Memoirs — Peter Millard

Or Words to That Effect

Dr. Peter Millard (1932-2001) began lecturing in English at the University of Saskatchewan in 1963. His subsequent academic career was distinguished. Besides authoring numerous books and articles he served as the University’s don of residence, as chair of the English Department and as chair of the Faculty Association.

In 1973 he joined Saskatoon’s burgeoning gay liberation movement and quickly became an organizer and spokesperson in most of the province’s early battles to advance equal rights for gays and lesbians. He held leadership roles in the Gay Community Centre of Saskatoon, the Committee to Defend Doug Wilson, and the Coalition for Human Equality.

On campus he organized a Gay Academic Union in 1975 and became the mentor/protector of two generations of lesbian and gay students. In 1991 he taught the University’s first gay studies course, an examination of social attitudes towards homosexuality in literature. In 1994 the University established the Peter Millard scholarship, Canada’s first university-administered scholarship for research in gay and lesbian studies.

After his academic retirement in 1992 one of Millard’s chief pursuits was the writing of a personal memoir with the working title Or Words to That Effect. After his death the completed manuscript was added to the Peter Millard Papers at the University of Saskatchewan Archives. The memoir covers many aspects of Millard’s rich and wide-ranging life, including his student and academic careers and his dedication to the visual arts in both England and Saskatoon. He writes at length of his emotional life as a gay man and of his many experiences in gay activism.

Saskatchewan Resources for Sexual and Gender Diversity is pleased to host three short excerpts which we have titled:
1) Before Gay Liberation
2) God Likes Gays — A Campus Debate
3) Anita Bryant’s 1978 Visit to Moose Jaw

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Anita Bryant’s 1978 Visit to Moose Jaw (Chronology Link)

What was for me a particularly illuminating episode in the religious opposition took place in, of all places, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Strangely enough, the name Moose Jaw had a special resonance for me. Years before, in England, I used to enjoy leafing through an atlas and stopping at exotic-sounding names. I distinctly remember roaming through Canada, one rainy night in England, and being captured by names like Medicine Hat, and Moose Jaw. They called up visions of dusty cowboy country, rugged hills in the distance, and perhaps a sun-whitened moose skull lying on the ground. The real Moose Jaw is not quite like that. It is a neat little town, with a river, pleasant streets with the usual clapboard houses, and a charming park containing a handsome Carnegie library in pure neo-classical style.

In 1978 Moose Jaw celebrated its one hundredth birthday, and the Moose Jaw Fellowship for Evangelism decided that as a gift to the city they would invite the team of Anita Bryant and Ken Campbell to address a rally of the faithful on Canada Day, July 1st. Anita Bryant was a singer, known for her Florida orange juice commercials but more recently for her public campaign against gay rights in that state. By 1978 Bryant’s anti-gay campaign was running out of steam in the U.S. and she was finding it necessary to travel further afield in search of audiences. The Rev. Ken Campbell was a handsome and fundamentalist renegade from the United Church, now leader of an evangelical organisation called Renaissance International. ‡ Campbell had organised a Canadian tour for Bryant as part of something called the Christian Liberation Crusade.

A counter-event to the Anita Bryant rally was arranged by the University of Saskatchewan Campus chaplain, Colin Clay. At noon, several hundred gay men and lesbians, as well as concerned church people, union members, and other supporters, marched through Moose Jaw to meet for a quasi-religious service before the band shell at Crescent Park. Most people dispersed after the meeting, but a group of us, mainly gay men and lesbians, stayed on for the Bryant service that evening.

It was a glorious summer evening. At the Ross Wells Baseball Field, hundreds of chairs had been arranged in a huge triangle over the grass, and at the apex of the triangle a flat-bed had been parked to serve as a stage. Onto this platform trouped three or four young Christians led by an elderly man who looked exactly like Colonel Sanders. They carried various instruments, and were the back-up for Anita Bryant. Ken Campbell also took his place, as did Bryant’s husband, Bob Green, and their four children. Finally Bryant herself arrived, and the performance began.

I use the word performance advisedly, because Bryant behaved not like a participant in a religious service but like a performer in a night-club act or cabaret. The event had been advertised, in fact, as a “Christian Liberation Rally, Featuring Anita Bryant in Concert, with Host, Ken Campbell.” She was red-haired, unexpectedly short, and she wore a long off-the-shoulder gown that was purple with a strong black and white pattern superimposed. She swung right into her performance, wrenching the microphone from its stand and striding down into the audience. She began a warming-up process.

“Where are you from?” (choosing someone at random).
“ESTEVAN?” (Applause).
“And how old are you, Dear?” (to an elderly woman.)
“SEVENTY-EIGHT!” (Applause).

