TAMPA, Fla. (WFTS) — When Dr. David Johnson arrived at the University of South Florida in 2003, he didn’t expect to become the keeper of Tampa’s LGBTQ past. But over the past two decades, that’s exactly what’s happened.
“A lot of this history would have been lost if we didn't preserve it," he said. "You know, families would have thrown it away. An important part of Tampa history, right? The LGBT community has been around for decades, right? If not, if not longer, been fighting oppression, been resisting oppression, been organizing, forming community for decades, and it's important part of the local story.
Back then, Tampa’s LGBTQ history was scattered. Some of it lived in personal photo albums. Some in fading memories. And much of it was at risk of being thrown away.
WATCH: Unearthing Tampa Bay's LGBTQ past: How a university archive is becoming a beacon for forgotten stories
That changed when Johnson, alongside sociology colleague S.L. Crawley and USF’s Special Collections team, started building what would become an expansive LGBTQ archive. It began with two collections: one from Bobby Smith, a transmasculine photographer documenting life inside gay bars since the 1950s, and another from Women’s Words, a lesbian publication run by Edie Daly out of St. Petersburg.
“These are incredibly rare,” Johnson says. “We don’t have images inside gay bars in the '50s anywhere in the country, really—but we have them here in Tampa.”
That connection between the personal and the political has always been at the heart of Johnson’s teaching.
“When we think of LGBT history. We think of what happens in New York and San Francisco, right, like the Stonewall riots, right? But that was a local event too, right? All, in some ways, all history is local.”
For Johnson, preserving this history isn’t just academic; it’s local.
“So I wanted to be able to point to my students and show you know what was going on in Tampa Bay at the time, and we have this huge collection, so it was time to use it and put these stories together.”
Bobby, the Knotty Pine, and Nostalgia
Much of Tampa’s LGBTQ history centers around spaces: bars, churches, publications, that helped people feel safe and seen.
“The gay bar used to be the only place you could go,” Johnson says. “It was the community center.”
Johnson tells another story, this time about Tampa’s first gay bar.
“So we've, you know, discovered there was the Knotty Pine back in the 50s. And I learned the story of how the Knotty Pine became a gay bar from the son of the owners, because it was owned by a straight couple."
Johnson says he learned that one day while the wife was holding down the bar, two gay men walked in. They told her they had nowhere else to go.
“They maybe have been kicked out of some other bar or something, and, and the owner said, Oh, you're welcome here. And pretty soon, you know, all of their friends started coming, and it, you know, basically became the gay bar.”
“And when her husband came back. He was not really pleased that, you know, these new patrons were there. He was a Sicilian, you know, macho guy. But he also saw that the bar was making a lot of money. So he's like, okay, yeah, and it became this center.”
Tampa’s Own Stonewall
One story stood out: a moment of civil disobedience that, until recently, hadn’t made it into textbooks.
In 1974, a Denny’s restaurant in downtown Tampa became the site of a protest after the manager reportedly refused to serve gay patrons. The newly formed Metropolitan Community Church got wind of it.
“The minister called his secretary and said, ‘Call up all the members of the parish,’” Johnson recounts. “They went down to Denny’s that night and sat in.”
A few hundred members showed up.
“They got the management to change the policy.”
It wasn’t written down in any official history. But one of Johnson’s graduate students tracked down the original minister and recorded the story. It was the first known act of LGBTQ civil disobedience in Tampa.
“We’re dubbing it ‘Tampa’s Stonewall,’” he says.
For Students, a Hidden History Comes to Life
Joshua Valdez, a student in Johnson’s class, admits he initially signed up just to fulfill a requirement.
“Yeah, so I took this as one of the history classes that I needed to graduate. But it seemed really interesting to me, because you never really hear anybody talk about queer history. There's normally never any classes about it. So I thought it offered like a really unique opportunity to take something that I didn't really know anything about.”
The class opened his eyes.
