Scott Galvin has been one of the leading political voices in South Florida since 1999, when he was elected to the City Council of North Miami. He also holds the distinction of being one of the longest serving openly gay lawmakers in Florida. His legacy is one of showing up and being there for his constituents. After retiring from public service in 2024, Galvin has dedicated himself full-time to working as executive director of Safe Schools South Florida, a non-profit focusing on providing safe space for LGBTQ youth. In this oral history, Scott tells the story of growing up in North Miami, his political career, and his journey as a gay man.
Video Highlights
Oral History Audio
Outside of school, I wasn't necessarily politically active or aware. My first exposure to anything political was in seventh grade history class. It was 1980, and the teacher divided us up into groups. You're the Jimmy Carter Group, you're the Ronald Reagan Group, you're the John Anderson group. Now go find where their campaign headquarters are and go get some material and bring it back in. And I'm sure we got up and talked about the issues or whatever. And I was in the Reagan group, so I was a big Reagan groupie early on. And he, of course, was a cult of personality of his own, and I couldn't understand why it was cool to be a Reagan person and not so cool to be a Jimmy Carter person, losers.
Transcript:
(00:00):
Jeff Guin:
Okay, start by giving me your full name.
Scott Galvin:
Scott William Galvin.
Jeff Guin:
Okay. And do I have permission to record this interview?
Scott Galvin:
Yes.
Jeff Guin:
Okay. Let’s start by telling me when and where you were born.
Scott Galvin:
I was born here somewhere in South Florida, being adopted. I don’t know exactly what hospital or anything like that, but here in South Florida somewhere.
Jeff Guin:
Okay. And who else is in your family?
Scott Galvin:
Still living is my mom, Opal; and my sister, Julie; brother-in-law, Ken; nephew, Owen; and my partner Eric.
Jeff Guin:
Okay. And tell me a little bit more about your parents. Where are they from and what is your heritage?
Scott Galvin:
Well, again, it’s funny though. I use this story all the time being adopted. I don’t know exactly what I am.
Scott Galvin:
Okay. So being adopted, I’m not sure what my heritage is. My mom and dad are… dad was from Ohio, mom was from Kentucky, so they’re just your typical Anglo Midwesterners, Methodists. They met through the church. They both moved down to Miami independently. Dad came down here to teach school and mom just was being bold by moving from small town Kentucky down to big city Miami and being Methodists, that was the thing that they were told to do by their parents, “Well, go to church and you’ll meet somebody at church.” And sure enough they met each other at first United Methodist Church in Downtown Miami.
Jeff Guin:
Okay. Are there any traditional first names in your family?
Scott Galvin:
No. No, not really. I can’t think of anybody who’s, there’s no juniors or I think my name being a combination of my father and grandfather’s names, might be the closest to a lineage name, but my dad was an only child, so I have no family on that side. And then my sister and I are just the two of us, so it’s not like we have a big family base to draw from or something.
Jeff Guin:
Okay. And what type of work did your parents do?
Scott Galvin:
Dad was a school teacher, taught high school science at Norland High School, Carroll City High School, and the opened Hialeah-Miami Lakes High School in the mid ’70s. Mom did an assortment of real estate data collection. She was even a key punch operator when we were little kids, and that’s like a real manual kind of computer machine, and she stayed with that until she retired.
So career for mom was probably less an emphasis, just like it would’ve been traditionally for women of the era, and maybe she had to juggle family and work, but she was very present in the PTA and all things taking us to sports. And my sister took dance for a long time and that was sort of the mom thing to do. So very traditional stuff.
Jeff Guin:
Well, speaking of traditions, are there any traditions in your family’s past that stand out to you?
Scott Galvin:
No, unfortunately. I guess, we took family vacations up to Kentucky because I do have some cousins, had some aunts that were up there, aunts and uncles. My mom was one of five sisters, so the sisters were the front line of the family along with grandma when she lived up there. But as far as doing anything particular on a holiday, our family’s extent of vacation, we were very middle income.
We didn’t have a lot, when your dad is a school teacher and he’s the main breadwinner during the summers, dad would work at farm stores. We didn’t have a lot, but we didn’t want for anything. And we certainly didn’t know that our lifestyle was any different than anybody else’s, but we never went on big vacations. I went out of the United States for the first time myself as a 50-year-old. I’ve never been to Europe. Some people think that that’s absolutely strange. But vacations for us as kids, were going up to Kentucky in the summertime or going to Disney World. I wish I had pictures of when we were first at Disney World because it was right when Disney was opening, if you follow any of that Disney history stuff. But as far as the tradition goes, there wasn’t anything that I can think of that we particularly did.
Jeff Guin:
So we do have the holidays coming up here presently as we record interview. Being raised in North Miami, is there anything that stands out in terms of how the city looked at that time or experiences?
Scott Galvin:
Yeah. No, the city was, it was built right after the city was born in 1926, so it’s going on its 100th year, but there wasn’t a lot happening until after World War II and many other areas in South Florida, the soldiers who trained in the area came back and started homes and families. So demographically, it was all Anglo, very, very white. You did have a Jewish community in the ’70s and then into the ’80s and early ’90s in places like Keystone Point and San Souci, but there were not many people of color. There were a few, I mean, I can remember one of my best friends in elementary school, interesting, a story that I might say interesting, I mean, it’s interesting when I tell it, of course, but in second grade or third grade, my best friend at that moment was a little kid named David Mitchell. David was black, and you know how you play the little groups of boys.
There would be like four or five of us, and we’re playing at Donnie’s house today. We’re playing at Jonathan’s house today or playing at Scott’s house today. Whenever we would play at David’s house, it was time to go there. I was the only one who went. Now, I didn’t think anything of it, but David was living in an apartment building that was low income, obviously being Black. I look back now and I recognize what was happening. The parents were okay with the Black kid coming to their home, but they wouldn’t let their kids go to David’s home. And it was just an apartment. Everybody else had a house with a yard and you’d play in the street. In David’s case, we’d run up and down the hallways of the apartment building.
So thankfully my parents didn’t carry with them any of the racist background. Maybe they grew up around, but it didn’t carry with them, and it never entered their behavior in any way through my childhood. Likewise, when North Miami went through its demographic changes in the early ’90s, and it was becoming more and more Haitian American, all those same families I grew up with left and my parents didn’t. So I’m thankful that I never got poisoned with that mindset, that clearly, as recent political things show me, at least, that happened to most all of my former childhood friends because the things that they believe in now and that they say now are pretty staggering.
Jeff Guin:
Right. Well, you told me you grew up during an era where Miami was pronounced Miama. So talk a little bit about the milieu of Miama and at what point did that demographic change occur?
Scott Galvin:
Well, we spent a lot of time in church. My parents met at church and they stayed at church. We would normally, as I was a kid, go to church three times a week, twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday night for potluck supper. And our church was very old Miami and had a large congregation. So there was a lot of the Miama, the draws, very southern Christian religious kind of stuff that we were exposed to. I remember everybody just absolutely worshiping Anita Bryant when I was at church.
And that whole Anita Bryant LGBT period, I was about 10 years old. I remember the women coming to church with big old buttons on that said no casinos. And they would have a big cross through the word no, no casinos. So it was very conservative in a lot of ways. And that started to change then. And our church was Downtown. Downtown was not what it is now. What’s currently the Miami-Dade North Campus was originally when I was a kid, the first United Methodist Church campus. We sold it to them and it was very, very sparse. There wasn’t a lot happening. There was a Greyhound bus terminal across the street from the church that I remember, but there’s nothing happening. There certainly was no, Brickell was just totally different world.
When the church moved just a couple of blocks when we sold that property to the college and moved to fourth Street in Biscayne, homelessness, this is now the early ’80s and homelessness was pretty rampant in the area. There was no Bayside marketplace. It was Bayfront Park and homeless people sleeping in the bushes. And the church was right across the street. Church made a conscious decision in the early ’90s when they sold that early ’80s, sorry, when they sold the old property to stay downtown, so they could continue the ministry to people in need.
And it just was like many other things, old Miami, it just wasn’t like a blip in a certain instance where everything changed, but it was gradual where Miami became more violent. Now I’m in middle school and high school and remember very well the McDuffie riots and the Cuban boatlift and just how that was transforming Miami. And then, of course, Miami Vice, the TV show. And so over those years, we started to see fewer people coming to church because the area was seen as being more seedy now. It was, you had to run the gamut of homeless people who saw all these nicely dressed Anglo folks pulling up in their cars to the church parking lot and would saunter through the parking lot asking for money. And you’d have to navigate that just to get into the building. So little by little, fewer and fewer people were coming to church.
And those that did come that were new were of different colors of the rainbow, so to speak. And you again saw less of that Miama cracker mentality as the church became more progressive, I don’t know if that’s the right word, because they’re still pretty conservative, but more assimilated, I don’t know, what word I want to use.
Jeff Guin:
So thinking back to your early childhood memories, what was the influence of the church on your worldview? It sounded like that was pretty much your world for the most part.
Scott Galvin:
Yeah, sure. Outside of school, I wasn’t necessarily politically active or aware. My first exposure to anything political was in seventh grade history class. It was 1980, and the teacher divided us up into groups. You’re the Jimmy Carter Group, you’re the Ronald Reagan Group, you’re the John Anderson group. Now go find where their campaign headquarters are and go get some material and bring it back in. And I’m sure we got up and talked about the issues or whatever. And I was in the Reagan group, so I was a big Reagan groupie early on. And he, of course, was a cult of personality of his own, and I couldn’t understand why it was cool to be a Reagan person and not so cool to be a Jimmy Carter person, losers.
