11.17.16 Editor’s Desk

I fell off the float. I missed a step, as I always do at Come Out With Pride’s extravagant parade, and I landed on my ass: shaken, stirred, embarrassed. To be fair, floats are difficult travel devices anyway and, well, I’m a little top heavy on the hair side, so I fell.

The reason I bring this up is to illuminate the exhaustion and joy many of us felt after parading in front of over 150,000 people in Orlando’s largest Pride yet, the humiliation of an election that is showing signs of rolling back all of our hard-won rights (even if certain Trumps with two mouths promise otherwise), the lasting sting of a June massacre at Pulse.

We’ve been through a lot. We’re allowed to stumble sometimes.

The Watermark issue you see before you is a particularly important one to me. We were all set to run with another cover and dance a jig inside about Democratic victories. We wanted Dolly Parton to have her time to shine, all Pure and Simple like she does these days. We wanted a little breathing space. It reminded me of how time wobbles to the tune of its own randomness, and sometimes, instead of us making lives happen to plan, time makes us happen, completely unplanned.

This is the second – or even third, if you count the hurricane postponing Come Out With Pride back in October – that we have had to show up, put our minds into a collective Watermark blender and come up with a whole new issue. Another iconic issue, we smiled and frowned at the same time. Over the summer, we had three issues in a row covering Pulse – the initial reports as best as we could cull them, the psychology of dealing with community-wide grief, the need for gun reform and its current intersectionality with the LGBTQ community. We were afraid at times – at least I was – but this is what we’re here for. As our cover read after the Pulse massacre, “We aren’t going anywhere.”

And so here we are again, standing beneath a poison tree and watching its limbs grow into a cabinet that will almost certainly come after women, QLatinx individuals, immigrants on the broader scale. Pam Bondi is there. Paul Ryan is there. Rudy Giuliani is there. We, however, do not have a seat at this picnic table in the park. Not yet, anyway.

You see the thing that I’ve learned most about the community from compiling the messages from its leaders is how diverse, yet caring, we can be. I’m not going to fluff it up. Some of us are still on respirators at the thought of Trump presidency. Some of us are afraid to go to work.

This issue is all about going to work. Our forebears did not get shot in their San Francisco offices for us to give up. Those 49 beautiful souls on the Pulse dance floor did not die in vain. And that public-vote victory in favor of taste and kindness over some new, brutish model of an incompetent president whose stares are blanker than unemployment checks people no longer receive is not going to stick with us forever.

So we’ve assembled people from all walks of public life in Tampa Bay and Orlando and beyond so that we might get a little bit more insight into what we should be working on and what we can indeed achieve. It’s not an easy climb, but when has it ever been?

So please take some of their words to heart; let them be a source of comfort, frustration and action. We have too much to lose if you do not.

Meanwhile (kicks soapbox away), we do have Dolly in here, a little lesson on the legendary playwright Noel Coward, some wise words from our founder Tom Dyer, some news on the Pulse sale to the city – a little bit of something for everyone, then. What we don’t have is bickering among ourselves; we just don’t have the time or energy for it.

Otherwise, the next float that I ride upon, fist up in the air, will be the next float that I fall off. And you really don’t want to see that.

Thanks for sticking with us in these difficult times. There are a lot of celebrations around the corner. Hopefully we’re through the worst of the woods and into the best versions of ourselves. Take care. Of everyone.