Introduction

I’m not sure when I first saw the iconic photo and video of notable homophobe Anita Bryant covered in cream from a pie, but the image has lived rent free in my head ever since, partially because the image itself is hilarious and partially because openly defying and ridiculing someone on a hate speech “crusade”—someone with the kind of power and money to shape legislation and policy—is brave. But how did this image come to be? Not just in the sense of who pied Anita Bryant, but why a pie? And where do we stand today on pieing?

Anita Bryant’s Greatest Hits

The legend of Anita Bryant looms like a homophobic cloud on the horizon of most U.S.-based queer folks’ collective consciousness, but it wasn’t until I went to the GLBT Historical Society and Museum in San Francisco that I got a better idea of what she actually did.(1) Anita Bryant was a singer, Miss Oklahoma 1958 and a brand ambassador for the Florida Citrus Commission in the 1970s; she currently runs her own ministry in Oklahoma. However, she is perhaps best known for her Save Our Children campaign, which she created while seeking to overturn a Dade County, Florida ordinance that banned discrimination based on sexual orientation in areas of housing, employment, and public accommodation.

To be clear: Bryant wasn’t just a person with garbage public opinion on gays, someone who made a homophobic gaffe, or even someone who participated in an anti-queer campaign—all of which she did, mind you—but also someone who literally started a fear-mongering campaign to repeal a rights-expanding ordinance. She specifically targeted gay and lesbian school teachers, drawing on contemporary homophobic rhetoric claiming gays and lesbians were recruiting and molesting children. (Sound familiar? It’s the exact language that bigots use to target transgender people today.) As a direct result of her actions, Dade County’s anti-discrimination ordinance was overturned, a decision which inspired several other nationwide campaigns to further strip queer folks of their rights.

Queer folks and allies rallied together on their own campaigns in response. From protests and rallies, to legislation, to educational campaigns, boycotts, and direct action, there are lots of ways to fight back–and the tactics of activists at the time were as varied and diverse as our community is.

Enter the pie.

I could recap the pieing of Anita Bryant, but honestly, this news article from the now defunct Gay Community News does it so delightfully that I’ve just included the whole thing here:

“A Sticky Face for Anita”

A Sticky Face for Anita (The Gay Weekly, 1977)

DES MOINES, IOWA — A gay activist hit singer Anita Bryant in the facewith a strawberry-rhubarb pie on October 14 as the anti-gay crusader  was holding a press conference here. Bryant had just received the keys to the city of Des Moines. The pie, thrown by Thom Higgins of Minneapolis who is associated with the Target Cities Coalition there, was a direct hit and covered the singer from forehead to chin.

Bryant’s first reaction was to exclaim, “At least it’s a fruit pie.” She knelt in prayer, asking God to deliver the pie-thrower from his “deviancy” and then began to cry. Both Bryant and her husband, Bob Green, agreed not to press charges against Higgins.

However, Patrick Schwartz, another Minnesotian who successfully pied that city’s anti-gay archbishop recently, charged that Green seized a pie which he was carryig and pied him in the face in the parking lot shortly after the Bryant incident. Schwartz, who called himself a “willing recipient,” noted that when he reminded Green that both he and his wife had urged that no action be taken against the pie-thrower, Green responded that “I must have been temporarily insane when I said that.” Schwartz asserted that the pieing of  Bryant was the fourth successful action by the group in recent months.

Other victims, in addition to Bryant and Archbishop John Roach, were anti-gay Minnesota Senator Marion Menning and Paul Rimarcik, who aided the Bryant campaign while head of the Big Brothers of Minneapolis. “There is nothing more humiliating than getting a pie in your face,” a very pleased Schwartz told GCN.

Zapping, Dilemma Action and Pie

Boycotts, picketing, and protest marches are all important methods of resistance and raising awareness, but zaps are a different tactic to achieve these goals. As Cassie Sheets writes in a Pride.com article, the term zap refers to a direct action used “to embarrass a public figure or celebrity while calling the country’s attention to [in this case] LGBT rights. Zaps were a departure from the peaceful picket lines of the 1960s. Instead, zapping aimed to make the personal as political for straight people as it already was for LGBT people.”

Of course, no singular zap can make the personal as political for a privileged person as it is for the people they are targeting or exploiting. Yet, zaps can do the following: 1. make people think twice about public hate speech, 2. give them a taste of what it feels like to be targeted (having stuff thrown at you, being cut off from giving public testimony), 3. have shame thrown on them. Literally.

Non-pie-related zapping has also included things like the Gay Activists Alliance chanting at New York Mayor John Lindsay when he attended opening night at the Metropolitan Opera and ACT’s Die Ins. More recent direct actions include the cast of Hamilton booing then-Vice President Mike Pence when he attended the musical in 2016, “no ghost cops” Halloween demonstrations at Seattle City Hall in 2022 and 2023, and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)’s shut-down of the Space Needle and I-5.

