Episode 24: LIVE SHOW Anita Bryant with Sarah Marshall of You’re Wrong About

Hi everyone, I think we're going to get started.

Welcome and hello.

So this is a kind of a joint live recording of In Bed with the Right and You're Wrong About.

So think about Inbed with the Right, we've never done this before.

So for instance, the fact that we would not be facing each other on a Zoom like is only starting to sink in right now.

So luckily we have with us Sarah Marshall who is an old hand at these and that's very exciting.

So thank you Sarah for being here and for joining us to talk about Anita Bryant.

Thank you for having me here.

It's a,

what a beautiful day to talk about a terrible time in history.

So, you know, I am excited to see like where our sort of Venn diagram of podcasts kind of meets because right, like,

I think we sort of started with the idea that like, right, like, Anita Bryant is important for right-wing politics, so our beat, but is she also an unfairly maligned woman?

And like, I feel like, spoiler alert, maybe not.

So, like, semi-fairly maligned, I think is what we're going to come down on, I wonder.

I think the tricky part, especially in 20th century or any American history, let's be honest, is like finding a woman who's correctly maligned.

Just the right amount, right?

Because sometimes you'll find a woman who indeed has done horrible things, but then she's maligned for like what she wore at the time.

You're like, well, that's not,

like, you got where you needed to go, but not correctly.

But I feel like with Anita Bryant, we really have this like rise and fall, and her evil seems to have been matched proportionally to her like public

humiliation, right?

Her cancellation, dare I say.

I feel like we've found the symmetry.

We found the one correctly maligned woman.

Yeah.

She's perfect for this meeting of the podcast.

So in terms of how today is going to go, we'll hit record.

Well, we're recording now, but we'll sort of start recording in a formal way and then just launch into the episode.

We'll have some slides for you guys to see, but we'll be referring to them like only a little bit because like people can't see them.

And then also we have plenty of time.

So if you want to just come up and talk afterwards and give us your Anita Bryan stories, that's fine too.

So

we'd love to continue the conversation, but for now, I think we're just going to record it as though we were zooming because it's the only thing I know how to do.

So I don't know.

And I have no idea if this is going to actually play our theme music, but I thought it'd be cool to see if it does.

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.

So Adrian, I don't know if you noticed, but today we are joined by a very special guest, the one and only Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About Sarah.

Welcome.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yes.

It's going on record.

Make yourself sound bigger.

People need to know that I am loved.

And

if you don't laugh, it just sounds like I'm admitting my own insecurities instead of making a joke.

And then, you know, it gets complicated, which is where we want to be.

And yeah, I'm so happy that you had me here to talk about

a woman I feel like we remain in bed with, whether we know it or not.

You know,

Adrian and I have never recorded in front of a live audience, as he mentioned earlier.

We're usually doing this like from our respective living rooms.

So it's also like I am so aware of being like perceived, as they say, because usually it just feels like I'm talking to Adrian.

and like he and I are you know shooting this shit together and now we have to like deal with the fact that this is like oh my god these are public these conversations that we have but you're very used to this I get I guess, yeah, it's

and I love getting to do live events and getting to see human faces because it is, I think there's something,

especially in the last few years, it feels like podcasting or any kind of content creation, which whether we like it or not is what we're doing, is

something that we all have to do with some kind of ability to extrapolate the fact that there are real people listening, that it feels so intellectual when you're in your living room or in your closet or in your bedroom like I am.

And

it does, I don't know, it feels like in this moment, like everybody is engaged in the game of having to

teach their empathy to catch up with a world that's like bigger than we're evolved to deal with.

And so it's, I don't know, I think it can't be anything but surreal, but here we are, they're real people.

Real people.

And maybe we have an object lesson in the fact that other human beings are real.

And the figure that we're talking today about today.

Yeah.

Unfortunately.

miss anita bryant so anita bryant is a figure who's on adrianize radar because we host in bed with the right which is a clayman centers podcast about uh conservative understandings of sex gender and sexuality and she is kind of a bastion of mid-century conservatism, which is one of the reasons we wanted to have Sarah Marshall, one of our preeminent podcast historians of the 20th century and beyond, to come and tell us a a little bit.

I'm flexing a Diet Coke as if it is a microphone.

But like, who is this woman?

Adrian, can you tell us about Anita Bryant?

Yeah, so basic dates.

Anita Bryant was born in Barnesdale, Oklahoma in 1940.

And she hasn't died yet.

She's alive.

Yeah, we had an early design for the poster for this that kind of made it sound like Anita Bryant was going to be here.

And I was like, we can't have that.

I was like, this is, so that's a very different event, which, I mean, mean, like, could be cool too, right?

Like, she comes in and there's a pie sitting there, and he's like, oh, hell no.

But no, that's not what, you know, but no, she's alive.

But I think, sort of a little past her prime at this point, I would say it's fair to say, was Miss Oklahoma in 1958.

I think did Miss America in like the 60s.

We all did that.

It doesn't matter.

It's true, it's true, it's true.

And then I had a couple of top 20 hits.

Yeah, she was a singer

and sort of like

a D-list celebrity.

Like we were talking earlier and we were like, who's like her fame level like comparable to now?

And we were kind of talking about like housewives.

Yeah.

Okay, I think in a way she's like the Kevin Sorbo of this time.

Remember Kevin Sorbo?

He's like, I grew up watching Kevin Sorbo.

He was like, he was a Hercules in like a very low-budget TV show and he would occasionally show up on Xena or something like that.

Because they were like, Xena's not gay.

she's friends with Kevin Sorbo.

And then, so he was like this kind of, yeah, like V-list, you know, kids' afternoon rerun TV star.

And then he got big into fundamentalism and was in all the God's Not Dead movies.

Or I guess maybe it's the first one, because didn't he die?

But it's the thing of like, you kind of...

You don't flop exactly, but you just don't prove super memorable in the mainstream.

And then you adopt an extremist position, and then you suddenly get a big bounce out of that.

Yeah, so people sort of were like, oh, she's the kind of famous where you're like, I know her face.

What is her name?

She's been around a long time.

I kind of trust her.

And mostly you'd know her from this.

Come to the Florida Sunshine Tree.

Sunshine Tree at Walt Disney World.

And remember, breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.

You'd know her from

as an orange juice pitch person.

Yeah.

I think citrus more generally, but I think especially.

For the Florida Citrus Commission.

Yeah.

As you can see, kind of a cursed position.

You don't really want to endorse

orange juice.

Followed up by OJ.

So this is, you know, like, clearly they have unerring taste.

And like,

who next, you know.

This is Betrayal Hill where I grew up, and this is tree sweet.

The orange juice I grew up on, it's rich in natural energy.

And the kids, they like to taste the tree sweet because it's always naturally sweet.

As sweet as an orange right from the tree, right?

Yes, sir.

Well, and this is, this is a, I think OJ is endorsing, I'm such a, I'm obsessed with details.

OJ is inducing a brand, so we have to give the Florida Citrus Commission credit for that.

But

I love the copy, Adrian.

I wonder if that's too tiny for you to read in that ad, but it's like the framing of,

this is why academia never leaves you.

I'm like, the framing of feminine virtue as an aspect of orange juice is undeniable.

Wait, which paper am I reading?

Oh, just the top, that top paragraph.

Can you see?

I can't.

Tree Sweet Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice is never bitter, always naturally sweet.

Because Tree Sweet won't pick their oranges until they're normally ripe and sweet.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, no, that's OJs.

