Activist Nadine Smith Is Right on Time for The Advocate's Hall of Fame

Nadine Smith, the founder and executive director of Equality Florida, was feeling her second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine back in mid-April. Fighting exhaustion, aches, and a torrent of anti-LGBTQ+ bills, the veteran activist was fielding calls from journalists as well as from Florida lawmakers strategizing with her on how to defeat the latest transphobic attack -- an assault on trans student athletes -- being pushed in the GOP-controlled legislature.

"We're going to do whatever it takes," Smith says, undeterred by pain or politicians in the face of anti-trans legislation. "The level of cruelty is hard to put into words. Particularly because it's driven by people who don't care in the slightest except for throwing red meat to their base; pure political calculation. They don't care about yanking a soccer ball out of an 8-year-old's hands."

While Smith laments the cynicism of Republicans and the right wing, she doesn't exhibit a trace of it, even after laboring in the LGBTQ+ movement for over 30 years and working as a celebrated journalist before that. Smith was one of the chairs of the legendary 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, a rally that brought a reported million people to the front door of the White House. Days before the march, Smith was one of about 10 queer activists who lobbied President Clinton inside the Oval Office, the first time LGBTQ+ leaders secured a meeting with a sitting president.

Clinton's solution to military discrimination became the misfire known as "don't ask, don't tell" and civil rights legislation protecting LGBTQ+ people is still being debated in Congress, decades after that meeting. But Smith and her colleagues laid the groundwork for the progress we enjoy today and she's well aware that change does not happen overnight, especially in this country, and specifically in the South.

"All my family's values are long view, you carry the baton as long as you can," she says. "It's not one race but many races. The sense that I will do my part as long I'm here is really ingrained."

Smith adds, "Hate and anger don't fuel me."

"The biggest influence on me is my own family's history in civil rights. My grandparents were part of the Southern farmers' union and part of the fi rst farming cooperative in the Mississippi Delta. My parents always pushed us to understand our obligation to push for a better world, so they were training a young Black girl, but also a lesbian."

For the entirety of Smith's 24 years leading Equality Florida, Republicans have controlled Florida's legislature and, since 1999, the governor's mansion. Still, Smith has overseen numerous victories for the state's nearly 900,000 LGBTQ+ citizens. Just this year, the group helped push the state's agency that enforces civil rights law to affirm the 2020 Bostock Supreme Court ruling and said it will apply it in nearly all aspects of life. Doing so effectively makes anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations illegal in Florida.

Smith credits her family for her ability to be such a consistent force for good. She was amused when people asked if she was leaving Equality Florida after having son Logan with wife Andrea a decade ago.

"[Logan] crystallizes my activism," she says. "He's going to get the world he deserves."