Commies, Black folks, and queers, oh my! (with Robert Fieseler)

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Introduction – 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This episode includes brief discussion of sexual acts and suicidal ideation. Listener discretion is advised.

Welcome to Relationscapes, the podcast where we explore the terrain of human connection, breaking down borders as we go. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode about the roots of American fascism is journalist Robert Fieseler.

ROBERT FIESELER: And what would happen then if they were forced to talk about that in public under oath is that it would ruin not just their reputation, but it would destroy their families' names. These were individuals that had much to lose. And as a gay person, I wondered who I would have been.

BLAIR HODGES: In January 1959, college student Art Copleston was escorted out of his accounting class by three cops and taken to a dark motel room at the edge of town, where he was interrogated by government officials. His suspected crime? Being a homosexual.

And he wasn't the only one. Florida officials were on the hunt for people they considered threats to their Southern way of life, targeting suspected communists, Black citizens, and gay Floridians through investigations designed to expose and destroy lives.

It's a history Florida has tried to bury. Journalist Robert Fieseler helped dig it back up. His new book is called American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives. He joins us to tell the chillingly relevant story right now.

 

Meet Art Copleston – 02:01

 

BLAIR HODGES: Robert Fieseler, welcome to Relationscapes.

ROBERT FIESELER: Happy to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: Your book is a historical narrative. You're telling a history here, but something really, something really unusual happens on page 330.

ROBERT FIESELER: Whoa, you went deep.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Something rare, I think, happens here. There's 33 chapters in your book. In chapter 31, you suddenly use the word I. You appear in the story, and you make a personal confession there. And I've seen historians refer to themselves or speak in the first person, like in footnotes and stuff, but you appear in, in the narrative here.

You're talking about Art.

ROBERT FIESELER: Yeah, well, Art Copleston is one of the main characters in the book, or historical figures. He's probably the last living survivor of the Johns Committee, or the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, this McCarthy-era purge in Florida from 1956 to 1965, of the specific purge at the University of Florida in 1959. And I interviewed him about 70 times.

He is a queer elder, or he prefers the term gay elder.

BLAIR HODGES: See? Yeah, that's how it came up. Yeah. I've learned he didn't like queer studies. He didn't like the word queer.

ROBERT FIESELER: No. When he heard the word queer, he was in his, you know, 20s, in the 1950s, when the word queer was a weapon used to destroy a person's reputation. And it was a stain on a person's name. And it was the worst thing you could call, actually, a gay person. And so whenever he hears the word, he cannot help but instinctively wince.

And he would let me know in the 70 interviews I was doing with him. I mean, over time, he let me know, "Hey, you're using this word a lot." And I'd be like, "Oh, okay, well, let me explain to you why we use the word and that it's reclaimed and, you know, it's a catch-all. It means everything."

"And doesn't that feel good?" And he's like, "No, it doesn't feel good when you say it to me."

And then I thought about it, and I'm like, I am reaching him in his space. He is in his 90s, and he's not gonna change on this. And I am hurting him, and others are hurting him.

And he wants to share his story about what happened to him bravely. And he's going through the emotional turns to tell you the worst thing that ever happened to him when he was a closeted gay person at the University of Florida in the 1950s, and how what happened to him affected him not just psychologically, but bodily, for the rest of his life.

And I am this intruder. Yeah, I'm using the word of his oppressor. And so I had to wrap my head around that and understand that I had no right to judge him. And actually, I needed to learn something very profound. And Art's taught me many lessons.

Actually, we're still, we're friends. You interview someone 70 times, you end up, even as a journalist or, you know, the hard-nosed historian, you end up buddies.

And I visited him. I interviewed him in person. And, you know, he's a 93-year-old gay guy, so he lives in the one place that 93-year-old gay guys live: Wilton Manors, Florida, or Palm Springs, California. He lives in Palm Springs, and he emailed me a couple days ago.

He's constantly in contact with me to complain about the size of the typeface in my book.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I thought it was good, but I guess I'm not 93.

ROBERT FIESELER: He thought that my publisher chintzed out by not printing a larger font.

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, the book was thick enough, though. That would have been, I know, would have made it look longer.

ROBERT FIESELER: I know. And I mean it. It's 100 pages of endnotes. Yeah, we had a nervous breakdown on these endnotes. I wanted to substantiate everything I was saying.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh yeah, you trace—

ROBERT FIESELER: But Art and I have had an emotional journey learning from each other.

 

Gay Witch Hunt at the University of Florida – 06:03

 

BLAIR HODGES: And he really matters to the book. He's, as you said, one of the last remaining people who went through this witch hunt that happened at the University of Florida. That's a little part of the broader story you tell.

And I wanted to start there because I wanted to go to what he actually experienced. Take us to that accounting class he was sitting in, that final exam, and what happened to him there.

ROBERT FIESELER: Sure. He was a 20-something University of Florida sophomore attending the university on the GI Bill. Actually, he'd served a brief stint in the Air Force prior to coming to the University of Florida, had no other financial means to be there, and was a little bit older than the average undergrad, already feeling out of place.

He was a closeted gay man and part of a secret little gay underworld that included his closeted gay English professor and a couple other students that he knew.

And he was being hunted, stalked by men, adults in suits, as just a nobody college undergrad. He was paranoid. He thought something was about to happen. And a lot of friends of his who identified as gay secretly amongst each other were getting taken out of places and interrogated and asked to confess and asked to name all the other aberrant individuals they knew.

And Art was wondering when his time was going to come. And his time came at the most manipulative moment, a moment designed by authorities to break him. They pulled him. Basically, they accosted him and took him into custody during his final exam for his accounting class.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, this was orchestrated. This was theater.

ROBERT FIESELER: It was designed to result in complete surrender, to break him instantly. Three Florida law enforcement agents in powder blue uniforms walked into a very large auditorium-sized classroom. He's in front of all of his peers.

They state his name to the professor, who doesn't act surprised. So Art Copleston always felt the professor was in on it, pre-notified. The professor points him out, and the agents trot up to him as if he's this genuine danger to public safety. Hands on sidearms, they had handcuffs ready, and basically take him out of his life.

And in that experience, what Art was fearing was that they were going to publicly make a gay accusation in front of everyone there in that room, which would have meant that he had to transfer to another school. He couldn't have possibly continued his life as an undergrad.

So then they put a hand on his shoulder, they took him away from his test materials, they marched him out of the classroom, out an exit, to an idling squad car. And they pushed him into the squad car and started driving him to an unknown place.

BLAIR HODGES: So this was an investigation that these people were doing into an apparent homosexual underground, they would call it, at the University of Florida. Who the heck would have this kind of authority? Who's doing this investigating? How did this even happen?