The “no ghost cops” demonstrations, where activists dressed up as ghosts and Ghostbusters dance to the Ghostbusters theme song at Seattle City Hall to protest city budget funding going to police salaries of positions the city has no ability to fill instead of badly needed social services, are actually a related category of direct action: dilemma action. Srdja Popovic’s and Sophie McClellan’s write in their 2020 book Pranksters vs. Autocrats: Why Dilemma Actions Advance Nonviolent Activism,

Dilemma actions…ideally put the opponent in a situation where it must either (a) grant a nonviolent movement’s demand, or (b) act in a way that sacrifices some of its own support and damages its public image. Historically, dilemma actions have proved to expand the political space and given movements small victories that help them build momentum and a record of success. Part of that success stems from being rooted in popular, easy-to-agree-with beliefs.

For example, Popovic discusses adding an element of humor to direct action:

We frequently and strategically used this specific form of dilemma action—laughtivism—to challenge and ridicule Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević and his unpopular wife, Mirjana Marković. Mocking and teasing created a dilemma for the police, who were faced with two unfavorable choices: (a) arrest harmless, popular young people who were making others laugh, along with a ton of pedestrians and random passersby who were enjoying their own participation in street theater; or (b) ignore the action, disobey an order to stop the “humiliation” of the dictator and his family, and thus encourage other groups and individuals to challenge the regime in a similar manner.

Pie isn’t the only way to make a powerful person or political party look ridiculous. Other ways include antifascist Dadaist art like John Heartfield’s works, political cartoons, or satirical depictions of fascist leaders as seen in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Humor has its role in resistance: if you can show that a powerful person is just human after all and capable of looking funny, it can strip away some of the pomp and fear from their highly cultivated image. Have you ever laughed over an unflattering photo of a contemporary politician eating a hot dog or ice cream cone? No one looks good eating a hot dog, and politicians: they’re just like us!

But why pie?

To take it back to pieing, pieing is a great dilemma action because 1. it feels like an extension of throwing rotten food, like tomatoes and eggs, at a theater or at politicians, but with the benefit of (depending on the pie and the thrower) causing humiliation  without bodily harm. A pie can’t be fast-pitched and has a greater surface area than a tomato, so you’re more likely to hit your target without hurting them, especially if you’re going for a cream pie, or its lighter-weight counterpart, an aluminum pie pan full of whipped cream or shaving cream.

Furthermore, 2. throwing a pie has been a comedic trope for over a century. In “Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy,” Donald Crafton writes that the Pie, the gag spectacle of early film comedies, interrupts the Chase, the narrative build up or diegesis. In the case of zapping, the pie (or food item of choice) interrupts the build up of hate speech or interrupts a powerful person’s day in an embarrassing and inconvenient way.

“Whether thrown as an act of comedy, protest, or celebration, this enduring appeal of a pie to the kisser lies in its ability to instantly dissolve the barriers between a king and a commoner (or tech billionaire and an anarchist. It’s impossible to react without looking even more ridiculous,” writes Tara Kenny in “Extremely Creamy and Incredibly Close: A Brief But Remarkable History of Pieing” (Cake Zine, Issue 3: Humble Pie). In this piece, Kenny briefly traces pieing’s roots in comedy: from vaudeville to early film like the Three Stooges and Looney Toons, all the way through to Nickelodeon’s pie-and-slime era in the 1990s. Wikipedia has a surprisingly robust entry listing instances of pieing in comedy (first pie on screen in the U.S.: 1909) and pieing in politics.

Pieing culturally ties the dilemma action to comedy. As Aron Kay, an activist known as “Pieman,” said, “Pieing is an essential tool for deflating the pomposity of these politicians and commentators.” For example, David Horowitz, a conservative so vile he has his own entry in the Southern Poverty Law Center, described his experience being pied: “These attacks are sinister. The person who throws a pie is saying, ‘I hate you. I don’t want you to speak.’ And it took away my dignity. When you’re lecturing, you’re supposed to have an authority. But a pie turns it into a food fight.”(2)  Which is precisely the point: when you’re driving hate against marginalized groups, this is an interruption.

We’ll get to milkshaking later, but Jazmine Sleman of Vice put it this way: “It’s a genius move reserved for some of the absolute worst people in our society, because there’s no good way to respond to a milkshaking: do nothing and you look like a twat, or fight back and look like you’re overreacting.”

