Chasing the Rainbow Coalition
The 1980s were politically bleak. Ronald Reagan won two landslide elections, and the people-powered movements of the 1970s and 1980s had slowed down to survival mode. For LGBTQ+ Americans, the need to survive extended beyond metaphor and into a literal fight against the AIDS epidemic.
While thousands of people, mostly gay men, were dying from the horrific effects of a frightening new virus, the President remained mute, and the mainstream press largely relegated the issue to a back page novelty item, presenting it as relevant only to a neglected—and often despised—sexual minority.
The Republican Party mocked and derided gay and transgender people throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Rush Limbaugh gave an update on the AIDS death toll while playing songs like “Kiss Him Goodbye” for homophobic amusement. His supposedly enlightened counterpart, William F. Buckley, proposed that the federal government tattoo HIV-positive men with their disease status on their buttocks.
By comparison, the Democratic Party seemed compassionate and hospitable. At the 1980 Democratic National Convention, it endorsed a “homosexual rights” platform. That same year, Senator Edward Kennedy, of Massachusetts, during his primary challenge to President Jimmy Carter, was the first presidential candidate to attend a gay rights fundraiser. Yet these overtures were exceptions for a party that courted LGBTQ+ votes and volunteers, but shied away from displays of public acceptance. “We’re usually unmentionable,” David Taylor, then president of Manhattan’s Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats, said of the politics at the time.
It would take a crusading Baptist minister, who had already acquired a reputation as a civil rights hero, to crack open the complacency and reveal new possibilities.
Jesse Jackson, after working as an aide to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., leading a movement against economic apartheid in Chicago and beyond, and negotiating the 1983 release of hostage Navy Lieutenant Robert Goodman from Syria, announced his run for the presidency in the 1984 Democratic primary. He promised to inject electoral politics with the defiant, history-making vitality of the civil rights movement. Central to his mission was the construction of a “rainbow coalition”—a politics of measuring, in his words, “human rights by one yardstick.” “We must leave the racial battleground, and come to economic common ground, and moral higher ground.”
Leading more of a revival of the revolutionary spirit than a mere political campaign, Jackson spoke with passion to Black audiences, Native Americans on their own reservations, Latinx people while using a Spanish translator, Asian immigrants, and white family farmers in Missouri and Iowa.
His campaign was also the first to make LGBTQ+ rights central to its platform, and the first to build an infrastructure of openly gay staffers and volunteers. “We were no longer invisible. We weren’t pushed to the side, and told to keep quiet,” Allen Roskoff said during an interview when I asked about the role of gay and transgender Americans in the Jackson campaign. Roskoff was the director of Gays and Lesbians for Jesse Jackson in New York.
“Gays and lesbians” became significant as a phrase to the Jackson campaign, because during his thunderous 1984 address to the Democratic Convention, he became the first speaker to use the words “lesbians” and “gays” during a convention speech in American history.
Jackson’s LGBTQ+ advocacy went far beyond rhetoric. He included in every policy address calls for ending employment discrimination, increased funding for AIDS research and relief, and lifting the ban on opening gay people serving in the military. “I slept in hospices with gay men dying of AIDS in Illinois and Texas,” Jackson told me when I interviewed him for my book, I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters.
“It was dismissed,” Jackson said of the media reaction to his acts of solidarity with men experiencing the two-tiered assault of physical deterioration and political ostracization. Legacy media was more broadly indifferent to Jackson’s alliance with the gay rights movement, even when he co-led the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which preceded his second bid for the presidency in 1988.
A 1984 New York Times profile of the Jackson campaign, spotlighting his effort to build a rainbow coalition, did not even mention LGBTQ+ people, or the inclusion of them in his nationwide effort. Vic Basile, then director of the Human Rights Campaign, wrote a letter to the editor, castigating the so-called paper of record for omitting the 23 million “gay and lesbian Americans” to whom Jackson was giving historic representation.
Jackson’s groundbreaking and courageous support for LGBTQ+ rights and opportunities is unknown to most Americans. It is a story with instructive application to America’s current crisis of reactionary assault on LGBTQ+ rights, especially in an election year when the Republican ticket of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance routinely ridicule and slander gay and transgender people.
“His advocacy of LGBTQ+ rights was 100 percent in line with his advocacy of people for color and for women,” Roskoff says during our conversation. “His achievements and reputation in the civil rights movement meant a big win for the LGBTQ+ community, having him as one of our staunchest allies. He wasn’t the first presidential candidate to support LGBTQ+ people, but he was the first to make us a mainstay in his candidacy, and the first to make supporting us a pivotal civil rights issue.”
Delmarie Cobb, Jackson’s press secretary for the 1988 campaign, explained to me that Jackson’s bedrock philosophy, providing the foundation for his pioneer position on LGBTQ+ rights, was profound in its simplicity: “He said, time and time again, ‘you can’t be for the freedom of one group of people, and then for the oppression of another.’ ”
Jackson not only championed LGBTQ+ rights in many speeches he gave as a candidate in 1984 and 1988. He also spoke directly to gay advocacy groups, marched alongside them in 1987, and gave interviews to gay newspapers.