That one's.

I don't know what the subtext is of that one yet.

Yeah, I was going to say, like, I mean, given, I don't know, like, there's a kind of creepy masculinity to it, but I was like, no, but.

Yeah, look at that one.

Very hard to

make out.

I'm going to do it.

Okay.

This is all live, ladies and gentlemen.

Isn't it nice?

There are so many ways to buy 100%

pure orange juice from Florida.

Pure and innocent.

These are going to be words that you're going to hear a lot from Anita Bryan.

It's also...

When we started planning this, you guys were like, we're probably not going to talk about the orange juice part.

And I was like, oh, I really think we will.

Oh, yeah.

Because one of the slogans in the Anita Bryan era, I'm not going to have this word perfect, but was basically, a day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.

Which no it isn't.

What if you're diabetic?

Here's the thing.

I did not learn until I was researching for this show that that phrase had not originally been about lesbians.

I only know it as.

A day without lesbians is like a day without sunshine, which to me makes perfect sense.

That's how else would the plants grow.

Exactly.

And I understood it as like a fun gay pride slogan from the early 80s.

And I had no idea until today that they were telling Anita Bryant where she could go.

So, you know, you too will learn so much in this afternoon.

It's so beautiful.

I also want to briefly recognize this, like, you know, OJ is hawking, as you say, a specific brand.

I love the...

I love the fact that she's just like citrus, right?

Like the way like people were spokespeople for like entire

like like reagan well regan a g so i guess it was like as if he was the spokesperson for appliances of

things in the world like you know

and i mean she was just mid-century as fuck i guess is what we're saying here yeah but she made a really good living off of this orange juice endorsement it was a florida citrus growers association i think uh so it was like an industry lobby that hired her to be their spokesperson just promoting the concept of orange juice and she got $100,000 a year

in 1970s money, so adjusted for inflation.

This is a good living.

That's bankrobbery by the simulation money.

Liberation Army kind of money.

Wow, that is crazy.

Yours is more evocative.

Isn't it also the like other slogan they used I read was like orange juice, it's not just for breakfast or something like that.

Orange juice for Florida.

Remember, it isn't just for breakfast anymore.

Feels like they're like, all right, we've got breakfast covered up, but we need to increase, like people need to drink more orange juice

than they think they can stand.

Yeah.

But in a very families-value way, because that's the other thing.

Like, she was already known sort of as like an early kind of Christian morals crusader, right?

So there is a,

these are two of her books, which the cover is just like a trip, I think.

I think that one is her and her husband.

I really miss this kind of cover design.

Like, this is the kind of, like, these books are out there and they're like wedging open a window at grandma's house somewhere.

Yeah.

We should mention that the reason, so for people who can't see this at home, the two titles are Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, which is a reference to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which she sort of habitually seemed to sing at public events.

All the time.

All the time.

It's the huge singer of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

It's like the patriotic song.

It's like, Mine Have Seen the Glory.

The coming of the Lord.

He has trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stormed.

That's right.

And you know, it's truth that is marching on, basically.

Yeah, isn't that, it's weird to think of, like, like, if you could have a signature song.

What would it be?

It wouldn't be that.

Yeah, she was singing this, like, peppy,

really explicitly Christian song.

And like, I don't know why or how mid-century entertainment careers worked out this way, but she got paid to sing this one song and only this one song in public over and over and over again.

It was not her song.

It was like an old standard.

Yeah.

1862 or something like that.

Right, yeah.

The Civil War, which is the last time people knew what any of those lyrics meant.

Yeah, and I think she did that song at Johnson's funeral.

She did it at the Super Bowl.

Which, like, what kind of a mood is that for your Super Bowl?

But she was a singer.

She was kind of like a D-list

celebrity hawking orange juice, but she was also always really explicitly Christian.

This is something that was a feature of her career the whole time.

She's very into Jesus.

You don't have that kind of a face on your book cover and not be advertising Jesus in some way, right?

She's like looking just beyond the frame.

Yeah, like Jesus.

She's just off frame, exactly.

And she was kind of like an anti-vice crusader even before, right?

Like I learned when I was researching this that apparently at some point at a concert, I guess in Florida, Jim Morrison of the Doors got naked as he as he did.

It was kind of habitual for Jim Morrison.

And Anita Bryant got so outraged that she held a rally for decency like against Jim Morrison's penis, like specifically.

So she was already kind of on

this moral crusader beat already by the mid-70s.

It's like an established part of her career.

It makes me think of the Simpsons joke about Principal Skinner getting shot by his own troops in Vietnam because he was telling Joey Heatherton to put on some pants.

Like she's just like, before she gets political, she's just vigilantly against fun, which seems like a good place for people to stay.

At the same time, she's clearly networked kind of in what will become the Christian right, even though that isn't really yet a thing right like and the other thing that like is like very very funny if you look at her like collected works which we did which like are voluminous it's almost all like another attempt at autobiography like my eyes have seen the the glory is like her autobiography like at like age of like 29 or 30 and then bless this house is a you know it comes with at the bottom it says here with a family photo album and a beautiful prayer to bless your own home specially written by Billy Graham right so like on the one hand like really sort of tied into the the Christian right but on the other hand like kind of an inveterate narrator of her own story like every two years like checking in with Anita Bryan like what what what's my life been like now right like the the like

the own her own family her own biography is a big part of this it is like if it I feel like we act like we're in this brave new world with influencer culture and yet if you look back at you know like

the George and Gracie Allen show in the 50s when they would suddenly stop everything to talk about Carnation milk for three minutes, or, you know, Reagan working for GE kind of after he was naming names and before he was president as examples of this, it's like there's, for as long as there's been corporations, there's been a need for them, or lobbies in this case, there's been a need for them to present some kind of a public face.

And so it feels, I don't know, I feel like the way we live today probably makes more sense if we can place it on a a continuum.

And I wonder, I feel like the question of authorship with Anita Bryant is really interesting too, because it feels like to some extent she was kind of confected out of the thoughts of men.

Yeah.

This is something that you are gonna, or we, we together are gonna see when we get to her anti-gay campaign is that there was this kind of collective of like really gender conservative, far-right Christian media figures and like intellectuals and politicians who very consciously decided that Anita Bryant was going to be the face of a campaign that they were orchestrating, right?

So she was a spokesperson, not just for orange juice, but really for like Christian homophobia.

And she was made that way in a very conscious process.

For pure homophobia.

That might be a good moment to segue into what the state of like gender politics was in the mid-70s, because it's kind of

an interesting moment right because we're you know Nita Bryant's homophobia comes in at this place in the gay rights movement that's kind of like an in-between place right so

she emerges into this role in 1977 which is it's like January 1977 is a Miami referendum which we will explain I promise

but it's like seven eight years after Stonewall and there has been there had been a lot of progress right in those few years right and the activists who had been really active in the post-Stonewall era felt that their movement was sort of like losing steam a little bit and it's also before the AIDS crisis and before the sort of weaponization of HIV and its stigma as like a engine of homophobia right so you're in this black flash moment sorry can I can I ask a question too which is to what extent because I would like to believe in my utopian little way that women's lib helped gay liberation along.

But I also wonder

if we can even say that based on all of the, you know, Betty Friedan and the Lavender Menace and the kind of, you know, fight for respectability among women's libbers at the time.

Yeah, I mean, what you see in this era is that the...

homophobic and anti-feminist forces definitely saw them as kind of one movement, even if they didn't see themselves.

