HIGH GEAR/APRIL 1978

SHE LOVES US

generally gliding along much as she had envisioned it. In 1960, my entire concept of life, of my life, and my life plans was wrenched in directions I did not understand or recognize. If living with, but not really believing, the suspicion was bad, you can double the effect with certain knowledge. All I knew was that I was going to have to re-make my life. (The shrink at about this time said "$20,000; 3 years; and no guarantee. I've had limited success with 3 gays out of 25." And he strongly suggested that he would be of more value to me in helping me to live with it than cure it.)

At 27, Anita Bryant signed a $1,000,000 contract with the Florida Citrus Commission. A year later, I sat myself down and had a long talk with myself. I had been rebelling against my homosexuality for nearly 20 years and nothing had changed. I was getting a little too old to keep running myself into the ground over something that I had not been able to change, that God had not changed, and that the shrinks could not change, either. It was time to stop fighting it and learn to live with it as best I could.

At 31 I wrote my first article for a gay paper and was quickly labeled a 'political' writer.

I wasn't paying much attention when the battle for the Miami gay rights ordinance first began. With some working knowledge of Florida's nearmedieval juvenile laws, I had extracted the presumption that we could not win in Miami. Nor am I a fan of Anita Bryant's. nothing personal: I just don': like that nasal twang to her voice, have never bought an Anita Bryant record or attended an Anita Bryant concert and paid little attention to her commercials or career.

Until March 11, 1977. Wr.en I arrived home from work that night, the young man I had been dating for a while was on the phone to his parents, in utter agony, trying to explain to

them the pains of growing up gay. Anita Bryant's name cropped up over and over again, and as I listened to his conversation I was thrown with a shock back some 15 years to a time when it could have been me on that phone. Nothing had changed. He, at 22 in 1977 was going through the same hellish nightmare that I, at 19 in 1960, had gone through. His parents understood nothing of what he was saying: I understood it all too well. I've been there, and lived to tell about it. There are others that I've known over the years who didn't live to tell about it. I've had it Anita Bryant's way; I grew up in Anita Bryant's way; I know the effects, the terror, the anguish, the solitude and horror that come with Anita Bryant's way. And it was as much the re-living of that earlier anguish and terror in myself as for him that I knew I was going after Anita Bryant.

Well, Anita Bryant won Miami, and immediately branched out to

conquer the country-something I predicted later in the quote that was used in The New York Times, but not quoted by them. Her campaign has had the full attention of the national media, while we can get no coverage of the other side. She has called us "human garbage," and claims not to understand, our response. She has claimed not to "hate homosexuals," but to "love nomosexuais," it being the "sin of homosexuality" that she hates, boggling the mind, because you aren't until you do and if you don't, you aren't. If she hates one, she hates the other. She has used every emotionally loaded scare tactic in the book, even to claiming that she can't abandon her children to become homosexuals, when in fact if they are going to be homosexual, they already are.

Richard Heakin was murdered in Tucson coming out of a gay bar and his murderers went free because they were "good boys."

was

Robert Hillsborough murdered in San Francisco by a

THE MANHATTAN TRANSFER

TRANSFER: PASTICHE

By Darrell Mansarde Pas-tesh' n: a composition (as in literature or music) made up of selections from different

works. (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

On their latest album, Pastiche, The Manhattan Transfer are at

gang of punks screaming "faggot." Even without getting into the fray against Anita Bryant, it is a safe bet that my life is in far more danger than hers ever has been, yet we are continually inundated with her claims of death threats.

Anita Bryant claimed to have the pipeline to God that told her the California drought was a punishment for our state's tolerance of homosexuals. Now that the drought is over, we haven't heard from Anita Bryant what God has said about his change of heart.

Anita Bryant laments her lack of bookings as being a vicious attack on her and her beliefs, never once thinking that she. might be encountering merely a genuine disgust for her and her beliefs, a revulsion at her attempts to enslave people to her brand of salvation. In an interview on KGO-TV in San Francisco on February 22, 1978, she implied that she was not getting anywhere with a lot of government officials, stating that "this thing is bigger than we would ever have believed," implying that it is homosexuality that is so widespread and in control.