“I put together a rally in front of an LGBTQ+ center in New York in 1988,” Roskoff says. “We had a flatbed truck taking up most of the street. There were thousands of people there. It was evening. We had members of Congress there. [Future New York City Mayor] David Dinkins was there, as were others who were supporting Jesse. He gave a speech there that was unbelievable. He gave out candles, and asked us all to light the candles. Then, he asked people with AIDS to join him on the truck. He was not only dynamic and riveting. He was warm.”
Even with thousands of supporters, including elected officials and the soon-to-be elected mayor of New York City, Jackson was on an island in national politics. The Republican Party was viciously hostile to gay rights, while other candidates for President were silent. As The Christian Science Monitor reported in 1987, “Candidates avoid [the] issue of homosexual rights. Among those seeking the presidency, only Jesse Jackson has openly supported civil rights demands of gays and lesbians.”
When Jackson declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination in 1984, most of the mainstream press expected him to amount to no more than an asterisk in the race. He won nearly 20 percent of the vote. In 1988, he finished second to Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, earning seven million votes, and in the words of election expert, Steve Kornacki, becoming a “pre-eminent force in Democratic politics.”
“Some people walk a path. Our campaign blazed a trail,” Jackson once said to me. One lasting influence of his campaign was simply the enlargement of the Democratic Party, shifting its demographics and ideology into a more fully realized representation of America’s vast constituencies. Six million new voters registered with the Democratic Party as a result of Jackson’s two bids for the presidency. As a candidate, he became a progressive docent for Black, Latinx, Asian, student, and LGBTQ+ voters looking to make a home in the contested territory of democracy.
The “rainbow coalition” is now definitional and foundational to the Democratic Party. Any candidate hoping to secure national office must follow the Jackson template. It is a lesson not lost on one of the Jackson campaign’s supporters in the 1980s—a young woman with a Jamaican father and Indian mother who would later become the first woman Vice President of the United States by the name of Kamala Harris. “He defined the rainbow,” Harris said when speaking at a retirement ceremony for Jackson in 2023. “[It is] a coalition to push the values of democracy and liberty and equality and justice not from the top down, but from the bottom up and the outside in.”
The presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris is one of the many testaments to the triumph of rainbow coalition politics.
Jackson also influenced the Democratic Party in more immediately tangible ways in the 1980s. “He had a lot of leverage with the DNC,” Cobb tells me, recalling how the Democratic Party was frightened by Jackson’s popularity, hoping that he would not mount a third-party run or refuse to endorse Dukakis.
“Working with the DNC, he insisted that support for LGBTQ+ rights was part of the official platform,” she adds. In 1988, the official platform listed “sexual orientation” along with race, religion, and gender as protected identity characteristics in a statement demanding equal access to government services, housing, health care, education, and employment. It also declared the HIV/AIDS crisis a “public health emergency.”
In 1992, the Democratic Party platform explicitly called for “civil rights protection for gay men and lesbians.” “You plant trees,” Jackson once told me of his legacy, “and hope that someone else can sit underneath them and enjoy the shade.”
One beneficiary of Jackson’s work is Ken Mejia-Beal, who became the first out LGBTQ+ Democratic Party chair in Illinois when he was elected chair of the DuPage County Democratic Party in 2021. He is currently a DNC Harris delegate, as well as the fundraising chair of Youth Outlook, an organization committed to helping LGBTQ+ youth and their parents.
Mejia-Beal says that Jackson’s leadership corrected the “misconception that you couldn’t exist as a member of the LGBTQ+ community and be a Christian. He showed that you didn’t have to choose between being a member of the Black community and LGBTQ+ community.”
Following Jackson’s example, says Mejia-Beal, enabled “men like me to walk into any room with our heads held high.” He attributes his ability to withstand racist and homophobic attacks by learning from Jackson’s courage and resilience, and through the internalization of Jackson’s “I am somebody” mantra of affirmation: “I owe my success and sanity to Reverend Jackson.”
The autocratic personality cult surrounding Trump is a brutal backlash to the success of the rainbow coalition. Central to its authoritarian agenda is demagoguery and fearmongering surrounding rights and opportunities for trans youth. Harris’s record provides a powerful counterpunch. As the National Center for Lesbian Rights Legal Director Shannon Minter recently said of Harris, “She’s not just an ally—she’s a longtime, steadfast, committed, and well-informed ally.”
Democrats laboring to preserve democracy, and protect the people it serves, would do well to adopt Jackson’s words as instruction and guidance. At the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, he articulated a mission statement for the politics of democratic victory:
“America is a quilt of many patches, different shapes and sizes . . . but everybody fits, everybody counts, everybody must have equal protections. We are gathered to say we insist on everyone’s right to protection under the law, for civil rights, for women’s rights, for the rights of sexual preference . . . . Let’s not dwell on distinctions. Let’s focus on the ties that bind . . . . If we must fight, let’s fight together.”