The same way that the right believes today that everyone in the left agrees on everything

and we're very organized and we never infight at all.

It's very charming that they think that.

Exactly.

So when

Anita Bryant begins her anti-gay campaign, it's actually the same year that, is anybody familiar with this like odious little figure named Phyllis Schlafly?

Yeah, a couple hands are going up, some knowing nods.

So 1977, the year that Anita launches her anti-gay crusade, had also been declared by the UN as like, quote-unquote, the year of the woman.

I love how we keep declaring a year of the woman.

It's like 1984, 1992, probably another one.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It's the next time we're going to get it.

Eighth times the charm.

But there were all these, there was a big national conference in Houston, the national conference of the year of the woman.

And in the lead up to that conference, there were a whole bunch of state conferences.

And the feminists were really trying to get all of of these state conferences to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment or the ERA which was a constitutional amendment that was so close to being ratified I'm still so mad

that would have enshrined women's equality into the Constitution

and Phyllis Schlafly

had really organized this national opposition to send Christian conservatives to all of these different women's conventions across all these 50 states.

There's a great Marjorie Sproul book about this called Divided We Stand that everybody should read.

And they were just kind of being really vulgar and harassing.

Like guys would like seize the microphone at these women's conferences and like scream about their penises.

It was like we think that our politics have gotten more violent, more vulgar, more hateful.

And a study of gender politics in the 1970s will disabuse.

you have that, right?

And Phyllis Schlafly had managed to do that because she had done the impossible, which is unite different kinds of Christians who had previously hated each other.

Like, I think now, from our vantage point, we're used to thinking of like the Christian right as this sort of monolithic entity that is like very well funded and they've got a lot of lawyers and senators, et cetera.

And at the time, what there was, in fact, was a whole bunch of different Christian denominations that didn't really trust each other.

The evangelicals seemed really creepy to the mainline Protestants.

The Catholics didn't want to hang out with with the Protestants.

Nobody trusted the Mormons.

And what Phyllis Schlafly did and what the specter of the gay rights and feminist movements did was unite all these people together because they had a common enemy.

And that's kind of where we are

at this moment in Miami.

Do you guys want to tell us about Miami?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

one thing we should probably talk about,

like, the flashpoint in Miami becomes teachers, gay teachers.

It can happen again.

Yeah, exactly.

It's this perfect neuralgic point.

So post-war conservatism had really fixated on public schools as a site where, well, parents kind of give up a certain measure of control over their kids and are taught things that mom and dad may not believe.

There's a great book by Michelle Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism, about basically Los Angeles that basically pioneered this kind of running for school board and saying a bunch of crazy shit and then like, you know,

getting things removed from the library kind of thing that we have now luckily put behind us.

So like, you know, we don't have that happening right now.

But they had sort of pioneered this.

This wasn't sort of the attitude of the 20s, 30s and 40s.

Like that like people were just kind of glad that the government was taking the rug rats off their hands.

And like by the 50s, you get this kind of overinvestment in that site of transmission.

And there was like a gendered aspect to those periodic freakouts, I would say, in the sense that I believe sort of post-World War II, you get a feminization of school teacher.

The school teacher becomes,

it's numerically more women, but also like the symbolic, right?

Like, you know,

they become less

strict.

They start hitting their students less.

Like, oh, that's like, that feels coddling, doesn't it?

So the idea is that

the job itself becomes somehow more associated with with with sort of stereotypically feminine attributes and like and then when you get like men teaching your kids like that you're like oh that that feels off something something's wrong and so that's why why this kind of site emerges of like the of the of the gay teacher as a big problem i should say though the attack in 1977 is against a ordinance

77.4 in Dade County,

Florida, so Miami, basically.

And the idea there is like that that was not about teachers,

though she made it about teachers.

It was about non-discrimination against gays and lesbians in housing, public services, public accommodations, and hiring, right?

It's like one of like four or five buckets that the ordinance mentions.

And like Anita Bryan manages to extract from that, like, oh shit, it's about like gay teachers at my kids' parochial school, right?

It's like, well, no, Anita, it's also about

people being able to sign, you know, getting loans and signing leases and living somewhere.

Yeah, right?

Like

being able to like apply for a passport, but like, no, like Anita's kids like needed to be protected from

gay teachers.

And

the campaign she starts is called Save Our Children.

She also served as its president.

And here we have a, I think, first, this is, so it's called Save Our Children, but that's because they cut it off.

The full title is Save Our Children from Homosexuality.

Why is the, I'm sorry, why is the X dangling like that?

I don't know.

Did they run out of room?

Oh,

wow.

Someone, like, I think they had a gay on staff probably who was like, let's use this up.

Vote for repeal of Metro's gay blunder, gay as in quotation marks, which is something I still remember from the 90s.

Really?

Gay in quotation marks.

Oh, wait, because the New York Times wouldn't print the word gay as a description until very recently.

Well, that's because because they're, I mean, very, I'm sure it varied across places.

But yeah, that this, that it was like, they like to call themselves this, but we don't know.

Yeah, it's like they don't own this word.

This idea that like straight people have been like deprived of the word gay and couldn't like express joy anymore was like the idea that this

world have been stolen from them is like really important.

You know what?

I haven't researched this, so don't trust me at all, but I believe, because I was listening to a David Sederis essay that talks about learning the song about the kookaburra song when you're in grade school.

And when I learned it in the 90s, it was laugh kookabura, laugh kookaburra, save some gum for me.

And apparently when David Sederis learned it in the 60s, it was gay his life must be.

So at a certain point, perhaps we were like,

the implications in this song.

Anita Bryant actually personally changed lyrics to make sure gay wasn't injection.

She's like, these kids are not going to sing about gay birds while I'm on walk.

Not under my, not under my Battle Him with the Republic.

I mean, it is interesting, I think, that what you're talking about with the way teaching is framed fits into the same idea that Anita Bryant is both exploiting and being positioned to exploit by like, you know, the gang of Muppeteers who are moving her around.

Because, you know, this idea of the teacher as

not just someone who teaches you about the world or kind of gives you information that you can figure out what to do with, but is actually molding you into the correct kind of citizen in this very feminist, this very feminized kind of labor that is exactly how we're still talking about wives and mothers at this point in time and still today in most circles in the United States.

And it's also very convenient because any form of feminized labor based on this mindset, you can be like, well,

it's just, it's so great that women are able to nurture and also that we don't really have to pay them very much for it because they just love doing it.

Right.

I think we might be remiss also if we didn't point out the other obvious thing about why public schools became a center of conservative activism in the post-war period is because of desegregation and the court-mandated racial desegregation of public schools after Brown versus Board of Education, which met massive resistance in states like Florida, where Anita Bryan.

Parochial schools were often code, like they started out, they became Christian academies, but often, I don't know about Anita Bryan's children, I don't want to insult anyone, but they often started out as segregation academies.

But this was a focus, it was a subject matter where there was already a lot of right-wing organizing, right?

And this discourse of parents' rights had already been used to stand in for a really different kind of agenda before Anita Bryant sort of stepped into this ready-made like pie pan that was there for her.