But my parents, they always voted. They took me, there was a little Greek Orthodox church down the street. I still go to their Greek festival every year. I was just there last weekend or so for it. That was where our precinct was. And when they would go to vote, they would take me and my sister. So I was impressed early on with the idea that voting is important. But my parents weren’t activists or super involved in anything that was political. The church had an influence. I don’t remember them talking a lot about candidates in church though. So it wasn’t like the Sunday morning before the election Souls to the Polls kind of thing. That was not of my era at least. But like I said, it’s funny, the woman who was most against casinos ended up being one of the more liberal members of the church before she passed to show you how you can evolve, I guess.
But boy, they loved them, some, Anita Bryant and there was a church youth group boat trip that we took and it just went up and down to us. It was big and fancy, but the youth group went up and down the waterways of the downtown area, and I forget where it was that Anita Bryant was living at the time, but the boat stopped and was like, here’s Anita Bryant’s house, everybody, let’s make noise. Maybe she’ll come out and say, Hi. I don’t think she did. I probably remember that. But they loved them, some, Anita Bryant, and that was what was happening concurrently. That was at that moment with the LGBT community. Now I wasn’t aware of LGBT community that wasn’t 10, 11, 12 years old. That’s not where my mind was. But it’s funny in the way looking back now to see how the people I was closest with at that stage were very happy with whatever it was she was doing.
Jeff Guin:
Well, as you grew and as you evolved, how did your relationships change with those people?
Scott Galvin:
I still have one very, very good friend from back then. The church family spent a lot of, we spent decades. This little group would come to my house for Thanksgiving and then we’d go to their house for Christmas. It was very like you were spending the major holidays together. And I have this one friend who’s now super conservative Republican Trump make America great. She’s just… she is one of those people who means so much to me from my childhood. We’re the same age. We grew up going to birthday parties and stuff together. I’ve managed to put that aside so that I can maintain a cherished friendship with somebody. Although it’s difficult because she’s got a husband who was Mariel boatlift came over there and they’re super anti-immigration now, and it’s tough to watch. But like I said, with a lot of the people that I went to high school with, same thing. It’s been difficult trying to keep friendships with people you really like and I think they really like me, but it is definitely a lot different than Reagan versus Carter. Those differences are much more pronounced now.
Jeff Guin:
Got you. So let’s talk a little bit about your academic life. Tell me about the first school that you attended and what you remember from those days.
Scott Galvin:
I remember a lot. I went to Gratigny Elementary School, which was just 119th street, North Miami Avenue. I was there for kindergarten through sixth grade, could probably name all of my teachers if you stopped and gave me 30 seconds. I was not a good student. I was a behavior problem. I was easily bored, I guess, and would cause trouble. So teachers didn’t want me in their classrooms for good reasons. Some were a little bit harsher than they probably needed to be. My mom’s told me some stories about things teachers said about me, and I’m like, “Oh my God, that was a little,” I was just eight. What was that all about? But the teachers just didn’t want to have to deal with somebody who was so high-energy and stuff like that.
So I went to Gratigny, played Little League Football, then I left there, went to Thomas Jefferson Junior High School for grades seventh, eighth, and ninth, where my behavior was much worse than it was in elementary school. Grades in the toilet. I would do well in, usually like, social studies, I would do well. And for whatever reason, I seemed to like that class or PE. I always had really good attendance. I never missed a day of high school here on the city council. As I reached the end of 25 years and seven months, I’ve not missed a single meeting in all of that time. I have this thing about being present. Teachers probably wished that I would not come to school, but the bad behavior of the poor grades and the perfect attendance continued all the way until 11th grade when I went to North Miami Senior High School. I could tell the story at some point about the one teacher that did make that impact, that changed my life, but went from Gratigny Thomas Jefferson Middle, and then graduated from North Miami Senior High School.
Jeff Guin:
So yeah, go ahead and tell us about your mentor.
Scott Galvin:
So Mr. Hudak was my 10th grade English teacher. At that stage. My behavior was more and more dangerous. I never knocked an old lady down and snatched her purse, but we were shoplifting like nobody’s business. I got arrested a couple of times for, I think once was for shoplifting, once was for graffitiing. We were tagging things, back before it was called tagging. We would sneak into the local lumber store, steal some spray paint and go out and vandalize stuff. I had a couple of guns pulled on me.
We’re talking about the early and mid ’80s when everybody was buying a gun because Miami had gotten so wild and we were toilet papering some lady’s house or something like that. She came out with the gun. She could have just pa-pa, you know what I mean? And some of the other just things that I was doing was absolutely stupid. But I know looking back now, I had energy and my mind goes a mile a minute. It still does. But I was putting all my energies into negativity, and usually that’s what I was getting feedback from adults for was negativity. So I never got positive encouragement.
So 10th grade, I have Mr. Hudak as my English teacher. He’s a little bit of a wild guy. He’d dress up in costumes for the Shakespeare and he’d stand on top of the desk kind of stuff. And he was a real character. He skateboarded to school, everybody knows him and still to this day talks about him because he didn’t drive a car. He skateboarded. He had long, longish blonde hair, quite the character. Now turned the page into 11th grade and I was still acting the fool and student council elections were coming up, and he came to me and said, Scott, you should run for student council president.
Me? I wasn’t into any of that stuff. I wasn’t, you know what I mean, going to student council meetings. My grades didn’t warrant it. I owe something too to my principal who I badmouthed awful at that time too, for even allowing me to stay on the ballot. But at Mr. Hudak’s urging, I decided, “Okay, I’m going to run for student council.” I clicked the switch now I put all of that effort into making buttons. I was cranking out. They had this little homemade button, Michelle. I was drawing each button and cranking out the button and I was making campaign posters and putting them up. All of a sudden, I was putting energy into something constructive for the first time in my life. Rather than putting energy into figuring out how to steal something or break something, I was now figuring out how to win an election, I had been in indoor suspension for a week, not long before that election.
We were tagging the school. We were using magic markers and running around and putting a slogan, Fargin War from an old movie called Johnny Dangerously that we’d seen on spring break or something and thought was hilarious. So we’re writing Fargin war on desks, and of course, the administrators had no idea where it was coming from, and that was part of the game. And we put it, we’d even walk into the main office and pretend like we were talking to an administrator and then scribble it there on the desk and we’d go in the bathrooms and paint it real big. And long story short, finally got caught. We ran our mouths too much and somebody ratted us out. But yeah, that’s that group that’s doing it. And I was forced to clean high school bathrooms for a week as punishment.
So then when I’m running for, you can see why this is not the kid that’s going to be student body president. He’s destroying the school. He’s doing all of these bad things. Like I say, I’m surprised the principal let me stay. He should have… but teachers talk trash about me to all their students. There’s no way that you should vote for this Scott Galvin kid. There’s absolutely no reason. He’s horrible. He’s dangerous. He doesn’t have good grades. He breaks things. He’s been arrested. Don’t vote for Scott Galvin.
When all of the teachers in the school are essentially saying the same thing to their students, when the ballots came out, thank you teachers. Yes, my posters were up everywhere and I worked hard, you know what I mean? I showed up to the debate. My opponent who was like Mr. Goody, Goody student council guy, he didn’t even show up. He wasn’t going to be bothered. He didn’t have to campaign against me. He was going to win easy.
Thanks to the teachers being my mouthpiece. I won the election and I can remember, well when they announced they had all the candidates in this one room and they announced who the winners were. And I can remember the activities director saying, and for student council president, something, I’m paraphrasing a little bit. It’s unfortunate and we’re going to need all of your help to get through this, but the winner is Scott Galvin.
And rather than be put off by any of that, I now put all my effort into being a good student. We had regular meetings, we had organized agendas, we had pep rallies, not just for football, but for the girls sports too. I went to every football game and organized friends. That was if not for Mr. Hudak saying, “You should run for student council.” And seeing something in me and believing in me at that stage, I guarantee you I would’ve been in jail for a lengthy period of time. I would’ve gotten shot because my behavior was just getting more and more reckless as I was looking for more and more of that rush that you get when you do something naughty and get away with it.
Jeff Guin:
Well, you described that you had a friend group or you were exercising leadership, although not in a positive way. What did that friend group look like and did they evolve along with you into more responsible people?
Scott Galvin:
So yeah, it’s funny, poor things. I realize now that I was responsible for some friends getting some real butt whoopings at home for doing the stuff that I didn’t see myself as a leader, but I was leading and I was the one coming up with these crazy ass ideas. And I somehow convinced my friends to go along. One of my friends, she said afterwards, she says, “Yeah, we were afraid of you, Scott. Afraid of me? I was the most harmless guy in the world. You know what I mean? I didn’t see how, maybe, awful everything I was doing was at the time, but there was a level of fear, a level of arm twisting, wanting to fit in with the cool kids.
And it was a mix of, it is the same era where I got into Star Trek a lot too. That same little group of friends, we’d have Star Trek house parties. Okay, well, you’re the Black girl, so you’re a horror. My name’s Scotty, my name’s Scott, so I’ll be Scotty. The new Star Trek movies were out. So one of the girls was Lieutenant Saavik, the Haitian guy was Sulu, of course. So you look back and it’s like, wow, it’s a little diverse little group of friends, girls and boys, different backgrounds.
