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Anita Bryant, the singer and former magnificence queen who had a flourishing music profession within the Sixties and ’70, however whose opposition to homosexual rights — she referred to as homosexuality “an abomination” — nearly destroyed her profession, died on Dec. 16 at her residence in Edmond, Okla. She was 84.
The trigger was most cancers, her son William Green mentioned. The household positioned an obituary in The Oklahoman, a newspaper in Oklahoma City, on Thursday.
Ms. Bryant was simply 18 when she received the Miss Oklahoma magnificence title and was named second runner-up within the Miss America pageant. She promptly turned that success right into a profitable present enterprise profession.
For nearly 20 years, she had a easy run — entertaining troops on U.S.O. excursions with Bob Hope, performing throughout Billy Graham’s evangelical excursions and co-hosting nationally televised parades. She sang the nationwide anthem on the Super Bowl and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s graveside.
Most memorably, she represented the Florida Citrus Commission in an extended marketing campaign of tv commercials, during which she sang “Come to the Florida Sunshine Tree” and supplied the tagline: “Breakfast with out orange juice is sort of a day with out sunshine.” Wearing gingham, ruffles or each, she sauntered down nation lanes (juice pitcher in hand), talked to cartoon birds and beamed with pleasure concerning the wonders of vitamin C.
Then, in early 1977, Dade County, Fla. — which incorporates Miami, the place Ms. Bryant lived — gave its ultimate approval to an ordinance prohibiting discrimination towards homosexuals. A gaggle of opponents, led by Ms. Bryant, turned as much as protest. “The ordinance condones immorality and discriminates towards my youngsters’s rights to develop up in a wholesome, first rate group,” she mentioned.
She based Save Our Children, an anti-gay group that gave rise to the modern-day non secular proper’s technique of tying homosexuality to perceived threats towards youngsters. Her public picture — many referred to as her a “Christian movie star” — was modified endlessly.
Less than two months later, a tv producer instructed her that the publicity round her “controversial political actions” meant that she wouldn’t be employed for the variety-show pilot that had been deliberate.
“The blacklisting of Anita Bryant has begun,” Ms. Bryant introduced to the press. Although the citrus fee mentioned publicly that her activism wouldn’t have an effect on her $100,000-a-year association, the contract was canceled earlier than the last decade ended.
In October 1977, at a information convention in Des Moines, a demonstrator walked as much as Ms. Bryant and pushed a banana cream pie into her face. “At least it was a fruit pie,” Ms. Bryant ad-libbed.
Some took that comment as an harmless allusion to her job selling recent produce; others noticed it as a pointed touch upon a longtime epithet for homosexual males. As the cameras rolled, and pie filling clung to her cheeks, she started to wish — “We’re praying for him to be delivered from his deviant way of life, Father” — then broke down into tears.
“I don’t remorse it, as a result of I did the fitting factor,” Ms. Bryant recalled in a 1990 tv interview. “Sometimes you need to pay a worth for what you imagine is true.”
Anita Jane Bryant was born on March 25, 1940, in her grandparents’ residence in Barnsdall, Okla., a small city in Osage County. She was the daughter of Warren G. Bryant, whose occupation was listed as software dresser within the 1940 census, and of Lenore Annice (Berry) Bryant. When Warren joined the Army, Lenore took a clerical job at a close-by Air Force base. The younger couple divorced when Anita and her sister had been small.
As a toddler, Anita sang in church and at native fairgrounds. In her teenagers, she appeared on Tulsa and Oklahoma City tv stations. When CBS’s “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” visited Tulsa, she was invited to compete within the present’s New York competitors, and she or he received.
In 1958 she graduated from Will Rogers High School in Tulsa and was topped Miss Oklahoma.
The first decade or so of her present enterprise profession included appearances on prime-time selection sequence like “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show,” “Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall” and “The George Gobel Show.” The first time she sang on “The Tonight Show,” in 1959, Jack Paar was the host.
