Author: John Ervin

Chuck & Buck, a somewhat underrated 2000 film that was one of the first major releases shot on digital video, revolves around Buck, a 27-year-old man (Mike White) who, for all intents and purposes, is an 11-year-old boy. He perpetually sucks on Blow Pops, fills his room with toys, wears ill-fitting windbreakers, and speaks to other adults in a simplistic, gee-whiz monotone. The story begins with the death of Buck’s mother, a tragedy that sends him in pursuit of a childhood friend, an LA music producer named Chuck (Chris Weitz), with a stalker’s determination. Buck is clearly not developmentally challenged; he simply seems to be stuck in a time warp set to the years he and Chuck played make believe. A ridiculous tale? Perhaps. Yet, while Buck may seem an implausible character, there are, in fact, adults in real life — fully functioning members of society who are well educated and can live independently — who pursue the articles, activities, and attitudes of childhood with more dedication than most actual tykes.

One case study of this, a prominent Minnesotan who, sadly, died last August, would rightly be called the ultimate pursuer of this strange approach to life. For starters, his name was Joybubbles. He loved stories and had imaginary friends. And he was an avid fan of Mister Rogers and similar shows, as well as an incessant collector of toys, dolls, and other playthings, listing his age as "five" until the day he died, at 58. All this despite the fact that he was once a graduate student in philosophy with an IQ of 172, who could imitate the analog dial tone that used to be a fixture of the phone system. It was this last talent that briefly brought him international fame as the grandfather of a short-lived movement known as phone phreaking.

Blind since birth, Joybubbles entered this world as Josef Engressia in 1949, in Richmond, Virginia. In 1991, he legally changed his name to Joybubbles, which he happened upon several years earlier at a motivational seminar in Minneapolis. The leader of the conference asked attendees to describe themselves in one word. The first thing that came out of Engrassia’s head was "Joybubbles!" This confabulation gave the participant so much reason for living, he applied it to all unofficial and official documents, including his social security card.

The reason behind this alias, and Joybubbles’ fixation on collecting Raggedy Ann dolls, Curious George books, and Sesame Street episodes, was borne out of a desire to recapture the childhood he felt he never had, and to escape the adult world he no longer wished to be a part of. "Childhood is a protected status," says Ross MacDonald, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, "No one really expects anything of you. It’s a time of fun and frivolity, at least in theory. Someone uninterested in the pressures and responsibilities of adult life, and there is no natural reason to want them, would likely find childhood a fairly palatable state."

A quite unpalatable past drove Joybubbles’ infatuation: the sexual abuse he suffered when he was actually a child. According to longtime friend and executor of his estate, Steven Gibb, young Josef’s mother refused to believe her son’s reports about the molestation he experienced at the hands of a nun, who was also one of his grade school teachers. Consequently, as the years went by, mother and son would become so estranged that they ceased direct communication, using his father and later, following his death, his equally blind sister as go-betweens for messages.

Another source of the friction between child and parent, and a driving force in Joybubbles’ need to make up for lost kid time, was the isolation that he felt from other children, thanks to his ability to read at an advanced level and enjoy cultural pursuits far above his age group. The latter, above all, included phone phreaking, which involved duplicating the tones that connected long-distance numbers, thus allowing the phreak (a hybrid of the words "phone" and "freak") to make long-distance calls without the phone company making a record and charging the caller.

This bizarre hobby was made possible when human switchboard operators were replaced by automated systems that relied on tones. From the late ‘40s through the mid-‘70s, the telephone network relied upon a 2600 Hertz, or Hz, tone to indicate when a long-distance trunk line was idle, and used pulses of 2600 Hz to send dialing information. Most phone phreaks needed mechanical whistles to duplicate this sound (this included one acclaimed individual called Captain Crunch, so named after the cereal, whose whistle prize he used to imitate the tone), but Joybubbles, who was born with perfect pitch, could do so simply with his mouth.

It’s not hard to see the members of this niche movement as antecedents of today’s computer hackers. In fact, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple, started out as participants in this game. Phil Lapsley, an Oakland, California author who is currently working on a book about phone phreaks, claims: "Phone phreaking and hacking started to intertwine in the 1970s as computers became more widespread. Many of the skills that made one a good phone phreak also made one a good hacker. If you can understand how the telephone system works, you can probably understand how computers work, too."

As it happens, Joybubbles was one phreak who did not join the computer revolution, in no small part because he was blind. Even when Jaws and other audio systems enabled the visually impaired to use the technology in as sophisticated a manner as sighted people, and e-mail accounts could be had via telephone, Joybubbles, following a brief dalliance with the internet in the late ‘90s, never developed an interest in it. But, in the era of phreaking, he amassed an impressive "rap sheet" — ever since the day in 1957 when the eight-year-old Josef Engressia discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C would stop a dialed phone recording. This went on until the end of the ‘60s, when, as a graduate student in Tennessee, he was given a suspended sentence for malicious mischief after making long-distance calls for friends at a dollar a minute.

Engressia became such a celebrated member of this cult that an NBC Nightly News report featured him on November 27, 1968 — a clip of which can be found on YouTube and which is likely the only visual documentation of his life available to the public. He was also the inspiration for the blind character of Whistler, played by David Strathairn in the 1992 movie Sneakers.