In addition to making someone look ridiculous, getting pied delays the hate speech–it can ruin the speaker’s outfit and hairdo (especially a hairdo like Bryant’s, which couldn’t just be washed out). Want to change and shower and carry on? Fixing your face takes time away from the event. At the least, pieing has inconvenienced the person. At the best, the action shuts down their event and–at least for the time being–their rhetoric.

Also, the audacity of crying after you get pied when you’ve literally been campaigning to destroy the careers and lives of a marginalized group of people? Go to hell, Anita.

Other zaps

Milkshake era

2019 ushered in the brief but notable Milkshake Era, starting with Paul Crowther milkshaking Brexit leader Nigel Farage over “spouting bile and racism.” Milkshaking is particularly annoying because milkshakes are difficult to get out of a suit, and unlike a pie, a milkshake in a paper cup can be lobbed at a longer distance, making it slightly easier to get around security. Similarly, in the U.S, Amanda Kondrat’yev threw a red Slushee on Florida Representative Matt Gaetz to protest his involvement with the NRA (and politics in general) as Gaetz was leaving an event at a restaurant. Red food coloring is also difficult to remove quickly and the visual aligned with Kondrat’yev’s protest sign: “Gaetz – wipe the blood from your hands, A+ rating – NRA, save our kids vote Gaetz out in 2020.”

In both cases, the politicians retaliated legally, claiming assault: Gaetz pressed charges and Kondrat’yev served 15 days in jail; Paul Crowther paid a fine to Farage and did community service. Gaetz said of the incident, “Only incarceration allows me to reinforce to my supporters and opponents alike that Free Speech is welcomed—but assault will not be tolerated.” According to Vice, Kondrat’yev’s Twitter bio read, at the time of the trial in December 2019:  “’Matt Gaetz thinks cups are deadly weapons but guns are cool for school,’ a statement that is punctuated with an eye-roll emoji… and a cup with a straw.” We’ll see this unbalanced language come up again several times: accusing the pie/milkshake thrower of assault while the rhetoric and legislation of the powerful person who got pied is directly linked to queer people losing their jobs, rights, and even their lives. Let’s put a pin in that for a moment.

T4Tomato juice

In New Zealand in 2023, refugee and intersex activist Eli Rubashkyn threw tomato juice on famous hate-speech-spouting transphobe Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (aka “Posie Parker”–not to be confused with actress Parker Posey) and is now facing a lawsuit.

Rubashkyn told Stuff NZ: “The tomato soup…symbolizes this energy of fighting fascism. It’s got a working class association…. You cannot debate my existence…. My humanity is not up for debate…. Tomatoes are going to be the symbol of trans liberation.”

I don’t know if tomatoes will be the symbol of trans liberation, but the tomato juice harkens back to tomato throwing of yesteryear–and using red liquid is a good reminder that our blood is on her hands.

Conclusion

So what happened to Anita Bryant? Taking a pie to the face certainly humbled her, but the boycotts of Florida Citrus, declining to book her for speaking and singing engagements, and other comedians mocking her that actually tanked her career. She divorced in 1980 and filed for bankruptcy in 2002. (Apparently she’s also still alive, which was a surprise to me–that’s how far her star has fallen.)

Time and time again, I see this counterargument that “canceling” conservatives, transphobes, and politicians is cruel. For more on what “cancel culture” actually is (and is not), I highly recommend the podcast Cancel Me, Daddy as well as Michael Hobbes’s work on You’re Wrong About and elsewhere. But these fears about actual financial and social consequences for hatemongers are far older than this iteration of so-called “cancel culture.” Of Anita Bryant, Time Magazine hand-wringingly wrote in November 1977:

The feud began when Bryant led the crusade that last June caused the repeal of an ordinance in Miami’s Dade County banning discrimination against homosexuals in housing, employment and public accommodations. Since her victory, gay rightists have used Bryant as the symbol of what they must overcome in order to gain the full rights that are still denied them. Since Bryant promotes orange juice for the Florida Citrus Commission, some gays have been trying to persuade consumers to stop buying the product. The boycott has had only limited success nationally. While sales of orange juice are off about 10% from last fall, growers attribute this to higher prices, resulting from damages to the crop during last winter’s severe cold spell. So far, the commission has received some 85,000 letters about Bryant, backing her 3 to 1. This week the commission will meet in Lakeland, Fla., to decide whether or not to extend her contract as its $100,000-a-year sunshine spokeswoman….

Bryant claims that the homosexuals have pressured the networks into blacklisting her from talk shows—an unlikely charge, which the networks deny. She did, after all, appear on the Today show. Here and there, notably in the gay rights stronghold of California, campaigns have been attempted to keep her off the air. Though some religious stations in Texas have received increasing numbers of calls to let her sing out, no record company has bought the recent single that she recorded on her own. Its title: There’s Nothing Like the Love Between a Woman and a Man.

