikonomou

In 1977, orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant campaigned against a new anti-discrimination law protecting gay men and lesbians in Dade County, Florida. She had it overturned and riding on the wave of this success, started Save Our Children, the United States’ first national anti gay group.

More than forty years later in 2022, Alabama has passed legislation banning gender-affirming healthcare for minors under the name of the “Alabama Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act’’ or SB 184. Florida quickly followed in their footsteps with their Board of Medicine voting to do the same in November of 2022.

Coupled with this extreme aggression towards trans youth, Florida has also banned discussions around sexual orientaton and gender identity in schools with the “Parental Rights in Education Act,” also coined the Don’t Say Gay law or the “Anti-Grooming” bill in the charged words of Christina Pushaw, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ press secretary. Within the past month, Rep. Mike Johnson has proposed the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,” a measure that has the potential to extend Florida’s education ban to the entire country.

Are we starting to notice a trend in the names of anti-trans and anti-gay legislation? Why do the words “children,” “grooming,” and “sexualization” keep coming up? What we can gather from this charged language is that conservative lawmakers are attempting to weaponize the protection of children. By depicting LGBTQ+ educators and issues as inherently sexual, the Christian political right has justified the presence of homophobia and transphobia in America’s legal system in both the present and past. To fully understand how this warped conception of the LGBTQ+ community formed in the first place, it is important to look at the moral hysteria of the Satanic Panic and how the movement found its scapegoat.

In the lead up to the 1980s moral panic, the progressivism of the 60s and 70s was still in full ideology actually came out of a culmination of many predictable factors. Fears around the growing visibility of LGBTQ+ relationships, long-held Puritanical anxieties around Satanism, and a greater awareness around child sexual abuse created the perfect storm for America’s new scapegoat. The perfect pedophile, or monster, was the LGBTQ+ teacher.

Bernard Baran, an eighteenyear-old gay daycare worker, was one of the first victims of the Satanic Panic. Accused of mass molestation of preschoolers by his students’ parents, hearsay and homophobia plagued his trial from the start. Prosecutors brought forth heavily edited videotape interviews, cutting out large portions of footage where swing. Yet, with this newfound change came a conservative backlash, manifesting fully in the Satanic Panic. Born out of a fear for the degradation of America’s moral values, this social hysteria centered around “hundreds of accusations that devil-worshiping pedophiles were operating America’s white middle-class suburban daycare centers.”1 It might seem like this conspiracy came completely out of the blue, but the parents coerced their children into providing specific answers. As a form of medical “argument,” prosecutor Daniel Ford brought forth an expert witness to “testify to the prevalence of gonorrhea among homosexuals.” Despite the fact that Baran tested negative for gonorrhea and the aforementioned faulty evidence, he spent 21 years imprisoned before his convictions were overturned. Then there was the case of

Margaret Kelly Michaels. In the article “How the Gay Establishment Ignored a Sex Panic Fueled by Homophobia,” Jim D’Entremont writes about how outside prejudices impacted her trial, stating “prosecutors devoted two days to exploiting a same-sex relationship in her personal history, implying that lesbianism had impelled her to force toddlers of both sexes to lick peanut butter off her cervix at the Wee Care Nursery School in Maplewood, New Jersey.”2 nies from the nieces shifted with each new line of questioning, and medical evidence was equally sparse, based on now-defunct forensic science on the supposed “correct” shape of a child’s hymen. Worst of all was that the accusations themselves stemmed from a malicious source. The mastermind behind these confessions was Javier Limon, Ramirez’s former brother-in-law. During her trial, Ramirez displayed love letters that Limon had written to her and

Among countless other allegations and trials throughout the next decade, the case of the San Antonio Four served as a momentary bookend to the Satanic Panic’s reign of terror. Occurring in 1994 with its trials running from 1997 to 1998, the case involved four openly gay women — Elizabeth Ramirez, Cassandra Rivera, Kristie Mayhugh, and Anna Vasquez — who were accused of sexually assaulting Ramirez’s two nieces while the pair were under their care for a week in San Antonio, Texas.

