Saturday, January 11, 2025

Anita Bryant, Whose Anti-Gay Politics Undid a Singing Career, Is Dead at 84. (Anita Gates, NY Times, January 11, 2025)

 In October 1963, our UN Ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, was spat upon in Dallas by an angry right-wing mob. Ambassador Stevenson replied, "I believe in the forgiveness of sins and the redemption of ignorance." Justice Antonin Scalia used the term "Kulturkampf" in a Supreme Court decision to describe the anti-Gay haters' sick schtick. Jerry Falwell called for a "Thirty Years War" against homosexuality.  Bigots' bumptious bloviating helped elect candidates who used bigotry as a weapon in their culture war.  The bigots lost that war. Bigtime. Gay marriage is legal now.  Gay rights are respected now.  The tawdry tedious termagants angry attack on diversity have failed. As Langston Hughes said, "Let America be America again." Pray for the soul of Anita Bryant. From The New York Times: 

Anita Bryant, Whose Anti-Gay Politics Undid a Singing Career, Is Dead at 84

The former beauty queen and spokeswoman for Florida orange juice was an all-American entertainer before she began crusading against L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

Anita Bryant wearing a floral top in a black-and-white photo.
Anita Bryant at her home in Miami Beach, Fla., in 1978.Credit...Kathy A. Willens/Associated Press

Anita Bryant, the singer and former beauty queen who had a flourishing music career in the 1960s and ’70 but whose opposition to gay rights — she called homosexuality “an abomination” — virtually destroyed her career, died on Dec. 16 at her home in Edmond, Okla. She was 84. 

The cause was cancer, her son William Green said. The family placed a paid obituary in The Oklahoman, a newspaper in Oklahoma City, on Thursday.

Ms. Bryant was just 18 when she won the Miss Oklahoma beauty title and was named second runner-up in the Miss America pageant. She promptly turned that success into a lucrative show business career.


For almost two decades, she had a smooth run — entertaining troops on U.S.O. tours with Bob Hope, performing during Billy Graham’s evangelical tours and co-hosting nationally televised parades. She sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s graveside.

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Anita Bryant wearing a white dress and matching gloves with signage saying “Miss Oklahoma” above her in a black-and-white photo.
Ms. Bryant as Miss Oklahoma in 1958. She later was second runner-up in the Miss America contest.Credit...Associated Press

Most memorably, she represented the Florida Citrus Commission in a long campaign of television commercials, in which she sang “Come to the Florida Sunshine Tree” and offered the tagline: “Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.”

Wearing gingham, ruffles or both, she sauntered down country lanes (juice pitcher in hand), talked to cartoon birds and beamed with joy about the wonders of vitamin C.

Then, in early 1977, Dade County, Fla. — which includes Miami, where Ms. Bryant lived — gave its final approval to an ordinance prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals. A group of opponents, led by Ms. Bryant, turned up to protest. “The ordinance condones immorality and discriminates against my children’s rights to grow up in a healthy, decent community,” she said.

She founded Save Our Children, an anti-gay organization that gave rise to the modern-day religious right's strategy of tying homosexuality to perceived threats against children. Her public image — many called her a “Christian celebrity” — was changed forever.

Less than two months later, a television producer told her that the publicity around her “controversial political activities” meant that she would not be hired for a planned variety-show pilot.

“The blacklisting of Anita Bryant has begun,” Ms. Bryant announced to the press. Although the citrus commission said publicly that her activism would not affect her $100,000-a-year arrangement, the contract was canceled before the decade ended.

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Anita Bryant, with a kerchief around her neck and wearing a white dress, is walking hand in hand with a woman in a black-and-white photo. A few men are behind them, as they walk outdoors.
Ms. Bryant being led to the voting booth at her Miami Beach polling place in June 1977, as she prepared to vote against an ordinance that prohibited discrimination against homosexuals.Credit...Kathy A. Willens/Associated Press

In October 1977, at a news conference in Des Moines, a demonstrator walked up to Ms. Bryant and pushed a banana cream pie into her face. “At least it was a fruit pie,” Ms. Bryant ad-libbed.

Some took that remark as an innocent allusion to her job promoting fresh produce; others saw it as a pointed comment on a longtime epithet for gay men. As the cameras rolled and pie filling clung to her cheeks, she began to pray — “We’re praying for him to be delivered from his deviant lifestyle, Father” — then broke down into tears.

“I don’t regret it, because I did the right thing,” Ms. Bryant recalled in a 1990 television interview. “Sometimes you have to pay a price for what you believe is right.”

Anita Jane Bryant was born on March 25, 1940, in her grandparents’ home in Barnsdall, Okla., a small town in Osage County. She was the daughter of Warren G. Bryant, whose occupation was listed as tool dresser in the 1940 census, and of Lenore Annice (Berry) Bryant. When Warren joined the Army, Lenore took a clerical job at a nearby Air Force base. The young couple divorced when Anita and her sister were small.

As a child, Anita sang in church and at local fairgrounds. In her teens, she appeared on Tulsa and Oklahoma City television stations. When the CBS show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” visited Tulsa, she was invited to compete in its New York competition, and she won.

In 1958, she graduated from Will Rogers High School in Tulsa and was crowned Miss Oklahoma.

