Anita Bryant was an inspiration. In May 1977, a few weeks before Dade County citizens voted to repeal the “sexual or affectional preference” amendment, State Senator Curtis Peterson from Lakeland, Florida (headquarters of the Florida Citrus Commission, for which Bryant sang her “day-without-orange-juice-is-a-day-without-sunshine” TV commercials), sponsored two Senate bills. One prohibited homosexuals from adopting children; the other outlawed “single-sex marriage.”1 “The problem in Florida,” Senator Peterson declared in his down-home idiom, “has been that homosexuals are surfacing to such an extent that they’re beginning to aggravate the ordinary folks who have a few rights of their own. They’re trying to flaunt it. We’re trying to send a message telling them, ‘We’re tired of you. We wish you’d go back into the closet.’ ”2
The lone dissenting voice on the Senate floor was that of Senator Don Chamberlain, who spoke against Peterson’s adoption bill by comparing the antigay discrimination at its heart to the anti-Jewish discrimination of Nazi Germany: “To kill the human spirit was their first step toward killing the human,” Chamblerlain admonished, and he implored his fellow legislators not to stigmatize, not to deny anyone “the joy of being a family. Vote for love and tolerance and dignity for all human beings,” he exhorted them.3 They answered his impassioned pleas with stony faces. The bill banning homosexuals from adopting children passed 31 to 3. The bill outlawing “single-sex marriage” passed 37 to 0. (Democratic senator Jack Gordon got belly laughs from his colleagues when he observed that the next thing you know, homosexuals will want to change the traditional wedding march song to “Here Comes the Bride in Drag.” Not even Don Chamberlain dared to support so outrageous a notion as marriage equality.)4 Governor Askew signed both bills into law. When Chamberlain ran for reelection in 1980, his opponent reminded voters that he’d voted for the right of homosexuals to adopt. He became a one-term senator.
• • •
Gay activists around the country laid the blame for the reawakening of hostility toward homosexuals squarely on Anita Bryant. But they were at a loss about how to fight back. The continued national boycott of Florida orange juice—“gaycott,” it came to be called—was making some dent in sales, but the Florida Citrus Commission stood by Bryant. A Citrus Commission spokesman admitted that his group had received substantial amounts of mail, “mostly from California,” that threatened an orange juice boycott; but, he insisted, there was no objective evidence that the boycott was working, and the Florida Citrus Commission had no intention of canceling Bryant’s contract.5 “She’s doing a great job for us,” he declared.6
In fact, the commission had reason to worry. A national consumer survey showed that the impact of its advertising program was lower than it had been in years.7 Yet if the commission canceled her contract, its management knew, it would be inundated by protests from the religious right; and the Dade County vote had shown there were more of them than there were activist homosexuals. In November 1977 the Florida Citrus Commission announced not only that it was renewing Anita Bryant’s $100,000 a year contract, but also that it was “affirming our support of Anita Bryant for her courageous leadership on a moral issue.”8
Gay activists also targeted Singer Sewing Machine because Bryant had a contract to shoot a pilot as hostess of a syndicated television variety show, “The Singer Sewing Machine Hour.” Singer was soon bombarded by enough letters of protest from gay activists to cause the vice president Edward Trevorrow to announce that Singer would be looking for another hostess: “We want this to be a pleasant show. We’d like to have as little difficulty as possible in any direction,”9 he told the press. Bryant called a news conference at her Biscayne Bay mansion. Looking tragic and besieged, she bitterly complained to reporters, “The blacklisting of Anita Bryant has begun. Because I dared to speak out for straight and normal America I have had my career threatened.”10 Her followers waged a massive letter-writing campaign, some picketed Singer stores, and one town held a Singer sewing machine bonfire.11
Like the Florida Citrus Commission’s management, Singer’s chief executive officer, Joseph Flavin, anxiously concluded that it made more economic sense to appease the masses on the Right than to worry about a few gay activists. He responded personally to each of the pro-Bryant letter writers, claiming that the Singer board had actually not heard about the controversy until they read of it in the newspapers. “The following day,” Flavin assured Bryant fans, “we contacted Ms. Bryant by telephone and informed her that the decision to cancel her participation in the pilot program had not been cleared with the top management of the company.” Singer was in the midst of negotiating a contract with her, he said, and would be strong in affirming her “right of free speech.”12