As with the previous cases, there was little solid evidence to support this accusation. Testimo- explained that she had rejected his advances on multiple occasions. Despite Limon’s clear motive for coercing confessions from his children, the court did not press him on the matter. These many injustices against LGBTQ+ educators and child care providers illustrate that historically, the American public has often equated queerness with pedophilia, allowing homophobia to thrive through carceral “justice.” When societal norms view queerness as more deviant and offensive than heterosexuality, queerness takes on a dangerous proximity to pedophilia — both are taboo, while they have abso- lutely nothing in common. Under these harmful prescriptions about sexual orientation and gender identity, it is no wonder that these ‘save the children’-adjacent laws continue to proliferate. In Johnson’s “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,” the very title implies that an understanding of LGBTQ+ relationships and gender is something that sexualizes children or corrupts. This message is only echoed by the actual body of the act, which lumps together “sexuality, sexual orientation, transgenderism, and gender ideology” alongside “pornography” and “sexual acts” in its list of off-limits material.3 Although not likely to pass, this act is only a harbinger of the hysteria to come.

Ultimately, the language of these laws and the victims of the Satanic Panic beg the question: which children are we willing to save? Criminalizing gender-affirming healthcare and removing LGBTQ+ issues from public school curriculum endanger transgender and nonbinary youth who are already at a disproportionate risk of depressive symptoms and suicide.

According to the Trevor Project’s 2021 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, “more than half (52%) of transgender and nonbinary youth seriously considered suicide in the past year, and 1 in 5 reported attempting suicide.”4 In contrast, transgender and nonbinary youth in supportive environments (i.e. who were able to change their name or had their pronouns respected) reported lower rates of attempting suicide. These laws seem much less preoccupied with preventing sexual abuse than stamping out LGBTQ+ youth before they reach adulthood. By removing protections for trans kids while proclaiming their goal of saving “vulnerable” children, conservative lawmakers show that they fundamentally do not recognize trans children as children, either assuming that they are confused cis children or already “sexualized” by their queerness and therefore, beyond saving. Overall, America’s anti-gay legislation from the past and present aims to protect hypothetical children from mythical monsters, and remind the LGBTQ+ community that regardless of our age or “innocence,” we are not worthy of our government’s protection.

1: Sarah Hughes, “American Monsters: Tabloid Media and the Satanic Panic, 1970–2000.” Journal of American Studies, vol.51, no.3, (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 691-719.

2: Jim D’Entremont, “The Devil in Gay, Inc. How the Gay Establishment Ignored a Sex Panic Fueled by Homophobia,” Friends of Justice.

3: Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, 117th Congress, Section 4e (2022)

4: “The Trevor Project National Survey,” The Trevor Project, https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2021/.

Anonymous, Anonymous

Written and Photographed by Jackson Harris

I have this dream of dying in complete silence, and when the neighbors call to complain about the smell a few days later (and the firemen kick the door in), they’ll find my mother sitting calmly at the dining room table, knife in hand around a halo of sunburnt faces cutting branches from the family tree no one left to know what’ll become of me a week later in the paper, cause of death: unknown so I try not to sleep alone anymore — I keep my bandannas in a box filled with all the pictures from a life before: little girls who’ve lost their baby teeth and seashells drowned in bodega bleach covered in fabrics that gather on soap-stained floors right pocket, dark blue crimson garden rotten fruit anonymous, anonymous it’s pandemonium, uncontrollable, the blood rush to your cheeks. and this growing fear blooming deep inside: man, human, weapon, or disease? everybody dressed in black they tell you that your kidneys will fail pretty early on— me, in my best suit in-between the intake pages and the awkward exchanging of names and someone brought a bouquet of flowers, and i’m not positive, but there’s something i’m expected to say roses, keep your hands where we can see them please and death is a friend while flesh is containment sanitation, sanitation disinfecting nail beds

I believe in a short-term treatment plan. only the best. can you surrender?

God loves you I am bleeding through my teeth but not enough to save you and on the choir sings

‘There wasn’t a day when I didn’t think about it’ there are fireworks in my eyes

‘and certainly every time I had a sexual encounter’ abscess exile

‘it was in the front of my mind’ Americana dying

‘It inhibited me developing good close relationships’ but I’ve always been strong

‘A lot of my sex experiences were very furtive because of that’ can you surrender?

‘A nurse came out and put me in a side room and said, “I’m very sorry, he’s just died.”’ do you dare to sing along?

‘She asked me who I was and I said, “I’m his boyfriend.”’

Quotes from Andrew Anthony, “‘We were so scared’: Four people who faced the horror of Aids in the 80s,” The Guardian. Jan 31, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/31/wewere-so-scared-four-people-who-faced-the-horror-of-aids-in-the-80s.