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United States of Florida: The Secret History of the Evil, Racist, Homophobic Johns Committee
A discussion with Robert W. Fieseler, author of "American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives."
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In the 1950s and 60s, a secret—one might even say a closeted—cabal of hateful, racist Florida lawmakers went to war on the state’s Black residents. It didn’t work. Stymied by smarter attorneys at the NAACP, these efforts were rebuffed in court.
So the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee—FLIC, for short—decided instead to purge the Sunshine State of Communists. This also proved difficult, because Florida was not exactly a hotbed of anti-American traitors in league with the Kremlin; that wouldn’t happen until Donald Trump bought Mar-a-Lago.
Unable to persecute its two top targets, FLIC turned its sights on the Gainesville gay community. This was a more successful enterprise. Unlike Communists, homosexuals (as they were then called) were easy to find. And unlike African-Americans, they had no centralized organization, no kick-ass legal team, and thus could be picked off, one by one.
And so FLIC, with nary a thought to great harm it was doing to individuals, families, universities, the economy, and the state and country in general, went its merry way, destroying as many lives as it could—all while clinging to power like the hidebound authoritarian rubes they were.
It is an ugly chapter in the history of Florida—and its perpetrators knew it. When the extent of its covert operations came to light—because, and I shit you not, in its zeal to banish homosexuals, the Committee kinda sorta accidentally published a “purple pamphlet” of gay porn—members of FLIC dispersed like cockroaches. The head of the Committee, a grievance-addled state legislator named Charley Johns—not, in case you try and Google him, the Charlie Johns who married his nine-year-old neighbor in Tennessee; the FLA Charley Johns was a sort of proto-Mitch McConnell, but more racist, more homophobic, and more evil—used every tool in his legislative belt to seal the files, keeping the whole sordid mess under wraps for decades…until a relentless investigative journalist came along.
Robert W. Fieseler is a National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association “Journalist of the Year” and the acclaimed author of Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation. A Tulane Mellon Fellow, Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School and is a board member of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana. In his latest book, the excellent and essential American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, Fieseler tells the chilling, fascinating, and riveting story of Charley Johns and FLIC.
I had the pleasure of talking to Fieseler last month for the PREVAIL podcast. Here are three takeaways from our discussion:
United States of Florida: The Secret History of the Evil, Racist, Homophobic Johns Committee (with Robert W. Fieseler) Greg Olear |
As Florida goes, so goes the country.
Like a play opens in Provincetown to work out the kinks before it comes to Broadway, so Florida is often the staging ground for U.S. politics. It was like that in the 50s. It remains so to this day. I asked Fieseler how he happened upon the remarkable story he recounts in his book. He said he knew that
there must be some event in the past having to do with queer Americana, and also the subject of race, with Black Americana, in the South that must point towards an antecedent for all of the things we’re experiencing now that are disorienting us about the MAGA movement: Trumpism, DeSantisism, the sort of nostalgia for an imagined 1950s. And the 50s, if you follow history rather than sentimentality, is the era of the Red Scare...
And then I was also interested in this idea I was noticing called “Floridization,” or the idea that basically we’re all—everyone, even if you’re not a resident of Florida—a suburb or a proxy of Florida in some way. We’re all Floridians now, because of the way that Tallahassee politics have become our national politics.
Like, our Attorney General is the former Florida attorney general, our Secretary of State, a former junior senator for the U.S. Senate. And what is Trump 2.0, but a superego on spin in the Florida political machine? He so fits the mold of an archetypical Tallahassee strongman that basically the system embraced him in a way that I don’t think anyone anticipated….He became more himself by becoming a Floridian. And that happens to many people when they go to Florida: They become this sort of exaggerated version of the biggest parts of themselves. So I wanted to research that.
The way Florida was held by minoritarian rule for most of the 50s and 60s mirrors what the MAGA Republicans are doing right now.
Charley Johns—again, not the pedophile from Tennessee; that was a totally different creep—was almost MAGA 1.0 in that his entire raison d’être was fueled by grievance and hate. He’d briefly been interim governor, he wasn’t popular enough to keep the job, and he made Floridians pay for it for years afterwards.
But Johns was a shrewd, canny operator. He knew the law. He knew every comma in the nineteenth-century Florida state Constitution. And he knew how to use the codicils in that document to keep himself and his racist rightwing cronies in power—even as the demographics of the state changed radically during the 50s and 60s.
Fieseler explains:
The kind of gerrymandering he manipulated had a lot to do with having the top of the state hold on to all of the voting power, and any of the bottom—which was basically all the pre-World War Two population, when Florida was considered this kind of rural, agricultural, I’ll be honest, backwater—wasn’t really considered a place that would account into the political system.
After the war, everything changed.
Post-World War II, you had all the growth in the peninsula and in the center of the state on downward—all the exciting stuff happening involving, my gosh, rockets going off from Cape Canaveral, and you had “Miami’s the Magic City,” and you had the Sun Coast is called the Sun Coast, and that’s blossoming. And everyone in the country wants a taste of the frozen concentrated orange juice. And every famous writer, it seems, has a pied à terre in Key West, or Kerouac’s in Orlando, and Jim Morrison’s somewhere on a beach.
And so in the midst of that, all of that growth and that cultural largesse, you had one of the most old-school political structures run by Charley Johns that decides that they’re going to benefit from all the tax revenue of the growing state, but they’re going to hold on to all the representation by basically holding on to 1885 district boundaries.
