Back at it in Florida

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington DC in February of 1968.

Table of Contents

Finite Disappointment

Florida Gonna Florida

Historic Interlude

Infinite Hope

Bear the History Hound Finds

Finite

Disappointment

When it became in 2020 that we were taking our talents to South Beach (just kidding, South Beach is one neighborhood in a city named Miami Beach in which we don't live nor play and neither does LeBron James–fun fact, he NEVER played in South Beach), my mom cautioned us that Miami was so expensive.

Sitting in Sacramento, California when she told this, she was, frankly, not correct. A house in Sacramento was within a rounding error of a house in Miami.

Today, she is proven prophetic.

Long time readers will know that housing costs in Miami is a frequent subject of this newsletter, but last week it became official: not only is the disparity in income to rental costs the highest in the nation here in Miami, now the rent is just plain the highest.

There is an end in sight though! With Miami-Dade County the only county in Florida to lose people the last few years combined with more days with a heat index well over 100, and with rising sea levels due to make my house, 11 miles inland, beach front property within a cat's lifetime, the housing costs are sure to plummet for all the wrong reasons!

Yay Florida!

Florida

Gonna Florida

While companies like AirB&B are a major driver of the astronomical rent in Miami-Dade County, they are also making it less pleasant to live in Florida. A condo complex in Brickell (read, just south of downtown Miami) became to poster child for that this week when the Miami Herald ran a story about how the 15% of residents who actually live there are dismayed that no one in the government seems to care that their home has been turned into a frat party gone wrong.

Typical for a state that prioritizes arresting people for sleeping outside but turns a blind eye to tourists turing the condo into "the wild, wild west" as the HOA president there puts it.

Why are they allowed to do it? Well, for one thing, the "wild, wild west" was a largely mythical period that had some basis in reality for about 10 years. South Florida, on the other hand, has been a tourist sexual fantasyland, literally called "Fairyland" 100 years ago, since just about the moment the City of Miami's founder, Julia Tuttle, died four years after its founding.

Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940

Poised on the edge of the United States and at the center of a wider Caribbean world, today’s Miami is marketed as an international tourist hub that embraces gender and sexual difference. As Julio Cap Jr. shows in this fascinating history, Miami’s transnational connections reveal that the city has been a queer borderland for over a century. In chronicling Miami’s queer past from its 1896 founding through 1940, Cap shows the multifaceted ways gender and sexual renegades made the city their own.Drawing from a multilingual archive, Cap unearths the forgotten history of “fairyland,” a marketing term crafted by boosters that held multiple meanings for different groups of people. In viewing Miami as a contested colonial space, he turns our attention to migrants and immigrants, tourism, and trade to and from the Caribbean -- particularly the Bahamas, Cuba, and Haiti -- to expand the geographic and methodological parameters of urban and queer history. Recovering the world of Miami’s old saloons, brothels, immigration checkpoints, borders, nightclubs, bars, and cruising sites, Cap makes clear how critical gender and sexual transgression is to understanding the city and the broader region in all its fullness.

IndieCommerceJr. Capó, Julio

The other is that the place, Florida, a state with no fewer than five tries at a free and fair constitutions, has been a place where the Golden Rule reigned. No, not the Jesus thing, the "He who has the gold makes the rules" thing.

That and white supremacy.

Here's an example by a candidate for the Florida GOP's Governor race calling his opponent, who is Black, "a chimp." While this candidate, J. Fishback, is only polling at 10% compared to 45% for his opponent for the GOP nomination, that means that 10% of people who identified as Republicans say they want to vote for an openly racist man instead of a Black man who has been endorsed by Trump.

Fishback adds to list of racially charged scandals in Florida Gov. race

Davie’s own James Fishback most recently used the word “chimp” to describe GOP opponent Byron Donalds (who is Black).

Miami New TimesB. Scott McLendon

Historic

Interlude

This is a very short video in Heather Cox Richardson's series about the railroad that built South Florida. Sadly, it misses an opportunity that Flagler used convict lease labor on many, if not all, of his projects in South Florida. Still, it's interesting!

Infinite

Hope

What gives me hope in South Florida these days? If the tone of this letter didn't indicate it, it's hard to find it right now. At least its been raining every day (it's supposed to be, it's the rainy season but we've been under drought conditions for months).

I continue to work on the prayer vigil documentary, which I've given a working title of The Alligator Congregation (a group of alligators is, no joke, a congregation). I'm hoping that goes somewhere soon.

I have an idea for how to advance an old idea into reality; something very different. More on that in the future, but that's cool.

I haven't been in my beloved Everglades since June and I hope to do that this week, and that always fills me with hope and awe.

You reading this gives me hope.

Bear

The History Hound Finds

How do we defeat authoritarianism? By building a sense of belonging | Julie Fernandes and Katrina Gamble

Eighty-five million Americans are disaffected and less likely to vote, our survey found. Our democratic revival depends on a sense of community

The GuardianGuardian staff reporter

A TV and cinema calamity could be disastrous for what you watch and what you know. Act now to stop that | Alan Cumming, Benedict Cumberbatch and Benedict Wong

The Paramount-Warner Bros merger is being fought on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain’s culture secretary knows the risks and can intervene. She should, say actors led by Alan Cumming, Benedict Cumberbatch and Benedict Wong

The GuardianBenedict Cumberbatch and Alan Cumming and Benedict Wong

Revealed: history of Spain’s fearless 1970s trans-rights political collective

Pioneering activists risked arrest and imprisonment amid lingering persecution after Franco dictatorship

The GuardianAshifa Kassam

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