Anita Bryant

Anita Bryant

Anita Jane Bryant (born March 25, 1940, in Barnsdall, Oklahoma) is an American singer. She is widely known for her strong views against homosexuality and homosexual rights, and for her prominent campaigning in the mid-1970s to prevent gay equality, specifically her successful move to repeal a local ordinance in Dade County, Florida that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Bryant is a member of a conservative church congregation affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.

Early life and career

Bryant was born in Barnsdall, Oklahoma. Soon after her sister Sandra was born, her mother and father divorced. Her father went into the Army and her mother went to work, taking her children to live with their grandparents temporarily. When Anita was two years old, her grandfather taught her to sing "Jesus Loves Me". Bryant was singing onstage on local fairgrounds in Oklahoma at age six. She sang occasionally on radio and television, and was invited to audition when Arthur Godfrey's talent show came to town. Her father at first refused to allow her to go on Godfrey's show, relenting only when he was told his daughter had exceptional talent, and it would be a sin not to share it.

Bryant became Miss Oklahoma in 1958 and was a second runner-up in the 1959 Miss America beauty pageant at age 19, right after graduating from Tulsa's Will Rogers High School.

In 1960, she married Bob Green (Robert Einar Green), a Miami disc jockey, with whom she eventually raised four children, including Gloria and Robert Jr. (Bobby). Template:Sound sample box align left Template:Multi-listen item Template:Multi-listen item Template:Sample box end Her three biggest pop hits were: "Till There Was You" (1959) (Pop #30); "Paper Roses" (1960) (Pop #5) (successfully covered 13 years later by Marie Osmond); and "In My Little Corner of the World" (1960) (Pop #10). She placed a total of eleven songs in the Top 100, plus some in the "Bubbling Under" chart.

There were several albums on the Carlton and Columbia labels. The 1959 Carlton LP Anita Bryant contained "Till There Was You" (from The Music Man), "Do-Re-Mi" (from The Sound Of Music), and other show tunes. The 1963 Columbia Greatest Hits LP contained both Carlton and Columbia songs, including "Paper Roses" and "Step by Step, Little by Little". In 1964 came The World of Lonely People, containing, in addition to the title song, "Welcome, Welcome Home" and a new rendition of "Little Things Mean a Lot" arranged by Frank Hunter.

In 1969 she became a spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission, and nationally televised commercials featured her singing "Come to the Florida Sunshine Tree" and stating the commercials' tagline: "Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine." All the commercials are now preserved and owned by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives in Miami. In addition, during this time, she also did advertisements for Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, Holiday Inn, and Tupperware.

She sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" during the graveside services for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1973, and performed the National Anthem at Super Bowl III in 1969.

Political campaigning

Save Our Children

Further information: Save Our Children

In 1977, Dade County, Florida (now Miami-Dade County) passed an ordinance sponsored by Bryant's former good friend Ruth Shack, that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Anita Bryant led a highly publicized campaign to repeal the ordinance as the leader of a coalition named Save Our Children. The campaign was waged based on what was labeled "Christian beliefs regarding the sinfulness of homosexuality and the perceived threat of homosexual recruitment of children and child molestation."

Her view was that "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. [...] I will lead such a crusade to stop it as this country has not seen before." The campaign was called 'Save Our Children', the start of an organized opposition to gay rights that spread across the nation. Jerry Falwell went to Miami to help her.

Bryant made the following statements during the campaign: "As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children" and "If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters." On June 7, 1977, Bryant's campaign led to a repeal of the anti-discrimination ordinance by a margin of 69 to 31 percent.

The gay community retaliated against Bryant by organizing a boycott on orange juice. Gay bars all over North America took Screw Drivers off their drink menus and replaced them with the "Anita Bryant" which was made with Vodka and Apple Juice. Sales and proceeds went to gay political activists to help fund their fight against Bryant and her anti-civil rights views.

Victory and defeat

A boycott was organized against the Florida Citrus Commission, who used Bryant in advertising

In 1977, Florida legislators approved a measure making it illegal for gays and lesbians to adopt children. The adoption ban was overturned more than 30 years later when, on November 25, 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Cindy S. Lederman declared it unconstitutional and "not rational."

Bryant led several more campaigns around the country to repeal local anti-discrimination ordinances including St. Paul, Minnesota, Wichita, Kansas, and Eugene, Oregon. Her success led to an effort to pass the Briggs Initiative in California which would have made pro- or neutral statements regarding homosexuals or homosexuality by any public school employee cause for dismissal. Grass-roots liberal organizations, chiefly in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, sprang up to defeat the initiative. Days before the election, the California Democratic Party (wary of appearing pro-gay) opposed the proposed legislation. The initiative suffered a massive defeat at the polls.

In 1998 Dade County repudiated Bryant's successful campaign of 20 years earlier, and re-authorized an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting individuals from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation by a 7 to 6 vote. In 2002 a ballot initiative to repeal the 1998 law called Amendment 14 was voted down by 56% of the voters. The Florida statute forbidding adoptions by gay persons was upheld in 2004 by a federal appellate court against a constitutional challenge, but was overturned by a Miami-Dade Circuit Court in November, 2008.

Anita Bryant's political success galvanized her opponents. She became one of the first persons to be publicly "pied" as a political act (in her case, on television), in Des Moines in 1977. Bryant quipped "At least it's a fruit pie", apparently making a pun on the derogatory term for a gay man, "fruit". Police authorities refused to prosecute for the assault. Gay activists organized an orange juice boycott. Many celebrities including Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Paul Williams, John Waters, Carroll O'Connor, Mary Tyler Moore, and Jane Fonda publicly supported the boycott. The story was told in the book, At Any Cost (1978). To this day, Bryant is reviled by members of the civil rights and gay communities, who regard her name as synonymous with hatred and homophobia.

