Bob Kunst is an American gay rights activist and perennial candidate. [1]
Contents
- Early life
- Gay rights activism
- Democratic politics
- Other activism
- Support of Donald Trump
- References
Bob Kunst is an American gay rights activist and perennial candidate. [1]
Kunst was born in 1941 in Miami Beach, Florida.
He worked in marketing for the Miami Toros professional soccer team in the 1970s. [2]
He supported the 1976 Miami-Dade County Ordinance for Gay Rights [3] and was later involved in activism for people with AIDS. [4]
Kunst opposed Save Our Children, a Dade County, Florida voter-approved county initiative supported by singer Anita Bryant and her then-husband Bob Green. The initiative repealed the previous anti-discrimination ordinance Kunst had supported. [5] He helped organize the subsequent pressure campaign on citrus industry corporate sponsors of Bryant. [6] The law was eventually repealed by the state Supreme Court of Florida in 2010. [7]
In 1991, after allegations of financial mismanagement were published in the Miami Herald, Kunst was fired as the executive director of Cure AIDS Now. [8]
As a Democratic Party politician, Kunst unsuccessfully campaigned in the Democratic primary against Bob Graham in the 1986 United States Senate elections in Florida. Kunst also ran unsuccessfully in the 2010 United States House of Representatives Election, this time as an unaffiliated independent, against incumbent Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat, in Florida. [1] Kunst volunteered for the Hillary Rodham Clinton 2008 U.S. presidential campaign in Florida. [9]
Kunst was president (1991-2001) of Shalom International, a Jewish group combating global Neo-Nazism and Neo-fascism movements. And he was a co-founder of the Oral Majority in 1982, the liberal and secular counter-protest group of the Religious Right organizations Moral Majority and later the Christian Coalition. [10]
In 2018, Kunst protested outside the courthouse where Noor Salman, Omar Mateen's widow, was being tried for complicity in her husband's Pulse nightclub massacre. Kunst held a sign reading: "'Fry her till she has no 'Pulse'". Noor Salman was found not guilty during a trial that also exposed the fact that she was abused by her husband. [11]
Kunst supported Donald Trump for U.S. president in 2016 [12] 2020, [13] and 2024. [14] As of 2019, he said he had attended 150 Trump rallies. [13] He protested the March 2023 indictment of Donald Trump. [15]
Anita Jane Bryant was an American singer and a Christian activist against gay rights in the United States. She had three top 20 hits in the United States in the early 1960s. She was the 1958 Miss Oklahoma beauty pageant winner, and a brand ambassador for the Florida Citrus Commission from 1969 to 1980.
This is a list of notable events in the history of LGBT rights that took place in the year 1977.
This is a list of notable events in the history of LGBT rights that took place in the 1970s.
Ruth Shack is an American politician who served as the sponsor of the 1977 Human Rights Ordinance in Miami-Dade County, Florida. She served on the Metro-Dade County Commission after being elected in 1976, 1978 and 1982. After leaving the commission, she became the President of the Dade Community Foundation. She retired in 2009.
Save Our Children, Inc. was an American political coalition formed in 1977 in Miami, Florida, to overturn a recently legislated county ordinance that banned discrimination in areas of housing, employment, and public accommodation based on sexual orientation. The coalition was publicly headed by celebrity singer Anita Bryant, who claimed the ordinance discriminated against her right to teach her children biblical morality. It was a well-organized campaign that initiated a bitter political fight between gay activists and Christian fundamentalists. When the repeal of the ordinance went to a vote, it attracted the largest response of any special election in Dade County's history, passing by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) people in the U.S. state of Florida have federal protections, but many face legal difficulties on the state level that are not experienced by non-LGBT residents. Same-sex sexual activity became legal in the state after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas on June 26, 2003, although the state legislature has not repealed its sodomy law. Same-sex marriage has been legal in the state since January 6, 2015. Discrimination on account of sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing and public accommodations is outlawed following the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County. In addition, several cities and counties, comprising about 55 percent of Florida's population, have enacted anti-discrimination ordinances. These include Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, St. Petersburg, Tallahassee and West Palm Beach, among others. Conversion therapy is also banned in a number of cities in the state, mainly in the Miami metropolitan area, but has been struck down by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. In September 2023, Lake Worth Beach, Florida became an official "LGBT sanctuary city" to protect and defend LGBT rights.
Equality Florida is a political advocacy group that advocates for civil rights and protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) residents of the U.S. state of Florida. Equality Florida consists of two organizations - Equality Florida Institute, Inc., the 501(c)(3) educational charity and Equality Florida Action, Inc., the 501(c)(4) advocacy organization. Together with over 300,000 supporters, these organizations form the largest civil rights organization dedicated to Florida's LGBTQ community.
