Ding dong, she is dead!
Anita Jane Bryant (1940 – 2024) is the encapsulation of what “anti-queer hate” means. Her death, announced earlier today, is nothing short of a moment worth celebrating.
For the occasion, I’m organizing a protest in Montréal to celebrate her death, just like how the French did with Jean-Marie Le Pen. Join me at 8:30pm, January 10 (today), at Place du Canada, and let’s share some queer joy and queer schadenfreude together!
Anita Bryant, the hatemongerer
Anita Bryant’s claim to notoriety stems from successfully campaigning to overturn a Florida ordinance forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, amongst other things. If she were not so virulently anti-queer, she would have been remembered as a singer of the 1960s, known for her presence in orange juice ads. However, her hate has permanently corrupted her legacy into one of hate and fearmongering.
Anita Bryant led a huge campaign in the late 1970s to oppose anti-discrimination ordinances protecting queer people (in practice, primarily LGB people) in the United States. Most infamously, her campaign, “Save the Children” — the first organized anti-gay movement in the USA — would lead to the overturning of such ordinances in Miami-Dade County, Florida; St. Paul, Minnesota; Wichita, Kansas; and Eugene, Oregon.
She used ideas which would be recopied by modern-day anti-trans activists. Most notably, she manufactured consent for the repealing of anti-discrimination ordinances by preaching that queer people were dangerous to children, and were attempting to “recruit” them to turn them gay. Bryant became the centrepiece of a major, nationwide anti-gay movement across the United States, the prelude to the AIDS crisis that would later exterminate enormous numbers of queer and trans people. Her stochastic terrorism would also lead directly to the murder of Robert Hillsborough, a gardener in San Francisco, as well as several suicides in the face of dehumanization.
Anita Bryant has also attempted to bring her hatred to Canada in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though not much is available online regarding her hatemongering here, it’s known that she’s faced confrontations all across the country. Her hatred would also lead to escalating anti-queer hate, leading up to Operation Soap, a mass-arrest of 306 people for being in, or owning, gay bathhouses.
She is the prototypical example of what someone who’s dedicated her entire life to marginalizing the marginalized. As we examine contemporary anti-trans legislation, such as in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the same arguments of, amongst other things, “child endangerment”, return with few, if any, adjustments. Bryant’s legacy remains embedded in the contemporary anti-trans movement, and shall go down as one of hate, intolerance, and attacks on 2SLGBTQ+ rights. Her death deserves no commemoration but celebration.