ROBERT FIESELER: Sure. So these were agents of a McCarthy-era cabal that was operating out of Tallahassee, Florida, the state capitol. They were called the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, and they were run by a very powerful segregationist state senator who had actually just been governor and gotten kicked out of the governor's mansion. He was very bitter about it.

A guy named State Senator Charlie Johns. And what Charlie Johns was perpetrating as part of this—supposedly it started off as this anti-communist committee—but he couldn't find any communists. So he started trying to go after Black integrationists. Then, when they gummed him up in the courts, he started going after the people that couldn't defend themselves, which were the closeted queer folk, the closeted gay folk hiding in these university towns.

And so what he was perpetrating was becoming so notorious in Florida that folks were nicknaming it the Johns Committee. And Art Copleston had heard about this Johns Committee and was just starting to piece together that these agents following him, these agents that just took him out of the final exam, might be Johns Committee agents.

BLAIR HODGES: If I remember correctly, there was Tileston, or whatever that guy's name is, that was basically stalking Art.

ROBERT FIESELER: Yeah. Officer Tileston. Yeah, he's a campus security officer. Campus security, whose main job was basically chiding students for throwing gum wrappers on the ground, who'd then been drafted by the county sheriff and by state law enforcement to become a covert mole and plainclothes investigator, following around students that he suspected of homosexuality.

And Tileston would go to local bachelor bars, they called them, in Gainesville, which is how he saw Art Copleston at a bachelor bar close to Art Copleston's dorm building, called the Burger House.

And then Art Copleston claimed that Tileston stared at him and eyeballed him and then began to stalk and invade his life, following him from class to class, sitting in the dorm cafeteria watching him eat, at times standing outside of his dorm room door listening in, invading Art Copleston's last 10 feet of private space.

And also enlisting Art Copleston's dorm mate as a spy to try to find evidence that Art Copleston was participating in homosexual activities. This was his nemesis that was stalking him.

I don't know who you were as a college undergrad. I was a doofus. He was following around a college undergrad, determined to get this guy.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] I wasn't stalking anybody.

 

Florida’s Red Scare – 11:09

 

BLAIR HODGES: So we have campus security all the way up to this Charlie Johns, who's a state lawmaker. How in the world did Florida politics enable such a thing, where they could have this Legislative Investigation Committee? It seems like their own little private FBI that they just kind of invented. How did Florida politics allow for this kind of thing?

ROBERT FIESELER: Sure.

BLAIR HODGES: It's such an invasion of privacy, and it seems like breaking all kinds of constitutional principles. So what's happening?

ROBERT FIESELER: The Florida state constitution was drafted in 1885, basically to end Reconstruction. It was one of the most corrupt state documents ever created. It legislated and supposedly legalized, using state powers, a racial apartheid system that also greatly empowered hetero whites, competent or not, and placed them at the top of the pecking order.

And it created all sorts of loopholes for them to basically enclose all state power around themselves if they wanted to. So segregation was under siege from federal powers in all Southern states in the 1950s, basically from U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, et cetera.

And especially in Florida, North Florida Dixiecrats, they called themselves, or Pork Chop Democrats, were determined to hold on to segregated power for another year, another month, another day, as long as they could. They were going to bring down the system to do it.

And so, also in the 1950s, they were watching what was happening in Washington, D.C. There was a federal Red Scare led by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, led by this House committee called the House Un-American Activities Committee. And although the federal Red Scare sort of had its era, its vogue, in the early 1950s and then collapsed in failure, Southern segregationists caught wind of this hot-button word that the federal government called "communists."

BLAIR HODGES: They're like, "Hey, this is pretty cool. Let's get the communists."

ROBERT FIESELER: And they realized that they could use fear of communism, subversion, enemies of the people, all of those phrases, to go after—they could weaponize these phrases within their own segregated milieu. They could create enemies and go after whoever they wanted to, to rile up their white base and to create an atmosphere of fear so that basically their white base would be asking the segregationist leaders like Charlie Johns for red meat.

"You've made us afraid. You've told us there are enemies in hiding. Who are they? Show us to them."

BLAIR HODGES: And they're like, "Well, it's Black people." It was that dumb.

ROBERT FIESELER: Right. It's Black integrationists—because Marx wants a unification of the races so that the proletariat rise up. It's Black integration—

BLAIR HODGES: And Black people are like, "We just want to vote and be able to get jobs and eat at lunch counters, guys."

ROBERT FIESELER: Right. And segregationists were saying these were pinks, right, adjacent to the red communists who were just as bad, who were trying to end the Southern way of life and bring down the American family.

BLAIR HODGES: And it's funny because when people think about the Civil Rights Movement, when everything was going on, I often think of Alabama and Mississippi and other Southern states, Louisiana. I had been overlooking Florida. But your book makes an argument for how central it was. There was a lot going on there.

And this investigative committee, the Johns Committee, was going after the NAACP there. They were trying to rope Martin Luther King into controversy there.

ROBERT FIESELER: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: And they were doing it under the guise of accusing them all of being communists, right? So the committee's gonna start trying to call in NAACP representatives under the authority of the state to interrogate them and get them to implicate each other.

ROBERT FIESELER: Correct.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. So, yeah, if I remember from the book, they're like, "Okay, we're gonna bring 'em in, interrogate them, and insist that they bring NAACP records that we can look at."

ROBERT FIESELER: "Give us your membership rolls."

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And the NAACP was ready for this.

ROBERT FIESELER: They were. So this had already happened, this tactic of getting NAACP leaders under subpoena to bring in their membership rolls and then abusing, harassing, and targeting all of the people on the list. That had already happened in Alabama and in Texas. And so the national NAACP was wise to this.

And when the Johns Committee started in 1956, basically Thurgood Marshall, who was the head lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York City, future U.S. Supreme Court justice, also the guy who'd argued successfully in the Brown decision, told the Florida NAACP, "Send me all of your records right now. Just send them out of state. They're going to ask for them."

BLAIR HODGES: And you won't have them.

ROBERT FIESELER: You won't have them, and therefore you cannot give them. And then what was unjust is the Johns Committee subpoenaed the Florida NAACP leaders. They told them to bring the membership rolls. The leaders would turn up, actually lawfully, in these open hearings where they were getting badgered and embarrassed, and they would say, "I don't have the materials. I've sent them to Thurgood Marshall."

And Charlie Johns and the Florida authorities would be like, "Tell Thurgood Marshall to give us back the records."

And they're like, "Okay, but he's not bound by this."

