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- Former Miss America Anita Bryant isn't dead, but her career as a singer and a spokesperson for Florida orange juice expired decades ago, following nationwide boycotts against her professional endeavors by gay-rights activists.
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The county also happened to be home to Anita Bryant, a former beauty pageant winner with a string of semi-successful songs under her belt and a lucrative contract as the face of the state’s...
Oct 26, 2023 · On October 14, 1977, while speaking at an event in Iowa to promote her campaign to roll back anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people, Anita Bryant is hit in the face with a pie.
May 11, 1992 · Anita Bryant may have been bloodied by the collapse of her life and singing career since she was last in the public eye - but bowed she definitely is not. Nor has she backed off from her belief...
- Overview
- Bryant 'won the battle' but lost 'the war'
At a public hearing in Dade County, Florida, parents were enraged. The nation, they said, was in peril and children were at risk. A recent ordinance had granted gay people housing and employment protections, and that meant teachers couldn’t be fired because of their sexuality. Florida classrooms quickly became a battleground, and opponents of the ordinance said the state’s support of civil rights for homosexuals was infringing on their rights as parents.
Action had to be taken, and a campaign to limit the legal rights of LGBTQ people — all in the name of protecting children — was enacted. A woman who spoke at this hearing said it was her right to control “the moral atmosphere in which my children grow up.” That woman was Anita Bryant, formerly Miss Oklahoma and a white, telegenic, Top 40 singer who was well known for her Florida orange juice commercials (“A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine!” she’d say). Bryant spearheaded an anti-LGBTQ campaign of such impact that its echoes can be heard in today’s rhetoric. The year was 1977.
Last month, nearly half a century after Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education bill, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by its opponents. The measure, which takes effect July 1, prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in “kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” Similar bills are being considered in 19 other states, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank that has been tracking the bills.
Advocates of Florida’s bill say its purpose is to allow parents to decide how and when LGBTQ topics are introduced to their children. Opponents say it hurts the very children advocates are trying to protect. Sam Ames, director of advocacy and government affairs at The Trevor Project, a queer youth advocacy group, said in a statement that the bill will “erase young LGBTQ students across Florida, forcing many back into the closet by policing their identity and silencing important discussions about the issues they face.”
Historians say they’ve seen this before.
“It’s a contemporary version on these older attempts to annul homosexuality,” said Lillian Faderman, author of “The Gay Revolution,” among other queer history titles.
Though the Dade County ordinance was repealed, opposition to the bill led to a kind of LGBTQ activism that had not been previously seen in South Florida.
“The thing to remember is that Anita Bryant won that battle initially, but she did not win that war,” said the historian Julio Capó Jr., a native Floridian, who wrote “Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940.”
He said Bryant inadvertently spurred a mobilization and a movement.
“It was transformative,” Capó said. “It got people to see themselves as a voting bloc. It got them to see that their very existence and their rights were very much under attack in a different way than we had seen in the decade prior.”
The activism spread from Dade County and across the country, pushing against Bryant’s own “Christian crusade,” as she called it. In 1977, the co-executive directors of the National Gay Task Force wrote a thank you in The New York Times to Bryant and her Save Our Children organization, saying they were “doing the 20 million lesbians and gay men in America an enormous favor: They are focusing for the public the nature of the prejudice and discrimination we face.”
Though Bryant did enjoy some additional years of fame, her anti-gay rhetoric ultimately caused her career prospects to plummet. Her booking agent dropped her, the Florida Citrus Commission stopped running her orange juice ads and she filed for bankruptcy — twice. The anti-discrimination ordinance she helped repeal in 1977 was restored in 1998.
- Jillian Eugenios
Mar 20, 2011 · In the wake of the pie incident and nationwide boycotts of Florida orange juice, the Florida Citrus Commission dropped Bryant as a spokeswoman. She divorced Bob Green in 1980. The couple had four children. Conservative Christians blacklisted her because she had divorced.
Oct 14, 2016 · 39 years ago today, Anita Bryant was iconically pied in the face by gay rights activist Tom Higgins. Bryant was being interviewed for her crusade against homosexuals when the historic moment...
Aug 18, 2016 · A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey published just two weeks ago found that nearly one in every five gay and bisexual students have been raped at some point in their lives, compared...
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