Despite Anita Bryant’s post-victory declaration, she modestly told the media that she would not be bringing her campaign to other cities “unless invited by God.”13 The divine call came soon. Richard Angwin, an ambitious thirty-three-year-old fundamentalist preacher at the Temple Baptist Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota, prevailed upon Anita Bryant to help him do in Saint Paul what she’d done in Dade County. The city council of Saint Paul had passed a nondiscrimination ordinance in 1974 that included precisely those four words—“sexual or affectional preference”—that had horrified Bryant into founding Save Our Children. The words had gone unnoticed and unchallenged in Saint Paul since their passage,14 but now Reverend Angwin wanted them removed. Like Bryant, he believed that “homosexuality is a murderous, horrendous, twisted act . . . It is a sin and a powerful, addictive lust,”15 and that “grassroots Americans don’t want to be thrust into contact with immoral people.”16 (Angwin made no mention of the fact that in his youth in Kansas, he had been sentenced to jail for the immorality of car theft.)17
Bryant, with the aid of Brother Bill, advised Reverend Angwin on how to manage a repeal campaign; she also donated $10,000 to get him started. With the seed money, Angwin formed Citizens Alert for Morality—a name as frenzied as “Save Our Children”—whose main propaganda message was modeled on that of the Bryant group: laws that protect homosexuals, who are inveterate child molesters and sinners, endanger and corrupt our children. Through Citizens Alert for Morality, Angwin organized a petition drive in churches; volunteers knocked on doors; they buttonholed people on street corners—even though it was by now the dead of winter and Saint Paul temperatures had dropped below freezing. In a mere three weeks, Angwin had obtained well over the required number of signatures needed to place repeal on the April 1978 ballot.18
Reverend Angwin replicated almost step-by-step the strategy that Save Our Children had developed in Dade County. For the next months, he and his group bombarded Saint Paul with media messages about homosexual child molesters. Billboard ads proclaiming “Preserve the Family!” all but dominated the landscape. A week before the election, Citizens Alert for Morality rented the St. Paul Civic Center Auditorium and staged a massive three-hour prayer rally, advertising Anita Bryant singing and the Reverend Jerry Falwell preaching on the evils of homosexuality.19 By the time the vote was held, on April 25, most citizens of Saint Paul were convinced that homosexuals wore horns and were a dire threat to all that was good in the world.
As in Dade County, Saint Paul turned out in force to vote 2 to 1 to remove the words “sexual or affectional preference” from the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance.20 Richard Angwin, like Anita Bryant, “danced a jig”: “We whopped them,” he gloated. “It’s a warning that you can’t flaunt your perversions.”21
Flush with his success, Reverend Angwin flew immediately to Wichita, Kansas. He would teach the techniques he’d learned from Bryant and Brother Bill to his old friend and fellow Baptist preacher Ron Adrian, the head of Concerned Citizens for Community Standards. Adrian’s group was leading the campaign to strike gay rights from Wichita’s nondiscrimination ordinance.22 Wichita, which had added the four controversial words to the city ordinance only the summer before, had already been well primed by Anita Bryant. She’d visited the city that winter to sing in a revival concert and tell voters that the Wichita homosexual rights amendment was a danger not only in itself but also because it set a terrible precedent: “Next you will have thieves, prostitutes, and people who have relations with Saint Bernards asking for the same rights,” she warned.23 Bryant’s message, bolstered by Angwin and by Reverend Adrian’s Concerned Citizens for Community Standards, met with stunning success: 57,251 Wichita voters went to the polls on May 9; 47,246 of them, a ratio of almost 5 to 1, voted to repeal any reference to gay people from the law protecting minorities from discrimination.
The momentum Bryant had created seemed unstoppable. Two weeks later, voters in Eugene, Oregon, a university town with a liberal reputation despite its share of lumberjacks and born-agains, cast their ballots 13,838 to 7,685 to remove those four controversial words from its nondiscrimination ordinance. While Anita Bryant had little to do directly with the Eugene campaign, the repeal drive would surely not have happened then and there had her homophobic rhetoric not captured headlines everywhere for the previous year and a half.
