Queer Miami: The Stories of Fred Symonette & The La Paloma KKK Raid

What’s up peoples, I’m your host Lo and you’re back At The Bistro, a safe space where we focus on stories of, and from, forgotten communities and their connections to each other. Basically, we’re a history podcast y’all hahahahaha.

This week’s topic is Gender & Sexuality as we start our Queer Miami/South Florida series. 

Today we’re going to share a couple of stories that shows the commonality between two different communities: Fred Symonette & the La Paloma Queer Bar Raids, in Miami, of the 1930’s - 50’s. 

***SIDENOTE/DISCLAIMER: The Bistro is a sex positive space. There will be times in which I refer to some acts and actions as “devious.” This is only in response to how patriarchy views sex and the contradictory manner in which they publicly shame certain sex acts while they privately indulge in those same acts***

At The Bistro: Stories of Marginalized Communities is available on all podcast platforms!
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Transcript

At The Bistro - Queer Miami: La Paloma Raid
(Intro, Fred Symonette, Fairyland, La Paloma Raid, Outro)

Cold Opening

Yoooooo, have you heard the stories of Fred Symonette & the La Paloma KKK Raid in Miami? Welp, let’s talk about that shit then!

Song Intro

Welcome

What’s up peoples, I’m your host Lo and you’re back At The Bistro, a safe space where we focus on stories of, and from, forgotten communities and their connections to each other. Basically, we’re a history podcast y’all hahahahaha.

This week’s topic is Gender & Sexuality as we start our Queer Miami/South Florida series. 

Today we’re going to share a couple of stories that shows the commonality between two different communities: Fred Symonette & the La Paloma Queer Bar Raids, in Miami, of the 1930’s - 50’s. 

We’re going to also dive into Miami origins as Fairyland or Magic City, an oasis for the rich and wealthy to indulge in whatever fantasies they have. 

If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to listen to the Liberty City Rebellions series, especially the first episode, as it gives a little more insight to the history of Miami and its relation with its Black residents. This helps provide a little more context with the information provided throughout the Queer Miami series. 

***SIDENOTE/DISCLAIMER: The Bistro is a sex positive space. There will be times in which I refer to some acts and actions as “devious.” This is only in response to how patriarchy views sex and the contradictory manner in which they publicly shame certain sex acts while they privately indulge in those same acts***

So Be Preparrrrrred!

So bitch, gon head, grab your vice of choice and let’s spill the tea on how whiteness, ONCE AGAIN, rears its pasty ass head, here - At The Bistro.


***
Intro

Picture this: 

A place where you can escape to and leave all your worries behind. 

No job. No spouse. No kids. No responsibilities. 

Somewhere you can go and let loose, let your inhibitions fly free. 

An adult playground of sorts. 

No judgements. No punishment for shifty behavior.

Gender norms thrown out the window. Gender and sexual non conformity accepted. 

You can live the most glamorous life and do the most seedy things and get away with it.

This was Miami, Florida back in the early 1900s and still reign true till this day. But back then, Miami was known as Fairyland, Magic City where all dreams came true. 

Miami had come to represent unrestrained carnal pleasure, vice and sin.

What happened in Fairyland, stayed in Fairyland.

But what affect does this exuberance have on the native residents and communities that reside in the resort of fun and pleasure?

What happens when the rules of the rich and tourists doesn’t extend to residents struggling with their own gender and sexuality? 

Let’s explore the history of Magic City Miami and the dichotomy of the city’s treatment of its Black and queer residents vs the rich, white elites that used the city as a backdrop for their devious behaviors. 

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The Story of Fred Symonette


For many of Miami's racial and ethnic minorities and working-class residents, fairyland represented something entirely different than the wide open adult recreational playground that it had become. 

From Miami's earliest days, urban planners designed the area by consolidating the city's black
neighborhoods with its red-light district. Miami's sexual economy proved critical to the Magic city's success.

White "slummers" frequently sought sexual thrills in these racialized spaces. Urban designers were hell bent on physically quarantining - BUT NOT PURGING - this thriving sexual economy. 

