In a 1997 think piece for the Wisconsin Light, a Milwaukee-based gay and lesbian publication, Tom Sena reflected on his journey to self-acceptance. After years of turmoil resulting from his inability to live freely and authentically, Sena found the courage to “come out of the closet.” This was not a tale of revealing his sexuality, however, as Sena had long been open about being gay. This was a story of a second “coming out”: Sena’s process of revealing to his queer friends that he was opposed to abortion. Sena described how he had “learned to sneer” at right-to-lifers and “hurray on cue” at pro-choice accomplishments in the hopes of fitting in with other sexual minorities.Footnote 1 Eventually, though, he detangled himself from “the group mind-meld” of supporting abortion rights when he confronted, “in all intellectual honestly … the life and humanity of the unborn child.”Footnote 2 Soon after he left the closet for the second time, Sena set about connecting with like-minded individuals: lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people who wished to “rebel against the myth that if you’re homosexual, then of course you are for abortion.”Footnote 3 In 1990, Gays Against Abortion was born, and its first chapters were established in Washington, DC and Minneapolis. Just a year later, the group changed its name to the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians (PLAGAL) to reflect the gender diversity of its members, approximately a third of whom in the mid-1990s were lesbian or bisexual women.Footnote 4
While little is known about the estimated five to nine hundred people on PLAGAL mailing list from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s,Footnote 5 the group’s architects derived from different religious faiths and diverse political persuasions. Consisting of “a very conservative Republican,”Footnote 6 a gay male “pro-life Democrat,”Footnote 7 and a lesbian “Buddhist and Hindu … Green Party member,”Footnote 8 its leading members evade neat categorization. PLAGAL relished the opportunity to confound observers. In the words of one bisexual member, “I’m deemed as a threat. [LGB people] see me, and they don’t know what to say because they cannot stereotype [me] as a religious right-winger.”Footnote 9 PLAGAL iconography and messaging were crucial to its efforts to dismantle stereotypes. At antiabortion marches and Pride rallies, they displayed a “rainbow flag emblazoned with a fetus” and paraphernalia of a fetus inside an upside-down pink triangle alongside the words “Abortion = Death,” an appropriation of the phrase “Silence = Death” popularized by ACT UP during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.Footnote 10
PLAGAL bright colors and bold visuals modelled the pride its members had for both their sexual orientation and their commitment to defending the unborn – positions they held to be complementary. “I’ve always been a pro-life and I’ve always been Gay; they are two constants in my life,” one leader proclaimed in 1997.Footnote 11 This sentiment, however, was not shared by many of their contemporaries. Feared to be imposing a “gay agenda” by some religious conservatives and distrusted as homophobic spies by some LGB activists, PLAGAL was viewed with suspicion. For if the two sides of the culture wars were agreed on anything, it was that the fights for fetal rights and gay rights were incompatible. As Washington Blade, the United States’ oldest queer newspaper, explained, “If, as Harvey Milk suggested, Gays truly are everywhere, then it only follows that they would be standing alongside some 60,000 religious right-wingers at an antiabortion rally. But to be Gay and to be pro-life is to embody a political paradox with an unfortunate set of drawbacks.”Footnote 12
Through an examination of PLAGAL organizational materials – including the unprocessed papers of former president Cecelia Brown – and commentary in the LGB press and antiabortion literature, this article will explore how the pro-gay rights, pro-fetal rights organization battled for recognition in the 1990s. Though PLAGAL endeavored to establish chapters across the United States, support outside of the Midwest and the Northeast was limited. As well as facing exclusion from national right-to-life events, they were “unable to motivate” activists in “important cities within the lesbian and gay community.”Footnote 13 Deemed a threat to religious teachings on homosexuality and conservative “family values” on the one hand and regarded as traitors to their lesbian and bisexual feminist sisters’ fight for reproductive autonomy on the other, PLAGAL failed to foster many alliances.
Political, gender, and class divisions among PLAGAL members also suggest that, besides being united in the goals of defending sexual minorities and the unborn, the group lacked uniformity. Though these differences may have hampered PLAGAL goal of convincing others of the necessity of allying the gay rights and right-to-life movements, their campaigns nonetheless raise interesting questions about (the limits of) identity politics in the 1990s. For while the activities of this relatively obscure organization arguably had little material impact, PLAGAL was not alone in understanding the revolutionary potential of their framings. In a turbulent decade that saw both sexual-minority and antiabortion activists query how best to reach their goals, PLAGAL called for a reckoning of the very meanings of these respective movements. Their presence at antiabortion rallies and Pride marches caught the attention of queer activists grappling with the uptake of assimilationist strategies within gay rights organizing. Elsewhere, “fringe” right-to-lifers shared with PLAGAL the understanding that the antiabortion movement was, at its core, an expansion of “human rights,” and cited the group as evidence of the growing “diversity” of their cause. More than showcasing activists who evade neat categorization, attending to PLAGAL first decade of organizing may help us rethink the relationship of different social and political movements.
By the close of the twentieth century, questions concerning gender, sex, and the family were at the center of American’s “war with one another,”Footnote 14 and the debate over abortion appeared decidedly partisan: one that pitted religious conservatives in favor of “life” against secular liberals in support of “choice.”Footnote 15 Yet the struggle over abortion was never so straightforward, with abortion foes and supporters carrying more complex views, experiences, and goals than stereotypical assessments suggest. As historian Deborah Gray White explains, “identities were in flux during the postmodern 1990s, and the mass gatherings of the decade were therapeutic places where people did not just express their identity, but where they sought new identities as well.”Footnote 16 White’s characterization of the activists who marched en masse in the 1990s is fitting of PLAGAL. As the group understood itself, “The presence of PLAGAL encourages those who are imprisoned in the double closet – the gay closet and the pro-life closet – to escape both.”Footnote 17
Shattering preconceptions was chief on PLAGAL agenda. Though some leading members picketed abortion clinics or raised funds for crisis pregnancy centers outside their involvement in the LGB antiabortion group, the available archival evidence suggests that PLAGAL was primarily focused on carving out a space for sexual-minority right-to-lifers. The purpose of their awareness-raising campaigns was twofold: to convince antiabortion activists that LGB people were an asset to their movement, and to persuade LGB activists that the struggles for unborn and sexual-minority rights were related. These goals were outlined in two open letters, copies of which were distributed at antiabortion and Pride events. The first, “An Open Letter to the Pro-life Community,” called for a more inclusive antiabortion movement: one that recognized the value of all abortion opponents, regardless of their sexual orientation. Arguing that it was not same-sex relations but abortion – “a non-homosexual atrocity” – that was to blame for the breakdown of the nuclear family, PLAGAL urged the antiabortion movement not to be distracted by “non-life” issues such as homophobia.Footnote 18 The second, “An Open Letter to the Lesbian and Gay Community: Under the Rainbow Flag,” accused the LGB rights movement – supposedly built on inclusivity – of hypocrisy for shunning right-to-lifers. PLAGAL suggested that the many colors of the rainbow flag, a symbol of Pride, represented not only a spectrum of gender and sexual-minority identities, but also a spectrum of political views and moral values. Celebrating being antiabortion as testament to the diversity of queer America, PLAGAL asked fellow sexual minorities “to eliminate dogmatism and intolerance within our own ranks.”Footnote 19 Neither of these goals was easily attainable, however, given that PLAGAL had “staked out territory in two of the most volatile battlefields of American life”: abortion and gay rights.Footnote 20
Founded at the beginning of a decade that scholars characterize as “fractured” and “unfixed,”Footnote 21 PLAGAL early years constitute a distinctly 1990s story. Notwithstanding the horrors of HIV/AIDS, the epidemic gave LGB activists a new impetus for organizing. The push for gay marriage – in part a product of the necessity of establishing kinship and community ties during the epidemic – gained new ground. The 1990s also saw the development of new LGB subjectivities on the right. Although conservative LGB groups such as the Log Cabin Republicans sprang up in the late 1970s, the amenability of LGB politics to conservatism arguably became more pronounced by the close of the twentieth century. Like conservative LGB groups, PLAGAL evidenced the possibility of divorcing one’s sexuality from a given (leftist) political position – no small feat given the politicization of gay identity since the late 1960s. Interestingly, though, as this article will explore, PLAGAL had a strained relationship with gay conservatives. The historical record also gives no indication as to whether PLAGAL joined queer activists in campaigning for gay adoption or assisted reproductive technologies, perhaps suggesting the group’s limited engagement with reproductive issues besides abortion.
