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Anita Bryant, the singer and former beauty queen who had a robust and flourishing music career, including hit songs like \u201cPaper Roses,\u201d in the 1960s and \u201970s, but whose opposition to gay rights \u2014 she called homosexuality \u201can abomination\u201d \u2014 virtually destroyed her career, died on Dec. 16. She was 84. <\/p>\n
The death, at her home in Edmond, Okla., was caused by cancer, her son William Green said. The family placed an obituary in The Oklahoman, a newspaper in Oklahoma City, on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Ms. Bryant was just 18 when she won the Miss Oklahoma beauty title and was named second runner-up in the Miss America pageant. She promptly turned that success into a lucrative show business career.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
For almost two decades, she had a smooth run \u2014 entertaining troops on U.S.O. tours with Bob Hope, performing during Billy Graham\u2019s evangelical tours and co-hosting nationally televised parades. She sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl and \u201cBattle Hymn of the Republic<\/a>\u201d at President Lyndon B. Johnson\u2019s graveside.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Most memorably, she represented the Florida Citrus Commission in a long campaign of television commercials, in which she sang \u201cCome to the Florida Sunshine Tree\u201d and offered the tagline<\/a>: \u201cBreakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.\u201d Wearing gingham, ruffles or both, she sauntered down country lanes (juice pitcher in hand), talked to cartoon birds and beamed with joy about the wonders of vitamin C.<\/p>\n Then, in early 1977, Dade County, Fla. \u2014 which includes Miami, where Ms. Bryant lived \u2014 gave its final approval to an ordinance prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals. A group of opponents, led by Ms. Bryant, turned up to protest. \u201cThe ordinance condones immorality and discriminates against my children\u2019s rights to grow up in a healthy, decent community,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She founded Save Our Children, an anti-gay organization that gave rise to the modern-day religious right’s strategy<\/a> of tying homosexuality to perceived threats against children. Her public image (many called her a \u201cChristian celebrity\u201d) was changed forever.<\/p>\n Less than two months later, a television producer told her that the publicity around her \u201ccontroversial political activities\u201d meant she would not be hired for the variety-show pilot that had been planned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe blacklisting of Anita Bryant has begun,\u201d Ms. Bryant announced to the press. Although the citrus commission said publicly that her activism would not affect her $100,000-a-year arrangement, the contract was canceled before the decade ended.<\/p>\n In October 1977, at a news conference in Des Moines, a demonstrator walked up to Ms. Bryant and pushed a banana cream pie<\/a> into her face. \u201cAt least it was a fruit pie,\u201d Ms. Bryant ad-libbed.<\/p>\n Some took that remark as an innocent allusion to her job promoting fresh produce; others saw it as a pointed comment on a longtime epithet for gay men. As the cameras rolled, and pie filling clung to her cheeks, she began to pray \u2014 \u201cWe\u2019re praying for him to be delivered from his deviant lifestyle, Father\u201d \u2014 then broke down into tears.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t regret it, because I did the right thing,\u201d Ms. Bryant recalled in a 1990 television interview. \u201cSometimes you have to pay a price for what you believe is right.\u201d<\/p>\n Anita Jane Bryant was born on March 25, 1940, at her grandparents\u2019 home in Barnsdall, Okla., a small town in Osage County. She was the daughter of Warren G. Bryant, whose occupation was listed as tool dresser in the 1940 census, and <\/strong>of Lenore Annice (Berry) Bryant. When Warren joined the Army, Lenore took a clerical job at a nearby Air Force base. The young couple divorced when Anita and her sister were small.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As a child, Anita sang in church and at local fairgrounds. In her teens, she appeared on Tulsa and Oklahoma City television stations. When CBS\u2019s \u201cArthur Godfrey\u2019s Talent Scouts\u201d visited Tulsa, she was invited to compete in the show\u2019s New York competition, and she won.<\/p>\n In 1958 she graduated from Will Rogers High School in Tulsa and was crowned Miss Oklahoma.<\/p>\n The first decade or so of her show business career included appearances on prime-time variety series like \u201cThe Ed Sullivan Show,\u201d \u201cThe Tennessee Ernie Ford Show,\u201d \u201cPerry Como\u2019s Kraft Music Hall\u201d and \u201cThe George Gobel Show.