Just what is going on in Bricktown?

 

BELLY OF THE BEAST

March 14, 2009

Special Report

By James Miko

Special Supplement on Gary Reasons Available Here

Tribal Elders Have Come Forward Accusing Dry/Anoatubby of Corruption and Brutal Treatment of Indian Children - Read Story - 
 

PREFACE

 

Hidden on the fourth floor of a restored building in the Bricktown entertainment district of Oklahoma City, two stories directly above a Hooters restaurant franchise, is the Anita Bryant Ministries International, Inc. The organization quietly keeps its physical location of 115 E. California secret from the public and only provides a post office box for contact, but Gossip Boy was able to ferret out the legendary gay civil rights opponent and stage an undercover operation to expose her plans to wage a new battle against homosexuals.

 

The 68-year-old Bryant is of course known for her Florida based anti-gay crusade of the late 1970’s where she assisted in banning gay adoptions in Florida, caused gay civil rights overturned in cities like Wichita, Kansas, and tried to have homosexual teachers and their supporters fired in California. About six years ago, after fleeing a number of states under suspicious circumstances, Bryant settled back in her native Oklahoma. Recently, she’s been endorsing columnists writing about her seventies crusade after years of distancing herself from the anti-gay stance that ruined her entertainment and product spokesperson careers. As it turns out, Bryant feels 2009 is the year to embrace her controversial past and once again become a general in the national hate mission.

 

While operating within Bryant’s inner sanctum and gaining the confidence of her husband Charlie Dry, who operates a business that houses the ministry, this reporter soon discovered there was more than one story to be told here. A deepening investigation would see Anita Bryant’s husband threaten to have this reporter killed, as the former NASA employee and aviation official came to understand that information he believed was being shared with a potential business connection was in fact being given to an undercover reporter out to expose his wife.

 

Before starting this investigation an alternative identity was established, which showed this reporter as being an employment official for the Caddo Nation, who had been referred to Charlie Dry by Chickasaw Nation Lt. Governor Jefferson Keel. Having already done substantial research over the married couple, there was prior knowledge of Dry working closely with some tribes in the state, most notably the Chickasaw Nation, and it was known that Dry was lifelong friends with the governor and lieutenant governor of that Southeastern Oklahoma tribe. To enhance the undercover identity a thorough schooling of Chickasaw tribal officials and operations was obtained in order to “name drop”. The identity was assumed in order to get into the GPS area that houses Bryant’s ministry where I’d then indicate to Dry an appreciation for Anita Bryant and request an introduction to the elusive character.

 

A side product of that assumed identity saw Dry’s increasing interest at obtaining influence with the Caddo Nation…and it saw him hint at bribes - were certain favors made available.

 

 

Events turned sinister as this reporter soon realized he was not just in the middle of an anti-gay ministry, but that Bryant’s offices were in the midst of Dry’s Government Procurement Services LLC, which isn’t everything it appears to be, but is more likely an influence peddling operation he runs with shadow partner J. C. Watts, a former U.S. congressman and potential Oklahoma gubernatorial candidate. Then it was discovered the entire fourth floor of 115 East California was filled with defense contractors involved in the machinations of war, such as Long Wave Inc. Down below tourists walked along the water canal or ordered chicken wings in a restaurant, while just above them secretive merchants of death were networking with Native American tribal officials and using them as minority-preference fronts in order to obtain multi-million dollar contracts with the United States Department of Defense.  

 

The oft-times ditzy Miss America runner-up from Barnsdall, Oklahoma, had gone for the day and left this reporter alone in the lair with Charlie Dry, a soon-to-be-identified former pro football player, the war profiteers and the brawny men that do their bidding. That was not the best time for the increasingly surreal operation to start falling apart.     

 

The ruse used by this reporter proved quite effective for awhile in gathering intelligence on both Bryant and Dry’s operations. There is indeed a new anti-gay crusade planned by Bryant. At some point, however, the undercover operation began unraveling as a once trusting Dry became suspicious, which would soon lead into an uncomfortable confrontation where he twice threatened to have me killed.  It had reached the point where the undercover initiative was at an end and it was time to leave.  

 

That’s when the Men in Black showed up. 

Note: Growing concern over death threats made by Anita Bryant’s husband Charlie Dry have forced additional personal security measures to be taken by Gossip Boy staff, including this story’s reporter being forced to send his son to an undisclosed out-of-state location for fear of exposing him to a potentially dangerous situation. Gossip Boy is publishing the results of this extended investigation as quickly as possible, so that the names and actions of those involved lie in the hands of the larger public.

