Members of Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights protest against the Briggs Initiative in the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco.
For many, the takeaway of the March 5 primaries was that San Francisco could no longer be considered a progressive city. With voters backing a slew of moderates for the Democratic County Central Committee and ballot measures loosening restrictions on police and screening welfare recipients for drugs, a lot of eyes are on how centrist Democrats will remake the city.
But moderate Democrats aren’t the only ones who have the potential to reshape the city’s politics. Moderate Republicans are also now positioned to do the same, and they already have an established playbook to draw on from a little-known part of their history — as the birthplace of gay Republicanism.
Moderate Republicans took control of the San Francisco Republican County Central Committee earlier this month. A slate of 17 centrist candidates won their elections, supported by a new Republican group called the Briones Society. Founded three years ago, the organization’s platform calls for reducing government, increasing housing and doubling the city’s police force while taking mostly moderate positions on social issues, including LGBTQ rights. The group includes “diversity” among its core values.
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“America is an idea,” the group declares, “and we welcome all who embrace it — no matter where they come from, whom they love, or how they worship.”
In a city where only 7% of registered voters are Republican, the Briones Society contends that its “center-right” policies and moderate temperament are what the local GOP needs to attract independents, disengaged Republicans and disaffected moderate Democrats.
That was the same message a group called Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights made in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Founded in 1977 by a handful of gay men and some heterosexual allies, the group would eventually link with other gay Republican clubs around California and across the country in the early 1990s to form the Log Cabin Republicans, the nation’s largest and most important LGBTQ Republican organization. Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights, which now goes by the name Log Cabin Republicans of San Francisco, is the nation’s oldest LGBTQ Republican organization.
From its start, the San Francisco group insisted that its business-friendly, socially progressive model of Republicanism represented the best path for the GOP in the city, where the party was in significant decline. Over the previous decade, the number of registered Republicans in San Francisco had dropped by a third, down to just 21% of voters by the time of the group’s founding. It intended to make itself the local party’s greatest partner in turning the GOP’s fortunes around, and it focused on recruiting new members from the city’s gay and lesbian community.
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Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights found that its libertarian message worked particularly well with the city’s growing gay, white entrepreneurial class, those who felt excessively burdened by the city’s regulations and taxes on their businesses. They also continued to insist that, if homosexuals’ lives were to improve, then gay and lesbian persons needed to belong to both political parties so that gay rights would become an uncontroversial, bipartisan issue. This logic appealed especially to independents and even some moderate Democrats who thought the Democratic establishment took its gay and lesbian support for granted.
By the early 1980s, Concerned Republicans had more than 250 members, making it the largest GOP club in San Francisco. Around the same time, eight group members won spots on the San Francisco Republican County Central Committee, representing a third of the delegation. Concerned Republicans’ diligent efforts — the group provided countless volunteer hours for the party and usually the most foot soldiers for campaigns — gave it outsized influence with the local GOP. While the statewide party lurched rightward, Concerned Republicans held the San Francisco GOP to a moderate course. On gay rights issues, the group’s presence helped ensure that the local Republican Party took a progressive stance, including collaborating on opposing Proposition 6, a 1978 anti-gay ballot initiative that would have banned gays and lesbians from working in the state’s public school system had it passed.
Yet as quickly as Concerned Republicans rose to influence in San Francisco, the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s almost destroyed the organization. Scores of its members died from the disease; many of those who survived quit the club because of their belief that conservatives within the Republican Party were using fears over the epidemic to ramp up anti-gay efforts. By 1989, the membership of Concerned Republicans had plummeted to 70. Three years later, the group was down to 50.
Although Concerned Republicans was in freefall, gay Republicanism boomed in the 1990s, fueled in part by the launch of the national Log Cabin organization. That growth — in some of the nation’s reddest states like Oklahoma and South Carolina — pushed the gay Republican movement to the right, away from its origins in San Francisco moderation, drawing far more conservative types than the moderate gay men who ran the national headquarters of Log Cabin.
Tensions erupted when the national Log Cabin board narrowly voted against endorsing Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, despite most chapters wanting to do so. Following Trump’s win, most of the never-Trump faction quit Log Cabin while the group cozied up to the Trump administration, despite its anti-LGBTQ actions.
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Perhaps the biggest evidence of Log Cabin’s conservative transformation was that even its San Francisco chapter had supported endorsing Trump in 2016.
Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights under its original name and politics may no longer exist but its early history provides a valuable lesson for San Francisco’s moderate Republicans. Locally, the group found it wielded an outsized power in shaping city politics by helping boost moderate Democratic politicians and backing more centrist economic, housing and law enforcement policies over liberal alternatives. Because of its size and activism, its meetings became a required stop for nearly every Democratic candidate running for office — and it was the first Republican group that Dianne Feinstein met with after she became mayor of San Francisco. By offering itself as a potential supporter, the group helped hold many elected Democrats to the center as the local party — and its voter base — moved more to the left.
The Briones Society might work to do the same today. While its message and muscle are sure to attract some new members to the Republican Party in San Francisco, optimizing the city’s current political climate will likely best benefit its larger policy objectives. Given that Democratic politicians are virtually guaranteed to win every election in the city for the foreseeable future, San Francisco’s moderate Republicans would do well to understand that they’ll likely get a lot more of what they want by working with centrist Democratic allies than in trying to remake their own party.
Neil J. Young is the author of the new book, “Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right.”
40 years ago, gay Republicans shaped San Francisco. How the city’s GOP can do the same today
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31.03.2024
Members of Concerned Republicans for Individual Rights protest against the Briggs Initiative in the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco.
For many, the takeaway of the March 5 primaries was that San Francisco could no longer be considered a progressive city. With voters backing a slew of moderates for the Democratic County Central Committee and ballot measures loosening restrictions on police and screening welfare recipients for drugs, a lot of eyes are on how centrist Democrats will remake the city.
But moderate Democrats aren’t the only ones who have the potential to reshape the city’s politics. Moderate Republicans are also now positioned to do the same, and they already have an established playbook to draw on from a little-known part of their history — as the birthplace of gay Republicanism.
Moderate Republicans took control of the San Francisco Republican County Central Committee earlier this month. A slate of 17 centrist candidates won their elections, supported by a new Republican group called the Briones Society. Founded three years ago, the organization’s platform calls for reducing government, increasing housing and doubling the city’s police force while taking mostly moderate positions on social issues, including LGBTQ rights. The group includes “diversity” among its core values.
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
“America is an idea,” the group declares, “and we welcome all who embrace it — no matter where they come from, whom they love, or how they worship.”
In a city where only 7% of registered voters are Republican, the Briones Society contends that its “center-right” policies and moderate temperament are what the local GOP needs to attract independents, disengaged Republicans and disaffected moderate Democrats.
That was the same........
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