I'm coining the term Bryantism to explain the recent deluge of anti-gay legislation and all-around """discourse""", including the actions of deplorable troll hacks, that are infecting social media regarding LGBTQ issues as of late. This also applies to discussions around anti-trans legislation as it's basically cut from the same cloth. I'll define it in a minute, but since this is the Internet and no responsible troll ever reads anything to gain understanding before farting up a storm in the comments section, I shall have to provide context.
Bryantism comes from Anita Bryant, famous American singer and anti-gay rights activist who infamously claimed in the seventies that gay people were a "cult" who recruited children. When pressed on this statement, she said that gay people "can't reproduce, so they must recruit to keep their numbers". This is obviously hogwash, but Bryant's status as a award-winning singer gave her radical views visibility, and she capitalized on this through an organization called "Save Our Children, Inc." If that phrase sounds eerily similar to the stuff you've heard from the right in the past year or so, this is why.
The older gay folks in Florida remember her actions in Dade County, which ended up backfiring on her and sinking her career. She launched a nasty anti-gay campaign in 1977 through her hate-based organization to repeal a local ordinance that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The repeal passed with 69%, one of the few times the funny number wasn't nice.
While all this was going on, during a press conference that October, she was pied in the face by a gay rights activist. This well-deserved "pieing" was mocked by the press, and - most notably - Johnny Carson. His monologue on Bryant performed so well that he stuck with it night after night, exposing Bryant's bigotry on national television. This was so effective that record companies left her on read for the rest of her career. Even though Bryant had "won" in Florida, her reputation elsewhere cratered, branded as a wolf-cryer on national media. Faced with losing brand deals- the most notable one being the national spokeswoman for Florida Orange Juice - she persisted, and her campaign managed to get an anti-gay adoption law passed later in Florida that year. This would be her last true victory.
She would succeed in getting pro-gay laws repealed (albeit temporarily) in Minnesota and Oregon, but hit a brick wall of reality in California, where then-governor Jerry Brown and former governor Ronald Reagan publicly opposed Anita Bryant and her organization. After half a dozen legislative failures later, she faded from the public eye, declaring bankruptcy twice. In 2021, her granddaughter came out as lesbian. All of her legislative accomplishments fell apart by 2008, with the gay adoption ban in Florida being overturned. All of her work, felled with the flinging of a pie.
Now that I've got that out of the way: what the hell is Bryantism?
Bryantism is: "A political dehumanization technique which conflates LGBTQ+ members and their supporters with pedophilia and child abuse."
That's it. That's what we're dealing with.
So surely we should talk about Bryantism, right? Good luck! Because you're going to be harassed on every platform in which you try to by vile actors who have nothing else to do during the day but sniff their own gym socks from the clothes hamper. What Anita Bryant didn't have but the new Right-wing trolls do have is social media. Her grasp could only hold on to traditional terrestrial broadcast media, an op-ed or two in a handful of national newspapers willing to publish her, hate-filled newsletters, speaking tours with televangelists, and radio interviews - in an era where most media was ephemeral, local, trusted, and reliable, and 24-hour Cable News, The Drudge Report, and Rush Limbaugh's bullshit didn't exist. But that was then, this is now. We have to take that into account.
The current strategy the Right-wing trolls use on social media (especially Twitter) to quash any challenge to Bryantism is to harass folks who might be talking about it through "Quote Tweeting", a sort of call-out post which serves only to fill up a victim's mentions with hateful garbage. Because Twitter is a dumpster fire, users are ill-equipped to combat this harassment and are left swinging in the wind. The harassment is so bad that a significant percentage of people who support the LGBTQ+ community are afraid to state that they do so, which is deliciously ironic since the Right have been claiming for years that they are the "truly oppressed" folks on Twitter, going as far as to write to Republican politicians to pass legislation aimed at restricting Twitter from suspending their accounts. Accounts that they use to harass people. It'd be funny, if it wasn't so sad.
So how do we deal with this? Honestly, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ? The cultural climate that allowed Anita Bryant to thrive and self-destruct doesn't exist now, and there is no Johnny Carson equivalent to expose this infantile idiocy to the public. If anything is going to stick, it'll have to be local, personal conversations with people who were swept into a frenzy over this by right wing "influencers" who don't care about them, and will likely drop this entire thing for another election cycle as soon as it doesn't get more Republicans in office.
If you're going to talk about this online, use a platform in which you have the most control and can write an actual essay, including the exhaustive context, and not just a microblog like Twitter where trolls can cherry pick a tweet, strip it, and beat you over the head with it. If there's one thing a troll hates more than anything else, it's reading. Hell, make the post a mile long where they can't say a goddamn thing other than "didn't read lol". I have no patience with a troll who can't clap back with anything substantial because he doesn't have the attention span to read and actually learn something.
Then again, I have pronouns in the bio on Twitter so wtf do i know amirite?