And that is in perfect keeping with Anita Bryant's conviction that gays have sprung, Athenalike, from some unknown sinister source as full blown "homosexual militants," with no mother, no father, and no childhood. With an estimated 20,000,000 gays in the United States, there are 20,000,000 mothers of gays, as well as 20,000,000 fathers of gays, or an absolute minimum of 60,000,000 Americans who have had to deal with the issue of homosexuality and homosexuals at very close range. Most of us have brothers and sisters, and that figure spirals upward to 80,000,000 to 100,000,000 --half the population. Add in aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces. nephews, and the number of Americans who have someone gay close to them reaches near the total population. And, while I their best. No album of recent release has more to offer than these consistently refined vocal and musical arrangements. The selections immediately whisked me back about 35 years. Songs like "Four Brothers," which opens the album, give the air of being in a New York City night club back in the '40's. From there we travel to the Old West, where Alan Paul tells us about his "Gal in Calico." Janis Siegel and Laurel Masse' follow Alan out West by singing about "Love for Sale.":

"If you want the thrill of love, I've been through the mill of love, old love, new love, any kind but true love"

Sounds familiar, you dare say? Cole Porter wrote it! Laurel whirls us to the other side of the world in "Je Voulais," a Parisian torch song. If all this globehopping isn't enough for you. Alan's back singing "On a Little

By Donald Cameron Scot

undoubtedly have some relatives who would gleefully support Anita Bryant against "those homosexuals," there are others who would stomp her through the floor before they would let Anita Bryant get near

me.

Ironically, it has been Anita Bryant who took the lead in establishing that opposition to her, for with her campaign of hatred and bigotry, more and more gays have come out to fight against her, and in coming out, have put relatives directly in the conflict with them having to make a choice between supporting Anita Bryant or a son or daughter, or a brother or sister. What Anita Bryant may be running up against is nothing more than the friends and relatives of gays who are no more willing to support her venomous than I am. Yet Anita Bryant would claim that my mother was "vicious" should my mother's concern for me outweigh her support for Anita Bryant and her campaign.

Anita Bryant earns $100,000 a year and lives in a 27-room mansion in Miami Beach. As much as she "hates to do it," she nonetheless charges the religious organizations that now make up her audience, to try to maintain herself in a life-style that needs an annual income upwards of $300,000. Anita Bryant makes money from her "beliefs." On the other hand, the time and labor that went into the article that The New Times

quoted was my own, after work. And, I paid for the copying and the postage to mail that article to the Gay Community News in Boston. There's a shyster in here somewhere. See if you can find her.

And now, Anita Bryant wants to put me in a cage. Because I won't help her pay for it, build it, crawl into it, lock the door and give her the key, I've acquired another label, by, of all damned things. "The Kingdom and The Power," as being "vicious," for I can find no other reason that George Vecsey quoted me as he

Street in Singapore." (Talk about the '40's revisited!) Then Janis returns to dedicate "In a Mellow Tone" to Ella Fitzgerald with love. My physical being was exhausted from the pure force of energy transmitted by this lineup...and that's only side one!

Side two treats us a little more tenderly. Instead of traveling around the world in song, we explore love's many emotions....from true love to love's loss, from wistfulness to love's languish, and returning again to the loss of love. (Of par ticular note on side two is the old Supremes' standard, "Where Did Our Love Go?" Suprisingly well done, at that.)

The Manhattan Transfer has an uncanny ability to measure up to whatever possibilities a song has to offer. They especially excel in the songs of times past. With Pastiche, they deliver a tour de force

Page 11

did other than to point out the veracity of Anita Bryant's claim, and to elicit sympathy for poor Anita who doesn't "understand". all the "viciousness" directed at her. It's something new for me, and I'll have to make some adjustment--I have a reputation for being one of the most easygoing guys around. But at least that epithet is easier to handle at 37 than "faggot" was at 14, 16, 19, or even 28.

And if that is, indeed, vicious, then I am not likely to change any time soon. I have spent nearly twenty-five years of my life trying to salvage, whatever dignity, honor respectability, and self-esteem I could in the face of the "viciousness" directed at me and not to get bitter about what has happened. I've done pretty well with that, and as I read back over this, dredging up all the that painful memories brought me to The New York Times, I realize that I am not bitter, but I am pissed by the waste. I am not about to sit quietly by while some Biblethumping aging beauty queen that I never particularly liked anyway stuffs oranges in her sweater and tramps around the country lamenting the fact that she just may have to learn to live on only $100,000 a year since she can't make much more than that on the backs of all that "human garbage" she is trying to bury alive, and some creep sits in Florida announcing to the press that he's not worried about an orange juice boycott because "Lesbians and queers don': eat oranges anyway."

Anita Bryant claims to have been made for this battle, and wanted to be the symbol for it: She can damned well be the target for the opposition. The woman is rapidly approaching a position where she is to be pitied, and I'll have no trouble with that-right after she is totally disarmed.

Until then, I don't drink Florida orange juice, and I don': drink. Coors beer. Both for the same reason.

AMERICA NEEDS YOU NOW

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