. . . It’s called malapportionment, meaning that they said it doesn’t matter that there isn’t one person, one vote; if you live in certain parts of the state, you should have more of it. Your vote should count for a little bit more than if you live in other parts of the state.
So they wanted the North to basically be able to hold on with an iron grip to every aspects of the legislature….Charley Johns had all the North Florida Dixiecrats take a Klan-style blood oath at, like, a weekend retreat. And they agreed that they would never redistrict the state. And they also agreed that they’d never desegregate. These were the two missions.
Johns and his allied oathkeepers were called, funnily enough, “pork-chopper Democrats” or just “pork choppers.”
“Charley Johns was sort of like the chief pork chopper,” Fieseler explains. “And it was crazy, researching it, where you saw how 12 to 15 percent of the top of the state, basically because of the way they gerrymandered, could hold a majority of both houses of legislature and oftentimes take the governorship, too.”
He continues:
Twenty thousand people were all it took for [state] Senator Charley Johns to be elected and reelected out of his North Florida district. Whereas the same [state] senatorial seat in Miami’s Dade County took 500,000 people. So it was astounding to me that the concept of one person, one vote wasn’t viewed as important by the old school Dixiecrats, who loved manipulating the power levers of this system so that they could benefit disproportionately—and who were also determined to utilize this system to…if necessary, drive this country and that state as close to the cliff as to a second splintering as possible. They were for real about holding onto power or tearing down the state infrastructure under their watch. And they did.
Money that’s appropriated will be spent—one way or another.
I worry about this with the gargantuan budget Congress allocated to ICE in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bullshit Bill. What will we wind up spending all that money on? So far, it’s on bonuses for the most ruthless and creative Gestapo agents. What’s next? It’s all up to ICE, which means it’s all up to Trump, which means it’s all up to Peter Thiel, or Leonard Leo, or some faceless weirdo from the Project 2025 gang.
This is what happened to FLIC, which was originally intended to persecute Black people. The Johns Committee only pivoted to persecuting gay people when the initial attempt was shut down—after Johns’s “efforts to harass and to destroy the Florida NAACP had been hamstrung so effectively by lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, specifically Robert L. Carter, the attorney from New York City, who had so effectively argued in 1954 as co-counsel for the Brown v. Board of Education decision,” Fieseler explains. “So, one of the best appellate lawyers of the 20th century or maybe ever, beside Thurgood Marshall, his co-counsel.”
For all his knowledge of the Reconstruction-era state Constitution, Johns and his rubes were no match for those legal titans. “And so Charley Johns is stuck,” Fieseler tells me. “He’s got this appropriation in 1958 and 59, two years into his McCarthy purge, where he’d promised heads on spikes to his Southern white base. All of a sudden he’s got this investigation committee with nothing to investigate. He’s got this appropriation he’s got to spend. He hasn’t produced one single Communist yet, though he’s told Floridians they’re everywhere. And so he sends his chief investigator to Gainesville to try to ferret out Communists. And he didn’t find any Communists, but he did find a lot of gentlemen hugging other gentleman at the local theater company.”
So that’s who the Johns Committee began entrapping. Not Communists infiltrating the NAACP: gay men, many of them associated with the state university.
“It was all opportunistic,” Fieseler says. “They couldn’t even come up with a rationale initially for how their operating statute told them to try to go find the Communists trying to integrate schools in the NAACP—and then they ended up, you know, finding a bunch of men masturbating each other in a bathroom in Gainesville.”
So they made up some bullshit about how homosexuality was inherently Communist because the Soviets don’t like the family, or somesuch. “They had to find some ad hoc, very provisional, very happenstance rationale.”
But the public was cool with it. “Charley Johns understood that Florida social conservatives and religious folk especially would be so apoplectic that he could pursue this as far as he wanted to go, because they wouldn’t care why these individuals were being investigated by the same committee that was investigating the NAACP—people would only care that they’re investigating them. And that’s how some of the greatest scholars of Florida…were found out to be closeted, either queer or bisexual, and were destroyed by the Johns Committee.”
The lesson, from this infuriating, cruel, and ugly piece of history, recounted wonderfully in American Scare, is that money appropriated will be spent—and not necessarily on what it was originally earmarked for. That makes the ICE budget extraordinarily dangerous. Today it’s immigrants; tomorrow it’s gay men, or political dissidents, or anyone who doesn’t properly genuflect at the altar of the slain hate-monger whose funeral service Trump spoke about himself at two days ago.
When immigrants aren’t safe from the Gestapo, none of us are.
As Florida goes, so goes the country.
American scare, indeed.
United States of Florida: The Secret History of the Evil, Racist, Homophobic Johns Committee (with Robert W. Fieseler) Prevail with Greg Olear |
United States of Florida: The Secret History of the Evil, Racist, Homophobic Johns Committee (with Robert W. Fieseler) Greg Olear |
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
Robert W. Fieseler is a National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association “Journalist of the Year” and the acclaimed author of Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation—winner of the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Louisiana Literary Award from the Louisiana Library Association, shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize for Writing from Stanford Libraries. Queer literary icon Andrew Holleran reviewed Tinderbox as "far more than just a history of gay rights" and Michael Cunningham praised it as "essential reading at any time." A Tulane Mellon Fellow, Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School and is a board member of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana. His latest book is called American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives.
Buy the book:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665384/american-scare-by-robert-w-fieseler/
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