Anita Bryant, Whose Anti-Gay Politics Undid a Singing Career, Is Dead at 84

The former beauty queen and spokeswoman for Florida orange juice was an all-American entertainer before she began crusading against L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

Anita Bryant, the singer and former beauty queen who had a robust and flourishing music career, including hit songs like “Paper Roses,” in the 1960s and ’70s, but whose opposition to gay rights — she called homosexuality “an abomination” — virtually destroyed her career, died on Dec. 16. She was 84.

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.

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.

For almost two decades, she had a smooth run — entertaining troops on U.S.O. tours with Bob Hope, performing during Billy Graham’s evangelical tours and co-hosting nationally televised parades. She sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s graveside.

Most memorably, she represented the Florida Citrus Commission in a long campaign of television commercials, in which she sang “Come to the Florida Sunshine Tree” and offered the tagline: “Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.” 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.

Then, in early 1977, Dade County, Fla. — which includes Miami, where Ms. Bryant lived — gave its final approval to an ordinance prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals. A group of opponents, led by Ms. Bryant, turned up to protest. “The ordinance condones immorality and discriminates against my children’s rights to grow up in a healthy, decent community,” she said.

She founded Save Our Children, an anti-gay organization that gave rise to the modern-day religious right's strategy of tying homosexuality to perceived threats against children. Her public image (many called her a “Christian celebrity”) was changed forever.

Less than two months later, a television producer told her that the publicity around her “controversial political activities” meant she would not be hired for the variety-show pilot that had been planned.

“The blacklisting of Anita Bryant has begun,” 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.

In October 1977, at a news conference in Des Moines, a demonstrator walked up to Ms. Bryant and pushed a banana cream pie into her face. “At least it was a fruit pie,” Ms. Bryant ad-libbed.

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 — “We’re praying for him to be delivered from his deviant lifestyle, Father” — then broke down into tears.

“I don’t regret it, because I did the right thing,” Ms. Bryant recalled in a 1990 television interview. “Sometimes you have to pay a price for what you believe is right.”

Anita Jane Bryant was born on March 25, 1940, at her grandparents’ 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 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.

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’s “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” visited Tulsa, she was invited to compete in the show’s New York competition, and she won.

In 1958 she graduated from Will Rogers High School in Tulsa and was crowned Miss Oklahoma.

The first decade or so of her show business career included appearances on prime-time variety series like “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show,” “Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall” and “The George Gobel Show.” The first time she sang on “The Tonight Show,” in 1959, Jack Paar was the host.

Between 1959 and 1961, she had four Top 40 hits: “Paper Roses,” “Till There Was You,” “In My Little Corner of the World” and “Wonderland by Night.”

Before her job promoting orange juice, Ms. Bryant also appeared in commercials for Coca-Cola, Holiday Inn, Friedrich air-conditioners, Phillips 66 and Tupperware.

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. “Miss Bryant’s cause is never defined too clearly,” John J. O’Connor wrote in his New York Times review of “The Anita Bryant Spectacular” (1980), “but seems directed at anyone who may differ from her particular concepts of godliness and cleanliness.”

Mr. O’Connor continued that, despite “careful projections of wholesomeness and benevolence,” Ms. Bryant’s message appeared to be “persistently hostile and aggressive.” The special was sponsored by her religious organization, which supported “conversion therapy” for gay men.

Two months after the special, Ms. Bryant ended her marriage to her manager, Robert Einar Green, a New York-born former disc jockey whom she married in Oklahoma in 1960. Some conservative Christian fans, shocked by the divorce, turned away.

Later, Ms. Bryant spoke openly about having considered suicide in the late 1970s. “I went into hiding,” she said in a 1990 “Inside Story” interview. “Today 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.”

Ms. Bryant first became an author with books like “Amazing Grace” and “Bless This Food: The Anita Bryant Family Cookbook, but her most talked-about title was “The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality” (1977).

She was always an object of teasing. In 1974, when her purse was stolen, a column in The Times reduced her to “the singer who sells orange juice on television.” So it was probably inevitable that she would be skewered on television shows like “Saturday Night Live.” In 1977, Jane Curtin, co-hosting the show’s news segment, screened the pie incident and reported, “Fortunately, Ms. Bryant, who was not injured, enjoyed a good laugh and said it was OK if the assailant dated her husband.”

A sketch that year on “The Carol Burnett Show” featured Ms. Burnett sporting a corsage of full-size oranges, making double entendres about queens and singing about a promised land that’s “bright and gay,” and Tim Conway as a character who looked and sounded a lot like Truman Capote.

The 1980 film comedy “Airplane” compared a plane full of nauseated passengers to an Anita Bryant concert. In Michael Moore’s “Roger & Me” (1989), Ms. Bryant embodied forced optimism, singing “Joy to the World” (the pop music version) to audiences in economically devastated Flint, Mich. Footage of her anti-gay campaign appeared in the film “Milk” (2008); and plays, including “Anita Bryant Died for Your Sins” (2009) and “Anita Bryant’s Playboy Interview” (2016), opened on both coasts.

In 1988, she attempted a comeback tour, performing in Florida trailer-park rec rooms.

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 to Oklahoma, where they operated Anita Bryant Ministries International.

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.

“I was a sacrificial lamb,” Ms. Bryant said in a syndicated newspaper article in 1988. “I didn’t even know it. And I couldn’t get out of it once I’d begun.”

Sara Ruberg contributed reporting and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.