During Pride Month, LGBTQ community vows to say gay, stay strong, register to vote

In gay-friendly towns like Wilton Manors, they thought they had gotten past this. Same-sex marriage, once controversial, had gained greater acceptance every year, according to most available polling. Bans on gays and lesbians adopting children had long been rescinded or struck down by the courts.

And then came HB 1557, the Parental Rights in Education Bill (derided as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by its critics). Passed this year by the Florida Legislature and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, HB 1557 has fueled concern and resolve in the LGBTQ community, feelings that have only intensified during June, aka Pride Month.

April offered a preview of the response: “Say gay!” echoed through the streets of Miami Beach during the city’s loud, colorful gay pride parade. Democrats are hoping to harness that zeal to boost turnout in November’s mid-term elections.

The past weekend brought a fresh reminder of the nation’s frightening cultural divisions and rising extremism with the arrest of dozens of masked men from a white supremacist group, crammed into a U-Haul truck with riot gear, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. They were allegedly on their way to disrupt a gay pride event.

Florida Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Democrat who is openly gay, said both the LGBTQ community and its allies must be visible and vigilant heading into the mid-terms.

“Because the people only fight against things that they know they are losing,” Jones said of opponents of LGBTQ rights. “As we see this uptick in violence that is happening toward the LGBTQ community, it only goes to show that the people who are on the right side of history are moving forward regardless of what people on the other side are doing.”

Since 2000, Wilton Manors has celebrated Pride Month with the Stonewall Parade, paying homage to the June 1969 Stonewall protests in New York that occurred after police raided a gay club in Greenwich Village named the Stonewall Inn. It is considered a pivotal moment in the gay rights movement. The parade became a village-sponsored event in 2007.

What many LGBTQ leaders see as a scapegoating of their community has led to the rising cost of police presence for this year’s event, creating a challenge for the parade on June 18, said Chris Caputo, a village of Wilton Manors commissioner. He said the cost to have police at the event was around $45,000 last year and is now around $97,000.

“The fact that it costs more to protect an LGBTQ event,” he said. “The fact that there hasn’t been this sort of attack on our community since before gay marriage. This is definitely more important than ever.”

With the upcoming elections this August and November, LGBTQ organizations are mobilizing to register and motivate voters. Among the organizations at the vanguard of this effort: SAVE LGBTQ and Equality Florida.

Equality Florida has been providing information to voters in Tallahassee on where candidates stand on LGBTQ issues. The organization’s political action committee also mobilizes volunteers to help candidates who win the PAC’s endorsement.

“There are lots of volunteer opportunities for people angry at watching politicians use, especially LGBT young people, as political pawns,” Nadine Smith, Equality Florida executive director, said. “We are able to help them channel that into productive work of helping to elect fair-minded, pro-quality politicians.”

The leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that would reverse Roe v. Wade has stoked further concern in the LGBTQ community, with some theorizing that the court could even reverse Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that legalized same sex marriage nationwide.

“If we would have had a conversation, six months ago, and if anyone would have suggested Roe v. Wade could in the near future be at real risk, or even further than that the idea of gay marriage is at risk, I probably would have said absolutely no way,” said Caputo. “But I think this has shaken our communities at the core.”

More than 150 people gathered together at the Stephen P. Clark Center on June 1 as the county’s LGBTQ Advisory Board kicked off Pride Month by unveiling a mural displaying the faces of several well-known icons from the LGBTQ community. Faces on the mural include such gay and lesbian icons as actor George Takei, performer Angie Xtravaganza and activist Pedro Zamora.

Twenty University of Miami students, faculty and staff worked together with community resources to establish the mural. It was initially unveiled in April to mark the 10-year anniversary of the school’s LGBTQ and sexual studies minor.

Several people from Miami-Dade government saw the mural and asked if it could be displayed as part of Pride Month. It was a final project for students who were part of the university’s inaugural Gender and Sexuality Studies Living Learning Community.

“They [students] took their Gender and Sexuality Studies class together,” Dr. Gisela P. Vega, director of the LGBTQ Center at the University of Miami, said. “And part of the requirement for the class was to develop a service project that they would implement and that would somehow impact the community and create social change around issues of gender and sexuality.”