 

PART ONE: THE RISE, FALL, AND RESURRECTION OF ANITA BRYANT

 

 

On June 21, 1977 32-year-old Robert Hillsborough lay feet away from the doorstep of his San Francisco home bleeding to death from fifteen stab wounds inflicted by a young man that stood over him screaming “FAGGOT! FAGGOT! FAGGOT!” According to an eyewitness account, one of Robert’s four assailants looked at him and said, “This is for Anita Bryant.”

 

First blood had been drawn and the mother of that fallen gay man would soon step forward and point an accusing and condemning finger at the Florida Sunshine Woman.

 

31 years later…

 

On December 10, 2008, Anita Bryant stood looking out her husband’s office window staring towards the Harkins Cine-Capri movie theater in Oklahoma City’s Bricktown entertainment district. Wanting a better view, she left her fourth story perch to go street side and, while standing next to a water taxi stand ignored by passer-bys who in another era would’ve swarmed the one-time celebrity, she anxiously monitored the cinema. The biting cold air eventually forced her to move back inside to pace and stare. And fume.

 

For over the canal and across the street were hundreds of gays and lesbians a scant block away from the woman who had at one time led a national crusade against homosexuality. This time, however, the homosexuals weren’t there to scream at Bryant or hit her in the face with a fruit pie. In fact, none in the gathering crowd even knew she was nearby and watching. None would know of her actions that day until this gay journalist, working undercover during two separate occasions, obtained access to Bryant’s hidden sanctuary.

 

The spied-upon crowd was braving the cold, gray near-winter evening to see a special screening of the film ‘Milk’, which honored the life and death of legendary gay rights activist Harvey Milk – a film in which Anita Bryant is a prominent villain. To them Bryant would be a ridiculed subject on the movie screen, not someone that was discreetly watching them congregate and seething over the unfairness of life and the immorality she feels has overtaken the beloved country she once supported by doing USO tours with comedian Bob Hope and singing the Star Spangled Banner at baseball games.

 

Bryant would later say, “I know God doesn’t want my trials to be easy ones. I know there is a purpose to this. I tried not to be offended by the openness of so many homosexuals out there that day, but I have a weakness and I falter. Where has our nation arrived at that such a man is being honored? The evilness that walks the streets below me has only won the battle, not the war. To everything there is a season and now it is the time for my Father’s righteousness to return.”  

 

Shortly after Bryant confided in me about the return of such righteousness, her husband, Charlie Dry, threatened to have this gay journalist killed after he discovered the person the couple had independently befriended was in reality there to expose his wife’s resurrected hate campaign. It didn’t help matters, when Dry realized he’d done a bit too much talking to the wrong person himself.

 

***

 

Harvey Milk had become the first openly gay man to be elected to an important political position in American history. The following year San Francisco City Supervisor Milk was assassinated by fellow supervisor Dan White, who also killed Mayor George Moscone in the city hall shooting spree.

 

    
Anita Bryant and Harvey Milk

 

Milk and Moscone were buried after their bodies lie at rest in the San Francisco City Hall Rotunda, so that mourners could pay their final respects. Over 30,000 Bay Area residents silently marched in their memory.

 

In what would become known as “The Twinkie Defense” defense lawyers blamed White’s actions on a diet of junk food. Yet others blamed an increasingly hateful atmosphere of intolerance that was being fueled by Bryant’s national campaign to outlaw homosexuality. A former campaign manager came forward claiming White was anti-gay and an aide claimed that White had told him before the shooting spree that Milk and Moscone represented all that was wrong with the world. White was found guilty of manslaughter and his seven year sentence for the murders of the two city officials led to the largest gay riot in U.S. history. The White Night riots saw 61 police officers and one hundred protestors hospitalized.

 

After serving five years for the murders of Milk and Moscone, White was released. Eventually he returned to San Francisco where he committed suicide.   

 

***

 

On that bone-chilling December night in 2008 things had come full circle for Anita Bryant. She was born in Oklahoma 68 years earlier and had since traveled the country and the world as a pop singer, commercial pitchwoman, challenger to the concept that all men are created equal, and a deadbeat fleeing tax collectors and unpaid employees. She did not stand before that window regretting the deaths of her fellow man and the blood that marked her life and made her a pariah, but coldly calculated how she could revive a dead career by reclaiming her throne as homosexuality’s leading nemesis.