And so Thurgood Marshall would keep them, basically, then they would hold the NAACP leaders in contempt of the Johns Committee.

This is another example of how this state cabal collapsed the entire separation of powers around them. They could hold people in contempt. They basically acted as a judicial authority. They were using executive law enforcement.

And then their dream was to hold the NAACP leaders they were citing for contempt—they wanted to get them basically arrested, jailed in prison stripes. The Johns Committee wanted to photograph the NAACP leaders in prison stripes on a Florida chain gang on the side of the highways.

That was their dream: to humiliate and destroy the hopes of the integration movement in the state.

 

The Hunt for Commies Takes a Queer Turn – 17:10

 

BLAIR HODGES: And so while all that's going on, the NAACP is doing a really good job of dodging all the shenanigans they're trying to pull. Father Gibson is one that they pull up. His case eventually gets to the Supreme Court, which we'll talk about a little bit later on. But while all this is going on, it might seem a surprise to some people that homosexuality, as they would talk about it back then, would get roped into this overall thing.

Because if they're looking for communists and they're trying to accuse Black people of being communists, how all of a sudden are they winding up down toward the more southern part of the state, at the University of Florida, looking for gay people?

ROBERT FIESELER: So the NAACP sent down Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP Defense Fund attorney, and his co-attorney, Robert L. Carter, who was the co-counsel who'd argued the Brown decision. So Robert L. Carter comes to Florida and starts personally representing leadership of the Florida NAACP, like the Miami NAACP president, Theodore Gibson, et cetera. And he basically outguns all of the state lawyers, who are used to playing by segregated rules and expectations of segregated white talent doing well.

And I don't know if you've thought about this, but segregation didn't do a lot for white competence.

And so basically, he's just creaming them and gums up and hamstrings the Johns Committee's efforts through the courts. Robert L. Carter does.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, they are used to the system facilitating everything. So as soon as somebody comes in here who understands the system and can actually hold them accountable to higher authorities, they're like, "What do we do?"

ROBERT FIESELER: Correct. So these Johns Committee lawyers are Southern Foghorn Leghorn-style lawyers. They think they can go in front of white juries, white judges, who are their friends. This is all going to work no matter what. It's a layup. It's a gimme. And then suddenly they're losing.

So the Johns Committee panics. They had this appropriation, lots of money, lots of money to go find communists. They haven't found a single one for several years, right? They're promising heads on spikes. They have none. And they're like, "What are we gonna do? What are we gonna say to people if we have nothing to show before our financial appropriation elapses?"

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Because they're supposed to give reports on what they've been doing. So they knew, crap, we gotta have something in these reports.

ROBERT FIESELER: We got nothing. So they decided, we're gonna go after some of the professors at the University of Florida who were targeted in the federal Red Scare. Don't you remember this guy, Professor Reynolds? Wasn't he targeted? Didn't he resign? We're going to get the commie that got away, proverbially. We're going to go get this guy.

So they start staking out in Gainesville. They send agents to stake out professors who had been targeted.

BLAIR HODGES: Was Strickland there yet? Was this when—correct? Sheriff Strickland? So he's a big part in the book.

ROBERT FIESELER: He's the chief investigator. He's Charlie Johns's chief lieutenant, man on the ground. Charlie Johns preferred to do most of his dirty work through proxies.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, and he's also doing his insurance company and his other money-making schemes.

ROBERT FIESELER: Correct.

BLAIR HODGES: He was a busy guy. [laughter]

ROBERT FIESELER: He had a lot of other spoils mechanisms to pay attention to. So he sends Strickland to stalk these professors.

Again, the Johns Committee has no qualifications or even the competencies to unearth a Soviet agent. These are not people schooled in the tradecraft of spies. They don't know this shit.

BLAIR HODGES: I love when the FBI got involved and they're like, "These guys don't know what the hell they're doing. What the hell?"

ROBERT FIESELER: Their level of incompetence could run pretty high. So basically, these state agents were hiding in the bushes outside professors' homes in Gainesville. They would note who came and left the houses of these professors. They didn't find any communists, but they did notice certain artsy, effeminate men who would also go to a local theater company called the Gainesville Little Theater, where they tended to hug each other a lot.

And then they also noticed that a lot of these men would go to bars. They called them guy bars, not gay bars, where these men would—there were no women. There were no women. These men would sing around pianos. And they started to realize. Then they followed some of these men to actual cruising grounds. They found hookup spots.

BLAIR HODGES: One of them in the basement of the courthouse, which—how the heck do you choose a courthouse?

ROBERT FIESELER: Correct. I mean, it's in plain sight. And that was the homosexual Times Square of Gainesville, Florida. My God. A place where desperate longing found desperate release. [laughter]

You would walk down into this basement bathroom of the county courthouse, and there would just be, along the walls, basically a lot of hand-drawn graffiti of men in various poses out of the gay Kama Sutra. I mean, you can imagine. This is something considered so hot for the 1950s.

And so this was where men would seek anonymous encounters, even some Southern men who were only homosexual in the Southern milieu. They hadn't even admitted to themselves that what they were doing was significant.

 

50 Shades of Gay – 21:57

 

BLAIR HODGES: I want to dig into that because, like, what was it like being gay in Florida at the time? When we think about being gay, I think I often think of it as an identity, like a way that someone thinks about themselves as a whole person. But at this time, there were people who didn't think of it that way.

So there were married men who, if you said they were gay because you found them cruising in a bathroom like this, they'd be like, "What are you talking about?" And they wouldn't be lying. They'd be like, "No, I'm not gay. I just like to do this thing."

ROBERT FIESELER: They'd be saying, "This is elaborate horseplay. This is something I'm seeking as a release." They would say, "Sex can only happen between me and my wife. Therefore, what I'm doing with these anonymous men is not anything that needs to be identified."

They considered it more an action they were performing than a self, than anything involving an identifier. It was a verb rather than a noun.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And they'd even break it down by active versus passive. So how they were doing the activities, they would also distinguish that way. This came out in some of the interrogations where they were like, "Hey, I was only passive. I wasn't active."

ROBERT FIESELER: Right. And passive would be accepting fellatio, accepting a blowjob, or topping at times, or allowing someone to give you a hand job, I suppose. And active would be—again, this is sex-negative, and obviously this is homophobic, especially towards bottoms—but active would mean being a bottom, a giver. It would be the individual that was considered, and this is so antiquated, but performing, by 1950s standards, the non-male role.

BLAIR HODGES: Right, right. Exactly.

ROBERT FIESELER: And so basically it all broke down like this. So there were plenty of men in the basement bathroom who went down there and claimed that this didn't mean anything about them because they were only accepting blowjobs.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I wasn't the one giving them.

