Bryant “Save Our Children” Campaign Targeted LGBTQ rights
Anita Bryant, the pop singer and former Oklahoma beauty queen who gained fame as the face of Florida orange juice before becoming a divisive figure in the battle over gay rights, has died. She was 84. Bryant’s family announced that she died on Dec. 16 at her home in Edmond, Oklahoma.
Bryant first rose to prominence in the 1960s as a singer with pop hits such as “Paper Roses” and as the spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission.
However, her turn to “activism” in the late 1970s dramatically altered her public persona. In 1977, Bryant launched the “Save Our Children” campaign to repeal a Miami-Dade County ordinance that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. The campaign was successful, and the ordinance was repealed by popular vote that year. It wasn’t reinstated until 1998.
Bryant’s campaign made her famous and popular among the religious right, but it also solidified her as a symbol of opposition for LGBTQ rights activists. Her activism extended to supporting California’s 1978 Briggs Initiative, which sought to ban public school employees from making pro-gay statements or supporting gay rights. The initiative was ultimately defeated by a wide margin, with even conservative Governor Ronald Reagan opposing it.
The backlash to Bryant’s crusades crushed her career. LGBTQ activists organized a nationwide boycott of Florida orange juice, leading to her dismissal as the brand’s spokesperson in 1980. Bryant was famously hit in the face with a banana cream pie by a gay activist named Tom Higgins on October 14, 1977.
Bryant published a memoir, Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality, in which she claimed that LGBTQ individuals “recruited children” because they “could not reproduce.”
In recent years, Bryant’s legacy was revisited when her granddaughter, Sarah Green, who identifies as gay, publicly announced her engagement to her fiancée. Bryant had once claimed in an interview that she “loves homosexuals but hates their sin.” She also claimed that God talked to her and told her to oppose LGBTQ rights.