Before Bryant’s victories, gays and lesbians in cities all over America had been working for passage of nondiscrimination ordinances; but by 1978, it was clear that the times were not propitious. In Cincinnati, a proposed ordinance to extend “human rights” protections to the elderly and the physically handicapped almost failed because it included protections for homosexuals as well. Council members threatened to vote against the entire ordinance unless references to homosexuals were excised.24 They were. But taking no chances that some homosexual zealots might yet find a way to convince the council that homosexuals deserved rights, Protect America’s Children—Anita Bryant’s renamed Miami organization—announced to Cincinnatians that the group “would be glad” to make “anti-homosexual pamphlets available for distribution” in Cincinnati immediately.25
The inchoate movement for gay and lesbian civil rights was on a precipitous downhill slide, and gays were unable to figure out how to apply the brakes. There’d been some valiant efforts in gay communities to fight,26 but there weren’t enough activist gays and lesbians, there wasn’t enough political savvy, and there weren’t enough straight allies to counter the propaganda campaigns that appealed to blind bigotry.
It’s ironic that it was Anita Bryant who pumped vital energy into a renewed battle for gay and lesbian civil rights. She created fervent activists out of those who’d previously been content simply to enjoy their newfound freedoms—which now, they realized, could easily be taken away. She made them fighting mad. They were ready to do what Bob Basker had once hoped in vain Miami gays would do: wage war against an enemy that denied them first-class citizenship. Eric Hoffer famously observed in the 1950s that a mass movement can get along fine without a god, but it won’t get along at all without a devil.27 For gay people all over the country, Anita Bryant became that devil.
In the gay pride parades of 1977 and 1978, Bryant figured prominently. Marchers, carrying placards that displayed her image side by side with images of Hitler, Idi Amin, and Joseph McCarthy, shouted denunciations of her until they were hoarse. As parade sponsors told the New York Times, the parades in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kansas City, Atlanta, and Seattle were far bigger than they’d ever been because of the “spreading resentment caused by the efforts of Anita Bryant.”28 The San Francisco parade attracted two hundred thousand—more people even than had participated in the anti–Vietnam War march of the sixties, which to that date had been San Francisco’s largest demonstration.29
Gay and lesbian fury toward Bryant was raging even higher in San Francisco than in other cities because they’d just witnessed a horrifying result of the hatred she’d provoked. As participants in the 1977 parade marched past the San Francisco City Hall, they bowed their heads before flags flying at half-staff. Mayor George Moscone had ordered the flags to be lowered in memory of Robert Hillsborough, a gardener who tended the lawns and flowers in a playground near city hall.30 The children called him “Mr. Greenjeans.”31 He’d been killed, San Francisco gays believed, because Anita Bryant had “unleashed a bloodbath” through her hate campaign.32 A few days earlier, on a warm evening at the start of summer, the thirty-three-year-old Hillsborough had gone dancing at a disco with his boyfriend Jerry Taylor. The two left the nightclub about midnight and stopped for a snack at a drive-in restaurant. There they were spotted as gays by four young men who taunted them and then followed their car to the Mission District apartment building where Hillsborough lived. Just as Hillsborough and Taylor were about to enter the building, the four men pulled up, jumped from their car yelling “Faggots! Faggots! Faggots!” and attacked them. Nineteen-year-old John Cordova, an auto mechanic, had a fishing knife in his pocket. He pulled it out and began slashing at Hillsborough, screaming, “This is for Anita!” Jerry Taylor broke from the grip of one of the assailants and ran, but Hillsborough was pinned by the other two and then thrown to the ground while Cordova stabbed him fifteen times in the face and chest.
