Bob Kunst is an American gay rights activist and perennial candidate. [1]
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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 The initiative repealed the previous anti-discrimination ordinance Kunst had supported.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 [6] The law was eventually repealed by the state Supreme Court of Florida in 2010.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 with 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 in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. [12] He protested the March 2023 indictment of Donald Trump. [13]
Anita Jane Bryant is an American singer and political activist, known for anti-gay activism. She scored 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 from 1969 to 1980 for the Florida Citrus Commission.
This is a list of notable events in the history of LGBT rights that took place in the year 1977.
Deborah Wasserman Schultz is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative from Florida's 25th congressional district, first elected to Congress in 2004. A member of the Democratic Party, she is a former chair of the Democratic National Committee.
The 2002 Florida gubernatorial election took place on November 5, 2002 for the post of Governor of Florida. Incumbent Republican governor Jeb Bush defeated Democratic candidate Bill McBride. Bush became the first Republican governor of Florida to win re-election to a second term. This election was the last time until 2022 a Florida gubernatorial candidate won the general election by double digits or that a Republican won Miami-Dade County. This was the first time in Florida's history that a Republican Governor was re-elected.
Ruth Shack is an American politician who served as the sponsor of the 1977 Human Rights Ordinance in Miami-Dade County, Florida. She was elected to the Metro-Dade County Commission in 1976, 1978 and 1982. After leaving the commission, she became the president and CEO of the Dade Community Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organizations in Florida. 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 because the ordinance specifically required parochial Christian schools, like the one her children attended, to hire openly homosexual teachers. 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. In response to this vote, a group of gay and lesbian community members formed Pride South Florida, now known as Pride Fort Lauderdale, an organization whose mission was to fight for the rights of the gay and lesbian community in South Florida.
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.
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, Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old man, killed 49 people and wounded 53 more in a mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, United States. Orlando Police officers shot and killed him after a three-hour standoff.
Pulse was a gay bar, dance club, and nightclub in Orlando, Florida, founded in 2004 by Barbara Poma and Ron Legler. On June 12, 2016, the club was the scene of the second worst mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history, and the second deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since the September 11 attacks. Forty-nine people were killed and 53 other people were injured.
The 2018 United States House of Representatives elections in Florida were held on Tuesday, November 6, 2018, to elect the 27 U.S. representatives from the state of Florida, one from each of the state's 27 congressional districts. The elections coincided with the elections of other offices, including a gubernatorial election, other elections to the House of Representatives, elections to the United States Senate, and various state and local elections. The party primaries were held on August 28, 2018.
There were several protests organized by the LGBT community against the policies of United States President Donald Trump and his administration.
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.
The 2020 United States presidential election in Florida was held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as part of the 2020 United States presidential election, in which all 50 states and the District of Columbia participated. Florida voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote, pitting the Republican Party's nominee, incumbent president Donald Trump, and his running mate, Vice President Mike Pence, against Democratic Party nominee, former vice president Joe Biden, and his running mate, United States senator Kamala Harris, of California. Florida had 29 electoral votes in the Electoral College.