Jeff Guin:
Who was Kirk?
Scott Galvin:
We never let anybody be Kirk or Spock. Those were the two sainted characters and nobody was good enough to be them. So we were all these mid-level and more random characters. We had several Star Trek parties and switched over to V when that-
Jeff Guin:
Oh, yes.
Scott Galvin:
Yeah. Pictures of me in homemade V costumes that we made. It was great. Good times.
Jeff Guin:
Okay. But as you became more responsible, you are holding this office in school, did they join you in that effort? Did they help campaign for you?
Scott Galvin:
No, I don’t think they campaigned for me. Well, they might have. I mean, what would be great, that would be a great question for me to email all of them now, because I still am in touch with a couple of them more than others, but I’m still in touch with, I think, all of them, at least via Facebook to say, what do you remember of me campaigning? I remember it being a lot of me, just this ball of energy. And I was probably just self-absorbed at that minute too. But I mean, after I won, then my friend base probably changed a little bit because now I was doing more student council and had more of those traditionally student council kids around me. That’s another interesting question. Did I ditch you guys? It couldn’t have been too bad of a ditching if I did though, because we’re still friends now.
Jeff Guin:
Well, if they were afraid of you, I’m sure they didn’t mind whatsoever. They’re like, oh, thank God. Going to get somebody else in trouble for once. No more guns pointed at me as I tag things.
Scott Galvin:
Right.
Jeff Guin:
So I do want to get back to the tagging situation. You mentioned there was something from a movie that you used to tag. Did you have your own language for tagging things or was there any type of mindful intent behind what you tagged in Wire?
Scott Galvin:
No, it was just that the slogan was Fargin War. There’s this little character in the movie that couldn’t… he had this thick, it was a gangster spoof starring Joe Piscopo and Michael Keaton. And it was like a spoof of gangster movies. And so the gangster godfathers really had these horrible accents that were, and this one main gangster couldn’t pronounce words correctly. And when it came to curse words, because they were keeping the movie, it was before there was a such thing as PG 13, but instead of saying the F word, he would say Fargin. And okay, when you’re 13, 14? Well, no, by that point we’re probably 15, 16. But that was hilarious. Fargin War was like the catchphrase of the movie, which became our catchphrase. And we just started writing it everywhere. Don’t ask me why. It was like Bill the Cat. We had another fascination period with Bill the Cat. It was cartoon character from Bloom County in the early ’80s.
Jeff Guin:
So it was pop culture stuff.
Scott Galvin:
It was pop culture stuff.
Jeff Guin:
You weren’t forming your own graffiti language.
Scott Galvin:
Right. Yeah. It was just Bing Tom.
Jeff Guin:
So tell me about your A team and Mr. T.
Scott Galvin:
Okay, Mr. T. Now this was back to… now we’re going back to junior high. It wasn’t middle school yet. It was junior high school. And so I guess, if you looked at the calendar, I think 18 came out like 1982, so this must have been 1982. That would’ve put me in eighth, maybe ninth grade. And 18 comes out, Mr. T is all over pop culture. You couldn’t avoid him. And I got this wild idea. I still have one of the posters I drew, and you can see the correlations between this kind of stuff. And then me actually running for office myself and hand drawing stuff. But we made posters, you know Mr. T for student council president, Mr. T for student council president.
And it was a bad thing to be doing. The teachers didn’t like it. Now they didn’t know who was making these posters. And we’d put them up in places. I must’ve been sneaking into somebody’s Xerox machine somewhere and running hundreds of copies of this Mr. T poster and we’d put it everywhere. And then we started the rumor that if Mr. T got the most votes, Mr. T would come to the school. Well, kids believed that, you know what I mean? Fake news.
But between this guerrilla Mr. T campaign posters and stuff like that, when they were, again, actually having the election, they had to say over the PA, it is, please do not write in Mr. T’s name. There are other kids on this ballot who are really running Mr. T is not coming to the school, that is not true, please don’t. I think he’s still got 30 something votes. But yeah, again, just using this pop culture, and I guess that showed me how you can run a low budget campaign and still be effective. And imagine if I’d been talking about something useful, I could have maybe had something, a positive influence back then. But instead, I just loved the counterculture chaos that it created. And teachers saying, don’t vote for Mr. T, no, which three years later translated it. Don’t vote for Scott Galvin, no, but it was fun.
I was having a good time. Some people look back at middle school and high school and like, “Oh, that was awful formative years.” And I said, “Oh my God, I had a blast. I had a good time.” Even though I was getting suspended and arrested and having to do community service and going to courtrooms and sitting in front of a judge, there’s a Dade County Juvenile courthouse is on Northwest 27th Avenue. I think it’s still there. I’ve been inside that building many times. But I was having a good time.
Jeff Guin:
How did your parents respond to that?
Scott Galvin:
They were not happy. Had they whacked me, it would’ve been well-deserved and I’m sorry for, and I have told them since that I was sorry in retrospect that I was making them have to pay the price too. You know what I mean? I have a younger sister who was probably held, I going to say, teachers probably didn’t like her, fearing that she would be like me. I think she was actually secretly worse and I was providing the cover because we have some stories. We’ve learned about her since. So I won’t tell those right now out of respect for her. But obviously, my parents had to go to the courthouse, my parents had to come to jail, my parents had to get me out. My parents’ friend circle at church, etc. are probably all like, “Oh my God, poor Opal and John, they have to deal with this thing that they voluntarily brought home from the adoption agency. Probably hard to see any way forward for me to be a productive member of society.”
The people who know me now, the people who know Councilman Galvin have long assumed that I was straight a student in school, a teacher’s pet, clearly my behavior. And then people from high school, I still have people to this day from high school who’ll drive past me and just yell, “Fargin War” or make some sort of comment on my Facebook page and stuff like that. And they’re like, “Dude, how have people voted for you all these years? You’re such a… you know, you’re such a ne’er do well, that’s not the word they used, but you know what I mean. But I can see the seeds of who I am today coming from that seventh grade class with the Reagan Group and the Mr. T campaign.
Jeff Guin:
Take a little swallow of water, take a break for a second. Watch your whistle. Mark, is everything looking good? Okay. All right. So where did you go to university?
Scott Galvin:
FIU.
Jeff Guin:
Okay.
Scott Galvin:
Yeah. Never left North Miami. At that time, it was north campus, south campus. I spent a year at Florida State. I actually tried to go away, but small town, Tallahassee for me just wasn’t, and I had a series of odd roommates, sorry, odd roommates, but I wasn’t ready. I was sheltered a bit, you know what I mean? I wasn’t ready to live with another kid. It just wasn’t. And then Tallahassee was just lights out at three o’clock in the afternoon like, “Bro, what do people do around here?” “Nothing.” Football season was fun. But then, I mean, if you go to Tallahassee now, it’s still small town. It was way smaller then. There was no such thing as clubs and there’s probably bars or something. But I wasn’t drinking. I didn’t drink at all. I didn’t drink until somewhere in my mid 20s or even late 20s. Didn’t have my first touch of alcohol until then.
So Tallahassee was not for me. I came back, transferred everything to FIU, had to drive down to the south campus for certain classes, but was a college student at FIU and continued my political involvement, but not at the university. Whereas people of my age normally would’ve been running for student senate or something like that. I first ran for the North Miami City Council when I was 20. I was an FIU junior, Miami Herald couldn’t, my middle name must have been 20-year-old FIU Junior because they had to have that next to my name and everything. I was like, come on, don’t beat on my age all the time. But they were pointing out my lack of experience and stating it in a factual way. But that was the only reason they were continually wanting to use it in every story. They didn’t write that my opponent was 55-five-year-old real estate guy. I was always Scott Galvin Antonio. But I was running for city council when most kids would’ve been running for student council. I had already then changed my ambitions to want to do something city-wide and not-
Jeff Guin:
And why was that?
Scott Galvin:
I was a know-it-all kid, of course. I thought I knew how to do things. I see so much of myself in some of the radical kids I know today. I look back and go, “Oh, you’re so Scott Galvin.” I don’t say it to them, but in my head I’m like, “That’s how I used to be. I know everything better than the older people. These older people just don’t know anything. God, look how stupid. The answers are so simple. We’re going to fix things. We’re going to change things.” So even though I’d become more mainstream, I wasn’t now stealing stuff anymore.
I was still a rebel at heart. That Rebel was very much alive in me. I don’t know anything about running for office and suddenly here I’m running for city council. What the hell is that? So that I was just going to change things, you know what I mean? I was a Parks employee and they transferred me from one park to the other, and I thought that was wrong. Stupid stuff looking back now. But at that time, it was important to me and it’s what pushed me to get out and run for office.
Jeff Guin:
Was that the moment when that happened that you decided to do it? Or was it a series of things that led you to do that decision?
Scott Galvin:
Yeah. No, it definitely stemmed back to when I was working for the Parks Department, and it was silly stuff. I mean, all of the people that I’ve worked with were teenagers mostly. So it makes sense that you get less hours this week and maybe we need you at this park, so we’re going to move you over here. I didn’t like being told, no, ever. You know what I mean? You’re not going to be able to do this. You can’t do this. No, no. That visceral like, oh yeah, that came out of me time and again. And so that’s what led me to run for city council. It wasn’t like I came out of high school thinking, one day I’m going to run for the city council. I now, I’d had enough success with politics in high school to say, okay, I want to do something with that.
