Anita Bryant, anti-gay rights activist and singer, has died

Anita Bryant, a popular singer and product pitchwoman in the 1960s and ’70s who successfully destroyed both those aspect of her career by becoming the public, and very loud, face of a 1977 campaign against gay rights, has died. The singer of songs like “Paper Roses,” as well as the inspiration for the “Anita Bryant cocktail”—a blend of apple juice and vodka that became popular because her public association with orange juice made screwdrivers highly unpalatable in Florida clubs—Bryant never recovered from the backlash that greeted her efforts to repeal a Florida law banning workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Per an obituary published in The Oklahoman, she died on December 16, 2024 in her Oklahoma home. Bryant was 84.

Named Miss Oklahoma in 1958, Bryant embarked on a singing career shortly after, scoring moderate hits with “Paper Roses” and “Till There Was You.” A regular on USO tours during the 1960s, Bryant gained enough public prominence that she performed at the Super Bowl in 1971, and at graveside services for former President Lyndon Johnson when he died in 1973. She also became a well-known commercial presence, serving as a spokesperson for Coca-Cola and, most famously, the Florida Sunshine Commission, which used her for nine years as the face of orange juice in America.

All of which came to a slow, but screeching, halt in 1977, when Bryant—citing both her interpretation of Christian scripture, as well as her belief that gay people were fixated on “recruiting” America’s children into their ranks—lent her not-inconsiderable celebrity to fighting a Dade County ordinance calling for non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Declaring a “crusade to stop it as this country has not seen before” Bryant actually organized a successful effort (with the ordinance being repealed with a vote of 69 to 31). But she simultaneously made herself a national laughingstock as the face of anti-gay bigotry through her group Save Our Children. Musicians, talk show hosts, actors, and other celebrities were quick to organize against her, including notable boycotts of the products she endorsed. After several years of being a regular target of jabs from folks like Johnny Carson—and gaining the distinction of being one of the most prominent pie-throwing victims in American political discourse—Bryant’s career began to wither; the orange juice people let her contract lapse in 1981, and she released her final album in 1985. (Meanwhile, her divorce from first husband Bob Green, who Bryant alleged was emotionally abusive, alienated her from many on the Christian right who refused to support a divorced woman.) Attempts to revive her music career, including an effort to run a musical museum devoted to her life in Branson, Missouri, failed, causing her and her second husband to file multiple bankruptcies. Bryant is survived by four children.

[via THR]