Women who love women rise to the forefront every April 26 for Lesbian Visibility Day. The campaign has grown each year since at least 2008, prompting women around the world celebrate themselves and the diverse lesbian community.
That’s why Watermark spoke with some of Central Florida and Tampa Bay’s most renowned community leaders ahead of this year’s campaign. These women reflected on their pathways to LGBTQ activism as well as the mentors and icons who influenced their work.
Nadine Smith’s activist roots run deep, tracing back to her grandparents. “Activism is in my family,” says the CEO and founder of Equality Florida, the state’s largest civil rights organization dedicated to fighting for the rights of the LGBTQ community.
“My grandparents were part of the Southern tenant farmers union that worked to get sharecroppers fair treatment in the South,” she says, “and they were also part of the first integrated farming cooperative in the Mississippi Delta, in the very hostile, Deep South.”
Growing up in the Florida Panhandle, her parents also taught her and her siblings to stand up for what they believed in from a young age. “My father said, ‘Don’t act like you’re better than anyone and don’t let anyone treat you like they’re better than you,’ Smith recalls.
“That’s the kind of philosophy I bring to activism,” she says. “They taught me to stand up to racism and not let it undercut my ambitions and vision for my future. They just did not know they were also teaching that to a young lesbian at the same time.”
Smith didn’t get her first taste of LGBTQ activism until she attended the United States Air Force Academy in the 1980s. In this pre-Don’t Ask Don’t Tell era, she saw the military’s “anti-gay witch hunts firsthand.”
“A lot of cadets were getting kicked out with dishonorable discharges,” she explains. “It was a very stressful time and I left before I was subjected to that.”
It was during her time on campus, though, that she first spied a flyer for the fledgling International Gay & Lesbian Youth Organization. It was a life-changing experience for Smith, who went on to become one of the organization’s founding board members.
She traveled the world with the group, meeting individuals in places she describes as even more repressive than the U.S. was in the early 80s. She also met people from places much more advanced and inclusive than the nation.
“It was like a crash course in how internalized homophobia affects people, how it affected me,” she says. “I began to imagine a world where from birth you are accepted as how you are. For me, it was a crash course not just in activism, but in repairing the harm that homophobia had inflicted on me, often by the people who were supposed to be protecting me. It was the process of unlearning internalized messages. It really redirected my path towards activism.”
As planning for the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation began, she was selected to represent Florida at the national level. Later, she was chosen as one of the event’s four co-chairs and held a meeting with then-President Bill Clinton, the first meeting between a sitting president and LGBTQ leaders in the Oval Office.
She then joined the Tampa Bay area chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) “at a time when discrimination and ignorance about HIV was stigmatizing and endangering alliances in our community,” she says. Along the way, she enjoyed a career as an award-winning journalist, working for outlets including Watermark, where she covered the Tampa City Council and the Hillsborough County Commission.
“I got to hear all of the homophobic jokes while they were there talking about bond issues,” Smith recalls. “My blood began to simmer.”
She left journalism to focus on LGBTQ activism. Her early work in the mid-90s fighting local discriminatory laws led her to cofound Florida’s Human Rights Task Force, which became Equality Florida in 1997.
Decades later, Smith reflects on her influences. “My first big hero was Audre Lorde,” she says. “I read her book ‘Zami: A New Spelling of My Name’ so many times the spine disintegrated.”
The 1982 work spearheaded a new genre that the author called “biomythography,” combining history, biography and myth. Unfortunately, Smith never got to meet the self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” and civil rights activist.
Another influential figure is Fanny Lou Hamer. Born into a sharecropping family, Hamer went on to become a renowned African American Civil Rights leader and the co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that registered and encouraged black voters in the 60s.
“In organizing, one of the things that was a big revelation for me was I had this idea of activists being cut from a particular cloth or born into certain circumstances,” Smith says. “I didn’t know you became one simply by acting; by taking action.”
