The Public Relations Strategy That Normalized the LGBT+ Agenda
The LBBT+ Agenda to Switch from Hard "In Your Face" Sexuality to Win Mainstream Acceptance
This essay is an excerpt form my book Bad Samaritans: The ACLU's Relentless Campaign to Erase Faith from the Public Square.
Those pursuing the LGBT agenda have been open in explaining the public relations launched in the late-1980s with the goal of changing the attitudes of the majority community from hostile to sympathetic. The ACLU has been able to fight the LGBT battle in the courts largely because gay rights activists have waged a systematic public relations campaign to change U.S. public attitudes toward LGBT lifestyles. The point is that the ACLU can only succeed in its radical leftist legal agenda if public attitudes shift to accept the lifestyle behavior the ACLU pursues as part of the organization’s political agenda. This holds across the spectrum of ACLU political causes. The ACLU cases attacking God in the public schools and in the public arena would not have been possible unless the U.S. society had become more secular in nature. Similarly, ACLU cases seeking to establish legal abortion in the United States depended upon first desensitizing the U.S. society against the death of the unborn fetus inherent in the act of abortion. The same logic holds with regards to the ACLU attack on sexual mores.
Gay rights activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, Ph.D., laid bare their tactics in their 1989 book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s. “It’s time to learn from Madison Avenue, to roll out the big guns,” Kirk and Madsen wrote. “Gays must launch a large-scale campaign—we’ve called it the Waging Peace campaign—to reach straights through the mainstream media. We’re talking about propaganda.”[1] Citing Sigmund’s Freud’s observation that “groups are subject to the truly magical power of words,” Kirk and Madsen urged gays to talk about homosexuality openly, often, and positively. Under the principle that constant talk builds the impression that public opinion is divided and that a sizable block accept or even practice homosexuality, they advised, “The main thing is to talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome.”[2] They suggested that gays should portray themselves as victims in need of protection, “so straights will be inclined by reflex to adopt the role of protector.”[3] They urged that the message be kept simple—gay rights—calculating that potential protectors needed to perceive that homosexuals had a just cause.
Kirk and Madsen critiqued a series of advertisements designed to promote homosexuality, rating each ad according to the following eight-point criteria:
1. Communicate; don’t just express yourself.
2. Appeal to ambivalent skeptics.
3. Keep talking (desensitize, don’t shock).
4. Keep message simple-minded: gay rights.
5. Portray gays as victims, not aggressors.
6. Give potential protectors a just cause.
7. Make gays look good.
8. Make victimizers look bad.
The authors criticized one ad because “it showcases a couple that reinforces an unappealing stereotype—suggesting, perhaps, two leathery old dykes from tobacco road who bark at each other with gin-cracked voices, and who first met at a motorcycle roundup.”[4] Another ad—this one showing two male sailors in uniform locked in an intimate kiss—the authors criticized because instead of “offering potential friends the ideal of Love as a just cause worth defending, this ad offers the ideal of Gay Lust, which isn’t half so compelling or, legitimate to straights. Overall, the ad’s effect is not to desensitize, jam, or convert: it merely reinforces revulsion and inflames homohatred. Not recommended.”[5] An ad the authors liked showed a photo of a gay man smiling. The ad, captioned “Someone You’d Like to Know,” was scored positively for employing the following strategy: “Strategy: Conversion. Compensate straights’ lack of familiarity with gay people by presenting them with ‘solid citizens’—likeable individuals who defy uncomplimentary stereotypes. The interviewee talks about his conventional gay life in a relaxed, low-key, matter-of-fact way, undercutting several myths as he talks.”[6]
The public relations strategy the authors proposed carefully avoided any explicit discussion of what sexual practices gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals actually want viewed as normal, for risk of offending a majority heterosexual audience by providing too much information. Instead, the authors merely advise against a list of rather explicitly discussed behaviors they characterize as “homosexual misbehaviors”—practices that range from aggressive homosexual sex displayed in public to openly practiced homosexual promiscuity involving multiple partners and seemingly little or no emotional attachment. “Self-indulgent, self-destructive behavior is lamentable enough when it occurs, so to speak, ‘within the family,’ but when Brother Gay trots out his unsavory shenanigans for the consumption of the general public, the rest of us are dragged down with him,” the authors admonished.[7] But a successful public relations campaign professionally managed with the right messages properly delivered, the authors envisioned, could not only turn public opinion positive toward homosexuality, but also prove lucrative in the process. “If the ads project a new, resolutely positive, all-American image with which most gays can identify, we think that, in no time, millions will be so eager to perpetuate these good works that they’ll begin to donate money to our appeals on TV as though their social salvation depended on it. Which it does,” the authors advised with great anticipation.[8]
[1] Maarshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 162. Italics in original.
[2] Ibid., 178.
[3] Ibid., 183.
[4] Ibid., 232–233.
[5] Ibid., 230–231.
[6] Ibid., 244–245. Italics in original.
[7] Ibid., page 307.
[8] Ibid., page 263.