Anita Bryant, singer and anti-gay rights crusader who sparked orange juice boycott, dies aged 84
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Singer and campaigner’s homophobic rhetoric persists in anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns to this day. Anita Bryant, the Grammy-nominated singer who later became a high-profile and controversial campaigner against gay rights in America, has died aged 84. The New York Times reported that Bryant’s family said she died from cancer at her home in Edmond, Oklahoma, on 16 December.
![[Bryant speaking at a press conference in 1977]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/10/09/newFile-3.jpg)
“May Anita’s memory and her faith in eternal life through Christ comfort all who embraced her,” the family said in an obituary placed in local paper The Oklahoman. Born in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, on 25 March 1940, Bryant began singing in public from the age of six and made occasional appearances on local TV and radio. She was given her own WKY series, The Anita Bryant Show, when she was 12 years old.
With her wholesome image, she won the Miss Oklahoma beauty pageant when she was 18 and was the second runner-up in the 1959 Miss America pageant, releasing her self-titled debut album that same year. She appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 with songs such as “Till There Was You”, from Broadway’s The Music Man, in 1959, and again with “In My Little Corner of the World” and “Paper Roses”.
Bryant performed at both Republican and Democratic national conventions, as well as singing at the White House during the presidency of Lyndon B Johnson, one of her biggest fans. He was so taken with her rendition of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the 1971 Super Bowl halftime show that he asked her to sing it at his funeral.