“So it was really eye-opening to really see like this history does really go back really far, and it's even documented back really far too," he said.
“And then for the final project, for the class where we came here for the archives, it was really just seeing the like history of Tampa and how it truly has been here for so long. But you know, it's not talked about, it's not like saved in any type of way.”
Joshua, a military kid himself, wanted to tell a different kind of war story.
He researched Harold Bryant, a military sergeant discharged from MacDill due to his sexuality.
“The military had a long standing ban on homosexuality and the Bay Area Rights Council, which was formed by John Grannan, who we have some of his collection, formed the Bay Area Rights Council to help Bryant and his legal efforts and everything but the Bay Area Rights Council formed to help like all minority groups in the Tampa Bay area,” he explained.
He says it shows the intersectionality of LGBT rights, blending with other minority rights.
“So I think their part of the story kind of shows that, like, this doesn't just have to be a part of the like, gay community, but like, it could truly be something that the community all comes together for.”
The Case That Still Echoes
April Young’s current focus is on a court case from 1979—Kirkpatrick v. Seligman—where a trans woman was fired from her job at a salon in St. Petersburg for following medical advice during her transition.
“At the time for you to medically transition, you had to go through a real-life test. Meaning, you had to wear clothes that align with your gender for a period of, some cases, years, but in her case, it was about a year," she explained. "And that conflicted with what this salon wanted. But that's the doctor's orders, and it's in preparation for surgery.”
Young says it’s a perfect example of why local stories matter.
“It's just interesting because it gets at the heart of employment, and like the stakes of employment for gay and trans people.”
But through the tough stories, Young can also appreciate the archives that paint normal life. She pointed out one of her favorite photos: a lesbian couple smiling and embracing in front of a local restaurant.
“These pictures. Are just moments of people's lives, moments of people being themselves. And I think there's a real beauty in that," Young said.
Because sometimes, history isn’t just about what was fought for. It’s about what was shared. A drink. A night out. A beach day. A community.
A Privilege and a Purpose
After 20 years, Johnson still finds it moving to walk through the archive.
For him, this is more than a preservation project. It’s a living legacy.
"It's a privilege, really, to be able to preserve these community leaders' legacies, and that's kind of why we're well, we're doing it, both to preserve their legacy," he said.
He also sees this as an opportunity to inspire the youth.
"For a younger generation to learn from it and to see that we as a community have suffered oppression in the past, probably worse than what's going on now, even if the community does. You know now feels under siege, but there's an important lesson to see that we've been through this before, and we've overcome it before. We've overcome more, in fact, before,” he said.
And thanks to a group of determined historians, those memories are no longer lost.
They’re here. Preserved. And finally, being told.
Your Photos, Your Stories, Your History
In June, they launched a website and Facebook page highlighting the storied local history.
This project was supported by a grant from the USF Foundation’s LGBTQ+ Giving Fund Leadership Council.
For those interested in seeing more, the USF Libraries LGBTQ+ History Project maintains a growing website and Facebook group where the public can view digital collections, browse photo archives, and engage with stories from Tampa Bay’s LGBTQ+ past.
The Facebook group, which already has nearly 600 members, is a place where former patrons of historic bars, activists, and allies share memories and help identify people and places in vintage photos.
“People posting, sharing stories, pointing out things about pictures that I post that I didn't notice before,” Johnson said.
Community members are also encouraged to contribute their own materials, whether that’s photos, flyers, journals, or oral histories; to ensure this local history is preserved.
You can find the website here. You can explore or participate by visiting lib.usf.edu/special-collections/lgbtq or by searching for "Tampa Bay LGBTQ+ History Project" on Facebook.
“It's been amazing. It's worked beyond my wildest dreams," he said.
"He just never showed up"
What started as a project to make a bathroom more accessible for 80-year-old Sharon Shomaker turned into a family paying for a job without seeing any work and discovering the plumber they hired had no business taking the job.
