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Anita Bryant

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Anita Jane Bryant (born March 25, 1940, in Barnsdall, Oklahoma) is an American singer.

Anita Bryant

In the 1968 she became the longest-serving spokesperson for the Florida Department of Citrus. She is also widely known for her strong views against homosexuality, and for her prominent campaigning in the mid-1970s to prevent gay equality - specifically her successful move to repeal a local ordinance in Miami, Florida, that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Bryant is a member of a conservative church congregation affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.

Early Life and Career

Anita Bryant's belief in God and the Bible had their roots in her childhood. She was declared dead at childbirth in her grandparents' tiny frame house in Barnsdall, Oklahoma. When the doctor told her grandfather to get him a pan of ice water, the new grandfather lost no time and the new born Anita survived. Her grandfather taught her as a baby to sing when she was six months old. Soon after her sister Sandra was born, her Mother and Father divorced. Her Dad went in the Army and her Mom went to work, taking her children to live with their grandparents temporarily.

When Anita was two years old, her Grandfather taught her to sing Jesus Loves Me. Bryant was singing onstage on local fairgrounds in Oklahoma at age six. She sang occasionally on radio and television, and was invited to audition when Arthur Godfrey's talent show came to town. Her father at first refused to allow her to go on Godfrey's show, relenting only when he was told his daughter had exceptional talent, and it would be a sin not to share it.

Bryant became Miss Oklahoma in 1958 and was a second runner-up in the 1959 Miss America beauty pageant at age 19, right after graduating from Tulsa's Will Rogers High School.

In 1960, she married Bob Green, a Miami disc jockey, with whom she eventually raised four children, including Gloria and Robert Jr. (Bobby).

Her three biggest pop hits were: "Till There Was You" (1959) (also covered by The Beatles in 1963 at the Royal Variety Performance); "Paper Roses" (1960) (successfully covered 13 years later by Marie Osmond); and "In My Little Corner of the World" (1960). She placed a total of eleven songs in the Top 100, plus some in the "Bubbling Under" chart.

There were several albums on the Carlton and Columbia labels. For example:
The 1959 Carlton LP "Anita Bryant" contained Til There Was You, Do-Re-Mi (from The Sound Of Music), and other show tunes. The 1963 Columbia Greatest Hits LP contained both Carlton and Columbia songs, including Paper Roses and Step By Step. In 1964 came the "World Of Lonely People" album (pictured) containing "Welcome, Welcome Home" and a magical new rendition of "Little Things Mean a Lot" arranged by Frank Hunter.

In 1969 she became a spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Commission, and nationally televised commercials featured her singing "Come to the Florida Sunshine tree" and stating the commercials' tagline: "Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine".

In addition, during this time, she also did advertisements for Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, Holiday Inn, and Tupperware.

File:AnitaBryant-WdLonPeople LP.jpg
1964 album

She sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" during the graveside services for Lyndon Johnson in 1973, and performed the National Anthem at Super Bowl III in 1969.

Notable Songs

Song Samples

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Political campaigning

Save Our Children

In 1977, Florida's Dade County (now Miami-Dade County) passed a human-rights ordinance that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Anita Bryant led a highly publicized campaign to repeal the ordinance. The campaign was waged based on what was labled "Christian beliefs regarding the sinfulness of homosexuality and the perceived threat of homosexual recruitment of children and child molestation."

Her view was that "What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternate way of life. [...] I will lead such a crusade to stop it as this country has not seen before." The campaign was called 'Save Our Children', the start of an organized opposition to gay rights that spread across the nation. Jerry Falwell went to Miami to help her.

Bryant made the following statements during the campaign: "As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children" and "If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters." On June 7, 1977, Bryant's campaign led to a repeal of the anti-discrimination ordinance by a margin of 69 to 31 percent.

