Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Anita Bryant, Beauty Queen and Raging Homophobe, Dies
On Thursday, Anita Bryant, the singer and anti-gay crusader whose career was hoisted by her own shitty politics, died. But hey, let's not remember Anita Bryant—let's remember Thom Higgins, the Minnesota activist who famously threw pie in her face!
Not to make this about me, but this is one of the reason's the Minnesota Star Tribune's refusal to restore the City Pages archive is so frustrating: In 2020, I wrote a deeply researched cover story headlined "Queer disobedience: A history of pride and protest in the Twin Cities." One of the stories highlighted therein was the pie-ing, which was orchestrated by a Twin Cities gay rights group called the Target City Coalition.
You can find the whole story via the Internet Archive, but because I find it deeply annoying that it's not easily searchable/accessible, I've pasted the whole segment on Anita Bryant below. Enjoy!
It’s one of the most satisfying two-minute clips on YouTube. Notorious anti-gay activist Anita Bryant is on a panel in Des Moines discussing her work to end protections for “the homosexuals.” Out of nowhere, a fruit pie flies across the screen, splattering all over her bigoted face.
This is in 1977, and the “Save Our Children” campaign is in full swing. The group wanted to overturn new laws around the nation protecting gay people from discrimination, and Bryant—a former beauty queen and Christian singer who was also the face of Florida Orange Juice—was its most prominent spokesperson. “She had a kind of celebrity that was very much tied to conservative, right Christians,” explains Kevin Murphy, one of the editors of Queer Twin Cities.
“At the center of their agenda was this idea that gay men, especially, would recruit children,” Murphy explains. “They can’t procreate by themselves, so they need to increase their numbers through recruitment.” (They were also early proponents of the whole, “if we let men marry each other, where does it end—with people marrying Saint Bernards?” line of thought.) Save Our Children was working to reverse ordinances around the country that protected gay rights, and with some success: They helped overturn a Miami-Dade County law that banned discrimination in areas like housing and employment.
One of the places Bryant targeted was St. Paul, which had passed civil protections on the basis of sexual preference in 1974. A Twin Cities gay rights group called the Target City Coalition didn’t love that. “They were radical in the way they protested—you could see the kind of street, performative politics... Target City Coalition believed in the kind of protesting that would get a lot of media attention and public attention through spectacle,” Murphy says. And what better way to do that than with pie?
“Pie-ing is spectacular, right?” Murphy laughs. “It’s an act that gets attention, it has some humor, there’s an element of camp. It’s in the tradition of throwing cream pie in people’s faces that comes from, like, the Three Stooges, and vaudeville. It’s made for media culture.”
Thom Higgins wasn’t just the poster boy for workplace non-discrimination... he’s also the activist who splattered Bryant with pie. Thom and co. did a few famous pie-ings—they pied the Catholic Archbishop of Minnesota, to somewhat mixed public reaction—but this one was huge.
“That clip was featured on Saturday Night Live, in the Weekend Update segment. It immediately got a lot of attention,” Murphy says. “And that clip, in the age of the internet, it’s circulated so widely that it’s become influential on its own.”
Again, there was concern within activist groups that the tactic was inadvisable, that embracing radical queer politics would turn people against their cause. And in fact, Save Our Children did manage to overturn protections for gay people in St. Paul.
“In the immediate sense, it was not successful,” Murphy said. “In the longer-term sense, though, it was very successful, in that if politics are debated and understood within the realm of popular culture, then finding ways to engage the media and popular culture in protest can be very effective.”
Can MN's Power Grid Handle Mega Data Centers?
Good news? More companies are choosing Minnesota. Meta is building a mega data center in Rosemount, while Amazon and Microsoft have chosen Becker. The Colorado firm Tract is working on a Farmington project and has further facilities in Rosemount and Cannon Falls in the agenda. Chaska, Faribault, North Mankato and Hampton—each location is a proposed site for yet another data center.
Bad news? “If built, this crop of data centers could demand as much electricity as every home in Minnesota.” So says Walker Orenstein in the Strib today, and to find out how bad that news is, and you’ll have to read his full story to follow the debate on whether that’s something Minnesota can adjust to.
