Anita Bryant Takes a Final Pie to the Face

The family of Anita Bryant (1940–2024) only recently announced that the singer and Christian activist died on December 16. The belated family obituary that broke the news notably made no mention of Bryant’s prominent efforts in the late 1970s to counter what she called “the threat of militant homosexuality.” But if most headlines since her death are any indication, the gay rights movement has certainly not forgotten about that chapter of Bryant’s life.

The child of a broken home, Bryant went on to become Miss Oklahoma and a successful singer. One of her biggest hits was “Paper Roses,” a lament about being deceived in matters of love. She entertained the troops with Bob Hope in Vietnam and sang at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 1968. She performed at the 1971 Super Bowl, and sang as President Lyndon Johnson was laid in his grave two years later.

In 1976, Bryant used her celebrity—she was then widely known as a pitchwoman for Florida orange juice and living in the Miami area—to support Ruth Shack’s successful campaign for Dade County commissioner. (Shack was the wife of Bryant’s agent.) As she wrote in her book The Anita Bryant Story, Shack had some “good ideas . . . relating to ecology, helping the elderly, and other issues.” But when Shack introduced a resolution making sexual orientation a special protected class in 1977, the Baptist Sunday School teacher was taken aback. Bryant had amicably worked with plenty of homosexuals in the entertainment industry, but as a mother of four, she feared the ordinance would require Christian schools to allow openly homosexual individuals to instruct children.

Despite her initial outreach to Shack and others, the resolution, one of the first gay rights laws in the country, passed. When Bryant spearheaded the effort to repeal the law via a referendum, she became the face of parental rights and traditional family values on TV sets tuned to everything from The 700 Club to The Phil Donahue Show. In response, Singer Sewing Machines pulled the plug on a variety show she was set to host, and celebrities from Carol Burnett to Johnny Carson made her a prudish punch line.  Still, nearly 70 percent of the referendum voters agreed with Bryant.

Following that landslide victory, Bryant famously took a pie to the face from an angry protester who called her a bigot at a press conference in Des Moines, Iowa. She quipped, “Well, at least it’s a fruit pie,” then prayed and forgave the man before breaking into tears. The person who pied her, Thom Higgins, was a homosexual activist who was later credited with coining the term “Gay Pride” based on a memory of the seven deadly sins from his Catholic education. Higgins died of AIDS in 1994 and so did not see the subsequent dominance of that “pride” within American culture. Bryant certainly did, though, even as she faced her own challenges. Her marriage ended in divorce, and she was suicidal for a time. She later married Charlie Dry, a childhood friend who notably had a role in NASA’s Apollo program. After attempts to revitalize Anita’s career in places like Branson, Missouri, and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, they lived for more than two decades in their native Oklahoma.

California Gov. Ronald Reagan flew across the country to personally show support for Bryant in the midst of the referendum campaign, but American culture and politics have since shifted. President Donald Trump is comfortable holding a rainbow flag and has appointed openly homosexual people to key positions, including his Treasury secretary nominee Scott Bessent. The usually private First Lady Melania Trump has fundraised for the Log Cabin Republicans. Trump’s second inaugural festivities featured The Village People, who catered to the gay disco scene of the late 1970s as Bryant campaigned. The schools that Bryant tried to protect from homosexual influences are awash in them now, and drag queens read to preschoolers at public libraries.

Nevertheless, pro-LGBT voices continue to use Bryant as a means to rally around the Pride Flag once again. Politico, reporting on her death, focused on a family rift to demonize Bryant:

In 2021, her granddaughter, Sarah Green, told Slate that she came out to Bryant. Her grandmother responded, Green said, by claiming that homosexuality—which in this case is actually bisexuality—is “a delusion invented by the devil.”

“It’s very hard to argue with someone who thinks that an integral part of your identity is just an evil delusion,” Green said.

That’s a perfect encapsulation of Bryant’s enduring legacy. It has taught conservatives how to invalidate the very existence of LGBTQ+ people, turning them first into a phantom menace, and then into a convenient bogeyman.

Could Bryant, in the 1970s, have predicted the cultural chasm of the 2020s? Today, any claim that what one feels might be a delusion can be seen as an invalidation of another’s existence. 

Politico’s reference to a “convenient bogeyman” is especially ironic, as the gay rights movement cast Bryant in just that role. Though Bryant was far from perfect in her advocacy, she often said that she did not hate homosexuals. For many the feeling was not mutual. In the same Slate podcast that Politico references, Lillian Faderman, an LGBT historian, says, “Anita Bryant became the devil of the gay rights movement,” a common enemy who enflamed passions and motivated effort.

After the successful referendum in Florida, Bryant largely left activism and tried to rebuild an entertainment career that never fully recovered from the earlier blacklisting.That may be one reason opponents continue to keep her memory alive: Bryant’s professional demise serves as a warning to others. But as a student of the Bible, Bryant likely knew that such a warning had already been delivered on a Galilean hillside, but with a promise: “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven.”

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