"Don't Say Gay" Bill and The Fight to Preserve LGBTQ+ History
When it comes to fighting for human rights, Robert Kesten is no stranger to this kind of uphill battle. He was in Tahrir Square during Arab Spring and sought to establish it as a Human Rights City. He urged top figures in Ukraine to make the country the first former Soviet republic to decriminalize homosexuality, and counseled John Atta Mills, former President of Ghana, to incorporate human rights into the country’s constitution.
But Florida was a different obstacle. “I arrived Labor Day weekend of last year in Sarasota. It’s quite, quite red. I tried to organize there and found that even people who were like-minded were afraid to say or do anything other than talk in whispers behind closed doors.” Not too long after, a friend of Kesten’s passed along a job posting at the Stonewall National Museum & Archives, one of the nation’s LGBTQ+ libraries and archives, in Florida. He didn’t think he’d get the job but applied anyway. Then in June of this year, he became the institution’s new Executive Director.
But one month into Kesten’s tenure, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill went into effect. He wrote an op-ed in The Miami Herald on the eve of Pride Month and his new colleagues were worried about losing their 501(c)3 funding status because of its overly political nature. As it stands, Stonewall Museum has nominal state funding because the institution meets the mandates. However, according to Kesten, the closer it gets to election or reelection this may all change. He remained unmoved. In Kesten’s words, “If we are not defending our right to be, we will no longer exist. We are in a precarious state because they would like to force us back into the closet.” These concerns bring up a larger question: How do LGBTQ+ archives remain accessible and maintained under the tide of rising fascism in this country?
Florida maintains a very peculiar yet rich position in our nation’s consciousness. Many jokes fly about the most bizarre circumstances happening in the sunshine state. It’s a place where the biodiversity of the Everglades is as broad as its people, many of them descendants of Caribbean and South American migrants. Much of this landscape intersects with queer history, which has always been under threat. In the 1950s, democratic Senator Charley Johns created a team informally known as the “Johns Committee” that targeted students and professors over their presumed homosexuality. As a result, over 200 of these university members were either thrown out or dismissed.
In 1964, the Johns Committee took it a step further and published Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida, more commonly known as the “Purple Pamphlet,” which contained gay slang and graphic sexual images of both adult men and young boys. Though the Johns Committee became a widespread embarrassment that ceased operation soon after the pamphlet’s release, there was the “Save Our Children” anti-gay and lesbian campaign in 1977, Florida’s sodomy law from 1868 to this day (though unenforceable due to Lawrence v. Texas), the introduction (but subsequent withdrawal) of a bill to ban gay organizations on university and community college campuses, police raids of popular gay bars like Copa and Club 21 in the early 1990s.
Yet even before the 1950s, homophobia could be found not necessarily in political campaigns, raids, or legislative bills, but through other undignified records. Julio Capó Jr., Associate Professor of History at Florida International University and author of Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940, says,
“So often we have to learn their stories through the lens of criminality. The records that appear for them are in arrests or when they make it through the courts…Imagine if your entire life story was told entirely through the lens of police records or the carceral state. It doesn’t give any volume or texture or integrity.”
This is why institutions like Stonewall Museum are necessary even if safety is not a guarantee.
“Before I got here, I believe the front doors were left unlocked,” Kesten tells me. “And now unless we have someone stationed at the front desk, the doors remain locked and someone has to ring to get buzzed in. The doors to the archives are locked all the time. No one can get in or out without knowing the code and signing in. We’ve also changed the alarm. We’re keeping our ear to the ground.”
Hugh Ryan, author of The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison and When Brooklyn Was Queer, sits on the Board of Advisors for the Stonewall Museum in Florida, has been doing the work of digging into LGBTQ+ archives for quite some time. An historian, curator, and journalist, Ryan has been involved in a national curriculum development conference this year in order to share LGBTQ+ resources in a K-12 space. Ryan is well aware that DeSantis’s reign of terror is a harbinger of things to come and presents a warning to those who live in other states that are presumed to be safer:
“We can roll our fucking eyes at every Florida man news story that comes down the pipe but how many youth do you think it’s okay to abandon because you don’t like what the adults in that state are doing? I think there’s a real duty to not give up on places where it’s harder just because we in other places have it easier.”
But nevertheless, in spite of the unfortunate political events happening in Florida, Kesten told me that the Stonewall Museum’s launch for Women’s History Month was the biggest exhibit in the space and yielded the highest gallery turnout in the organization’s history.
Though it was a free event, the museum raised $30,000. In Kesten’s words, “My guess is that people were a bit unnerved by what’s going on. We are, through these efforts, moving the women's movement with the LGBTQ movement, the trans movement with Black Lives Matter with the fight against antisemitism and Asian hate all together. We understand that our role as an archive in a library, as well as a museum is to utilize those collections as a way of uniting people, because in our collection, every other population is directly or indirectly represented.”