Was there a point where I probably wanted to be President of the United States? Yeah, I’m sure that was there. You know what I mean? Where I thought that that was a realistic ambition. But did I ever have a plan to run for State House, State Senate? No. I mean, it was just going to run for city council. And then by the time I got into this city council, I’ve stayed here. I ran as a 20-year-old and I lost. But then I got involved in all sorts of community events, and that was teaching me better leadership skills all along. And so I was president of the JCs. I was president of my homeowners association. I was still living at home with my parents. I didn’t even own the home, but they were so starved for any type of young leadership and somebody who’s willing to do all of this work.
I just got more involved. Most people run for office, and when they lose, they disappear. It’s your name on the ballots. When you don’t win, you take it very personally. When the Dolphins play a game on Sunday and they win, Dolphins win, maybe there’s a little mention that Tua had a great game, but if Dolphins lose, it’s a shared team experience. When it’s you, it’s much more personal. So I’ve watched it time and again over the decades now, somebody runs, they lose. You never hear from them again. I instead stayed involved and just did more things. I caught the eye of the office of Congresswoman, Carrie Meek when she was running. She was a state senator, and I volunteered on her campaign in ’92, I think this is ’91, ’92.
And not long after she got elected, I got a call saying, “Hey, you want to come work for the Congresswoman?” I quit my job, which I was teaching at that point. Now I’m 23. I’m just out of college. And for the next 10 years, essentially, I worked for her. So I was doing all this community work. I was working in a congressional office. I drove motorcade for Bill Clinton. I worked with a White House Advanced Team to put together an event for then Vice President Gore at elementary school. I was gaining all of this thing so that when I ran again for city council, when I had turned 30, in 1999, then I won. I’d spent that decade building that resume purposely knowing I was going to run for the city council again.
Jeff Guin:
Okay.
Scott Galvin:
I just didn’t know, simultaneously we’re seeing demographic changes in the city. So I didn’t know how all of those things would play out, but I definitely knew that at 20 when I lost, I was going to take my time and run again when it was time.
Jeff Guin:
So that was quite a number of years that you were in training to try again.
Scott Galvin:
Yeah.
Jeff Guin:
Did you ever aspire to perhaps a larger office?
Scott Galvin:
Well, I did run for Congress in 2010. The challenge, the interesting thing about North Miami at what’s happening concurrently with me running for and prepping for being in office, was North Miami, went from a very white city to the first city in America to have a Haitian-American elected majority. I was there for that moment. When I first got elected in 1999, all of the department heads were white males, except one who was a white female. There was no Hispanic, there was no Haitian. All of that change happened along with me coming up through the ranks, so to speak.
I think that’s partially why I have been so well accepted in the Haitian-American community. I mean, they voted for me. I did not win six consecutive elections for council based on the white gay vote, didn’t even exist. You know what I mean? I had to have cross community support. And I know that it’s because in the ’90s when the Haitian-American community was forming itself in South Florida, finding its own legs, I was in the office of Congresswoman Meek doing immigration case work. I heard from families who said, “We are here because of the Congresswoman. Thank you for being our immigration case worker. We remember you.”
That built a following that allowed me to translate to now as I leave office, I’m the only non-Haitian-American in Haitian and city leadership, our entire city council. But for me, our city manager, our city attorney, our police chief, Haitian-American, north Miami is the bedrock of Haitian-American community, I think in the United States. And they’ve allowed me the privilege of having a seat at that table these last several years. And I think it’s because you look back and I was doing work in that community. I had one former student, the first group of kids I ever taught are in their mid 40s now. And this one young lady came up to me and years later, she’s now probably 40 years old herself. And she says, “Mr. Galvin, Mr. Galvin, I love you. Oh, you’re my favorite teacher in junior high school.” And I’m like, “Oh, my God, that’s so nice.” And she said that when I had her in my class, she had just gotten to the country. She didn’t speak any real English, and I was the only teacher who could correctly pronounced her name.
All the other Anglo teachers were butchering the Creole sounding name. I saw it. I know what she meant. And it meant so much to her. She didn’t… it wasn’t that she was oh, impressed with my teaching skills. She was just so thankful that it was an adult who was willing to say her name correctly. And as a kid, that meant the world to her. And she still lives in North Miami. She owns a business in North Miami now. I see her every now and then. And so those are the roots that I was, I wasn’t consciously building those connections, but that’s part of what’s allowed me to be an office as long as I have that connection.
I've spent so much time working in the North Miami, and the immigration and in the political worlds, I hadn't had time to work in the queer worlds, and I don't have exposure to that here in North Miami. North Miami doesn't have a gayborhood. This is not Wilton Manors, it's not Miami Shores, it's not South Beach. So, I've had this part of me that's like, "You know what? I want to give back to the gay community. I want to do something in that arena." So, when the job of Safe Schools was advertised, they literally put an ad in the paper, like half page that I saw, or something like even full page, it was a big ad, I was like, "There we go. There's something that I can..."
Transcript:
(00:00)
Jeff Guin:
Okay. Well, let’s go back to what you were saying about mentoring. You have obviously had an effect based on some of the students that you taught. Have there been other people over the years that you’ve mentored either as students or maybe in politics that stand out?
Scott Galvin:
No, because I’ve been so busy working that I haven’t had time to slow down for stuff like that. There’s a couple of people here and there, like the current mayor of the City of North Miami, Alex DeSulme. He has graciously told the story many times over the years about a time I came to speak to his high school class. He went to North Miami High School. I went to North Miami High School. There’s several years between us, 15 or more. But every so often I would get invited back to the high school to talk to somebody’s class. And I’ve done that dozens of times. But I spoke to his class and he’s told the story many times over the years that it was me talking to his class that got him involved in politics. He saw another young person making a difference. He volunteered with the JCs, which was a fraternal organization that I was very active with for many years. So, he’s told the story of me giving him his launch. That wasn’t a conscious thing that I was doing.
I’ve appointed people to city boards, who’ve moved on to be… One’s a state legislator now. Another is on the Miami City Commission right now. I don’t know if that’s really me… That was maybe me opening the door for them a little bit to give them the opportunity to serve somewhere, but they had volunteered. So few people take the initiative to volunteer anymore, you jump at those opportunities, but there’s not been any… And again, that’s probably a good question for other people. Maybe somebody has felt inspired by something I’ve done that I’m not even aware of just because… But I didn’t do it on purpose. I was just doing my job. And if somebody else liked what I was doing and wanted to emulate it somehow, that’s an honor, but I’m not conscious of any of it.
Jeff Guin:
Are there any moments in your political career that stand out as particular achievements, things that you would want to be remembered for?
Scott Galvin:
Well, I mentioned earlier, I’ve not missed a meeting, and that was hard. We meet two to three times a month officially, sometimes even more. And there’s budget hearings. And my dad passed away and it was like a Sunday morning. I was here on the Tuesday night following. I had major open heart surgery in 2018. I didn’t miss a meeting. I came to a meeting when I could barely walk or speak, but I was there. I mean, I took my responsibility as an elected representative to be present, and to vote and to do the things that the people elected me to do. So, I’m happy for that. You might not like some of the things that I’ve represented over the years, but I’ve certainly never gotten myself in trouble over 25 years of being in political office. Knock on wood. There’s not been some scandal that I was attached to. I’ve conducted myself… My mom is still alive, and I’ve always wanted my mom to be proud of what I’m doing. If I embarrassed the heck out of her when I was a kid, I’m making up for it now.
Jeff Guin:
For the rest of your life.
Scott Galvin:
Right. Exactly. For the rest of my life.
There are a couple little local initiatives. The building that we’re sitting in right now, the reason it’s named for me is because of my legacy, but it’s also because I’m the one who got the city to buy it. This was athletic facility for Johnson and Wales University for better part of 10 years. And when they went out of business a couple of years ago, they divvied up the 28 acres that they had around here and they sold it. They were recouping their losses, and this was on the market. And I knew that there was a need for a community space like this in this area. We didn’t have anything certainly as nice, as big, as modern, as diverse usages it could have. It’s got a workout gym. It’s got a full basketball gym, meeting space, office space.
I had to muscle a little bit to get the city in position to be able to purchase it and then get the votes on the council to purchase it. So, I’m very proud that we have it. Yes, doubly proud that it now bears my name. That was an unintended consequence that was a cherry on top, but the real reason that I pushed for us to have this facility is so that there would be a community space to meet. And if you come here now, I mean, after school, there’s high school and middle school kids that are playing in the gym. There’s pro basketball players that are training on the off-season here at the gym. Homeowner groups meet here. The community band uses it. The Parks Department has the whole third floor for their office space. They used to meet in trailers. There’s real vibrancy to this building, and I’m proud of that.
Otherwise, there’s just little odds and ends. The Arch Creek East Park, most people would be like, “Well, what’s that?” But for the people who live in that area, it’s 13 areas of undeveloped land that when I realized the city owned it… Nobody even realized that we owned it. It was just sort of there. And in the early 2000s, it would’ve been real easy for me to say, “Hey, well, we own this 13 acres. It’s on the water. Sell it to some developers. Let’s get some money.” Instead, I got it locked down as a nature preserve, and we’ve continued to work at restoring it to an even better natural condition. So, I’m proud of little things here and there.