PLAGAL organizing must also be situated in the context of the evolving antiabortion movement. Setbacks in the form of Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the election of a President in support of abortion rights, and the public backlash emanating from violent extremism at abortion clinics left the movement in flux. Hoping to rejuvenate their cause, some right-to-lifers constructed the fight against abortion as one for “human rights.” Doing so not only involved borrowing the language of the “rights revolutions” of the 1960s but also, as historians Daniel Williams and Mary Ziegler respectively explain, required mirroring the framings of their pre-Roe v. Wade (1973) forerunners who understood defending the unborn as a social-justice issue.Footnote 22 Though “human rights” claims were made by antiabortion activists of all political stripes, including evangelical conservatives such as Operation Rescue’s Randall Terry, PLAGAL used such rhetoric to position themselves at the vanguard of a more inclusive, and thereby more effective, right-to-life cause. Indeed, they joined other “fringe” right-to-lifers – including antinuclear, anti-racist, pro-feminist, and pro-disability rights activists – in positioning the unborn and minorities as alike in struggle. The seemingly impenetrable boundaries of the culture wars notwithstanding, PLAGAL thus deemed the 1990s ripe for opportunity, with the mainstreaming of sexual-minority identities and strategic developments within the right-to-life cause heralding the potential to unite LGB and antiabortion activists.
“AS A LESBIAN WOMAN I LIVE IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE UNBORN CHILD”: CONSTRUCTING AN AFFINITY BETWEEN SEXUAL MINORITIES AND FETUSES
Since their inception in the early 1990s, PLAGAL worked to sever any presumed connection between the LGB rights and pro-choice movements. Proclaiming, “No one has an abortion as a gesture of good will to the gay community!”Footnote 23 the group insisted that abortion actively harmed LGB people, reasoning that “just like homophobia, abortion tries to get rid of real human beings who are considered threatening or undesirable.”Footnote 24 From arguing that “Roe v. Wade could ensure the total elimination of homosexuals from American society,”Footnote 25 to declaring it “hideous to see the extermination of millions of preborn lives as testimony of gay liberation,”Footnote 26 PLAGAL understood abortion as a grave threat to LGB people, whose survival apparently was threatened by the readiness of Americans to abort other “undesirables.”
PLAGAL leveraged the discrimination and loss experienced during the HIV/AIDS epidemic to connect the violence of homophobia with the “violence” of abortion. Some male leaders were HIV-positive, which only strengthened their resolve to fight on behalf of other vulnerable populations, including those who contracted the disease in utero. PLAGAL warned that fetuses with HIV were especially at risk of being aborted. Out of this concern came a PLAGAL-sponsored forum on World AIDS Day 1994 on the ethics of testing pregnant people for AIDS. Though PLAGAL was in support of various efforts to eradicate HIV/AIDS, it did not deem terminating the pregnancies of HIV-positive people a morally justifiable solution to the management of the disease.
As well as positioning HIV/AIDS as a threat both to the unborn and to sexual minorities, PLAGAL connected abortion to the specter of discovering a “gay gene” in utero – a subject of much popular and academic debate in the early 1990s.Footnote 27 The “gay gene” held the illustrious promise of providing LGB Americans with an origin story: “evidence” that they were unchangeable and “born this way.” And yet there were significant anxieties concerning this potential scientific breakthrough. While admitting that the discovery of a “gay gene” would help refute the notion that sexual orientation was a “choice,” Tom Sena feared that the search for a “cure” for homosexuality would soon follow, and if such a cure could not be found, fetuses suspected of being sexual minorities would be aborted.Footnote 28 LGB activists not affiliated with PLAGAL also warned of the negative effects of the discovery of a “gay gene.” Activist Charles Silverstein cautioned in 1990, “It is just a matter of time before some S.O.B. says I have a test … that will determine homosexuality”: a test that would “change the values of Gay and Lesbian people.”Footnote 29 Such fears appeared to be confirmed in 1993 when the journal Science suggested that male homosexuality could be genetically identified and, four years later, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Dr. James Watson stated that he did not object to aborting “gay fetuses.”Footnote 30
PLAGAL was also not alone in anticipating that the “gay gene” would have dramatic consequences for both the antiabortion and gay rights movements. A 1996 PLAGAL Memorandum reported that gay rights activist Larry Kramer “joked the Christian Right is going to become violently pro-choice,” and televangelist Pat Robertson “responded by noting that the gay community may soon turn radically pro-life” in response to the breakthrough.Footnote 31 Thus, for all the fear that the potential discovery of a “gay gene” engendered in PLAGAL members, it could be a potential rallying point for the LGB community: a much-needed wake-up call to the alleged injustices of abortion and its adverse effects on LGB people. These hopes notwithstanding, some queer commentators denounced PLAGAL “misled ravings” on the issue, arguing that their discussion of the “gay gene” was a ploy to scaremonger sexual minorities into opposing abortion rights.Footnote 32 As one lesbian publication wrote scathingly in 1995, PLAGAL “exploits and misrepresents scientific research which suggests that there may be some kind of physiological indicators of homosexuality.”Footnote 33
Yet other pro-choice LGB activists took issue with PLAGAL inflammatory rhetoric. In language evocative of the mass extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany, PLAGAL warned of a gay “final solution” if a genetic predisposition to homosexuality was detected.Footnote 34 PLAGAL iconography was also evocative of the Holocaust. Through their depiction of a fetus inside a pink triangle – a reclamation of the symbol used by the Nazis to signal sexual minorities – the organization suggested that, like other minorities, (gay) fetuses were victims of genocide. Historian Richard Hughes has shown that the predominantly white antiabortion movement alluded to slavery, eugenics, and other instances of racial discrimination to present abortion as a “genocidal” threat in the 1990s.Footnote 35 Allusions to human rights abuses and the deployment of apocalyptic rhetoric were certainly common among PLAGAL members. As Donna Marie Kearney questioned in 1995, “Can the day be far off when that genetic link [that predisposes one to homosexuality] is found and future generations of homosexuals will be wiped out before birth?”Footnote 36 Borrowing from the language of the disability justice movement, Kearney further pondered, “We live with a laissez-faire attitude that enables parents to abort fetuses because of presumed handicaps. Couldn’t these same parents someday (if not today) deem homosexuality such a handicap?”Footnote 37 Yet others warned that abortion threatened LGB extinction. In a 1993 article for Lesbian Contradiction, PLAGAL member and Feminists for Life–Arkansas coordinator M. Luhra Tivis lamented that “one-half of the 1.5 million abortions done each year kill baby wimmin [sic] … that’s 75,000 baby dykes killed each year.”Footnote 38 These statements reflected the contention that, in contrast to the pro-choice movement, the right-to-life cause was concerned with protecting society’s most vulnerable.
