Anita Bryant

About Anita Bryant

Anita Jane Bryant (born March 25, 1940, in Barnsdall, Oklahoma) is an American singer. She is widely known for her strong views against homosexuality, and for her prominent campaigning in the mid-1970s to prevent gay equality, specifically her successful move to repeal a local ordinance in Miami, Florida that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Bryant is a member of a conservative church congregation affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.

Bryant's belief in God and the Bible had their roots in her childhood. She was initially declared dead at childbirth in her grandparents' tiny frame house in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, but her grandfather would not accept that the baby was dead. When the doctor told her grandfather to get him a pan of ice water, the new grandfather lost no time and the newborn Anita survived.[citation needed]

Her grandfather taught her as a baby to sing when she was six months old.[citation needed] Soon after her sister Sandra was born, her mother and father divorced. Her father went in the Army and her mother went to work, taking her children to live with their grandparents temporarily. When Anita was two years old, her grandfather taught her to sing Jesus Loves Me. Bryant was singing onstage on local fairgrounds in Oklahoma at age six. She sang occasionally on radio and television, and was invited to audition when Arthur Godfrey's talent show came to town. Her father at first refused to allow her to go on Godfrey's show, relenting only when he was told his daughter had exceptional talent, and it would be a sin not to share it.