Jeff Guin:
Tell me about the Galvin List.
Scott Galvin:
So, immediately upon working for the congresswoman, Congresswoman Carrie Meek, she was… Oh my gosh, I can’t say enough good about her not only for her influence on my political career, but just as a person. You hear a lot about elected officials who are ogres behind closed doors. I’ve had friends over the years who’ve been staffers for elected officials, who just you hear how they behave to their staff and you’re like, “Oh my God.” Congresswoman was so loving, so gracious, so encouraging. She was like my grandmother because by that point, both of my grandparents had passed away. All four of my grandparents had passed away, and both my grandmothers. And she’s just this loving, embracing person, who was always encouraging of things that I was involved with.
She said early on, “Scott, when you’re working for me, you’re going to meet a lot of famous people.” And I did. I mean, I met presidents of this country. “You’re going to see a lot of big names.” And I did. There were influencers, and lobbyists and people that would come into office. She said, “I don’t want you to pay any of those people any attention. The people I want you to pay attention to are the people who call in. That woman who’s calling about her social security problem, you might’ve heard the same concern 12 times already this week.” And again, I’m paraphrasing her a little bit now, the congresswoman, “… but her problem to her at that moment is the biggest problem. Might not be your biggest problem, but it’s hers. And if you show people respect and you try to fix their problems, they’ll pay it back to you with their support and their votes.”
So, I took that to heart and we had staff meetings every Monday, and we had a list of cases that we’d been assigned, a list of people that we’ve been assigned. And we had to report back on where their issues stood. And again, the bulk of what I was doing was immigration. Did a little social security in there too, but veterans, military academy appointments. There, there’s another one where somebody who I appointed to the military academy just retired as a lieutenant colonel, and she invited me to her farewell party. That was unexpected. But long story short, she’s the one who underlined for me the need to pay attention to the constituents. That was where your real bread and butter is.
So, then when I got elected, I created a constituent list. I was doing what she did, and I was creating a way for me to keep track of the people who called. Now, of course, in 1999, times were quite different. When you wanted to get ahold of your councilman, you wrote a letter, you called, you faxed, but email was in its infancy. It wasn’t really even being used by most… I mean, I had an email address that I’ve continued to keep all of these years before City Hall had email. Most residents weren’t using it. Now, you look at all the other platforms, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, people message you on all of those platforms. And we’ve conditioned ourselves too to expect very quick turnaround response times.
So, the list was useful not only in me keeping city staff focused on the problems we need to fix because you can get lost when they come at you with volumes, it also helped me stay focused. So, to this day, I have the Galvin List that has… Right now it’s about 30 different constituents, I’m trying to get their problems wrapped up by December 10th, when I leave office. But the list has become internally a punchline, a bane of existence, but a useful tool, hopefully, in getting staff to remember that the constituents, they’re the taxpayers, they’re why we’re here. And when they call in with a problem, we need to remember to help them with their problem and see it through to fruition. And it’s true, you can’t help everybody. You can’t fix every concern, but they will absolutely respect you if you at least tried and you explain why perhaps that problem can’t be fixed the way they think it should. So, the Galvin List was born at the feet of Congresswoman Carrie Meek. And hopefully, whoever takes over the seat when they get elected, they’ll continue something similar.
Jeff Guin:
Well, I’m sure you’ll advocate for that. Okay. Well, tell me about the North Miami Historical Society.
Scott Galvin:
So, another group that I started, the late ’90s, somewhere ’96, ’97. I think we were born in ’97. So, ’96, ’97, I recognized that North Miami was changing. A lot of the people that I’d grown up with were leaving as were people around City Hall. And that history was leaving with them. Now, I’ve always had an interest in history. Social studies, and history and civics was always my favorite classes. So, I said to this other gentleman, Glenn O’Hearn, who I don’t even know if he’s still alive, he moved away and I stopped hearing from him, but I said to Glen, “We need to start a North Miami historical society as a way to capture some of these things that are happening around us and that are leaving.” So, we did, and we found a few other like-minded older folks too, because, sadly, it often tends to be the older folks that are most interested in history. And we started an organization.
We would have regular board meetings and regular community meetings, where we would invite like an old police chief to come back and talk, where we could capture some of the photos that might have otherwise been thrown in the trash and still work to identify who some of the people were that were in the photos. We have a bunch of old campaign posters. It’s now housed here at the Galvin Center. It was, for decades, in the basement at City Hall. And luckily, we moved it here because there’s air conditioning here. The basement at City Hall was musty, and damp and not conducive to keeping negatives. We also got lucky that we moved it here because there was a huge water leak in City Hall just less than a year ago now. So, by like two months we moved everything over here. Otherwise, it could have all been destroyed.
We’ve got old yearbooks, North Miami High going back into the ’40s and ’50s. That’s how old some of the collection is. That is, people were leaving town, they’d call up and say, “Hey, I’ve got a bunch of yearbooks. I’ve got a bunch of photos. I’ve got these pom poms that I had when I was a cheerleader. Do you want them?” And my answer was always, “Yes.”
So, we have this historical society. And now as I head into retirement with the city’s 100th anniversary coming up in just a couple of years, I’m going to quietly come in here, and help organize it and get it in position to where it can be enjoyed by more people because now it’s sort of kept behind locked doors, which is unfortunate, but at least it’s all still here. And maybe we’re not able to identify people in the photos anymore because people have forgotten, but even things that I went through 20 years ago, you talk about the first Haitian American elected officials coming to North Miami in that whole wave, that, in its way, also was history. So, we need to collect those stories and bring them together under one roof.
I’m not going to do much in retirement from city council stuff. It’s time for me to step aside. I’m not going to be coming to commission meetings and advocating for causes. I’m not going to be going to city events. Whoever takes my seat, District 1 seat, deserves to not have me all up in their business. And it’s not a cute look when an elect official can’t let go. It is time to let go, but there is one thing that I’ll quietly do. Nobody’s going to know that I’m doing it, but a few people in the Parks Department, I’m going to come in here and get things a little organized and help breathe some life into that for the city’s 100th anniversary.
Jeff Guin:
Do you have any hopes for how it will be used? Will it become a research library? What’s ideal?
Scott Galvin:
I think in an ideal world, yeah, you’d have a museum that’s staffed, et cetera, but that’s super difficult. You can’t just have historical items on display without somebody to watch them, unfortunately, because people will go, “Oh, there’s a 1962 yearbook. There’s my dad’s picture”, and they’ll just walk out the door with them. So, in a perfect world, it would be nice to say, “We’re going to have a museum”, but that takes money, and time, and staff and grant writing. And that’s not an easy lift. I’ve got a full-time job with Safe Schools South Florida. That’s where my primary focus is going to be going forward. But if I can at least have the… Right now, everything’s just shoved in boxes. Some of the boxes are labeled, some aren’t. We moved it all over here in a quick hurry, not knowing that the basement would flood, but it just wasn’t done in a organized fashion. So, I just want to get in organized in that way. There’s some really cool negatives in there and just some ephemera that really is neat.
Right now, I’m the only one who knows it’s there because the original members of the Historical Society, who were in their 70s and 80s 20 years ago, they’re not here anymore physically, or being alive even. So, I’ll be putting a little bit of side effort into getting that collection shored up a little bit.
Jeff Guin:
Great. Well, you mentioned Safe Schools. So, you’ve worn multiple hats over the years, and city councilman, that’s been the longest running one and taking a lot of your time. But a few years ago you joined Safe Schools as executive director, but I guess you had a history even prior to that. Tell us about how all that came about.
Scott Galvin:
So, we haven’t talked about my role as a gay elected official, which has its own little unique storyline to it. But I’ve spent so much time working in the North Miami, and the immigration and in the political worlds, I hadn’t had time to work in the queer worlds, and I don’t have exposure to that here in North Miami. North Miami doesn’t have a gayborhood. This is not Wilton Manors, it’s not Miami Shores, it’s not South Beach. So, I’ve had this part of me that’s like, “You know what? I want to give back to the gay community. I want to do something in that arena.” So, when the job of Safe Schools was advertised, they literally put an ad in the paper, like half page that I saw, or something like even full page, it was a big ad, I was like, “There we go. There’s something that I can…”
I’ve been working in the nonprofit and education adjacent fields for my entire professional career. When I saw that, and I knew of Safe Schools because I’d come out to their award ceremony to present awards to kids, and stuff like that, I said, “There’s something I’d like to apply for.” That, “All of my skill sets have led me to be in a place where I could do good for that community and use the people, the connections, the leadership training that I’ve built up over these years to do that.” So, I applied for the job. And after a lengthy application interview process, they hired me in the end of 2019 going into 2020. So, I’ve been here now going on five years.
Jeff Guin:
Okay. And what do you do in that role?
Scott Galvin:
A little bit of everything. So, when I got to Safe Schools, things were a little up in the air because of things being whatever transpired before I got here. Record keeping wasn’t strong. Fundraising wasn’t strong. There was no solid email database. There wasn’t any real money in the bank. The programs that they had traditionally done had fallen away over the years. And looking back now, I can also recognize that they were working with gay teachers historically and queer students at a time when those things were not well accepted or popular. The internet didn’t exist when Safe Schools was founded in 1991. How did teachers get resources on gay topics? Well, Safe Schools was providing some of those resources.
