National
Florida LGBT rights movement grows more visible
Local, state officials more receptive to advocates’ concerns
St. Petersburg (Fla.) Councilman Steve Kornell (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.—St. Petersburg City Councilman Steve Kornell was at his first candidate debate in 2009 when a woman in the audience asked him to respond to a “rumor” that he was gay. There was an audible gasp in the room, but Kornell did not hesitate to acknowledge his sexual orientation.
Even his opponents applauded him.
“Even though I was completely out, thousands of people didn’t know me at all so they didn’t know that about me,” Kornell, whom voters elected to represent the city’s Pinellas Point neighborhood in 2009, told the Washington Blade during a Feb. 4 interview near his home. “Somebody could have used that as an attack, and my response to that was I’m going to put it right out there.”
Kornell is among the public faces of a statewide LGBT rights movement whose profile has grown significantly over the last 15 years.
Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, said she had difficulty putting together a statewide board of directors when the organization formed in 1997 because people were afraid they would lose their jobs if they were outed. Journalists who wanted to cover Equality Florida events had to stand in the back of the room. They could only film the backs of the heads of those who had given their permission to appear on camera.
“When people stepped forward to the microphone at a county commissioner or a city council meeting to talk about the need for basic discrimination protection, they were literally risking their job,” Smith said. “There are some parts of Florida where that remains true.”
Only a handful of cities and counties included gay-specific protections in their anti-discrimination and anti-bullying ordinances in 1997. That number has grown to dozens of municipalities throughout the state.
Then-Gov. Charlie Crist in 2010 announced Florida would no longer enforce a law that banned gays and lesbians from adopting children in response to a state appellate court that found the 1977 statute unconstitutional. He signed the state’s LGBT-inclusive anti-bullying law in 2008.
State Reps. Joe Saunders (D-Orlando) and Dave Richardson (D-Miami Beach) last year made history as the first openly gay candidates elected to the state legislature. The Florida Senate Committee on Children, Families and Elder Affairs on Feb. 19 will debate a bill sponsored by state Sen. Eleanor Sobel (D-Hollywood) that would create a statewide domestic partnership registry.
Saunders and state Sen. Joe Abruzzo (D-Wellington) on Feb. 7 filed the Florida Competitive Workforce Act that would add sexual orientation and gender identity and expression to the state’s employment non-discrimination law. State Rep. Holly Raschein (R-Key West) is the proposal’s primary co-sponsor.
“Florida has changed dramatically over the last 15 years,” Smith said. “The change has accelerated in just the past three or four years.”
In spite of the aforementioned victories, the movement has suffered a series of stinging setbacks over the last decade.
Voters in 2008 approved a state constitutional amendment that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.
The Hillsborough County Commission on Jan. 24 voted 4-3 against a proposed countywide domestic partner registry — commissioners in neighboring Pinellas County that includes St. Petersburg nine days earlier approved an identical registry for unmarried same-sex and heterosexual couples. The Lake County School Board’s move to ban extra-curricular clubs in the district after a group of middle school students in Leesburg tried to form a GSA has sparked outrage among LGBT advocates and their supporters.
Smith noted the board’s announcement coincided with a near unanimous vote in the Tavares City Council on Feb. 6 that created Lake County’s first domestic partner registry.
“It’s not a direct line between here and there,” she said. “It’s a zigzag line and forward motion and push back, but the message we deliver is we’re going to keep coming because we’re fighting for our lives, for our families, for many of us for our children. We’re never going to give up.”
SAVE Dade Executive Director CJ Ortuno (Photo by KUTTNERpix.com; courtesy of CJ Ortuno.)
CJ Ortuño, executive director of SAVE (Safeguarding American Values for Everyone) Dade, brings this message to his advocacy.
The Miami Beach resident who is a straight man of Cuban descent told the Blade that a gay man named John introduced his parents. He and his partner lived downstairs, and gave them the dining room table from which Ortuño’s young daughter Amalia eats.
Ortuño said he decided to become involved with the movement during President Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008 — the same year Florida voters approved the constitutional same-sex marriage ban.
“It was me staring at my daughter and saying, ‘I don’t know who she’s going to love when she gets older, but I’ll definitely be damned if I don’t do something,” he said. “I want to change this world and leave it a little better than the way I found it.”
SAVE Dade, which was founded in 1993 in the wake of the Anita Bryant-led movement that successfully repealed Dade County’s gay-inclusive human rights ordinance, continues to work with local municipalities to offer domestic partner benefits to their LGBT employees.