\u201d The first time she sang on \u201cThe Tonight Show,\u201d in 1959, Jack Paar was the host.<\/p>\n Between 1959 and 1961, she had four Top 40 hits: \u201cPaper Roses<\/a>,\u201d \u201cTill There Was You,\u201d \u201cIn My Little Corner of the World\u201d and \u201cWonderland by Night.\u201d<\/p>\n Before her job promoting orange juice, Ms. Bryant also appeared in commercials for Coca-Cola, Holiday Inn, Friedrich air-conditioners, Phillips 66 and Tupperware.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As the publicity about her anti-gay views died down, she returned to television with a two-hour variety show special, smiling big but with what struck one media critic as a giant chip on her shoulder. \u201cMiss Bryant\u2019s cause is never defined too clearly,\u201d John J. O\u2019Connor wrote in his New York Times review<\/a> of \u201cThe Anita Bryant Spectacular\u201d (1980), \u201cbut seems directed at anyone who may differ from her particular concepts of godliness and cleanliness.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. O\u2019Connor continued that, despite \u201ccareful projections of wholesomeness and benevolence,\u201d Ms. Bryant\u2019s message appeared to be \u201cpersistently hostile and aggressive.\u201d The special was sponsored by her religious organization, which supported \u201cconversion therapy\u201d for gay men.<\/p>\n Two months after the special, Ms. Bryant ended her marriage to her manager, Robert Einar Green<\/a>, a New York-born former disc jockey whom she married in Oklahoma in 1960. Some conservative Christian fans, shocked by the divorce, turned away.<\/p>\n Later, Ms. Bryant spoke openly about having considered suicide in the late 1970s. \u201cI went into hiding,\u201d she said in a 1990 \u201cInside Story\u201d interview<\/a>. \u201cToday I can honestly say that there is such a peace and a confidence and a maturity, if you will, that can only have come out of going down to those pits of despair and despondency and wanting to take my life.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Bryant first became an author with books like \u201cAmazing Grace\u201d and \u201cBless This Food: The Anita Bryant Family Cookbook, but her most talked-about title was \u201cThe Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation\u2019s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality\u201d (1977).<\/p>\n She was always an object of teasing. In 1974, when her purse was stolen, a column in The Times reduced her to \u201cthe singer who sells orange juice on television.\u201d So it was probably inevitable that she would be skewered on television shows like \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201d<\/a> In 1977, Jane Curtin, co-hosting the show\u2019s news segment, screened the pie incident and reported, \u201cFortunately, Ms. Bryant, who was not injured, enjoyed a good laugh and said it was OK if the assailant dated her husband.\u201d<\/p>\n A sketch that year on \u201cThe Carol Burnett Show\u201d featured Ms. Burnett<\/a> sporting a corsage of full-size oranges, making double entendres about queens and singing about a promised land that\u2019s \u201cbright and gay,\u201d and Tim Conway as a character who looked and sounded a lot like Truman Capote.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The 1980 film comedy \u201cAirplane\u201d compared a plane full of nauseated passengers to an Anita Bryant concert. In Michael Moore\u2019s \u201cRoger & Me\u201d (1989), Ms. Bryant embodied forced optimism, singing \u201cJoy to the World\u201d (the pop music version) to audiences in economically devastated Flint, Mich. Footage of her anti-gay campaign appeared in the film \u201cMilk\u201d (2008); and plays, including \u201cAnita Bryant Died for Your Sins<\/a>\u201d (2009) and \u201cAnita Bryant\u2019s Playboy Interview\u201d (2016), opened on both coasts.<\/p>\n In 1988, she attempted a comeback tour, performing in Florida trailer-park rec rooms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1990, Ms. Bryant married Charlie Hobson Dry, an Oklahoma native and former NASA test crewman. He spent the next decade trying to revive her career, opening the Anita Bryant Music Mansion in Branson, Mo., and Pigeon Forge, Tenn., but financial problems plagued both ventures. The couple moved back<\/a> to Oklahoma, where they operated Anita Bryant Ministries International<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n \u201cI was a sacrificial lamb,\u201d Ms. Bryant said in a syndicated newspaper article in 1988. \u201cI didn\u2019t even know it. And I couldn\u2019t get out of it once I\u2019d begun.\u201d<\/p>\n Sara Ruberg contributed reporting and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n