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AND SHE SAYS

"We should not rest until Anita Bryant utterly destroyed."...Donald Cameron

Scot...

is

"Nobody had ever said a bad thing about me in my life," Miss Bryant says. "It was hard to understand the viciousness. All of a sudden, nobody would touch.

me."

--New York Times, 2/20/78 2/21/78

Anita Bryant wants a federal law making gays criminal with a concentration camp to send me to and she doesn't understand the response? Well, just let me explain it to Little Miss GoodyTwo-Shoes.

Anita Bryant and I are within months of the same age. We were born and reared in neighboring states, under similar cultural and social atmospheres. Both have been baptized in the Baptist church. Though not "dirt-poor," as her family was reported to have been, I nevertheless went to work at 13 to earn money to help my mother who was supporting three kids alone. I've worked

ever since, and damned sure not at any $100,000 a year.

The summer of the year I was 14, I got caught with a neighborhood school mate. To cover himself, he talked to all and any who would listen, conveniently glossing over his participation in the affair, and neglecting to add that we had been together for about 2 years. By the time school resumed that fall, word was out: I returned to face something for which I was not prepared: 'Nobody had ever said a bad thing about me in my life. It was hard to understand the viciousness. All of a sudden, nobody would touch me.' At 14, that's a little harder to take than at 37, but it was something that I would learn to live with for a good number of years afterisolated and alone. Suspecting that you were gay in 1954 was not exactly greeted as the best of news, nor something that you could go home and say--"Folks. I've got a problem and I need to talk to you."

While Anita Bryan: was attending high school, dreaming of stardom, I was trying desperately to keep myself

HIGH GEAR/APRIL 1978

afloat and get through each day, one at a time. From the first thing in the morning, it was an exercise in sheer guts to get up and GO to school where the risk of someone calling me 'queer,' was a daily reality, and there were often gangs of punks willing to beat the shit out of me' because i was gay.

If suspecting that you might be one of those 'awful creatures' at 14 in 1954 was not greeted with great celebration, the growing realization that it wasn't going away, that it wasn't going to go away, that it was, in fact, doing just the opposite, was even less of a blessed revelation at 16 in 1956.

I played in my last talent show in 1956, and, after what proved to be my last recital, my mother wanted to know why I was so uptight. Why couldn't I just relax as others did? And how in hell are you going to tell your mother, at 16, that the reason you are so uptight on stage is that you are living with the deadly fear that some day, somewhere, someone is going to stand up in an audience and yell "faggot," and there you

He's the hero-that's right,

the hero!!

THE ROCKY HORROR

would be, spotlighted for all to see as "human garbage." It was the same year that I won my medals in music, but I never went back.

For the next fifteen or so years, Anita Bryant and I took totally different paths: she forever seeking out the spotlight, always wanting the center of attention; I going quietly on my way, hoping that if I didn't call attention to myself I might get through another day being left alone. 'Don't rattle anybody; don't make any waves, and maybe nobody will notice you and you won't have to deal with it.' Withdrawal, I think, is the professional name for it.

Then we graduated, Anita and I, she to go off to pursue her career in the spotlight and I merely glad to be escaping the solitary torture that being in a school where everyone "knew" brought with it, looking forward to going to college-a different atmosphere; different people. A 'new' life, as it were.

But it didn't work that way. The day after I checked into the dorm, one of my roommates went down stairs to the desk to demand that his room be changed. He wasn't about to share a room with nie, and I was completely bewildered. I had assumed that the derision of the previous four years had been a result of the blabbermouth, and

did not understand at all what I had done that he was so upset about, that he should dislike me so intensely on sight that he would demand that his room be changed.

In its own way, it helped. I was rattled enough about the roommate affair that there were enough hints dropped to let me know why that roommate had demanded that his room be changed: I had unwittingly become so effeminate that I was an easily spotted gay wherever I went. Once I caught on, I immediately picked out a football player whose masculinity was not in question and even though I did not know what I had been doing wrong before, imitated his

(Continued from Page 9)

mannerisms completely and totally.

While I was 'relearning' to walk, talk, stand, and hold my hands and arms, Anita Bryant was parading across a stage to become Miss Oklahoma. She would go on to the Miss America pageant, and the following year my homosexuality would be driven home to me with the force of striking lightening. But at least I wasn't nellie.

Until about the age of 16, I had assumed that my homosexuality was a phase that would eventually fade out andta! ta! I would be like every other boy I was growing up with. By 16, I had developed a rather sinking suspicion that might not be true, still holding on to the hope that I was just slower in developing than other boys and that at some vague point in the future my sexual drive would change direction, perhaps at 18. And I hoped that God was just taking his time in answering my prayers to change that sexual orientation. I couldn't see why he would have forsaken me: I had never done anything seriously wrong; had always been a good boy; minded my parents; did my homework; played softball and football with the other boys. Surely he would not let me be one of those hideous' things--a faggot, a queer, a fruit all my life. there was just no reason for it.

was

At 19, I had still not found out why God hadn't done anything for me, but I did find out on a stifling summer Sunday that i was unquestionably gay, that it was not just a phase, and that it not just boys horsing around. It was real. It was serious. And it was a hellish apocalypse. When the realization came, my head reeled and I didn't go back to my dorm for hours because I didn't know what I was going to do, or say, or how I was going to act, or even whether my thunderstruck revelation showed, or whatever else might have been in there. In 1960, Anita Bryant's life was

Maybe Shapespeare, whom speaking out with pro-gay many consider our sexual viewpoints. And for many of us, brother, foresaw this turn of the fortuitous tide of events that events. But if he didn't, we do. leads to fortune is absence of Numerous ministers, rabbis, fear, guilt, anxiety and priests and other religious are frustration in our sexual life.

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