Anita Bryant, the Florida orange juice promoter turned anti-gay rights activist who inspired the failed California Briggs Initiative, died in obscurity last month. She was 84.
Ms. Bryant died December 16, according to an obituary that was published by her family January 9 in The Oklahoman.
Ms. Bryant was born March 25, 1940, in Barnsdall, Oklahoma. After winning a singing contest on Arthur Godfrey's talent show, she got a TV show of her own at age 12, which in turn propelled her to winning Miss Oklahoma in 1958 and becoming the second runner-up of Miss America the following year. The next decade was dominated by her singing career — including performances at the funeral of former President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and at the half-time show of Super Bowl V.
In 1969, Ms. Bryant became a spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission, stating the famous tagline "Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine" in the group's TV advertising.
But she soon waded into the culture wars and became a virulent anti-LGBTQ crusader. Those battles ended up costing her lucrative contracts, as companies sought to distance themselves from her strident homophobia.
Ms. Bryant used her national fame and recognition to lead a successful campaign to repeal a 1977 Dade County, Florida (now Miami-Dade County) ordinance to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. She led the first organized opposition to the American gay liberation movement about a decade after the 1969 Stonewall riots, which she called Save Our Children Inc.
Ms. Bryant was an early proponent of the "homosexual recruitment" conspiracy theory, which is still peddled today by anti-LGBTQ groups.
"What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternate way of life," Ms. Bryant said.
After the victory in the Sunshine State, Ms. Bryant took Save Our Children to St. Paul, Minnesota; Wichita, Kansas; and Eugene, Oregon.
Homophobia gained traction in CA
Gay former San Francisco supervisor and state assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) was a public school teacher when Ms. Bryant's homophobic rhetoric started gaining traction in the Golden State, long a haven for LGBTQ people.
"There was definitely a climate of gay rights laws being repealed and that certainly was red meat on the savanna for some of the homophobes here," Ammiano told the Bay Area Reporter on January 10. "To get a gay rights law in Oregon and in Florida, and then get it repealed, excited the homophobia that existed here in California."
The result of that was Proposition 6, the Briggs Initiative, a 1978 California statewide ballot measure that would have banned gay and lesbian teachers like Ammiano.
"It brings me back to a time I feel very strongly about our gay liberation era with Harvey Milk in the lead and how we felt resolved to push back," Ammiano said, when asked to respond to news of Ms. Bryant's death. "I think a person like her gave us that opportunity to really personalize it. To me, that was thrilling and we made advances."
Ms. Bryant became what Ammiano termed "a favorite piñata" for the gay liberation movement.
The most famous example of this was in 1977 when, in Des Moines, Iowa, Ms. Bryant was hit in the face with a banana cream pie by gay activist Tom Higgins.
"At least it's a fruit pie," she quipped, before praying for Higgins' soul and crying.
Ammiano joked, "As someone told me, rest in pie."
"The pie in the face she got reminds me of the days such actions were admired and popular," Ammiano said. "It's hard to feel bad about her passing and her ideas resulted in ... a lot of blood on her hands."
Longtime gay activist Cleve Jones was on the frontlines of the fight in those days.
"I would say Anita was kind of an almost comedic figure, but one could not say the same of her protégé John Briggs, who attempted to capitalize on Bryant's momentum with Prop 6, which, had it passed, would have been incredibly dangerous," Jones said. "It was easy to laugh at her but she enabled others who were less amusing."
The opposition to the 1978 Briggs initiative was led by Milk (then a San Francisco supervisor), who traveled the state in a series of debates with legislative sponsor the late Republican state senator John Briggs. The late firebrand lesbian feminist Sally Gearhart also played a key role in the defeat of Prop 6, as detailed in the new documentary, "Sally!"
Bryant did damage
Gwenn Craig, a Black lesbian, also helped lead that effort alongside Milk, Gearhart, and other Bay Area LGBTQ activists.
"It hurt personally as well as politically. The damage she did was psychological as well as sociological and political and that's why people hated her so vociferously," Craig said of Ms. Bryant. "She never asked for forgiveness. She never sought redemption. She never thought anything she did was wrong. You'll see so many people saying today they're glad to see her gone. It's sad but it's understandable."
Craig explained that Bryant "did a great deal of harm while she was most active in public life."
"She came out and encouraged people to hate us and to distrust us and to try and squash our rights and our political movement at a time when we were at our most vulnerable. ... John Briggs got his idea in California because he went to Florida and was very impressed with what she was doing."
Ms. Bryant's homophobic activism led LGBTQ businesses to boycott Florida orange juice. The February 17, 1977 edition of the B.A.R. states that "gay bars around the country have discontinued serving orange juice from Florida. The impact of the boycott is not yet known, but as one wag put it, 'By destroying 20% of Florida's orange crop with a big freeze, the Lord had demonstrated to Ms. Bryant and company that He supports Gay Rights Legislation."
During this time, LGBTQ bars served a variation on the screwdriver called the Anita Bryant cocktail, with vodka and apple juice instead of orange juice, Ammiano recalled.
Ultimately, the Briggs initiative went down in defeat just weeks before Milk's assassination inside San Francisco City Hall alongside then-mayor George Moscone on the morning of November 27, 1978. Months prior to their deaths Milk and Moscone shepherded a gay rights ordinance into law in San Francisco similar to the ones Ms. Bryant had played a role in repealing.
Things didn't get any better for Ms. Bryant after that; the Florida orange juice organization dropped her as a spokesperson. Her first marriage ended in divorce. And she ran unsuccessfully for vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant Christian denomination.
In 1998, Miami-Dade County reinstated the anti-discrimination ordinance.
Yet, Ms. Bryant heralded an era of religiously-motivated anti-LGBTQ involvement in politics that continues to this day. Even as Save Our Children fell into irrelevance, the late Reverend Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority helped lead Ronald Reagan to landslide wins as U.S. president as the AIDS epidemic would soon decimate the gay and bisexual communities.
Craig said Ms. Bryant "set the course" for things to come.
"I think people were glad she diminished in popularity, but she had already raised up others who went on to greater things, people like Jerry Falwell, who came to Florida to support her. He amassed a following," Craig said. "She lit the spark with what she did and got people seeing [that] campaigning against the LGBTQ movement was very effective, though she herself was forced to drop out of being in the leadership of that fight."
Ammiano said of Ms. Bryant's legacy that, "I think today it's a warning to us, especially through [President-elect] Donald Trump, that we need to embody gay liberation in a way that invites action and pushback. I think we're missing some leadership around that, and the community is going to have to embody that."
Asked if there were any lessons of that era that could be applied in 2025, Jones said, "The main lesson is their playbook really doesn't change. The specific targets may change — for example, the current focus on trans people — but it's the same old lie we're a threat to children. Her campaign was called 'Save Our Children.'"
Mr. Bryant's own family had LGBTQ ties.
Ms. Bryant's granddaughter announced she was marrying a woman in 2021, NBC News reported.
"I can certainly see an irony in that her granddaughter is a lesbian," Ammiano said, adding that though "I'm not going to miss her ... she helped unintentionally organize the queer community."
Jones agreed with that assessment.
"What should be said about her brief moment on the stage is though she certainly did some harm, she also in an odd way was quite useful, because thanks to her efforts, our communities nationwide rallied in a way that had not been done before," Jones said. "So perhaps part of her legacy was to unleash an amount of LGBT political power that was unanticipated."
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