Florida’s Blueprint for Resistance
Nadine Smith has dedicated her life to speaking truth to power and organizing for a better future. As the executive director of Equality Florida, the largest organization in the state working to end discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, she has led the organization since its founding in 1997 and remains one of the most respected voices for LGBTQ+ rights in the country.
Before becoming an organizer, Nadine was an investigative journalist. Her reports aired on WUSF, the NPR affiliate in Tampa, and she wrote columns for both gay and mainstream publications. However, she did not just tell stories; she stepped into leadership and began to shape the movement from the inside.
In 1993, Nadine co-chaired the historic March on Washington for LGBTQ+ rights. The same year, she was part of the first-ever Oval Office meeting between a sitting U.S. president and LGBTQ+ leaders. She served on President Obama’s National Finance Committee, helped lead efforts like Citizens for a Fair Tampa to defend local human rights protections, and served on the founding board of the International Gay and Lesbian Youth Organization. She was also the first openly lesbian African American to run for Tampa City Council and currently chairs the Florida Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights. Her work has been recognized by the League of Women Voters, the Florida Diversity Council, Influence Magazine, and many others. In 2022, she was named to the TIME 100 list of the most influential people in the world.
Nadine has never been afraid to confront power directly and has never lost sight of what this work is truly about. As she once said, “We march, we lobby, we educate, we protest, and we should and we must”. She added that it has become increasingly clear that movements must now “place ourselves visibly at odds with an unjust law to provoke the consequences that can prick the consciousness of our country.”
This spirit is what makes her work so deserving of this award. Her activism reflects the core values of humanism: that every person has worth, that justice must be for all, and that progress depends on people working together with reason, compassion and resolve. Nadine has dedicated her life to challenging cruelty and building a more equal world not because of dogma or doctrine, but because it is the right thing to do. That is humanism in action, and that is why we are proud to honor her for not only what she has accomplished but for how she has done it, with clarity and courage.
NADINE SMITH: Wow, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. That was quite an introduction, and I’m going to have to steal it from you because you were giving me flashbacks. It’s good to see all of you, past and future Floridians.
Ich bin ein Floridian. We’re all Floridians.
I was asked, “How are things going in Florida?” and I will talk about that. I made that same noise you all just did, but when I’m asked, I say, “You know, Florida is the frontline, but it’s also the blueprint for resistance.” There are terrible things happening in Florida, but there are incredible people fighting back and learning things that we are exporting to other states so you can fight back too.
I don’t know how many of you know a lot about Florida’s geography, but most people know it from that cartoon of Bugs Bunny trying to saw Florida off the map. I grew up in the panhandle of Florida, affectionately known as the Redneck Riviera. It is the darkest red area of that state. I tell people I grew up there because that’s the South; in Florida, the further south you go, the further north you get.
The panhandle is deep-red territory. I remember when I was growing up as a Black lesbian girl in the South, and a math nerd, the chances of survival for any combination of those two were pretty slim when I was in school. To give you a taste of that area, during P.E. we played “Smear the Queer.” This was before the word “queer” was reclaimed. But then one summer, when we came back, “Smear the Queer” was gone and had been replaced with “murderball,” so slowly but surely, the light was dawning. We had no “out” teachers, which is unfathomable to me to think of now. But what we did have was a woman named Anita Bryant who used to sell us orange juice.
The upside of Anita Bryant was that as she went on her hateful attacks, she introduced me to a vocabulary that I did not have, but I somehow knew it applied to me. She was talking about “homosexuals” all the time. Because she was talking about it, so were the 700 Club and the “PTL Club.” They would have b-roll from San Francisco and New York Pride, and it was the first time I had ever seen leather-clad lesbians straddling motorcycles. I knew I would have to find that amazing place one day. Honestly, then and now, the best place to find LGBTQ+ content is the right wing; they are obsessed.
When I was a reporter for the Tampa Tribune years ago, I remember every month there would be a manila envelope about a quarter-inch thick of xeroxes from gay male magazines. The quality was so bad that you couldn’t quite tell what was going on, so he would helpfully circle the areas he wanted to draw your attention to. About six months in, one of the other reporters said, “Do you ever wonder why he doesn’t send us the originals?” It became clear to me that he was trying to convince himself, and possibly his wife, that it was research.
I’m not saying every person who is obsessed with this wakes up in the morning wondering how to make the lives of LGBTQ+ people harder and is secretly gay. I’m just saying an awful lot of them are. They are navigating the same thing I was as a kid: we were taught that we should not exist, and if we did, we should hide. We were taught that if we did not hide successfully, any harm that came to us was our own fault. This was taught to us by the people who were supposed to love and protect us the most, and many of them inflicted psychological and spiritual torture on their own children, students, and family members under the guise of Christian love.
