When I knew (Part 2 of 3)

When I announced – seemingly out of nowhere – that I wanted to move to New York City, many folks were shocked.  The migratory route from New York to Florida is one of the most heavily traveled in the country – but not necessarily the other way around.    So after having worked so long and so hard to finally achieve what was once but a dream to me – a beautiful apartment in the Miami metro area, a mere 20-minute drive from South Beach – what prompted me to move?

Many, many factors – it was perhaps the most multi-faceted decision of my young life.  Certain work-related issues which I will kindly refrain from discussing here.  An affinity for a truly urban, big city existence.  The fact that the largest chunk of my social network is here, including my best friend one state away in Massachusetts.  But far above all else, a stark realization that I had fundamentally misjudged the character of my home state of Florida.  Or perhaps I did not misjudge her character, but the state simply changed around me in a manner that I found increasingly intolerable.   What was once a state that welcomed immigrants from around the world with open arms became one that seriously debated an Arizona-type “show your papers” immigration law.  A state with one of the nation’s largest LGBT populations passed a draconian measure, Amendment 2, in 2008 – with over 60% of the vote – which not only outlawed same-sex marriage, but any type of civil unions as well.  A state that once prided itself on its Bright Futures scholarship program threatened to effectively disembowel it.  And on and on.  The gist of it seemed to be that a state that had once drawn significant pride from the immense cultural separation between it and neighboring Alabama had, all of a sudden, began trying to “out-Alabama” Alabama.  And it was doing a damn good job of it.

Why did I leave Florida?  Perhaps the better question is – why did my home state leave folks like me behind?

By July 2010, after a series of business trips to New York, I had effectively fallen back in love with the city that I had long admired as a little kid.  As early as then, I had a gut feeling that I would be moving here.  But there were really two key moments – both in November 2010 – in which I truly “knew” – with all of my heart and soul – that my days as a Floridian were numbered.  Those two experiences are briefly recounted below.
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November 2, 2010 – the day of the 2010 midterm elections - was of course not a pleasant experience for anybody even a smidgen to the left of Tony Perkins or Rush Limbaugh.  Watching your fellow citizens - many of them driven by pure unadulterated racial animosity, fear, and stifling ignorance - hand over the reins of Congressional power to a deranged coterie of anti-government zealots...well, that’s not a great way to start your week.

But in Florida, it was far worse.  Florida politics quite often does have a certain surreal element – witness the success of Carl Hiaasen – but last year’s gubernatorial race blew everything else out of the water in terms of relative levels of insanity.  The contest boiled down to one between a proven, centrist – even fiscally conservative - former business executive, Alex Sink; and a far-right crook whose company had perpetrated the largest fraud against Medicare in that program’s venerable history.  In any sane place, that race would have been as lopsided as Alvin Greene’s stint in South Carolina.  Not in Florida.

At first I did not take Rick Scott seriously.  I viewed him as the quintessential embodiment of Tea Party excess, a brash, out of touch ideologue who would go down in flames as Carly Fiorina did in California and Carl Paladino did in New York.   I could not have been more wrong about the nature of my home state.

When I woke up the morning after the election and it became clear that Rick Scott would be the next Governor of Florida, I did something I have only once before as the result of an election.  I sat there in my bed, reading The Miami Herald, and I cried.  At first I considered it a tad silly – it was just an election after all, and these things are cyclical – but in this case it represented something far more.  It hit me in the gut, like the death of a close friend.  Rick Scott’s victory was not merely a manifestation of anger over a depressed economy; no, it represented a final affirmation of something far more sinister that I had been trying to deny steadfastly since 2008.

In November 2008, many gay men and women watched with truly mixed emotions as our country elected Barack Obama, while proceeding to deny a certain subset of loving, committed couples the right to marriage.  Florida was one of those places that both voted for Obama while breaking the hearts of its LGBT citizens – and just like with Rick Scott’s election, that vote was a complete shocker to me.  In Florida, constitutional amendments – the right wing’s preferred vehicle to inflict tremendous harm on LGBT citizens – require 60% of the vote to pass via citizen referendum.   While I never had doubts that Amendment 2 – the harsh, draconian measure that not only outlawed same-sex marriage, but any type of equivalent domestic partnership or civil union – would gain a majority of the vote in Florida, 60% seemed unreasonably high for a state with a huge gay population and a liberal population center in the Miami – West Palm Beach conurbation. 

And then election night came – and as I watched the Junior Senator from Illinois make history, I also watched in horror, from Pennsylvania, 62% of the folks in my home state effectively spit in my face and announce to me “You’re not welcome here.”

I truly don’t think that the right-wing religionists understand how much pain that they inflict with these measures.  If I were to insult their religious choices, to their face, in a very nasty and hateful manner, they would be offended and hurt.  And yet, when they pass significant legislation with no ostensible purpose other than to strip away my civil liberties, I am, for some never-explained reason, supposed to understand that it’s “not personal”, “not hate”, just political.