You're right, and that this language was waiting to be used, and there's something I think about a lot is this moment from, there's a documentary series called the Reagans that I think was on Showtime and it talks about how when he I think I forget if it was for election or re-election it doesn't really matter because he won both in an absolute landslide but in one of them he went to the county fair in Neshoba County Mississippi announced his candidacy lovely event for him and

what some of the scholars in that documentary pointed out is that if in 1984 and I believe today, Neshoba County, Mississippi was known only for being the site where three volunteers were lynched for attempting to register voters and that to therefore get up on a stage like Reagan did and talk about states rights in Neshoba County, Mississippi is to talk about segregation by any other name, right?

And that if you hear the phrase parents' rights in Florida in the late 70s, like it feels like you know exactly what that means.

Yeah.

And I think the local context is important, right?

Like thinking about what Florida means, what its history is.

But this is also not an ordinance that is only arising in Miami.

Post-Sonewall, there had been a lot of gay activism and a degree, and I really don't want to overemphasize this, a small degree of

greater public sympathy for the gay rights cause.

And a couple states

that are not available.

Like a vermouth and a martini, like it's in the next room.

But like a couple states had repealed their criminal sodomy statutes, right?

These were laws that had been on the books often for a very long time that made homosexual sex between consenting adults punishable under the criminal law.

Florida had not gotten rid of its sodomy statute, so gay sex remains a crime under Florida law at the time this ordinance is passed.

But A bunch of cities had gone even further and said, you know, we don't just want to take bans on gay sex out of our criminal code, or maybe we can't do that.

What we actually want to do is integrate gay people a little more into public life and give them these civil protections so that they can not be discriminated against in housing, so that they cannot be discriminated against in employment, so that they cannot be discriminated against in what's called like public accommodations, which is like, you know, any kind of public-facing business has to serve you the way they serve everybody else.

That's something we still fight about today, right?

Like, I mean, like, the most recent Supreme Court cases are about this, but we'll...

Well, Adrian, that's a spoiler.

But it's happened in like 40 cities by the time that this ordinance is passed in Miami in 1977.

So it is happening around the country, and it's becoming a little bit of a national story.

Post-Stonewall, there's now not just a national Christian right that's increasingly unified, but there's also like a national kind of gay consciousness.

Gay people are thinking about being gay as something they might have in common with somebody across the country and imagining that those local ordinances reflect also on their dignity in other places, which is also going to be important for the story.

Yeah.

So we should mention, like,

even though like the campaign, the Save Our Children campaign, very clearly partakes of these like earlier conservative movements, it also kind of shows off just how far the Christian right has come.

So just to give an example, and to do a You're Wrong About extended cinematic universe shout out, one of the first places where Brian takes her show is to Jim Baker, Jim and Tammy Baker's PTL club, and then later to Pat Roberts' 700 club.

So they've got the big satellite.

Yeah, so these are these are right, like this is, these are nationally syndicated,

you know, fundamentalist Christian TV shows and like this is a this is a big big push.

We should mention this is kind of interesting to think about the attack on the ordinance pulls poorly for quite some time.

Like it looks like

this effort is not going to succeed and she is able to basically flip people in Miami, which is which is really kind of interesting.

And it's not kind of a low turnout thing.

In the end, I think it's a 40% turnout thing election, which for a

proposition

off-cycle, not a presidential year,

pretty remarkable.

I mean, I think this is the kind of thing that if it hadn't been made such an issue out of, that a lot of people would simply not have heard of until they were there in the booth and then had to decide where they thought the verb was.

and vote for something, you know, like I never do.

So this is like, I don't know, I think it's also just worth noting how outsized this national campaign was.

This is a county ordinance.

It is a local law saying you can't discriminate against gay people and it becomes a national news story.

So not only is Anita Bryant going on these big, big TV programs to talk to a national audience about this local law in Miami, but also gay communities are sending money.

They're like raising money at their little gay bars in Oklahoma and Vermont and mailing checks down to the counter campaign to try and keep this law on the books in Miami.

It becomes this like national fight over a very local issue.

And is there, I mean, is there any comparison in history to, you know, like a pre, some kind of previous initiative that you know, that people were able to, if not organize, then at least to kind of share a culture around opposing in this way?

Or is this the first of its kind?

You're looking at me like I know.

We have to find out.

I know it is.

Right, because it's a terrible question to ask if you haven't like spent three hours reading about that particular question because it's like, well, there could be, but we probably forgot about it.

But right, I mean,

regardless of the precedent and the spot I put you in, it feels like

there is

something

that you know

changes things when you're able to have a conversation about

we oppose this and we are opposing it together out loud because you know in order to do that you have to believe to some extent in your own personhood and your own equality yeah it seems like yeah yeah i mean it definitely seems true that so when she wins and then so when the this is the new york times article about this um basically anita bryan almost immediately says like we're taking this show on the road right so and i think people were sort of able to read the tea leaves that this was not this was a test case and that they were going to keep trying elsewhere right so like i do think like the nationalization

like you know is it is there's there's an implicit nationalization i think going on here yeah i mean not to

say anything mean about jennifer lopez who has never done anything on the scale in her life but like there is some kind of resonance of like there's something dangerous about like a a grown-up woman who just wants to play the ingenue and won't let anyone stop her.

She's like, I just want to to put on my dress and have everyone look at me.

I'll take away all the human rights I have to if I can keep doing that.

It's my projection.

But this is also like really Anita Bryant's moment.

Like maybe never since singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic for the 470th time at the Super Bowl has she been the subject of so much attention.

Yeah.

And a couple of things that we should probably mention is like, right,

It's important to note, as Maura is saying, like the

homosexuality was still illegal in Florida.

And Florida didn't actually have that many gay teachers because Florida had had 20 years of sort of anti-gay

kind of witch hunts in public schools, right?

There's a great book by Karen Graves, and they were wonderful teachers, which outlines basically...

Yeah, like since the mid-40s, basically, there had been this incredible, you know, sort of starting with McCarthy, you get these moments where basically teachers are routinely drummed out of schools and universities.

So that's kind of amazing, right?

That they're, it's not like there was like a robust cohort you were cracking down on.

Like, there were hardly any.

The other thing that I think we should point to is like, right,

the thing she opposes is an ordinance passed by, what are they called, the supervisors or the commissioners of Dade County, meaning like these were elected officials who'd sat down and been like, this seems like the right thing to do.

And she starts using kind of a proposition process, as we would call it here in California, right like so if you're hearing certain early foreshocks of like things having to do with you know proposition eight for instance like this idea that you use direct democracy as opposed to going kind of the electoral route and pressuring your elected officials like that's clearly what's happening here too there is this kind of this this new mode of politics which is like particularly useful for conservative women, right?

Because otherwise you have to say like, okay, why do you want this job?

It's like, oh, I don't want any job.

I just want people to stay out of family's business.

I want them, I want my children to be protected from these horrible, you know, seductive teachers or whatever, right?

Like, it's a perfect way to sort of do a non-political politics.

But not from, like, I don't want to protect my 15-year-old daughter from like her adult male teacher who's going to marry her.

That's fine.

However,

right, yeah, thank you.

But can we also, can we talk about the gossip part?

which is that the county commissioner who proposed this non-discrimination ordinance

So the county commissioner who proposed it was Anita Bryan's agent's wife, is that right?

Yeah, so they're like, they know each other.

And like, she's kind of hurt, I think, by like Anita Bryan coming out swinging against what she sort of seems to have thought as like

a perfectly sensible response to like, you know, this going with the times.

And like,

and Anita comes out and just like makes a huge fucking deal out of it.

It's, I mean,

my two obsessions, the satanic panic and Nancy Reagan, feel very connected to this, yeah, inevitably.

