A queer history of Tallahassee: 'It's important because it's our home' | TLH 200

In the 1960s, there were three spots in downtown Tallahassee where queer white men could steal a glance and meet someone like them.

The bus station, the courthouse and the bar in The Floridan Hotel, where Aloft is located now, which was then called The Cypress Lounge.

But it was risky, said Charles Upchurch, a history professor at Florida State University.

“You had to be very cautious because the consequences of being arrested and having your name published in the paper could be very high,” Upchurch said.

Tallahassee’s LGBTQ history and the various ways people have experienced "same-sex desire and transing gender," goes back to as long as people have lived in the city, Upchurch said. But documenting that history is relatively recent.

For this year’s Tallahassee Pride Week, Upchurch researched the capital city’s queer history and shared what he found with the Tallahassee Democrat.

Florida’s LGBTQ community grew along with the state’s increase in tourism, the creation of interstates and military bases. Many spots in Florida, including Tallahassee, were highlighted in national guides as queer locations for those traveling across the country. 

During the 1960s, the laws were intentionally vague. Someone could be arrested for lewd or lascivious behavior or public loitering, and if the crime was printed in the Tallahassee Democrat police blotter, then the person could be outed. 

This was at the same time as the Johns Committee, which from 1954 to 1965 was an effort by the Florida Legislature to originally investigate communist influence but was later used to crack down on LGBTQ people in the state, specifically in higher education. 

The state’s homophobic climate eased in the 70s and 80s, and Tallahassee had LGBTQ bars and businesses, including Rubyfruit Books and numerous gay bars. There was a lesbian publishing house, Naiad Press, and a strong social justice presence that started on Florida State University’s campus called the Tallahassee Gay Liberation Front.

“It was just a wonderful flowering of multiple individual initiatives that all got strength from each other and what was felt to be the changing climate of the times,” Upchurch said.

Rumours and a civic responsibility to the queer community

In 1979, Katee Tully opened Rumours on Gaines Street with her partner. The space was an old office building next to a dry cleaners. 

“In those years, the bars where queers would congregate tended to be sticky and dark and not in very nice places of town,” Tully said. “Don't laugh, but you know, we almost thought it our civic responsibility to open up something that was nicer and more in the downtown core.”

Tully said the city gave her the permits with “a wink and a nod” to open the bar as a social club. Patrons would pay $5 at the door to be a member for the night. 

The bar, located where The Plant is now at 517 Gaines Street, had no sign. There were no advertisements. By word of mouth, people knew the bar opened at 8 p.m. and closed around midnight.

Disco was king (or queen), and the bar had a DJ and a disco ball. It was decorated with an Art Deco, Key West feel, Tully said, and the furniture was bought from Chez Pierre, the old French restaurant on Thomasville Road.

“We wanted a place that people would feel good about themselves, feel proud, feel like it was a lovely, clean, decent, but fun space to gather in,” she said.

Tully added that the bar was never raided by the Tallahassee Police Department.

Rumours was a “golden moment” in the history of Tallahassee’s LGBTQ community.

“Who could have predicted that just around the corner in 1980, 81, the whole HIV/AIDS epidemic would consume our culture, consume so many people in our gay community who lost their lives, lost that battle,” she said. "These were kind of some halcyon days of having something special that was ephemeral, I think we paved the way for Club Park Avenue, which followed downtown.”

Club Park Avenue, where local restaurant Savour is now, is the most prolific gay bar in Tallahassee history. That same space once housed TPD's headquarters from 1959 to 1972.

Today there’s even a Facebook group called “Club Park Avenue Tallahassee.” In the “About” section, it reads: “CPA. For years THE place in Tallahassee. Famous and infamous. No other club in Tallahassee will ever live up to the history that is CPA. Rejoin and remember.”

Upchurch spoke to dozens of older LGBTQ Tallahassee residents, and many had fond memories of CPA. 

“Many people could remember names of other bars, but they recounted stories about Club Park Avenue,” Upchurch said.

The height of activism

In the 1990s, Tallahassee’s LGBTQ community began to organize and gathered momentum in the fight for equality. It started out as a march in 1991 – people walked from Myers Park, down Apalachee Parkway to City Hall and back. 

The next year, Tallahassee had its first pride festival, and about 200 to 300 people marched and rallied at the Capitol. There were speeches, performances and the media covered it all.

Then the following year, the pride celebration expanded to include the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival at the LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library. But the American Family Association learned of the event and subsequently tried to stop it, arguing it would be “the public showing of child pornography,” Upchurch said.

The day of the film festival, the American Family Association had 100 to 200 people in the library parking lot trying to block the films from being delivered to the library, but TPD stopped them and said the protesters had no jurisdiction, Upchurch said.

“Organizers estimated that one-third to one-half of the audience was American Family Association members, attending to disrupt the event – so they played the slowest, dullest, art house film first, ‘Andy the Furniture Maker,’” according to Upchurch’s research. “The American Family Association folks left, and everyone else settled in for the rest of the films.”

‘It’s important because it’s our home’

Since 1993, when then-Tallahassee Mayor Dot Inman-Johnson acknowledged the first Pride Week, to 2024, when thousands of people attended Pride in the Plaza downtown, the city has made large strides on the path to equality.

In 2014, it was U.S. District Court Judge Robert Hinkle in Tallahassee who ruled the state’s same-sex marriage ban was unconstitutional. 

"To paraphrase a civil rights leader from the age when interracial marriage was struck down, the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice," Hinkle wrote.

Tallahassee is also where Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature have enacted numerous anti-LGBTQ laws in the past several years, including the Parental Rights in Education Act, also known by critics as “Don’t Say Gay,” and anti-trans legislation that blocked access to health care for transgender Floridians.

But it was Hinkle, a Tallahassee federal judge, who ruled that law unconstitutional recently, and stated “Gender identity is real.”

Upchurch, who studies queer history in Britain and the United States, said that queer history happens everywhere, including Tallahassee. A professor at FSU for 20 years, he said researching his local community was rewarding.

Twenty five years ago, there were no books on southern and rural queer history.

“It’s important because it’s our home,” he said. “One thing that the focus on southern and rural queer history tells us is we don’t have to be exceptional to have stories worth telling. It’s about those everyday struggles and living an authentic life wherever you are.”

QUEER FIRSTS IN TALLAHASSEE

• First (unofficial) gay bar: The Cypress Lounge
• First (official) gay bar: Red Boar Tavern
• First bookstore: Rubyfruit books
• First couple legally married in Tallahassee:Richelle Marsico and Manda Smith
• First couple to legally adopt in North Florida: Casanova and Daniel Nurse
• First professor in the nation to teach LGBTQ history classes at a university: FSU professor Rictor Norton

This story is part of TLH 200: the Gerald Ensley Bicentennial Memorial Project. Throughout our city's 200th birthday, we'll be drawing on the Tallahassee Democrat columnist and historian's research as we re-examine Tallahassee history. Read more at tallahassee.com/tlh200. Ana Goñi-Lessan can be reached at agonilessan@gannett.com.