Not Obeying in Advance: How Equality Florida is Turning the Tide
Heidi Siegmund Cuda on the activists who mobilized thousands to fight against anti-LGBTQ legislation. In a Q&A, Equality Florida co-founder Stratton Pollitzer explains how it can be done anywhere.

Glitter was everywhere. From the sequined gown adorning the “world’s tallest drag queen” Daphne — the evening’s hostess — to the sparkle of sequined bow ties and vintage art deco jewelry worn on lapels.
The annual gala of Equality Florida on 18 May in St. Petersburg was an evening of pure joy.
The 700 people in the room represented the thousands of Floridians who helped defeat or neutralize 21 of 22 bills in the most recent Congressional session.
They not only defeated the worst of the anti-gay agenda pushed by the failed presidential candidate, Governor Ron DeSantis, they managed to get 11 school districts representing 75% of the student population in Florida to return to their original protocols for protecting the rights of LGBTQ students. And in more news: in previous years in Florida, extremist candidates ran uncontested by the dozens. This year, that number is zero.
“In those moments when it feels so scary, like it’s all falling apart, you have to remember that you cannot erase consciousness,” Stratton Polltizer, Equality Florida’s co-founder and deputy director told Byline Supplement.
In the room where the gala took place, you could feel the collective exhale of all that they had accomplished by simply remembering that people do have power.
Equality Florida is the largest civil rights organization in the state, dedicated to securing full equality for Florida’s LGBTQ community. And the bottom line, the organization isn’t new to this. It has been pushing back against bad bills since 1997, the year it was founded.
What follows is my Q & A with Stratton Pollitzer, Equality Florida’s Co-Founder and Deputy Director, on how they are beating Ron DeSantis at his own game, and how what they’re doing in Florida can inspire other states to not lose hope.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: The headlines coming out of Florida are so grim, but my visit to your state tells a completely different story. Can you start there?
Stratton Pollitzer: What is happening now in Florida, this is not the way it was supposed to be. This was not the story that Florida was writing. If you go back in time just four or five years, Florida was positioned as the breakthrough red [Republican] state in the country where broad bipartisan coalitions come together, working to pass LGBTQ legislation.
So before Ron DeSantis took office — after blue [Democrat] states in the country had passed a wide range of pro-LGBTQ laws — we had 20 Republican co-sponsors of our statewide non-discrimination protections. It was the most co-sponsored piece of legislation in Florida that year. The momentum was building.
Similarly, the work we had done in our schools in Florida — Safe and Healthy Schools Program — is easily the largest scale, LGBTQ school-based program in the United States.
In a period of just five years, we had trained in person with our staff, over 40,000 principals and school district leaders all across Florida. There was a better than 50-50 chance that there was somebody in your school who we had trained. That was the story we were writing, and that was the direction we were moving in.
And that's one of the reasons this has been such a painful period. It hurts so bad, because we've come so far.
But we are a state absolutely held hostage by a gerrymandered legislature, and a Republican supermajority that's just wildly out of step with everyday people here. And then we got Ron DeSantis. He made the cynical approach to running for President with a campaign that was basically a think-tank-manufactured list of issues that he believed if he repeated robotically, he could ride to the Republican nomination.
He tripled down on what he believed was the ‘perfect’ formula — the ‘Free’ State of Florida, an anti-woke agenda, a culture warrior — their twisted version of parental rights, which is basically taking rights away from most parents in service to an extreme fringe.
It was a cynical attempt to appeal to a Republican primary base. And then in the last election cycle in 2022, when he was re-elected Governor, there was a deep collapse of Democratic turnout in Florida.
HSC: So they made the fatal mistake of obeying in advance.
SP: And the Democrats were wildly outspent. But even so, DeSantis didn’t get any more votes than in the previous election, but he read his win as an endorsement of his manufactured culture war strategy.
And so our job in that moment in 2022, heading into 2023, was to reshape the narrative and mobilize people.
That was when DeSantis really unleashed the first 20-plus anti-LGBTQ laws in Florida. That's the year that the ‘Don't Say Gay’ bill was first introduced.
What we said in that moment was we are going to own this narrative. We have to show the country that Ron DeSantis is actually anti-parental rights, that this is censorship, authoritarianism, and about control.