Supporters of these developments, Orenstein writes, tout benefits such as “carbon-free power infrastructure, construction jobs, tax revenue and, potentially, lower electric bills for everyone.” But others doubt that these companies will help the state reach its clean energy goals and worry whether the state can generate enough power to serve both these corporations and its citizens.
Nurses at Mayo’s Fairmont Medical Center Vote to Nix Union
The National Right to Work Foundation strikes again! While the group claims to be “fighting to break the chains of forced unionism” (something that is already illegal), it’s really about removing labor roadblocks for corporations under the guise of standing for the common worker.
In 2022, billionaire-adjacent nurse Brittany Burgess (she’s Glenn Taylor’s stepdaughter), campaigned with the help of the org to decertify the union at Mayo's Mankato hospital. Then came the death of unions at Mayo facilities in Austin and St. James. Now, Max Nesterak at Minnesota Reformer reports, nurses at the Mayo’s Fairmount hospital recently voted to give up their union protections with the Minnesota Nurses Association. Predictably, Mayo is cool with the election results. “We look forward to working with them directly,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement.
Ironically, Mayo has had a hand in denying local nurses the right to work; in 2023 it threatened to take its billions elsewhere when Gov. Tim Walz said he planned to sign a bill that would have required more nurse staffing. Congress eventually gave Mayo an exemption.
The Rare Photo of Bob Dylan (Allegedly) Working for the MN Daily, Explained
Alright, first thing's first, take a looksee at this stupendous '70s Minnesota Daily ad that local writer Jim Walsh recently unearthed and shared via Facebook.
Reads the caption from Walsh...
Found it! This 1961 photo of Bob Dylan in the basement of Murphy Hall, taken just before he lit out for NYC and the tale told in A Complete Unknown, ran in The (University of) Minnesota Daily regularly in the ‘70s, and we re-published it for Welcome Week ‘88 with the caption Bob Dylan: “I threw it all away…”
Incredible. With A Complete Unknown-induced Dylanmania in full swing, we felt compelled to: a) share with you; b) track down as much intel as possible on short notice. So we pestered veteran Strib music critic Jon Bream for context, anecdotes, and general Breamisms.
Here's what he had to say...
When I was the assistant A&E editor of the Minnesota Daily in ’71-72, we found three black-and-white photos in the A&E desk: A grainy photo of Spider John Koerner and Bob Dylan performing; a grainy photo of Dylan playing guitar in the window of the Ten O’Clock Scholar in Dinkytown, and a photo of man wearing shades typing in what appeared to be the Daily office. It sure looked like Bobby Zimmerman, probably in his freshman year 1959-60 at the University of Minnesota. We never determined that he published any stories in the Minnesota Daily.
We tried to track down the photographer, whose name was on the back of the photos. Good luck finding a John Anderson when all you have are Minneapolis and St. Paul telephone books a dozen years after the fact. Never found the photographer.
For the next two school years, we published that photo of Zimmerman typing as part of a cheeky ad soliciting writers for the A&E section.
For the record, two of the writers I hired as A&E critics went on to have noteworthy success in their fields: theater critic Barbara Nosanow (later Field) became a playwright, dramaturg at the Guthrie Theater (famously adapting “A Christmas Carol”) and cofounder of the Playwrights Center, and rock critic Andy Schwartz (aka Seth Schwartz) become editor of New York Rocker, an influential periodical that covered punk and new-wave from 1978-82.
As for Dylan, a Minnesota Daily photographer, Gary Tassone, and I did get to go cover one of his 1974 concerts with the Band, in Bloomington, Ind. (I won tickets in a lottery.) We didn’t get a chance to ask him about his Murphy Hall experiences.
By the by, those John Anderson performing photos were published in the Minnesota Daily in the early ‘70s (and in the Minneapolis Star in the mid-70s), and a copy of at least one of them is on display at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa.
Great stuff. Take us into the weekend, (allegedly) failed journalist Bob Dylan!
