Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma (30 page)

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These stories are among the very many gifts of being a Student Affairs professional. While I had no contact with my own children for many years, I have had the privilege of working with other people’s children for periods of time. As a woman, a mother, a grandmother, as one who keeps students at the center of my focus, I cannot imagine working in any other field. It took me 47 years to find this profession. I have no doubt, though, that the profession found me, and I feel very, very blessed.

39. Letter to Anita Bryant

Dear Anita,

This is not the letter I would have written to you in 1979, but it is what I need to say to you today. In 1979 I was too angry. At the age of 31, in 1979, I acknowledged my lesbian identity. After 20 years of self-deprecation, of intense fear of discovery and deliberate, painful, deafening silence, I acknowledged my true self. After seven years of marriage and two beautiful babies, I came out. I didn’t know about the laws that were passed by the Florida legislature following your 1977 anti-gay work in Miami. Your Save Our Children campaign led to the repeal of Miami’s anti-discrimination ordinance. You said, “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children.” Wrong, Anita. I reproduced. I’m a mother. I’m a homosexual and I reproduced.

I was naive back then about Florida’s laws, about politics, about lesbian and gay history and civil rights, and even about you. Yes, I knew who you were. You were a popular singer and the spokesperson for the Florida Orange Juice Commission. In fact, my aunt was once your ex-husband Bob’s secretary at the radio station in Miami. But in 1979 all I knew was that I could no longer live the “Big Lie.” I didn’t know that my decision to finally be honest about my sexual orientation would result in the loss of custody of my children.

Anita, were you ever aware of the ripple effects of your actions which were endorsed by then Florida governor Ruben Askew? Immediately following your hate-filled work in Miami, the Florida Legislature passed SB 354 which prohibited adoption by homosexuals. Senator Don Chamberlin tried to fight that law. He told the Florida Senate:

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There is no demonstrable social problem. Don’t start a discrimination; don’t pick a fight. At the heart of this bill is not the subject matter of adoption—it is discrimination. This bill begins a state policy [of] selective, deliberate discrimination. It picks a fight. (Journal of the Florida Senate, 1977)

The bill passed, and Senator Chamberlin was not re-elected. That was the state’s first piece of anti-gay legislation, Anita, and it was to honor you. Today, thirty-three years later, Florida’s adoption ban, the only one of its kind that remained in the United States, was finally overturned. The ban against homosexuals in Florida was the only categorical adoption ban on the State’s books. Florida evaluated adoption applications from all other would-be adoptive parents, including those who have failed at previous adoptions and those with a history of drug abuse or even domestic violence. In Florida, the law was clear: Homosexuals were not fit parents.

You probably know that you weren’t the first to actively fight to deliberately discriminate against homosexuals in Florida. Charley Johns beat you to it by about twenty years with the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee whose purpose was to find ways to identify and remove homosexuals from Florida’s schools. Public school teachers and college professors were the primary targets of Johns’ eight-year investigation. Many teachers—some gay and some perceived to be gay—were publicly named and forced to resign, wrecking careers, destroying families, and causing tremendous harm to many. Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida (1964) was the resulting publication of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee. The Purple Pamphlet, as the report became known, was the hottest item on the pornography market that year because of the explicit photos in it

I wish Florida’s state-supported discrimination against homosexuals had ended in 1964 with the John’s Committee disbandment, but then you came along in 1977, Anita. Following in your footsteps, Representative Tom Bush of Ft. Lauderdale and Senator Alan Trask of Winter Haven authored the Bush-Trask Amendment into the 1981 Florida General Appropriations Bill which was signed into law. The Bush-Trask Amendment read:

No funds appropriated herein shall be used to finance any state-supported public or private post-secondary educational institution that charters or gives official recognition or knowingly gives assistance to or provides meeting facilities for any group or organization that recommends or advocates sexual relations between persons not married to each other (Laws of Florida. Chapter 81-206, p. 645).

Tom Bush appeared on the Phil Donohue television program to explain that this amendment was specifically targeting “homosexuals in Florida’s universities.” Bush stated that he resented taxpayers’ money going to support such “garbage” as campus gay groups. When Rep. Joe Kershaw inquired if gays were not taxpayers, too, Bush replied that while they might be, so are “murderers, thieves, and rapists.”

During that time, I was the executive director and lobbyist of the Florida Task Force, Florida’s lesbian and gay civil rights organization. The Task Force joined with other organizations and took this discriminatory law to the Florida Supreme Court. The Court unanimously agreed that “the proviso violates the freedom of speech under the First Amendment and article I, section 4 and is unconstitutional.” Bush was not re-elected and Trask resigned. In fact, Trask was charged with violating Senate ethics rules and several federal rules as well.

When I came out as a lesbian thirty-some years ago, like so many of my contemporaries I was thrust into politics by a deep anger that was fueled by the loss of custody of my children. Passion and a need to create change were deeply ingrained in my soul, probably very similar to the feelings you had during that same period of time, and I remember how lucky I felt to be able to do lesbian and gay civil rights work. I also remember the 1998 reauthorization of the anti-discrimination ordinance against which you fought so hard twenty years earlier. Miami-Dade County now protects people on the basis of sexual orientation. Other cities and counties in Florida followed suit, but the state of Florida itself—like the federal government—still has no such protection.

I remember Tony and Richard, two young men who befriended me when I worked at Burdines Department Store in the late 1970s. They’re gone now. AIDS. But back then, they saved my life. When I was on the verge of coming out, they took me to Orlando’s most famous gay bar, the Parliament House. I walked into that huge room where I saw men dancing with men, but far more important for me—because I knew no other lesbians yet—I saw women dancing with women. While I’m not much of a drinker and didn’t know a soul there, I knew I was among my people. And so my journey out of the closet began.