We had to show that he is willing to demonize and harm the most vulnerable people in our state in order to profit his political ambitions.
And I must say, I think we did a phenomenal job of labeling him to the country.
I don’t think anybody’s heard of the ‘The Parental Rights and Education Act’ — that's what they call the bill. But everybody’s heard of the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill. Those were our words for what they were actually doing.
HSC: DeSantis is now synonymous with this mean-spirited, anti-gay, anti-immigrant stance. No one likes book bans, everyone loves teachers, everyone cares about children. He is now associated with all of this mean and cruel anti-gay culture war junk.
SP: People have come to understand that. And late in his campaign for President, he stopped using the word ‘woke’, he began trying to move away from these things. And when he came back to Florida right after he suspended his campaign, he tried to scrape all of this off of his résumé and started saying that he never believed in book bans. And that it was a misapplication of the law, that people have misunderstood his words, and all of these things, because he came to realize how all it did was tarnish his reputation.
Our job is to make sure that all of that was permanent, not just for him, but for how he represents a whole style of conservative politicians. You know, like Governor Abbott in Texas, who are all working this playbook, and we have to prove that it was a losing strategy.
HSC: Being in Florida over the weekend, you could feel how out of step his policies are. How did you go about getting people out of fear and into action?
SP: I would say — step one, we reframed the narrative. We knew we had to be super disciplined about how we showed what was driving their agenda and how we talked about it.
We understood all of these bills, including the attacks on the telling of history in our schools and the attacks on diversity, equality, and inclusion in our schools, the book bans, and all of it is part of the same cloth — a cynical strategy saying he’s claiming to be fighting for families, when really what he's doing is attacking. He’s attacking all of us in an inclusive and broad society.
And so right when he announced the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, we raised money to cut television commercials — something we had never done before. We put them on air in Tallahassee. The first one is called My Heroes. We helped raise the profile of what he was doing here nationally, and by July of 2023, it was the most well known piece of legislation in the United States.
So that was step one, you have to really name what they're doing and what is motivating them and be very disciplined. Never let them run from their résumé.
HSC: What you are describing is a broader point in how to win in a propaganda war. Because I think so often, people are caught on the back foot because they don't even know how to frame the pushback. So to be able to call it what it is, and to never deviate from it is really important.
SP: That’s right. So then we said, ‘Alright, as these laws are coming, we have to make these commitments: we will stop and kill every bill that we can, and we will use everything we have’.
And it was going to take a new playbook because the old style of how we used to work won’t accomplish our goals.
We determined we had to mitigate and lessen the impact of these bills and amend anything that we can't stop outright to make a less harmful impact.
And then we said, anything that does pass, we will try to have it softened up in committee and through testimony, to prepare for legal challenges.
And so in the first year, they passed something like six bills, but we managed to kill 15 of them.
A bunch of really bad ones passed but even the ones that passed, we were able to get crucial carve-outs. One example is the bill that banned transgender people access to the restroom that aligns with their gender identity. Originally it was going to ban access to any bathroom, public or private, and we were able to restrict it to government buildings only. And similarly, they tried to ban gender affirming care — health insurance for gender affirming care. And we were able to restrict that to government-issued health insurance. So the Government or government entities could not provide gender affirming care, but private insurance still could.
HSC: I understand you have such legislative superstars as Robbie Kaplan on your team and former congressional lawyers and that in a matter of months, it was Ron DeSantis who was caught on his back foot.
SP: Exactly, we showed him for who he is and the media stopped buying his version of events.
HSC: What I could also feel in my trip to Florida is that Ron DeSantis, who fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls a ‘true fascist’, has paradoxically unleashed so much love with his cruel policies and that love has manifested into meaningful action.
SP: One thing you have to remember in moments where we're going backwards, there was a period of about eight or 10 months where our state was just in an all out state of panic, there was no silver bullet. We knew it was gonna take time and be difficult.
But in those moments when it feels so scary, like it’s all falling apart, you have to remember that you cannot erase consciousness.