“We just want to get back to leading normal lives,” says Green. “This is no fun and games.” The gays, he contends, “are haunting us wherever we go. They won’t let her alone.”

Know Your Meme.

Here’s the thing: Anita Bryant could have left “the gays” alone. She didn’t have to start Save Our Children or work to get the anti-discrimination law repealed. She wouldn’t let queer people “lead normal lives.” She actively chose to use her platform for hate, to literally destroy other people’s lives, and she got what she deserved. Turns out deplatforming hate speech can actually work.

Fun fact: did you know the famous “a day without lesbians is like a day without sunshine” pride poster is a reference to Anita Bryant’s jingle “a day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine?” I love gaining context!!

A huge thank you to Internet Archives for preserving much of the 1970s news articles so I can access them for free online. Please note that pieing, etc., is considered assault in many states/countries, so keep yourselves safe.

I’d also like to thank my patrons for making this post, which was first published on Patreon, possible. In addition to supporting me with a monthly donation that goes to printing my zines and tabling costs, patrons provide me a safe, semi-private space to write about queer food both online as well as in print. If you’re interested in my work, you can join for as little as $2/month.

More importantly, you can donate to the Palestine Red Crescent Society here and demand your politicians call for a ceasefire in Gaza here.

Please note that homophobic comments on WordPress go straight to my junk folder in comments/email and will not be seen by me personally or published.

Notes

1.  In my defense, I’m an elder Millennial, not from Florida, and I had to read the 1970s chapter the night before the AP U.S. history exam because we didn’t cover it in class! Since graduating high school, my focus has been more on 20th century Japanese history.

2. The full quote is even worse: 

“A university is where students are supposed to hear opinions on all sides.” Horowitz saw the recent pie-ings as just a symptom of a larger decline of academia, which once stood for vigorous debate. “Larry Summers at Harvard raised an interesting issue [about women’s scientific aptitude] at a meeting and the feminists stormed out! They might have well have thrown a pie in his face. Now, instead of having a debate, we have Summers, who is a respected thinker, apologizing and backtracking.”

Horowitz used an old World War II cliché to describe his pie-ing: “I never saw it coming,” he said. “And it took away my dignity. When you’re lecturing, you’re supposed to have an authority. But a pie turns it into a food fight.”

Select Bibliography

“A Sticky Face for Anita.” Gay Community News. October 29, 1977.

“Anita Bryant – Save Our Children Campaign.” Archived footage from various news sources, 1977, by SuchIsLifeVideos. YouTube. 2014.

Blakemore, Erin. “Zapping: The boisterous protest tactic that ignited early LGBTQ activism.” National Geographic. June 14, 2021.

Castrodale, Jelisa. “The Guy Credited With Starting the “Milkshaking” Trend Feels Kind of Weird About it Now.” Munchies. Vice. December 12, 2019.

Chakrabortty, Aditya. “This Milkshake Spring isn’t political violence – it’s political theatre.” The Guardian. May 21, 2019.

Crafton, Donald. “Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy.” Ed. Wanda Strauven. The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam University Press, 2006.

Fieldstadt, Elisha. “Florida woman who threw drink at GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz sentenced to 15 days.” NBC. November 19, 2019. (Note: Kondrat’yev is a genderqueer femme who uses she/her pronouns.)

Kerr, Florence. “Protester who threw tomato juice over Posie Parker to face trial.” Stuff.co.nz. October 26, 2023.

Kunztman, Gersh. “Pie-Faced: Why throwing a pie at someone who deserves it is one of the most celebrated traditions in our so-called culture.” Newsweek. April 18, 2005.

Mayron, Sapeer. “The refugee and trans activist who threw tomato juice on Posie Parker.” Stuff.co.nz. March 26, 2023.

Novak, Sara. “Why Do People Throw Tomatoes?” How Stuff Works. February 19, 2021.

Paynter, Ben. “How Pie Became A Powerful Punchline In Political Provocation.” Fast Company. November 20, 2017.

Serhan, Yasmeen. “Why Protesters Keep Hurling Milkshakes at British Politicians.” The Atlantic. May 2019.

Sheets, Cassie. “5 Direct Action Zaps We Can Learn From in LGBT History.” Pride.com. June 20, 2016.

Sleman, Jazmine. “Dry Cleaners Explain How to Make a Milkshake Literally Destroy Your Clothes.” Vice. May 21, 2019.

“The Nation: The Gaycott Turns Ugly.” Time Magazine, November 21, 1977. Retrieved from the Internet Archive.

Tobin, Kay. “MARTY ROBINSON—MR. ZAP! Kay Tobin’s Magnificent Portrait.” Gay Today. 1998.