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Thursday, January 16, 2025

Anita Bryant Is Dead.

Her Ideology Is Alive and Well.  The anti-gay crusader popularized a political strategy that today’s Republican Party has eagerly adopted.


By Dylon Jones
01/14/2025



Anita Bryant
known for opposition to gay rights
dead at age 84
Anita Bryant, the singsongy beauty queen who spun her folksy Oklahoma charm into a career hawking orange juice and campaigning against gay rights, died last month at 84. When the news broke on Thursday, some of my friends were surprised — not that she’d died, but that she hadn’t died a long time ago. After all, this is the era of gay marriage, which the majority of Americans, including nearly half of Republicans, support. Bryant seemed like an artifact of a bygone era when casting gay men as salivating predators was a successful political message. If she herself hadn’t died a quiet death decades ago, when her politics sank her entertainment career, surely her political project already lay in an unmarked grave.

But Bryant might have died happy.

Despite the tectonic cultural reset around mainstream LGBTQ+ issues like gay marriage and military service (hardly the priorities of gay liberationists from back in Bryant’s day), her ideological project of convincing voters that queer people pose a threat to children is more politically potent than at any time since the period when gay activist Thomas Higgins pied Bryant in the face on live television — a moment that came to symbolize the humiliating decline of her reputation following her entrée into politics. From the proliferation of “Don’t Say Gay” laws and bans on gender-affirming care for minors in red states to President-elect Donald Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric about “child sexual mutilation,” Bryant’s method of curbing LGBTQ+ rights by appealing to parental fears has once again become a powerful political weapon for conservatives. In short, Bryant might have lost a short-term political battle, but she won a much longer war that many people thought had been decided conclusively in her enemy’s favor.


Carol Burnett, SNL and movies like Airplane may have made Bryant a laughingstock and canned her superstar aspirations, but her project has outlived her — and it’s thriving.

Footnote: Bryant's granddaughter Sarah Green, who married a woman, told Slate in 2021 that she came out to her grandmother on her 21st birthday. Green told Slate that Bryant responded by saying homosexuality isn't real.

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