These days, Smith serves as an influential figure on others. She’s the reason Selisse Berry, founder of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, relocated to St. Petersburg last year. She learned about the Tampa Bay area from Smith, a friend and longtime peer in the LGBTQ advocacy world, and also joined Equality Florida’s statewide Board of Directors last fall.
Born in Oklahoma, Berry spent the early portion of her career in Texas working as a teacher, and guidance and therapeutic counselor for children. She was also drawn to social justice issues and the Presbyterian tradition in which she was raised. After long dreaming of becoming an ordained church leader, she entered the San Francisco Theological Seminary in the late 80s.
At the time, the Presbyterian Church wouldn’t ordain LGBTQ clergy, which was a concern for Berry. “I was paranoid when I first came out,” she recalls.
“For a while, I thought maybe I’d have to go to a UCC or a Unitarian Church.” Then, she met one of the greatest influences in her life, Rev. Dr. Janie Spahr, a Presbyterian minister who was already ordained when the church voted to exclude LGBTQ people from ministry. She was grandfathered into church leadership and the only gay minister for many years. “She’s now retired, but she single-handedly changed the Presbyterian Church,” Berry says. It has since adopted policies more supportive of LGBTQ people.
During her time in seminary, they forged a friendship and Berry eventually came out to her. Ultimately, Berry was never ordained. Instead, she founded Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, the country’s oldest LGBTQ business organization.
“I felt I could have more of an impact focusing on helping people coming out at work and bringing people and businesses together in compliance [with equality laws,]” she says.
The organization’s most recent annual conference drew 6,000 attendees from 60 countries, focusing on peer-to-peer education. Out & Equal also partners with Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies to improve work environments for LGBTQ employees and advocate for workplace equality.
After 20 years, Berry decided to retire from the organization, though her advocacy continues. In addition to her work with Equality Florida, she sits on two boards that assist LGBTQ refugees around the world, Safe Place International and ORAM Refugee.
Shannon Fortner, executive director and founder of Sarasota’s Harvey Milk Festival (HMF), says Smith also influenced her. The HMF honors its namesake’s legacy of political activism by fostering the arts for change.
“I’ve definitely appreciated the work she does,” Fortner says. “I was on a panel discussion with her once. It was such a cool experience, especially because I was a little bit younger when that happened.”
During her early days of organizing, Fortner found inspiration in other local LGBTQ activists as well. “I think there’s a lot of really amazing people here,” she says. “We on the Suncoast should be really grateful for how many amazing movers and shakers we have, especially in the Tampa Bay area.”
When organizing HMF, she relied heavily on the area’s financial advisor Turner Moore, who served as her vice president. He’s worked with other area nonprofits, including ALSO Youth and the Southwest Florida Business Guild.
She also counts Ken Shelin, who served on the Sarasota City Commission and led the charge in the passage of an ordinance providing domestic partner healthcare benefits to city employees, as a mentor. Shelin was also heavily involved with Equality Florida.
“He’s just a really great, calming voice and very supportive,” she says. “Turner and Ken are my solids. Anytime I need to ask a question and not worry about how I ask it, I turn to them.”
Fortner learned as a teenager that she could connect with others through music. She came out as a lesbian as a teenager, though as an adult, she says she “claimed the queer flag.” Though she was inspired by local grassroots LGBTQ advocacy efforts early in life, she was more focused on survival. She moved out of her family home at 15 and found herself homeless, living on the streets for several years.
“My focus was on graduating from high school and working,” she says. As she got older, her passion for music and the arts continued to grow, and she went on to form the synth-pop band MeteorEYES in 2008.
Not long afterwards, she marched with Out4Immigration at the 2009 National Equality March in D.C. There, she heard longtime LGBTQ activist Cleve Jones speak.
“He told us to go home and organize,” she says, which is exactly what she did. Later that year, she hosted Sarasota’s Equal Civil Rights Rally, organizing area LGBTQ organizations as well as high school and college Gay Straight Alliances. Attendees marched through downtown Sarasota.
“I remember feeling so empowered by the action taken by our community,” Fortner says. “That was the first time I used a bullhorn. That was the first time I had a platform to speak up. It made me realize I could possibly rally people together and become a leader that got people excited.”