Though defending the fetuses was central to PLAGAL, it refrained from brandishing photographs of miscarried or aborted tissue on the understanding that it might alienate supporters. As an editorial on member Megan Wilson remarked,
At her last abortion rally, she really wanted to give one of her fellow protesters a good whack upside the head with her pro-life placard … There she was, looking fine in a black leather jacket and cat-eye shades, and this social misfit had to ruin the party by waving his dead-fetus posters at passersby on their lunch hour. How uncool is that?Footnote 39
PLAGAL avoidance of visceral images of fetuses may also have reflected a shift from “fetal-centered” to “women-centered” tactics. Alongside confronting the limits of absolutist legal strategies and the public-relations damage caused by antiabortion extremism, right-to-lifers in the 1990s sought to counter accusations of being “profoundly anti-women.”Footnote 40 As such, “women-centered” or “pro-woman” framings became increasingly popular. As Dr. John C. Willke, former president of the National Right to Life Committee, explained in 1997, “Five or ten years ago my emphasis would have been on the right to life and on saving babies. But now … we’ve got to go out and sing from the housetops about … how compassionate we are to women, how we are helping women – not just babies.”Footnote 41 In keeping with this strategic shift (which, in essence, expanded abortion’s “victims”), PLAGAL vice president Jackie Malone, an antiabortion feminist, mother of two, and “homemaker,”Footnote 42 argued that women were “severely debilitated mentally” by abortion,Footnote 43 and member Steve Cook described legal abortion as “unsafe” for both woman and child.Footnote 44 As with other male-dominated antiabortion groups – but perhaps especially so for an organization that proclaimed itself to be invested in the rights and protections of minorities – it was important that PLAGAL demonstrate its concern for women as well as fetuses. One way they did so was to highlight women members’ experiences in their literature.
While some male PLAGAL members spoke of fetal rights in abstract terms, women’s rationales for joining the group often stemmed from their own reproductive journeys. Far from its being an issue of marginal importance to sexual minorities, they understood unexpected pregnancies – and thus abortion – as a real possibility for bisexuals, lesbians, and young people “who may be experimenting with their sexuality.”Footnote 45 Since the 1980s, some women transformed their personal experiences with abortion into political tools through the creation of “abortion-regret” organizations.Footnote 46 Countering the pro-choice narrative that legal abortion protected women from the “back-alley butchers” of the pre-Roe era, they argued that they suffered from “post-abortion syndrome”: a host of emotional and physical maladies caused by legal abortion.Footnote 47 Women PLAGAL members, such as Cecelia (Holesovsky) Brown, expressed similarly intimate reasons for entering the fight against abortion. Having experienced a “very traumatic” abortion at the age of eighteenFootnote 48 – a decision she “regretted … deeply” and sought to remedy by deliberately falling pregnant again – Brown began to participate in abortion clinic rescues.Footnote 49 (Brown also posited that her crisis pregnancies were born of internalized homophobia, for she only had sex with men “when [she] was trying to be someone [she was] not – heterosexual.”Footnote 50 “How do you prove you’re straight?” she asked the audience at a University of Miami Respect Life event: “You sleep around.”Footnote 51) After growing uncomfortable with “a great deal of anti-gay sentiment” within Operation Rescue, Brown “hooked up with” the antiabortion feminist group Feminists for Life, who then informed her about PLAGAL.Footnote 52 Brown’s lengthy presidency of PLAGAL – from Tom Sena’s untimely death in a car accident in 2001 to 2023 – represented a stark break from the past, as the organization was previously led by men for just a couple of years at a time. A waitress, Brown also stood out against the male attorneys, architects, and librarians at the group’s core, suggesting that the gender divide in PLAGAL intersected with social class.
Cecelia Brown was not alone in bringing personal experience to the right-to-life cause. PLAGAL Chuck Volz, a gay male attorney who represented antiabortion “rescuers” charged with blockading and trespassing abortion clinics – including Operation Rescue’s Randall Terry – was married twice to women before coming out as gay.Footnote 53 Abortion was far from a distant or abstract issue to Volz, for he and his second wife had adopted a baby girl after persuading a woman visiting an abortion clinic not to terminate her pregnancy. After his wife’s death, Volz adopted a second child from the same birth mother. The father of two children who might have been aborted if it weren’t for his intervention, Volz’s campaigning was deeply personal, and his parenting was both a political and a politicized act. His antiabortion activism extended beyond his involvement in PLAGAL, as he was also a president of a crisis pregnancy center in Philadelphia, a pregnancy counselor, and an abortion clinic protestor. But, like Steve Cook, Hugh Joseph Beard, and other PLAGAL members who participated in the right-to-life cause long before coming to terms with their sexuality, the LGB organization offered Volz a way to reconcile the seeming contradictions between his sexual orientation and his opposition to abortion. Volz’s coming-out journey, when positioned in tandem with his parenting journey, reminds us that questions concerning reproduction do not solely concern heterosexual people. Indeed, his intimate connection to the abortion issue serves as a corrective to some pro-choice activists’ charge that abortion seldom concerns men, much less so gay men who are unlikely to be embroiled in unexpected pregnancies.