University of Miami rising junior Ryan Hires, one of the students who worked on the mural, said: “It definitely required a lot of teamwork. Everyone became an artist. It was a really amazing experience to be a part of, and it was really rewarding to see all this coming out of it and all this stuff.”

The LGBTQ Advisory Board has been around for about two years, advising Miami-Dade County on policies concerning the LGBTQ community. Advisory Board Chair Patricia Hernandez believes that visibility is crucial during Pride Month.

“So when we’re visible, then people will start understanding that we’re not so different than everybody else in the sense that we should be entitled to the same rights. We’re a community just like everybody else. We’re human beings just like everyone else, and we deserve the same rights as everyone else.”

Supporters of the Parental Rights in Education Bill say it is simply aimed at prohibiting instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for children in third grade and younger and ensuring that older students are only exposed to such issues in an age-appropriate way.

Opponents say the legislation’s vague wording is a way to stifle discussion and intimidate teachers into silence.

“It [Parental Rights in Education bill] alienates children who have same-sex parents because they won’t be able to talk about their parents,” Hernandez said. “Like a child talking about their two mommies or their two daddies, that’s going to now create a problem in the school system.”

While many Evangelical Christian churches have lined up in support of the Parental Rights in Education bill as well as efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade, a few churches have been vocal in their opposition to both moves.

“If you’re going to deny women, which is half the country, the choice over their own healthcare and their own bodies,” said the Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins, executive minister at the gay-welcoming Sunshine Cathedral in Fort Lauderdale, “well, why wouldn’t you just deny anyone their rights. And at least half the states in this country don’t seem to even view transgender people as full humans and as full citizens.”

The church has tweaked Gov. DeSantis by sending him rainbow-hued postcards.

Another issue that has galvanized the LGBTQ community during Pride Month is the state’s effort to prevent parents from seeking treatment for their minor children for gender dysphoria, a sense of unease that a person may have a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity.

It is an area of medicine that has divided clinicians and become a political fault line.

Florida Health officials are asking for additional restrictions on such treatments, following the release of a report by the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) on June 2 saying that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex reassignment surgery have not been proven safe or effective in treating gender dysphoria.

According to its report, AHCA believes that these treatments “are not consistent with generally accepted professional medical standards and are experimental and investigational with the potential for harmful long term affects.”

Allison Yager, Florida Health Justice Project executive director, said that the report from AHCA comes from scientists who have been discredited.

“We know they searched far and wide to find scientists who would reach the politically driven conclusion,” she said.

Yager added that this potential decision to restrict gender dysphoria treatments for transgender youths, which requires a formal rulemaking process before it guides Medicaid’s coverage of such treatments, is putting youths’ health in jeopardy and that denying them gender-affirming care is equal to denying them their identity.

According to an article from Lambda Legal, a national organization that advocates on behalf of the LGBTQ community, “AHCA’s intended rulemaking and report do not currently prevent any doctor in Florida from providing medically necessary and essential medical care to transgender patients.”

Don Squire, vice president of Congregation ETZ Chaim in Wilton Manors, said his organization will have a booth during the Wilton Manors parade, where it will provide handouts on these and other issues facing the LGBTQ community.

Upcoming events in South Florida

▪ June 18: Stonewall Pride Parade & Street Festival, Wilton Manors. Street Fair: 3 p.m.-11 p.m. Twilight Parade: 7 p.m.

▪ June 1-30: Toast with Pride, 1 Hotel South Beach, 2341 Collins Ave., Miami Beach

▪ June 25: Fourth Annual Family Pride Day at the Museum of Discovery and Science, 401 SW Second St., Fort Lauderdale. 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

▪ June 25: Voices from Florida: Celebrating LGBTQ Pride, Miami Beach Regional Library, 227 22nd St., 1-2 pm.

▪ June 25: NBV 2nd Annual Pride Fest, Drag Show & Dj Set, Dr. Paul Vogel Community Park, 7920 West Dr., North Bay Village, 6-9 p.m.

▪ June 26: L,G,B + T: A Pride Month Fundraiser for SAVE/LGBT, the Sandbox, 2341 Collins Ave., Miami Beach, 8:30 p.m.

This story was originally published June 14, 2022 at 9:37 AM.