My journey to humanism was right through the Bible. I read it religiously, and not because my parents forced me to go to church. I voluntarily went to Bible camp. There’s nothing like reading it to cause a person to go, “Well, wait a second. This doesn’t quite add up. This doesn’t make sense to me. How can this be true?” I cannot worship something that is less merciful than me. Down that road, I realized I did not believe it anymore. It was more my culture than an actual belief system. I’ve spoken at a number of religious-based organizations, and I always ask the people who pick me up at the airport, “Do you believe in God?” The number of times they pause and fumble for an answer that isn’t a “no” but also isn’t a “yes” is telling. I get a lot of “I want to” or “I believe in a mystery that is not solvable.” How much of it is a reflexive culture rather than an actual belief system?
Because we swim in that ocean at all times, it becomes really important for gatherings like this to exist. I will just say plainly that it is wonderful to see Black, Indigenous and people of color in this space, because it is too rare. The oppressive nature of moving through a world with the expectation that you are religious – because of the role that faith has had in civil rights and liberation struggles, makes me feel much better every time I see people who look like they could be part of my family in a room.
I have a podcast, “Wide Awake America,” because as fascism emerges fully on the American landscape, I found myself drawn to my original profession as a reporter. I wanted to talk about things beyond the scope of the Equality Florida portfolio, though they are very much inseparable.
I want to point your attention to two things. One is a new book called “American Scare” by Robert Fieseler. It is the most comprehensive look at the Johns Committee, the Florida version of the McCarthy era. Fieseler stumbled on this treasure trove and began writing this book to try to understand the “Florida-ization of America.” When a writer who lives in Louisiana says they needed to go to Florida to understand what’s wrong with the country, that’s a wake-up call.
His amazing book is a reminder that what we are facing now, we have faced before. It seems like every decade or two, there’s an evil clown in the sewer trying to drag us down, whether it’s McCarthy, Charlie Johns, Anita Bryant, Ron DeSantis or Stephen Miller. It all comes from the same place. When Anita Bryant started her hateful “Save Our Children” campaign, her arguments were recycled, but she was bankrolled by an organization that later became known for its anti-abortion organizing. The thing that truly animated them was that they did not want to integrate schools.
We see this time and time again. The same school districts that want to get rid of “And Tango Makes Three,” the true story of two male penguins raising an orphaned penguin chick, immediately afterward got rid of “The Life and Times of Rosa Parks.” They know that they can create enough fear if they can triangulate.
In an April 17, 2023 New York Times article, a right-wing think tank called the American Principles Project admitted that marriage equality stopped being an effective “wedge issue.” He said, “We threw everything against the wall, and to our surprise, what stuck was Americans did not know much about the transgender community, and we knew we could work with that.” What they meant was that they knew they could take ignorance and coin it into fear, and then mold that fear into anger. They showed the effectiveness of this by spending hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars demonizing transgender people, who have existed in every timeline, on every continent, and in every culture.
The second thing is that I interviewed reporters out of Ukraine, and in different ways, they told the same story. When Russian occupying forces came into a town, one of the things they did was destroy photo albums and diaries. They wanted to erase Ukrainian culture. They moved children into schools where they would be “retrained” to think of Ukraine as Russia. One of the reporters said, “You don’t recognize it, but we are being colonized.” He said that while we think of colonialism as white people colonizing Black and brown people, what is happening to Ukraine is a complete erasure of their identity and a re-education.
I think about this because America is being colonized. The tech oligarchy and other forces are treating America the way an invading, colonizing army thinks about a new land. It’s about treating a place like a foreign country to be invaded and subdued. We have to be very real and let go of our normalcy bias. We have to let go of the mythology of America and confront the reality of it.
When I think of Adriana Smith, her decaying body was kept blood pumping and lungs filled so that she could serve as an incubator due to an abortion ban. Her family watched her skin rot off and her eyes sink in. It wasn’t until there was so much water on the brain of the fetus that they finally removed it. It is horrible to think about, and it is even more horrible to think about the extraordinary expense that now falls on the very parents who were trying to allow her to be buried in dignity.
Contrast that with a Republican lawmaker in Florida named Kat Cammack. She had an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured, and she was told by doctors that because of Florida’s law, she had to be closer to death before they could give her an abortion to save her life. She insisted that she knew what the law was supposed to do and called the governor’s office to get assurances for the doctors that they would not be tried for murder. After the procedure, she now says that Democrats are “fearmongering.”
The laws were never supposed to apply to everyone the same. Abortion laws do not stop wealthy people from getting abortions. They like the laws to fall disproportionately on whom they intend to hurt while protecting their own.
It’s becoming more and more important for us to call things what they are and not lull ourselves into normalizing what should be outrageous. The moment Marines put their hands on an American citizen on US soil, we should have shut this whole damn thing down. I want to thank you for this and for inviting me, but most of all, I want to thank you for leaving the light on, the light of reason, accountability, personal responsibility and community.
A friend who launched an organization called Leaving MAGA told me that people are not drawn to it because of racist dog whistles or anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. They look at a ballot with two dynasties, Clinton and Bush, and feel like something is fundamentally broken. He said once he got involved, he found community, belonging and a sense of purpose. It is what draws people in; they don’t have a coherent political framework, but they have a cult of personality and a sense of purpose. It is hard to compete with fantastical supernatural stories, but it is so important that we try. It’s so important that we come together and be in spaces like this.