After President Donald Trump recently entered office for a second time, his administration seems poised to enact an anti-LGBTQ+ agenda more sweeping than his first term.
The American Civil Liberties Union expects the administration will roll back LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination policies, enact a ban on transgender Americans serving in the military, remove gender-affirming care in federal healthcare programs and weaponize federal law against state-level protections for transgender students.
On the state level, Florida has been a beacon of anti-LGBTQ+ policies. In the last few years, the state legislature has enacted an anti-transgender bathroom ban, restricted access to gender-affirming care and removed books about LGBTQ+ characters from school libraries.
Although these efforts have affected Florida’s queer community broadly, the state has directly targeted UF students after UF complied with an audit on the number of patients receiving gender-affirming care.
This targeting of queer students hasn’t been met quietly at UF. In response to the audit, transgender students and allies marched on the Student Healthcare Center in support of gender-affirming care. The Pride Student Union and LGBTQ+ Presidential Advisory Committee have also worked to raise awareness about resources for queer students.
The existence of these resources and organizations today are the result of decades of UF queer activism when the environment for queer students was far more hostile and dangerous.
UF has a long history of institutional homophobia, with the Johns Committee of the mid-1950s to mid-1960s enacting a witch hunt to remove numerous gay faculty and students. Less than 10 years after this witch hunt — nicknamed the “lavender scare” — queer UF students inspired by the radical movements of the 1960s began to organize.
In 1970, the Gay Liberation Front formed in Gainesville and attended a weekend “Gay-In” at Florida State University. Julius Johnson, the president of the organization, was a Black queer student and formed alliances with radical campus organizations.
Most of the early 1970s consisted of a battle to force the university to recognize a campus queer organization. By 1976, UF administration relented and the Gay Community Service Center moved to campus.
But by the late 1970s and early 1980s, coinciding with Anita Bryant’s infamous “Save Our Children” campaign, homophobia at the university intensified. A group of students held signs during Lesbian/Gay Awareness week that read, “Homosexuals need bullets — not acceptance” and collected 50 signatures in favor of executing homosexuals.
A hostile campus atmosphere and limited funding from student government eventually forced the University Federation of Gay and Lesbian Students, the campus queer organization at the time, to leave campus in 1987.
With a queer student presence, two administrators — Phyllis Meek and Irene Stevens — worked from inside the university to change the culture.
Meek and Stevens formed an unofficial Committee on Sexism and Homophobia and distributed brochures dispelling myths about homosexuality, conducted surveys about campus homophobia and encouraged the return of a queer campus organization: the Gay and Lesbian Student Union.
Through their efforts, they eventually formed the official university LGBT Concerns Committee, a precursor to today’s LGBTQ+ Presidential Advisory Committee, and laid the foundation for institutional changes within the university.
Many of the resources and policies queer UF students and faculty benefit from today — anti-discrimination policies, LGBTQ+ faculty partner benefits, a gender and sexuality students department and even a queer campus organization — are the result of decades of efforts by both student and faculty activists.
Even in a significantly more hostile campus environment, queer students and faculty fought to assert their right to exist publicly.
As another period of anti-LGBTQ+ backlash looms with Trump’s second term and a culture war-obsessed state legislature, the past serves as a reminder that even in a moment of anti-LGBTQ+ reaction, queer people will always fight back.
Rey Arcenas is a UF history and women's studies senior.
