Thom L. Higgins, Anita Bryant and the Most Famous Creampie in Herstory
Let’s face it, we’ve all dreamt of delivering a pie straight into somebody’s face! Charlie Chaplin had a fetish for it, you know. And that’s not a euphemism. I do mean the slapstick sort. His preference was lining young girls up and sexually harassing them with custard. Christ! And I think my search history, which includes things like “army doctor physicals” and “real men don’t have hair”, mortifying. Oh well, whatever floats your boat!
The Little Tramp would approve of today’s subject. Anita Bryant, the anti-gay campaigner and erstwhile citrus spokeswoman. Chaplin would’ve relished the sight of that shellac-haired zealot – humiliated in a flurry of gunge and phallic bananas by activist Thom L. Higgins in 1977. A messy comeuppance that gave us the immortal quip: “At least, it’s a fruit pie”. (“Why do you think homosexuals are called fruits?” she proselytised to Playboy “it’s because they eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of life, which is male sperm.”) Knowing how I would inevitably humanise the pie-ee – Ms. Bryant being a kind of Annette Funicello-cum-Tammy Faye Messner, whose self-sabotage reduced her to performing in trailer parks – I’m going to tell it from the perspective of the pie-er.
Thomas Lawrence Higgins was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin in 1950. Suspended as a freshman at the University of North Dakota, he decamped to Minnesota and became a protégé of the charismatic Jack Baker. (Baker and husband Michael McConnell were famously the first same-sex couple to wed without having their marriage license revoked.) Throwing himself into The Cause, Higgins was enraptured by notions of homosexuals marrying and adopting children when such ideas were in their infancy. Ditto the need for trans individuals to be protected in legislation. Fiercely committed to these radical principles, Higgins took the slightly more affected “Thom” as his sobriquet.
Higgins’s mentor had been the first openly gay president of a student union (a victory J.B. attributed to the sophistication of his University of Minnesota Law School colleagues: “Put yourself in my shoes,” ran campaign ads, showing the suave beefcake in kitten heels). The young attorney led a ragtag bunch of mischief makers in the North Star State – and fittingly for someone whose name was “Baker”, embraced whimsical pie-throwing as their preferred form of resistance.
The state capital, Minneapolis, was the first city in America to pass a non-discrimination ordinance against gays in 1975 thanks to such leaders. When Higgins was fired from his job as a radio announcer, thirty members of the group FREE, “Fight Repression of Erotic Expression”, picketed his employer. Thom Higgins wasn’t just “Pie Man”, Homer Simpson’s flan-flinging vigilante (though more than Ms. Bryant received their just desserts: the archbishop of Minneapolis-St. Paul, John R. Roach, was another “victim”). He typified the fight against workplace discrimination.
Speaking in 2022, Michael McConnell said: “The term ‘gay pride’ was invented here. Thom Higgins had been raised in the Catholic Church and decided to come up with a means of countering negative energy. So he paired two sins: gay and pride. That language was transformative. It is one of those things that opened the door and moved people forward”. But as queer liberation came to prominence, so did the tired tropes our community faces to this day. In Dade County, Florida (it’s always Florida), Anita Bryant promulgated grooming slurs; hocking fear, hatred and orange juice. “Save Our Children!”. After finding success in DeSantisland, Bryant took the show on the road – and it was at a pitstop in Des Moines, Iowa that she met her maker. Sorry, “baker”.
It was October 1977. One month before Harvey Milk’s historic election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. (“In the weeks before and after Dade County,” Milk noted “more was written about homosexuality than during the total history of mankind!”) Higgins and Baker were keenly aware of this, placing tongue-in-cheek ads in the Miami Herald, urging gay Floridians to relocate to Minnesota: to “trade a rotten palm for a thriving pine”.
“We love you as a person, but we can’t stand the garbage you spout,” Higgins shouted as he pushed pastry into Anita Bryant’s maw. She was already a target of ridicule: lampooned by drag queens up and down the land. But her media entourage recorded the pieing forever. Nearly half a century later, the second Ms. Bryant lost all credibility still attracts millions of viewers on YouTube – the moment Thom Higgins, literally, turns her into a clown. Anita Bryant was damaged goods. She lost everything from her sponsorship with the Florida Citrus Commission on down. But her appalling views continued to dominate – especially once the evangelical cohort got into bed with the Republican Party. Unlike Ms. Bryant’s ramshackle and unsophisticated efforts, her bigotry is now peddled far more adeptly online.
After retraining as a nurse in the early eighties, Thom Higgins died in 1994. A Pride hero! Bryant is solely remembered, as Lina Lamont lamented in Singin’ in the Rain, as the woman who got whipped cream in the kisser.