In 1918, the Dade County Grand Jury recommended to a circuit court judge that "the county and city authorities maintain a proper house of refuge for the care of prostitutes and unfortunate women and girls who may express a desire to reform and lead a proper life."

It also maintained that it could not "abate this evil entirely, for many women of lewd character would never" be fully re-formed and would "continue their nefarious work against the good morals of the community." 

The grand jury recommended that women suspected of being what they considered irredeemable "be segregated outside the barred zone prescribed by the government, and be kept under strict surveillance." They would be physically relocated to spaces where prostitution was made legal. 

***WHISPER: the black neighborhoods shhhhhhh***

These proposals had very eugenicist like origins wherein "quarantining those who challenged the nineteenth-century ideal of female sexual purity would allow civilization to progress."

***Chiiiiiiiiiiiiiilllleee, they really tried it***

While this plan was ultimately rejected, the sentiment was clear: Miami residents wanted easy access to a segregated and regulated sexual community in which the exploitation of these laboring women would neither reproduce new unfit children or impede civilization. 

Sexually transgressive women and queer people in general, made fairyland work.


***SIDENOTE: Isn’t it crazy that the government find ways to benefit economically off of things that at the same time, they deem immoral or unfit for society??? 

Isn’t it WILD that they create rules, laws and boundaries to justify their patriarchal wants and actions (in private) while at the same time condemning others that live their truths open and honestly???***

In comes the story of Fred Symonette, a black Bahamian who worked as a common laborer in Miami. Fred and his family made their way to and from the then British colony of the Bahamas in the early 1900s. They settled in Miami in 1922, shortly after the U.S. immigration laws restricted such travel. Black Bahamians like Symonette built much of the early city and were the pillars of its urban growth.

***SIDENOTE: Black people and Black Bahamians made up over half of the 368 population when Miami became incorporated. They truly built the city*** 

Despite his contributions to Fairyland as a black migrant man living in the Jim Crow South, Symonette soon found himself in trouble with the law.

You see, Symonette was queer and therefore on the radar of Miami PD and state officials, for the perceived criminality of his relationships with other men.

Police arrested him for unknown reasons in 1927. Given his limited financial means and perceived deviant and criminal personality, (for being Black and queer), law enforcement sought to purge
him from the city. As with others before him, police made the case before a judge that Symonette should be transferred to the Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee in the northwest part of the state.

His medical file revealed he suffered from syphilis, which caused a sore on the foreskin of his penis. He was circumcised and thrown in jail. They thought that his circumcision would not only alleviate his pain but would also dampen his sexual urges for other men. 

I’m going to repeat this. Fred Symonette was arrested and circumcised, by the government, against his will, because they thought that it would stop him from having sexual urges for other men. 

In their medical diagnosis and assessment, examiners observed that Symonette "likes men better than women." They elaborated on his “unnatural” preference saying that the "Patient talks incessantly; seems impossible for him to talk on any subject" without "referring to men." 

The fact that he was an unmarried, black migrant further led to his uncontested commitment in the state asylum. 

Symonette's Bahamian family in Miami, which also had limited resources, had no idea what happened to him after his commitment. 

Symonette died in that asylum in 1944, 17 years after being committed.

In 1952, the institution received a letter from a man identified as Symonette's friend who wrote on behalf of the deceased's mother in Miami. They wanted to know how Symonette was doing and if they could retrieve him, completely unaware that he had died nearly a decade prior. Regrettably, only the county judge who adjudicated him mentally deficient had been alerted of his passing."


***
Lead Into Fairyland


Although men like Symonette found willing sex partners - both women and men - in the fairyland, their black, migrant, and working class statuses often rendered Miami much more a nightmare than a recreational playground.

We’ll discuss more after the break. 

———————————————————————————————————
Fairyland Miami

Miami’s formal establishment in 1896 intersected with the United States’ most heightened moment of imperial power: the Spanish-American War. 

In 1898, the U.S. used said war for a colonial smash and grab: occupying colonies and territories in Asia and the Caribbean. 

Miami’s proximity to the Caribbean enabled city boosters to attract a military camp, functioned to stimulate the local economy and served as a spark for urban development. Other aspects of American imperialism would shadow Miami’s development—notably the municipal government’s colonial relationship with its Black and Caribbean populations.

