Discovering Fairyland: Miami’s Forgotten Queer History Dates Back Over 100 Years

There’s always been something inherently queer about Miami - part of the city’s backbone long before Florida legalised gay marriage in 2015, before Robin Williams’ groundbreaking 1996 comedy The Birdcage and Giovanni Versace moved into his art deco mansion in 1992. It's queer history even predates South Beach growing into a hub for LGBTQ+ communities in the 1980s and the impassioned community rallies against Anita Bryant’s anti-LGBT crusade in the 1970s.

It is the subject of Professor Julio Capó Jr.'s book Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940, in which he uncovers a rich history of queerness in Miami at a time when being gay was inherently underground and difficult to document.

By digging deep into archives- from police raids to drag performance posters - he found a clear relationship between Miami’s role as a holiday haven dubbed 'fairyland' and a space of tolerance for queer people, where transgressing heteronormative norms was permitted without many questions asked...

Miami has an international reputation of being a very queer city. As a local, would you say this is accurate?

Absolutely. A hundred percent. Early urban boosters sought to market it as the Las Vegas of its day: 'What happens in Miami stays in Miami'. In that sense, it was extraordinarily queer. There is quite a bit of evidence to support this.

When you say early urban boosters, what time are you referring to?

It's founded as a city in 1896 - much later than most major Metropolitan areas in the United States. So by the early 1900s, it's a really small place. There's hardly any people here, it's only really accessible by boat until the railroad comes in 1896.

From the very start it’s very much marketed as a tourist destination -  a space where people can engage in leisure and recreation. Like the Las Vegas of its day, ‘what happens in Miami stays in Miami’.

"Early urban boosters sought to market it as the Las Vegas of its day: 'What happens in Miami stays in Miami'. It was extraordinarily queer"

This is when people start using the term ‘Fairyland’ to refer to Miami - a marketing term for escapism?

What Fairyland really depended on the language of the day - people called it that all the time. For some people, Fairyland was just like a place where you could go sunbathing and play golf.

And be queer.

It turns out Miami was extraordinarily queer, even among people who weren’t necessarily engaging in queer life themselves. They were aware that the city offered a space where people could explore parts of their lives they might not have explored elsewhere in the country.

The book I wrote takes “queer” as an analytic, thinking about what was understood as normal and what was seen as transgressive. In this book in particular, the focus is on same-sex relations or gender-nonconforming behaviours, actions, and identities, or some version of that.

Why was that? Did authorities just turn a blind eye to same-sex relationships?

A lot of reasons. The biggest part is the heavy reliance on tourist dollars and pesos. Miami was, by the 1940s, the least industrialised major city in the United States. Industrialisation didn't just take off - it was heavily dependent on the tourist economy.

During this time Miami was very seasonal. From November to March / April was the time that people wanted to come here. No one wanted to be here in the summer when it was extraordinarily hot - right before there's anything close to what we think of as air conditioning.

[There were] lots of these queer joints and spaces where there were burlesque and 'pansies' on stage - [which] I uncovered through official and unofficial records, meaning police records, newspapers, and testimonies. The police would look the other way - they often called it their ‘seasonal face washing’, where the tourist dollars mattered. So much of the more lax enforcement was largely about tourism.

"The city offered a space where people could explore parts of their lives they might not have explored elsewhere in the country."

So, would only tourists be able to enjoy same-sex freedom in Miami? What about locals?

This Fairyland is very much created by white, urban boosters of the era, it isn’t for everybody. This is largely catering to a white middle-class, aspirational middle-class, or elite crowd of folks. For many people of colour, Miami was experienced in radically differently. They were often in the service of that playground.

There’s also some evidence that queer folks, especially performers, would leave during the off-season and go to other places.

You’ve mentioned burlesque shows, and queer performers. So, what kind of scenes are we seeing in Miami there?

I would say Miami doesn’t have a clear queer scene - gay bars, entertainers - until the 1930s. Things we would image today as drag shows, then understood as female impersonates. The [iconic drag show] Jewel Box Revue - which goes on to tour the country for decades - begins in Miami Beach in the 30s.

There was a gay bar called La Paloma in Miami-Dade County. There were 'pansies', strippers, clientele who were largely gay. It was raided in November 1937, not by the police, but by nearly 200 members of the Ku Klux Klan. In the archives, I found letters that the KKK sent to the police saying ‘if you don’t raid this place, we will’ - and turns out that they did.

"They are essentially queering a KKK raid on a gay club. It’s such a story of queer resistance and resilience, because it’s taking power away"

The Paloma closes down for a few weeks and then reopens. They decide to turn the raid by the klan into their new act - a performative thing - theatrical.

They are essentially queering a Klan raid on a gay club. It’s such a story of queer resistance and resilience, because it’s taking power away. You think you're going to scare us and intimate us and close us down. I’m still here, taking away that power from you. It’s a powerful testament to the way queer folks survive.

Would you say this history has shaped the queer character of Miami today?

Certainly. There’s so many remnants of that history in our present today - The Versace mansion in South Beach. That was built by a queer man, a very wealthy white man, radical, in the 1930s, who certainly espoused same-sex desires. The Versace mansion was actually a queer space, decades and decades before it became known as the Versace Mansion.

Julio Capó Jr. is the Associate Professor of History and Public Humanities at Florida International University in Miami. His book, Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940, is published by The University of North Carolina Press. Find more information here.