In 2017, Sean Baker’s film The Florida Project came out. It was titled after the code name for the 1971 project that became Walt Disney World.

I was born a second-generation Floridian in 1987. Everywhere I’ve lived, including New York, Ohio, and a major Florida city, people have received the fact of my nativity with some surprise. Tampa is full of people from somewhere else—other state locales, sure, but the northeast is particularly well-represented. My Pennsylvania college friends swore my accent matched theirs.

To Midwesterners and Northerners, I don’t seem authentically Floridian, whatever that might mean.

St. Augustine, billed as the oldest continuously-occupied city in the United States, was founded by Spanish colonists in 1565. Slaver Douglas Dummett, commonly considered the progenitor of the Florida citrus industry, began fruit grafting experiments in the 1830s along the Indian River, my home turf. The ancestors of Native peoples had lived in what would come to be called The Flowering Coast for 12,000 years before the conquistadores.

The assassination of Harry and Harriette Moore, 1951. My mother’s birth, 1956. My spelling-bee visit to the county center, which boasts an educational installation about the Moores, 2000.

My first Pride festival, St. Petersburg, 2017. My first ReadOUT, Gulfport, 2025.

One of the most comprehensive Archaic burial sites in the world is located in the north of my home county. It’s in the interest of moguls, developers, and hatemongers to homogenize Florida; to deny its Southern identity with one hand and excise its civil rights history with the other; to flatten its wetlands in truth and in myth, in order to achieve a blank canvas onto which has been printed and reprinted a particular portrait of the American dream.

I learned about the Windover people as a kid and have dreamed of them ever since: their apparent care for disabled group members, their water burials, the ossuaries undergirding housing developments as both dark metaphor and mirror image of the state’s limestone skeleton. I’ve put on waders and wandered in swamps for science projects, let myself revolve above the spring boil at Silver Glen for as long as my breath would hold.

Water burial mimics birth, the return to the womb and the rebirth of baptism. My baptism into the Mormon church, 1995. My rebirth into the world as an apostate, 2007. The second coming of my queerness, 2016. A second exile, a grasp toward fulfillment, 2018. So many selves I’ve consigned to the water.

As an expat in New York—as an American in post-America—I’ve had the thought that if I were going to die, I would go back to Florida first.

That to return to Florida would be to die.

When I began taking anthropology classes in college, I learned about linguistic relativity. That this notion had ever been in question was startling to me, someone raised in traditions which didn’t question the power of terminology, the brute force of speech. I knew how to describe Mormon women; I was becoming a Mormon woman, so there was a certain sure trajectory to my life. Weddings and children didn’t occupy my mind as aspirational milestones, merely future facts. I didn’t want them, but had no other framework for imagination. Even my teenage daydreams necessarily featured the romantic target converting to the church so it was ok for me to kiss them.

It probably goes without saying that I didn’t know any out queer people until college.

There are plenty of queer people who knew from a young age that they were different. There are many post-Mormons who left the church because of their queerness, rather than becoming queer due to leaving the church. I believed from a young age that I was bad, but queerness was so under-discussed that it didn’t even ping my radar as a possible Root Cause Of Sin.

Chief among the features of various fundamentalist stripes is an essential creative impoverishment.

If I’m my own mother in many ways, so is Tampa. I arrived in 2005, before I even turned 18. First city, first kiss, first drink, first fall, first apartment, first job in my field. I could not have been less prepared. Big Percival vibes.

Tampa isn’t a generous place, but its eye—like the sun—is impassive and so often turned from you. I thrived in its blind spots, not realizing my own self was mostly a collection of blind spots. I was freer than I’d ever been: free to drive around by myself, to sit in coffee shops before I was ever a coffee drinker, watch foreign DVDs in the library, go dancing, study what interested me, rove neighborhoods not mine, work on Sunday, be anonymous. A body in a city of 400,000 bodies.

There are fewer residents of my hometown than of Twin Peaks.

By the time I left Tampa for Cleveland, I knew how to be car-less in a car-loving city. By the time I returned again, I knew how to be alone. By the time I left again—for good?—I thought I knew myself.

Each time I return now, the timestream has moved farther away from our single origin. My old neighborhood has become Midtown; flood maps have shifted with the coastline; the St. Pete Pier is glossy and elongated. There’s no proof I was ever there to begin with.

February 2025. I fall into Gulfport’s placid water, one of many droplets creating ripples, intersecting and burgeoning, a rainbow spray across this sleepy bedroom ‘burb. I’ve been queer in Florida before but only as a close-held intimacy or a political stance. I’ve selected myself out of this community of activists and collectives, yet arrived to find a place I could occupy, if I so chose.

From 2000 miles away I’ve written myself back into my own history. The work is waiting, wherever we love or call home.

The Florida Project is ongoing.