Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Using queer of color critique to analyze interactions of race, class, gender, and sexuality, this chapter examines over a decade of local and statewide homophobic public policy ballot initiatives in Oregon. The Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA), a conservative Christian rights organization, sponsored more than two dozen local and statewide antigay ballot initiatives voted on and passed mostly between 1992 and 1994 through the process of direct democracy, which bypasses elected legislatures. The chapter argues the OCA’s success was due in part to Oregon’s little-known history of racism written into its 1859 state constitution through a Black exclusion law; its reluctant and/or belated ratification of the Nineteenth-century Reconstruction amendments, the Thirteenth abolishing slavery, the Fourteenth granting birthright citizenship to African Americans, the Fifteenth extending voting rights to African American men; and in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan’s influence on education in Oregon. My discussion focuses on the battle over the 1992 ballot initiative known as Measure 9 that would have required Oregon teachers and public schools to recognize homosexuality as “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.” The OCA ballot initiatives called into question the definition of social citizenship for LGBTQ+ music teachers and students, imperiling them personally and professionally—an issue that remains salient in many US schools and communities today.</jats:p>