ENDING ANITA — How Two Key West Bartenders Won Gay Marriage For Florida
I wrote ENDING ANITA for Aaron Huntsman and Lee Jones whose marriage equality case was the first to win in Florida. Now that it is published — you’ll find it on Amazon — I see that it is really about LGBT activism, assimilation and our new post-gay world.
Why did I write ENDING ANITA? As a journalist, I choose to celebrate people who do good things. When I met Aaron and Lee at Island House in Key West, I saw that they were gentlemen who might easily be swallowed up and hidden by their own headlines. That would have been a loss for Florida and LGBT young people who need role models for their activism.
I don’t talk much about Anita Bryant in ENDING ANITA, because I have never been able to interview her, and because I want to shrink her legacy rather than magnify it. She is a former beauty queen, former singer and former face of the Florida Citrus Commission who opposed gay rights in 1977 Miami by inciting fear and panic in the hearts of religious people. We were not her only target. She fought anything that didn’t fit her definition of holy, and she protested anything she felt was scandalous. Sound familiar? Today there are “Control Queen” versions of Anita Bryant at work in politics, still trying to do the same damn thing. They say they want “religious freedom” but they really want to put their noses in your bedroom and direct your actions. Like little forest fires, they have to be stomped out before they can grow to cause serious damage. It took a few decades to extinguish the rage of Anita Bryant, and we still have to watch those embers.
What did I really want to say by writing ENDING ANITA? Organized LGBT activism, like our major political parties, needs to be recast to address the ongoing battle for gay rights. The victory of Aaron and Lee is a blueprint for new gay activism. The newest LGBT generation has just been jolted awake by the horrific presidential election. They are scrambling to mobilize in new ways because the old ways have failed. When the newest generation of queer kids reads this book, they will know what to do and we can rest a little bit easier about our future. That is why I hope their friends and families buy ENDING ANITA for them!
Writing this book was a revelation about the future of gay culture! My preface to ENDING ANITA is called “The Death of Fabulous.” In it, I talk about going to Washington DC with Aaron and Lee for the Supreme Court hearings. That is where I discovered that my sense of being gay was very different from theirs. I had to come to terms with this. While I believe we should have equal rights, I think it leads to a day when there will be no “gay” and no “straight,” a day when we will all be just points on the full spectrum of fluid personal choice. I worry a lot about assimilation. I don’t want to look and act like everyone around me. I don’t want to fit in, but I can feel it happening. Writing ENDING ANITA helped me embrace the inevitable post-gay future. At least, I worry less about it, having met Aaron, Lee and their friends in Key West.
https://www.amazon.com/Ending-Anita-Bartenders-Marriage-Equality/dp/0692741887/