Throughout the early twentieth century, boosters like oil & railroad tycoon Henry Flagler, Miami Chamber of Congress President E.G. Sewell, and entrepreneur Carl Fisher, among others — promoted Miami’s tropical setting as “a site for heterosexual romance and tourism.”

Touring companies offered excursions to Havana, Cuba, where American men pursued Cuban women. 

As historian Julio Capo observes, “what was really being sold was a growing heterosexual culture,” all thru a colonial gaze.

Cuban excursions were only one part of Miami’s burgeoning sex industry; the city also welcomed sexual transgression, gender and sexual non-conformity - but only for certain groups of people. 

In 1933, with diplomatic assistance from the U.S., rebels ousted the sitting government in Cuba and drove thousands of exiles to Miami. 

Still, in order to compete and separate themselves from Havana, the city still needed to mimic Havana’s exoticism and loose enforcement of laws.

City officials sold Miami as a white middle to upper class heterosexual playground. The city’s modern beaches, dance pavilions, shops, theaters and ports all catered to this new consumer group. 

But, as Miami rose out of the marshes and mangroves of South Florida, boosters promoted the region as a fantastical “fairyland,” for not only privileged white heterosexuals but homosexuals as well. This did not extend to the city’s Black communities and working class citizens. 

Miami became a movie scene backdrop for white elites, privileged tourists and their fantasies. 


***Play bridge music to separate this section***

Immigration to South Florida increased with Miami’s economic and spatial expansion. Rural economic depression in the Bahamas and opportunity in Florida led to shifts in the islands’ demographics. Between 1911 and 1921, over five percent of Bahamians left for other shores. As a result, the Bahamas and Miami intertwined economically and culturally. 

Miami increased their travel to its Caribbean neighbor. In return, the Bahamas sent labor, tourists, and alcohol. During Prohibition, both the Bahamas and Cuba provided a key source of Miami’s liquor. 


Bahamian women labored in the “city’s growing number of hotels and service industries, while their male counterparts worked in construction, particularly as “carpenters and common laborers” building Miami’s homes and hotels, and clearing its roads. 

But what Bahamians encountered upon arrival to Miami was anything further from a Fairyland. 

An invention of Henry Flagler and his urban development hunger, Bahamians arrived in Colored Town, which they realized for Miami’s Black citizens, equated to “the filthy backyard of Magic City.” Colored Town had initially housed both white and Black workers, but soon evolved into a segregated, overcrowded community. 


***Learn more about this during the first episode of the Liberty City Race Rebellions series!***


Flagler was one of the first to recognize the bounty that Miami represented and benefited mightily from the city’s development boom. He paved new roads and railway connections during the early 20th century to extend the region’s anemic transportation infrastructure, which until then, was only accessible by stagecoach and ship. 


Due in part to this immigration flow and the internal migration of both northern whites and southern Blacks, Miami’s population soared from just a few thousand in 1900 to nearly 30,000 in 1920 and over 110,000 ten years later.  As the construction industry exploded between 1915 and 1925, union membership climbed. By 1919 3,600 union members labored in the city, making up 35 percent of the workforce. 

These unions though, were very segregated, as almost everything else was at that time. 

The Central Labor Unit noted “Organized labor must maintain the barrier between white and black in Miami.” Miami unionists consistently worked to exclude their Black counterparts. Despite such open prejudice, Miami’s rapid growth and eventual success rested on the labor of its Black residents, who built much of Greater Miami.

Bahamians and other workers of color served as props in the fantastical productions of white residents and tourists, who in many cases, were able to transgress the dominant gender and sexual strictures of the day.


Bahamians, but especially men, were fetishized by the leisured class, received hostility from native Miamians, and harassment from law enforcement. 

Middle and upper middle class white men centered their attention on the figure of the Bahamian laborer developing a “queer erotic” which “served as a building block for diverse expressions and subjectivities – and perhaps in years to come identities – of gender and sexuality.” 

***Hmmmmm, doesn’t this sound familiar people? The fetishization of Black and dark bodies in our society? While restricting, abusing and condemning those bodies at the same time??? Hmmmmmmm***

And police targeted Bahamians disproportionately. 

