Singer, Anti-Gay Rights Activist Anita Bryant Dead at 84

Anita Bryant, whose singing career was long overshadowed by her outspoken opposition to gay rights, has died at age 84. She died Dec. 16 at her home in Edmond, Oklahoma, according to an obituary published in the Oklahoman on Thursday.

• Bryant was crowned Miss Oklahoma in 1958 and was second runner-up in the Miss America pageant in 1959, the year her first album came out, per the Hollywood Reporter. A stream of hits, including "Paper Roses," followed in the 1960s and she frequently joined Bob Hope for USO shows during the Vietnam War.

• Bryant appeared in ads for Coca-Cola, Tupperware, and, most famously, the Florida Citrus Commission. Starting in 1968, she appeared in dozens of ads reciting the line, "Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine."
• In 1977, when she was living in Miami with then-husband Bob Green and her four children, her opposition to LGBTQ+ rights turned her into one of the most "incendiary cultural warriors of her era," the Washington Post reports. Bryant, who called homosexuality an "abomination," fought to block a Dade County ordinance banning discrimination against gay people in housing and hiring. The ordinance passed, but was repealed later that year.

• Bryant, who went on to found anti-gay organization Save Our Children and helped Jerry Falwell create the Moral Majority movement, faced a massive backlash that effectively ended her singing career, the New York Times reports. Activists organized a boycott of Florida orange juice and bars replaced screwdrivers with a "mixture of vodka and apple juice called the Anita Bryant cocktail," per the Reporter.
• In October 1977, a protester shoved a banana cream pie in her face during a press conference in Des Moines. "Well, at least it's a fruit pie," she quipped, per the Times, before beginning to pray, saying, "We're praying for him to be delivered from his deviant lifestyle, Father."
• Bryant was dropped by scores of organizations, including the citrus commission, and ended up going bankrupt, the Post reports. She fell out with the evangelical movement after she divorced Green in 1980. She married her second husband, former NASA crewman Charlie Hobson Dry, in 1990 and they repeatedly tried to revive her career. Dry died last year.

(More obituary stories.)