I’ve heard stories of some of the original members, who were gay teachers, who were just meeting to go have wine at one another’s homes because being gay in the workplace was not accepted. So, I can tell that part of the problem that Safe Schools ran into as well in the mid-2010s and later was that you didn’t have to hide being a gay teacher or a gay student anymore. It was much more accepted in culture. So, there was less of a need for you to join a gay-straight alliance because, well, you just joined the regular Key Club. You didn’t need to have those types of stand-alone kind of events, queer proms, et cetera.
When I came in 2020, COVID, of course, shut down the schools, which necessitated us changing our way of doing business. Even though we didn’t have a lot of money in the bank, I couldn’t tell the donors who’d given it, “Oh, well, we’re just going to wait until the end of COVID to start doing anything again.” At that moment, we didn’t know how long things were going to be shut down, so I had to come up with something different. We can’t do GSA clubs. Well, we can do digital programming. Let’s do some digital programming.
And then schools reopened, COVID abated. And almost immediately Don’t Say Gay came and, again, effectively, shut down schools. So, we’ve, in the five years that I’ve been here, had a lot of adversity trying to stay relevant, trying to stay head above water to grow the organization. We still don’t have a lot of staff. We’ve just, in the last year, opened our own standalone youth groups at different churches, who are willing to work with us coincidentally, because the school clubs… And this is where I could go on a whole tangent about Don’t Say Gay and how it’s impacted the schools. Teachers are afraid to be club sponsors, even though the clubs are effectively allowed, or legally allowed. There are principals who don’t want them at their school, so they won’t let a teacher sponsor them. They’ve forced students to change the names of the clubs to get their parents to sign permission slips to be able to be a member of clubs.
There’s all these hurdles that Don’t Say Gay as a law across the state of Florida created confusion, that remains today. Confusion, and fear and people not knowing what they’re allowed to do, “Am I allowed to sponsor this club? Are we allowed to have this book in the library? If it can’t be in the library, can I put it in my classroom? Oh, no, I can’t. But yes I can.” And, “Oh, wait, a parent could now sue me.” It’s made queer activities inside public schools super difficult. So, that’s why we started our own youth groups.
We’ve expanded our digital programming. If you go back and watch some of our 2020 episodes of Safe Schools TV, it was pretty rough around the edges. We’ve gotten better over the years and we’ve diversified the number of programs that we have. We’ve got three regular programs now. We’re getting ready to start another one in probably the turn of the calendar year. But we’re having to create independent space that isn’t reliant on schools, because especially with the U.S. presidential election just having passed, I’m expecting that Don’t say Gay, which is the law in Florida and has been copied in like eight or nine other states, is probably going to become a federal policy. And the Department of Education will likely say to schools, “If you’re doing queer activities, DEI, you get no funding.” And it’s that funding carrot that school systems are petrified to lose, because how do you run school systems if you don’t get federal or state dollars? So, it’s going to get more challenging, and we’re working to establish good independent things where kids can come and be accepted.
Jeff Guin:
Are you looking, or do you anticipate Safe Schools being a model that can be replicated in other states?
Scott Galvin:
Yeah. And I think it can. What’s interesting, the name of the organization is Safe Schools South Florida. My COO, Harold Marrero, and I speak all the time on this as we banter. He’s the mastermind, who’s put together such great digital programs. He’s very inventive. We talk about rebranding the organization because Safe Schools is a little innocuous. What does that mean? I mean, we have people who think that we’re in the business of keeping kids safe from lockdowns when there’s an active shooter in the building. We’re the Safe Schools, that’s what you do. But we’re not able to effectively be in schools now. Should we even keep the schools in our name?
And then South Florida, because of the digital presence, we’ve interacted with student groups in Salem, Massachusetts, in Tokyo. There was even a teacher in Tokyo who had us do a Zoom with his kids one day. Our shows are watched by tens of thousands of people. Everything that we post gets a lot of views. Well, those aren’t just kids that are sitting around in Dade and Broward counties.
There’s this scope now that we have that’s different, that’s larger. Should we even keep South Florida in the name of the organization, because we’re semi-global? We don’t have the budget to really say that we are, but I think that if it is going to be the case that Don’t Say Gay type laws become federal policy, more and more of the organizations that are doing things around what we’re doing are going to have to go digital, or find more rebellious ways of reaching kids, a little bit more of that guerrilla warfare, a little bit more of that Mr. T campaign to find ways to provide safe spaces for kids, because a lot of… I fear, and I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that as bad as things have been in Florida for the last four or five years, we’re about to experience that exponentially on a national stage.
Jeff Guin:
Well, it stands to reason. I mean, you’re developing influencers with the videos that you’re doing, Tiffany being an example, if more folks were to adapt the model, you could create a network of influencers on the same topic.
Scott Galvin:
Yeah. And it’s funny, Out of the Closet Thrift Stores, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, but as the name “Out of the Closet” implies, it’s like a queer thrift store with thrift stores across the country. I don’t know how many different cities they’re in, but they got a hoot out of a couple of our videos. And we are now officially unofficial handshake agreement, where our influencers are prepping to do some Out of the Closet… We’ve already done some Out of the Closet commercial stuff for the local three South Florida locations, but I want to figure out how we can have those same influencers, Eddie, Tiffany, David going to some of their Out of the Closets across the country, or finding a way to find kids that are in those cities, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, to do some of the same “Get ready with me” kind of episodes that we’ve been working on, where we’re doing a queer prom in May.
Safe Schools is doing a queer prom in May in Vizcaya, and we’re super excited about it. And I’m like, how do we maybe have a Get Your Prom outfit together in partnership with Out of the Closet?, ways of turning the activities that we’re already doing into things that can be replicated in different cities, and on a bigger scale and growing those partnerships that you have. Because those types of partnerships are going to be absolutely necessary to surviving the next four years, eight years, however long, I don’t think Don’t Say Gay changes in the state of Florida for a generation. So, you need to make friends and build community with those types of organizations, like SAVE, like TransSOCIAL, like Out of the Closet that are in the queer affirming space because we can’t survive on our own.
It was a Saturday morning, just got done walking the dog. I'm drinking my coffee, and I felt a pop in my chest, and immediately I saw lights. If you look at a bright light and you can see stars, the pop and the stars, and I just instinctively knew something was wrong. Now I thought, "Okay, I'm having a heart attack. You're 50 years old, Scott." And I wasn't panicked. I didn't freak out. Luckily I didn't go lay down in bed to rest for a little bit because I'd probably died in bed. Had that happened, instead, I said to my partner, "Hey, I think I'm having a heart attack. Take me to urgent care." There was an urgent care right around the corner. I thought they were going to be, "Like, yeah, have some aspirin." What do I know now? Health-wise, my whole life, I'd never even broken a bone. I'd never had any issues, nothing. That led me to think I've got some sort of heart condition
Transcript:
(00:00)
Jeff Guin:
Okay, so in 2018 there was a major health issue that arose. Tell me a little bit about that.
Scott Galvin:
Sure. At Christmastime in 2018, I had what’s called an aortic dissection. It’s a pretty rare heart issue. In my case, it was genetic. The aorta, which is the largest vein in your body and attaches to the heart, had become greatly detached. Didn’t come fully off or I would’ve immediately bled out and just been dead. But I was very quickly bleeding out internally.
It was a Saturday morning, just got done walking the dog. I’m drinking my coffee, and I felt a pop in my chest, and immediately I saw lights. If you look at a bright light and you can see stars, the pop and the stars, and I just instinctively knew something was wrong. Now I thought, “Okay, I’m having a heart attack. You’re 50 years old, Scott.” And I wasn’t panicked. I didn’t freak out. Luckily I didn’t go lay down in bed to rest for a little bit because I’d probably died in bed. Had that happened, instead, I said to my partner, “Hey, I think I’m having a heart attack. Take me to urgent care.” There was an urgent care right around the corner. I thought they were going to be, “Like, yeah, have some aspirin.” What do I know now? Health-wise, my whole life, I’d never even broken a bone. I’d never had any issues, nothing. That led me to think I’ve got some sort of heart condition.
We go to the urgent care, which is literally two blocks away. By the time we got there, I couldn’t get out of the car on my own. I was quickly losing use of my left leg. Lucky in the end that they didn’t have to amputate it because it was getting no blood for an hour and change until they got me into surgery. Emergency rescue comes, takes me to Aventura Hospital. They track down a heart surgeon who was great, Dr. Robert Faravar, and perform emergency 14-hour open heart surgery. They sawed my chest open with a saw from Home Depot, an electric saw, it wasn’t a manual one, but I was living on… They had to take my heart out of my body. I was living off of a machine that was keeping blood circulating somehow. Spent 16 days in ICU. As a result, I now have a plastic aorta and I have a metallic heart valve made of titanium, and I’ve got some titanium plates that still grasp my chest together.
I was lucky, lucky to have lived. One of those very rare, strong things. It wasn’t like I hear people say, “Oh, you had a heart attack.” And I’m like, “Yeah, and I wish it was just the heart attack.” But it changed my life. Spent my 50th birthday in the ICU, and I remember my family had brought some balloons and stuff to decorate the room. My birthday is right after Christmas and the doctor walks in and he sees the big sign that says, “Happy 50th,” and he looks at me and he looks back at the sign and he looks and he says, “Oh, you poor guy.” Most people are celebrating their 50th with some big old party and living it up, and I’m on machines. I wish they’d taken pictures of me, but I apparently had 10 or 15 machines that were keeping me alive, circulating my blood, massaging my ankles.
