‘Shadow in the Land’. William Dannemeyer’s bizarre gay conspiracy theory.

William Dannemeyer was an extreme Right-wing Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives. His general political activities included opposition to the Americans with Disabilities Act and attempts to block funding for evolution-related exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institute.

But when it came to homosexuals, he excelled himself.

In 1985, for example, he called for people with HIV to be banned from the healthcare industry. He justified his demand with the claim that people with HIV/AIDS were already banned from working in maternity wards – ‘because they emit a spore that has been known to cause birth defects’.

In 1986, he was the only well-known politician to support political nutcase Lyndon LaRouche with his Proposition 64. Had Proposition 64 become law it would have required mandatory testing of various groups, banning students with HIV from schools and colleges and quarantining people with AIDS.

In1989, Dannemeyer published Shadow in the Land, a hysterical and groundless attack on the gay rights movement. In line with so many homophobes, he argued that gay rights was nothing more than a plot to deprive heterosexuals of theirs. Just in case people weren’t convinced, he further argued that gay rights would:

“…plunge our people and, indeed, the entire West into a dark night of the soul that could last for hundreds of years.”

He went on to propose a number of measures for the control of HIV/AIDS. These included, “The Restoration of the Laws Against Sodomy” and “The Rejection of Anti-Discrimination Laws.”

During the debate on the removal of HIV from the list of conditions that can be used to bar someone from entering the USA, Dannemeyer circulated a letter claiming that the American Medical Association opposed removing HIV from the list. In fact, the exact opposite was true.

Clearly he was no friend to the gay community; especially those with HIV/AIDS. Indeed, his views on people with HIV or AIDS can best be demonstrated by his alleged comments to then U.S. Surgeon General C.Everett Koop. In his memoirs, Koop claimed that Dannemeyer had told him that people with HIV should be “wiped from the face of the earth”.