Florida is a place that either looks like paradise or the nation’s worst pariah. People flock to the Sunshine State for its eternal summer, but for Floridians, there remains at all times an uphill battle in the popular imagination. Amid the bizarre headlines that appear nightly on national news, the zany folks who end up on mugshot websites and an inevitable flurry of chaos during election season, there is a day-to-day reimagining of what Florida should be in pockets of the state cradling the Gulf of Mexico. The ongoing transformation of a once desolate LGBTQ community reveals the sentiment: Change is here, and it’s written on a postcard from Southwest Florida with a big rainbow stamp.

Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Naples, Sanibel and Captiva Islands, Bonita Springs and Sarasota — Southwest Florida is a region just two hours south of Tampa and a shot across Alligator Alley from Miami. In 1990, my parents uprooted us from the suburbs of Chicago and moved to Fort Myers. Regular trips to the beach blanketed forgotten winters. We visited swampy sloughs, we pet baby alligators. Plenty of the city was overgrown and yet to be developed with the many gated neighborhoods, malls and restaurants that sit there now.

As a kid, I was bullied for simply being “weird.” I had a best friend I became close with during high school who eventually introduced me to a world of hidden gay bars I thought were offices or warehouses. Tubby’s was a cozy bar that sat lonesome in a strip mall, a regular gaggle of older gay men dangling their feet on worn leather bar stools while enjoying a bucket of afternoon cocktails. The industrial district is the underbelly of Fort Myers, an area that doesn’t see much thru-traffic, but there lay The Bottom Line, affectionately referred to as TBL, an LGBTQ nightclub with a whopping seven bars and a handful of dance floors. For years, it seemed impossible to pull in a full Friday night throng. Drag queens performed weekly, and the sparse turnout consisted mostly of gay men. Nothing was progressing, there was a lack of informative support, the vibe was stagnant and, at times, grimy. The bar-goers had glints of Studio 54 in their eyes, but up and out merely meant making it to the next morning and doing it all over again the following night.

I moved away and forgot about the scene or lack thereof. I went to big city Gay Prides and even had the chance to walk in Seattle’s 2010 Pride Parade with a host of floats, organizations and bead-wearing trailblazers, who linked hands and danced across the streets. There, a woman holding a “God Loves You” poster smiled at me with the kind of understanding and lightness you’d expect from your own mother. I met amazing people who taught me that it was OK to be myself.