Between 1959 and 1961, she had 4 Top 40 hits: “Paper Roses,” “Till There Was You,” “In My Little Corner of the World” and “Wonderland by Night.”
Before her job selling orange juice, Ms. Bryant additionally appeared in commercials for Coca-Cola, Holiday Inn, Friedrich air-conditioners, Phillips 66 and Tupperware.
As the publicity about her anti-gay views died down, she returned to tv with a two-hour selection present particular, smiling huge however with what struck one media critic as an enormous chip on her shoulder. “Miss Bryant’s trigger is rarely outlined too clearly,” John J. O’Connor wrote in his New York Times assessment of “The Anita Bryant Spectacular” (1980), “however appears directed at anybody who might differ from her specific ideas of godliness and cleanliness.”
Mr. O’Connor continued that, regardless of “cautious projections of wholesomeness and benevolence,” Ms. Bryant’s message gave the impression to be “persistently hostile and aggressive.” The particular was sponsored by her non secular group, which supported “conversion remedy” for homosexual males.
Two months after the particular, Ms. Bryant ended her marriage to her manager, Robert Einar Green, a New York-born former disc jockey whom she married in Oklahoma in 1960. Some conservative Christian followers, shocked by the divorce, turned away.
Later, Ms. Bryant spoke brazenly about having thought-about suicide within the late Seventies. “I went into hiding,” she mentioned in a 1990 “Inside Story” interview. “Today I can truthfully say that there’s such a peace and a confidence and a maturity, if you’ll, that may solely have come out of happening to these pits of despair and despondency and desirous to take my life.”
M
s. Bryant first turned an writer with books like “Amazing Grace” and “Bless This Food: The Anita Bryant Family Cookbook, however her most talked-about title was “The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality” (1977).
She was all the time an object of teasing. In 1974, when her purse was stolen, a column in The Times lowered her to “the singer who sells orange juice on tv.” So it was in all probability inevitable that she could be skewered on tv reveals like “Saturday Night Live.” In 1977, Jane Curtin, co-hosting the present’s information phase, screened the pie incident and reported, “Fortunately, Ms. Bryant, who was not injured, loved chuckle and mentioned it was OK if the assailant dated her husband.”
A sketch that 12 months on “The Carol Burnett Show” featured Ms. Burnett sporting a corsage of full-size oranges, making double entendres about queens and singing a couple of promised land that’s “brilliant and homosexual,” and Tim Conway as a personality who regarded and sounded loads like Truman Capote.
The 1980 movie comedy “Airplane” in contrast a aircraft stuffed with nauseated passengers to an Anita Bryant live performance. In Michael Moore’s “Roger & Me” (1989), Ms. Bryant embodied compelled optimism, singing “Joy to the World” (the pop music model) to audiences in economically devastated Flint, Mich. Footage of her anti-gay marketing campaign appeared within the movie “Milk” (2008); and performs, together with “Anita Bryant Died for Your Sins” (2009) and “Anita Bryant’s Playboy Interview” (2016), opened on each coasts.
In 1988, she tried a comeback tour, performing in Florida trailer-park rec rooms.
In 1990, Ms. Bryant married Charlie Hobson Dry, an Oklahoma native and former NASA check crewman. He spent the subsequent decade attempting to revive her profession, opening the Anita Bryant Music Mansion in Branson, Mo., and Pigeon Forge, Tenn., however monetary issues plagued each ventures. The couple moved again to Oklahoma, the place they operated Anita Bryant Ministries International.
She is survived by two sons, Robert Green Jr. and William Green; two daughters, Gloria and Barbara; and two stepdaughters. Mr. Dry died in 2024.
“I used to be a sacrificial lamb,” Ms. Bryant mentioned in a syndicated newspaper article in 1988. “I didn’t even realize it. And I couldn’t get out of it as soon as I’d begun.”
Sara Ruberg contributed reporting and Sheelagh McNeill contributed analysis.
