Pensacola Dreams

Queer sex in the heart of American fascism

This piece is a collaboration with Slate, part of Not Quite Pride, a special series exploring how LGBTQ+ people are really feeling this June during America’s anti-queer “state of emergency.” Audio reading & Pensacola party album for paid subscribers only.

Illustration by Anjali Kamat

With all the noise Ron DeSantis makes these days, you’d think he’d single-handedly run every gay and immigrant out of Florida. But as both an immigrant and a gay, I’ve never let a bigot ruin my fun. (I’ve survived Reagan, two Bushes, and a Trump.) So to kick off Pride month this year, I headed into the belly of the beast for Pensacola Pride.

I wasn’t alone: Despite the travel advisories issued by the Human Rights Campaign against visiting Florida in light of the state’s recent legislative assault on LGBTQ+ lives, around 200,000 queers from all over the South descended on the white sand and warm sapphire waves of Pensacola Beach. Thousands of cars carrying tents, coolers, speakers, picnics, a metric ton of White Claws, tequila, whiskey, and rainbow flags. Plates from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee.

The gays I traveled with had never been to Pensacola before, so there was uneasiness. How could there not be? The news cycle and our social media feeds have been dominated for months by Florida’s anti-drag, anti-trans, and “Don’t Say Gay” laws. We expected protesters or worse: Maybe DeSantis and his goons would come to crash the party for a GOP presidential primary photo-op. We made emergency plans in case someone plowed a car through the crowd or brought a semi-automatic weapon. Pride is always an exercise of strength in numbers, though, and as soon as we walked onto the beach and saw the throngs of family celebrating in thongs, we felt at home.

As we set up our camp alongside thousands of others, the ocean breeze charged us with an electricity I couldn’t pinpoint immediately. Our worries over safety and social anxiety began to be replaced by something else. It was unfiltered, everywhere, baking in the heat, reflecting off the blinding sand: queer desire—unadulterated horniness.

We took a stroll down the beach, which by noon resembled Mardi Gras. Not a corporate rainbow logo or child in sight. Instead: inflatable sex dolls, dressed up and playfully tied to poles, flags that read “Do DILFS, Not Drugs,” handmade “Cock for Shots” and “Tits for Jell-O” signs. Circuit-party gays puppy-piled on enormous lounges of inflatable furniture and jammed to skanky music from generator-powered sound systems. Lesbians brought a carnival of games: dildo ringtoss, oil wrestling in inflatable pools, strip beer pong, and topless karaoke. Women kissed and scissored on beach chairs. Pasty, sunburnt boys grinded on each other, covered in oil. Trans men sunbathed in chest binders and trans women smoked joints surrounded by adoring baby gays. Nonbinary people strutted in Fenty swimsuits, and men played swords peeing in the dunes near an HIV testing truck.

Cars were parked all along the shore, some with the engines running, towels over the windows. They rocked gently. As the sun started to set, drunk men gathered in clusters for circle jerks. An easy-to-spot single police cruiser passed up and down the beach behind the campsites, driven by a young officer trying to keep his eyes on the road. We watched him far into the distance as my group lined up to show our dicks to a ginger man in exchange for Jell-O shots that tasted like cough medicine. We had all made an unspoken agreement: Fuck DeSantis, fuck the culture wars, and more importantly, fuck each other.

Here in the heart of American fascism, sex was serving as both resistance and relief. I watched the ginger come out of a parked car with a smile and a condom wrapper. For a minute, I imagined what he might have been up to, and then my mind drifted somewhere else: If only Bayard Rustin could see us now …

These thoughts are more related than they seem.

Bayard Rustin, Photo by Stanley Wolfson ­— Library of Congress.

Bayard Rustin was one of the godfathers of the Civil Rights Movement, chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, deeply involved in the Montgomery bus boycott, and an adviser to Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. A decade before the march, he was already a prominent activist. In 1953, he was in Pasadena, California, giving a speech about anti-colonial struggles in West Africa. Afterward, he got in a car with two admirers from the audience. They were having sex when an officer spotted the parked car, then arrested Rustin for “lewd vagrancy.” He was sentenced to 60 days in jail and forced to register as a sex offender for the “morals charge,” a trumped-up statute often used to target queer people. The arrest nearly exiled him from the movement. Many historians still cite his arrest as a sordid stain on his record.

I see it another way. I picture him hyped up from the speech and getting himself a well-deserved lay. I admire that at 41, he didn’t just pull one twentysomething piece of ass, but two. I imagine that the stupid injustice of 60 days in jail must have supercharged his spirit to be a Civil Rights juggernaut, even after having served two earlier years in federal prison as a conscientious objector.

How many queers in our history have had a similar experience, transforming criminalization and state attacks on our sexualities and culture into the fuel we need to resist, politically and erotically, systems of oppression? Indeed, when you look at the last 50 years or so of queer history, what you find is a flip-flop of crackdowns and setbacks followed by upswells of queer sexual and political energy.

Take, for example, the “solicitation arrests” and raids on our bars and sex spaces in the 1960s. In New Orleans, these violations prompted Mardi Gras krewes (social groups that organize Mardi Gras balls and parades) to politically organize and get a gay-friendly mayor elected in the ’70s. It’s no coincidence that following the Stonewall riots in 1969, when police brutality against gay gatherings was the spear of the era’s homophobia, New Yorkers gave a new meaning to promiscuity at the piers and freight trucks in the Meatpacking district, and opened the notorious Mineshaft cruising club—our desire would never be suppressed again. After meetings of gay political groups in that era, there was always an afterparty at an abandoned firehouse or warehouse in the middle of nowhere, plans for zaps hashed out between blowjobs. A wave of death and government neglect during AIDS resulted in safe-sex harm reduction and entirely new ways for us to fantasize and screw, like rubber and pup play. Which all led to the quiet sexual revolution of the past decade, brought on by new HIV treatments and prevention tools like PrEP. Criminalization of our sexuality has always come with unintended and powerful consequences.

Every time I see a headline about the right trying to ban our books or our drag or our porn or rumblings about the reversal of Lawrence v. Texas, after the initial panic and burst of rage subsides, I think: We are about to fuck—and fight—like it’s the end of the world. This isn’t wishful thinking or toxic positivity. It’s in our Queer lifecycle’s DNA.

Rustin was posthumously pardoned by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020. History always sides with us. It’s an endless loop. We have sex, they criminalize, we fight back (and usually win), we have sex even louder and organize even stronger. I bet some of the loudest bigots screaming about child grooming wish they could leave their own kids at home for two days to make sweet love on the Pensacola beach. Their criminalization always leads to our radicalization, and that can make us feel terrified, ready for anything, thrilled, euphoric. Actually, there’s another word for that: foreplay.

Pensacola Memorial Day, 2023 Photo Album and Video (paid subscribers only)