Victory and defeat

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A boycott was organised against the Florida Citrus Commission, who used Bryant in advertising

In the aftermath, legislation was passed outlawing adoption by gays and lesbians in the state of Florida and Bryant led several more campaigns around the country to repeal local anti-discrimination ordinances. Her success led to a proactive effort to pass landmark anti-homosexual legislation in California that would have made pro- or neutral statements regarding homosexuals or homosexuality by any public school employee cause for dismissal. Grass-roots liberal organizations, chiefly in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, sprang up to defeat the initiative. Days before the election, the California Democratic Party (wary of appearing pro-gay) opposed the proposed legislation, causing it to go down to narrow defeat at the polls.

In 1998 Dade County repudiated Bryant's successful campaign of 20 years earlier, and re-authorized an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting individuals from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation by a 7 to 6 margin. In 2002, a ballot initiative to repeal the 1998 law called Amendment 14 was voted down by 56% of the voters. The Florida statute forbidding adoptions by gay persons, however, remains law; in 2004, a federal appellate court upheld Florida’s anti-gay adoption law against a constitutional challenge.

Anita Bryant's political success galvanized her opponents. She became one of the first persons to be publicly "pied" as a political act (in her case, on television), in Des Moines in 1977; Bryant quipped, "At least it was a fruit pie", apparently making a pun on the derogatory term for a gay man, "fruit". Gay activists organized an orange juice boycott. Many celebrities including Barbra Streisand (who was even quoted as saying she would never share a stage with her), Bette Midler, Paul Williams, John Waters, Carroll O'Connor, Mary Tyler Moore, and Jane Fonda publicly supported the boycott. To this day, Bryant is still viewed as one of the most loathed public figures of all time by the gay community, her name being synonymous with homophobia.[1]

Career decline and bankruptcy

The fallout from her political activism had a devastating effect on her business and entertainment career. Her contract with the Florida Citrus Commission was allowed to lapse in 1979 because of the controversy and the negative publicity generated by her political campaigns and the resulting boycott of Florida orange juice.[2]

Her marriage to Bob Green failed at that time and in 1980 she divorced him[3], although he reportedly has said that his fundamentalist religious beliefs do not recognize civil divorce and that she is still his wife in God's eyes. Some observers feel that her husband pushed her to get involved in the political activism that eventually led to her downfall and loss of income. Kathie Lee Gifford, who worked as a live-in secretary/babysitter for the Greens in the early 1970s said in her autobiography that Green had a ferocious temper and could be very possessive and emotionally abusive and that Anita was not very happy.

Due to her divorce, many fundamentalist Christians shunned her. No longer invited to appear at their events, she lost a source of income.[4] With her four children she moved from Miami to Selma, Alabama, and later to Atlanta, Georgia. In a Ladies Home Journal article she said, "The church needs to wake up and find some way to cope with divorce and women's problems."

In the 1980s she even renounced her anti-gay ways. In the same article in Ladies Home Journal she said that she felt sorry for all of the hateful things she had said and done during her campaign.[5] She said that she had a more "Live and let live" attitude now.

She married her second husband, Charlie Hobson Dry, in 1990, and they tried to reestablish her career in a series of small venues, including Branson, Missouri, and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Commercial success was elusive however due to the controversy from the past, and they left behind them a series of unpaid employees and creditors. They filed for bankruptcy in Arkansas (1997) and in Tennessee (2001).[6]

Her career decline is detailed in her book, A New Day (1992).[7]

Anita Bryant returned to Barnsdall, Oklahoma, in 2005 for the town's 100th anniversary celebration and to have a street renamed in her honor. She returned to her high school in Tulsa on April 21, 2007, to perform in the school's annual musical revue. She now lives in Edmond, Oklahoma, and says she does charity work for various youth organizations while heading Anita Bryant Ministries International.


References

  1. ^ Louis-Georges Tin, "Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience" (2003), ISBN 978-1551522296
  2. ^ Saint Petersburg Times article
  3. ^ Saint Petersburg Times article
  4. ^ Saint Petersburg Times article
  5. ^ Cliff Jahr, "Anita Bryant's Startling Reversal", Ladies Home Journal 97 (December 1980), 60-68.
  6. ^ Saint Petersburg Times article
  7. ^ Saint Petersburg Times article

Trivia

On Will and Grace, the character Karen Walker refers to Anita Bryant as being her enemy that fell in love with her.

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