Two decades ago, if you were trying to sell a house in Wilton Manors, you didn’t say Wilton Manors. You said northeast Fort Lauderdale. That is not a marketing flourish. That is what former mayor John Fiore remembered doing, because outside the city limits almost nobody knew the place existed, and the people who did know it had mostly heard it was rundown.
Today the rainbow flags start before you reach the sign. The main drag fills with thousands every June. The city consistently ranks as one of the gayest in America by the only measure the census allows. Somewhere in those two decades, a forgotten little island flipped into a national symbol.
This is how it happened, and why it was never a sure thing.
Before the flags
Long before it had a brand, the land that became Wilton Manors had a different name: Colohatchee. There was a stop by that name on the Florida East Coast Railroad, near what is now Northeast 24th Street, when this stretch north of Fort Lauderdale was farms, mangrove, and not much else.
The name Wilton Manors arrived in 1925, coined by Edward J. “Ned” Willingham, a land developer from Georgia who platted a residential subdivision during Florida’s 1920s land boom and imagined an elegant suburb rising out of the scrub. The 1926 hurricane and the Depression had other plans. Willingham’s vision stalled for two decades.
The city that actually got built was a postwar one. In 1947, a few hundred residents petitioned to incorporate as a village, in part to avoid being folded into Fort Lauderdale and its debts. A home-building spree followed. For most of the next forty years, Wilton Manors was an ordinary middle-class bedroom community on a small island wrapped by the forks of the Middle River. Quiet. Affordable. Easy to overlook.
By the 1980s, overlooked had curdled into neglected. The housing stock aged. Property values sagged. The city had a reputation problem.
And that reputation problem turned out to be its opening.
The arrival
Gay life in South Florida did not begin in Wilton Manors. For years its centers were elsewhere: Key West at the end of the road, Victoria Park just to the south, the rising spectacle of South Beach across the county line. Wilton Manors was not a destination. It was cheap.
That was the point. Cheap, central, and a short drive from the Fort Lauderdale beach scene meant a wave of gay men and women could buy the very houses no one else wanted, and then do what underestimated neighborhoods always get rebuilt by: sweat equity. Bungalows got restored. Yards came back. Shuttered storefronts on Wilton Drive, the old Wilton Boulevard, reopened as bars, cafes, salons, and shops owned and run by the people moving in.
Revitalization and identity arrived as the same act. You could not separate the new paint from the new community, because they were the same hands.
The milestones that made it official
A neighborhood can change quietly. Wilton Manors started changing on the record.
In 1988, the city elected Broward County’s first openly gay official. That was the signal that the shift was not just residential but political, that the people remaking the place intended to govern it too.
By 2000, Wilton Manors had the second openly gay-majority governing body in the United States, with a gay mayor, vice mayor, and councilman. A city most of the county couldn’t locate on a map was now a national first.
The numbers caught up in 2010, when census data ranked Wilton Manors second only to Provincetown, Massachusetts for the share of same-sex couples in its population. By the Williams Institute’s analysis it counted roughly 125 same-sex couples for every 1,000 households. The comparison usually cited for scale is San Francisco, at about 30.
Then came 2018. Voters elected an all-LGBTQ city commission, making Wilton Manors the first city in Florida and only the second in the country, after Palm Springs, to do so. Not gay-friendly. Gay-run.
What WilMa actually means
The nickname is the tell. Locals shortened Wilton Manors to WilMa, an affectionate, slightly campy contraction that you only give to a place you feel ownership over. You don’t nickname a suburb you’re embarrassed by. The other nickname, Island City, is literal: the whole place sits on a true island, barely two square miles, ringed by the Middle River.
WilMa is what a community calls home after it has stopped apologizing for where it lives.
The identity is built into the infrastructure now. The Pride Center at Equality Park is one of the largest LGBTQ community centers in the Southeast. Mayor Justin Flippen pushed the city to permanently raise a pride flag in 2015, a small gesture that became permanent policy; Flippen died in office in 2020 at just 41, and the loss was felt across the state. In 2023 the city formally declared itself a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community. Even the police cruisers carry rainbow graphics. None of it is decoration. It is the receipts of a forty-year transformation.
The part that doesn’t fit a postcard
A mecca has a cost, and WilMa’s is the oldest story in real estate. The same revival that saved those bungalows drove their values up. Some of the longtime residents who built the city, especially older community members on fixed incomes, now struggle to afford the place they made famous. The neighborhood that welcomed people priced out everywhere else is, in spots, starting to price out its own pioneers.
That tension is not a footnote. It is the live question hanging over WilMa’s next chapter, and any honest history has to leave it open rather than tie it off.
Why this is a Finding Pride story
Wilton Manors is easy to mistake for something that was always here, a natural gay capital that sprang up fully formed with the flags already flying. It wasn’t. It was a rundown island nobody could find, rebuilt house by house and seat by seat by people who weren’t welcome in many other rooms. The mecca was made.
That is the throughline of this series. South Florida’s queer landmarks were not granted. They were claimed.
On June 20, the Stonewall Pride Parade and Street Festival shuts down Wilton Drive and fills the island with thousands. When you stand on that street, you are standing on the proof.
Rumor vs. Record
Rumor: Wilton Manors has always been South Florida’s gay capital.
Record: For decades the centers of gay life here were Key West, Victoria Park, and South Beach. Wilton Manors became a hub only over the last forty years, and the modern milestones, the first openly gay official in 1988 and the gay-majority commission in 2000, are recent history.
Rumor: The city was so desirable that gay residents flocked to it.
Record: It was the opposite. The city’s rundown reputation and low prices are precisely what made it affordable to buy into, and that affordability is what built the community.
Rumor: “WilMa” is the city’s official name or an old founding nickname.
Record: WilMa is an affectionate local contraction of Wilton Manors. The official-sounding older nickname is Island City, and that one is literal, because the city sits on a real island in the Middle River.
Next in Finding Pride: “The Drive: A Block-by-Block History of Wilton Drive” (Part 4). Start the series at Finding Pride 2026, or go back to Part 1, “Stonewall Came to Wilton Drive: South Florida’s Pride Roots.”
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