PLAGAL attacked abortion on multiple fronts: on a philosophical level by linking LGB and fetal oppressions, on a scientific level by discussing the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the “gay gene,” and on an intimate level by referencing members’ pregnancy and parenting journeys. Regardless of whether their entrance into the right-to-life cause was born from ideological theorizing or personal experience, though, its members understood their sexual-minority status as paramount to their antiabortion activism. Throughout the 1990s, however, other activists remained largely unconvinced of the appropriateness of marrying these two campaigns.
“HOW DO YOU REPLY WHEN SOMEONE CALLS YOU A NEO-NAZI OR A SELF-HATING GAY MAN?” TENSIONS WITH GAY RIGHTS ACTIVISTS
PLAGAL often failed to foster meaningful connections with other gay rights activists, especially those who understood the antiabortion movement as inextricable from a socially conservative crusade against gender-nonconforming and sexual-minority Americans. As well as struggling to connect with pro-choice LGB activists who accused them of being “gay ‘Uncle Toms’,”Footnote 54 some PLAGAL members’ abortion politics resulted in a “disharmonious home life.”Footnote 55 In a 1995 interview for the Philadelphia Gay News, Cecelia Brown, Philip Arcidi, and Donna Marie Kearney all admitted that their antiabortion views had caused rifts with their romantic partners – and in some instances resulted in their relationships breaking down altogether – due to the perceived incompatibility of supporting both fetal and gay rights.Footnote 56
Many PLAGAL members insisted that they experienced greater hostility from fellow gay rights activists than from religious conservatives in the antiabortion movement. Kearney, who, like founder Tom Sena, claimed she had to “come out of the closet twice” – once for being a lesbian, and once for being antiabortion – posited that while her right-to-life friends were “pretty respectful” of her sexuality, “some of her gay colleagues [weren’t] so generous about her politics,” and she experienced “more intolerance among them than among the abortion opponents.”Footnote 57 Arcidi concurred, arguing that “being with pro-lifers is a picnic relative to the some of the flack I’ve gotten from the Gay community.”Footnote 58 And in 1996, member Mary Jean Mulherin, an antiabortion feminist, lesbian, and mother of five, stated, “When I came out as a lesbian it was like giving birth to myself … but then to come out and feel like I had to crawl back in the closet has been a great sorrow.”Footnote 59 Their ouster from right-to-life events notwithstanding, PLAGAL rejection from LGB circles was perhaps deemed especially hurtful because the gay rights movement was committed to diversity and inclusivity.
Though PLAGAL maintained that LGB Americans were no less antiabortion than their straight counterparts, they recognized that the loudest voices within the queer community were supportive of abortion rights. PLAGAL therefore attributed its lack of success in forging relationships with other LGB activists to “the dogmatism that exists in the gay community: ‘Celebrate Diversity’ is the spoken motto, but the unspoken half goes, ‘As long as you’re just like everybody else.’”Footnote 60 Intolerance for dissent on abortion was supposedly so pervasive among LGB pro-choice supporters that PLAGAL accused some gay and lesbian publications of censoring their voice.Footnote 61 Thus, while Tom Sena proclaimed in the year 2000 that “long gone are the days when in order to be a good little gay or lesbian, you had [to] buy unthinkingly into abortion rights,”Footnote 62 other members disagreed, arguing that support for abortion continued to be a litmus test for acceptance into queer circles, for LGB activists “often hold rigid ‘politically correct’ views about other gays, and then use these narrow definitions to brand some gays ‘good’ and others ‘bad.’”Footnote 63
Tensions between PLAGAL and other LGB activists in part stemmed from the fact that some gay rights groups believed that the argument of the “right to privacy” articulated in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) – the Supreme Court ruling that protected married couples’ use of contraception without government interference – and Roe v. Wade (1973) should be extended to homosexual sex. In their view, “advocating for women’s continued reproductive freedom has been a major part of the gay civil rights effort … because it is symbolic of the dangers of government interference in personal matters.”Footnote 64 Put differently, it was feared that overturning Roe “could open the doors for the government to invade the bedroom.”Footnote 65 In contrast to the insistence that the legal justification for Roe was fundamental to establishing gay rights, PLAGAL pointed out that legalizing abortion had not won LGB people more freedoms. Steve Cook deemed the “right to privacy” argument not simply irrelevant to gay rights, but fallacious. “Abortion denies the privacy rights of the fetus … If this is a privacy issue, why do pro-abortion advocates want government funding of a private act?” he argued.Footnote 66 Others in the LGB antiabortion group similarly warned that extending the “right to privacy” argument might harm the campaign for sexual-minority rights. “What do [pro-choice LGB people] say when millions of parents decide – in the free exercise of their inviolable right to privacy – that they do not want to bear a gay or lesbian child?” quipped PLAGAL literature in 1994.Footnote 67 Having rejected the logic that legal precedent connected the campaigns for reproductive and LGB rights, PLAGAL then questioned the appropriateness of allying these two movements. As member Hugh Joseph Beard asserted, “groups like PLAGAL show a gay rights movement that has matured and diversified enough … to argue that gay rights have nothing to do with the right to privacy.”Footnote 68 In this telling, antiabortion sentiment served as evidence of the expansiveness of the gay rights movement at the close of the twentieth century.
Criticisms of PLAGAL from other gay rights activists sometimes centered on the group’s “assimilationist,” as opposed to “liberationist,” goals. Whether sexual minorities should seek acceptance from their heterosexual counterparts, or instead fight for full liberation from the confines of straight society, was a particularly contentious issue in the 1990s. PLAGAL was not insulated from these discussions. Indeed, one pro-choice lesbian charged that president Philip Arcidi (1994–98), in opposing abortion rights, “obviously believes that the goal of the gay movement is to gain inclusion into the mainstream,” a mainstream that was “sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, etc.”Footnote 69 Arcidi would likely have supported the rationale undergirding LGB assimilation. Writing to the Gay and Lesbian Times, he argued that PLAGAL ouster from 1995 San Diego Pride made “a mockery of the gay community’s demands for inclusion in mainstream society,” for “how can we claim that gays and lesbians are as diverse as the nation if we deny a place for gay pro-lifers?”Footnote 70 Maintaining that sexual orientation had no bearing on one’s politics or values, PLAGAL prided itself on demonstrating that LGB Americans weren’t all too different from their straight peers. Some pro-choice queer commentators agreed, arguing, “We need everybody’s contributions and viewpoints. Otherwise we are a small-minded family of people, turned in on ourselves instead of creating a generous home.”Footnote 71 PLAGAL saw diversity in opinion regarding abortion as a strategic win for the gay rights movement, arguing, “To gain credibility and respect from our society, our families, and friends, we in the gay community must demonstrate respect and love for all human life, and not exclusively our own lives.”Footnote 72 However, the implication that defending the unborn was a ticket to sexual minorities’ acceptance often led PLAGAL into hot water with other gay rights organizations.
