Politico’s reference to a “convenient bogeyman” is especially ironic, as the gay rights movement cast Bryant in just that role. Though Bryant was far from perfect in her advocacy, she often said that she did not hate homosexuals. For many the feeling was not mutual. In the same Slate podcast that Politico references, Lillian Faderman, an LGBT historian, says, “Anita Bryant became the devil of the gay rights movement,” a common enemy who enflamed passions and motivated effort.

The family of Anita Bryant (1940–2024) only recently announced that the singer and Christian activist died on December 16. The belated family obituary that broke the news notably made no mention of Bryant’s prominent efforts in the late 1970s to counter what she called “the threat of militant homosexuality.” But if most headlines since her death are any indication, the gay rights movement has certainly not forgotten about that chapter of Bryant’s life.

The child of a broken home, Bryant went on to become Miss Oklahoma and a successful singer. One of her biggest hits was “Paper Roses,” a lament about being deceived in matters of love. She entertained the troops with Bob Hope in Vietnam and sang at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 1968. She performed at the 1971 Super Bowl, and sang as President Lyndon Johnson was laid in his grave two years later.

In 1976, Bryant used her celebrity—she was then widely known as a pitchwoman for Florida orange juice and living in the Miami area—to support Ruth Shack’s successful campaign for Dade County commissioner. (Shack was the wife of Bryant’s agent.) As she wrote in her book The Anita Bryant Story, Shack had some “good ideas . . . relating to ecology, helping the elderly, and other issues.” But when Shack introduced a resolution making sexual orientation a special protected class in 1977, the Baptist Sunday School teacher was taken aback. Bryant had amicably worked with plenty of homosexuals in the entertainment industry, but as a mother of four, she feared the ordinance would require Christian schools to allow openly homosexual individuals to instruct children.

Despite her initial outreach to Shack and others, the resolution, one of the first gay rights laws in the country, passed. When Bryant spearheaded the effort to repeal the law via a referendum, she became the face of parental rights and traditional family values on TV sets tuned to everything from The 700 Club to The Phil Donahue Show. In response, Singer Sewing Machines pulled the plug on a variety show she was set to host, and celebrities from Carol Burnett to Johnny Carson made her a prudish punch line.  Still, nearly 70 percent of the referendum voters agreed with Bryant.

Following that landslide victory, Bryant famously took a pie to the face from an angry protester who called her a bigot at a press conference in Des Moines, Iowa.

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