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Last night on YouTube I watched a Canadian millennial couple react to the 1980 absurdist comedy film Airplane! As with the many of the reactors who have engaged with this piece of silly cinema, much of the chaotic comedy still worked 46 years later, and some were too fixed to their time and place to have any meaning to people born more than a decade after the movie’s release. It is a strange quirk of comedy that the ‘Jim never has a second cup of coffee at home’ gag is rewarded with laughs because of the strangeness of the spouse’s thoughts, and without any context to the Yuban coffee commercial it is lampooning.

While references to Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan spark some recognition in younger viewers, and the use of serious dramatic actors in farcical skits has little to no impact on those who are watching this movie from the last century, this is not the issue that is sticking with me today. One target of the filmmaker’s sharp critique stirs no reaction and is nothing but a forgotten cultural relic, Anita Bryant.

Anita Jane Bryant, beauty pageant queen, singer with multiple top-ten hits, and ubiquitous citrus spokeswoman for much of her career, was a popular but not stellar figure in the American cultural landscape, often traveling with the legendary Bob Hope on tours to support and entertain the Armed Forces, and finding herself welcome at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions. She hosted parades, performed at half-time shows for the Super Bowl, and even at the funerals of Democratic presidents, and yet today her name, except for whom politics is a passion or who either in or adjacent to the gay community, is almost entirely forgotten.

In 1977, Dade County, Florida, passed the first ordinance in the nation that prohibited discrimination in housing based upon sexual orientation, protecting gay men and women from prejudicial treatment when it came to renting homes, igniting the ire of Bryant, a fire that would consume her career and, in the end, erase her from cultural memory.

Bryant successfully led a campaign that overturned the ordinance, but that victory raised the issue to the wider culture, and while gay rights were not an unknown thing before Bryant’s crusade, (Stonewall was 8 years earlier,) her actions made the cause much more salient to the national conversation. Sponsors dropped her from their advertising campaigns, networks rescinded offers to host weekly television programs, and her career over the next decade functionally ceased to exist. In order to legally allow bigoted people to refuse homes to those whom she despised, Bryant self-immolated to the point that by the time of her death in 2024 she had ceased to be known by the wider public at all.

Both sides waged the political fight in Dade County with ferocity, Bryant deploying the slanderous, vile label that gay men preyed upon children to ‘recruit’ new homosexuals, while some among the fight for rights resorted to political violence. Yes, that violence was shaving cream pies to her face, but it remained political violence, and in my opinion, one only employs violence when no other path remains open and the physical threat from the dominant political actors is very real. While a direct line cannot be drawn from these pie attacks to the January 6th insurrection, the indirect lineage is there.

Anita Bryant’s obscurity is, in the end, the best of all possible victories over her bigoted political warfare.