"gay agenda"

[Geoffrey Nunberg]

"Liberal agenda" and "conservative agenda" are quite common, and date
back to the sixties. The difference is that the phrase "gay agenda"
implies a secret program, i.e. a hidden agenda -- as does the phrase
"having an agenda." (That's what was troubling about Scalia's use of
the term, I think -- he referred to "the agenda promoted by some
homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium
that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct." The idea
here, as best I can tell, is that gay efforts to remove the stigma
attached to homosexuality are somehow surreptitious or oblique rather
than up-front.)

Safire did a good column on this phrase on September 16, 1984. He
reckoned "hidden agenda," "private agenda," and "secret agenda" as
dating from the early 1980's. I haven't been able to determine when
"agenda" was first used in this sense all by itself, or when "having
an agenda" acquired a sense of having a secret program.

I've  wondered whether this usage has anything to do with the
introduction of "agenda" as a name for a datebook, a usage that I
assume was borrowed from French or Italian. The earliest cite I've
found for this is from a Washington Post article on "Date Books of
the Rich and Famous" of 12/31/1984: "Film producer John O'Brien
records addresses and phone numbers with stick-on tabs in 'my
traveling desk,' as he calls his refillable Italian leather-bound
agenda." But my guess is that that will be easy to antedate. (This
sense is not recorded by the OED, the AHD, or MW, by the way.)

Geoff Nunberg




>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Mark A Mandel <mam at THEWORLD.COM>
>Subject:      Re: "gay agenda"
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>On Sun, 6 Jul 2003, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>
>         [...]
>
>#        It's only homosexuals who are routinely referred to as having
>#an "agenda".  If I talked about the women's agenda, the business
>#agenda, the Black agenda, the Southern agenda, the Jewish agenda, the
>#fundamentalist agenda, the urban agenda, and the like, you'd have some
>#idea what sort of thing I was referring to in each case, but you'd
>#probably feel uncomfortable with the suggestion that there's an
>#ominous monolith of activism at work.
>
>ISTM that the first sentence in this paragraph assumes, or requires, a
>modifier such as "in the mainstream press". Though I can't provide
>citations, I feel fairly sure that I've seen "the Jewish agenda" (or
>"the Zionist agenda", in an attempt to cover against charges of
>antisemitism) in quotations from various media I don't try or want to
>read; and I wouldn't be surprised to find "the fundamentalist agenda" in
>other media whose leanings I find less personally objectionable.
>Similarly (to "Jewish") for "Black" and "women's", although the latter
>may be more often fulminated against as "the feminist agenda".
>
>OK, who'll run the obvious Google searches?
>
>-- Mark A. Mandel