And I, I, with Nancy Reagan, I think one of my, one of the things that fascinates me about her, like, we all remember that Ronald Reagan was an actor, or most of us do.

I mean, you weren't there, but I was at the time, and it was great.

And, but I feel like it's easy to forget that Nancy Reagan was also an actress.

She was never in a movie with a chimpanzee, so she doesn't have that going for her.

But, you know, that she was a stage actress, and then she came to Hollywood in the 40s and that her career kind of never took off.

She was always in like small roles in big movies and larger roles in bad movies.

Her biggest role might have been playing the pregnant wife of a man who God starts talking to for some reason.

And she has to just be very supportive and be like, well, honey, I guess, yeah, this is what we're doing now.

And that, like, in the presidency, well, first, you know, by becoming First Lady of the State of California and then by becoming First Lady of the country because it does seem to escalate that way sometimes.

That that was her great role, right?

And that she

was often noted for the gaze, the G-A-Z-E, to quote Kitty Kelly in that same documentary,

although she had trouble with both, but the way that she would gaze at Reagan, because

it's kind of like the way they talk in figure skating about the flower and the stem, or the man holds the flower, and the woman is the flower, and the man is the stem, right?

And that's how we imported gender into a sport somehow.

I didn't know this.

Like his

patriarch and politico act only works if he has the little woman literally gazing up at him because she wasn't very tall.

And, you know, that this is,

I feel like the Anita Bryant types and kind of women especially who find this kind of role in conservative politics in America, there is this air of like, well, I never would dream of wanting a position outside of the home and taking care of my husband and children is the only thing I would ever aspire to, but I was simply, you know, forced to.

I was called to it.

I had to do it for my country.

And it's that people love the kind of heroic martyr fantasy where they didn't even want to be so gosh darn heroic, but they just had to.

And like, I would just like someone to be like, I spent my whole life wanting everyone to pay attention to me and I finally found a way to get it.

What we should note that, by the way, just as a bit of background, so you might think like, well, maybe Anita Bryan's husband made the money.

Anita Bryan's husband was Anita Bryan's manager.

That was his job, right?

Anita Bryan's husband was Anita Bryant, maybe to an extent.

It's classic trad wife, right?

Like this performance of your rejection of this very public performance of your rejection of the public sphere and of like masculine ambition actually catapults you into these fears of remunerative fame.

My toddlers wanted some totalitarianism this morning, so I got up early and started planting some laws.

Yeah.

I mean it's interesting, right, though, because

there is in some way a performance of traditionalism here, and I think that's where

the trad wife comparison works perfectly.

But at the same time, at a moment when

this stuff cannot be assumed anymore.

And the same is true for her anti-gay politics, right?

She is sort of the first anti-gay celebrity, not in the sense that people before had been cool with gays, but more in the sense that it was assumed that everyone was anti-gay.

Like she's sort of part of a generational shift where she has to say that, right?

Where homophobia becomes an opinion that you have to, like, you know, Kevin Sorbo's style have to be like, yeah, by the way, right, like, here's who I hate, and people can call you out for it, right?

Whereas before it was just like, common sense, right?

And like, there is this thing where like, you know, this kind of aggrieved, like, I can't believe I have to say this, right?

Like, and

on the one hand, like, it can feel very apolitical, but like, it usually couches, you know, a pretty serious political intervention, which she was exactly making.

Yeah.

So can we maybe take a tiny detour into the Anita Bryant story?

Her book, you know, her book about this campaign.

And Adrienne mentioned earlier that she

You look at her like bibliography and it looks like she wrote a lot of books, but she actually just wrote the same book like 15 times.

15 times.

But this is the one about...

Except the cookbook.

The cookbook I think is different.

I was able to find a copy and like...

Oh, wow.

Is it any good?

We have to make the recipes.

No, they look disgusting.

But I read this because I am so dedicated to my job.

And I have to say, this is an insane book.

This is a book that reads like an author is really heavy-handedly trying to tell you that their narrator is unreliable.

You know, it's just like, look how obviously this person is lying.

So she recounts this campaign.

She does say that she was called to public homophobia by God.

He does that, apparently.

Like you do.

So it was not her idea at all.

And it was totally God's idea.

But then it's like, it's full of stuff like

little grievances,

like just seamless slippages between talking about gay people and talking about pedophiles, which is also like the sort of not very at all concealed assumption behind the Save Our Children campaign.

But then she's always saying stuff like, oh, the media is so unfair.

They said that I called gay people garbage.

I didn't say they were garbage.

I said they were like garbage.

And it's like, and it's that for like 200 pages.

And she really has,

I wanted to like maybe bring up this sense of being the moral majority or what she actually called the normal majority.

Because it's, as Adrian was saying, it was a majority position that had to be articulated, right?

And so she gets the sort of credibility of being the standard, of being normal, and of being the majority, but then also has the sort of moral authority of being besieged and a victim.

And she gets both of these at the same time.

It's very, very slippery, whether she's

defiant and control the hegemon or if she's this persecuted victim.

It's like slips back and forth.

And it feels like the kind of, that's still the kind of

conservative Christian agenda is to have your martyr cake and eat it too, right?

And this idea that like I am leading this charge and I am, you know, taking over as much of the world with my culture as I possibly can.

And also I'm being oppressed.

And it's like, but how?

You know, and it's

a very good genius of the Christian martyr culture is that we've secularized it, right?

Like now that's just a cancel victim.

The person who says like, oh, everyone believes what I say anyway, but I'm a bold truth teller for saying it like that's more conservatives need to watch The Wicker Man, a movie about how if you're not being burned in a giant pyre, you really shouldn't be complaining.

Spoiler alert.

It's okay, everyone saw it coming, but the main guy.

Yeah, it's true.

But right, yeah,

and you know, this need to oppress while claiming you're being oppressed feels like it is kind of baked into the bones of colonial America and pilgrim culture and that it is sort of one of the primary, primary, like one of the oldest ghosts in the house that we have to deal with.

But it's not like nobody hates Anita.

All of us hate Anita.

And you know, after she wins this repeal vote in Miami, she does really take this show on the road and leads these repeal votes in other cities that have these civil rights ordinances.

In two states, California, Prop 6, the so-called Briggs Initiative,

I don't think she's ever officially,

like, she's not behind it.

This is Congressman Briggs that does this,

but she basically,

she's out front campaigning for this thing.

Because

that's her celebrity beep now.

So we have, I mean, you know,

they barely bother to update the talking points here, right?

Like on the right, we have protect our children, right?

Preserve parents' rights to protect their children from teachers who are immoral and who promote a perverted lifestyle.

Vote yes on six, right?

But this time, we should mention, right, the gays are ready for her.

Like, this is sort of when I think Anita really becomes kind of like the pop culture figure that she has remained, because like not for the thing in Miami, frankly, but because

she

takes on, you know,

the gays of California and it does not altogether go well, I would say.

Congratulations.

I mean, do you picture, it's so funny to me.

I'm just realizing that like she had this initial skirmish in Florida.

She felt great.

And she was like, and so she's going around the country singing her Civil War song about herself.

Oh, yeah.

You know, and she's like, yeah, I'm doing the Civil War too, you guys.

And then, you know, gets to get beaten a little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's true.

I mean, she's definitely, I mean, like, I guess I wonder what the what the significance of like civil war imagery would have been.

