Timeline is a regular feature in each issue looking back to events and milestones that have helped us evolve into the community we are today.

Early July, 1990

A bigoted Republican businessman received help from the nephew of President Bush to unseat Congressman Gerry Studds, a homosexual. John Bryan, a wealthy Republican businessman from Cape Cod, had undertaken what he referred to as his “crusade” to stress “family values.” Part of this crusade included launching political advertisements against Studds. Studds told the media that Bryan’s propaganda was “so inflammatory it would embarrass me to repeat them for you.”

The Boston Globe had predicted that the battle between Bryan and Studds would be an ugly one, despite the fact that Bryan promised not to “get into the nitty-gritty of homosexuality.” The Cape Cod Times had asked Bryan whether political campaigns shouldn’t be about philosophical differences between honorable people. Bryan’s reply to the question was that he “would not go so far” as to call Studds “honorable.”

One of Bryan’s campaign committee members commented that only a “family man” is morally suited to serve in Congress. Another spokesman representing Bryan was quoted as saying, regarding Studds being a homosexual,  “this kind of permissiveness is making me sick.” Not surprisingly, Bryan received financial campaign support from the nephew of President George W. Bush. Bush’s nephew, who had recently moved into the Tenth Congressional District of Massachusetts, began a national effort to support Bryan with fundraising appeals claiming that “if we are concerned about the family in America, Gerry Studds is standing firmly in the way of our making any progress to strengthen it.” The Bush effort included text which read: “1990 will not be the year of the gay Congressman in Massachusetts.”

Studds responded to the slanderous comments made at him by saying, “Attacks on personal integrity are not new in politics, but these are the particularly nasty lessons derived from the last presidential election...the strategy of calculated distortion and homophobic crusades may sometimes work. But it is wrong...it insults already cynical voters by muddying public discussion. And it insults gay men, lesbians and all people of good will.”