Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music

4. “Fuck Aneta Briant” and the Queer Politics of Being Political

131 In 1978, David Allan Coe was at the peak of his career. He opened the year with a songwriting grand slam in Johnny Paycheck’s release of “Take This Job and Shove It,” which climbed to No. 1, spent eighteen weeks on the country charts, and inspired a 1981 Hollywood comedy of the same name (which introduced monster trucks to the big screen). Coe had previously captured the top spot in 1974 with “Would You Lay with Me (In a Field of Stone),” a song that became both a bona fide hit and a succès de scandale, censored by many country radio stations when recorded by the duskyvoiced teenager Tanya Tucker.1 As a singer, Coe in 1978 released two new albums and a greatest hits collection on Columbia Records, all three of which went to the Top 50 on the Country Albums Chart. He had enjoyed recent singles success with sly-witted, musically compelling cuts of Steve Goodman’s “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” (#8 1975) and the self-penned “Longhaired Redneck” (#17 1975). And he would chart again in the next few years with “The Ride” (#4 1983), “Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile” (#2 1984), and “She Used to Love Me a Lot” (#11 1984), among other records. Also in 1978 but worlds away from Nashville’s Music Row, Coe issued an LP in a limited production run on his private label, D.A.C. Records. Bearing catalog number DAC-0002, the album’s low-budget cover featured black block lettering on a plain white background, with added text and graphics scrawled in freehand. The title and opening track proclaimed Nothing Sacred, and the phrases “Adults Only,” “not recomended for Air4 . “Fuck Aneta Briant” and the Queer Politics of Being Political To be known and recognized also means possessing the power to recognize, to state, with success, what merits being known and recognized. pierre bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations Fuck Aneta Briant! Who the hell is she, Tellin’ all them faggots that they can’t be free? Throw that bitch in prison! Maybe then she’ll see Just how much those goddamn homosex’als mean to me. david allan coe, “Fuck Aneta Briant” 132 / Part II Play,” and “Not for Sale in Store’s [sic]” adorned the sleeve front and back. Track titles like “Linda Lovelace,”“Cum Stains on the Pillow,” and “Master Bation Blues,” with their openly sexual allusions and often obscene language , clearly warranted such advisories in the context of 1970s country radio. Another title, listed as Track 5, further challenged dominant standards of propriety, presenting not only obscenity but belligerence and bad spelling. Yet even with misspellings, “Fuck Aneta Briant” made its reference clear (figure 11). figure 11. Nothing fancy: An underground album release by the David Allan Coe Band, Nothing Sacred was issued in a limited pressing and with DIY cover art on Coe’s private label, D.A.C. Records, in 1978. Courtesy of Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum. The Queer Politics of Being Political / 133 who the hell is she? After being crowned Miss Oklahoma in 1958,Anita Bryant won the second runner-up title in that year’s Miss America pageant and proceeded directly into a singing and recording career. She scored four hits on the pop Top 40 charts in 1959–60 and released over a dozen albums in the 1960s and 1970s. Bryant was Coe’s contemporary and in the seventies his label mate at Columbia, but her music fell into two categories far removed from his Outlaw Country: Christian music and the radio format then known as middle of the road, or MOR (now called “adult standards”). Beginning in 1969, Bryant appeared in a series of television commercials for the Florida citrus industry, and for the next seven years she was best known as America’s prime promoter of orange juice. But she gained her greatest and most lasting notoriety in a different arena. In 1977, Bryant spearheaded an antihomosexual crusade in Dade County, Florida. Dade County was where the entertainer and three-time winner of Good Housekeeping magazine’s “Most Admired Woman in America” poll made her home, in a Miami bayfront mansion she shared with her husband and four children. When the county’s board of commissioners voted to add a sexual orientation clause to Dade’s civil rights statutes, Bryant launched an organization called Save Our Children and...