Thanks to the movie Milk, we all associate Anita Bryant's late-1970s antigay work in Dade County, Florida, with the concomitant campaigns in California. But Middle America has lots to teach us about Bryant and the bourgeoning conservatism she symbolized. At a time in which Christian businesses and Cold War apocalypticism were sweeping through Bryant's home state of Oklahoma, she emerged as a moral entrepreneur who embodied the wholesomeness of white femininity that connoted the American heartland and exemplified the national ideal of womanhood. It was this unspoken norm of whiteness that undergirded fighting for "our" children. It was this projected purity that a newly nationalized gay activism sought to sully, most famously with a banana cream pie thrown in Bryant's face. Theories of the abject, histories of colonialist agribusiness, and homespun humor merge in this heretofore-untold story of Bryant's rise and fall in Middle America.