Anita Bryant, singer who opposed gay rights, dies

Anita Bryant, a former Miss Oklahoma and popular singer who became known over the second half of her life for her outspoken opposition to gay rights, has died. She was 84.

Bryant died Dec. 16, 2024, at her home in Edmond, Oklahoma, according to a statement posted Thursday by her family to The Oklahoman. The family did not list a cause of death.

Bryant was a Barnsdell native who began singing at an early age, and was just 12 when she hosted her own local television show. She was named Miss Oklahoma in 1958 and soon began a successful recording career, her hit singles including “Till There Was You,” “Paper Roses” and “My Little Corner of the World.”

By the late 1960s, she was among the entertainers joining Bob Hope on his USO tours for troops overseas, had sung at the White House and performed at the national conventions for both the Democrats and Republicans in 1968. She also became a highly visible spokesperson for various products, notably for Florida orange juice.

But in the late 1970s, her life and career began a dramatically new path. A lifelong Christian, Bryant led a successful campaign to repeal an ordinance in Florida's Miami-Dade County that would have prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Supported by the Rev. Jerry Falwell among others, she continued to oppose gay rights around the country and became the object of much criticism in return. Bryant insisted that she had nothing against gay people personally.

“The hardest thing to do is to convince people I don’t hate homosexuals,” she said on “The Phil Donahue Show” in 1977. “I pray for them. I would like to help homosexuals.”

Her frequently strident rhetoric, however, suggested otherwise. She maintained that gay people were trying to drip-feed what she considered a lifestyle choice into the mainstream. She claimed that gay teachers would use their positions to recruit students into homosexuality and linked gay people and pedophiles.

“A particularly deviant-minded teacher could sexually molest children,” she wrote at the time.

Activists organized boycotts against products she endorsed, designed T-shirts mocking her and named a drink for her — a screwdriver that replaced orange juice with apple juice.

In a crude made-for-TV moment n 1977, a gay activist slammed a banana cream pie into her face during a news conference in Des Moines. She and her then-husband asked that the protester not be detained and instead prayed for him.

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Her career in entertainment declined, her marriage to her first husband Bob Green broke up, and she later filed for bankruptcy.

More recently, she led Anita Bryant Ministries International. Her second husband, NASA test astronaut Charles Hobson Dry, died last year. According to her family's statement, she is survived by four children, two stepdaughters and seven grandchildren.

The Washington Post contributed to this report.