no hot just mess

October 14, 1977, Anita Bryant is pied for her antigay bigotry at a press conference in Des Moines, IA.

It was 40 years ago today…

Never gets old.

40 years on and it still is gratifying

Anita’s still alive and kicking and being anti-gay. Thom Higgins, who threw the pie when he was 27 – and was poetically from Beaver Dam – passed away 17 years later at 44. Info on his life is here. The pie throwing was a big deal. In an age before the internet let gays feel connected, and long before ACT UP, the pie showed small pockets of gays that we could fight back.

it showed that gays were human beings, who might be in the room with you, that you had been accepting as being equals and treating as people. you didnt suspect them as bieng gay, why should you treat them different after? do they become less human after finding out? i mean, its almost like you just found out they have an oppinion on your bullshit

She was “pied” on TV.  All across the country, people got to see proof that the LGBT community weren’t going to just sit there and take it.  People who thought they had no choice but to stay silent saw a horrible woman get humiliated on live TV.  

One of the best moments in television history.

A comedy in two acts

there’s a large grey area between “this creator is a misogynist/homophobe/racist” and “this creator did not fully think through the implications of some of their writing choices” and it would be nice if people would stop to assess where in the scale between those two cases their criticism applies, instead of going for a hard zero on the first option all the time

Gaga was publicly criticized, called everything from a fraud to an attention seeking whore, her authenticity was questioned on a regular basis, so many people were quick to jump to say “she’s exploiting the gay community” and a song that started off just about herself and her fans and as an answer to interviewers who kept asking her about the way she dressed was over-analysed, critiqued and torn apart. After Jamey Rodemeyer’s suicide she spent time with Harvard experts studying and researching bullying and launched her own youth empowerment foundation named after her album, Born This Way. She has never backed down with the discussion, awareness and support to this day unlike so many other pop stars, even throughout everyone trying to put her down and the Russian government threatening her with imprisonment. During her 2012 tour she faced mobs of religious protesters in countries all over the world and was still defiant and truthful even risking arrest and jail several times yet somehow people still question the credibility and legitimacy of her activism. 

I cannot respect homophobia. 

I cannot respect hatred or intolerance towards the gay community.