ROBERT FIESELER: Correct.

BLAIR HODGES: And so the committee is noticing all of this action going on now. They're like, "Hey, we can get some results here. Why don't we focus in on this gay underground and start busting people for that?" And did they tie it into the communism stuff as well, or how did that work?

ROBERT FIESELER: Well, they started staking out these places because they were claiming, basically, that this homosexual underground might have something to do with Marxism because, supposedly, the Soviets wanted to destroy the American family before the first Red boots set foot on American soil.

BLAIR HODGES: So turn them gay, and then the American family will collapse or whatever.

ROBERT FIESELER: Basically. This was another way to destabilize American society and end the Southern way of life.

BLAIR HODGES: Did they also think, too, that military stuff—so if gay stuff was going on in the military, they would be vulnerable to telling America's secrets or something? Weren't they liabilities because of that?

ROBERT FIESELER: Right. Yeah, there was this claim from the post-World War II Truman administration into Eisenhower, this idea that being gay, if you were in a position of authority, made you vulnerable to blackmail.

 

American Views on Homosexuality: The Bible, the DSM, and Kinsey – 25:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so we kind of get a picture of how gay people were thinking of themselves at the time. What about broader public opinion about gay people? You mention two really important books of the era that helped define the RSV, so the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and the DSM, the book for the American Psychiatric Association.

What do we learn about what people thought about gay people from those sources at the time?

ROBERT FIESELER: The RSV Bible came out in 1946. Basically, it was the first English-language translation of the Bible that included the word homosexual, and not in a positive sense. It translated the traditional Greek words for what were a lot of sexual worship traditions in, you know, the zero zeroes, et cetera, as this late-1800s German word, homosexual.

So basically, it made a direct translation, and not in a positive sense. It's Leviticus. It's First Corinthians. It's saying it's an abomination, et cetera.

And this is important because in the South, this is the era of the creation of the so-called Bible Belt. So basically, it's very Baptist, very evangelical in the South. And many of these denominations in the South adhere to a concept called biblical literalism. Whatever the Bible literally says in English is the word of God.

And so basically, you have homosexuality being declared a sin one-to-one formally. Not just, you know, men who dirty themselves. No. Homosexuals, adulterers, thieves, murderers—they're all in the same basket.

So the RSV Bible creates this sort of religious ferment against homosexuals, and basically that builds throughout the 1950s.

Then in the 1950s, too, you have the American Psychiatric Association creating the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which labels homosexuality as a disease, as a social disturbance and a disorder.

So basically, one-to-one, you have religious power suddenly saying homosexuality is evil. And you have medical authorities co-signing that in another way and saying that homosexuality is a dangerous social disturbance.

And so that created widespread antipathy, fear, paranoia, and panic involving homosexuality, where it was one of the least popular concepts in existence in American society, on par with nuclear war, just as bad.

BLAIR HODGES: And it was already generally not liked by the public. It wasn't like the public was like, "Oh, being gay is great," and then these sources came out. This seemed to kind of solidify societal prejudices or reflect the fact that homosexuality appearing in the RSV, to me, is a reflection of the prejudice that was already there being put into the text.

And with the American Psychiatric Association's manual, sort of the same thing. You also talk about how this was a really crucial time for America's understanding of sex in general because of the Kinsey studies that were coming out at this time, really complicating the picture of human sexuality at this time.

ROBERT FIESELER: Right. So it's the book by the sexologist at Indiana University, Alfred Kinsey, who published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was one of the first actual studies about the real sex lives of American men. And it revealed this complicated factor, the fact that basically about a third of the population had performed, or would in their lifetime perform, some aspect of same-sex behavior.

And it created this notion of the Kinsey Scale, you know, one to six, where you would be the most homosexual versus the most heterosexual. Right? There wasn't this notion of absolute polarity. A lot of people would fall in the middle of the Kinsey Scale, claiming some opposite-sex attraction, some same-sex attraction.

And that angered the public, too, to learn about any of the scientific basis for this. Because they're like, "Oh my gosh, homosexuality is a sin. It's a disease. And it's everywhere. It's everywhere."

BLAIR HODGES: And it's an immediate threat, and you can get recruited into it. So this is where their ideas of—we hear today people talking about grooming, especially with regards to trans people. Back then, the same kind of discourse was used to say homosexuals are trying to recruit people.

Like Anita Bryant, this activist coming out of Florida. She sang the Florida orange juice song. Christian fundamentalist woman, crusaded against gay rights. She's saying, "They're coming for the children." She's like, "I know I would never have a gay child. The only way that could ever happen is if the gays recruit that child."

So they could kind of point to Kinsey, incorrectly and improperly, to bolster these fears, actually.

ROBERT FIESELER: Sure. So they would use the same evidence that individuals who were trying to claim, "See, homosexuality is no big deal. It's always been here," would use, to say, "No, homosexuals can't reproduce biologically. Therefore, they must tempt the vulnerable into their aberrant lifestyle. And we need to make sure that we get the predators."

BLAIR HODGES: And so the Johns Committee is jumping on that train.

We're talking to Robert Fieseler about the book American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives. This was actually a Kirkus Best Book of the Year for 2025, also recognized as an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book.

Bobby graduated from the Columbia Journalism School, and right now he's pursuing a PhD at Tulane University as a Mellon Fellow.

 

Gay Interrogations – 30:31

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, Bobby. Some of the most difficult parts of the book for me to read, the ones that hit me most emotionally, I think, were the interrogations of the suspected gay people. And you were able to get into these records and actually read the back and forth because these were recorded. These were tape-recorded and transcribed.

And so we see how these individuals were trapped, how they were treated, how some of them turned on each other to protect themselves, and how that often backfired. Anyway, as a gay man yourself, what was it like to go through those? Because for me, it was an emotional experience.

ROBERT FIESELER: It was quite gutting. Basically, it was a process not just of reading the transcripts, because most of the transcripts were heavily redacted and censored. I had to go through a multi-year process of noting censorship mistakes and also noting mentions of these individuals and people in other documents that actually weren't censored, to piece together who was being targeted, where they were taken, what was being said about them in the interrogations, and actually how they suffered and what happened to their lives afterwards.

And as a gay person, I wondered who I would have been. I honestly did. And this is why I tried to approach each interrogation with compassion and understanding that I can't transplant the ethos, the understanding I have about gay life, about queer life from the 21st century, back into the 1950s.

And so I was seeing and feeling a lot of sympathy with individuals who were in an utter state of panic, who were being told suddenly that basically they were being taken out of their lives, abducted, brought to isolated places, soundproof rooms of the campus police department, isolated motel rooms on the edge of university towns, where they would then be sat before state agents, state lawyers, sometimes, honestly, state senators or state house representatives, public officials.

