Florida’s LGBTQ+ residents relieved after easing of DeSantis’s anti-gay laws

Leaders of Florida’s much-embattled LGBTQ+ communities say the worst of Governor Ron DeSantis’s three-year onslaught against them may be over, with the official start of Pride month celebrations only days away.

Evidence has been mounting over the past 12 months of a radical change in the political climate now facing LGBTQ+ people in Florida. The first sign came in June 2023 when a federal district court judge in Orlando granted an injunction that prevented the state from enforcing a DeSantis-backed law that prohibited children from attending public performances by drag queens.

Related: Florida settles lawsuit after challenge to ‘don’t say gay’ law

The first quarter of this year brought more welcome news. In March, the state’s premier advocacy group for LGBTQ+ rights announced a settlement with the state over key provisions of the so-called “don’t say gay” law that DeSantis rammed through the Republican-controlled state legislature in 2022.

Under the terms of that settlement, the state agreed to reinstate the rights of students and teachers to speak freely in the classroom about LGBTQ+ people, families and issues, according to Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida. The settlement acknowledged that the law does not prohibit the reading of books or the staging of musicals and plays featuring LGBTQ+ characters in the state’s public schools.

Last month, DeSantis even signed the HIV Infection Prevention Drugs Act, which community advocates have hailed as Florida’s first pro-LGBTQ+ bill in recent history because it expands access to medication critical to preventing HIV transmission. The outcome of this year’s state legislative session in Tallahassee was equally encouraging.

“We stopped or neutralized 21 of 22 anti-LGBTQ bills this session,” said Jon Harris Maurer, public policy director of Equality Florida. “Momentum is on our side.”

That is being felt at the grassroots level. A year ago this month, Kristina Bozanich reluctantly canceled an adults-only event at a gym in the central Florida town of St Cloud that would have featured a drag show. The appearance of a road sign in the neighboring community of Lake Nona that read “kill all gays” in the days leading up to the show had prompted the withdrawal of the four drag show performers who had agreed to appear at the event. That put an end to the 2023 Pride month celebrations that had been scheduled to take place in St Cloud on 10 June.

A year later, the Proud in the Cloud program of events scheduled for 8 June has already received thousands of dollars in corporate contributions. A city council member and lifelong resident of St Cloud named Shawn Fletcher recently issued a proclamation declaring June 2024 to be Pride month in the community of approximately 67,000 people.

“The drag ban is no longer enforced, and we have so much more backing, including from local law enforcement,” marvels the 32-year-old Bozanich. “I’ve been shocked – but in a good way.”

Longtime observers of Florida politics point to the collapse of DeSantis’s quest for the Republican party’s presidential nomination after just one contest – the Iowa caucuses – as a sobering experience for the 45-year-old governor and possible catalyst for the sea change.

“He wasn’t pushing the more radical elements of his agenda through the state legislature in 2024 as he did one year ago because they didn’t bring him the presidency,” notes Charles Zelden, a professor of history and politics at Nova Southeastern University in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Davie. “He is thinking about his future as a politician and what comes next after the governorship – and he seems to be trying to moderate some of his harsher stances.”

That became clear not long after he came off the presidential-nomination trail in January of this year.

At a press conference he convened 25 days later, a chastened DeSantis backed a bill pending in the lower chamber of the Florida legislature that would limit “bad-faith objections” to school library books and instructional materials. He declined to mention the pivotal role he had played in enacting legislation that empowered individual parents to demand the removal of books they deem to be objectionable – regardless of whether their children had actually been enrolled in state-run public schools.

Last month, DeSantis signed that same bill into law and asserted that it “protects schools from activists trying to politicize and disrupt a [school] district’s [book] review process”. The governor explained his apparent volte-face by conceding that “some people are taking the curriculum transparency (policies favored by his administration) and trying to weaponize that for political purposes”.

The governor’s communications director, Bryan Griffin, declined a request for an interview.

As part of the slow-motion rollout of his presidential bid during the first half of last year, DeSantis published a self-promoting book titled The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, which urged other states to follow the trail he had blazed during his governorship to date. But lawmakers in Maryland and even deep-red Wyoming have spurned key elements of that so-called “anti-woke” blueprint, rejecting attempts by far-right Republican legislators to promote bills modeled on the “don’t say gay” law in 2022 and 2023, respectively.

The top official and co-founder of Equality Florida also sees another factor at work.

“Florida has shamefully been named the No 1 book-banning state in the country, educators have left the profession, and LGBTQ teachers were told to take down photos of their families in classrooms,” noted Nadine Smith.

“But the tide is turning. We’ve seen thousands of parents mobilizing to school board meetings to speak out against these attacks on their rights. Families are standing up for their kids – and they’re not letting the governor and the legislature push their kids around any more.”