I was trashed, could barely speak because I’d been intubated the whole 14 hours. But you come out of something like that with a little different perspective on life. I’d always liked to have thought I was trying to live life in a good way for other people, hopefully getting into heaven to make up for all the stuff that I did when I was a kid. But then when you come that close to death and you do come out of it on the other side, I spent my 50th year traveling and doing a lot of things that I had never allowed myself the time to do because I realized all of a sudden, oh wait, one of my goals has always been to live, to be 100 years old. When you almost don’t make it to 50, it’s a stunner. So knock on wood, going on six years later, things are still clicking away. That valve is still doing its job. I’m still above ground, but I’ve had to moderate.
Jeff Guin:
Do you remember the time in the hospital?
Scott Galvin:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Guin:
What were you feeling?
Scott Galvin:
Not a thing. I was simultaneously on, oh, and I’m not going to remember, but it was fentanyl, like a variation of, I can’t think of the names of the medications, but I was high as a kite the whole time. I thought it was good that it happened over Christmas because then nobody realized. I didn’t miss a council meeting, I was physically… Had there been a council meeting then during that period, I would’ve missed it because I couldn’t get up from the hospital bed. I was on breathing machines and stuff like that, but I was so drugged I didn’t let anybody and didn’t want my mom to tell anybody that I was in the hospital because the same residents who come to your door to knock on the door because they’ve got a problem, would also want to come to the hospital, knock on your door and express that they hope you get better.
I was in no condition to have any level of serious conversation with anybody. I’m in my hospital gown and spewed out all over the bed high on drugs and luckily Christmas, even though it’s like, “Oh my God, you had to spend your 50th birthday in the ICU.” At least it afforded me the opportunity to keep it secret. And then when I got out of the hospital, I announced that I’d had the issue. Again, I learned that. I knew it was a major life-changing kind of thing, and I wasn’t going to… I couldn’t do some of the things. I still can’t do some of the things that I used to be able to do, but I didn’t want to hide that from residents. Some people don’t like to talk about their medical issues publicly. In my case, I did because there was not going to be any masking it. And life has gone on, but it definitely…
Jeff Guin:
How long did you convalesce?
Scott Galvin:
I was in ICU 16 days, and then I took three months of family medical leave. That same act that allows pregnant women to take time when they have their baby actually extends to guys too if there’s a medical thing. So I took three months to recuperate at home. As the calendar would have it, that was also in the middle of my most recent reelection, so I was having to campaign. I could barely speak. It was six months before I got my voice back to close to normal. I could barely walk. My left leg almost had to have been amputated. Couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk, but damn if I wasn’t out knocking on doors and whispering to the voters saying, “Please.”
Jeff Guin:
Well, they had to really listen.
Scott Galvin:
And they did, yes. But I couldn’t knock on as many doors as I normally would, but I wasn’t going to be lazy or let that be an excuse. Sure, it curtailed a lot of the things that I could do, but I couldn’t not. I took my job as being city councilman. Seriously. I couldn’t just say, “Well, I’m sick so I can’t do any of those things.” That wouldn’t have been fair to myself or the people around me. So I did the best that I could. It was-
Jeff Guin:
So was your voice affected just by the intubation during the procedure, or was there something affecting afterwards?
Scott Galvin:
Yeah, because it was such an… I was about to die. They intubated me so quickly there was no care for whether or not I’d ever speak again. And the doctors told me afterward, “You may never regain your voice. This whisper might be all you ever have. It might be all you ever have the rest of your life.”
Okay. I, again, was very well-adjusted. I never went through a woe is me period. In the emergency room as they were trying to figure out what the heck was happening, they kept asking me if I did cocaine. “Scott, do you do cocaine? Do you do cocaine?” Asked my partner, “Does he do cocaine? How much cocaine does he do?” I guess cocaine use is some leading attribute to this coming on. Since I didn’t do any cocaine, for the record I don’t, never have, even though I grew up in the eighties in Miami, that’s how they know that it was a genetic thing. It had been there all along. I just was not going to the doctor to get checked because I never had any issues. Yeah, that was another story I was going to weave back to there, but…
Jeff Guin:
Well, what are the implications for you going forward with it?
Scott Galvin:
I’m on seven or eight different medications now, all to moderate heartbeat and blood thickness. I have to go get my blood drawn every month. They have to keep it at a certain level of thickness. They don’t want it to be too thin so that if I cut myself, I bleed out, but it can’t get too thick, because then the blood would gum up the metallic valve. I’m always at doctors. It is frustrating sometimes you’re like, “I’m too young.” My partner says, “No, you’re not. You’re in your fifties.” I’m too young to have to be going to doctors all the time, but it’s better than having been dead. It’s better than having had a leg amputated or something like that. It just means I’ve had to adapt a better diet for the most part.
I can’t go out and play football like I used to, but life goes on and it’s just yet another challenge I’ve tried to step over and deal with. And does it shorten my lifespan? Yes. Even though in my mind I say I’m still going to live to be 100. Doctors have told me, and I’m aware of that. 70 is about where I’m headed, and when you’re 55, and I think back, well 40, I was just 40, and what’s happened in the last 15 years? Obama’s been out of presidency that 15 years.
Oh, that’s all I’ve got to do? I better live my life well going forward. I better not let things get to me too much. Don’t get too stressed. I better try to do some of the travel. Part of the reason I’m leaving the city council now and not running for something else is because the time I have left is far less than the time I’ve experienced. I need to experience part of life. I’ve served the community, I’ve done the best job that I could, and I’ve worked hard the whole time. I owe it to myself. I owe it to my husband. I owe it to family that’s still alive to get out and be normal and just work one full-time job, save schools and go places and do things. So that’s what I’m looking forward to doing with the time that I’ll have back in my control once I’m out of office.
I didn't know another gay person until after high school. Even though some of my friends in high school were gay, nobody was out to each other. Nobody talked about it. Even some of the other kids that I know that were pretty effeminate, everybody just continued to pretend, so to speak. And again, even with me, even though I was aware I was gay, I was busy breaking things and doing these crazy stunts that it was a convenient way for me to not be dealing with those things. And I didn't miss it because it still wasn't something that was important to me.
Transcript:
Jeff Guin (00:00):
All right. I want to talk a little bit more about your identity and the evolution of it as you were growing. At what age did you generally have an idea of what gay was and whether that applied to you or not?
Scott Galvin:
Right. I had to have become aware of it somewhere in middle school and junior high school. Probably because I had such an intense personality and was doing all these crazy things, A, I wasn’t looking for somebody else. One would have to understand that the gay community, as we recognize it now, didn’t exist in the 1970s and ’80s, at least not for a kid. There were no characters on screen for you to even know about or identify with. There was no internet for you to chat with other people. It just didn’t exist. And because that wasn’t where my interests were, finding somebody to date or anything like that, I didn’t even miss it. And then somewhere in those 13-year-old years, I had to have become aware of being gay.
Now, I didn’t know another gay person until after high school. Even though some of my friends in high school were gay, nobody was out to each other. Nobody talked about it. Even some of the other kids that I know that were pretty effeminate, everybody just continued to pretend, so to speak. And again, even with me, even though I was aware I was gay, I was busy breaking things and doing these crazy stunts that it was a convenient way for me to not be dealing with those things. And I didn’t miss it because it still wasn’t something that was important to me.
Jeff Guin:
Could those two things have been related?
Scott Galvin:
It’s possible. But even if I’d wanted to find a boyfriend at the age of 14, let’s say, how would that have been possible? It wouldn’t, at least as far as I knew. And I was pretty sheltered from sexual behaviors. And maybe that traces back to the church. I don’t know. Maybe that’s too stereotypical of a thing to say. But I wouldn’t have even known what to do, nor would you have talked to somebody about stuff like… It wasn’t part of my life until I became an adult, and literally age of 18, and then you’re exposed to more people. I met my first gay person in college. Now, there was no desire to act on anything there, but I was like, oh, these people exist. Excuse me. From being exposed to Anita Bryant, there had to been some conversations that were had in my presence about what she was doing, but I don’t remember them in any way relating to me or feeling… Did the people at church who championed her, did they talk about why they didn’t like her? I had to have had some awareness, I just don’t remember what that might’ve been.
Jeff Guin:
Did you have any crushes?
Scott Galvin:
I guess in the middle school and high school years, there were people on TV. There was probably somebody at school, but I just don’t remember that kind of stuff.
Jeff Guin:
Okay. As you’re getting a little older, you mentioned that there was a group of folks that fostered you in a way in your political career. Do you want to talk about them?
Scott Galvin:
Sure. I’m 20 years old. I had zero idea how to run a campaign other than my foolishness in school. A real actual organized campaign, no understanding of that. One of my friends said, “Well, you’re a Democrat. You should go to Democratic Club meeting and meet other Democrats, and they’ll be able to help you.” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’m going to do that.”
I went to Miami-Dade Democrat meeting. I can picture it in my head. I don’t know exactly where it was now, but there were all these other people, other Democrats in the room. And this one in particular, super interested in my candidacy. He’s talking me up. He wrote a check right there, and it was a few hundred dollars. All I had to do is show up and they’re writing me checks.
