Anita Bryant and me.

I see that Darren Star, the creation of Sex and the City, is teaming up with writer Chad Hodge to produce a biopic about Anita Bryant. And so I thought I’d share the story of my day with Anita Bryant, but first some background.

Bryant was pretty much a second-rate celebrity for much of her life. She was a contestant in Miss America but was a runner-up. She had been a singer but never had a #1 single or album. Like so many of the almost-famous, or has-beens, she went into Christian music and did television commercials. The orange juice commercials, for the Florida Citrus Commission, were really her main claim to fame, until she founded a Christian-inspired anti-gay crusade.

It was 1977 when Dade County passed a poorly written gay rights ordinance. I say it was poorly written because it said that private schools, even religious ones, didn’t have the right to discriminate on hiring when it came to sexual orientation. In other words, private, religious schools were told they would not be allowed to refuse to hire gay people, in spite of their strong, albeit absurd beliefs about gay people. At the same time the government schools were exempt. In a rational world it would have been the opposite, with government schools forbidden from discriminating while private schools were exempt.

Of course, those libertarian distinctions were not what concerned Anita. She simply hated gay people. She publicly said the most absurd and vile things about gay people. She started holding rallies where she equated being gay with being a pedophile and said that since homosexuals “can’t reproduce” the only way they “refresh” their ranks is by seducing children. She was a woefully ignorant woman, if not simply malevolent.

Her campaign was in full swing and in 1978 I was working for a small publication in the Midwest. Anita Bryant’s bigotry was a wake-up call for me. I had been a conservative (mea culpa, mea culpa) and was a frequent guest on some of the local radio talk shows. But what I saw in Anita was so repulsive that I wrote a letter to the local paper distancing myself from her and her campaign. That led to several interviews on radio stations that wanted to talk to the conservative who didn’t like Anita Bryant. It was also the time that I began investigating libertarian ideas as an alternative as well as when I began to openly rethink my own Christian beliefs. In many ways, Anita Bryant, started me on my journey to becoming both a libertarian and an atheist.

I had just taken a position at a local publication when Anita was on a tour of the Mid-West preaching her Christian, antigay message to swarms of unthinking fundamentalists. I wanted to write about her and when I learned she would be in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I started thinking about making the rather long drive there.

Having had some experience with fundamentalists, from my days in seminary, I knew what to say and how to act to put them at ease—something I actively try to avoid these days. I put on my suit and looked like the All-America Boy. It didn’t hurt that I had a tendency to look about 10 years younger than I was. I was still fairly blond though not as blond as I was as a boy, with blue eyes, and that seemed to charm people fairly easily. And with the suit on I was the perfect Christian, conservative lad.

I had called the minister who was sponsoring the rally with Anita in Ft. Wayne and charmed him into giving me permission to spend the afternoon with Anita at the local convention center, where her rally would be held.

The center was a large auditorium that would seat several thousand. Bryant, and her husband Bob Green, were in the auditorium where she was practicing for the evening rally. They used recorded music and Anita was particularly worried about getting the sound system just right. The rehearsal was going to go on for several hours and I was welcome to stay for the whole afternoon.

Between practicing songs Anita would take a break and we would talk. I had a tape recorder and a camera and recorded much of the conversation. I always had to be on guard as to how I asked a question. The same question, asked one way would give them assurance, but asked another way would put them on guard. And when I wasn’t talking to her I was watching her. In particular I was struck by the way she and Green seemed to be relating.

She would have only been just short of 40 years old at the time. But I was surprised, when speaking with her close up, how much make-up she was wearing. There actually seemed to be a line under her chin and around to the bottom of her ears, where the make-up stopped. It wasn’t just a line, however, it seemed to be noticeably raised. In other words it appeared that she had make-up on that was something like 1/8th of an inch thick. She was very overdone. Perhaps it was for the stage, where make-up has to be exaggerated. But this was hours before her performance and I suspected that this was her day-to-day make-up job.

During the times of conversation my biggest problem was Green. He wanted to interrupt constantly. He was clearly leading Anita when it came to answers. He was aggressive and intrusive and someone who seemed on the edge of exploding in anger.

Actually he would explode in anger, although never at me, but at Anita. There was strong tension between them. She seemed to resent him being there. He seemed to see her as incompetent, needing his direction, and always barking orders at her. She clearly didn’t like it and would snipe back but only a bit, trying hard to be the subservient, obedient, Christian wife.

Green seemed to relish his role as “head of the household,” appointed by God. But he was more than that. He was also her manager. He didn’t just tell her what to do at home. He told her what to do in her career as well. Wherever she was, what ever she was doing, he was present issuing orders and pulling her strings.

Anita was one of the first to promote the idea that Christian conversion will turn gay people straight. She really did seem to believe they could pray away the gay. I remember asking her about this. Anita energetically responded, “There was one just last night.” She seemed to think that because she got a gay man “saved” and “born again” the previous day, or so she claimed, that he was now “exgay.” Clearly, with less than 24 hours of being "cured" there was a strong possibility it wouldn't last. I carefully asked my follow-up question as to what that really meant.

Green took over answering, leaving Anita to sit silently there. He went on about how it doesn’t actually mean the person no longer has gay inclinations, or romantic/sexual interest in same-sex partners. The more Green stuttered, trying to give a precise definition to the term, the more clear it was that the term meant nothing at all.

There were two impressions I got simply from watching Anita that day. First, I got a strong sense that she was a very unhappy woman. Whatever she said in public, in private her life was hell to her. She was a woman teetering on the edge, ready to have an emotional breakdown. The other thing was the amount of tension between her and her husband. He would interrupt her singing to tell her what she was doing wrong. She would look at him with rage in her eyes and her entire body tensed up. She appeared ready to rip his throat out, but she didn’t express it, not with me sitting there.

I remember the drive back home after the afternoon. And I contemplated what I saw that day. The interaction between Anita and Bob was more important to me than anything they said. They were quick to portray themselves as the perfect, Christ-centered couple. But what I saw were two people who had long ago lost any desire to be in one another's company. I wondered about their children and how a divorce would affect them.

Later I learned Bryant admitted to a problem with pills of some sort. And, she and Bob Green did divorce. Anita wanted to see gay people as a threat to her and her family. In reality the real threats to her family came from herself and her husband. It was later alleged that Green was emotionally abusive to Anita. I can believe that. He was controlling, aggressive and very dominant that afternoon.

Her response was not complete submission but reluctant, angry submission. She did what he said, but seemed to resent it and him, and I couldn't blame her.

Her crusade did set back the gay rights movement but it also inspired hundreds of thousands of “recruits” to join that campaign. Until I saw her on television, and learned what she was saying, I was a rather contented, conservative Christian. But she so appalled me that I wrote a public denunciation of her. That was considered a rather brash thing to do in those days. It led to my public disavowal of prejudicial campaigns on radio and to my exploring libertarian ideas. Actually, it was the editor at the publication where I worked, who handed me a copy of Libertarian Review that he found lying in the snow. He said he thought I’d like it and he was right.

Anita’s campaign forced me to reconsider my political beliefs and her Christian-inspired bigotry pushed me into exploring whether or not I was comfortable being a Christian. That journey took longer than did my embracing of libertarianism, but it was more substantial in how it changed my views. One does not give up a belief in a deity lightly. I don’t think Anita would be happy to know she set me on the road to atheism. Libertarianism would be offensive enough to her, but godlessness as well!