The Coral Gables City Commission last October unanimously approved domestic partner benefits to LGBT employees — more than a year after lesbian police officer Rene Tastet filed a complaint with the city manager’s office after she did not receive bereavement leave to attend her partner’s father’s funeral in North Carolina. The organization is also lobbying the Miami-Dade County Commission to add gender identity and expression to the county’s human rights ordinance.
“I think we can do that this year like our neighbors to the north (Broward County) and south (Monroe County) of us,” Ortuño said.
SAVE Dade also works with Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and other members of South Florida’s congressional delegation on immigration reform — and especially the Uniting American Families Act that would allow gays and lesbians to sponsor their foreign-born partners for residency in the United States. The organization also advocates for the re-authorization of the Ryan White CARE Act.
“We do the same thing on a statewide level,” he said, noting Miami-Dade has the largest legislative delegation in Tallahassee. “We don’t drive state policy, but we often support or provide resources through our Dade delegation.”
Smith said Equality Florida, which has chapters throughout the state, looks to its local partners to cultivate relationships with lawmakers in Tallahassee.
“They have a constituency that they are accountable to,” she said. “We really look to our local partners to help us reach out and cultivate these relationships. We do so much local work that the partnerships are essential.”
Saunders told the Blade during a Feb. 1 interview in his Orlando office that some of his fellow lawmakers are “still trying to readjust and figure out how to deal with this new community that’s now represented” in light of his and Richardson’s election. Kornell said his presence on the St. Petersburg City Council has had what he described as a positive impact on LGBT-specific issues.
St. Petersburg Mayor Bill Foster, whom Kornell said made some “less than pro-gay” statements when he was a city councilman, approved his proposal to extend domestic partner benefits to the city’s 1,800 non-unionized employees.
“The mayor went ahead and did it,” Kornell said. “That’s the kind of thing when we have gay people sitting at the table; those kinds of things start to shift. It’s hard to hate somebody when you get to know them.”
National
Man charged in Mall of America shooting plot inspired by Pulse massacre: report
Suspect exchanged hundreds of messages, pledged loyalty to ISIS
The U.S. Department of Justice charged Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, 18, of Richfield, Minn., on Oct. 7 with one count of knowingly receiving a firearm and ammunition in order to commit a federal crime of terrorism. Mohamud allegedly planned to carry out a mass-casualty attack in support of ISIS, inspired in part by the Pulse nightclub massacre that took place on June 12, 2016 when then-29-year-old Omar Mateen murdered 49 people and wounded 58 – one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, and the deadliest targeting the LGBTQ+ community.
According to a DOJ statement release, Mohamud was arrested on Oct. 6 by the FBI, which had arranged to sell him an AK-47 assault rifle, magazines, and ammunition through an undercover FBI employee. Mohamud was arrested shortly after paying $600 in cash and taking possession of those items; he reaffirmed his intention to shoot people at the Mall of America during the transaction.
“Mohamud allegedly sought to carry out a mass-casualty shooting at the Mall of America, expressing a desire to emulate some of the most horrific ISIS-inspired attacks in the United States, including the atrocities at Pulse Nightclub and 2025 New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg in the statement by the DOJ. “The National Security Division will continue to work closely with the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force to track down and prosecute ISIS-inspired terrorists in the United States.”
According to the complaint, beginning on or about December 2024, Mohamud had exchanged hundreds of messages through multiple social media and messaging apps with a confidential source, and expressed a desire to travel to Somalia to join a designated foreign terrorist organization to fight on their behalf.
The defendant stated many times that if he was unable to travel overseas because of a lack of funds, he planned to carry out a mass-casualty event in Minnesota in support of ISIS.
According to the DOJ, “In July 2026, Mohamud sent messages discussing his intent to carry out a mass-casualty shooting attack at the Mall of America because he claimed it was owned by Jews. He wrote that [he] wanted to kill 30 to 60 people so no one would go there.”
“During the course of his communications, Mohamud stated that he wanted to commit an attack similar to those of the Pulse Nightclub mass-shooting in Orlando, the Bondi Beach mass-shooting in Australia, and the New Year’s Day vehicle-ramming attack in New Orleans.”
This case is being prosecuted by Trial Attorney Ryan White of the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Bejar for the District of Minnesota.
California
Calif. GOP gubernatorial candidate ad ‘disgusting attempt to exploit lesbian intimacy’
Activists, anti-LGBTQ religious leaders criticized Steve Hilton spot
Two women sit on a bed, a Pride flag hanging behind them. One is nervous; the other tells her to be calm and that she’ll do “all the work.” The music swells. The two hold hands and — fill out a ballot voting for Steve Hilton?