I think today that's gotten a lot more charged, but like there is, there is an interesting kind of you know she's she's saddling up for the for a rematch to some extent right and she you know it gets uh gets pretty badly badly clobbered by it it's also that we should mention that uh this is also the moment where we can talk about that a little bit more later but like this is also the moment where

the Democratic Party kind of comes out of hiding.

My impression is like

went back in, I guess.

Yeah, I guess

for another 25 years.

But yeah, so basically,

right, like the Briggs initiative is something where like, I think like Carter comes out against it, like the governor comes out against it.

Ronald Reagan comes out against it.

That's right.

He's like, this has gone too far.

It's a don't say gay teachers fill.

You had his comments.

Not many, but he did.

Yeah.

And, right, like, it's basically like you can get fired for being gay.

It's basically like the kind of thing that, like, you know, again, like, Ron DeSantis probably just Xerox this shit and was like, yeah, let's pass this into law.

But like, it is really remarkable that like it's, it suddenly is okay to come out against this uh which like

is it's also an interesting kind of moment and i think it has to do with this opposition to the figure of anita bryan she's really important and focalizing kind of like just being kind of the the what's that thing called at the at the front of a of a ship she's like basically the

um

none of us know yeah okay but you know the thing right like it's like a unicorn or like uh you know or like a mervino

figurehead yeah the figurehead the figurehead yeah it's the figurehead of uh i thought you meant an

Fouse Sprint or something like that.

Yeah, she's both of those.

And

for basically this homophobic backlash, and suddenly that makes it easier to kind of fight with this,

take this on, I would say.

Yeah, so she

has this galvanizing effect because as we talked about, the gay rights movement, you know, it's like seven or eight years after Stonewall.

They're kind of a little bruised.

They're really internally fractious.

They're fighting with each other a lot.

And they don't quite know where to go next.

They suffer this big defeat in Miami and then a few other cities where these ordinances get repealed.

And then Anita Bryant,

through her success as a homophobic hate monger, really galvanizes this internally divided gay rights movement because they say, you know what, we all

have our differences and we've had our disagreements, but we all fucking hate this lady.

And she really unites the nation.

What I love is that there's this kind of, there's a back and forth, right?

Because there's, we have gay liberation and women's liberation galvanizing the Christian right to sort of, you know, begin to recognize itself as such and kind of melt in that crucible.

And then Anita Bryant crucibles them right back.

Yep.

And then everyone gets to unite over hating her.

Everybody does unite over hating her.

So the first thing that seems to happen, which I think while...

my friend sent me a reproduction of that pin and I can't find it.

I think one of my cats knocked it under the couch and I'm so sad.

It'll turn up, but I can't.

We should narrate for our listeners.

This is a very famous button from this campaign that says, Anita Bryant sucks oranges.

Which I love.

It's like the equivalent of telling someone to go fly a kite, I think.

Yeah.

It's really good.

It's like, it's goofy.

It's almost like childish insults,

which is going to be like a recurring theme.

So one of the big things that happens is that gay people organize a boycott of orange juice.

Gay bars stop serving screwdrivers.

They instead start serving a cocktail they call the Anita Bryant, which is vodka and apple juice, which has got to be the most disgusting thing I've ever heard of.

It's good.

I think that's the thing you do for politics.

And the sales of that drink went to combating her anxiety.

When you come back, standing at the airport between the Chick-fil-A and the Sparrows, and you're like, ah, fuck.

And, you know, scaring Anita, sticking it to Anita becomes this kind of like rallying cry.

Yeah, yeah.

We should say it's not the first gay boycott, right?

There's the Coors boycott a couple of years before.

It's interesting.

I read an article in preparation for this that made the point that these

probably were more PR disasters than they were really economic disasters, like compared to like...

Just like now.

Yeah.

But the interesting thing is that like, it did this kind of very interesting positioning of like gay people as consumers, right?

Like which tends to in US society, I feel like move you up, right?

You're like, you know, we drink beer, we drink orange juice, right?

Like it kind of puts you back into the mainstream because you do the thing that everyone else does, which is...

you know, buy, choose between three opposing but identical looking objects, depending on which one you want to give your loyalty to, right?

Like it's pretty clear that like, it's also just like a way of like being a we're just like you because we also enjoy orange juice with our

well in this case breakfast at a gay bar but like let's not dwell on that part.

Just you know bright.

You got your orange juice in one hand and your beer in the other.

But

it's funny now also that at this point conservatives love boycotting stuff more than anyone else.

And I'm sure there are people in this country who still will not drink Budweiser, not because it's gross, but because a trans person might get a right.

Yeah.

And

got one can sent to them, I believe.

Like that's like, yeah, that's what the entire boycott is about.

It's really remarkable.

But I love kind of, yeah, the idea of breaking a conservative brain by being like, you know, these people that you're rallying everyone against, they also buy things.

So

I know you didn't think of that, but they do.

Well, that's woke capitalism.

If people, if they cave, it's just woke capitalism.

But this is like, there's a quality to the anti-Anita Brian.

Yeah.

Hatred.

Yeah.

It's kind of goofy.

Adrian, you were telling us about this.

Yeah, so we have a couple of signs here.

Some of them are

pretty

sort of,

two of them, I think I would say, are not particularly wild.

On the left-hand side, we have straights for gay rights.

We're okay, they're okay, Anita's wrong, right?

So, like, a nice kind of way to like build allyship through this person.

They needed some graphic design help, but yeah, it's a good idea.

Well, even though that lady is just like dressed wonderfully, I mean, like, I want that outfit.

I'm looking at the outfit, and I'm like, how straight are these people for gay rights?

Yeah, it's giving Annette Benning in every lesbian role she's ever played, I have to say.

But like, yeah, you know, it was the 70s.

Everyone looked at lesbian, to be honest.

It's not gay to kiss your friends if it's out of protest.

That's right.

And then the more serious one is in the middle.

Anita, gay blood is upon you.

And then who's next?

Again, like the,

you can tell that people were...

making these non-digitally in the sense that like clearly ran out of space and we're like well we're not buying another one of these uh But then on the right-hand side, we have, your voice is good, Anita, but your mind is warped.

Which I think I really like.

It's like they're kind of reading her a little bit, right?

They're like, you know, game-recognizing game.

The songs are good.

The Ballad of the Republic, low-key slaps, but

I hate the hatred that is in your heart.

I will say, when I was researching, I did listen to some Anita Bryant recordings and was really disappointed at how good a singer she is.

I know.

She actually does have a beautiful, like resonant alto.

It's really nice.

Are you an alto?

I'm an alto.

I am an alto.

Yeah, so like altos love other altos because there is, as we know, we've had, it's, and also share, we're all the same.

But there is like, yeah, there's something kind of, it's not violent, it's not like homicidal hatred, right?

It's although we might quenture this one, that's like a little bit rough.

Yeah, that's a little more, yeah.

So this is a picture from SF Pride.

This is clearly Civic Center in San Francisco with a picture of, I think on the right, that's Edi Amin, right?

Then we have a Burning Cross.

Then we have Anita Bryan.

Then we have Adolf Hitler.

Just a great group of people together.

And then next to it, once the Jews, then the blacks, now the gays get off our backs, right?

It definitely had,

you know, there were others that were not as tongue-in-cheek, but I do think that overall you're right.

There was a real kind of

people were were

drawing on a deep well of creativity

to come after this person and kind of make fun of her.

And that might bring us to the most famous anti-Anita pro-gay incident.

The thing that really brings us all here.