This article concerns LGBT history in Florida.
The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation's Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality is a 1977 book by Anita Bryant, in which the author provides an account of her evangelical Christian campaign against a gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. The claims Bryant makes about homosexuality in the book have been described as false and unscholarly in nature.
The 2018 Florida gubernatorial election was held on November 6, 2018, to elect the next governor of Florida, alongside an election to the United States Senate, elections to the United States House of Representatives and other state and local elections. Incumbent two-term Republican Governor Rick Scott was term-limited and could not run for a third term, and he successfully ran for Florida's Class I Senate seat.
Ronni Lebman Sanlo is the Director Emeritus of the UCLA Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center and an authority on matters relating to LGBT students, faculty and staff in higher education. She recognized at an early age that she was a lesbian, but was too afraid to tell anybody. Sanlo went to college then married and had two children. At the age of 31, Ronni came out and lost custody of her young children. The treatment toward the LBGT community and her rights as a mother are what gave Sanlo the drive to get involved in activism and LGBT politics.
SAVE is a grassroots nonprofit political advocacy organization located in Miami, Florida. Founded in 1993, the organization's stated mission is to "promote, protect and defend equality for people in South Florida who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender."
Timothy A. Canova is an American politician and law professor specializing in banking and finance. Canova was a candidate for Florida's 23rd congressional district, unsuccessfully challenging Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the 2016 Democratic primary, and again in the 2018 general election, where he ran as an independent candidate. He later supported President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
On June 12, 2016, 29-year-old Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people and wounded 53 more in a mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, United States before Orlando Police officers fatally shot him after a three-hour standoff.
Omar Mir Seddique Mateen was an American terrorist and mass murderer who killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, before he was killed in a shootout with the local police. It was the deadliest mass shooting in American history until the Las Vegas Strip shooting on October 1, 2017, and it is the deadliest known incident of violence against LGBT people in U.S. history.
In 1977, the Texas State Bar Association invited country singer Anita Bryant to perform at a meeting in Houston, Texas. In response to Bryant's outspoken anti-gay views and her Save Our Children campaign, thousands of members of the Houston LGBT community and their supporters marched through the city to the venue in protest on June 16, 1977. The protests have been called "Houston's Stonewall" and set into motion the major push for LGBT rights in Houston.
Malcom Gregory Scott also known as Greg Scott, is an American writer, activist, and AIDS survivor. In 1987, the United States Navy (USN) discharged him for homosexuality, after which Scott worked to overturn the Department of Defense (DoD) directive prohibiting the military service of lesbian and gay Americans. Upon his discharge, Scott also learned he had tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). He was active in the Washington, D.C., chapters of ACT UP and Queer Nation. Scott was an advocate for legal access to medical marijuana, a critic of early HIV prevention education strategies, and a proponent for expanded academic research to support the public policy goals of queer communities. American journalist Michelangelo Signorile once called Scott "the proudest queer in America." Scott worked as a writer for Fox Television's America's Most Wanted, and his writing has appeared in several newspapers and magazines. Scott nearly died of Stage IV AIDS in 1995 and credited marijuana with his survival until effective anti-retroviral therapies became available.
Anne Ackerman was an American political activist. After retiring to Florida in 1969, Ackerman organized thousands of residents of condominiums near where she lived into a politically active group. Condominium residents turned out at very high rates and were recognized as a powerful force in the state's politics: politicians running for local and national office sought Ackerman's endorsement.
Miami has one of the largest and most prominent LGBTQ communities in the United States. Miami has had a gay nightlife scene as early as the 1930s. Miami has a current status as a gay mecca that attracts more than 1 million LGBT visitors a year. The Miami area as a whole has been gay-friendly for decades and is one of the few places where the LGBTQ community has its own chamber of commerce, the Miami-Dade Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (MDGLCC). As of 2005, Miami was home to an estimated 15,277 self-identifying gay and bisexual individuals. The Miami metropolitan area had an estimated 183,346 self-identifying LGBT residents.
Anthony Frank Sabatini is an American politician, attorney, and military officer serving as a captain in the Army National Guard. He previously served as a member of the Florida House of Representatives from the 32nd district from 2018 to 2022 and as a city commissioner for Eustis, Florida from 2017 to 2018. In 2022, he was the runner-up in Florida's 7th congressional district Republican primary, losing to Cory Mills. In December 2022, Sabatini was elected chair of the Lake County Republican party. He is well known for his staunch support of President Donald Trump.
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