This essay discusses the 1959 mayoral campaign in San Francisco, which is a good example of how Berube employed history to illuminate contemporary events. In April 1980, CBS television nationally aired Gay Power, Gay Politics, a news special that raised the prospect of homosexuals dominating San Francisco politics and transforming the city into a sexual playground. Berube's response was to tell the story of an earlier era in the city when the specter of homosexual power was used by politicians to inflame public opinion. The historical lesson he hoped to communicate was that efforts at repression might also breed resistance and organization. Berube's piece was published in The Body Politic, based in Toronto, a city that was experiencing its own wave of antigay political repression in the early 1980s.