So I really hope you can...

This is, by the way, from Gay Pride 77,

with dear Anita having a gay time, wish you were here.

So like, this is is the kind of thing.

They're having fun with this.

I think more Bixi postcards are in order in the political climate.

But as Maura is alluding to,

we move on from Bitchy postcards to this, and I hope this video works.

This is in Iowa.

It's a press conference she's giving.

Good old Iowa.

If we were going to go on a crusade across the nation and try to do away with the homosexuals,

then we certainly would have done it on June the 8th after one of the most overwhelming victories in the country.

But we didn't.

We tried to avoid it and went into a place called Norfolk, Virginia, and were met with protest and

all kinds of problems.

And

every

security agent, security agents.

No, no, let them stay.

Well, at least it's a fruit pie.

Let's break this right now, Anita.

So I have to say,

also, again, on the topic of game recognizing game, like the fact that she, like, as she still has

the cream in her face goes well at least it's a fruit pie which

I think it's just like a bit like I don't think it was but like it's just like it's pretty good

this is someone who can command a stage it's this little sprit de scalier yeah yeah yeah

yeah I would have come up with that line like 20 minutes later

she came up with it years ago although she half no because I guess pieing was pieing happening a lot thank you I was gonna ask that question does anyone know I don't know I know streaking was but that's not the question

Can I half a point?

There was a brief moment in my gay youth when anti-gay politicians were getting doused with glitter.

People kept throwing glitter on Santorum.

And that was like, it happened like 15 times.

People just love throwing glitter on this man.

And it had that sort of like playful irreverence.

It's not violent, but it like treats people, it treats anti-gay figures with the disrespect that they deserve, right?

You may remember, people of a certain vintage in the audience may remember spreading spreading Santorum, which became like an infamous thing, right?

Like it's a form, it was an early form of Google bombing, right?

Like

this idea that you kind of go with the time and you find like a vernacular for protest that's both making your point, but also like, yeah, kind of withholding full recognition to the person.

To me, that reads like this, but I have no idea how how common this was.

A pie in the face is something you do to a literal clown.

It's like from the circus.

It is profoundly, you know, it's very playful, it's like kind of childlike.

It's one of the silliest things.

It's so silly.

It also diminishes the target.

It's disrespectful in a playful way.

It's also, says the Freudian, right, an implement of the home.

It's like there is a weird kind of re-domestication.

Yeah, this is a literature professor now.

Right?

But like, yeah, like she's literally being confronted with the

she who claimed to be a homemaker when she's giving press conference, right?

They're like, oh yeah.

Well, here's

something for you.

Yeah,

I love that.

Yeah, and I feel like it's kind of, there's an interesting kind of test to it, right?

Because it's like, it's almost like a burlesque of an assassination, right?

Like somebody was close to you and they could have done something to you and they didn't.

And it feels like the way you react to it is a kind of personality test, right?

Because of, and I mean, to her credit, like she

deals with it much better than anyone currently in politics would today, with the exception of, I don't know, Mitt Romney or something.

Oh my gosh.

Joe Biden, he wouldn't even blink.

Oh, he didn't kill him.

Imagine if somebody pied like Mike Johnson.

There would be a bill to ban pies like tomorrow.

Yeah.

Like the left has gone off the rails.

Now they're pieing Mike Johnson.

Yeah.

Wokeness

has gone too far.

But I do think that there's also an element here, like we should mention,

the pieing is in 78, is that right?

Yeah.

So like a time when Americans famously resolved political conflict in far less mature ways, right?

Like this is, you know, right around the time of Jonestown.

This is right around the time of the Milk Moscone

assassinations.

Like, I think, didn't, like, there's a bunch of like forgotten things.

Like, sure, there's like Simbini's Liberation Army and stuff like that.

And there is a sense coming out of the 60s that like, you know, among

people who I've talked to, if we are to trust them, and I do, and also various historians, which I I guess is I'm just talking about all of history as a form of study but right the feeling in the 60s of like are we ever gonna stop having all these assassinations right because you had both Kennedys you had Martin Luther King Jr.

you had Malcolm X you had you know this wave of that just being what life was like and I think this was still in a period of like have we stopped are we done yet yeah well I mean I was gonna say like I think in San Francisco you know These are the people who were successful.

These were people who at the top of the assassination game, if you will.

I think there's a bunch of weird attempts.

I think there were two attempts made on Carter's life in San Francisco alone.

Don't quote me on this, but I think, like, I mean, I'm guessing these people didn't get that close, but there were people with guns

going for Jimmy Carter, right?

Really, I can't imagine anybody feeling that strongly about Jimmy Carter.

The worst offensive man ever.

So, this is kind of the pinnacle, right?

Because after the pie,

after the defeat in California, things really kind of turn for Anita.

And what happens to her next?

Well, so I think, so I think you looked into this, but basically she gets fired from the Florida gig.

No more citrus.

Although

they waited a while.

Yeah, they waited until 80.

Yeah, yeah.

And then...

She loses a TV show.

She was going to be the host of a variety show, kind of like America's Got Talent or something, and they canceled it.

And she said, that's the end of a lifelong dream.

That was her lifelong dream?

That and no gay teachers.

Yeah, I do know she did like a

special in 1980, the Anita Bryant Spectacular, which speaking of like the importance of people remaining organized in a Bixi way has a 3.6 rating on IMDb.

Wow.

And those people haven't watched it.

They're just like, we got to get her numbers down.

And then she gets divorced, too.

Yeah, so for a while, Anita's only real gigs are like singing for Christian groups.

She sings at a lot of churches, but that's sort of like the extent of where she's acceptable for a while.

This has really left sort of a

taken the shine off of the rose a little bit

on Anita Bryan's popular fame.

But then

she files for divorce from her husband Bob Green and this is where it like becomes kind of not a fun story because Anita's account of her marriage was that it was a pretty abusive situation.

And true to an abusive husband, Bob Green refuses to sign the divorce papers.

He fights her in her divorce, saying that divorce goes against his religious convictions.

And the religious right, the Christian community where she had made her career really takes Bob Green's side.

They say, no, you shouldn't be allowed to divorce your crappy husband.

And they really turn on her too.

And there's this moment during this drawn-out, public, really humiliating divorce saga where Anita Bryant tells an interviewer, she's like, you know, I don't think the answers are so simple anymore.

Now I kind of think I feel like I know why the feminists and the gays are so angry.

Which could have been a really beautiful moment if she had pursued that insight or held on to it for even a minute.

She like basically turned back around and was impassioned and publicly homophobic again after that.

But I think it's like a really interesting truth about these right-wing women, like these figures who use femininity and who use the cause of sexism and homophobia against other women and against queer people,

is that they cannot escape misogyny by doing that.

They are still

entangled in it and victims in it even as they are also wielding it against other people.

And there's something something like

kind of really tragic about that more in a

in in a in a in a way that I think is more

interesting if you don't just think about what it means when somebody gets their comeuppance and they get their hypocrisy turned back on them.

It's also a human struggle that she couldn't quite escape.

Right, yeah, because it is, it's a game that you lose by winning, right?

Is conservative being a woman active in conservative politics.

And yeah, we were, I wonder if,

should I bring out a Dworkin quote?

Oh, always.

Yeah, all right.

We were talking earlier about Andrea Dworkin's book, Right-Wing Women, which I think came out in 1980, and which you were just telling me is being reissued.

Yeah, which is 2025.

