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Anita Bryant, shown here on May 1977, was a popular singer in the early 1960s who is now best known as an outspoken opponent of gay rights.
She was 84.
Anita Bryant, the evangelical Christian who led a charge against LGBTQ+ rights, died last month at 84, according to an obituary shared by her family.
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According to the obituary, Bryant died on December 16, 2024, at her home in Edmond, Okla.
Before her anti-LGBTQ+ positions made her a favorite of religious conservatives, Bryant was known for appearances in commercials, her time appearing at Bob Hope's holiday tours for overseas troops, and for singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" at the Super Bowl in 1971. She sang at both Republican and Democratic national conventions, at the White House when Lyndon B. Johnson was president, and at Johnson's graveside service in 1973.
Bryant, born in Oklahoma in 1940, was a beauty queen and a best-selling pop star before returning to her Christian roots in the 1970s. She became an antigay activist in 1977 when she launched the successful effort to repeal an antidiscrimination ordinance in Miami-Dade County; she had become prominent in Florida as a spokeswoman for its orange growers. Miami-Dade County's government had adopted an ordinance banning employment and housing discrimination based on sexual orientation, making it one of the first municipalities to do so. Bryant, who had testified against the ordinance, was outraged at its passage and led a campaign dubbed "Save Our Children" to persuade voters to repeal it.
“I got involved only because they were asking for special privileges that violated the state law of Florida, not to mention God’s law,” Bryant said of gays and lesbians in an interview with Playboy.
Along the way, Bryant became a darling of her fellow conservative Christians and an enemy of gay people and their allies; in 1977, an activist threw a pie in her face at a press conference.
Miami-Dade citizens did repeal the ordinance, with over 70 percent voting to do so. The city-county government restored the ordinance in 1998 and added gender identity to it in 2014. Her activism also inspired a ban on adoption by same-sex couples in Florida, which was struck down in court in 2010.
Outside Florida, she backed California's Briggs Initiative in 1978; the ballot measure sought to bar gays and lesbians from teaching in the public schools. It failed to win a majority of the vote. Opposition was led by activists including Harvey Milk, and California's then-governor, Jerry Brown, and Jimmy Carter, then the U.S. president, spoke out against it.
Along the way, Bryant claimed that she didn't hate gay people but wanted to help them, and she founded Anita Bryant Ministries, which offered "ex-gay" therapy. However, she also conflated LGBTQ+ people with pedophiles.
It emerged in 2021 that Bryant's granddaughter Sarah Green was gay and engaged to marry a woman. Green talked about her relationship with the notorious antigay crusader on an episode of Slate's podcast One Year, hosted by Josh Levin and focusing on 1977, a year when the nation seemed on the verge of great change.
Green told Levin she had no intention of coming out to Bryant, but she was spurred to do so on her 21st birthday. Bryant sang "Happy Birthday" to her granddaughter on the phone and told her that if she had faith, the right man would come along. "And I just snapped and was like, 'I hope that he doesn't come along, because I'm gay, and I don't want a man to come along,'" Green recalled. Bryant responded by telling Green that homosexuality is a delusion invented by the devil and that her granddaughter should focus on loving God, because that would make her realize she's straight.
Robert Green Jr., Sarah Green's father and Bryant's son, said on the podcast that when he told his mother of Sarah's engagement, "All at once, her eyes widened, her smile opened, and out came the oddest sound: 'Oh.' Instead of taking Sarah as she is, my mom has chosen to pray that Sarah will eventually conform to my mom's idea of what God wants Sarah to be."
Bryant apparently never recanted her anti-LGBTQ+ views, but they did cost her. Singer, the sewing machine company, had planned to sponsor a TV show for her, but it pulled out soon after the "Save Our Children" campaign,The Washington Postnotes. Eventually, the Florida orange industry dropped her.
"Ms. Bryant went bankrupt, struggled to provide for her children, said she contemplated suicide and admitted that for a time she became dependent on pills and wine — a striking coda to her early career, when she refused to perform in venues that served alcohol," the Post reports.
Her divorce from her first husband, Bob Green, in 1980, led some conservative Christians to lose their respect for her, and she in turn lost her respect for some of them. But she clung to her anti-LGBTQ+ ideology. “I’ve never regretted what I did,” she told The Oklahoman in 2011.
Bryant later married Charlie Dry, whom she'd dated in high school. He died last year. She is survived by four children, two stepdaughters, and seven grandchildren.
