This is The Parlour, a place for intimate conversation, a real-time archive, a shared diary passed between a rotating cast of queer characters every week in an attempt to capture a kaleidoscopic view of what it’s like to be a queer person right here, right now.
I spent last month living in Portland, Oregon for a writing residency. I have a lot of friends, most of them writers, in Portland, a city I’ve never lived in but visit often. Among its many selling points is the fact that the city experiences its best weather when back home, in Orlando, we’re stuck in our worst. Every time I visited Portland in the past, I met friends of friends who then became my friends. It’s a small city with a big arts and culture scene. This last Portland trip, my longest, people kept saying things along the lines of I wish you lived here.
I kept responding: me too.
It was a fanciful fantasy wish, not in any way real or concrete. For many reasons, Orlando is my home for the foreseeable future. And I love Orlando. I love my life there. I love my wife, who is bound to her hometown in a way I often envy. She has a solid sense of home I’ve never had. I feel lucky that Orlando gets to be my home now. But it’s a simple fact my social life is technically more robust in Portland, a city three thousand miles from where I live. Many of the friends I have there are ones I made on my own rather than through my wife. I know I could do this in Orlando, too, but, and I’m sorry to sound like This: I don’t need more friends. I have plenty. They’re just so far away.
This has always been true for me. Long distance friendships have been a staple of my life since I joined tumblr in my mid-teens. Thanks to over a decade of internet friendships, I can visit most major cities in the U.S. and know someone I can text to meet up for coffee or drinks, someone to crash or catch up with. It’s a beautiful thing, to have so many people in so many places. It has made up for the fact that I’ve never had a strong attachment to any one place as Home. If I lived in Portland, I’d live ever farther away from a lot of my best friends — who are mostly in NYC, Philadelphia, and Chicago — than I already do down in Florida. I would maybe gain something, but I would also lose a lot. It’s not that I wish I lived in Portland; I just wish I could pop over whenever I wanted. Or carry the people who live there around with me. Distance is difficult in any kind of relationship. I’m lucky, at least, to have reasons to keep returning to the pacific northwest.
My time in Portland also came with a healthy dose of FOMO for my life back in Orlando, not just because I missed my wife and my very vocal cat Timmy Tomato, but because the dyke social scene has been truly popping off back home in a way that reminds me why I love the city I currently live in so steadfastly. Queer events were happening in Portland just about every night of the week when I was there (it was June, after all, though PDX celebrates Pride locally in July). But it’s not…the same. Doing gay shit in Orlando hits different.
In Orlando, there are no official dyke bars, but that hasn’t stopped the local lesbians from providing year-round nightlife and social options throughout the city. And the scene is only getting bigger. We’ve got Les Vixens, a sapphic burlesque group with a standing residency at Orlando’s long-running dyke night every Saturday at LGBTQ+ bar Southern Nights. The Vixens are also a large part of the Sapphic Saddles edition of BOOTS, a temporary but wildly popular country-themed dance and party night running all summer. Dyke Nite Orlando — an offshoot of other Dyke Nite collectives around Florida — is an incredible new DIY group organizing events from chill lesbian movie nights to themed dance parties to higher concept events, like a strip spelling bee my wife and I attended shortly before I left town for a month.
When I was away, I looked on longingly as Dyke Nite sold out a special midnight screening of 1971’s Vampyros Lesbos at our incredible single-screen arthouse movie theater Enzian. I also missed out on a gay pool competition where lesbians took over a billiards bar in town that’s usually brimming with heterosexuals on awkward first dates. It was organized by yet another grassroots events collective that has popped up in town. Lesbian billiards night will be back in August, and you better believe I’ll be there.
I also recently wrote a story about my big gay Florida wedding for a new RISO-printed monthly local paper called The Sapphic Sun, operated out of St. Pete but with lots of involvement from folks throughout the greater central Florida area. I don’t really write for places for free anymore at this point in my career, but I didn’t hesitate to do so for this scrappy but beautifully made publication. I can tell you right now: I wouldn’t do that in Portland. I wouldn’t do it in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or any of the other places I’ve lived. I’d only do it in Florida. Do it for Florida. Because being a part of queer scenes and organizations down here just does feel different.
Connecting and dancing and partying and playing and talking and watching movies with other queer and trans people in a place so often at the center of the current culture wars, in a place used as the testing grounds for anti-LGBTQ+ legislation to spread throughout the country, it does feel like a call toward something more than just sweaty, silly fun.
Florida is in the national news for awful reasons once again and rightfully so. Alligator Alcatraz is one of the worst nightmares to come to life in our country’s fascist hellscape I can imagine. And still, there are people who seem to believe the majority of Floridians wanted this, that it is somehow Florida’s fault. Alligator Alcatraz will overwhelmingly harm Floridians and the natural lands of Florida. The immigrants and citizens who have made a home here will suffer. It is Floridians — many queer, Indigenous, and Black and brown — showing up at the site of Alligator Alcatraz trying to stop it. Share their photos, not the ones of people posing with the prison’s sign like it’s a tourist destination. Alligator Alcatraz will bring death and destruction and terror to the Everglades, a place typically teeming with life and beautiful biodiversity. I understand why people — especially queer and trans people — are leaving. I understand why people like my wife want so desperately to stay, to fight.
There are horrors here, the way there are in this whole graveyard of a country. But I’ve never been part of a queer community more alive, more loud, more willing to take over spaces that were not designed to include us.
I called it FOMO a few paragraphs back, but I think what I mean is, for one of the first times in my life, I was homesick.
ok i canNOT be reading this article and getting homesick for florida!!! i grew up in Port A John, Floreeda, aka Port St John, and now live in PDX & wow, SO TRUE it does not hit here the way it hits elsewhere.
Thank you for reading 💗
This is just wonderful.
I think that my sympatico for Florida started with the episodic story of D.R. Davenport in The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Florida is, in the gently simmering gumbo of my memories, a mythic destination.
Not the snowbird destination of my friends and neighbours but something much richer and also elusive.
But still beyond that, it’s the description of the connection you describe between yourself and others, and others and others, that just growls like deep thunder. What we’re capable of sometimes, an almost mycellic? connection between us, through the land we’re living on. Ugh I’m not high enough to express this.
You and Stef both manifest this fantastic visceral connection to Florida, queer for sure but organically so ? It’s so awesome.
wow this is such a beautiful comment, i love it so much. “growls like deep thunder” resonates sooooo much. even the way Stef and I came into each other’s lives really speaks to the organic queerness of Florida i think