And they were being told that this behavior that they hadn't even thought much about, that they had participated in in their lives, was illegal, consequential, and that they needed to spill their guts now. Or basically they would have to tell the same story, the same embarrassing story, in a public hearing where they would be embarrassed and publicly destroyed, just like they'd seen happen to the NAACP leaders.

Except it would be about an even worse topic, believe it or not, in the South. A worse topic than integration. It would be about their male sex lives.

And what would happen then if they were forced to talk about that in public, under oath, is that would ruin not just their reputation, but it would destroy their families' names. It would lead to a string of... They knew in their own hearts that it would lead to a string of suicides.

BLAIR HODGES: Probably a lot of them had families, like married.

ROBERT FIESELER: And so they were worried, because these were individuals that had much to lose. And they were. Also, this was an era where there was a lot of pre-antipathy toward law enforcement, where this was their first interaction with state authorities that was negative.

So a lot of them thought that if a cop says, "Oh, just give me a little bit so that we can all—give me a little bit of information here, and then we can all end this thing and go home," that that was actually true. That if they just stated something small on the record, basically that would get them out of the room and that would put them back in good graces with the powers that be and with the society that they actually loved and related to.

A lot of these men thought of themselves as heterosexual and wanted to. And so basically their interrogation was a process of their being psychologically destroyed.

BLAIR HODGES: Were there any particular interrogations that stand out to you still? Like any back-and-forths that have stuck in your mind since you put the book together?

ROBERT FIESELER: Yeah, several. So one that really got to me was the reputational destruction of the head of the University of Florida geography department, Sig Dietrich, Dr. Sig Dietrich, who was basically the greatest scholar of Florida studies ever in history.

This was a man who loved Florida more than anyone, who saw something special in this post-World War II boom state that had been nothing prior to World War II, basically a rural agricultural backwater, that he saw become transformed through Cape Canaveral, through the advent of air conditioning, through Miami exploding and becoming the Magic City, into this cultural and scientific envy of the world.

And he was there to study all of it. He was so excited. 

BLAIR HODGES: And he had built one heck of a department too. Like, an incredible geography department at the university. So it wasn't just his love of Florida, but also his building of an incredible academic community.

ROBERT FIESELER: Internationally respected, published in God knows how many places. Former governors had asked him for advice.

And he had a sexual secret.

And the state of Florida targeted him, pulled him to a random hotel room on the edge of town, forced him to confess about his homosexual liaisons that he'd randomly had on campus, though he was married and had a child, and just utterly, utterly broke and destroyed him. Took him basically to psychological foundation levels where basically he—

BLAIR HODGES: The brink of suicide.

ROBERT FIESELER: Yes, he actually would attempt suicide after these interrogations and after basically what happened to him.

And he confessed. He refused to give other names, but he confessed because of his own unique circumstance. His wife had fallen ill. She became physically unable to have sex with him, which in the '50s was cause for divorce, actually. But he loved his wife, so he didn't divorce her. He didn't want to cheat on her, so he couldn't be with another woman.

BLAIR HODGES: But with a woman. Do you think he believed—do you think this was really his story? This is where I wonder, like, was this really his story, or was this his way of saying, "This will help get me off"?

ROBERT FIESELER: Very good question. No. He was a penitent Catholic. I think he was in very incredible denial. And I think he felt honestly that the sexual liaisons he was having anonymously with other men did not constitute sex in the same way as sex with his wife.

Now, this probably made him bisexual, you know what I mean? But he didn't relate to that term. And so he confessed very quickly.

BLAIR HODGES: He almost seemed relieved. Almost relieved to be like, "Thank you for letting me get this off my chest."

ROBERT FIESELER: As if it was like the sacrament of confession or something.

BLAIR HODGES: And a fawn response, too, right? So his Catholic confession nature mixed with that nervous system fawn response. I see both of those coming together for him.

ROBERT FIESELER: And they basically destroyed him. And they even got the story of his wife out of him.

And then at the end, the thing that got me was, he knows basically that he's lost his entire reputation. It's only a matter of time before he's gonna get fired from his job, which he loves, that he's gonna lose his position in society. He's gonna lose his source—

BLAIR HODGES: He was working on the atlas.

ROBERT FIESELER: Yeah. He was working on a major publication for the University of Florida, this thing called the Atlas of Florida. It was the first academic compendium attempting to chart the growth of the state. He was the brainchild of this major project. He'd recruited other scholars for it. He knew he was going to get kicked off of this project.

And basically he said at the end of the interrogation—and it actually is one of the saddest things I can—I almost... it almost was the title of the book. He said, "What should I do now?"

After the interrogators were done with him, they told him, "Act normal as ever."

Oh man, that destroyed me. That got deep into my little middle-class, closeted childhood. "Act normal as ever." Oh no.

And so then I saw, basically, for weeks later, this man lived in panic. He shuddered whenever the phone rang because he thought it was going to be his boss calling to fire him. And eventually the phone did ring for that reason.

And then after he was fired, he attempts suicide by an overdose of aspirin, where he actually climbs to the top of the geography building on the state campus. And he basically ponders throwing himself off. He only falls backwards instead of forwards accidentally.

And then basically he has this entire brave story of how it's almost like a Job-like biblical tale, to be honest, of how he then pieces together a life from the wreckage of reputational dishonor.

This man actually maintained his status as an incredible international scholar, but he was nothing in Florida and nothing in the United States for the rest of his career. He ended his academic career at the University of Puerto Rico.

And when he died actually, in the 80s—this is a key psychological thing for him—he asked to be buried in his University of Florida academic regalia, though he'd not worked for that university, and he wasn't even welcome on campus, for decades.

That's what it meant so much to him. It meant so much to him, what he did there.

 

Resistance in the Courts – 39:54

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, Dr. Dietrich's story, that's one that absolutely stood out to me. And so what we're seeing is this Florida Legislative Investigation Committee. They're successfully weaving communism, racial integration, and homosexuality together into this grand conspiracy that they authorized themselves to investigate and punish.

And while all that was happening, talk a little bit about what was effective at impeding their work. Because I think this kind of bears on things that we're experiencing today. So I actually saw some interesting ideas of, like, hey, we should try that.

ROBERT FIESELER: Sure. What was most successful at impeding their work were actually lawsuits in two instances.

One, the NAACP was actually successfully pursuing a lawsuit through various appellate courts that eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Johns Committee wanted to jail Father Theodore Gibson, president of the Miami NAACP. And he was actually the lead plaintiff of the school desegregation lawsuit in Miami.

