Looking back on what we did in 2024, it was certainly not in our plan nor was it an inevitability that our queer community activism would contribute so substantially to the transformation of our world. Obviously, however, the opening of our small LGBTQIA+ community center on the island of Key West, Florida served as a catalyst for enacting a new world view in the state of Florida, in the United States, and, ultimately, in the wider Earth community. With our byline “Love is love. Community is everything.,” Queer Keys managed to influence the hearts and minds of people in a way that cut across politics, environmentalism, economics, and difference.
My dear friend Janiece and I founded Queer Keys in 2021 to address a total lack of LGBTQIA+ programs and resources in our community, which happened to be a small island called Key West at the southernmost point of the contiguous United States. Key West was known as a haven for gay men and other members of the queer community since it emerged as a refuge for men living with AIDS in the 1980s. By the time Janiece and I moved to the island and met each other in 2019, however, the ethos of community that had permeated the island in the late 20th Century had started to lose ground to the profit-motive of commercialism and tourism. Big money was being spent to market the island as an LGBTQIA+ vacation destination and the drag queens still barked at the passersby every night, but the familial nature of queer community was dissolving as the need to cater to the ever-increasing number of tourists took over. When the almighty dollar became the main source of purpose on Duval Street, t-shirt shops hawking MAGAwear were juxtaposed against the rainbow crosswalks.
We started our LGBTQIA+ youth group in 2021 soon after we learned about a young queer high schooler who ended their life because of a lack of support and a hostile environment. From the seed of our first youth group with 3 attendees that met in a donated space at the local Methodist church, we grew our organization into a full-service LGBTQIA+ community center. We opened our doors to the public in an 800-square-foot retail space next door to the homeless youth drop-in center and across the street from the local strip club in May of 2024. Our center had a space for people to drop in and relax, an LGBTQIA+ library of books that were being banned by our state government, a local resource center to provide referrals for services, and a wellness center for counseling and STI-testing.
The wider context for the opening of our center was dark. Florida, under a far-right governor who had made an unsuccessful bid to run for President, was leading the charge in dehumanizing, scapegoating, and attacking LGBTQIA+ people, particularly transgender people. Laws were being passed that made it harder for trans people to access healthcare, for trans people to use public facilities and get accurate state-issued identification, for accurate gender and sexuality education to be taught in schools, for people to find justice for discrimination, and many other forms of state-sponsored violence against queer people. The state was making it harder for immigrants to access support, for black history to be taught, for poor folks to access food stamps, and for Key West to protect its natural environment from enormous cruise ships. All-in-all, Florida was a state run by a white supremacist, patriarchal, nationalist, power-and-profit hungry government that reflected the purposes of the larger far-right movement in the United States and abroad.
When we opened our center, people commonly told us that we were doing something different. We attempted something that we weren’t sure would work by marrying a mutual aid framework to a traditional nonprofit structure. Queer Keys operated as a traditional 501(c)(3) organization with a board of directors and programs funded by donations and grants, but we consciously kept our focus on the people that needed the most help, sought ways to empower people rather than pick and choose who was deserving of support, removed barriers to care, and ensured that our leadership reflected our community. We maintained a structure of “trickle-up social justice,” a phrase coined by trans activist Dean Spade, wherein we structured our programs and services by focusing on the individuals existing at the intersections of the most lines of oppression, knowing that those existing in more privileged states of existence would automatically benefit from that work. Our teams always reiterated to each other that we worked for our people, not for our donors.
Our center was a lively community hub. The youth program turned into an advocacy and activist group, with young queer people organizing public rallies at Bayview Park down the street and addressing inequities in their schools, such as gender-neutral bathrooms. Our Trans Trust Fund, which began as a means to provide funds and case management to trans folks seeking access to gender-affirming care, complete with rides to Miami because there were no Key West doctors willing to stick their necks out to help the trans population, grew into an entire medical clinic of its own. Our parents and caregivers group formed a network of adults who worked together on behalf of their queer young people, offering childcare services, safe transportation, and family gatherings. We started a community garden that was used for community dinners and feeding anyone who was hungry. Queer Keys formed strong community bonds with the Bahama Village Music Program, the Keys Immigrant Coalition, the Key West chapter of the National Organization of Women, the Florida Keys Children’s Shelter, and other organizations that filled the gaps for the people of Key West and the Florida Keys. By 2030, we had achieved a level of community-wide coordination that allowed our island to boast that no one was hungry, unhoused, or uncared for in Key West, Florida.
