How LGBTQ Tourism Helped Put Florida on the Map

Last month, news outlets reported that Visit Florida, an agency funded by state taxpayers and members of the tourism industry, removed its “LGBTQ Travel” section from its website. The move aligns with and comes on the heels of several policy changes that directly target the LGBTQ community in Florida, notably the passage and then expansion of a law that has become known as “Don’t Say Gay” and a bill that banned transgender minors and restricted transgender adults from receiving gender-affirming care.

When asked about the change on the Visit Florida website, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis said he was made aware of it after the fact, but celebrated its push away from identity politics. He noted, “We’re not going to be segregating people by these different characteristics… that’s just now how we’re operating.”

In portraying this issue as one of identity politics that’s wrought social division, DeSantis and other conservatives willfully ignore how this is a matter of protected civil rights and freedoms—ones that reveal who is welcomed and who is not in Florida. It also betrays the fact that LGBTQ tourism remains big business for Florida, and indeed, has been central to the success of this booming industry for decades.

Prior to the Civil War when Florida joined the Confederacy, roughly 44% of the state’s sparse population consisted of enslaved people. The state even had a higher population of alligators than it did of people at the time. And so, in the aftermath of the war, Florida boosters launched campaigns to attract more wealthy white people to the state.

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By the 1860s, Floridians began marketing the state as a health resort—a frontier with unmatched tropical climate that could cure the ailments of the industrialized, overgrown cities of the north. But getting to Florida was challenging because much of the state remained poorly surveyed and had limited modes of transport.

That began to change in the 1880s, when Henry Flagler, of Standard Oil success, built railroads down the east coast of Florida, creating new resort cities along the way—from Jacksonville and Saint Augustine in the north to Miami and Key West in the south. The Florida East Coast Railroad finally reached Key West in 1912.

A silent film released two years later helped tell this story, while also showing how Florida’s distinct history often permitted people to shuck the era’s gender and sexual norms—a precursor to LGBTQ tourism. Based on a novel published in 1891, A Florida Enchantment was a film about wealthy northerners and their servants who traveled to a resort hotel in Saint Augustine, which had recently been transformed by Flagler and other investors. Once in Florida, they found special seeds sown from a “tree of sexual change.” Those who consume the seed changed gender, providing the audience with visuals of gender-bending on screen, sometimes through the illusion of same-sex love and affection.

Such representations marketed Florida as a playground or “fairyland” to white outsiders of means. This marketing strategy insisted that, in Florida, visitors could suspend reality, even if just temporarily. The confines of the real world, including the boundaries around gender and sexual expression, could loosen there.

The following decade, in 1924, Floridians went a step further and voted to ban state income and inheritance taxes in an explicit effort to attract wealthy individuals. At the same time, Florida policymakers also knew they would need laborers in service of this white and wealthy playground—primarily Black women and men—and so lawmakers ensured a strict adherence to the Jim Crow system of racial segregation and violence against Black people to expand this white leisure and recreation world.

The economic depression of the 1920s and ‘30s forced the state to open its doors to more and more people, including the middle and working classes. For many Floridian boosters, including its Governor David Sholtz, expanding and protecting tourism would be an important part of the state’s “New Deal.” It would be a pathway to economic recovery.

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The history of Miami during these years is especially illustrative here. A hurricane devastated the city in 1926, which meant the city was already in recovery mode when the global market crashed three years later. To boost Miami’s economy, promoters marketed the city as a safer alternative for tourists than nearby places in the Caribbean that had been prepared to operate as other metaphorical playgrounds for Americans through the tentacles of U.S. imperialism. No place was this clearer than Cuba’s capital, Havana.

For years, Miami and Havana battled it out over which city would be the most accommodating playground for tourists. In the process, an early form of LGBTQ tourism emerged. Miami officials informally adopted a policy of seasonal policing and enforcement of its laws—often looking the other way and, at times, even encouraging queer performances, acts, and entertainment for tourists and residents alike.

It worked. By the 1930s, Miami had a thriving and visible queer culture wherein people who today would likely identify as LGBTQ often found work, made intimate connections, and built community. During these years, or before air conditioning became a mainstay of Florida life, the area’s tourist season stretched from about October to mid-March. During those months, Miami law enforcement generally allowed the public visibility of LGBTQ people. They did so because it was part of the appeal for tourists; many travelers lamented when nightspots that featured drag performers, for example, were shut down.

And to appease moralists who wanted Miami to remain a “model city” without such entertainment, local authorities regularly conducted what one newspaper called “Miami’s seasonal ‘face washing’” from mid-March to the start of the tourist season. That included raids on vice dens and queer nightspots.

Until at least about the mid-1940s, this more permissive culture created a more tolerant climate, at least seasonally, for LGBTQ people, especially those who were white. Officials knew then that LGBTQ tourism was a central part of the city’s culture and that curbing it would hurt their pocketbooks.

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By the late 1940s and ‘50s, or as gay identities and communities became more formalized and visible, the state launched new campaigns against LGBTQ people—ones with striking parallels to what Florida is seeing today. Last year, major organizations including the Human Rights Campaign, Equality Florida, the NAACP, and the Florida Immigrant Coalition, issued travel or relocation advisory warnings on Florida. The NAACP maintained that Florida’s current laws are “openly hostile towards African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”

Today, several areas throughout Florida—including Key West, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Wilton Manors, Tampa, and Orlando, among several others—bring in billions of dollars every year to the state in promoting LGBTQ tourism. In the Orlando area alone, estimates from last year show that LGBTQ tourism brought in roughly four million visitors and more than $3.1 billion in spending.

Several Florida cities have been adopting gay-friendly policies to that end for decades. History shows us that promoting LGBTQ culture and diversity is not only an important step to making people feel welcome. It’s also just good business.

Julio Capó Jr. is associate professor of history at Florida International University and the author of the award-winning book, Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.