In the 70s, Gay Power was rapidly gaining ground. The religious right coalesced to put a stop to this (and to birth control). In 1977, Dade County passed an gay anti-discrimination act, and Christian singer Anita Bryant launched the Save Our Children campaign.

What Anita Bryant and her new Religious Right cronies decided was to use the pre-existing conflation of homosexuality with pedophilia in order to whip up a moral panic that would push for repeal of the Dade law & others like it by claiming gays were "recruiting."

Anita Bryant, it should be mentioned, was brand ambassador for Florida Citrus (big orange juice, basically), and used her platform to go in front of the press and say outrageous things about gays and their "threat" to children.

Anita quite literally wanted to ban all gay people from existing, and she was quite effective by bringing in this supposed threat to children. While liberals might have been fine with Bob at work with the limp wrist, they didn't want little Jimmy at home getting the wrong ideas.

(This happens at the same time that Janice Raymond writes The Transsexual Empire, in which she calls for transsexuality to be "morally mandated out of existance," by the way.)

Anita's campaign won their initial fight—the Dade County anti-discrimination ordinance was repealed 69 to 31 percent. But it also caused Gay Liberation to fight back. Gays, lesbians, and the rest of us organized mass demonstrations, attended by a surprising number of str8 allies.

Gays weren't going to take it from the Orange Juice lady anymore! Famously, and extremely satisfyingly, Anita got pied in the face by one activist while delivering one of her awful homophobic speeches.

But though Anita Bryant eventually lost all popular credibility, the seeds she planted continued to grow. The 80s were consumed with sex panics that overtly or covertly revolved around the "homosexuals are recruiting our children" ideology. The Satanic Panic itself began this way

In the UK, this wave of moral conservatism eventually culmination in Section 28: legislation introduced to ban all public bodies from talking positively about homosexuality. It was brought in bc one school had a copy of a children's book with gay parents.

Through the 80s, there was a concerted effort to portray adult LGBT people as sexual predators intent on corrupting children & youth. Unsurprisingly this homophobic narrative still has a big influence including on the attitudes of young LGBT adults re: today's 'age gap discourse'

This "Save Our Children" homophobia is now today's "Save Our Children" transphobia, as both the US and the UK are caught up in a near-identical moral panic over "the transgender craze seducing our daughters." It is an unbroken line of discourse from Anita Bryant to Shrier.