Queer Stories in Florida's Black History
When we say gay in Miami, Miami Beach is uplifted as the queer capital—a paradoxical place that draws more than 170,000 people each year for the Pride Parade, but also has a deep history of anti-Blackness that persists still today.
Little is said of Miami’s historically Black neighborhoods where the LGBTQ+ community has always existed. And now, the state of Florida wants to ban Black history, queer history, and intersectionality. I want to liberate these stories.
Black history in Miami is largely silent on Black queer folks, with Miami’s LGBTQ+ history embarrassingly devoid of Black stories. Two years ago, when I embarked on my research to correct this historical vacuum by unearthing and documenting Miami’s Black queer history, Naomi Ruth Cobb was the first person who agreed to sit down and talk to me.
Cobb, a retired cultural anthropologist, now 69, grew up playing on the Black side of the segregation wall that separated her Liberty City neighborhood in Miami from her white neighbors down the street—the same neighbors who had furiously fought against allowing families like hers from moving in.
“Being in our enclave of that part of Liberty City was safe,” says Cobb, who pulls back the neighborhood’s layers in a way that only an elder who grew up in Jim Crow Miami can really do. “Being on the other side was not safe.”
If what awaited them on the other side of the wall were unspoken and spoken threats, then, Cobb says, the Black side had to be a space for safety and love—a sense of belonging and care that extended to her Black queer neighbors, although at the time, she didn’t have the language to name them as such.
“You know, I believe that I was probably one of the most fortunate people to grow up around queer love, just not knowing what it was called at the time,” Cobb, a lesbian, says. She smiles when she shares memories of the popular Black drag queens walking through the neighborhood in towering heels on their way to perform at a dance hall.
Depending on your proximity to Miami or Black people in Miami, you might only know Liberty City as the place where the Oscar-winning movie Moonlight was filmed—a rare depiction of being Black and queer in Miami. Or you may know Liberty City from JT of the homegrown City Girls, who raps, “I'm from Liberty City (I'm from the Bridge) / Nah, bitch, I ain't from South Beach.”
I often joke with Cobb that she’s “the original city girl.” And she agrees (though she loves JT and Yung Miami). And like JT, she ain’t from South Beach: Cobb knows Miami Beach from her youth as a place she couldn’t enjoy, because it was a racist sundown town reserved for whites only.
The history of racism faced by Black queer folks in Miami Beach runs deep. Bisexual icon Josephine Baker famously refused to perform for a whites-only audience on Miami Beach in 1951.
“I cannot work where my people cannot go. It’s as simple as that,” she told the Copa City Club manager, who eventually relented and allowed the first desegregated show at the venue.
On opening night, Baker told the integrated Miami Beach audience, “I am happy to be here and to be performing in this city under these circumstances when my people can be here to see me.”
Though some exceptions were made for famous Black entertainers, Miami preferred to keep everyday Black residents out of sight. In Cobb’s neighborhood, the brick segregation wall along Northwest 12th Avenue concealed the Black section of Liberty City from the white area. Remnants of that wall still stand today.
“My mom and my grandmother and my aunts—they would work with white families over in Miami Shores, and at the end of the day, they had to make sure that they were on the west side of that wall,” she says.
Cobb’s family and others in the neighborhood would assign watch duties on the Black side of the wall’s entrance come nightfall; mostly, this task fell to the men. If a loved one didn’t get in on time or shortly after, it was a sign they might be in trouble.
“They said that there would be truckloads of white men on the other side of that wall waiting,” Cobb says.
While there’s no denying the state-sponsored terror of growing up in Jim Crow Miami, when Cobb reflects on some of her favorite memories living behind the segregation wall, they are filled with tenderness and Black queerness.
The first time she saw two women kiss, it was at her next-door neighbor’s house party. Cobb was about 12 years old.
“I didn't know what that meant,” she says. “But there was something about it that I liked seeing.”
Another neighbor had an ex-wife who would come visit him with her “special friend.” Her friend looked different from most of the women in the neighborhood.
“She would wear the same kind of shoes that my father had on, which were Stacy Adams tie-up shoes, and she had on a crisp white shirt and a jacket. You could tell she was a woman. But she dressed very much like my father did,” Cobb says.
Cobb was so excited to meet this dapper woman who also cut hair, she made a rash fashion decision to book a haircut—just to be in her presence for a little while.
Then, there were the moments where her dad would clear his station wagon of his landscaping work tools to drive her and her brother for take-out barbecue across from The Pool, a community hangout spot with a dance hall and stunning performers.
“They were men who dressed as women and performed at The Pool, and my father would sit out there and talk to them,” Cobb says. “Sometimes my father would get slabs of barbecue, and people would just come to the car and talk to us. That kind of love is what I saw in my neighborhood growing up.”
One of those performers was also the go-to tailor and dressmaker in the Black section who designed Cobb’s 11th-grade prom dress, a long satin blue gown.
“Every day, he wore lipstick and big earrings,” Cobb says, but with men’s clothes. A year later, when she returned for another dress, Cobb says she noticed that her Bahamian mom was using “she” and “her” pronouns for the tailor.
“By that time, I never saw her in any more male clothes. It was just dresses,” Cobb says.
Lately, Florida has been in the news for the censorship of Black and queer history, thanks in large part to a governor with presidential aspirations and a talent for launching “culture-war” broadsides at anything he pejoratively deems “woke.”
In a recent trial, when asked to finally define woke, the governor’s lawyers said it is “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” Imagine that.
The most recent example of the state suppressing history it doesn’t like: Florida rejected an Advanced Placement course on African American studies, because it included topics like intersectionality and Black queer studies. The College Board has since removed those two topics, among others, from the lessons taught in the course.
These heightened attacks on which histories can be taught, which we’re seeing around the country and in my home state of Florida, makes sharing and preserving the stories of Black LGBTQ+ Floridians even more necessary and urgent.
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