With Anita Bryant's recent death, I've started realizing how much of a thing it probably is for queers to celebrate the demise of famous enemies of our community. There's even a podcast that's ironically called Respect the Dead, where a group of queers and queer allies bash famous homophobes, transphobes, etc that have passed on. Aside from this premise for a podcast being generally amusing and maybe even cathartic for those of us who felt targeted by these figures, it seems to serve an... educational function too.
First, to talk about known homophobic figures, one usually needs to address basic biographical information about the person: when they were born, what they did with their lives, what kind of mark they made to earn their tar and feathering as a bigot, etc. When subjects, like Anita, have gained notoriety and infamy during what would be classified as a historic era, biographies should include the politics and culture of that time period to contextualize this person and their actions within a previous zeitgeist. Since things like social progress aren't quite as linear as some would like to assume, it's generally important to note how even though times in the past were likely more unwelcoming and ignorant of queer people and queer life, not everyone who lived in a period of time deserves to be remembered as an enemy to queer people. Only the ones who went out of their way to hurt our community and became notorious deserve this kind of hatred from us. So, there's a bit of a history lesson when queers in the know share the legacy of horrible people from previous eras.
Something that I just realized is how even though many gays and allies made a thing about acknowledging Anita Bryant's death, I don't think that many people who'd agree with Anita's politics even knew who she was. From my perspective, I've learned about her through various queer outlets, I assumed that some people in the queer community would know who she is and many wouldn't, and I sort of figured that there would be some people out there who'd be sympathetic towards her, either because of or in spite of her legacy as a homophobe. That perceived latter group wouldn't be people that I know or would associate with, but would likely be more on the conservative side of the spectrum, think that the anti-gay things she did were for a good cause, and might be offended by the queer community's endorsement of her death. However, I'm not sure if these people even exist.
Sure, there are likely people who generally think that nobody's death should be celebrated. There could be older people who remember Anita from the 70s and might either like her for the conservative culture war she waged at the time or even just what she did as a singer and beauty queen. There's definitely people who endorse homophobia and anti-gay actions. But I don't know if today's homophobes necessarily study and look up to homophobes of yesterday, especially those who faded into obscurity and weren't like presidents or prime ministers or something. Realizing this made me think about why this is the case.
My first speculation is that, well, most bigots are ignorant and don't know or care about history. Just like how ignorant people don't care for things like social progress, they also don't seem to like education; intellectualism; the humanities; the idea of women, lower class people, or minorities having the same access to education that white people, men, and the higher classes have; etc. A lot of this is rooted in the upper classes gatekeeping education in order to prevent the lower classes from reaching financial and intellectual autonomy. There's also religion baked into this with the ideas that modern medicine and technology are instruments of the devil and/or the fear that knowing more about the rest of the world and different cultures will make you more "worldly," thus further from God and probably closer to leftist ideologies. There's also the revisionist issue of people wanting to protect modern people of privilege from history's harsh realities that their ancestors contributed to the oppression of other people (via things like the hysteria about critical race theory). So, it isn't too much to assume that conservative people with bigoted ideologies can be fairly ambivalent to history.
My other speculation, which can relate to the prior, is that most bigots don't want to see themselves as bigots because they like assuming that they are on the right side of history and cultural ideology. For many things that people take for granted today, past conservatives probably had a problem with it and tried putting a stop to it. It's almost comical to see how there were always people who tried to reject different kinds of progress in the past as someone from the future, who is likely a product of that progress. And I don't think that people ever see themselves as opponents to progress when they're actively doing just that.
Aside from being on the wrong side of history, since most bigots don't like acknowledging that systemic inequalities and prejudices exist or that they're a problem, the idea of commemorating past bigots (especially ones that faded away decades ago) contradicts the denial of inequalities because bigotry of the past is usually less subtle and there's nothing else about prior bigots that a modern bigot can identify with. Since someone like Rush Limbaugh stayed relevant until he died a few years ago, people today likely commemorate him for the work he did over the span of several decades just as well as people bashed him for the horrible things he said about the queer community. Since he was around in modern times, people in 2025 likely remember him and can, somehow, plausibly admire him without seeming like a complete asshole. But if a modern person makes the effort to memorialize a bigot from another era, plausible deniability from having bigoted ideologies might be further out of reach because what else is there to like about that person?
A big part of having bigoted ideologies today involves being hidden in plain sight. For example, the political right's embrace of Kanye West was short lived because he outright praised Hitler and said the quiet parts out loud, which made agreeing with him a social liability. It's harder to say that you aren't racist, homophobic, antisemitic, etc. or argue that any of these aren't real issues when you're confronted with overt examples of these things. It puts one in a position to either disagree with these ideologies and condemn people with those ideologies, or admit to having bigoted ideologies as well.
This is why even though Pure Flix movies (like the God's Not Dead series) usually don't have gay characters or show how Christian protagonists of these movies would likely interact with queer characters or queer issues. They simply can't endorse queer people, even Christian ones, but they also can't depict Christians being homophobic, so they just seem to avoid anything queer. However, they do cite court cases that involved queer discrimination by Christians as examples of attacks on Christianity or God in the end credits. This demonstrates how modern Christians feel as if they're being oppressed by the mere existence of gay rights and queer people. By doing this, they don't have to defend or explain any depictions of queerness or homophobia, but can still rhetorically push a homophobic agenda.
Another reason why I think that bigots don't remember past bigots is simply because there are plenty of famous bigots that are still alive today. Unfortunately, people with bigoted ideologies today don't have to search that far or wide throughout history to find figures they'd identify with politically. They don't have to look to the past to see what people like them have done to marginalized communities when they have modern figures who do those things right in front of them. And there are plenty of bigoted public figures to choose from, from politicians to comedians, from people on mainstream news outlets (FOX News) to people on more niche conservative outlets (The Daily Wire, conservative social media, etc).
This brings me to the other educational component of "respecting the dead," teaching uninformed queers to never forget what the country, the church, or other bigots have done to us before because they can always do it again. Homophobes or even some dense people who aren't part of the queer community might classify this simply as whining. They'd say things like, "I don't understand why these gays are so angry! Aren't they happy that gay marriage has been legalized? What else could they possibly want?!" But as we're all witnessing, history has a terrible habit of repeating and nothing in the US has convincingly showed queer people in this country that our community and our rights are safe. So, the best thing we can do is protect ourselves and our community, as well as remind each other of what we want, who our enemies are, and what these people did to earn enemy status. Even though the queer community couldn't do much to end the homophobic culture war that Anita Bryant started, we at least made sure that most of the people who remember her remembered what she did and knew to hate her.
Learn about Anita's homophobic legacy on Contrapoints here: https://youtu.be/EmT0i0xG6zg?si=Anxgz5gZZdUeJzYX
@RespecttheDeadPodcast can be found on Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcast
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