Anita Bryant Was A Fervent Anti-LGBTQ+ Activist After a Successful Music Career

Plenty of celebrities have second acts that involve jumping into politics, but few did so with more stridency than Anita Bryant. Bryant had three top 20 hits in the United States in the early 1960s, and was also voted Miss Oklahoma in 1958. Later in life, though, she became known for being an outspoken Christian and specifically for her attacks on the LGBTQ+ community.

In the middle there, Bryant was an ambassador for the Florida Citrus Commission and starred in dozens of orange juice ads. Here's what we know about the orange juice part of her career.

Bryant worked as the ambassador for the Florida Citrus Commission from 1969 to 1980, and in that time she starred in dozens of orange juice advertisements where she said things like, "A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine!"

While she also appeared in ads for a variety of other products, Bryant became best known for her orange juice commercials, so much so that she was frequently lampooned for being associated with them.

Her relationship with orange juice fractured, though, in large part thanks to her outspoken advocacy against LGBTQ+ rights. As is often the case with anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric today, Bryant focused on children, suggesting that they needed to be raised with traditional, Christian values.

Bryant's rallying cry can still be seen in Florida and around the country decades later, but it came at some personal cost to her.

She lost her endorsement deal with the Citrus Commission and had to file for bankruptcy on two separate occasions. What's more, while many still use the rhetoric she once employed, they do so in a world where gay rights have become much more mainstream than they were when Bryant was railing against them.

Speaking of the personal sacrifices that Bryant felt she needed to make in order to marginalize in entire group of people, she once took a pie to the face during a press conference in Des Moines, Iowa. After the incident, she quipped that at least it was a fruit pie before eventually breaking down into tears on the lecturn with the cream from the pie still on her face.

“I don’t regret it, because I did the right thing,” she said in a 1990 television interview. “Sometimes you have to pay a price for what you believe is right.”

Bryant's stance on LGBTQ+ rights is even more divisive today than it was in the 1970s.

By couching their appeals in the language of children's safety, though, some have continued the legacy of discrimination that Bryant started nearly 50 years ago. Her orange juice commercials might have been memorable, but that is undoubtedly her most lasting legacy.