 

Blood on one’s hands is a thing that never completely washes away no matter how much you want it to disappear. Conversations with Bryant would later suggest that she never cared about the blood…only the glory. Her stage presence as a warm, caring, loveable person ends up being just a stage act. The person behind that façade is actually ruthless and cold, but lacking a serious enough degree of intelligence to succeed at her intrigues. What’s left is a broken woman pushing seventy with her beauty queen looks long behind her, who wants one more head liner and vindication for a sacrificed life.

 

Ironically, Bryant possesses all the criteria that makes for a beloved gay icon: larger-than-life physical features, belting voice, theatricality, show tunes, tacky costumes, man problems, professional ups and downs, unparalleled diva qualities, and sexy gay men high kicking behind her – one could say she’s a draq queen without the kick stand. But she came with hate and bigotry instead of alcohol and amphetamines.

 

Bryant stood before the window contemplating a three-decades old history of violence and death that many laid upon her shoulders and feeling a burning desire to resurrect a hate campaign that has already racked up a needless body count.

 

***

 

Last year, Anita Bryant received a ten-minute standing ovation in New Orleans during a national convention of conservative leaders. They were applauding someone who many consider a bigot, a charlatan, and someone that got an orgasmic thrill knowing she had the deaths and assaults of many gay men on her hands. Thirty one years prior to that night of laurels, Bryant had lodged an attack on gay men, and to a lesser extent lesbians, that would give birth to a national gay rights movement and plant the seeds for the rise and success of rightwing fundamentalist groups like the Moral Majority.

 

The biggest enemy to LGBT’s in the 20th Century would come to be known as the Mother of the Gay Rights Movement. It would be her actions that would motivate a nation of gays and lesbians to unite hand-in-hand to do battle with a woman who wanted to destroy them. There would be a rallying cry to all across the land and a fledgling gay rights group would find power and influence.

 

Anita Bryant’s personal office in Bricktown. Having built a shrine to herself, replete with photos with such luminaries as Bob Hope and Rev. Billy Graham, Bryant only promoted her ministry through a discreet post office box. Now her secret sanctuary has been invaded by those she fears most – The Gays.

 

In 1977 Dade County, Florida, passed an ordinance that banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. Famous resident Anita Bryant, a former Miss Oklahoma, second runner up for Miss America, pop and gospel star, and celebrity product spokesperson, found her cause célèbre and began organizing an effort to overturn the law. To advance her agenda, she founded the group Save Our Children. Bryant stated at the time that her group was formed for “Christian beliefs regarding the sinfulness of homosexuality and the threat of homosexual recruitment of children and child molestation.”

 

She would go on to publicly claim in front of television cameras, “If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters.”

 

It was a surprise to many that nail biters shouldn’t have the rights afforded to non-nail biters. In reality, those Bryant mentioned already had the rights being denied to homosexuals. Prostitutes could marry. People who slept with St. Bernards could adopt children. And even nail biters were allowed to eat in any restaurant.

 

"Homosexuality is nothing new. Cultures throughout history have dealt with homosexuals almost universally with disdain, abhorrence, disgust-even death.  The recruitment of our children is absolutely necessary for the survival and growth of homosexuality. Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, must freshen their ranks.  And who better qualifies as a likely recruit than a teenage boy or girl who is surging with sexual awareness." From an Anita Bryant ad in the Miami Herald on March 20, 1977

 

Bryant quickly gained an ally in Virginia, who went to Florida to work with and learn from her. That person was Jerry Falwell. Six years earlier Falwell had founded the Lynchburg Baptist College, which is now known as Liberty University. To fund the college Falwell marketed bonds to churches and other sources. Within a year the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Falwell with fraud and deceit. Falwell and his church, however, succeeded in their court battle with the federal entity. The university was left heavily in debt and was due to be closed, when a group came in and bailed them out. It was later found the group received $3,500,000 from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a controversial cult figure of the time. 

 

Working side-by-side with Bryant, Falwell became consumed with a passion to battle the “evils of immorality and homosexuality”. Gays, lesbians, and others would suffer the impact of their meeting for the next three decades and beyond. Thousands upon thousands of gay men would be ravaged by AIDS while the government turned its back on their suffering and brutal deaths, all due to the influence on the Reagan Administration by the hate Falwell embraced for homosexuality – a hate taught to him by Anita Bryant.

 

Rev. Jerry Falwell

 

While being mentored by Bryant, Falwell told reporters, “Gay people would just as soon kill you as look at you.”

 

Bryant successfully organized voters into overturning the Dade County ordinance and the homosexuals there lost their short-lived protections. It was then legal in the Florida county to fire workers for being homosexual, evict them from their homes, and refuse to do business with them. Store windows that twenty years earlier displayed ‘No Coloreds Allowed’ signs, hastily put up ‘No Fags Allowed’ ones.  Her group also caused a 31-year-long ban in Florida on gay adoptions that has been a forefront in gay activism this decade.