For the Bible Tells Me So, Daniel Karslake’s 2007 documentary on the history of the religious right’s hate-hate affair with the gay community, begins with news footage of a celebrity who was once a household name, but is now long forgotten … and yet, thanks to Minnesota 6th District Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, she is not at all unfamiliar to us. The fallen idol is Anita Bryant, singer of “Paper Roses,” “Til There Was You,” and other hits from that bleak era in popular music between Buddy Holly’s death and the arrival of The Beatles (who, ironically, did an equally bleak cover of “Til There Was You”). In the seventies, Anita would become even more famous for her TV pitches for the Florida Citrus Commission, exhorting Americans to drink orange juice, with everything from toast to cheeseburgers to caviar, with the words: “It’s not just for breakfast anymore!” But, by 1977, the year of the footage featured in Karslake’s film, Bryant’s name became synonymous with one thing: homophobia.

That year, Bryant founded and became the spokesperson for a grassroots campaign called Save Our Children. She had begun SOC in response to a movement by the Commission for Dade (later Miami-Dade) County, in her home state of Florida, to amend a human rights ordinance so that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation would be outlawed. The amendment was slated for a vote in June, 1977, and Bryant, who belonged to the Northwest Baptist Church, a virulently conservative congregation that also fought against school desegregation, was not about to let gays and lesbians be given the same rights as those minorities her confederates failed to keep out of their schools.

With the help of her husband, Miami DJ Bob Green, and a little known pastor named Jerry Falwell, Bryant and SOC quickly gained support via petitions, direct-mailings, and phone drives. She also sought support, and gained nationwide notoriety, with public appearances in which she snarled statements like: “If gays are granted rights, next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters.”

These words, of course, were echoed in 1998 by recently retired senate minority whip Trent Lott, who said that gays should be put in the same class as shoplifters and drunks (and who, according to the blogosphere, at least, might have left office out of concern for being outed by a rent boy). But the whiff of familiarity does not apply only to Lott. In fact, Anita Bryant bears so much resemblance, in terms of personal, spiritual and professional philosophy — not to mention physical appearance — to Michele Bachmann, that it’s enough to make one, well, bite one’s nails.

Back in 1977, Bryant launched her SOC campaign with this fearful declaration: “As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically
reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children." When Bachmann was serving as Minnesota state senator in 2004, she reacted to Massachusetts’ legalization of same-sex marriage with this eerily similar preoccupation in a radio interview: “Little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal and natural and perhaps they should try it.”

Unlike the juicer, who made no bones to the mainstream press about her notion that gay people love nothing more than to get their greasy little hands into kids’ pockets, the congresswoman, like most other current anti-gay fundamentalists, insists that she merely wishes to protect the sanctity of marriage. But, as her own personal and professional pursuits have shown, this is a diversionary tact to distract from her and her cronies’ determination to purge society of any gay person who doesn’t want to be “cured.” It’s just that Michele, like others of this peculiar mindset, has learned to be more careful in her language — at least that which she deploys in secular, mainstream settings — thanks, in no small part, to the woman who would be the homophobes’ first celebrity mascot.

Turning back the clock again to the year that disco — up to then the province of bars and clubs catering to all those sweating, pulsating gay men — took over the world, Bryant and Save Our Children did shore up significant support for repeal of the amendment. She not only became a darling of the religious right, helping to shine the spotlight on Falwell, as well as Phyllis Schlafley and Pat Robertson, but even enjoyed support from the conventional media, including Time Magazine and The New York Times.

At the same time, she inadvertently galvanized the gay rights movement, increasing its numbers several-fold, and sparking record-setting attendance for pride parades in major cities, most of which used her as an emblem of hate (in fact, here in Minneapolis, an Anita look-alike contest was part of the festivities). A nationwide boycott of Florida oranges began, and the Citrus Commission was inundated with phone calls urging them to dump the woman who so sweetly chirped, “A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine!”

Barbara Streisand, Ed Asner, and other celebrities spoke out against Bryant, as did former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and President Carter. By the time the Dade County Commission voted in favor of repealing the anti-gay discrimination amendment, Anita and her people had won their political victory. But they also, as The Nation aptly put it, became “the best thing that ever happened to homosexuals.” This was largely due to the hateful one-liners the chanteuse (who, despite a high singing voice, had an intimidatingly low speaking one) would spit out before cameras and microphones, such as: “If homosexuality were the normal way, God would have made Adam and Bruce.”

The gaining strength of the gay community, and the beginning of the end of her crusade, is symbolized by the footage featured in For the Bible Tells Me So. At a press conference in Des Moines, one of several cities where discrimination ordinance amendments were to be voted on, Bryant discusses the protests and harassment she has received from the people she regards as pedophiles. As she does, a gay activist named Aron Kay rushes up to her and rams a pie in her face. While gasps fill the room, and Bryant’s husband implores attendees not to apprehend the assailant — whose specialty was sending the pastries into rightwing enemies’ kissers — but to pray for him, the singer growled, “At least, it was a fruit pie.” (For the record, it was just cream.)

Within months, Save Our Children would collapse, and Bryant’s performing and pitching career would come to a screeching, terminal halt. The Citrus Commission, and the many corporations for which she was a spokesperson, refused to renew her contracts. By the early ’80s, she was making pathetic attempts to renounce her hate-mongering, insisting the whole campaign was the idea of husband Bob, whom she divorced in 1980. This rapid fall taught many, if not all, antigay crusaders to be more careful in how they spoke to those outside their inner circles (Falwell and Robertson would continue to have a problem with this, especially after 9-11).

Thus, Michele Bachmann, who began her life as a “fool for Christ” around the time of Anita Bryant’s brief tenure as chief fool, made sure, by the time she ran for national office in 2006, to focus on the preservation of marriage and deny any links to homophobic institutions — even if those links were very much a part of her adult life.