Anita Bryant Must’ve Died Happy

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.

“I credit Bryant with seeing the political expediency of the child endangerment claim,” says Patrick McCreery, a professor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study who examines popular fears surrounding children and queerness. It has endured — and surged amid a broader “anti-woke” backlash — partly because it engages parents’ natural drive to protect their kids and partly because it exploits a lack of knowledge about a community that was relegated to the shadows until quite recently. While gay activists of the time focused on their civil rights, Bryant focused on our families. “I think more people could identify with Bryant than identified with the gay activists,” McCreery says.

It may be that the same is true for transgender activists today.

Indeed, politicians who have benefited from the ongoing anti-LGBTQ+ backlash owe a deep debt to Bryant. Witness their accomplishments: In just a few short years, trans bathroom bans have gone from a radioactive folly that could help topple a red-state governor to the law of the land for schools in at least 13 states, not to mention the U.S. Capitol. More than 1,000 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have popped up in state houses in the last five years, focusing particularly on schools and youth, with 26 states and counting passing bans on gender-affirming care for trans minors, though some of those laws were mired in the courts. Even kid-friendly drag performances have become the subject of legislation in multiple states, two of which — Tennessee and Montana — passed bans on “adult performances” in public or anywhere minors are present. The Montana law, which a federal judge blocked on the grounds that it targeted free speech, specifically outlawed “drag queen story hour” events, in which drag queens read books to kids, even if the performances were devoid of sexual content.

A decade past the honeymoon period following the gay marriage breakthrough in 2015, resurgent anti-queer politics has risen like smoke from fire-red state legislatures to the heights of the GOP. Trump’s presidential campaign explicitly targeted the marginalized group with unabashed disdain. “Kamala is for they/them,” intoned an ominous ad knocking Vice President Kamala Harris for once indicating that she supported gender-affirming care for incarcerated trans people. “President Trump is for you.” The president-elect further promises to “stop the transgender lunacy” on day one of his presidency, declaring that he will “sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation, get transgender [sic] out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools.”

Even across the aisle, some Democrats and center-left pundits have called for a retreat on LGBTQ+ issues. Democrats “have to stop pandering to the far left” on trans rights, New York Rep. Tom Suozzi told The New York Times following Harris’ defeat. On Tuesday, two Democrats — Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas — voted with Republicans to pass a ban on trans girls and women participating in women’s sports from elementary school through college.

Likewise, supposed queer allies in the corporate world and in Hollywood dropped their defenses as the political winds shifted. Target pulled back on its Pride merchandise this year (though, to be fair, that was something of a mercy to any LGBTQ+ person remotely interested in style), and Disney, which all but went to war against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a few years ago, recently cut a trans storyline from an upcoming film, saying in a statement that “we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.” The tech world followed suit, with Meta announcing last week that it had dropped anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech policies on its platforms, allowing “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.”

Public opinion polling also indicates a shift. While the majority of Americans “approve of LGBTQ+ people living as they wish,” writes the LA Times, their support of trans people in particular has declined. And the courts, which delivered the greatest LGBTQ+ victory in American history with the gay marriage ruling, now appear poised to deliver blows. The Supreme Court is set to decide the fate of Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors — and with it, similar legislation in other states. And on Friday, a federal judge blocked President Joe Biden’s Title IX rule extending discrimination protections to cover gender identity and sexual orientation.

If this state of affairs is surprising to political observers post-Obergefell, the Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage nationwide, the anxiety over children at the heart of it is all too familiar to anyone who knows the tune of “Come to the Florida Sunshine Tree.”

It was 1977 when Bryant leaped into Sunshine State politics with her “Save Our Children” campaign — an ultimately successful attempt to overturn Dade County’s law preventing discrimination against gay people in housing, employment and public services. (Dade County was renamed Miami-Dade County in 1997.) The law was broad, applying across industries, but Bryant found oppositional purchase in one particular niche. “Bryant did not make arguments against gay waiters or lesbian nurses,” McCreery says. “All of her arguments were about gay teachers.”

“Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit,” Bryant proclaimed, spreading fears that legally protected gay teachers would prey on children. “And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America.”

More than four decades later, conservative activists and politicians translated her message into the puerile vernacular of the internet. Yesterday’s “recruiters” are today’s “groomers.”

In 2022, DeSantis signed legislation that critics dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, preventing educators from discussing LGBTQ+ subjects in kindergarten through third grade, and later expanded it to cover every grade through 12th. His press secretary at the time, Christina Pushaw, referred to the legislation as an “anti-grooming bill,” posting on X that anyone opposed to it was “probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.”

The law employed such broad and vague language that many feared state retribution should they so much as acknowledge the very existence of LGBTQ+ people. Ultimately, the state had to clarify in a legal settlement that simply mentioning LGBTQ+ people (like a teacher responding to a question about a student’s gay parents) is permitted, as long as it’s not part of classroom instruction. Nonetheless, as books disappeared from shelves and worries of inadvertently crossing a poorly drawn line abounded, some queer educators decided to leave the profession altogether.

Thus the same old smear refreshed itself for the age of social media. Conservative activist Chaya Raichik built a brand out of Libs of TikTok, an engine of anti-queer bigotry with millions of followers that has produced targeted harassment campaigns and bomb threats. Queer people were inundated with accusations of grooming and pedophilia online, and the FBI reported an uptick in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes, even as overall crime rates fell nationally. Trans care bans followed, forcing families to flee across state lines in fear of being prosecuted for supporting their queer children.

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles — who, an internet sleuth later discovered, once played a queer character in a student film — succinctly summed up the broader political goal at CPAC in 2023, saying that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”

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.

So I have to imagine that Bryant died happy — for the state of her political mission if not for her own family. 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.