They tried erasing us from public life, but guess what? We spent decades in Florida building strong partnerships. And in our school districts, students don't have an issue with LGBTQ students at all. They are a highly visible part of the school community. There are so many teachers and district leaders and school board members who are on our side.
So DeSantis is unable to erase what people already know. And because he can’t erase consciousness, it’s in that scary moment where we remembered how to fight back — 3,200 parents, students, volunteers, began showing up to 500 school board meetings this year. That's a real number.
And because they made their presence known, it gave our allies in those districts the courage to stand up and fight. There was a moment where they were trying very hard to scare school board members into believing that Ron DeSantis would just remove them from office if there was any hint that they weren't enforcing his law, and he did remove three school board members in Broward County in September of 2023 — one of the most progressive school districts in the state.
And that was the year that a lot of districts stopped celebrating LGBTQ history month and you know, people got really scared. But when we started showing up and we had our unified message, the manufactured extremist group, Moms for Liberty, backed down, or stopped showing up altogether. We were outnumbering them five to one.
HSC: Moms for Liberty’s ongoing scandal has resulted in the dissolution of the cynical think-tank manufactured hate group in some areas, as well.
JP: We found when we're face to face with them, and it's not just us, not just our community, but parents of LGBTQ children, when they step into those rooms, you know, they have such moral authority, because they actually are there fighting for their children.
They're not there with some whipped-up political scheme like Bridget Ziegler. What we understood is in this moment of danger, nobody's gonna fight harder for these young people than their own parents.
We learned to just keep fighting. You're not gonna win every one of these battles, you're gonna lose a whole lot of them, but you have to keep fighting until you start to get a win. And this last legislative session, we really begin to see a shift. It started with just one school district and now we're up to 11 districts, but the student population is pretty concentrated in those districts. You're talking about 75% of students in Florida live in these 11 districts.
There was a moment in Gainesville that was beautiful. It's North Florida, home of the University of Florida. And there's a moment where the school board members were like, ‘Okay, we want to put our [inclusivity] guidelines back up.’
But the school district attorney was being ‘Mr. Overly Cautious’ and kept not bringing forward the new policy for the board to vote on. And there's this moment where one of the school board members says, ‘Listen, I better see this policy at the next meeting. This is the hill I am ready to die on.’”
That was the steeliness, the commitment that we began hearing all over the state.
And just think of how much that means to an LGBTQ student in that district, who's reading all of these hateful attacks and sees things and sometimes has to put it to the test by literally having to walk past a gauntlet of Proud Boys.
In Miami, the Proud Boys showed up in force wearing masks and t-shirts that said, ‘Shoot Your Local Pedophile Today’.
HSC: No words.
SP: Yeah, no kid should have to endure that, but then to see your school board members fighting for you and to see people turning out in droves to fight for you — as soon as people get a taste of how to fight back, it's just taken off. I've been doing this for almost 30 years, and I've never seen anything like it.
HSC: There are so many other states under siege who are also in that state of panic, but by defeating or neutralizing 21 out of 22 bills this session and managing to turn school districts around, you are showing how it can be done.
SP: That’s right. And the only bill that did pass is a higher education bill that's about gay standards in higher education. And it's an expansion of the law that passed in 2023 that has already been put on hold by the courts, so it’s very likely to be declared unconstitutional.
One thing I can say about our tactics is you have to be doing two things at once: working toward your goals and showing up. You have to outnumber them. We had 7000 people show up during the 60 days of the legislative session — expert testimony from thousands of people.
We organized waves of people to show up in Tallahassee, which is a nine-hour drive from Miami, so it’s really remote.
We always had staff on the ground. We had youth marches, where transgender leaders organized 300 trans activists in a ‘Let Us Live’ march. We provided tens of thousands of dollars in travel scholarships to get people to Tallahassee. Sometimes you only get 48 hours advance notice that a bill will be read, and we had to raise $12,000 for buses one afternoon. We sent out an email to the whole state, and raised it in four hours.
We sent out a weekly Resistance Report to stay connected and keep everyone moving. We gave them the tools to show up.
HSC: I think of my visits to Florida, the beauty of the state, and the gayness of the state. I’m from California and grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s, where everyone was so free. I feel like Florida has been captured by a monster that doesn’t represent its true spirit. And that words like gerrymandering obfuscate what really happened.
