My Friend Survived a Gay Witch Hunt in Florida
More than 200 others in Florida’s state universities did not
Florida politicians’ recent efforts to restrict LGBTQ rights are just another similar chapter in our state’s shameful past.
Some might recall the controversy over citrus industry spokeswoman Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign in the 1970s, but less known is the witch hunt for gays and lesbians in state universities that started about 20 years before.
The Charley Johns Committee was created in the state Legislature to root out homosexuals, much as Sen. Joe McCarthy’s federal committee did with suspected communists nationwide earlier in the 1950s.
Between 1956 and 1964, Florida’s Johns Committee was responsible for firing or expelling more than 200 suspected gay or lesbian faculty and students from state universities in Florida. I’m personally fortunate that it didn’t succeed with a man who became my first close gay friend.
Chuck Woods was a writer for the University of Florida when I met him in 2005, but he probably would not have been there if he had admitted to being gay when being grilled by campus police as a UF student in 1959. He would have been expelled even though he was told he would be “helped” if he admitted his orientation and named other suspected…