One thing that allowed our work to cut across so many boundaries and to make so many connections with different kinds of people is that gender and sexuality are universal – everyone participates in these distinct-yet-related parts of the human experience. Queer Keys training and educational programs taught participants about the spectra of gender and sexuality, and taught people how to first understand themselves before trying to understand another person. For as RuPaul famously says, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” We taught that queer people are not a separate category or species, but a natural expression of human diversity. We had straight, cisgender grandfathers leaving our trainings with big grins, thanking their trainers for helping them to understand what all the young folks were talking about. Our organization led by example, by treating everyone who came through the doors of our community center as a sibling in our “One Human Family.” And if we couldn’t help address someone’s needs, we knew another organization that could.
We received our fair share of backlash in the early days. Far-right activists smashed our front windows a few times. The first time it happened in 2025, we were pretty shaken. But a few local faith organizations – Unity Spiritual Center, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Old Stone Methodist Church, and the One Island Family Unitarian Universalist Congregation – gathered their resources and bought us brand new windows in just under two weeks. After that, each time our windows were smashed a local window shop replaced them and our newly formed “Angel Coalition” covered the costs. The smashing stopped about a year and 7 panes later. A local political hopeful running for city council tried to smear us in a debate by referring to our youth program as a “grooming school,” utilizing rhetoric that had become common among far-right politicians. His opponent was the incumbent and a friend of our organization, however, and she was able to speak from experience about the lives our program had saved. She was met with a standing ovation, and she won the election by a landslide. Even the governor of Florida mentioned us in a speech once, saying he knew of a group of queer (in air quotes) radicals in Key West that were turning the whole island into a “confused, communist wasteland.” And, actually, this was the moment our work went national.
After the governor spoke about the queer radicals in Key West, a producer from The Daily podcast from the New York Times reached out to ask about our organization. Ultiamtely, Queer Keys was featured in the August 6, 2027 episode that talked about LGBTQIA+ issues in Florida and how the state government was codifying oppression in the state law. The episode highlighted our community-level work as an effective means of building resiliency for a community that experienced a continuous onslaught of attacks from those in power, sharing information about our youth programs and health funds, our community garden and free dinners, and our guiding principle of caring for the most systemically disenfranchised. It also talked about the way that the island community had rallied around our work, and the way in which our community center inspired people on the island outside of the purview of our mission to take a vested interest in caring for one another. After this episode aired, our donations skyrocketed, which ultimately led to our increased capacity and the 0% destitute statistic our island achieved by 2030.
In addition to the national attention and boost in funding, that podcast led people in other cities and states, particularly in states that were experiencing high rates of anti-trans and anti-queer legislation, to found queer community organizations based on our mutual aid non-profit model. These groups formed strong bonds with other organizations in their communities working on justice issues related to immigrants, people of color, people living with disability, unhoused people, indigenous people, women, mental health, the environment, etc. If the capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal profit motive was destroying it, coalitions rose up to address that part of the destruction. Slowly but surely, the profit machine lost momentum as people started to reach across their differences and create connections more valuable than the dollar. People realized that a future, any future, was only possible by caring for one another and addressing issues that did not necessarily affect them directly. After this movement spread throughout the US, it spread across the globe. People trying to hold on to power through old paradigm methods simply could not do so. Power to the people actually took hold, and regionalized, leaderless coalitions became the source of human organization.
There is something about seeing a person that is different from you, perhaps radically different, and approaching them with kind curiosity rather than suspicion. It allows you to stop objectifying the other and lets you hear them when they tell you who they are and what they need. Acknowledging that multiplicity and difference are endemic to the human population, and that we are still an enormous family, seems to have opened something in human consciousness that allowed people to see that animals, plants, and all other beings on the planet are also part of our wider family. The ripple effect is real.
Looking back on how quickly Queer Keys work informed a national-cum-global movement, I am still tickled by how daunting it all seemed at first. There were so many moments when my team and I questioned whether or not we were doing the right thing, whether gaining visibility threatened our ability to keep helping people, and whether or not we had the wherewithal to keep going. However, it turns out that our message of community-over-everything was just what people were hoping to hear, and it spread like wildfire. My graduate school professor, the cosmologist Brian Swimme, always encouraged his students to follow our creative passions because the impetus that comes from within is the creative nature of the universe itself. I experience the biggest cosmic giggle that permeates my body when I think about the lived truth of that statement, and how a small group of people in Key West, Florida sparked a community revolution that literally set things straight across the world.
The effects of climate change still came. The extreme weather patterns continued, sea-level rose, species continued to go extinct, and diseases continued to spread at higher rates. However, our means of addressing these issues became focused on care for the other and solutions rather than care for the self and blame. In 2050, we’re finally starting to hear from our scientists that the Earth systems are beginning to right themselves. And just like when the world stopped in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, and we all watched the waters and the skies clear, I know that Earth will return from the brink. Hope has arrived.