Cindy Brown was a local high school student back in 1977, when Miami-Dade County became political ground zero for the modern gay rights movement.
That year, 70% of voters – led by popular singer and Florida orange juice spokesperson Anita Bryant – repealed a newly passed county ordinance protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination in jobs, housing and public accommodations on the basis of “affectional or sexual preference.”
“I watched and listened to the news and saw Anita Bryant and heard what she was saying,” recalled Brown, who graduated in 1979 from Palmetto Senior High School. “A couple years later, I realized that yes, in fact, I was one of those people that Anita Bryant was talking about.”
After going through times of “self-shame and self-hatred,” Brown accepted her sexuality.
“When I realized I was a lesbian,” she said, “it was almost like the world was lifted off my shoulders.”
Her coming out led Brown to a passionate career working for LGBTQ+ rights, including creation of the first Miami Beach Pride in 2009. Now 62, she is director of Lambda Living, a program for queer senior citizens run by North Miami-based Jewish Community Services of South Florida.
Nationally during the 2010s, the LGBTQ+ community had much to cheer about during annual June Pride Month celebrations.
In 2011, two years after the first Miami Beach Pride parade, Congress repealed the “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” policy, which prohibited lesbian, gay and bisexual people from openly serving in the U.S. military. Two years after that, the Supreme Court ruled the U.S. government must fully recognize legally married same-sex couples. And two years after that, the court ruled that all states must perform and recognize same-sex marriages.
Then came the political backlash, mostly against the rights of transgender children and adults, but also against LGB+ people.
“During the (2016 presidential) campaign, things were being said that hadn’t been said in a long time publicly. People may have thought it, felt it, but they understood that it wasn’t appropriate. It wasn’t socially acceptable,” Brown said. “But once the White House changed hands, all of a sudden, those things became acceptable again. All these folks who were homophobic, anti-immigrant, antisemitic – anti-whatever – were given license to be open and out about it, because the president was open and out about it. And that created an environment of fear.”
In 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a Florida law dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” because it prohibited discussion and education of LGBTQ+ issues in public schools. Civil rights activists and lawyers sued, reaching a state settlement in March that restores the rights of teachers and students to discuss LGBTQ+ people, and allows school gay-straight alliances and anti-bullying measures.
Florida lawmakers in 2023 banned public funding of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training at state facilities such as college campuses.
Despite those legal obstacles and others now faced by many LGBTQ+ people in Florida, Brown has advice for celebrating Pride Month 2024: Have fun but also keep in mind the politics. Remember why the first Pride parades began following the June 1969 Stonewall gay bar rebellion in New York’s Greenwich Village.
“This is an election year,” Brown said. “Do your homework. Research these people who are on the ballot and make intelligent decisions when you vote. It’s really important. Don’t pay attention to the commercials. Do some due diligence and look at where people stand on the issues. And vote. Vote locally. Our state Legislature is a really great place to start.”
(Dale Stine)
John Buckley, Unity Coalition Vice President
John Buckley, a gay Black Hispanic activist in Miami, agrees now is the time for LGBTQ+ people “to be educated and know who is running, as well as what they stand for.”
“And not only what they stand for, but what they have actively done to uplift and support our LGBTQ+ plus community,” said Buckley, 39, vice president of the Miami-based Unity Coalition|Coalición Unida. “Making sure they’re not just doing it to get a vote.”
Buckley, whose parents were Honduran, said now is not the time for LGBTQ+ people to feel sorry for themselves.
“It’s very important that we continue to show our pride, especially in Florida, despite the governor we have and his antics to try and scare us into not being proud and not being vigilant within our communities,” he said.
Todd Delmay, executive director of SAVE, Miami-Dade’s largest LGBTQ+ political organization, affirms these are challenging times for the queer community.
“We go through these moments of progress and then there’s this backlash and we get trapped sometimes in the backlash. It’s hard to break out of the, ‘Oh my gosh, things are so bad,'” he said. “'They’re always gonna be bad. It’s never gonna be good again.’ And the last two years have been such a shock to the system, just how aggressive DeSantis and Republicans were coming after us.”
(Carina Mask)
SAVE executive director Todd Delmay speaking at the organization’s “Champions of Equality” 2024 gala at the Eden Roc Miami Beach Resort May 4, 2024.
Delmay, 52, says LGBTQ+ people should not depend on anyone else to ensure their rights.
“It’s rather remarkable that before ‘Don’t Say Gay’ we had nothing in writing, we had no promises that LGBTQ+ people would be seen or that LGBTQ+ students would be allowed to be themselves or have safe spaces or GSAs,” he said. “We just kind of took it for granted that these things existed, but there was nothing guaranteeing that. And ‘Don’t Say Gay’ revealed that.”
Delmay became a known LGBTQ+ activist in 2014 when he and his partner, Jeff, along with four other same-sex couples, sued the Miami-Dade County clerk’s office for the right to marry. They won their circuit court case and in January 2015 the Delmays became the first male same-sex couple to wed in Florida.
(Courtesy of Elizabeth Schwartz)
Elizabeth Schwartz, Miami Attorney
The same-sex couples were represented by Equality Florida, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and several attorneys, including Elizabeth Schwartz of Miami, one of the nation’s leading experts in LGBTQ+ family law.
Schwartz, 52, participates in the Miami-Dade guardian ad litem program and has recently been attorney ad litem for a 15-year-old transgender boy in foster care.
“My kid’s parents are garbage,” Schwartz said. “They’ve thrown him out, each of them separately threw him out and they’re not together. The mother was like, ‘You can dress like a boy if you let me take you to church.’ And the father has his own host of issues.”
Miami Beach Pride is held in April, not June. (Organizers say it’s too hot for an Ocean Drive parade in the scorching summer.)
Schwartz hadn’t been to a local Pride parade in a few years and this April decided to take her young trans client. Suddenly, the LGBTQ+ rights veteran “saw Pride in a whole new way.”
“I went out for this kid and he said it was the best day of his life,” Schwartz said. “This is a kid who has been Baker Acted repeatedly, who cannot get gender-affirming care in the state of Florida. This is a child who is rapidly developing secondary sex characteristics because he can’t get the science-based, evidence-backed care that he needs in Florida.”
The teen told Schwartz that his first Pride parade was “better than Christmas.”
“He met LGBT people. He’s never met this whole community. He felt so celebrated, he felt so normal, he felt so seen,” she said.
The teen marched with the North Miami-based Alliance for LGBTQ Youth.
“Their chant while they were taking pictures was ‘I am the future; I am the future,’” said Schwartz. “For this kid, who has literally been at death’s door – he has suicidal ideation – for him to chant ‘I am the future’ – I said to him afterwards, ‘Baby, when things get tough, I want you to remember what you were screaming about, what you were chanting about – that you are tomorrow' ... to me, that’s what brought home what pride is, the concept of the march and the togetherness.”
Steve Rothaus covered LGBTQ+ issues for 22 years at the Miami Herald. Follow him @steve.rothaus on Threads.
(NLGJA.org)
Steve Rothaus