During the summer of 1969, at the Ansley Mall Mini Cinema in Midtown, Atlanta police raided a screening of Andy Warhol’s film, Lonesome Cowboys. A satirical take on Hollywood westerns, the film features the exploits of a group of effeminate cowboys who flaunt their sexuality and disregard for heterosexual norms. It offered a ripe target for moral crusaders in the city allegedly “Too Busy to Hate.” Yet like the more well-known raid on New York’s Stonewall Inn a few weeks prior, the Lonesome Cowboys raid spurred Atlanta’s LGBTQ+ community to action and ignited the long campaign for gay rights in Georgia.
Cold War Morality and Security
The cold war filled many Americans with anxieties about real and imagined enemies infiltrating the very heart and soul of American society. Difference, in the minds of many, meant un-American. Congressional committees investigated everyone from government employees to Hollywood actors. Neighbors looked with suspicion through window blinds at any odd goings-on across the street.
This suspicion was fostered by those like Senator Joseph McCarthy, who, in February 1950, initiated the Second Red Scare by warning against the “enemies from within.” According to McCarthy, the primary threat to American supremacy and security was a decline in Christian morality, an “apathy to evil.” He called for a “moral uprising” to cleanse American government and society of allegedly dishonest, disloyal, and indecent subversives.
Shortly afterwards, the U.S. State Department, denying it employed communists, announced it had dismissed ninety-one gay employees as “security risks.” Letters from an outraged public flooded government offices and newspaper editorial pages. A sampling of letters sent to McCarthy alone showed that for every one correspondent concerned about “red infiltration,” there were three condemning “sex depravity” among government workers. It was the beginning of what became known as the Lavender Scare.
As the 1950s transitioned into the 1960s, people increasingly bucked against the restrictions of cold war conformity. The struggles of various rights movements led many to believe that the roots of America’s social problems ran much deeper than originally thought. The horrors of the Vietnam War (1964-73), broadcast on television and spurring protest, sowed doubt about the virtue of American ideals. So-called normalcy gave way to rapid political and cultural change, which some met by “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.”
Others resisted these changes, hoping to shore up “law and order” by attacking what they viewed as moral decay. Just as the Lavender Scare made homophobia official government policy, the moralizing association of sexuality with security stigmatized queerness as a threat to public safety.
A Changing Atlanta
Atlanta was no stranger to the push and pull of progress and reaction. Long a center of Black activism, Atlanta’s Black population grew during the 1950s and 1960s, exerting greater influence over city politics. In response, thousands of conservative white Atlantans took flight into the quickly growing suburbs. Meanwhile, Atlanta’s postwar business boom, which purportedly made it “the City Too Busy to Hate,” drew in even more people less inclined to recognize the old order and its traditional mores.
Among the newcomers were queer people who built a burgeoning community centered largely around Midtown. Places like the Tick Tock Grill, Mrs. P’s, and Dupree’s offered safe spaces for people to be gay, temporarily escaping the judgments of the world beyond their walls. And of course, there was the open-air shopping center, Ansley Mall.
Andy Warhol’s parody western, Lonesome Cowboys, had been playing at the Ansley Mall Mini Cinema for three weeks by the time authorities received a complaint about its “obscene” content in early August 1969. Containing nudity, cross-dressing, and homoerotic desire, ads contended that it “may be a bit too much for many people” and was “definitely not for the young-uns!”
Responding to the complaint, police raided the theater during a screening the following night on August 5. Fulton County Solicitor Hinson McAuliffe, acting under the authority of Georgia’s obscenity law passed a year earlier, ordered the raid as part of his righteous war “against these people dealing in obscenity.” Police confiscated the film and arrested the theater manager and projectionist.
But it was clear there was more to the story. Police snapped photos of the shocked moviegoers (about seventy in total), asked probing questions, and took down personal information. The Great Speckled Bird denounced the raid as the latest attack in a “vicious campaign of harassment” against Atlanta’s “gay subculture” that offended “the ‘liberal’ fat cats” of the upscale Ansley Park neighborhood. Authorities confirmed that they photographed the audience to determine if any were “known homosexuals.”
Embodying the conservative reaction to a changing Atlanta, Solicitor McAuliffe professed himself a savior, saying, “I believe that if we don’t keep a good moral community, the time will come when we don’t have a community at all.”
The Fight for Liberation and Pride
According to Abby Drue, one of the harassed moviegoers, “the Lonesome Cowboys raid was the spark that ignited the Atlanta homosexual population.” With their community under attack, queer Atlantans and their allies launched the fight for gay liberation.
Not long after the raid, activists gathered at the New Morning Café near Emory University. The Georgia Gay Liberation Front (GGLF) was born. In addition to registering voters and protesting anti-gay laws, the GGLF set about organizing Atlanta’s first Pride event, which took place in 1971.
Denied a permit, 125 people marched along the sidewalks for Atlanta Gayday. Waving signs that read “Jimmy Carter Uses Hairspray” and chanting, “Two, four, six, eight, gay is twice as good as straight,” the marchers left Sunday churchgoers aghast.
Although the number of people marching down Peachtree Street the next year doubled, many still feared the consequences of public exposure. Some lesbians who were nurses or teachers covered their heads with paper bags, saying “If I Show My Face, I’ll Lose My Job.” The homophobic linkage of sexuality, morality, and public safety carried very real consequences that undermined Pride.
Still, Atlanta continued to change. In 1973, Maynard Jackson was elected Atlanta’s first Black mayor. Fulfilling his promises to gay supporters, Jackson proclaimed June 26, 1976, Gay Pride Day and called for legislation “to eliminate discrimination so that, as myths and stereotypes are shattered, change can come about.”
Conservative Atlantans, on the other hand, continued to resist this change. Several anonymous and wealthy individuals calling themselves Citizens for Decent Atlanta (CDA) sought an injunction against the Pride Day proclamation and took out three-quarter-page ads condemning Mayor Jackson’s official support for “a sexual orientation…against the moral law of the judeo-christian tradition.” Another ad insisted that “perverted sex strikes at the heart of the moral order of our society.”
The CDA’s campaign, according to critics, was not only anti-gay but a covertly racist attack on Atlanta’s new Black leaders, whose opponents could no longer use racial slurs but still found it acceptable to scream “‘pervert’ and ‘queer.’” Tyrone Brooks, a representative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), called the CDA “the same conservative racist businessmen” who had opposed the SCLC and other civil rights organizations. “They’ll come up with something else after this,” Brooks added. Great Speckled Bird correspondents concluded that the CDA was “trying to regain political control of the city by pitting black and gay and poor white people against each other.” Under pressure, Mayor Jackson slightly stepped back a year later, issuing a similar proclamation for a more watered-down “Civil Liberties Day.”
It was neither the first nor the last challenge faced by queer Atlantans, who would face regular moral panics and reactionary repression over the next decades. The struggle for gay liberation and pride was and remains hard-fought. Nevertheless, Atlanta now stands as an LGBTQ+ haven while Atlanta Pride ranks among the largest pride festivals in the United States. And it was a religiously moralizing raid on a movie theater that helped launch the fight that, ironically, made Atlanta the gay capital of the South.
