Tag: Anita Bryant

And Anita Bryant has also left us…

Born on 25 March 1940 in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, Bryant quickly rose to fame through her musical career with hit songs including Till There Was You, In My Little Corner of the World and Paper Roses. At the age of 18, Bryant was crowned Miss Oklahoma.
In addition to singing at the White House during Lyndon B Johnson’s presidency, Bryant sang at Republican and Democratic national conventions. She was also the spokesperson of Florida Citrus, at one point coining the phrase, “Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.”
In the 1970s, Bryant became politically involved by leading the anti-LGBTQ+ “Save Our Children” campaign, which sought to repeal an ordinance in Dade county, Florida, that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Speaking to Playboy in 1978, Bryant said: “I got involved only because they were asking for special privileges that violated the state law of Florida, not to mention God’s law.”

This led to the infamous but kind of glorious incident illustrated above where she got pied in the face on TV by Thom Higgins; it evidently remains his best known piece of activism (apart from apparently coining the term “gay pride”), and probably the defining image of herself… I must say, if you were going to detonate what had been a pretty nice career up to that point, Anita found a brilliant way to do so; she’d never really hid her religiosity but this wasn’t the ideal way of underlining it, and even for the 70s it was considered unnecessarily egregious. The real crunch came, though, when she divorced her husband a few years later and all her Christian friends turned on her cos she violated “God’s law” with that; she fucked her secular entertainment career AND her religious one. The damage that she did to others, of course, was already done, even though she did apparently soften her views later, and her being gone from the world will hardly make the US a magical wonderland of queer acceptance… Still, I imagine there’s a lot of queer people out there who are not exactly sorry to see the back of her right now; wonder what “tributes” pride month will feature when that comes round…