Stonewall Came to Wilton Drive: South Florida’s Pride Roots

The riots that changed everything happened in New York; the ripple took years to reach Broward County, and history books mostly missed it.

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But here’s what those books left out: the shock wave from that night didn’t hit South Florida on schedule. No timely force of relief was provided to us, like a train coming into a station. Punctual. While New York organized, marched, and started building what would become the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, Broward County was still mostly doing what it had always done, looking the other way, pretending the gay community didn’t exist, and occasionally sending the sheriff to the beach to make arrests.

The ripple got here eventually. And when it did, it reshaped this stretch of South Florida in ways that are still unfolding today. Before There Was a Drive, There Was a Beach.

You don’t understand Wilton Drive without understanding what came before it.

Before there was a gayborhood on Wilton Drive, Fort Lauderdale’s LGBTQ+ community gathered on a barrier island beach in Dania, isolated, quiet, and about as far from a city spotlight as you could get. The Broward Sheriff’s Office conducted periodic raids there, arresting men on charges of public indecency. And still, the community kept showing up. That is not a small thing. That is what resistance looks like before it has a name.

The real turning point came in 1972, three years after Stonewall. The Marlin Beach Hotel, a 105-room property on Fort Lauderdale Beach, complete with a stage, two restaurants, and an enclosed pool courtyard, was reopened as America’s first explicitly gay beach resort hotel, establishing Fort Lauderdale as a gay tourist destination and its LGBTQ+ community as a visible part of the landscape. Gay entrepreneurs spent over $300,000 renovating it and ran national ads in gay magazines calling it “America’s premier gay resort,” a winking callback to the 1960 film Where the Boys Are that had made Fort Lauderdale famous in the first place. By the mid-1970s, the Marlin was grossing over $2 million a year, hosting iconic poolside tea dances at what regulars called the “Poop Deck.”

Fort Lauderdale’s mayor at the time, E. Clay Shaw Jr., was not amused. “If a family from the Midwest comes to Fort Lauderdale and sees men making love on the beach, what will they think?” Shaw said. “They’ll never come back.” (I mean… sounds like a goo… well, never mind.) His goal, per the Fort Lauderdale News, was to eliminate every vestige of homosexual activity from the beach. But we will not be erased, I say. No, we shall not.

He did not succeed. The Marlin weathered the early waves of the AIDS crisis but lost its footing after rebranding as a spring-break resort in 1986. By 1992, it went bankrupt and closed, amid a farewell blowout attended by over 5,000 people. One hell of an exit if you ask me. Wish I was around to enjoy it.

The Sheriff Comes Knocking (Again)

If you want to understand why the LGBTQ+ community in Broward County doesn’t have a particularly warm relationship with law enforcement as it does now, thankfully, 1991 is a good place to start. Now, when we talk about any time of law enforcement taking on the LGBTQ+ population, it’s primarily because that was the case anywhere you go during this era, so don’t just limit your thinking of South Florida to be a bad place for the community. It’s not so bad down here. At least not where I am located.

The Broward County Sheriff’s Office conducted joint raids of gay bars Club 21 and Copa on May 3, 1991 — and Sheriff Nick Navarro actually invited media and visiting dignitaries to watch the raid at Copa happen, bringing his wife along for the occasion. Hundreds were detained. Only six were charged. None of those charges led to convictions.

Enter Wilton Drive

Incorporated in 1947, Wilton Manors was for years a typical middle-class suburb. By the 1990s, it had succumbed to drugs and prostitution, cheap storefronts, empty lots, a street that nobody particularly wanted. Which, if you know anything about queer geography in America, is precisely when the community showed up.

Wilton Drive’s transformation gained traction with the revival of the Arts and Entertainment Overlay District in March 1997. When Georgie’s Alibi, the first major LGBTQ+ business on the strip, opened in April 1997, the city’s demographic shift started taking place. George Kessinger had transformed a dilapidated bank in a strip mall into a gay bar. Other gay-owned businesses followed. The rainbow flags came next. Then the property values. Then the people who had been priced out of South Beach and Key West.

In 1988, Wilton Manors elected Broward County’s first openly gay elected official. By 2000, it had the second gay-majority governing body in the United States. In 2018, it became the first city in Florida with an all-LGBTQ+ City Commission, second only to Palm Springs, California. And in 2015, Wilton Manors hosted a mass wedding ceremony at City Hall on Valentine’s Day, legally recognizing the unions of 37 couples, many of whom had been together for decades.

Today, Wilton Manors has the second-highest concentration of same-sex couples of any city in the United States, trailing only Provincetown, Massachusetts. The Drive is its main artery, a walkable strip of 30-plus bars, restaurants, cafes, and shops that functions as one long gay village.

From a shuttered bank to the second gayest city in America. Not bad for a strip mall on the edge of Fort Lauderdale.

The Institution That Kept the Record

None of this history would be as well-documented without one organization that had the foresight to start collecting before anyone thought it mattered.

If You’re Shopping for Pride Month

• The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History — edited by Marc Stein — primary source anthology for readers who want the full national context behind what eventually landed on Wilton Drive.
• Where the Boys Are (1960) — DVD — the film that put Fort Lauderdale on the map. Required viewing before you can fully appreciate the irony of what the Marlin Beach Hotel became.
• Last Call: A History of America’s Bar Culture — Local Author Rick Karlin contextualizes the gay bar as a political institution, pairs directly with the raids section of this article.

Properly South Florida documents the history, rumors, and myths of Fort Lauderdale and Greater Broward County. This article is classified Record, with one Rumor and one Myth noted above. Have a source, a correction, or a story we missed? Find us at properlysouthflorida.com.