The first decade or so of her show business career included appearances on prime-time variety series like “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show,” “Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall” and “The George Gobel Show.” The first time she sang on “The Tonight Show,” in 1959, Jack Paar was the host.

Between 1959 and 1961, she had four Top 40 hits: “Paper Roses,” “Till There Was You,” “In My Little Corner of the World” and “Wonderland by Night.”

Before her job promoting orange juice, Ms. Bryant also appeared in commercials for Coca-Cola, Holiday Inn, Friedrich air-conditioners, the energy company Phillips 66 and Tupperware.

Anita Bryant, in a white dress, holds the microphone while standing onstage and smiling in a black-and-white photo.
Ms. Bryant singing during the taping of a Dick Clark special called “The Sensational Shocking, Wild and Crazy Seventies” in Los Angeles in 1979.Credit...George Brich/Associated Press

As the publicity about her anti-gay views died down, she returned to television in 1980 with a two-hour variety show special, “The Anita Bryant Spectacular,” smiling big but with what struck one media critic as a giant chip on her shoulder. “Miss Bryant’s cause is never defined too clearly,” John J. O’Connor wrote in his New York Times review of the show, “but seems directed at anyone who may differ from her particular concepts of godliness and cleanliness.”

Mr. O’Connor added that, despite “careful projections of wholesomeness and benevolence,” Ms. Bryant’s message appeared to be “persistently hostile and aggressive.” The special was sponsored by her religious organization, which supported “conversion therapy” for gay men.

Two months after the special, Ms. Bryant ended her marriage to her manager, Robert Einar Green, a New York-born former disc jockey whom she married in Oklahoma in 1960. Some conservative Christian fans, shocked by the divorce, turned away.

Later, Ms. Bryant spoke openly about having considered suicide in the late 1970s. “I went into hiding,” she said in a 1990 interview for the TV program “Inside Story.” “Today I can honestly say that there is such a peace and a confidence and a maturity, if you will, that can only have come out of going down to those pits of despair and despondency and wanting to take my life.”

Ms. Bryant became an author with books like “Amazing Grace” and “Bless This Food: The Anita Bryant Family Cookbook,” but her most talked-about title was “The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality” (1977).

She was always an object of teasing. In 1974, when her purse was stolen, a column in The Times reduced her to “the singer who sells orange juice on television.” So it was probably inevitable that she would be skewered on television shows like “Saturday Night Live.” In 1977, Jane Curtin, co-hosting the show’s news segment, screened the pie incident and reported, “Fortunately, Ms. Bryant, who was not injured, enjoyed a good laugh and said it was OK if the assailant dated her husband.”

sketch that year on “The Carol Burnett Show” featured Ms. Burnett sporting a corsage of full-size oranges, making double entendres about queens and singing about a promised land that’s “bright and gay.” 

The 1980 film comedy “Airplane!” compared a plane full of nauseated passengers to an Anita Bryant concert. In Michael Moore’s documentary “Roger & Me” (1989), Ms. Bryant embodied forced optimism, singing the pop song “Joy to the World” to audiences in economically devastated Flint, Mich. Footage of her anti-gay campaign appeared in the film “Milk” (2008); plays, including “Anita Bryant Died for Your Sins” (2009) and “Anita Bryant’s Playboy Interview” (2016), opened on both coasts.

Ms. Bryant attempted a comeback tour in 1988, performing in Florida trailer-park rec rooms.

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Anita Bryant smiles, wearing a fuchsia-colored jacket and matching lipstick.
Ms. Bryant in 1992.Credit...Wyatt Counts/Associated Press

In 1990, she married Charlie Hobson Dry, an Oklahoma native and former NASA test crewman. He spent the next decade trying to revive her career, opening the Anita Bryant Music Mansion in Branson, Mo., and Pigeon Forge, Tenn. But financial problems plagued both ventures. The couple moved back to Oklahoma, where they operated Anita Bryant Ministries International.

In addition to her son William, Ms. Bryant is survived by another son, Robert Green Jr.; two daughters, Gloria and Barbara; two stepdaughters; and seven grandchildren. Mr. Dry died in 2024. 

“I was a sacrificial lamb,” Ms. Bryant said of her vilification in some quarters in an interview for a syndicated newspaper article in 1988. “I didn’t even know it. And I couldn’t get out of it once I’d begun.”

Sara Ruberg contributed reporting and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 11, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Anita Bryant, 84, Whose Clash With Gay Rights Undid Career, DiesOrder Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe






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Anita Bryant wearing a floral top in a black-and-white photo.
Anita Bryant at her home in Miami Beach, Fla., in 1978.Credit...Kathy A. Willens/Associated Press

Anita Bryant, the singer and former beauty queen who had a flourishing music career in the 1960s and ’70 but whose opposition to gay rights — she called homosexuality “an abomination” — virtually destroyed her career, died on Dec. 16 at her home in Edmond, Okla. She was 84. 

The cause was cancer, her son William Green said. The family placed a paid obituary in The Oklahoman, a newspaper in Oklahoma City, on Thursday.

Ms. Bryant was just 18 when she won the Miss Oklahoma beauty title and was named second runner-up in the Miss America pageant. She promptly turned that success into a lucrative show business career.

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