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The way Anita Bryant told it, she didn’t have a choice but to build a nationwide antigay movement.

In 1977 and 1978, she led a successful drive to get equal rights ordinances repealed in Dade County and elsewhere, stoking an antigay backlash that left LGBTQ+ Americans fearing for their lives.

As my Slate colleague Christina Cauterucci laid out in her podcast series Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs, the antigay wave that Bryant instigated in Florida would come to a halt in California.

A couple of years later, it seemed that Bryant was inching toward disavowing her role as America’s leading antigay voice.

When I reported on Bryant’s antigay crusade for an episode of Slate’s One Year: 1977 podcast, her son Robert Green Jr. told me that his mother took action close to home.