 

[Editor’s Note: In 1998 Miami-Dade County reinstated protections for sexual orientation. An effort by the Christian Coalition to revoke the protections failed in 2003. On September 11, 2008, a Florida judge overturned that law. Judge David Audlin Jr. declared the ban unconstitutional and ordered that a gay man be allowed to adopt a boy he’d been fostering for seven years.]

 

Anita Bryant would take her mission nationwide and within a year protections for gays were overturned in Minnesota, Kansas, and Oregon. An effort called the Briggs Initiative, strongly opposed by Harvey Milk, saw her and Falwell deeply involving themselves in California to outlaw homosexuals from teaching in public schools. However, Bryant and her allies suffered defeat there, when voters overwhelmingly opposed the measure.

 

"I don't hate the homosexuals. But as a mother, I must protect my children

from their evil influence." From an Anita Bryant 1978 fundraising letter.

 

In the end, due to rising resistance and heavy-handed tactics by gays and their supporters, Bryant ended her national campaign and retreated from the public eye. There were threats on her family, boycotts of products she had endorsed in commercials for Coke and Florida orange juice, petitions and pickets.

 

And then there was an attack with a pie…

 

 

There were, however, many others anxious to take up her cause.

 

Empowered by Bryant’s successful assault on gays, the Old Testament religious right set their eyes on the White House. Falwell, Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Phyllis Schlafly (Sally Kern belongs to Schlafly’s group the Eagle Forum) would organize and found the religious right with Anita Bryant being its seed.

 

These groups would use Bryant’s attacks on gays to ignite conservative Republicans and turn Southern Democrats into rightwing religious fanatics, who abandoned their party to join the newly founded Moral Majority. Their large electoral might would thrust Ronald Reagan into office followed by George H. Bush and later by George W. Bush. Reagan would go on to hinder research into a plague decimating gay men across America – AIDS. The latter Bush would advocate the changing of the United States Constitution to ban gays and lesbians from marrying.

 

The Moral Majority found themselves in the hot seat in the latter 1980s, when well known religious leaders like Jim Bakker (then husband to the now late Tammy Faye Messner) and Jimmy Swaggart became embroiled in highly-publicized sex and finance scandals. With Falwell taking over Bakker’s ministry the black-eyed Moral Majority needed a new image and so the Christian Coalition was founded. At the time, Falwell was also fighting against the sanctions in South Africa and did not want the United States interfering in Apartheid. He urged his followers to support the system in which the white-controlled government would practice racial segregation by buying up South African gold.  

 

In 2004, Falwell, who was often referred to as an “agent of intolerance”, emboldened by the sweeping re-election of George W. Bush, revived his group as the Moral Majority Coalition, which he called, “the 21st Century resurrection of the Moral Majority.” Gay marriage was becoming a wedge issue across the country and Falwell sought to finance candidates that would, when elected, ensure that gays not achieve equal status in America. The following year both Falwell and Pat Robertson would declare that Hurricane Katrina was a punishment by God for the homosexuals in New Orleans. Prior to this Falwell had become an object of ridicule with his constant declarations that fictional characters like the Teletubbies and SpongeBob Squarepants were all agents of a gay agenda.

The re-born group’s purpose was to lead a revolution and cause voters to “vote Christian”. They had three main objectives: The confirmation of pro-life U.S. Supreme Court Justices; the passage of a constitutional Federal Marriage Amendment that would limit marriage to one man and one woman; and the election in 2008 of a conservative candidate to the White House.

 

Anita Bryant’s victories over homosexuals did not come without cost. She would go into virtual obscurity in the 1980s, endure bankruptcy, and a bitter divorce that would see Christian fundamentalists turning their backs on her. The entertainment and advertising industries made her an untouchable and in an attempt to save face, Bryant made herself out to be a sacrificial lamb claiming that the attacks on homosexuals were orchestrated by her husband Bob Green, a Miami disc jockey.

 

Anita would eventually re-marry in 1990 to childhood sweetheart and retired NASA flyboy Charlie Dry. The duo would spend years fleeing a number of states after business ventures soured, leaving the pair owing money to employees and various state tax coffers. 

 

Six years ago, Bryant and her husband took up residence in an Edmond, Oklahoma estate valued at nearly one million dollars. The supposedly bankrupted pair, also, secured office space within the city’s pricey entertainment district.

 

Then Charlie Dry started calling in favors.