Returning to the stage, Bryant began her act proper. It took the form of a rambling account of her life, with the emphasis placed more or less equally on her career as a singer/broadcaster and on her dealings with the Lord. She dropped names liberally, and the audience seemed suitably impressed by her close acquaintance with celebrities like Bob Hope, Jimmy Carter, God, and Johnny Carson. At certain moments, predictable by those who had seen her act before, she produced tears.

Every now and then she would give an invisible cue to the little band, and she would launch into an appropriate song. There were sure-fire favourites like “The Old Rugged Cross,” and at one point, vaguely aware that this was a national holiday but perhaps confused as to exactly where she was, she delivered a soulful rendering of “God Bless America.”

Memorable moments during the evening. A tap on my shoulder after some of us had responded aloud to the remarks from the stage. It was a police sergeant, burly and in plainclothes, who warned us that if we continued to interrupt a “religious service” (his words) he would arrest us. Then, Bryant talking about the birth of her twins. “This is for the ladies in the audience,” she said, dropping her voice, “So you men just stop listening.” Then we all squirmed, men and women alike, as she recounted in detail the events of her labour.

There was a good moment towards the end of the programme when Campbell began his pitch for contributions. Addressing the men only this time, he attempted to spur them to sacrifice for the cause by citing the example of the Bryant-Greens’ self-denial. The Campbells and the Bryant-Greens had spent time together, he said, in Ontario, enjoying the Campbells’ summer cottage at Rattlesnake Point. During a quiet moment, Bryant had told him that because of her brave stand against homosexuality—the cancellation of her orange-juice contract, for instance, as the result of a homosexual conspiracy—her career had suffered to the extent that her income was reduced last year by at least $100,000.

Campbell heard the involuntary gasp that went through the crowd and realised his blunder. (“Reduced by a hundred thousand!” you could almost hear everyone thinking. “What was it before” What was it after?”) Campbell tried to recover, but he lost much of his audience at that point.

The best event of the evening, though, came about two-thirds of the way through. Bryant was in the middle of a particularly moving song when two men in our little group got up. “To hell with this,” one of them said, “It is Saturday night, after all,” and arms around each other, they walked the width of the arena, creating a shock wave that spread through the whole audience and left Anita singing to herself.

That evening in the Moose Jaw ball park was something of a revelation to me. As Bryant and Campbell worked their way through their programme, it became clear what sort of a society they wanted. Homosexuality, as it turned out, was not their main target. It was just one item, albeit an important one, in a list containing everything that did not conform to a stifling, oppressively limited view of reality.

They believed in a mean-spirited theocracy where values of small-business private enterprise were paramount; where women were denied dignity and independence, reduced to the role of child-bearers and servants of the male; where abortion would be criminal; and where homosexuals would receive short shrift (elsewhere, Bryant had actually proposed placing homosexuals in concentration camps—“ranches” she called them). While religion figured in the rally, there was much more emphasis on the structure of society and on power. It was, in fact, more a political event than a religious one, with a fundamentalist interpretation of the bible used as justification for a right-wing ideological and economic agenda

The thought-process of Bryant and Campbell was raw, brutal in its insistence on applying broad rules that ignored individuality or complexity. And what at first seemed mere vulgarity on the part of Bryant and her cohorts I could now see as something far more serious. It was coarseness of spirit and of intellect that crashed through the norms of decency and rationality that until that moment I had taken so comfortably for granted. At the very end of the meeting, Campbell asked everyone to stand and to pledge their commitment to the values that had been expressed that evening. Stuck in our seats, a tiny group of gay people and friends, we found ourselves surrounded by about one thousand ordinary, decent Saskatchewan people dedicating themselves to work for a society in which we might as well not exist. I glanced behind and, sure enough, the police sergeant was standing too, the setting sun gleaming in his eyes. So there was no doubt which side he was on.

Perhaps it was because I had spent most of the day in the sun, perhaps it was the bizarreness of the evening’s events, whatever it was, by the end of the evening I was in a mood I had never experienced before, in which all perceptions were heightened and made strange. It was in this state that I received one final, unforgettable image, which at that time seemed sinister, almost apocalyptical. On the flat-bed, raised above the crowd, Anita Bryant was singing her last song. By now the sun had descended, a huge ball, to a point exactly behind her so that her figure was superimposed against a circle of flame. The purple in Bryant’s dress was merged into the sun, leaving only the black and white stripes visible like bars, or bones, across her body. This skeletal shape was topped by a head, its halo of red hair set on flame by the sun, livid with make-up, mouthing into a microphone. It was a vision from Rattlesnake Point.

— Peter Millard Papers (University of Saskatchewan Archives. P.T. Millard Fonds. MG47)

‡ Note by SRSD content advisor: Millard's description of Campbell as a United Church renegade is inaccurate. Ken Campbell (1934-2006) was the son of a Baptist pastor. He was ordained in the Baptist church and was a member and pastor of that Protestant denomination.