Differences between LGB pro-choice and antiabortion activists came to the fore at various events for sexual-minority rights in the 1990s. As mentioned above, the struggle against HIV/AIDS was a prominent theme in PLAGAL literature, and the organization hoped that LGB people would respond to the anguish of the epidemic with “a new paradigm … that is life-affirming, proud of our sexuality … and equally concerned for the rights of others,” including the rights of the unborn.Footnote 73 And yet, rather than unite LGB abortion foes and supporters, HIV/AIDS often brought the group into direct conflict with other activists. These tensions were often explicitly gendered and reflected a long-standing neglect of women’s health issues within the gay rights movement. PLAGAL opposition to Philadelphia’s 1993, 1994, and 1995 AIDS Walks, organized by the group From All Walks of Life (FAWOL), are a case in point. FAWOL donated some of the funds raised at the events to Planned Parenthood of Southern Pennsylvania, the Elizabeth Blackwell’s Women Center, and the Greater Philadelphia Women’s Medical Fund, all organizations that provided abortion services. PLAGAL criticized FAWOL for this decision, arguing that because abortion clinics were among the beneficiaries of the AIDS Walk, LGB right-to-lifers were “precluded” from participating.Footnote 74 As Cecelia Brown pondered, “how can we argue against people who would segregate and brand those with the ‘gay plague’ when we financially support those who advocate the choice to destroy HIV + unborn children?”Footnote 75 Although the executive director of Planned Parenthood of Greater Cleveland, a financial beneficiary of another AIDS Walk in Ohio, explained that Planned Parenthood provided “HIV prevention information to thousands of women and their partners,”Footnote 76 PLAGAL retorted that, without a guarantee “that the funds received from the AIDS Walk are segregated,” they could “only assume that the revenues” went to abortions.Footnote 77 Writing to the Philadelphia Gay News, PLAGAL Chuck Volz explained, “We have also seen our loved ones die from the plague of AIDS, and we wish to be equal co-participants in the fight against it. However, we should not be required to violate our conscience to do so.”Footnote 78 “If abortion providers want to help AIDS sufferers,” Volz and his allies posited, “they should be contributing to FAWOL, not vice versa.”Footnote 79
As well as clashing with pro-choice LGB activists at AIDS Walks, PLAGAL ran into confrontation at Pride marches. The antiabortion group understood Pride events as “the best places to accomplish” their goal of “advancing the pro-life message within the lesbian and gay community.”Footnote 80 Thus, despite being denied inclusion in the 1995 Boston Pride parade on account of their antiabortion position, PLAGAL decided to attend the event anyway.Footnote 81 At the parade, journalist Nat Hentoff, who frequently spoke out in defense of “progressive” antiabortion activists, reported that “a group of pro-choice lesbians, eventually at least 50 in number, obstructed access to the PLAGAL table … tried to pull down PLAGAL banner, trashed brochures, and stole” surveys.Footnote 82 The image of an angry mob of lesbians was also invoked in PLAGAL literature, which reported that “a jeering, threatening crowd of abortion supporters forced a small contingent of gay pro-lifers to quit the Boston Gay Pride festival … under protection of a police escort.”Footnote 83 Philip Arcidi, who was working the PLAGAL table at the event, said he had “never seen such hate exhibited at a gay or lesbian function,” and was shocked that such hatred was directed at fellow sexual minorities.Footnote 84
Attending to pro-choice LGB activists’ objections to PLAGAL requires grappling with the gender politics of queer activism in the 1990s. As the phrase “Women don’t get AIDS … they just die from it” suggests, the HIV/AIDS epidemic sparked internal criticism of the gay rights movement for ignoring women’s health issues, especially as they pertain to reproduction. As well as battling against the sexism of the male-dominated gay liberation movement, lesbian and bisexual women found themselves fighting against the heterosexism of the women’s liberation movement. But, in spite of their exclusion from both causes, they often “argued that the right to choice and queer rights were closely linked.”Footnote 85 As one contemporary explained, many lesbians “instinctively support abortion rights,” and were “often the first line of defense outside women’s health clinics.”Footnote 86 Owing to their historic involvement in the fight for abortion rights, some queer women – claiming that they were “just as affected by the need for reproductive freedom as straight women” – were alarmed “to see gay men siding with the enemy – the heterosexist minority” – on the issue of abortion.Footnote 87 To quote one lesbian writing in 1994, “There’s something discomfiting about members of an already oppressed population calling for restrictions of individual rights.”Footnote 88 Recognizing that bisexual and gay men were not immune from sexism, some queer women thus objected to PLAGAL – a male-dominated organization which, in their view, was working to curtail women’s reproductive freedoms. One woman described PLAGAL male members as “woman-hating,”Footnote 89 and another criticized the group for implying “that women are flippant, unthinking, and frivolous in deciding to have an abortion.”Footnote 90 Further still, PLAGAL was denounced as a men’s club that, “like their heterosexist counterparts,” had no regard for women’s reproductive autonomy.Footnote 91 “The boys from PLAGAL” – for “there aren’t actually any gals playing along yet” – were specifically criticized for privileging fetuses over “living and breathing women.”Footnote 92
The LGB antiabortion organization repeatedly found itself on the defensive when it came to gender politics. One way it sought to counter accusations of misogyny was to remind commentators that its membership consisted of lesbian and bisexual women. The coordinator of PLAGAL Houston–Galveston shared that she signed up ten women to their mailing list at the 1997 Texas Lesbian Conference.Footnote 93 Steve Cook took care to explain to the queer press, “Yes, we do have lesbians in our group (which surprises some feminists). Our Arkansas chapter is simply called ‘Lesbians for Life’ because they have no men in that particular chapter.”Footnote 94 And in 1995 the group celebrated its women members for “gleefully undoing” the “dogmatism” of pro-choice ideology within the women’s liberation movement.Footnote 95
Tokenistic celebrations of its women members notwithstanding, PLAGAL damning assessments of pro-choicers meant that some LGB activists remained distrustful of the organization. As well as depicting pro-choice queer women as intolerant of a diversity of opinion, PLAGAL positioned them as ideologically inconsistent. Writing for the queer publication Advocate, one LGB right-to-lifer posited, “If lesbians had any feel for the absurd, they’d see how ludicrous it is that so many of them are conscientious vegetarians as well as rabid abortion ‘rights’ advocates.”Footnote 96 Philip Arcidi similarly deemed pro-choice animal rights activists hypocritical, stating, “Try as I might, I could find no logic that would reconcile a tender concern for flora and fauna with a callous disregard for the fate of unborn children.”Footnote 97 By demarcating queer pro-choicers – especially women – as “fearful of rational discussion,” intimidating, and obstructors of free speech, PLAGAL worked to depict itself as victim of a culture that had little tolerance for those who challenged the status quo.Footnote 98 But such framings, which often relied on negative depictions of women activists, also had the effect of alienating many queer people from the right-to-life group.
