NEW YORK – Anita Bryant, a former Miss Oklahoma, Grammy-nominated singer, and prominent promoter of orange juice and other products who became well-known in the latter half of her life for her outspoken opposition to gay rights, died. She was 84.
Bryant died on December 16 at her home in Edmond, Oklahoma, according to a statement posted by her family to The Oklahoman on Thursday. The family did not specify the cause of death.
Bryant, a Barnsdall native, started singing at a young age and was only 12 when she hosted her own local television show. She was crowned Miss Oklahoma in 1958 and quickly launched a successful recording career.
Her successful singles included “Till There Was You,” “Paper Roses,” and “My Little Corner of the World.” Anita Bryant, a lifelong Christian, received two Grammy nominations for best sacred performance and one for best spiritual performance for her album “Anita Bryant … Naturally.”
By the late 1960s, she was one of the entertainers on Bob Hope’s USO tours for troops overseas, had sung at the White House, and had performed at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 1968.
She also became a well-known commercial spokesperson, with advertisements for Florida orange juice featuring the tagline, “A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.”
But in the late 1970s, her life and career took a dramatically different turn. Unhappy with the cultural changes of the time, Bryant led a successful campaign to repeal an ordinance in Florida’s Miami-Dade County that would have prohibited sexual orientation discrimination.
Bryant and her “Save Our Children” coalition, which included the Rev. Jerry Falwell, continued to oppose gay rights across the country, denouncing the gay community’s “deviant lifestyle” and referring to gays as “human garbage.”
In turn, Bryant received a great deal of criticism. Activists organized boycotts of products she endorsed, designed T-shirts mocking her, and named a drink after her — a screwdriver variation with apple juice instead of orange. During an appearance in Iowa, an activist smashed a pie in her face. Her entertainment career stalled, her marriage to her first husband, Bob Green, ended, and she later declared bankruptcy.
In Florida, her legacy was both challenged and preserved. The ban on sexual discrimination was reinstated in 1998. On Friday, Tom Lander, an LGBTQ+ activist and board member of the advocacy group Safe Schools South Florida, told The Associated Press: “She won the campaign, but she lost the battle in time.”
However, Lander acknowledged the “parental rights” movement, which has resulted in a recent wave of book bans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Florida, spearheaded by conservative organizations such as Moms Against Liberty.
“It is so connected to what is happening today,” Lander said.
Bryant spent the latter part of her life in Oklahoma, where she directed Anita Bryant Ministries International. Her second husband, Charles Hobson Dry, a NASA test astronaut, died last year. Her family has stated that she is survived by four children, two stepdaughters, and seven grandchildren.