The slain man’s mother, Helen Hillsborough, also knew the name of the devil to blame. The seventy-eight-year-old widow sued Anita Bryant, Bryant’s husband, Bob Green, and Save Our Children33 for $5 million, charging that Bryant had “incited violence and riot” against gay people. “My son’s blood is on Anita Bryant’s hands,” Helen Hillsborough said.34
• • •
It took awhile before the expanding community of gay and lesbian activists discovered the most effective ways to fight. Initial battles were primarily against their devil rather than for their cause: they were set on destroying Anita Bryant’s career. When Bryant was sent by the Florida Citrus Commission to Minneapolis to dedicate a new fruit warehouse, two hundred demonstrators lay in wait for her and staged a picket outside the warehouse.35 Gay people were soon waiting for Anita Bryant everywhere. Three days after the Dade County vote, she performed at a Tidewater Religious Crusade in Norfolk, West Virginia. Five hundred gays and lesbians were scattered among the crusade crowd of two thousand. They sat quietly, as though they were part of the faithful, until Bryant read her favorite antisodomy passage from Leviticus. Then chanting “Two! Four! Six! Eight! Gay is just as good as straight!” they rose as a group, hoisted placards with messages such as “Save Our Children: Defend Lesbian Mothers,” and stormed out as noisily as they could; they joined a picket with four hundred more protestors, some in drag, who were marching outside the arena. Onstage Bryant burst into tears.36
A few days later in New Orleans, she was performing with a Summer Pops Orchestra at the Municipal Auditorium, which bordered the French Quarter. Activists hung huge banners from French Quarter buildings that spelled out in big black block letters: “A DAY WITHOUT RIGHTS IS LIKE A DAY WITHOUT SUNSHINE.” Inside the auditorium, Bryant received a standing ovation for her performance; but outside the auditorium, hundreds of protestors kept vigil with flaming candles in their hands. The following day they rallied in Jackson Square and marched through the French Quarter streets. The police were on hand, videotaping marchers in order to intimidate them. But gays were not in the mood to be intimidated. Frank Kameny, who’d flown in from Washington, DC, told the press, “This is only a preliminary. We intend to stage protests all over the country, wherever she’s performing.”37
And that is what they did. In Atlanta, when Bryant was invited to speak and sing at a Southern Baptist Convention, 1,800 gays picketed.38 In Washington, DC, when she was invited by the National Association of Religious Broadcasters to help launch a campaign to rid TV of sex, violence, and homosexuality, 2,000 gays held a service in a nearby church, accusing Bryant of “perverting the Christian message of love to one of hate.” Then, as Bryant sang hymns to the broadcasters, gays marched in a candlelight protest around the Washington Hilton Hotel.39 The Shriners invited Bryant to Chicago, to star in a Flag Day program, and 2,000 gays were waiting for her there, too.40 In Houston, she was invited to entertain the Texas Bar Convention at the Hyatt Regency. More than 3,000 protestors, organized by the Texas Gay Political Caucus, paraded around the hotel carrying signs comparing her to Hitler.41
When The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality was published, Bryant and Bob Green called a news conference at the New York Hilton to publicize the book, but the hotel management was informed that 5,000 to 10,000 gays were planning to march on the Hilton in protest. Gays had already burned her in effigy in a bonfire big enough to cause the NYPD to rush over and stomp out the flames.42 Claiming fear for her life, Bryant and Green canceled the news conference, dropped all plans to publicize The Anita Bryant Story in New York, and scurried back to Florida.43 “Why don’t they just kill us and get it over with!” an exhausted Bob Green lamented as they hurriedly departed the hotel.44
Activists staged zaps against Bryant, too. Most famously, as she sat at a televised press conference in Des Moines, Iowa, Bob Green at her side, gay activist Thom Higgins ran onto the set and smashed a banana cream pie in her face. The cameras kept rolling. Bryant burst into tears, and then she and her husband bowed their heads and prayed for the assailant, “God forgive him for his deviant lifestyle”—but not before she indulged in a catty quip: “At least it was a fruit pie.”