Separately, they wanted to jail him because he was in contempt of the Johns Committee because he'd failed to produce the membership rolls. And Robert L. Carter was Theodore Gibson's attorney. He took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he was arguing for freedom of association.

And Robert L. Carter had a ton of appellate law experience. He co-argued the Brown case and—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated schools, or at least ordered the desegregation of schools. Yeah. So this was a pro. He was up against this guy named Hawes, who is a third main character in the book. We got Charlie Johns, we have Strickland, and we got Hawes, who's kind of the—

ROBERT FIESELER: Lawyer side. He's attorney for the Johns Committee.

BLAIR HODGES: He comes across as kind of a stooge.

ROBERT FIESELER: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: Versus this powerhouse.

ROBERT FIESELER: Correct. He had no appellate law experience. In the hubris of the state of Florida, they decided to send Mark Hawes, basically their lawyer and chief lieutenant, instead of the state attorney general, to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court.

And it is probably the most humiliating, piss-poor performance I've ever seen. Hawes wastes his initial minutes and seconds complaining of a cold. Then he tries to tell a joke that nobody laughs at. And the Supreme Court clerk notes in brackets, basically, "attempt at laughter."

BLAIR HODGES: Sounds like some of my interviews, Bobby. [laughter]

ROBERT FIESELER: And it results in the Supreme Court justices only asking Carter about precedents and all sorts of things. Robert L. Carter basically dominates the whole time. And Robert L. Carter wins a case he may otherwise have lost, 5-4, basically preserving the freedom of Miami NAACP president Theodore Gibson by the skin of his teeth.

And that shuts down the Johns Committee's anti-Black campaign. They couldn't go after the NAACP after this because basically they had lost so brutally in the highest court of the land.

BLAIR HODGES: So step one: resist. Courts. Go for it. Obstruct. Use the legal system as much as you can.

ROBERT FIESELER: Yes.

 

Resistance in the Streets – 43:41

 

BLAIR HODGES: There was also student outcry at the University of Florida.

ROBERT FIESELER: There was. This is right when Art Copleston was basically in the midst of ending his tenure at the University of Florida. He had survived interrogations with the Johns Committee. He'd not confessed. He'd not given up the names of any other queer folk.

The student body at the University of Florida was starting to get so pissed that there were state agents basically ruining their college experience, stalking around, preventing them from having their four years of basically consequence-free life. And they were tiring of the anti-sex angle, even if it was angled against queers. They didn't like the moralism to it.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, they weren't necessarily pro-gay rights, per se, but they were also like, "How about we just lay off altogether? Yeah, get out of here."

ROBERT FIESELER: And you're making my degree worthless, basically, by damaging the reputation of the school I'm at.

And so the state legislature was in session. The students were all convinced that Charlie Johns was going to do something to shut down their school. Finally, for whatever reason, the power goes out at all the dorms at the University of Florida, and they're all convinced that Charlie Johns has finally succeeded in shutting down their school.

And they riot. They riot. They burn an effigy of Charlie Johns. They all go out with a bunch of signs. They decide they're gonna celebrate sexuality. And all the people in the male dorms are gonna go to the female dorms, and they're gonna have a panty raid.

And basically they turn over dumpsters and light 'em on fire. It's basically a student uprising and a rejection of the presence of the Johns Committee on the University of Florida campus. And the media and the university administration all collude to just try to make it seem like, "Oh, this is just college jocularity."

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, they want to downplay the overall messaging of it. And I was really frustrated with the ways that the president of the University of Florida kind of colluded with the Johns Committee, in part because they held the purse strings. So he's probably thinking about the financial welfare of his school. But also, he just didn't really put up much of a fight.

Other schools in Florida put up a little bit more of a fight. And I see that again playing out as the Trump administration's trying to crack down on woke, you know, DEI, and on trans folks, coming down on institutions which are then often buckling instead of fighting this stuff. So I'm seeing echoes. You know, history doesn't necessarily repeat, but it rhymes quite often. I see that happening.

And so people have got to check out the book if they want to dig more into that side of things. Again, it's called American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives by Robert Fieseler.

 

The Music Professor Fights Back – 46:12

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, so you mentioned that first Supreme Court case that FLIC lost. Another Supreme Court case impacted the downfall of FLIC.

This is a professor by the name of Neal, William James Neal, a Black music professor who was being investigated for homosexual activity. And he breaks things open by finally pushing back and suing. So he's like, "I'm actually gonna sue."

What's interesting is he was a Black professor. He didn't get the buy-in of the NAACP or other Black activists because of the gay angle. Talk a little bit about Professor Neal's situation.

ROBERT FIESELER: Yeah. William James Neal was a closeted music professor at a segregated junior college in the Tampa and St. Pete area called Gibbs.

And William James Neal was called by his white superintendent boss into a room under false premises and then held there for several hours until, eventually, to get out of the room, William James Neal makes a verifiably false confession after he'd asked for attorneys and been denied it.

He makes a verifiably false confession to basically giving or receiving a blowjob in New York, in a different state, at a time when he actually was verifiably not in that other state.

So he is fired nonetheless. And in addition, his teaching credentials are revoked, so he cannot teach in Florida or any other domain because of this disciplinary measure. And his name was trumpeted in all of the state newspapers and on all of the state TV news channels for being a pervert teacher who was fired for reasons of moral turpitude due to homosexuality.

So William James Neal is the first—he's a junior college professor, Black, in a segregated state. He's the first teacher who actually tries to do this. The professors don't even do this at the universities. He is going to.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. He's like the last guy you'd think would try.

ROBERT FIESELER: Basically, he's at the point of desperation. I don't know what motivates it.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, he had that great tactic, that he lied. He can prove that he lied, which he can argue was because of the coercion that they were putting him under and object on those grounds. So I feel like he's the most unlikely to sue in my mind, but also set himself up so well to sue through his direct experience.

ROBERT FIESELER: Correct. And he knew they were violating their own procedures to fire him. He'd figured that out too.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes.

ROBERT FIESELER: And so he decides, basically, he leaves the state to make his race not an issue, because everyone forgets that this is a Black professor.

So then he hires two white appellate lawyers and he sues in the state of Florida. And it goes all the way up to the state Supreme Court. And he wins in a very, very conservative court.

And you can tell in all the legal cases that the issue of his race, the mention of it, never comes up. Not once. Basically, the racist, conservative Florida Supreme Court justices, many of whom were friends with Charlie Johns, forgot or were not aware of the fact that this was a Black professor from Gibbs, a segregated junior college.

