Anita Bryant, singer and anti-gay rights crusader who sparked orange juice boycott, dies aged 84

Anita Bryant, the Grammy-nominated singer who later became a high-profile and controversial campaigner against gay rights in America, has died aged 84.

The New York Times reported that Bryant’s family said she died from cancer at her home in Edmond, Oklahoma, on 16 December.

“May Anita’s memory and her faith in eternal life through Christ comfort all who embraced her,” the family said in an obituary placed in local paper The Oklahoman.

Born in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, on 25 March 1940, Bryant began singing in public from the age of six and made occasional appearances on local TV and radio. She was given her own WKY series, The Anita Bryant Show, when she was 12 years old.

With her wholesome image, she won the Miss Oklahoma beauty pageant when she was 18 and was the second runner-up in the 1959 Miss America pageant, releasing her self-titled debut album that same year.

She appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 with songs such as “Till There Was You”, from Broadway’s The Music Man, in 1959, and again with “In My Little Corner of the World” and “Paper Roses”.

Bryant performed at both Republican and Democratic national conventions, as well as singing at the White House during the presidency of Lyndon B Johnson, one of her biggest fans. He was so taken with her rendition of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the 1971 Super Bowl halftime show that he asked her to sing it at his funeral.

She was appointed the spokesperson of Florida Citrus from 1969, coining the phrase: “Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.”

From the late Seventies, Bryant became an outspoken opponent of gay rights, leading the anti-LGBTQ+ “Save Our Children” campaign that sought to repeal an ordinance in Dade county, Florida, that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation.

open image in gallery

The born-again Christian told Playboy magazine in 1978: “I got involved only because they were asking for special privileges that violated the state law of Florida, not to mention God’s law.

“You know, when I was a child, you didn’t even mention the word homosexual, much less find out what the act was about. You knew it was very bad, but you couldn't imagine what they tried to do, exactly, in terms of one taking a male role and the other taking a female role.

“I mean, it was too filthy to think about and you had other things to think about. So when I finally found out the implications, it was a total revelation for me.”

The campaign was successful, but it permanently damaged Bryant’s image and led to a nationwide boycott of Florida orange juice among the gay community and their supporters.

Bars stopped serving screwdriver cocktails and replaced them with a mixture of vodka and apple juice, which was named the Anita Bryant cocktail.

She told Playboy that she lost around half a million dollars in concert bookings, along with a deal to host her own TV show, as her public appearances became a draw for gay rights protestors.

She was possibly the first recipient of a protest pie in 1977, when she was creamed in the face by Minnesota activist Thom Higgins during a news conference in Des Moines, Iowa. “At least it’s not a fruit pie,” she said, appearing to refer to a derogatory term for a gay person, before bursting into tears and praying that Higgins would be “delivered from his deviant lifestyle”.

“Deviance” was part of her core argument that LGBTQ+ people did not deserve rights, while her notion of protecting children through the argument that “homosexuals cannot repoduce, so they must recruit”, is one that persists in anti-LGBTQ+ campaigning today.

By 1980, Bryant had been dropped by the Florida Citrus Commission, around the same time she and her husband of 20 years, disc jockey Bob Green, got divorced. The split lost her support from conservatives who said she was no longer a positive role model.

Bryant married the late Charles Dry, who was her childhood sweetheart, in 1990. Together they made a number of attempts to revive her career, to no avail. She was the subject of a number of productions including the 2016 play Anita Bryant’s Playboy Interview and the 2018 musical The Loneliest Girl in the World.

In 2016, Sir Ian McKellen read a powerful letter about a man coming out to his parents as part of the Letters Live series. Taken from Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, it was written from the perspective of Michael Toliver, a gay man who discovers that his parents have joined Bryant’s campaign in Florida.

A planned biopic about her life was reported to be in the works in 2019, written and directed by Chad Hodge and starring Ashley Judd as Bryant.

She is survived by her children, two stepdaughters, and seven grandchildren.