Career decline and bankruptcy

The fallout from her political activism had a devastating effect on her business and entertainment career. Her contract with the Florida Citrus Commission was allowed to lapse in 1979 because of the controversy and the negative publicity generated by her political campaigns and the resulting boycott of Florida orange juice.

Her marriage to Bob Green failed at that time, and in 1980 she divorced him, although he reportedly has said that his fundamentalist religious beliefs do not recognize civil divorce and that she is still his wife in God's eyes. Kathie Lee Gifford, who worked as a live-in secretary/babysitter for the Greens in the early 1970s, said in her autobiography that Green had a ferocious temper and could be very possessive and emotionally abusive, and that Anita was not very happy.

Due to her divorce, many fundamentalist Christians shunned her. No longer invited to appear at their events, she lost a major source of income. With her four children she moved from Miami to Selma, Alabama, and later to Atlanta, Georgia. In a 1980 Ladies Home Journal article she said, "The church needs to wake up and find some way to cope with divorce and women's problems."

In the same article in Ladies Home Journal she said that she felt sorry for all of the hateful things she had said and done during her campaigns. She said that she had a more "live and let live" attitude, apparently indicating a significant shift in her worldview.

She married her second husband, Charlie Hobson Dry, in 1990, and they tried to reestablish her career in a series of small venues, including Branson, Missouri, and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Commercial success was elusive, however; Bryant and Dry left behind them a series of unpaid employees and creditors. Her career decline is detailed in her book, A New Day (1992). They filed for bankruptcy in Arkansas (1997) and in Tennessee (2001).

Anita Bryant returned to Barnsdall, Oklahoma, in 2005 for the town's 100th anniversary celebration and to have a street renamed in her honor. She returned to her high school in Tulsa on April 21, 2007, to perform in the school's annual musical revue. She now lives in Edmond, Oklahoma, and says she does charity work for various youth organizations while heading Anita Bryant Ministries International.

Anita Bryant appears to have resumed her anti-gay stance in that Anita Bryant Ministries International recently featured just two articles, both championing her long-standing opposition to the "homosexual agenda". The links have since been removed, and the site only now contains a biography (which discusses her anti-civil rights activism).

Singles

Charted hits

Year	Title	Chart Positions
		US Pop	US R&B
1959	"Till There Was You"	30	—
	"Six Boys and Seven Girls"	62	—
	"Do-Re-Mi"	94	—
1960	"Paper Roses"	5	16
	"In My Little Corner of the World"	10	—
	"One of the Lucky Ones"	62	—
	"Promise Me a Rose (A Slight Detail)"	78	—
1961	"Wonderland by Night"	18	—
	"A Texan and a Girl from Mexico"	85	—
	"I Can't Do It by Myself"	87	—
1964	"The World of Lonely People"	59	—

Notable songs

• "Step by Step, Little by Little"
• "Welcome, Welcome Home"
• "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"

Cultural references

• In Will & Grace, the character Karen Walker refers to Anita Bryant as being her enemy who fell in love with her.

• In Designing Women, Bryant is mentioned on more than one occasion by Suzanne Sugarbaker, referencing both her beauty pageant history, as well as her political activism.

• In an episode of The Golden Girls, an effeminate male guest star is overcome with emotion, causing character Blanche Devereaux to comment, "you're about to go flying right outta here, aren't ya". The man replies, "well, excuse me for living, Anita Bryant!"

• Mad magazine's parody of Three's Company (where John Ritter's character Jack pretends to be gay to share an apartment with two women) ends with a visit from the "new landlord," a whip-wielding Anita Bryant.

• In several episodes of the first season of Soap, Jodie Dallas' gay character refers to Anita Bryant as an anti-gay reference.

• In the film Airplane!, Leslie Nielsen's character, Doctor Rumack, upon seeing a large number of passengers become violently ill, vomit, and suffer uncontrollable flatulence, says, "I haven't seen anything this bad since the Anita Bryant concert."

• In the song "Fuck Anita Bryant," on his album Nothing Sacred, David Allan Coe expresses his feelings for Bryant.

• In an episode of Gilmore Girls (season 2, episode 12: "Richard In Stars Hollow"), Lorelai says to her father that he could fill a huge gap after Anita Bryant because her father always has half of grapefruit for breakfast.

• In the song "Mañana" by Jimmy Buffett, Buffett says "I hope Anita Bryant never ever does one of my songs."

• The Dead Kennedys song "Moral Majority" addresses Bryant along with Phyllis Schlafly and others, with the refrain "God must be dead, if you're alive."

• In Armistead Maupin's novel More Tales of the City, Michael Tolliver's parents write to him praising Anita Bryant's Save Our Children campaign, prompting him to write back and come out of the closet.

• In the 2008 film Milk, Bryant's anti-gay activism is largely shown in news reels, and her name is shouted in anti-gay marches by gay rights activists in said film.

• In the 1989 film Roger & Me, Bryant is interviewed and travels to Flint, Michigan as part of the effort to revitalize the devastated local economy.

External links

• Anita Bryant Ministries International
• Florida Orange Juice Commercial (Google Video)
• Image of Anita Bryant in the 1970s (available for public use from the State Archives of Florida)
• Belated curtain call, Tulsa World, 19 April 2007
• Readers Forum: Anita Bryant to star in Round-Up 2007, Tulsa World, 18 April 2007
• Celebration draws Anita Bryant back to Barnsdall, Tulsa World, 28 May 2005
• Anita Bryant gets a pie in the face, YouTube video (retrieved 30 March 2008)