She used that traction to launch the first HMF in 2010, bringing together her two passions – the arts and activism. She had long connected with the work of political icon Harvey Milk, so it felt natural to name the festival after him.
Though it was difficult pulling the community together around the event at first, she’s proud of what her team has accomplished over the past decade. “We created a platform for people to speak out on specific topics that people need to hear about,” she says. “If you have music and art, people pay attention. It’s more accessible combining activism and the arts.”
In Central Florida, Jennifer Foster, founding executive director of the One Orlando Alliance, has long donated her time and talent to community organizations, but she never had the desire to work in the nonprofit world professionally. After all, she enjoyed her career as a writer, producer and director.
Then, the Pulse shooting in Orlando happened. In the aftermath of the 2016 attack, where 49 victims’ lives were taken and dozens more were injured, she and others sprung to action. Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer appointed Foster to serve on the OneOrlando Fund board, which oversaw the handling of funds donated to those affected.
In 2017, the One Orlando Alliance, which unifies the region’s LGBTQ community as a vital support network, officially formed. Its coalition members include Come Out With Pride (COWP), Equality Florida, the LGBT+ Center Orlando, the onePulse Foundation, Watermark and more.
Initially, Foster was selected as board chair, but after two international searches for a full-time executive director came up short, she was asked to take on the role in Oct. 2018. “I had no intention or vision of starting an alliance or a nonprofit, but I saw a need and stepped into the role,” she says. “I just fell into the job.”
She’s not new to serving the LGBTQ community. Foster co-founded the Human Rights Campaign’s Central Florida chapter 16 years ago, serving as co-chair of the local steering committee and on the national board for years.
“Any good leader should know when it’s time to step away,” Foster says. “It allows the organization to evolve to its next level and recognize its capacity for growth.”
After that, she focused on other nonprofit work in the region, including a 2004 role on the Florida Red and Blue campaign board formed in opposition of a proposed state amendment banning same-sex marriage. She credits a number of influences throughout her career and community work.
“I have mentors in different areas. I don’t have one go-to mentor,” she says. “One person doesn’t have all the answers. I ask myself, ‘Who is leading in this space,’ and I try to build relationships with them.”
One of her earliest influences is her Midwestern grandmother, Lorene Haase. “She was not very worldly, but certainly very lively and welcoming,” Foster reflects. Despite spending her entire life on a small-town farm, her grandmother embraced inclusivity, which “was refreshing as a kid growing up in Ohio.”
Actress, comedian and writer Lily Tomlin is another icon. “She’s been steadfast her entire career in the entertainment industry,” Foster says. “She’s been authentically herself the entire time.”
She also credits Joe Solmonese, president of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, as an influential figure. She knows him personally from her time with the HRC, when he was president of the organization at the national level.
“I admire his political astuteness and ability to get things done in very challenging spaces,” Foster says.
Foster is also admired by a number of Central Florida leaders, including Roxy Santiago, board president for The LGBT+ Center Orlando. The two met when Santiago joined the HRC Central Florida chapter in 2006.
“She’s an amazing leader, somebody I looked up to,” Santiago says. “It was a beautiful time working together.”
She adds that Foster’s “leadership made me look at the politics of things I never had the knowledge about. I really learned how to become an activist.”
Santiago has a long history of activism herself. Her first work with the Orlando area’s lesbian community came in the early 2000s, when she and two friends organized women-only happy hour events at non-LGBTQ bars and restaurants.
“We’d hold them once a month at establishments not known for lesbians,” she says. “At times, 100 to 150 women would come out. It was great.”
It wasn’t common at the time for non-LGBTQ spaces to open their doors to such events, she adds. “Now, it’s so different. Gays, straights, everyone parties together at all different bars. We don’t need that kind of happy hour anymore.”
From the HRC, she branched out and volunteered with a variety of organizations, including the Democratic Hispanic Caucus of Florida and the American Red Cross, serving on its Disaster Action Team.