SP: In Florida, like many states, this is a state where the legislature draws the districts. They draw the legislative districts. So instead of voters picking who their elected representatives are, you have elected representatives, picking their voters.
And so what they do is they pack all the Democrats into a handful of districts so then Republicans can have the majority and lots more districts. So you have a state like Florida that is almost even and for a long time had a Democratic voter registration advantage. And so Republicans hold super majorities in both chambers, because of the way they draw the districts for their benefit.
HSC: Thank you for explaining that. I have friends who left Florida who told me it's actually a Democrat state. It's a blue state that's just been gamed and rigged.
SP: Every city in Florida basically is blue all over and in major urban areas, they become much more blue. Even Jacksonville just elected a Democratic mayor.
Our cities are doing everything they can to be welcoming and inclusive. Unfortunately, our state Government keeps trying to preempt them to pass laws that override local policies. In our rural communities is where you see a more conservative political framework. But the cities in Florida have made tremendous progress.
HSC: Our readership is global and I would like you to remind everyone about the true spirit of Florida and how woven into the fabric of the state and its history is the strength of its gay communities.
SP: I think most readers are going to be familiar with the famous LGBTQ destinations in Florida — Key West, Miami Beach, Wilton Manors, some of our most LGBTQ friendly cities. Wilton Manors might have been the first city in the United States to have a 100% LGBTQ commission and Mayor.
But beyond big population centers, I think a city that really tells the story of Florida and the impact of our community is Orlando.
It's the story of Pulse, and what happened in Orlando and Central Florida after the Pulse nightclub massacre. We created the GoFundMe campaign to create a victims’ fund the morning after it happened. We set an audacious goal of raising $100,000 for the victims. And we broke $100,000 in the first 90 minutes.
We went on to raise $9 million from 125 countries.
If you go to Orlando now, there's no other city where you will see more rainbow stickers on the windows of businesses or rainbow flags flying and there’s just a deep pride in being a city that has branded itself as inclusive and open to all — it wasn't that Orlando was unfriendly before, but it didn't stand out.
And there's been a progressive takeover of almost all offices in the city and county level. It's just palpable. When you're in a place that has experienced some kind of social injustice, trauma and overcome it, there's a reverence for inclusion and diversity in Orlando that really centers around our community.
HSC: Out of crisis and loss, beautiful things can blossom.
SP: I think we have to remember there are cycles for social justice. And in moments of crisis we have to keep our heads and remind everyone we will get through this. And the only way we lose is if we stop engaging. That's what they're hoping — that is their game plan to scare us into no longer showing up.
So in these moments, when they say, ‘here are the new ways we're going to harm and punish you’, we have to be even more visible.
The only remedy for anxiety and despair is to get to work. When you show up at one of these school board meetings, you will feel better.
HSC: Last question, now that the tide is turning, what’s next?
SP: It's going to take us a long time to unravel the damage DeSantis has done to our state. But the next big step for us is the fall elections — we take this one one bite at a time.
We have a once in a generation opportunity with abortion on the ballot and marijuana legalization on the ballot to inspire a different electorate — a younger electorate — to come out and vote this year.
And we have got to seize that opportunity. We won't be able to flip control of our state government in one election cycle. But we got to have a narrative that comes out of Florida that means people see that Ron DeSantis and extremists like him lost ground in Florida this year, that their hatefulness backfired, and there was a political cost to the damage they're doing.
It's crucial that that be one of the narratives that comes out of Florida. We have a chance to double the number of LGBTQ-elected officials in Tallahassee, maybe triple that number this year. We have a chance to possibly elect the first transgender state legislator in Florida this year. Those are the kinds of headlines we need in November coming out of Florida to show people, the tide is turning.

I’m just thrilled to see this, Heidi. Thank you so much for telling our story.
That’s an awesome story for these wonderful people! My favorite and most spicy aunt ended up living in St. Petersburg with her partner… My grandfather kicked her out of the state of Virginia! She already had her her own radio show in New Orleans, worked at three other newspapers and ended up at Saint Pete times. I’m so happy to hear this news and I know that she would be in the middle of it if she were still with us on the planet!