One may presume that PLAGAL enjoyed a more positive relationship with LGB activists on the right given that some of its chief architects were ardent conservatives. Founding member Hugh Joseph Beard – who entered the right-to-life cause in 1967, long before coming out as gay – joined Chuck Volz, Michael Ferens, and Moses Remedios in participating in the Log Cabin Republicans (LCR), the largest queer conservative organization in the US. Historian Clayton Howard explains that LCR provoked “bafflement” and “chronic bewilderment” in those who presumed that LGB people shared “liberal values and an alliance to the Democratic Party.”Footnote 99 The “alleged absurdity” of LCR is also a befitting description of PLAGAL, whose existence similarly befuddled many observers.Footnote 100 And yet PLAGAL found few bedfellows in LCR, whose emphasis on minimalist state intervention in private life led many members to support reproductive choice.Footnote 101 Interestingly, though, LCR remained ambivalent about adopting an official pro-choice plank. Explains historian Neil Young, “although two-thirds of Log Cabin’s membership identified as ‘pro-choice’ in the mid-1990s, 80 percent said that abortion wasn’t a ‘gay and lesbian issue.’”Footnote 102 For Young, male LCR members ultimately “prioritized their fears of alienating the 23 percent … who called themselves ‘pro-life’” over lesbian Republicans concerned about the impact of abortion restrictions on their reproductive lives.Footnote 103
Like lesbian and bisexual women on the left, some women LCR members interpreted PLAGAL antiabortion position as an example of gay men’s long-standing neglect of women’s health issues. In 1995, Log Cabin national’s vice president, Evelyn Kotch, decried lesbians’ support of PLAGAL as nonsensical. In a scathing critique of both PLAGAL and the organizers of Diversity of Pride, a Philadelphia-based event to celebrate queer activists from across the political spectrum, Kotch queried, “Are there any lesbians in the pro-life movement? I bet not any with a living brain.”Footnote 104 In response to Kotch’s inflammatory comment, Philip Arcidi explained that “the lesbians who signed up with PLAGAL” at Diversity of Pride “flouted Ms. Kotch’s primeval stereotype of women; their numbers – and their brain capacity – matched, and perhaps surpassed, that of the men who joined PLAGAL.”Footnote 105 Despite Arcidi’s insistence that PLAGAL attracted the support of many women, criticisms leveraged by queer women on both the left and right suggest that unequal gender representation was a persistent problem for the group. Certainly, PLAGAL struggled to counter the suggestion that, like their straight peers, gay male right-to-lifers were unsympathetic to women’s issues.
Run-ins with whom they termed the “Rainbow police” notwithstanding,Footnote 106 PLAGAL members sometimes recounted positive interactions with other LGB activists. At 1997 Boston Pride, the group reported that “on several occasions, pro-choice lesbians and gays came by our table to express embarrassment at PLAGAL 1995 ouster,” thus demonstrating that some LGB activists took issue with disruptive pro-choice protesters.Footnote 107 And at 1998 Los Angeles Pride, a lesbian onlooker came to PLAGAL defense when a woman ACT UP member labelled their “Abortion = Death” slogan “obscene” and “demanded to know” what “two white men [were] doing here. You have penises!”Footnote 108 The onlooker maintained that LGB people who held differing opinions were welcome at Pride, a contention shared by another pro-choice lesbian who, despite disagreeing with the right-to-lifers, recognized that “anti-abortionists who are feminist and/or lesbians have valid conflicts between their desire to support women’s rights and their desire to also affirm the sacredness of newly-conceived life.”Footnote 109 PLAGAL Moses Remedios was also quick to challenge the ACT UP member, retorting, “Who are you calling white? Yo soy Cubano so respetame” (I am Cuban so respect me) and “[we’re funded by] the Moral Majority – not!!!” in response to the presumption that the antiabortion group consisted solely of white conservatives.Footnote 110 In another attempt to deflect accusations of sexism, Remedios communicated that almost half of the names collected for PLAGAL mailing list by the conclusion of 1998 LA Pride were of women. By positioning the political, racial, and gender diversity of its members as proof of its anti-racist and pro-feminist leanings, PLAGAL not only echoed the “social-justice” framings of other “fringe” right-to-lifers, but also endeavored to show that LGB Americans were not a homogeneous bloc.
PLAGAL was eager to challenge presumptions surrounding its members’ identities and rationales for joining the fight against abortion. Defying stereotypes was certainly important if it was to recruit queer activists distrustful of conservative social movements. Yet the group’s contention that abortion was not merely tangential to the fight for gay rights, but was an active threat to sexual minorities’ survival, failed to inspire many LGB Americans to join a cause whose members often appeared hostile to their very existence. Specifically, PLAGAL antiabortion position ran counter to lesbian and bisexual women who, despite battling sexism within both the women’s liberation and gay rights movements, had successfully convinced many of their peers of the necessity of allying the battles for reproductive and sexual freedoms.