On that night in 2008, it was personal.  Damn personal.  And yet – largely because of my misery in Pittsburgh, which led to a tainted view of the entire Northeast – I opted for the route of rationalization.  Unique combination of religious blacks turning out and wags in the Panhandle showing up en masse to vote against the black liberal from Chicago.  This couldn’t be my home state, I told myself.  Other places – Georgia, Kentucky, Kansas – do these things.  We have Miami and Key West – we, as Floridians, don’t go that route.  Or so I thought.

For two years I continued feeding myself the lie that Florida was anything less than a culturally conservative Red State.  When a plurality of Floridians opted for the extremist fraudster Rick Scott over Alex Sink, that silly, hollow delusion fell apart at the foundations.  At that moment, it became crystal clear to me that I lived in a state in which the vast majority of residents held core cultural values at fundamental odds with mine.  Irreconcilably estranged, starkly, incredibly different values from mine.  When Floridians chose Rick Scott, it became unequivocally clear that I – as a young, gay, non-religious black male with a degree from an elite Northeastern university – was not welcome.
 

One could say that, in spirit, I became a New Yorker on that dramatic day in which Alex Sink was defeated by Rick Scott – while one thousand miles to the north, an analogous right-wing zealot and super-bigot - Carl Paladino - was being thoroughly routed by Andrew Cuomo.  While Rick Scott spoke of mass layoffs of government workers and requiring pregnant women to view an ultrasound before getting an abortion, Mr. Cuomo spoke of his vow to legalize gay marriage and maintain New York as a leader in the strength of its social welfare state.

From more than a thousand miles away, New York seemed to beckon to me – and I could not resist the call.
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I knew that it would be a momentous trip shortly after getting my first ever First Class upgrade as a Delta Medallion.  To digress – there is essentially no other reason why I maintain near perfectly loyalty to what can only objectively be categorized as one of the world’s worst airlines.

Just about two weeks after the midterm elections, I found myself on a plane bound to New York for work at a client.  I cashed in 50,000 Hilton points to spend an extra night at the Embassy Suites in Manhattan and arrived in time for a friend’s birthday party.  I had a great time during the trip – ate too much, drank too much, worked too much, spent too much money – apply the word “too” to a verb, and I probably did it.

But out of the prodigious sum of great experiences during that week of November 14^th, there was the one moment that stands out and is seared indelibly into my memory.  It was at lunch the very last date of that trip, Friday, November 19^th, 2010.  I had my favorite dish, the Western omelette with wheat toast and coffee, at what has become my favorite New York diner - Amelia’s Café in SoHo.  And then I stepped outside after finishing my lunch and looked around.

It was bitterly cold by November standards – no more than 30 degrees with a brisk wind.  Back home in Fort Lauderdale, it was a balmy 80 degrees – the kind of shorts and flip flops weather that I adore.  As a stood there in the frigid air, I thought about cashing in another 50,000 Hilton points to stay an extra night…

Wait – I did what?

Two years ago as I drove away from Pittsburgh, with snow falling on the hills long ago denuded of greenery, my entire juvenile mindset was focused on fleeing cold weather.  I was deliriously happy that day to be heading back to the land of sun and beaches.  And now here I was, standing in 30-degree weather – and considering staying in it longer when 80-degree weather awaited me back at home.

People in stylish winter coats passed all around me on bustling Varick Street, bringing and taking with them the smells and hustle of true urbanity.  The love that I felt for this island seemed to rise like the first violent breeze before an arriving thunderstorm over the Hudson.

As I stood there on Varick Street, my values had no changed a bit from what they were my first time walking down Pittsburgh’s Forbes Avenue in heavy snow in October 2008.  I still hate cold weather and snow.  I will each year be one of the first person to put flip flops on and one of the last to take them off.  Nobody argues that 70-degree weather in January is not pleasant, which is why New Yorkers are willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to vacation in the Miami area during winter.  What had changed was my maturity – and from that maturity, the recognition that there are far more important things to life than weather, and that basing major life decisions around weather is, to bruise myself, nothing short of idiotic.  At that moment, I wanted to slap myself for having made such a major decision in my life - the decision to live in a state in which I would never be welcome - based solely on climate.

Standing there on Varick Street so fed up with my home state of Florida, thirsting so much for something more, yearning so strongly to live among people who saw the world the way that I do, I felt a level of enchantment towards New York City that I, in fact, never have once felt towards Miami.  In an instant, I made one of the most significant choices in my life.  I reached into my wallet, retrieving my MetroCard which still had about $12 left over from the trip.  Then and there, in the spontaneity of the moment, I made a solemn promise to myself:

“I will use this MetroCard again.  And the next time that I use it, I will be a resident of New York City and not a visitor…”

And after landing at La Guardia from Louisville on July 2^nd of 2011, I kept that promise – in one of the proudest moments of my life.

That MetroCard is on prominent display, attached to a shelf in my new room.  Every time that I happen to look at it I pause to smile and think “Then, on Varick Street - that’s when I knew.”