ORLANDO — Arlo Dennis has decided on a deadline to get their family out of Florida: July 1.
That is the day a slate of new laws signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting the LGBTQ community take effect. Doctors will be allowed to deny care based on their moral beliefs. The use of preferred pronouns will be banned in public schools. And children will be barred from attending drag shows, among other measures. One law that prohibits gender-affirming health care for transgender people under the age of 18 is already being enforced.
The Republican governor vying to become president in the 2024 election championed the bills as part of his “Florida Blueprint.” His critics call it “the slate of hate.”
For Dennis, they add up to a difficult but urgent decision to flee. “I’m a trans adult. I have gender nonconforming children, and these laws are just so specifically targeting our communities that I don’t feel like my parenting relationship is going to continue to be respected,” Dennis said. “We just low grade don’t feel safe.”
A tectonic shift in how the LGBTQ community perceives its welcome is underway in a state famed for both a vibrant gay history in pockets like Key West and a past filled with examples of intolerance and aggression. While some of the new legislation builds on previous laws, gay rights advocates say they are alarmed by the sheer number of bills and the increasingly hostile rhetoric from DeSantis and Republican state lawmakers
In recent weeks, several civil rights groups have issued travel advisories for Florida, warning LGBTQ tourists to reconsider plans to visit the Sunshine State. The overall impact of the laws make Florida “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals,” the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the nation, said in its warning in May.
Two Florida communities have canceled annual Pride parades out of concern that they will unintentionally break a new law that makes it a third-degree felony to have a child present at “an adult live performance.” Some transgender families are placing their children in private schools. And a growing roster of LGBTQ families and individuals are opting to leave.
NBA superstar Dwyane Wade announced that he had moved his family to California in part because he feared his transgender teenage daughter “would not be accepted or feel comfortable” in Florida. A NASA engineer left for Illinois after concluding the new bills amount to the state “attempting to erase trans people.”
Those who cannot afford to relocate are turning to GoFundMe to raise money to leave a state they say has become a dangerous place for them and their children. Advocates for transgender Floridians have started Transit Underground, an informal coalition to help connect those leaving with volunteers who offer transportation and temporary housing.
Florida is home to several cities famed for embracing gay life and culture but, as with many states, its history with the LGBTQ community has been uneven.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Johns Committee, a state-sponsored investigative panel, targeted civil rights activists suspected of ties to communists. Its work eventually homed in on Florida universities. A 1959 report by the group alleged that “homosexual professors were recruiting students into ‘homosexual practices’ and they in turn were becoming teachers in Florida’s public-school system and recruiting even younger students.”
A decade later, former beauty queen Anita Bryant launched what some now see as a precursor to the DeSantis-backed measure critics call “Don’t Say Gay,” which bars classroom lessons related to gender identity and sexual orientation in K-12 public schools.
Despite that complicated past, gay pride flourished in parts of the state. Glamorous hotels and restaurants catering to the gay community sprang up in Miami Beach in the 1970s and remain fixtures today. Thousands flock to Key West for Pride Month and New Year’s Eve, when the island city does a ball drop hosted by a drag queen.
There and elsewhere, many have felt the worst was behind them, particularly after the Supreme Court recognized same-sex marriage in 2015, said Scott Galvin, director of Safe Schools South Florida, which works with LGBTQ youth. “We thought, we’ve arrived, the struggle is over,” . . . Even after the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, many in the gay community felt a sense of solidarity. . . . “Even people who were not LGBTQ felt attacked,” Dennis recalled after a gunman killed 49 people in the gay nightclub. “After Pulse, I remember hearing a man, he looked like a regular good old boy, say ‘These are my gays. Don’t mess with them.’”
When DeSantis last year signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Galvin said he was taken aback. . . . Then he was hit directly: Miami-Dade County schools, which for 20 years had welcomed Galvin’s nonprofit to host an annual empowerment day for LGBTQ students, refused to authorize the event this year, citing the new law.
“When all of this started, we had a hard time motivating people in the LGBTQ community who don’t have children,” Galvin said. “You know, you’re 35 years old and you’re hitting up the clubs, life is great, so what happens in schools doesn’t affect you, right?” Now, he said, “they’re starting to realize that we’re all under attack.”
During a hearing over a bathroom bill, state Rep. Webster Barnaby (R) lashed out against those speaking against the legislation, likening them to people who are “happy to display themselves as if they were mutants from another planet.”
“The Lord rebuke you, Satan, and all of your demons and all of your imps who come parade before us,” Barnaby said, looking at the speakers . . . The harsh rhetoric continued even after the bills were passed. At a bill signing event in May, DeSantis was joined by Rep. Randy Fine (R), who sponsored some of the anti-LGBTQ legislation. Fine likened the bills as part of a broader war of good against evil. “There is evil in this world, and we are fighting it here today,” Fine said.
“What is happening now is taking us back not 50 years, but 100 years,” said Caitlin Ryan, a founder of the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University in California. “It is extremely destructive.”
Still, many are also vowing to stay and defend their rights, . . . Dennis has been a community organizer in Orlando and said they will miss “the tenacity and the creativity and the resilience of community.” “It feels like I’m jumping off a sinking ship and being like, well, I got my life raft, y’all take care of yourselves,” Dennis said. “But we can’t stay in Florida.”
We cannot allow this legalization of hate to overtake Virginia.
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