The Gay Panic That Brought the LGBTQ Rights Movement to New Orleans

In the late 1970s, Anita Bryant was best known as a spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission. Since 1969, televisions across the country had played ads featuring BryantOpens in new tab waking her young twins with refreshing glasses of orange juice. She assured viewers that Florida orange juice was affordable and “so wholesome, mothers can serve all they want for just pennies a glass.” 

Anita Bryant embodied a clean-cut American version of femininity. The former teen beauty pageant winner from Oklahoma had multiple Top 20 hits and two Grammy nominations. A frequent performer at Bob Hope’s USO shows, Bryant was recognized for her service entertaining the troops by the National Guard and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. For most of her early career, Bryant had been patriotic but not explicitly political. She courted audiences on both sides of the political aisle; in 1968, she performed at both the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the Republic convention in Miami. In 1973 she sang at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s funeral. 

That changed in 1977, when Miami-Dade County outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Bryant reached out to her former friend Ruth Shack, who’d sponsored the antidiscrimination ordinance. When Shack didn’t budge, Bryant spearheaded a public campaign to repeal the law. With Save Our Children Inc. (later changed to Protect America’s Children), Bryant used homophobic rhetoric to stoke fears about supposed threats posed to American society—and especially kids—by homosexuals.  

Bryant’s campaign gained momentum, with figures like Jerry Falwell traveling to Miami to support Save Our Children. On June 7, 1977, the antidiscrimination ordinance was repealed. Buoyed by her success in Florida, Bryant took the show on the road, urging other cities to roll back their support of gay rights. Wherever she went, gay communities organized in opposition to Bryant’s homophobic crusade. 

“When she portrayed gay people as child molesters, she became the face of all the awful people who had rejected us for so many years,” Bagneris writes in his memoir, Call Me Larry. “The nasty sludge of Bryant’s message made it imperative that we come out of the closet and take a stand.”

New Orleans had long been known as a haven for people who might now identify as queer, but almost a decade after the Stonewall riots in New York City, the Crescent City still lacked an organized gay rights movement. Publicly declaring their identity could be dangerous for queer people. Being out meant facing not only judgment from friends and family but also threats ranging from undercover vice officers and violent civilian vigilantes to discrimination in workplaces and housing markets. Gender and race also posed a hurdle to unification and organization along the lines of sexual identity.  

But that changed when Anita Bryant announced that she would make her New Orleans debut at the Summer Pops festival at the Municipal Auditorium in Louis Armstrong Park in June 1977. Galvanized by anti-Bryant protests in other cities—including one in Houston that Bagneris had attended a few days earlier—more than a dozen local organizations joined together to form the HERE initiative. A grassroots coalition of diverse groups, HERE included the LGBT-affirmative Metropolitan Community Church as well as gay Carnival krewes. Notably, they were joined by the New Orleans chapter of the National Organization for Women and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  

HERE tried to get the venue to cancel Bryant’s show. When that failed, the group planned a massive demonstration on the evening of June 18. Despite the threat of thunderstorms, at least a thousand protesters flocked to Jackson Square. There, they heard speeches from locals like Patrick “Skip” KibodeauxOpens in new tab, the public spokesperson of HERE, and national figures such as Frank Kameny, a pioneering gay rights activist. The crowd cheered as Vietnam War veteran and activist Leonard Matlovich shouted anti-Bryant slogans on a bullhorn.  

Gay carnival krewe members used their parading skills to organize protestors for the march through the Quarter to the Municipal Auditorium, chanting, “Out of the closets, into the streets!” The next day, the Times-Picayune reported that the “Gay Day Rally” was “the biggest gay rights protest in the city’s history.”  

The Anita Bryant protests helped bring national awareness to gay rights, and for Bagneris, the New Orleans event gave him an impetus to come out to his family. Just as acceptance didn’t come quickly on the national stage, Bagneris’s parents were not immediately enthusiastic. But with joy, love, and pride leading the way, he—and they—persevered. 

“Maybe it wasn’t instantaneous, but I could sense—even that morning—that acceptance was coming,” he writes. “‘I’ve never been happier in my life,’ I told them. ‘I’m off to the demonstrations. Y’all deal with this now. Bye!’”