The way Anita Bryant told it, she didn’t have a choice but to build a nationwide antigay movement. Her 1977 book The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality begins: “Because of my love for Almighty God, because of my love for His Word, because of my love for my country, because of my love for my children, I took a stand—one that was not popular.”
When Bryant took that stand, and became the public face of the activist group Save Our Children, she created a template that the American right wing is still following today. She also became the enemy that gay rights leaders needed to build a nationwide movement of their own.
Bryant, who died of cancer last month at the age of 84, first became known as a beauty queen—Miss Oklahoma, and then the second runner-up for Miss America 1959—and a pop singer, crooning the Top 10 hits “Paper Roses” and “In My Little Corner of the World.” But it was her TV ads for orange juice—featuring her own children, a cartoon bird, and a lilting jingle about the “Florida sunshine tree”—that made her the nation’s leading avatar for white-bread American wholesomeness.
Bryant didn’t see herself as a political figure, but she did publicly support the Vietnam War, calling it a battle “between atheism and God.” And in 1969, as the U.S. was roiled by youth activism, she lent her voice to a teenage “Rally for Decency” in Miami.
It was eight years later that, as Bryant put it, “God put a flame in my heart.” Her Baptist pastor had told her about a proposed bill in Dade County, Florida, to ban discrimination against gay people in the workplace, housing, and public accommodations. That amendment wouldn’t ensure anything close to full equality—“homosexual acts” would still be illegal in Dade County. But Bryant was still outraged. She wrote in The Anita Bryant Story, “The thought of known homosexuals teaching my children … kept coming to my mind.”
When I reported on Bryant’s antigay crusade for an episode of Slate’s One Year: 1977 podcast, her son Robert Green Jr. told me that his mother took action close to home. When she suspected that Robert’s favorite English teacher was gay, she pulled her son and his siblings from their school. That teacher, who Robert said had helped him “through a rocky time,” disappeared from his life forever.