So he wins. And not just wins in state Supreme Court, but basically the state Supreme Court is so adamant that the Johns Committee had broken their own laws to fire William James Neal, they attack and go after the chief investigator, Remus Strickland.

And they said that basically this man is an embarrassment. He had no right to be doing what he was doing, not just with William James Neal, but with any supposedly accused or allegedly gay professor or teacher.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Because they'd gone into the school systems now. They'd got the university stuff going. And as people can see in the book, they also went after teachers in the school system.

So Professor Neal carries the day with the Florida State Supreme Court, and that kind of kicks the other leg out from under the stool of FLIC. So they're in big trouble now, and they're going to start shutting things down.

Charlie Johns is trying to save things by—he kind of sacrifices his two henchmen. He sacrifices Strickland and Hawes, basically like, "Okay, guys, I'll cut you a deal. We'll kick those guys to the curb, but let's keep this thing rolling."

ROBERT FIESELER: It's a game of chess, right? He basically sacrifices bishop and rook.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And as things are just collapsing around him, then begins the cover-up. But before we talk about that, I also want to mention this really helped contribute to the rise of a gay political consciousness in Florida. Gay people really started to think of themselves more as a collective, more as a people that could follow in the footsteps of other civil rights movements that had been happening around the country.

Now Florida was really going to start getting involved with that, which is a really awesome part of it. But what was FLIC going to do to cover their tracks? And this affected how you could ultimately tell the story.

ROBERT FIESELER: Yeah. They decided, basically, in their last acts, after they'd lost their appropriation, as they were turning out the lights, that they were going to burn all their photographic records of all their spying. And also that they were going to permanently seal away, using arcane, weird rules of a state constitution from 1885, from public review, all of the records of their materials, claiming that it all had occurred during an executive session.

And that seal stays in play for the next several decades, leading to a kind of forced forgetfulness where even individuals who were anti-queer or anti-Black, who sort of parrot or mimic Charlie Johns's tactics or who have a recollection and were inspired by what Charlie Johns did, lose the understanding that they have this lineage tying back to this state McCarthy cabal.

BLAIR HODGES: It's unreal because Florida is now known as the Sunshine State. In fact, one of the reasons we hear funny news stories about Florida Man, like, "Florida man ties up an alligator and throws it into his neighbor's house," we hear about all this because there are these Sunshine Laws where you can see court records, you can see all kinds of public records. Basically, government records are really super public there.

But then we have this example of the FLIC records, which they worked so hard to suppress and hide.

ROBERT FIESELER: Even during the years of supposed government in sunshine, the FLIC records, the Johns Committee records, still stayed out of public purview.

 

Bobby Secures the Records – 52:17

 

BLAIR HODGES: Right. And you talk about the debt you have toward some of the Johns Committee scholars who preceded you. And I think one of the most remarkable things about this book is the preface, where you talk about the daring getaway where you got ahold of this kind of unknown, forgotten second set of Johns Committee records that the state had forgotten about, that helped bust everything wide open.

ROBERT FIESELER: Yeah. A Tallahassee paralegal who was the first Johns Committee scholar, when they were releasing the records in the '90s and they actually began the censorship and redaction effort in that release, somehow won the sympathy of state Senate staff through sloppy redaction. I don't know how. Who then just unofficially sort of ferreted her the secret second set of Johns Committee records, which she just put in her Hyundai and then drove away from the Senate building. There was no gift receipt or anything.

And then she hid these for decades until I read her 1980s thesis on the Johns Committee. I was so impressed, I reached out to her. And she told me she basically has this entire war room.

BLAIR HODGES: What were you thinking in that moment? Because this is unreal. I think it kind of made this book possible, that you have access to some of the records. It's really hard to look at them. They're heavily redacted to the point where you can't see names, and they're redacted in ways that cover up perpetrators and bad dealers as much as trying to, quote-unquote, protect victims.

What are you thinking when you see this is a treasure trove?

ROBERT FIESELER: I cried. I mean, it's overwhelming, you know, when you're getting crumbs off the table and you're trying to piece together a historical narrative that's substantiable based on that. And then suddenly you peek over the table and the main course is revealed to you.

This is after several years of toil in the state archives, not thinking this was ever gonna happen and wondering if I was ever gonna be able to write the kind of book about this historical atrocity that I wanted to.

And so it was just like, I'm driving through the mist, and suddenly the mist clears and I can see the mountain. It was incredible. An incredible moment.

I asked Bonnie later why she did this, why she told me she had the records and why she gave them to me, of all people, after she'd hidden them for so many years. She told me she felt a kinship with me.

And then she said the funniest thing, because she's such a quirky person. And I guess I'm quirky too. But she told me she went on my website, she liked my promo photograph that had my dog in it. She liked my dog. That was the reason she gave it to me.

BLAIR HODGES: What kind of dog did you have? You have two, right?

ROBERT FIESELER: I had a Cairn Terrier who passed away.

I couldn't bring myself to remove the picture because I loved him so much, and I can't. It's such a pretty picture. And she got something from that.

In some ways, that was my baby boy's last gift to me. When she told me she liked my dog, whatever, I was fine with that. You know, weirder reasons for historical breakthroughs have happened, and this is just mine.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm so glad it did because not only did you do such a good job putting the story together, but you are a terrific writer. Like, this book is riveting, the way that it's written. It's so good. For all the difficulties, for all the heartache in the book, it's so fun to read.

ROBERT FIESELER: Oh, thank you. I mean, I write the kind of books that remind me of the kind of history books that I like to read, which are things that grip you.

I was a teenager that read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. That era. I read Friday Night Lights, Buzz Bissinger. I like nonfiction that unspools the great mystery of reality and then reads beautifully, almost like a novel, where it reveals the fact that life in reality is so weird. What we're living in is so unpredictable, and so much is happening that's exciting and consequential side by side in our lives.

And so I love that kind of writing, and I thank you for that compliment. It's wonderful.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And it's so relevant too. I mean, in your acknowledgments, you don't even name the employees of the Florida State Archives for fear that it could jeopardize their jobs.

I mean, Florida's still a hotspot for homophobia, transphobia, queerphobia in general. Governor Ron DeSantis obviously harassing and legislatively persecuting queer people throughout the state. So yeah, in your acknowledgments, you're like, "I'm not going to name some folks because I don't want to get anybody in trouble, but thank you." Right?

ROBERT FIESELER: I mean, well, you've got to figure that out. Especially when I realized I was being surveilled by the state in the midst of writing this, I realized that these state employees who used the rules to help me—I don't want to penalize them for assisting with the creation of this work. I have to be careful on their behalf.