Yeah, it's which

think of all the things we'll know then that we don't know now about our country.

But

Andrea Dworkin is a fascinating figure if you don't know very much about her.

Have you guys covered her yet?

Or will you at some point?

Yeah, she's, yeah.

She was, you know, a very

strong radical feminist, I would say.

A passionate and polarizing figure.

Also an overalls aficionado, like really could style a pair of overalls.

So, you know, true

tradition.

But the listener is Sarah's Ruckin' in overalls.

I am.

They're really cool.

They're blue.

I came straight from the garden because I heard there was no time to spare.

But yeah, and a woman who, because of her convictions, like ended up famously coming out against pornography, against sex work, kind of ended up, I think, being her legacy at this point is literally, well not literally, but getting ideologically as in bed with the right as a person can on purpose for the sake of feminism.

And yet Her writing is amazing and I think there is so much amazing stuff in, you know, and the stuff that she got right, which in which she got something right, in my opinion, she really did.

And she wrote like an angel on fire.

And so here's something from right-wing women.

To waver, whatever the creed of the men around them, is tantamount to rebellion.

It is dangerous.

Most women holding on for dear life do not dare abandon blind faith.

From father's house to husband's house to a grave that still might not be her own, a woman acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence.

She conforms in order to be as safe as she can be.

And then another passage reads, so the woman hangs on, not with the delicacy of a clinging vine, but with a tenacity incredible in its intensity, to the very persons, institutions, and values that demean her, degrade her, glorify her powerlessness, insist upon constraining and paralyzing the most honest expressions of her will and being.

She becomes a lackey, serving those who ruthlessly and effectively aggress against her and her kind.

This singularly self-hating loyalty to those committed to her own destruction is the very essence of womanhood as men of all ideological persuasions define it.

And

the sheer timelessness of that to me, or at least the timelessness between, you know, I was looking at an ad today that was like, for garden tools, like crafted the same way for half a century.

And it's like, you're just saying since 1974, that's not that impressive when you put it that way.

But for half a century, that description has been true and, you know, clearly for longer.

And I, yeah, thinking about Anita Bryant that way, it's like, as I'm always saying on You're Wrong About Inevitably, it's like, you know, you don't let women or anyone else off the hook by looking at

the broth in which they were simmering for their entire lives before they made these decisions.

It just kind of shows you, all right.

That is something that may seem to people like a means to power, but in the end, it's all

just an illusion.

Yeah.

And you know, she really didn't have,

hasn't had a good rest of her life.

She got married again, she sort of moved around a bunch of small towns in the south.

She tried to start a music review in a tiny town in Tennessee and had to declare bankruptcy on that business, has also had to declare personal bankruptcy, seems to have a really fraught relationship with her children

and her

lesbian granddaughter

was very public about you know possibly not inviting her to her wedding this is you know somebody who has lived a life of

poverty

obscurity yeah and like real

like sort of punishing marginalization, which I think for somebody like Anidia Bryant, who so craved and thrived in the spotlight, has got to be like karmic retribution kind of par excellence.

And it does make me think of my beloved tabloid women where it's like, and in this case, they didn't willingly walk into the spotlight, somebody like Tanya Harding or Pollock Jones.

But in that case, too, there was this illusion.

at the time that like, well, if everyone is paying attention to her and making her life hell for 46 weeks, then like she must be making money.

And it's like, not really, not back then.

Like it was mostly just financially ruinous for people.

And then I think as people who love screens so much or, you know, looking at someone who's a political figurehead, we have this, there's a stream of like, well, if your face is used for so many purposes for a couple of years, surely the people who got a lot out of it have to be loyal to you.

And it's like, no, they don't, not if there isn't a contract.

Yeah, I mean, I guess that's kind of what Dorkin's pointing out there, right?

That like that

these people are extremely disposable.

Right?

The

movement using them gets to thrive on basically, and it's even true for men right that these right-wing anti-gay blowhards sort of are around for a couple of years and then are kind of forgotten again because like it's not actually that that important who's occupying that position right and I do want to point out one thing that I found as I was looking through

how do I do this I want to do yes I did find this this is from her book A New Day

and boy is it ever I mean I just think like, I do like to think that this is a bit of a this glow.

This might this is a book from the mid-90s, but it's the most 1988 glow I've ever seen.

But, like, I'm kind of happy for her that at least that worked out fine.

That's almost exactly what Katerina Vitt wore during exhibitions at the Calgary Olympics.

Yeah, right?

This is really uh, it's, but I think, I believe this is from the mid-90s, but like, it's always a little later in, I feel like, in Christian America, but

uh, but it's uh, but but I like the fact that, like, I like to think that

she was able to salvage something out of all this.

But at the same time, I do think it's important to note that we just

kind of live in,

still live in Anita Bryant's America in some really horrible ways.

Like, I mean, you mentioned the 303 creative decision that the Supreme Court.

Yeah.

I mean, like, the you know, groomers panic that sort of the Christian right keeps starting, trying to start around trans kids, like, the whole thing about parental rights around trans rights.

Like,

like it's not that we like we haven't moved on at all right like it's basically

Anita Bryan should be living off the royalties from all this like it's all just like they're all footnotes to Anita Bryan and like no one's like had gotten any new material since then essentially it's true they can't even get a new panic they're just playing covers yeah yeah it's very embarrassing yeah yeah I mean I don't know I guess

the redemption that I hope for for her or for anybody in her similar position and I forgot to mention this earlier, but I feel like you should know.

I've been pied, by the way.

I've been pied like 12 or 15 times because

I've had taken a pie to the face.

Is this a hobby of yours?

No, well, it is now.

No, it's because we did live You're Wrong About shows last year, and I love to do a big finish because I feel like, you know,

Coming out to see someone talk about history at night when you've already come home from work and have to leave and then go home again is so much that you at least see someone get hit in the face with something.

And so it was to test the theory of like, is this so horrible to experience taking a pie to the face?

So the big finish was always that, you know, some local luminary would come pie me.

And

it was great.

I recommend it.

I wish someone had a pie here right now.

So it's not the great hardship we might like to think it is.

But you know, my hope for redemption, if you'll call it that, for her, someone similar, is like

to just kind of find the quiet inside yourself and in the world, I guess, to allow you to think your thoughts without immediately having to go back underneath the cover of doctrine, you know, and to have that moment of like, I think I know what the girls, the gays, and the they're so mad about all of a sudden.

And to be able to stick with that for a minute, even if you never tell anyone about it.

Ideally, you should, but, you know.

Yeah.

Well, or you tell your lesbian granddaughter, what if I come to your wedding, but you pie me?

I think that would be just the perfect, that would be the perfect quota to this.

So if you're listening to this, Anita Bryant, like we've, we figured out the secret sauce for fixing that particular relationship.

Just let them pie you.

And you do have a nice voice.

Yeah.

You should sing something else, though.

I still can't get over the fact that you're, that it was 12 times.

You know, there's that Oscar Wilde quote, like, you know, one pie to the face is a tragedy, but 12 pies starts to feel like carelessness.

I think that's where we should stop.

That's the perfect end note.

Thank you so much to Sarah Marshall, our wonderful guest.

She really amazed our day.

And I want to thank our audience again because you guys were so patient and engaged and it was really nice to see you all.

I felt like it was a good group.

Oh my God.

Thank you for letting us hold you hostages on this beautiful day.

Yeah.

What a good.

To bed with the right, I'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Wau.