This is the new advertisement from the Hilton gubernatorial campaign that is drawing rebuke from both sides of the aisle, but for very different reasons.
Jorge Reyes Salinas, the communications director at Equality California, said the ad was an insult to the queer community.
“This ad is a disgusting attempt to exploit lesbian intimacy for political attention,” he said. The advertisement plays on media tropes that Salinas says “reduce lesbian and bisexual women … to sexual entertainment,” rather than showing them as well-rounded characters. “Any group of the LGBTQ+ community deserves the same dignity and respect as everyone else,” he said.
The ad is truly hyper-sexualized. It ends with one woman telling the other, “Now lick it.” The two pause and stare before she reveals an envelope to send the ballot, and large text pops up saying, “Just try it!”
Salinas characterized the ad as a desperate attempt to get attention from a candidate who is trailing far behind in the polls in heavily Democratic California. The Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra, who is endorsed by Equality California, holds a 25-point lead over Hilton according to recent polling by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.
Conservatives have also criticized the ad.
Influential evangelical Pastor Jack Hibbs thought the ad was distasteful and said, “lesbianism among college girls and some high school girls that right now is an actual pandemic of social ill.” Republican attorney general candidate Michael Gates said it undermines “the sanctity of the relationship between parents and their children.” This criticism is rather confusing because although the ad features two relatively young women, they both appear to be adults, not minors.
“The comments from Pastor Jack Hibbs should be criticized because there is nothing wrong with two women being attracted to each other,” Salinas said. “We’re calling out the ad’s stereotypes, while also rejecting the homophobia in the response to it … by other Republicans.”
The backlash from Hilton’s own party and supporters shows that an advertisement full of queer innuendo was ill-considered, considering the national GOP’s attacks on LGBTQ people in recent years. Hilton himself has been campaigning against transgender girls and women competing in school sports and using locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity. This context might be why Hilton’s political base responded to the ad just as poorly as the liberal voters he was attempting to court.
Hilton says the ad is part of a new series rolling out before Election Day, showing stereotypical California liberal archetypes voting for Hilton. He claims these ads are authentically filmed with real actors, as opposed to being A.I. generated, like many of his previous ads. One other advertisement has been released so far by the campaign showing a man at a spiritual retreat also being swayed to vote for Hilton, although it is notably absent of sexual innuendo.
Caleb Kaufman is a California Local News Fellow placed with the Los Angeles Blade. The California Local News Fellowship is a state-funded initiative to support and strengthen local news reporting. Learn more about it at fellowships.journalism.berkeley.edu/cafellows.
2026 Midterm Elections
Trump uses anti-trans slur against Democratic Senate candidate
President mocked Annie Andrews
President Donald Trump used an anti-trans slur against Democratic South Carolina Senate candidate Annie Andrews on Monday as he sought to rally support for Republicans in the state’s Senate race.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump attacked Andrews three times, referring to her as “trannie” while promoting U.S. Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.)’s campaign.
Andrews is running against Graham for a Senate seat in the solidly Republican state.
Earlier this year, Graham was specially appointed to the seat following the death of her brother, Lindsey Graham, who represented South Carolina in the Senate from 2003 to 2026.
Andrews, the Democratic nominee from the state, is a pediatrician that lives in Charleston with her three children. She told NBC News that she will “work with anyone to put South Carolina first.”
“As a mom and a pediatrician, I’m in this race to fight for my patients, my three kids, and South Carolina,” Andrews said, adding that “lowering costs and making life better for families across our state is going to take all of us working together.”
Andrews used the attention from the president’s attack to emphasize what she described as a focus on policy issues rather than the culture wars that have dominated much of the political debate.
“If you care more about your bills than the politics in Washington, this campaign is for you,” she added.
Trump’s remarks have drawn criticism from leaders on both sides of the aisle.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) condemned Trump’s words Monday night on social media, calling his attacks on Andrews “despicable.”
“Annie Andrews is a mom and pediatrician who’s always put her community first — and she’s exactly who South Carolina needs representing them in the Senate,” Schumer said on X.
Former South Carolina Gov. David Beasley, a Republican, also criticized the president’s attack on Andrews, urging voters to “reject politics based on division and hate.”
“This is abhorrent. Elections don’t have to be about cruelty and lies. South Carolina deserves better,” Beasley wrote Monday night on X.
South Carolina has not elected a Democratic senator in nearly three decades.
Andrews’s campaign website does not mention her positions on LGBTQ issues.
The Washington Blade reached out to Andrews’s campaign for comment on Trump’s attack and her positions on transgender rights but did not hear back by time of publication.
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