BLAIR HODGES: How did you find out they were looking into you?

ROBERT FIESELER: I found in the state archive and requested an unredacted and uncensored box that was actually in the archives of the clerk of the Florida House. So this is just archival mole-man digging.

But I knew in these records was the only extant record of the minutes of the Johns Committee meetings. So I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm going to be able to read whatever they said, who was there. Oh, this is great."

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, they have their names listed there and stuff.

ROBERT FIESELER: I saw the box. They pulled it out, and then they told me, "We're not going to be able to give it to you because these are unredacted. So we're going to have to send it to general counsel, and it's going to be away for several months. And we may have to redact the whole thing before you can see it."

And I realized that all of my archive pulls in Tallahassee at the State of Florida archives were observed. They were watching what I was requesting, and they knew what I had just found. I didn't even get to hold it. And basically, as I was about to get it, they just tore it away from me.

And basically I had just pointed them toward uncensored material that they may then destroy. I realized it was like the movie Chinatown.

I thought what I was doing was so boring. Like, who's watching a researcher in an archive look at pages? I couldn't believe they were doing this. But I was wondering why they'd made me only look at one folder at one time and why I had to sit in one specific seat. They insisted I sit in that one seat. I always thought it was weird, but I let them do it.

And now I realized it's because I was being watched by authorities the whole time.

BLAIR HODGES: And what's it to them if the story from 1954 to 1965 or whatever gets out? What's it to them?

ROBERT FIESELER: I think they fear that someone who understands this lineage will be able to tie this lineage to efforts of the current administration and specifically the anti-gay, anti-woke tactics that they're utilizing in terms of spoils, in terms of politics of revenge.

To know that it actually came from somewhere, that the state of Florida basically tried to submerge this history, and that this isn't new. And that actually, in the past, prior perpetrators of these same tactics have been defeated. And here were the strategies of defeat.

That's not something they want in the public light.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:00:01

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I want people to know about how to defeat it. I think looking at this history is a good way to get started. Again, the book is American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives by Robert Fieseler.

And Robert, we always like to close Relationscapes with regrets, challenges, and surprises. This is a moment for you to reflect on the creation of this book. If there's anything now that it's published that you'd change, do you regret anything about this book? Or you can speak to what was the most challenging—and I think, I mean, deciphering all the names, it seems like a gargantuan effort—or the biggest surprise to you as you were putting it together. You can speak to any of those things.

ROBERT FIESELER: I think the biggest challenge to this book was feeling so proud and certain that I'd created a work that people should pay attention to, and then launching it this year of all years. Launching a queer history and a civil rights history this year and seeing the consequences that had happened to our cultural landscape.

Because if I had launched this book two years ago, there would have been a completely different reception to it. More friendly, obviously, a greater outpouring. But basically I was facing headwinds in an insane way, where so many individuals and organizations who I thought were going to show up for this book, including history book festivals in random Delaware that had my picture on their website, decided they didn't want to host me.

So many different individuals that were counting on state and federal funding now had DEI concerns. And so basically I had to create and concoct ways to get the message out myself. And new allies came forward, and new friends, and new brave people who I'd never met before and never suspected came forward to support this baby book and to support the message getting out there.

And so many of them were members of the disenfranchised, very large population of either moderate-to-progressive Floridians that are completely out of power. Completely out of power in this massive state.

The state of Florida is so large, basically, and it's growing. It's the fastest-growing state. More than a thousand people move there every day, basically. And the disenfranchised population there is so big, it's basically larger than the state of Georgia.

And they're so appreciative. I can't tell you how appreciative those Floridians are that I'm giving them this story and this material and this word for them to spread. That's been so incredible.

So I hadn't faced this before. When I launched my first queer book in 2018,

BLAIR HODGES: That was Tinderbox?

ROBERT FIESELER: Yeah, and I had the wind at my back. I was just sailing forward, and I didn't even realize it. And all these queer groups and all these queer-allied organizations that had state and federal money, they're wanting me to come and talk, and the ALA wants me to give a talk at the conference.

They didn't want it this time. I'm spilling tea or—

BLAIR HODGES: It's infuriating. It really is.

ROBERT FIESELER: I'm gonna tell you something. But that's... so that work, it made the work, and it's made getting the message out there, so meaningful this time.

Where I'm finding the right people, right? And not just outside of the realm of hype. Just what happens where the right people are finding this, making connections with groups like Equality Florida and the former president Nadine Smith, and bonding on them and realizing, like Nadine says, basically we're going to want to take forward another round at this apology resolution to try to make the state legislature apologize for the historic atrocities of the Johns Committee.

Then being able to participate in that is amazing.

So it's been this incredible Herculean task of not just publishing this book that was hard to write and writing this book that was hard to write, but now getting individuals reticent to look at the truth to understand that they deserve the truth in this anti-truth time. That it's not something to fear, that it's not divisive and negative. I'm not a pundit.

And that this is something that will be enlightening, empowering, urgent, necessary, inspiring to—

BLAIR HODGES: No, it is inspiring.

ROBERT FIESELER: You will be able to use this in your life and in your resistance to the nonsense.

And so that's a different tack than my first book. My first book was just like, basically, I didn't have enough time to do—

BLAIR HODGES: All the stuff. To do all the stuff.

ROBERT FIESELER: And this time, well, this time it was at the ground level, at the grassroots level, event by event by event by event by event, climbing that mountain.

And you know what? That's taught me so much. And I'm going to tell you something. I liked this journey, even though it was harder. I've liked this journey more.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, as I say, it is an absolutely outstanding book. I give it my highest recommendation.

The book is American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, an incredible history, tragically relevant to our time.

Bobby, thanks so much for talking to us about it today.

ROBERT FIESELER: Of course. Thank you.

 

Outro – 01:05:17

 

BLAIR HODGES: Another Relationscapes journey comes to an end. Thanks for joining me.

If this is your first time, welcome to the journey. I hope you'll check out other episodes while you're here. I always like to recommend fellow traveler episodes, so if you enjoyed this one, check out Brandon Wolf's interview. It's called Safe Spaces: A Pulse Nightclub Survivor Remembers. We talk about Florida's Pulse nightclub massacre, which happened 10 years ago this month.

If you're enjoying Relationscapes, please rate it and review it in Apple Podcasts. You can also rate it in Spotify. Another way you can help me grow the show is by recommending it to a friend. So if somebody in your life came to mind while you were listening to this one, send them a link.

You can follow me on Instagram or TikTok to see some videos from this episode and some other bonus stuff, @_relationscapes.

Mates of State provides our theme music. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and I hope to spend more time with you soon here on Relationscapes.