In 1920, Bahamians made up one-fifth of Miami’s population yet they represented 36 percent of those arrested for sodomy and crimes against nature prior to 1924.

One of the reasons was law enforcement’s general relationship with Black residents. The Klu Klux Klan worked in a civic capacity alongside the Miami Police Department, as it did in several other American cities during this period. 

Police Chief, H. Leslie Quigg, openly admitted his membership! Torture and sexualized violence by the police toward Black Miamians were very common!


Connolly noted, “As a city founded with northern money, in a southern state, off the Caribbean Sea, Greater Miami belonged to a nation and region where white elites often governed with and through their colored counterparts, cultivating a kind of indirect rule.”


Meanwhile, during the 1930s, Miami’s famed Art Deco architecture arose, enhancing Magic City’s charm for nightlife and opulence. While the city endured hard times during the Depression, residents also witnessed the construction of over one hundred smaller, modest, art deco-styled hotels. City ordinances banned live entertainment in those hotels, so a network of nightclubs emerged during the 1940s and 50s. Many of these spots deployed nightly entertainment that mocked rigid gender and sexual norms.  

Between the late 1930s and the mid-1950s, Miami Beach eclipsed New York, Hollywood and Vegas in the constellation of “big league nighttime entertainment” and emerged as the star.  

The architecture and nightclubs created a “geography of glamour” that drew tourists in search of “sex, sport, and sin.” 

During the same period, Colored Town emerged as a “black cultural and entertainment center” welcoming Black and white tourists alike; who settled in for performances from the likes of Josephine Baker, Sammy Davis Jr., Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday. 

Unlike in New York, where authorities cracked down on queer culture, it flourished in Miami. 

***SIDENOTE: We have to take ‘flourished’ with a grain of salt because there definitely was still harassment and violence, as we saw with Fred Symonette and will soon see with the La Paloma night club***

Miami Beach and Miami were Florida’s top tourist destination stops until Disney World opened in 1971. Much as during the 1920s, Miami Beach “built its reputation not as a destination for families but as the nation’s premier winter resort for adults, and nightclubs.

While Colored Town’s nightclubs prospered and Black folk could perform in Miami Beach, segregation prevented Black performers from sleeping in the city’s newly developed white entertainment corridor. 

Now remember earlier where we discussed the city’s proposal to put all of the undesirables in one place: 

(Blacks, immigrants, queers and other sexual deviants. [do a patronizing voice])

The city was still able to achieve this without it being on the books. 

***
Lead Into La Paloma Raid

You know how urban planners were able to segregate the majority of Black Miamians into Liberty City as we discussed in the prior series? Welp, they added those other “undesirables” to the area as well. 

There was a quaint spot off of Northwest 79th street, in the heart of unincorporated Liberty City at the time, that certain hooded members of society weren’t too keen of its existence. 

We’ll talk about La Paloma and the story of the KKK raid right after this.
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La Paloma Raid

 
The night of November 15, 1937, a crowd of over 200 KKK members rallied at a nearby park in unincorporated Dade County. 

Dawning their usual long, white hooded robes that both concealed their identities and struck fear, they burned a fiery cross on public property and inducted several dozen new members. 

To celebrate their initiation, the crowd stormed a nearby nightclub that they’ve been trying to shut down for some time. 

See, that nightclub was a spot where Fairyland Miami existed. But unlike the clubs in Miami Beach, this club usually featured more local clientele. Yes, they attracted the usual wealthy tourists looking to indulge in their vices during the busy season. But La Paloma was a spot for the local unwanteds. 

At La Paloma, “unnatural” women performed stripteases on stage. Drag Queens, then known as “female impersonators” entertained paying customers, and effeminate men (or “pansies”) made crude sexual jokes. Gender and sexual non-conforming - trans people - not only staffed the club, they also represented a part of its clientele.

And of course, not only did this openly queer space get under the local conservative’s skins, it seethed Klan members like nothing else. 

You see, the KKK felt like it was their job, shit, their duty, to silence and purge challenges to white supremacy and urban authority. La Paloma represented its commitment to saving white homes, families, women and traditions.

