There is deeply rooted racial and economic disparity here which is constantly exacerbated by the often violent policies made at the local and state level.
#Standing gay sex gif free#
That doesn’t mean it’s free from the structural inequities of every other place.
South Florida is culturally and religiously diverse and, for one reason or another, has always been a haven for the freaks, for the weirdos, and for the people who didn’t fit in well with their places of origin. But I do think growing up in South Florida warped my understanding of what exactly it means to be out and safe in the place where you live. It’s true that - as a visibly queer or trans person - the threat of violence constantly surrounds you no matter where you are. Really, I hadn’t considered what it was like to be young and queer in Florida much at all either. It’s not that I had never heard Bryant’s name before, but I hadn’t really considered her. Early in that first semester of school, I was invited to a local showing of a documentary that discussed queerness and the Christian Church, and that was where, for the very first time in my life, I saw the archival footage of Anita Bryant taking a pie straight to the face on national television. When it came time to decide where to go for college, I decided the best course of action was to stay in South Florida and save up as much as I could to begin my post-college life in whatever place was as radical as I felt I was. The more I learned from the music I was listening to, from the people I was connecting to and working with in my community, and from consuming a ton of leftist media, the more I thought about leaving Florida for a place where it would be easier to organize and recruit more people to organize against our systems of injustice in this country, some place where I thought our efforts would “actually” make a difference. As we worked and worked and worked, many of us were under the impression that it was the unique and exceedingly complicated politics in our home state that made all of our resistance so difficult. I worked with other anti-war organizers to plan and execute protests against the wars I helped out in union spaces and helped people work to unionize their workplaces I worked with other LGBTQ youth to try to make spaces for us to connect and work together I worked with survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault and, with two friends, I helped launch the first chapter of Food Not Bombs in Ft. Like most of the teenagers who began organizing in the mid-2000s, the majority of the work I did was in anti-war (specifically the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), anti-violence, and anti-capitalist movement spaces. Luckily, by the time I was 16, I was fully entrenched in the punk scene in South Florida, which granted me access to a world that not only helped fill in some of the gaps in my political education but also encouraged me to seek out more ways to get them filled. Being the compassionate, angry, queer teenager I was by the time I got to high school wasn’t easy during these lessons, but paying close attention to them did help me gather tools to both open my mind to other possibilities and embrace the fact that there was so much more I needed to learn. Growing up and going to elementary, middle, and high school in Florida wasn’t much different save for a couple of teachers who, in retrospect, did what they could with the tools they had to show us different perspectives. In all our attempts to maintain the status quo, we purposely leave out the histories of the people who have fought the hardest to simply exist here, to get the care they want and deserve. So much is left out of what we teach them: Instead of teaching them the revolutionary truths of the fight for civil rights and the labor movement or the possibilities that exist beyond white supremacy and racial capitalism, we give them a sanitized version of “how far this country has come.” We give them something to be “proud” of. It’s not a secret that American students almost never receive the historical and political education they need and deserve in our schools. The truth is, as hard as I ride for it now, there was a time when I couldn’t imagine living here anymore, too.