“WE ARE IN KIND OF A RUT AS A MOVEMENT, AREN’T WE?” EXPANDING THE RIGHT-TO-LIFE CAUSE
Though PLAGAL were not the only sexual minorities involved in the right-to-life cause, “out and proud” LGB abortion foes were a rarity. In The Family Roe, historian Joshua Prager traces the perceived incompatibility of Norma McCorvey’s lesbianism and antiabortion sentiment. McCorvey – better known as “Jane Roe” in the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade (1973) – defected to the right-to-life cause in the 1990s after being taken under the wing of evangelical minister and Operation Save America leader Philip “Flip” Benham, a vocal critic of the sexual-minority rights movement.Footnote 111 McCorvey’s journey from pro-choice proponent to antiabortion spokeswoman caught the attention of PLAGAL. Although Philip Arcidi spoke damningly of McCorvey in 1994, stating, “I take no pride that it was a lesbian who paved the way to America’s holocaust of the unborn,” he shared a decidedly more positive assessment of her the following year.Footnote 112 In the wake of McCorvey’s 1995 baptism and involvement with Operation Rescue, Arcidi contended that her “change of mind is the best evidence to date that the continuing debate over abortion is having an effect on the American public.”Footnote 113 However, unlike socially conservative right-to-lifers who urged McCorvey to “renounce” her homosexuality, PLAGAL hoped that McCorvey would “remain faithful to her commitment to her partner” of twenty-seven years, Connie Gonzalez.Footnote 114 If Arcidi initially deemed McCorvey a poor model for LGB abortion foes, John Salvi III, who murdered two abortion clinic staff in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1994, was a considerably worse representative. Owing to rumors that Salvi was gay, and that his violent attack emanated from his struggle to reconcile his Catholicism with his homosexuality, Arcidi grew concerned that the extremist was somehow affiliated with PLAGAL. Fortunately for PLAGAL reputation, Arcidi’s research suggested that Salvi was unknown to the group. But, as the LGB press reported, “even the suggestion that Salvi … might be gay was enough to prompt discussion about whether a ‘pro-life homosexual’ was somehow a contradiction in terms.”Footnote 115
Emerging in a cultural and political context in which “religious conservatives and gay activists [had] become perfect enemies,” it was perhaps inevitable that PLAGAL would run into conflict with other antiabortion activists.Footnote 116 Some of the New Right’s and religious right’s chief architects were notoriously homophobic, and condemned homosexuality as a public-health risk, sinful, and an assault on “family values.” And, given that many prominent right-to-lifers deemed traditional sexual and social mores complementary to the fight against abortion, there appeared to be little room for sexual minorities in this increasingly conservative movement. And yet, as historian Daniel Williams explains, “because the pro-life movement grounded its arguments in the language of human value and constitutional rights, it was able to attract a politically and religiously diverse coalition that actually gained strength over time.”Footnote 117 Against this backdrop, PLAGAL worked to persuade other right-to-lifers of the benefits of embracing a diverse cohort of activists because, in Arcidi’s words, “Babies don’t care who saves them.”Footnote 118
PLAGAL sought to revamp the right-to-life cause by vociferously challenging the “cliquish and unwelcoming attitude” of some of their peers, arguing that the narrow-minded condemnation of sexual minorities only hurt their campaign.Footnote 119 Group members deemed homophobia detrimental to the right-to-life cause because it both deterred “unconventional” supporters and distracted from the primary goal of defending unborn life. In a letter to Physicians for Life, who authored a pamphlet entitled Homosexuality: A Disease and a Cult, Cecelia Brown condemned the social conservatives for “using the pro-life movement to promote your attack on the gay and lesbian community.”Footnote 120 Brown argued that such “exclusive attitudes only serve to [e]nsure that there will actually be more abortions, because it weakens and excludes from the all-too-small pro-life movement those who do not share a complete inventory of religious and moral beliefs.”Footnote 121 Likewise, Tom Sena posited that overtly religious messaging risked alienating nonreligious Americans who otherwise had moral or ethical objections to abortion. Writing in 1998, he argued, “By identifying the right to life with Christianity, we deprive ourselves of a tremendous wealth of other-than-Christian thought and experience that could be of invaluable service in the cause of life.”Footnote 122 In effect, PLAGAL hoped that more expansive framings would strengthen the antiabortion movement’s ideological basis and attract new recruits.
PLAGAL members understood themselves as being in the vanguard of a more inclusive antiabortion movement. Central to this vision was their understanding of the right-to-life cause as a “human-rights” campaign invested in the protection of America’s most vulnerable. As Tom Sena asserted in 1993, PLAGAL exists “because our members know first-hand what it is to have our humanity denied and our rights trampled,”Footnote 123 a shared experience that led him to the creation of the group’s motto, “Human Rights Start When Human Life Begins.”Footnote 124 Others joined PLAGAL in positioning fetuses in a lineage of minorities battling for rights and recognition. While historians such as Jennifer Holland show that social conservatives “repurposed” human-rights claims for their own strategic benefit, in essence “tie[ing] their own identities to fetal victimhood,”Footnote 125 such rhetoric also proved popular among those on the left of the right-to-life cause. Interestingly, some of these activists claimed to support sexual-minority rights. The Seamless Garment Network, for instance, featured a cartoon in a 1987 publication that mocked activists who were “for fetal rights, against civil rights, [and] against gay rights,” thus suggesting the incompatibility of defending the unborn while neglecting to protect other disenfranchised groups.Footnote 126 It is worth noting, however, that PLAGAL had a “limited” relationship with the organization because its conservative members diverged from the Seamless Garment Network’s liberal stance on issues such as nuclear war and militarism.Footnote 127 Regardless of whether human-rights framings were deployed by conservative or “progressive” right-to-lifers, though, scholars Alisa von Hagel and Daniela Mansbach explain that such framings have increased “legitimacy and support” for the antiabortion movement over time.Footnote 128 This is because, in expanding “the claims made and subjects it protects,” the antiabortion movement “created a complex and broad … strategy that is more inclusive now than ever.”Footnote 129
Although PLAGAL multipronged political identity put it at odds with some antiabortion “progressives,” it developed close ties with Feminists for Life (FFL), a group described by Tom Sena as also being “in the delicious business of bedeviling the abortion movement.”Footnote 130 Founded in 1972, FFL ramped up its organizing in the 1990s when it moved its headquarters to Washington, DC and took it’s “pro-life, pro-woman” message to college campuses. FFL queried second-wave feminists’ defense of abortion rights, arguing instead that abortion – a “quick fix” in a culture that both privileged female sexual availability and neglected to care for mothers and children – hindered the pursuit of gender equality. Operating in a context where the mainstream feminist movement proudly championed abortion rights, and where many prominent anti-feminists also held antiabortion views, FFL – like PLAGAL – straddled two political movements that appeared diametrically opposed. Both FFL and PLAGAL also understood the strategic value of attracting “non-traditional” supporters to the right-to-life cause. Indeed, FFL sang the LGB group’s praises for “utterly destroy[ing] the ‘conservative, narrow-minded bigots’ stereotype which a pro-choice media loves to disseminate.”Footnote 131 It was a “loose coalition” of fringe right-to-lifers, including members of FFL, who supported PLAGAL when they were expelled from the March for Life in the 1990s.Footnote 132