We saw this with Black communities not only in South Florida, but all over the country, where they were the unofficial police authority. Hell, most police departments worked hand in hand with the Klan, with many members being officers themselves! Miami PD was no exception. 

The Klan, a few days before the raid, sent a warning message to Miami PD that if they didn’t shut down the immoral facility, that they were going to take matters into their own hands. 

Of course, Miami PD did not care. 

Jean, born Eugene, was a trans performer at La Paloma. Her partner, Mitchell, was part of an unknown government agency. The morning of the raid, Mitchell received word about a Klan rally happening that night near the club. The hairs on his arms stood. He knew what was possibly going to happen. 

Night falls, and the club is functioning business as usual. Melvyn, the club’s only Black dancer, just finished a performance and went to the side of the bar where he met up with his boyfriend and Jean. 

They see fire outside coming near the club but think nothing of it. Jimmy, Melvyn’s boyfriend, noticed the white hoods as they started to enter the club and his heart fell to the floor - he knew exactly what was going on. 

Jimmy, who comes from a wealthy, midwestern white family, told Melvyn that he needed to get out of here. He knew that Melvyn would get the worst of everything that was about to happen. Melvyn, a Bahamian migrant worker, was able to escape to the roof where he witnessed everything go down. 

The Klan started to rough up patrons, break furniture and glasses. But what they weren’t expecting was a fight back. Performers and clientele alike threw chairs, punches, glasses, any and everything that they could find. But by the end, there were way more Klan members than them. 

As the dust settled, a few of the Klan members disrobed, dawning full Miami PD uniforms. Patrons and customers were arrested and taken into custody. 

The raid was plastered all over The Miami Herald and other local newspapers. 

Al, the club owner with a rather sheisty rap sheet, vowed that the club would reopen with even “spicer entertainment.”

Two weeks later, cars gradually pull up to the club and the curious and anxious customers cautiously return to the fantasy world of La Paloma, where possibilities always abound. Once inside, the invariable energy spreads and the usual suspects are seen; elegant boys dishing, fun-loving women cajoling one another, and assorted drag queens sprinkled about, here and there.

Word had spread and there was high anticipation for tonight’s show, Tropical Tempest. 

Jean is performing a striptease on stage when abruptly, the lights are turned on. To everyone's horror, there are suited Klansmen standing on raised platforms along the interior walls that
surround the audience. One of the Klansman walks on to the stage and Jean freezes. He begins to circle
Jean slowly, carefully sizing her up while eyeing her every move. The crowd is cautiously captivated.

"Girl, who does your hair?" says the hooded figure on stage. 

There is an explosion of laughter and after a brief and clever exchange of dialogue between the two, the character rips off the robe and it’s Melvyn in brown swimming trunks and work boots. 

The remaining Klansmen standing around the interior walls of the club begin their own cheeky, choreo-
graphed moves.

The entire club celebrates, momentarily feeling empowered…

***********
OUTRO

Two weeks later, Miami PD raided the club again. After another raid, club owner Al was eventually arrested on “white slavery” charges and the club shut down for good. 

White slavery is what they called prostitution back in the day. 

Although wildly different, the reason the events at Stonewall and La Paloma share some general overlapping threads is that queer joints have historically been key sites of resistance, change and even revolution. There are dozens more examples of such raids: Turkish Baths (New York City, 1929), Cooper’s Donuts (Los Angeles, 1959), Gene Compton’s Cafeteria (San Francisco, 1966), and Black Cat (Los Angeles, 1967), among others.


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Lead Into Next Episode

As you see, Fairyland Miami wasn’t for everyone and in our next episode, we’ll discuss one of the biggest wedding ceremonies in the city, of that era and its relation to queerness as we continue our Queer Miami series!


Folks, if you have an opportunity, please check out “(One night at) La Paloma: Based on actual events” by Peter Saiz, and “Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940” by Julio Capó Jr. as these books give further detail around queerness in South Florida during this time period. 


Also, remember to check out The Bistro Blog for full episode transcripts! 

I’m Lo Weaver and thank you for stopping by the Bistro this week! Y’all stay safe in these streets

Till next time, deuces. 

Remember to follow thebistropod on all platforms, like, subscribe and rate! 

Toodles!