Along the way, she found The LGBT+ Center, which provides programming and resources for the region’s LGBTQ community. For years, the organization had been known as “a man’s world, but it was changing when I first went there,” she says. Santiago quickly became involved with organizing programs to continue drawing a more diverse crowd.
“It was important to me to bring women and Hispanic people to The Center,” she reflects. Today, she serves as president of its Board of Directors, a role she’s held since 2016.
Another area advocates is Debbie Simmons, the former president for the Metropolitan Business Association (MBA), now The Pride Chamber, and a COWP founder.
After her parents divorced when she was young, Simmons traveled between her mother’s home in Sumter County and her father’s in Orlando. The two places couldn’t be more different, she says, and when she graduated in 1978, she permanently moved to Orlando.
It “was complete culture shock,” she says. “The only gay people I knew in high school were my girlfriend and our swing manager at the McDonald’s where we worked. I had absolutely no idea about the gay community.”
She discovered Parliament House at 18, where she learned about the local LGBTQ community. It “was the first big impact on me,” she says. “Your first experience at a gay bar, when you haven’t had exposure to the community, that’s huge. I saw the difficulties…I became aware about a lot of the struggles we were facing in terms of discrimination and not being treated equally, and it was aggravating. I believe in the Constitution and that I should get equal rights.”
In 1991, a lesbian couple she befriended invited her and her then-partner to Orlando’s first gay Pride parade. “They were a little bit older than us and more attuned to what was going on politically,” she recalls. “We wanted to go with them, but we were petrified.”
That’s because the couple had experienced discrimination firsthand while purchasing a home, Simmons says. “After that, it was worrisome, but we went.”
It was a small celebration. Many of the approximately 100 people that attended wore bags over their heads so they couldn’t be identified. “That’s how scary it was at the time,” Simmons recalls.
Inspired, this gathering changed her life forever. “It was so amazing that these people were so courageous, that they had put this parade together, and I wanted to know all of them,” she says. “I wanted to be a part of what they were doing.”
She credits the organizers, which included Patty Sheehan (who now represents District 4 on Orlando City Council), Lejeune Perrin, Phyllis Murphy, Joel Strack and Keith Morrison, with leading her towards the path of LGBTQ activism.
After that, she regularly attended programming at The LGBT+ Center, then-called GLCS, where she came across “a blurb” by editor Mike Sopoliga in the Triangle newspaper.
“It said something to the effect of, other large cities around the nation are forming [LGBTQ] business associations. Do you think it’s time for us to do it in Orlando – and if you do, join us at The Center,” she says.
She joined a dozen others at the first meeting for what would become the MBA in 1992. She was chosen as their first vice president and within a year, after Morrison stepped down as president, she took the helm. She held the position for 16 years, and the Pride Chamber remains dedicated to business equality today.
In the early 1990s, she also worked to bridge the growing divide between Central Florida’s gay male and lesbian communities. With the AIDS epidemic a growing concern, the Parliament House became more male-centric, segregating women, while local lesbian groups became more divisive, she notes. “I became like the red-headed stepchild trying to bring them together.”
She adds, “To me it was important unifying men and women, and to unify potential business owners, business owners and professionals. We even had a social membership, a student membership, a membership for retirees, so we could bring every segment of our community together.”
Just before stepping down as MBA president in 2005, Orlando’s Pride celebration fell apart. She and others had long been disappointed in the parade, she says.
Simmons suggested to the MBA board that they revive the event and they agreed to take it on as long as she organized it. Combining the parade with the group’s annual LGBTQ business expo, COWP was born.
Today, more than 175,000 attend the annual parade and other festivities. “My whole reason for getting involved were the people that inspired me at that first parade,” she says. With its success, Simmons says her advocacy work has come “full circle.”
All six of these trusted LGBTQ leaders – Selisse Berry, Shannon Fortner, Jennifer Foster, Roxy Santiago, Debbie Simmons and Nadine Smith – credit their mentors and icons with inspiring their work and shaping their activism. Today, after years of organizing and unifying the community, these leaders serve as inspiration for a new slate of activists.