PLAGAL began attending the March for Life, held since 1974 on the anniversary of Roe in Washington, DC, soon after its founding. Their five-foot banner “in subtle shades of purple and neon pink” on display,Footnote 133 the LGB organization was sometimes met with disparaging comments from fellow marchers, as was the case when two women shouted, “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” at them in 1993.Footnote 134 Other attendees questioned whether the PLAGAL contingent “was serious, and not a joke,” thus illuminating the perceived impossibility of marrying fetal and gay rights.Footnote 135 These instances notwithstanding, PLAGAL maintained that “surprised stares and supportive comments” far outweighed explicit homophobia,Footnote 136 something they interpreted as confirmation that “the stereotype that most pro-life activists … are as anti-gay as they are anti-choice just isn’t true.”Footnote 137 Though some marchers openly disapproved of PLAGAL, others – understanding that they were united in the goal of ending abortion – tolerated their participation. The Washington Times reported at the 1994 March for Life that a representative from Concerned Women for America, a group that “in the past ha[d] criticized the homosexual agenda,” said, “We would welcome [PLAGAL] with open arms,” and a spokesperson for Operation Rescue explained, “We consider homosexuality a sin, but not a reason for exclusion” from the march.Footnote 138 Likewise, at the 2000 march, Father Frank Pavone – national director of Priests for Life and former march board member – was reportedly “very friendly” to the group and, possibly reflecting his disbelief that LGB right-to-lifers were in attendance, “requested a photograph of himself standing before the PLAGAL banner.”Footnote 139 The following year, Father Pavone told PLAGAL that though he followed the Catholic Church’s teachings against homosexuality, he agreed with Pope John Paul II’s contention – “No single person or group has a monopoly on the defense or promotion of life” – and thus was “grateful” for the LGB organization’s efforts.Footnote 140 In this telling, diversity and cross-collaboration – not uniformity on issues besides abortion – were the antiabortion movement’s tickets to success. This sentiment was, of course, echoed by PLAGAL, who told homophobic right-to-lifers, “We know you don’t see gay and lesbian people in the way you should. Remember that by being here at the March for Life, we hold something in common with you.”Footnote 141
Despite PLAGAL insistence that they were “warmly received by almost all the other participants in the March”Footnote 142 – so much so that the event was described as “a stunning success” in a 1993 memorandumFootnote 143 – the group was sometimes victim to vehement attacks from religious conservatives. At the 1995 March for Life, member Betty Ann Keener was allegedly spat on by a member of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), a Catholic, anticommunist advocacy group. In a letter to TFP’s president, Philip Arcidi explained that though some marchers “profoundly disagree with the ‘lifestyle’ of PLAGAL members,” they expressed themselves with “civility, respect, and evident Christian charity.”Footnote 144 In contrast, TFP had conducted “an act of violence contravening to the spirit” of the event.Footnote 145 In a comment suggestive of PLAGAL commitment to defending women as well as fetuses from the “horrors” of abortion, Arcidi condemned the TFP member for attacking a woman PLAGAL member, whose prevention from the “brutal victimization by abortion is the chief goal of the March.”Footnote 146 Though reduced to tears at the time, Keener attempted “to take hostility in [her] stride” by joking, “Get out your umbrella!” as TFP passed PLAGAL at the 1998 March, thereby making light of her group’s unpopularity.Footnote 147
It wasn’t until 1999 that PLAGAL was officially banned from the March for Life by event organizer Nellie Gray. The seeds of PLAGAL expulsion were perhaps sown as early as 1991, however, when the editors of the March for Life program journal rejected PLAGAL request to advertise their organization. The group was still taken aback by their 1999 ouster, though, observing that “the reaction of the wonderfully diverse crowd of pro-lifers ha[d] been more and more appreciative and accommodating” of the LGB contingent over time,Footnote 148 and the event leadership’s intolerance thereby “inversely reflect[ed] a growing acceptance other marchers have shown for PLAGAL.”Footnote 149 At the 2000 March, too, PLAGAL was “barred” from participating as an openly LGB organization,Footnote 150 a decision that Michael Ferens, chairman of PLAGAL political action committee, interpreted as an attack on the rights of Americans to freely express themselves. Writing to Gay People’s Chronicle, Ferens compared PLAGAL exclusion to the Bill Clinton administration’s 1990s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy, noting that sexual minorities were seemingly only permitted participation in polite society if they remained in the closet.Footnote 151 President Moses Remedios (1998–2001) also likened the March for Life leadership’s insistence that activists not openly identify as LGB to discrimination against other minorities, arguing, “That’s as offensive as telling an African American, ‘you can ride on the bus, but just sit in the back.’”Footnote 152 In these instances and others, PLAGAL members demarcated themselves as victims of bigotry.
As in 1996, Nellie Gray prohibited PLAGAL from displaying their banner at the 2002 March for Life because it included the words “gay” and “lesbian.” Arguing that the group’s signage was “off-topic,” Gray declared that “all persons are welcome” at the march, but “all messages are not.”Footnote 153 Defying Gray’s order, Cecelia Brown and Eric Junek were arrested by the US Park Police on grounds of disorderly conduct. Brown told the Washington Blade that PLAGAL was protesting not simply the exclusion of LGB people from the march, but also the organizers’ intolerance for “all non-traditional pro-life groups.”Footnote 154 In her view, the inclusion of “fringe” activists was imperative because the fight against abortion could only be successful through the creation of a more expansive movement. Also convinced of the necessity of diversifying the right-to-life cause, Feminists for Life spoke out against Brown’s and Junek’s arrest. Colette Moran of FFL–Chicago posited “that as people that are actually discriminated against … [PLAGAL] voice is important,”Footnote 155 and Serrin Foster, president of FFL–national, argued that it was “deplorable that [Gray] would exclude pro-life gays and lesbians.”Footnote 156 Even some LGB pro-choicers spoke out in defense of PLAGAL rebelliousness. Reporter Mubarak Dahir, for instance, shared that though “a group of pro-life gays and lesbians hit [him] as an oxymoron,” he found himself “cheering as I read the account of how the determined members” rebelled against the march leadership.Footnote 157 For Dahir, the LGB group’s struggle for inclusion in the antiabortion march was akin to other campaigns for queer inclusion, such as the right to serve in the military or the right to marriage, and should thus be celebrated.
PLAGAL repeated expulsion from the March for Life indicates that its members’ openness about their sexual-minority status was not universally tolerated. Certainly, convincing a cause that increasingly attracted “family values” conservatives of the benefits of including LGB activists proved persistently challenging. This notwithstanding, PLAGAL received some support from fellow right-to-life activists. Encouragement came not just from self-described progressives, but also from religious and social conservatives who recognized the benefits of striving for a more expansive and inclusive antiabortion movement. While the right-to-life cause still overwhelmingly affiliated with the right, these glimmers of tolerance – if not wholehearted acceptance – signify an adaptive social movement cognizant of the strategic value of including “unconventional” activists among their ranks.
To conclude, the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians often occupied a lonely position in a nation bitterly divided not just by abortion and gay rights, but by larger questions concerning health, science, religion, and politics. The group’s very existence in its first decade of organizing perplexed its peers in both the antiabortion and gay rights movements, and its attempts to persuade others of the legitimacy of its campaigns were often in vain. PLAGAL engendered strong reactions in other activists, with its presence at Pride marches and antiabortion rallies in the 1990s often resulting in fierce confrontation.
Although, in some ways, PLAGAL struggles echo a familiar story of a United States irreparably torn apart along the fault lines of the culture wars, its activism arguably paints a more complex portrait of coalition building. In fact, attending to the group reveals cracks within, as well as between, identity politics at the close of the twentieth century. For while PLAGAL may have fallen short of achieving its primary goals in the 1990s – to convince the religious right that homophobia was detrimental to the fight against abortion and to persuade queer activists that abortion posed a threat to the LGB community – some pro-choice queer activists saw value in its “assimilationist” strategy, and the group found allies in other “fringe” right-to-lifers. Although media outlets suggest that PLAGAL membership dwindled to 180 members in 2022,Footnote 158 down significantly from a reported nine hundred members in 2000,Footnote 159 the group remains active. Indeed, PLAGAL January 2023 rebrand as the Rainbow Pro-Life Alliance – a name change indicative of the inclusion of gender-nonconforming members – suggests a continued desire for a space where queer right-to-lifers can be “out and proud.”Footnote 160
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