I knew I was a lesbian by the time I was eleven years old, but I refused to accept being so different from my family and friends. I struggled hard to be like everyone else. By the time I was thirty-one, twenty years in the closet was long enough. I couldn’t fight it any more. It was 1979. In a blink of an eye, in a heartbeat that thundered through my being, my six year old daughter and three year old son were taken away from me. I was “different”; I was a lesbian. Custody was granted to my children’s father. When you and Bob divorced, Anita, you kept your children. I could not.

Although I was allowed sporadic visitation, my former husband and his fundamentalist parents maintained tight control over when and how I saw my children. By the time the children were nine and twelve, they didn’t want to see me any more. They were told that all gay people have AIDS. Since I’m gay I must have AIDS, too. My children were told if they touched me or hugged me or kissed me, they would get sick and die. My children were afraid of me.

During the first few years after I had come out, I wondered every morning what my children were wearing to school. Were their clothes clean? Were their teeth brushed? Did they have a nutritious lunch? I wondered if they had any of the usual childhood diseases, if they wanted me to be there to hold them through a fever or a tummy ache. I occasionally wondered if I did the right thing by coming out when I did, but I knew that my only other alternative was death. I wondered how my children felt about me. Did they long to see me as I did them? I mourned for them, for my loss, but I felt confined and conflicted in my mourning: my children weren’t dead, just out of my view, out of my reach. Where were your young children, Anita? As you railed against homosexuality in Miami and as laws were created out of your ranting, did you think about how your actions affected other parents and their children as you kissed your own children good-night each evening? Probably not.

I remained in Florida until 1994. I believed that if my children needed me, I could get to them quickly. But by 1994, they were adults, eighteen and twenty-one. My staying in Florida was no longer a necessity. If my children wanted to contact me, they could do so no matter where I lived. I accepted a position as the director of the Lesbian and Gay Office at the University of Michigan and moved to Ann Arbor. The expectation of seeing my children any time in the near future was gone, but I always knew they would return to me. Someday.

I moved to Michigan in May of 1994. I had not heard from—or of—my children in many years. I had not been invited to their rites of passages such as their band recitals or their high school graduations or even my daughter’s wedding. So it was with great surprise that I opened an email message on Christmas Day, 1994, that started out by saying, Hi, Mom. I’d like to talk with you. My daughter and her husband had just moved from Florida to Dayton, Ohio, only three hours south of Ann Arbor. They came to my house the next day. We began to get to know one another as mother and daughter, and as adults. In May of 1995 I witnessed the birth of my first granddaughter. My second granddaughter was born in 1998, and I was there to greet her at her birth as well. 

I moved to California to become the director of the UCLA Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center. I was successful in my work and extremely happy with my life. All that was missing was my son, Anita, but I felt that one day he, like his sister, would also return to me. A year after I moved to Los Angeles, in August of 1998, I received a letter with my son’s name on the return address. Slowly I opened it and read: Dear Dr. Sanlo or Mom. I don’t know what to call you but in trying to find myself I need to find you. I hope it’s okay…

I hope you would ask about my children, Anita. Though we were estranged for many years, we are now a close family and we’ve come together as adults to honor the love and history we share. While I missed many years of my children’s youth, I am blessed that these two wonderful people are now friends and guides in my life. My son came out as a gay man several years ago and was disowned by his father and his fundamentalist grandparents. So much for Christian love. On Mother’s Day recently he gave a card to me in which he wrote:

Mom, I can honestly say that I can’t imagine a more amazing mother than you. I am blessed and lucky to have you. You have shown me love and support even when I didn’t know it. You have literally released me from so many chains. I owe you nothing less than everything I am. Happy Mother’s Day!

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So, Anita, times have changed, thank God, over these thirty-some years. Your anti-gay work in Miami was overturned, but not without residual effects for both of us. You were shunned by the very fundamentalist Christians who pushed you into the anti-gay limelight, and, ironically, you helped jump-start a budding gay civil rights movement as no one else had ever been able to do. You even apologized later to the gay community for the hateful things you said and did.

I’ve come to understand that while your work and its fall-out back then destroyed people’s lives, as the John’s Committee did two decades before you, you were doing the best you could with what you knew. I believe that today. I was not in a place to understand that then. I don’t know what my life would have been like had I been granted custody or even fair visitation with my children, but I can tell you that my life today is rich and full of love because of the experiences I’ve had, both positive and negative. Because you did what you thought was right, I made choices about the path I took, which became one of helping others survive in the face of great pain, both physical and emotional. My journey, though not without some tremendous bumps in the road, has been a blessing, and you, Anita, were instrumental in the way it occurred.

Because of the lessons I’ve learned—and perhaps this comes with the seasoning of age—as an educator, a mother, and a lesbian, Anita, I now let go of the last vestiges of anger. I forgave my former husband who kept my children away from me for all those years. I forgave his mother who choreographed the hate that filled their home. I forgave his father who stood by and did nothing to stop the madness as he secretly slipped money to me. I have even forgiven myself. In fact, I’ve forgiven the lawmakers of Florida for creating stupid, hateful, discriminatory laws, though I do believe that the Florida Legislature owes a tremendous public apology to lesbian and gay Floridians. And today, Anita, in honor of my children and grandchildren, and in memory of the many lesbian and gay Floridians we’ve lost, I forgive you.

Sincerely,

Ronni Sanlo

40. To the Florida Legislature, Apologize!

If I returned to Florida as a resident, I would spend my days demanding your attention, demanding an apology for the hell you repeatedly brought upon your invisible citizens, your lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender tax-paying citizens.