The man who threw a pie in Anita Bryant's face

Thom Higgins underscored how activism beats back bigots, whose legacies are more complicated than they may seem.

The infamous beauty queen turned religious crusader, Anita Bryant, died last month at the age of 84. Her dubious distinction was in tying homosexuality to child predation in the first years of what would become the modern LGBTQ rights movement, accusing “homosexuals” of “recruiting” children.

Though Bryant saw her entertainment career crash and burn as she led her anti-queer movement—founding a group called “Save Our Children”— there’s been much discussion in recent days about how her legacy lives on. There's an implication, in some of the pieces at least, that even after her death, her brand of demagoguery is successful.

The far right, after all, has once again weaponized the “groomer” lie, as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill sprouted out of Florida and across the states—and to the U.S. Congress—in the past few years, and trans people are under vicious attack by Republicans in Congress and across America, accused of endangering girls in public restrooms.

But I don’t think it’s so black and white.

It is just plain wrong and self-defeating to suggest that no matter what was done to take down the Anita Bryants of the world, they were ultimately successful and always will be, implying that change doesn’t really happen.

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There's been enormous progress in the years since Bryant came on the scene, even as her argument is still used again and again by bigots, who’ve been able to strip some hard-fought rights. That paradox underscores that LGBTQ rights are not on an even march toward progress—reaching some kind of finality—automatically gaining more and more acceptance. Rather, it's a movement that makes strides and continually faces attack and backlash.

Like civil rights for people of color and women, LGBTQ rights are in constant tension. The moment people believe they’ve arrived—letting their guard down—the enemies of equality snatch what they can. I wrote all about this in my 2015 book, “It’s Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality.”

I’d become aware that many queer people and our allies were swept up in what I called “victory blindness” after winning marriage equality. Looking at recent and not-so-recent history, it was clear to me that the anti-equality forces were gathering to hit with a vengeance. I didn’t know Donald Trump would become president the following year with the Christian nationalist movement in his base, but I could see, covering the gatherings of Christian nationalists as a journalist, that something was about to happen.

The point is that when people stay engaged in the fight, they win. And things roll back when they're not focused.

Back in the 1970s, Bryant shocked the post-Stonewall gay movement, which was following in the footsteps of the civil rights and feminist movements. She was a Miss Oklahoma and a runner-up for Miss America in 1959. She became a popular singer and entertainer, including going on Bob Hope’s USO tours. But she also was a hardcore Christian conservative, eventually leading a “Rally for Decency” in 1969 in Miami, where she’d settled, in response to the counterculture youth movement.

And then came her crusade against homosexuality in Dade County, Florida, and beyond. When the Dade County Commission voted to protect gay people from discrimination in 1977, the gay community was caught off guard by the backlash whipped up by Bryant and Save Our Children. She led a successful campaign to repeal it and then took the message on the road, having success elsewhere.

But activists soon became energized, and there were protests wherever she went. One of the most high-profile actions was when activist Thom Higgins threw a banana cream pie in Bryant’s face at a Christian conference in Iowa. It was front-page news and played all over television again and again, becoming an iconic video in queer history. She prayed with cream dripping down from her face and then just cried. It was pretty pathetic.

By the time Bryant’s crusade reached California, activists had successfully painted her—or banana-cream-pied her—as a bigot who was attacking a group of people and using grotesque and slanderous claims about child endangerment. Activists successfully galvanized the public—including Republicans—against an initiative in California to ban gay and lesbian teachers that was inspired by Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign. Even then-former Republican Governor Ronald Reagan came out against it and helped defeat it.

That was the end of the line—in that moment—for the Save Our Children campaign and Bryant. She saw her singing and entertainment engagements canceled within the next two years, and the Florida Citrus Commission killed her lucrative contract as their national spokesperson. And it was all because of activists. Marches, petitions, protests, and the rallying of allies brought pressure to bear.

And it was also because of high-profile events like the pie in the face. According to Q Voice News, Thom Higgins, who engaged in that action, grew up in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota and moved to the Twin Cities in Minnesota:

He was chief announcer and program manager for the Radio Talking Book Network, a service for the blind, and was a freelance writer for the Minnesota Daily and Hundred Flowers, an underground paper, according to the Minnesota Historical Society.

Higgins even is credited with coining the phrase “Gay Pride,” the ACLU said.

“In the Twin Cities, religious leaders were vocal, and Higgins wanted to counter the negativity coming out of the church,” the article said. “His parochial education seemed to have prepared him well for this moment. Higgins cleverly paired one of the seven deadly sins, ‘pride,’ with ‘gay.’.

Higgins also managed Jack Baker’s campaign for Minneapolis City Council in 1973. Baker and Michael McConnell were the first same-sex couple to receive a marriage license. It happened on May 18, 1970, decades before same-sex unions were legalized. Baker did not win the election.

Higgins was an advertising copywriter in the Twin Cities in the 1970s, and in 1981, he began studying to be a nurse.

He received his degree in 1983 and worked as a nurse until his death from AIDS complications in 1994.

I wanted to focus on Higgins to underscore that it wasn’t just some random person who threw the pie in Bryant’s face. It was someone who keenly understood media and how doing that at that point in time would help to supercharge the efforts to portray the bigotry of Bryant, forcing the press to focus on her movement and why it spurred so much anger because of how unjust it was. It was a powerful stunt that hijacked the media. And helped to make sure the message only grew, right up to the big defeat for Bryant and the bigots in California.

It seemed after the defeat of the initiative and Bryant’s downfall that we’d won, and she’d lost. And that was true. Except, of course, AIDS would explode in America and the world just a few years later, and now Reagan—the same Reagan who pushed back against Bryant just a few years earlier—would be president with the very same forces of the Christian right having paved the way for him as he brought them into the Republican Party. Reagan and the GOP allowed people to die, dictated by the beliefs of the base of their movement.

Once again, the gay community was caught off guard. The same forces talked about them as dangerous to children—and the world. And once again it would take high-profile protests by groups like ACT UP, marches, and organizing to beat back the haters.

This eventually led to getting promises from Democrats—like presidential candidate Bill Clinton—to rapidly develop drugs, and we’d see AIDS diminished and HIV infection become a manageable illness while the lies about queer people were once again debunked in popular media.

But then came the backslide again, with “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act—all using the same arguments Bryant used, posing gays as dangerous predators.

And we organized and fought back against it again too, eventually ending “don’t ask, don’t tell” and attaining marriage equality.

So progress is not a straight line, so to speak. And to say Bryant may have died but had success in the end, as if she and her ideology weren’t vanquished again and again, is incorrect. What Bryant teaches us, and what we should learn after her death and looking back, is that we can’t think we’ve ever won. The moment you think you’ve won, they’ll come back with the same tired arguments.

The battle is ongoing, and that should give hope to trans people, all LGBTQ people and many others now under attack. It’s about being engaged in it and being out there organizing the protests, the marches, the sit-ins, and doing whatever is today’s version of smashing a banana cream pie in their faces.