Gays and lesbians didn’t protest alone. In the fifties, sixties, and through much of the seventies, gay and lesbian activists attracted few straights to their cause. Though the Sexual Revolution made hip, young heterosexuals neutral about homosexuality, homophobia was not their battle, and they usually stayed on the sidelines. But Anita Bryant’s Bible-thumping took away their neutrality. The sexual sanctimoniousness of Bryant and her ilk were a threat to heterosexual freedoms, too, and straight hip culture began reflecting antipathy. A country-rock band, Gravel, produced a 45 record, “(Lord Knows) I Don’t Need Anita,” ridiculing Bryant: “She was Miss Oklahoma, 1958 / Now she’s usin’ God and Country to make everybody straight.” She was mocked, too, by the punk band Dead Kennedys in their song “The Moral Majority”: “God must be dead if you’re alive . . . Pissed at your neighbor? Don’t bother to nag / Pick up your phone and turn in a fag.” The humor magazine National Lampoon spoofed her with a parody of the Charles Atlas muscleman advertisements: “Anita Bryant’s Homo No-Mo Macho-Building Course,” illustrated by a saccharine picture of the singer saying, “Hi, I’m Anita Bryant. And I can cure your homosexuality in just 10 days!”45 She was a regular target of disdain on Saturday Night Live, too, where actress Jane Curtin satirized her as prissy, silly, and clueless.
The protests of gay and lesbian activists and their friends had their desired effect: Bryant’s career was decimated. She recorded a single that referenced her antigay crusade in its title, “There’s Nothing Like the Love Between a Woman and a Man,” but she could get no record company to distribute it. Bob Green was at his wits’ end about his wife’s failing career. Her show business earnings dropped 70 percent in the first months after her Dade County campaign. “Conventions have been totally inhibited from booking us,” Green lamented. “We just want to get back to leading normal lives. This is no fun and games. The homosexuals are haunting us wherever we go.”46
Bryant was reduced to performing almost entirely at revivals, where she was paid only whatever was dropped in the cardboard buckets that were passed around. At evangelist Cecil Todd’s Revival Fire held at the Blossom Athletic Center on the outskirts of San Antonio, she sang hymns and helped preach Reverend Todd’s message of bringing prayer into public schools and keeping homosexual teachers out of them. “The first step toward that goal,” Todd announced to the faithful, who were mostly factory workers and farmhands, “is to help Anita by dropping ten dollars or a hundred dollars into the bucket.”47
Incredibly, Bryant claimed to be astonished by the gay fury that had hurled her from bookings that paid upward of $8,500 a performance to bucket passing at a revival meeting. After her Revival Fire appearance, a New York Times reporter came to interview Bryant as she sat in the Blossom Athletic Center cement-block locker room that smelled of basketball players. In what can only be seen as a psychotic disconnect, Bryant wailed to the reporter, “Nobody had ever said a bad thing about me in my life. It’s hard to understand this viciousness.”48
Her $100,000-a-year gig inviting people to “come to the Florida sunshine tree” came to an end, too. The Florida Citrus Commission had been airing her commercials less and less because it could no longer ignore the fact that the gaycott was having an effect on sales. In addition, the venues that Bob Green once could depend on to publicize Anita Bryant’s work had dried up. “The talk shows won’t take her,” he complained. “We’ve got books to plug, albums to plug, and they won’t take her. The rule is, ‘Yeah, we’ll have Anita Bryant, but [for political balance] a gay must sit next to her.’ ”49
To raise money, she and Green established Anita Bryant Ministries, the purpose of which, they claimed, was to “seek help and change for homosexuals, whose sick values belie the word gay, which they pathetically use to cover their unhappy lives.” Fund-raising letters from Bryant requested that recipients who want her to pursue that goal send their “gift of love to me in the reply envelope I am enclosing.”50 But Anita Bryant Ministries was not a moneymaker. Bryant and Green realized they could no longer afford their twenty-seven-room home. The shock of penury, Bryant’s failing career, the constant emotional strain she was under (reduced often to tears by gay protests)—all of it together overwhelmed the marriage. In 1980 she divorced Green and announced that she was returning to Oklahoma.51 Many of her fundamentalist fans shunned her because their church did not believe in divorce. “Rotten apples have gotten into the American pie,” they complained.52 Gays beat the devil.
But beating the devil is not the same as achieving civil rights. That was a trick gay and lesbian activists had not yet mastered, as the sweeping defeats in Saint Paul, Wichita, and Eugene amply illustrated. Despite their victory over Anita Bryant, the blitzkrieg against gays and lesbians continued. The very liberal city of Seattle and the entire state of California were next.