It wasn’t until a little bit afterward, probably after a financial report had been turned in, that Jack Campbell, who was the person who took an interest and wanted me to go dinner with him and wanted to introduce to people and wrote that check that I realized not only was he gay, but he ran two or three gay bath houses in Dade County at that time. I didn’t know what a bath house was. You know what I mean? I was sheltered to those types of things. And I didn’t understand. He never said or did anything inappropriate in front of me or anything like that because somebody’s, “Oh, he is trying pick you up.” Maybe he was. He didn’t try very hard if that was the case. But he wrote checks and he did introduce me to people.
And that’s when I remember meeting through him the first trans person I ever met. And that was mind-blowing in 1989 to meet a trans woman who was very good-looking. And once I learned then what had happened, I go, “Okay, maybe her voice is a little masculine, I guess.” I met a lesbian, an older lesbian, Stacey Acre who was active in political causes then. And she lived here in North Miami. It must have been how she felt good and supported me. And she had an older wife. Obviously marriage wasn’t a legal thing at that stage, but she had somebody she’d been with and lived with for a long, long time. They were both older. They had to have been 60-something, great-haired, very grandmotherly. They all befriended me and they all were very helpful and lint advice, again with Jack and the money. This was very good. I was glad to be meeting new people, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, of course, not knowing what Jack did for a living at first, when I took the check, I had to list it on a report. And I wish now I could remember what the name of… The name Bathhouse LLC was not what the business was called. Club Body. Club Body was the name. Club Body. And I guess that’s a gym or something. I wouldn’t have thought any different. Well, of course when it’s listed on my campaign report, my opponent absolutely jumps on that and starts the rumor that I’m gay because I’m accepting gay money. Now, I knew I was gay. I’d never expressed that to Jack. I’d never expressed that to anybody else. At the age of 20, I’d never dated or had any type of relationship with anybody; never done anything sexual. And so it’s like a stunning thing to be outed in such a public way and you’re not even doing what they’re accusing you of doing.
Jeff Guin:
How did you react to that?
Scott Galvin:
I did my best to disavow it. There was a party for… And it’s funny, the event just came up last weekend when I was with a group of high school friends. Jack Campbell threw a fundraiser for a gay member of Congress back then. His name was Barney Frank. And it was at Jack’s house. And I knew there was going to be gay guy’s galore at this thing; Barney Frank was out. But I wanted to go to that party because I wanted to meet a congressman, but I also wanted to meet the money that hangs out around a congressman.
And I remember I took my friend Laura as my beard, if you will. She was my date for the night. And there’s pictures somewhere. But that was worth a funny haha after the fact. Even though I had a couple of girls that might’ve gone with me to things, I never tried to do anything other than it was a friendly thing. I wasn’t even trying to sleep with the girl instead. You know what I mean? But I did my best to mask it. And again, I’m so busy with the campaign. I was Superman. I was knocking on doors across the city two and three times. And we were on street corners with our signs every week, every afternoon. And I was running a campaign. I didn’t have time for a personal foolishness. But I’ve been accused of being gay since that very first campaign in 1989 when I was 20 years old.
Jeff Guin:
Obviously that would’ve affected your political career, but did you have any fear for your personal safety or well-being if you were associated in that way?
Scott Galvin:
Well, other than being slandered like that, no. Nobody drove by me on the street and yelled a curse word or anything like that. There was no intimidation being used. It was a whisper campaign. Although not very whispered, I guess. Was I asked about it at a forum? That might’ve happened, I don’t recall. But that was at a time where they could do something like that or would do something like that and not feel like they shouldn’t have asked that question. I’ve seen other politicians caught in similar scandals now where media today won’t ask straight up, “Are you gay?” To the person who was at the brunt of it because that wouldn’t be seen as politically correct.
Jeff Guin:
How old were you at this time?
Scott Galvin:
I was 20. I was 20 years old.
Jeff Guin:
Ryan White, had that happened by then?
Scott Galvin:
Yes.
Jeff Guin:
Okay. And-
Scott Galvin:
No, no, no. Well, yes. No, Ryan White, I was in high school, so yes. Ryan White dying of HIV, I think he died in about ’89. I was aware of Ryan White because in the Miami Herald, again, I read it every day now, I read it every day then, there was always a little blurb, so I was following the story every day. How’s this poor kid doing this? This poor kid’s getting sick. And I remember the whole thing about not being allowed to go back to school and the people in his city turning against the family. And that was all in high school. And then I think he must have passed about ’89. And then laws bearing his name didn’t come into being until early ’90s, if I remember correctly. But I was aware of his story.
Jeff Guin:
Yeah. And did that affect your thinking as a politician in terms of what you might be able to do or community?
Scott Galvin:
No, because I was… At that point too, it’s still local city commission. It’s the Parks department, it’s the library, it’s stuff like that. It’s not the overarching HIV causes that I’ve now come to become active in. I have people that I know via church, a former organist, former chef who passed away of HIV and AIDS round about that time. I think the organist, I was even still in early high school when he passed. I was aware of HIV, I was aware that it was a gay disease. Of course, that’s all I was told. You know what I mean? I was aware of being shameful and aware of people being afraid to use silverware or something like that. The Haitian American community was coming to South Florida, and there was a lot of people who associated Haitians with HIV, so I heard that kind of talk. But yeah, I wasn’t thinking, oh, Scott, you’re going to be in a position to somehow raise money for or fight the stigma or maybe help find a cure or bring an end to it. That wasn’t on my 20-year-old mind, it was I’m president of a homeowners group; I got to find a speaker for next month’s meeting.
And I was going to college. I was still in college, so I was actively pursuing my degree. I was actually studying. I did good. And it’s funny, my high school and earlier grades were trash. In college, all four years I never received anything less than a B-. Which for me was like, what? What happened? But I was finally applying myself and trying. I was studying and I was being a good social activist at that time.
Jeff Guin:
You’re going through your 20s in this position and you’ve changed yourself, you’ve evolved, and then you get to your early 30s. I want you to tell me a little bit about your coming out story. When did that officially happen?
Scott Galvin:
With the advent of AOL chat rooms, I now had a way to quietly and secretly talk to other gay people. Even though I wasn’t meeting anybody yet, you could have conversations. Likewise, one of my best friends from high school who I was still close with, we began to, “Haha, look at that guy over there. Haha, he’s cute. Haha, I just meant that as a…” That face-to-face, real-life person come out toward, his name was Mike. And so now we’re talking about me being in the neighborhood late 20s and turning into the 30-year-old, and I’m meeting people online now, I’m starting to go to bars and clubs, and I’m not behaving myself. You know what I mean? I was, “Wow, this is here. I’ve never seen or done or been around any of this.” It was a big, old celebration.
And I realized that being politically active, people… And it’s happened to me all of my adult life, people know who you are when you run for office. And you don’t know who they are, but they know you. And people come up, “Hi, Scott Galvin, I voted for you.” La, la, la, la, la. And, “Oh, wow, okay. I don’t even know who you are, but thank you,” that kind of thing. And I knew that obviously being at clubs and acting a fool at the clubs, that was going to bite me in the butt sometime as an elected official or as person in the public eye, for lack of a better term, so I started to tell people around me and become more comfortable with it and things like that.
When I ran in 1999 and got elected, it was chattered about because the community was still small enough. It had only been 10 years since Jack Campbell… Maybe Jack was still writing me checks in 1999. I don’t quite remember. I’d have to go back and look that up. It was talked about when I did finally tell my political community that I was gay, nobody was like, “Oh, my God.” It’s like, “Dude, we’ve always thought you. You never had a girlfriend.” And that’s the thing, I’m proud of that, that I never Tortured some poor girl by dragging her around to events as my girlfriend and then having her wonder, “Oh, no wonder you didn’t want her make out with me. I always thought I was fat and ugly.” I never did that to somebody. It wasn’t a huge surprise.
It always been talked about, but I wanted my story of being gay to be told by me on my terms, not by a political opponent who’d take a picture of me in some place doing who knows what and use it against me if I was ashamed of who I was or lying to the community. And I recognized by the age of 30, I was sophisticated enough that if you are honest with the voters, they’ll tolerate a whole lot more than if you’re hiding it from them or lying to them. I just didn’t know that when I came out to the community…
And all of that happened simultaneously, coming out to friends and family and to the community. Once I started, I was just like, “Well, let’s just start telling everybody.” I didn’t know at that moment there hadn’t been anybody else in elected office who’d come out under that same circumstance. You would’ve thought, I would’ve thought certainly in the ’60s or ’70s somewhere there’d been openly gay city councilmen somewhat. I didn’t know any of them, but I would’ve thought.
But because it was so unique, the Miami Herald latched onto the story and ran stories. “Councilman Comes Out.” I was teaching middle school at the time; I was back to teaching again. And parents of the kids that I taught were not happy. I was clearly going to be recruiting their 13-year-old sons. That groomer stereotype has been with the community for decades and probably will still be there decades from now. That was the part that caught me off guard, wait, this is getting attention. I didn’t expect this.
And people were generally supportive. I got this one letter, and I think I still have it somewhere, “Councilman Galvin, your lifestyle is an abomination. You are going to hell if you don’t repent, but I hope you run for mayor the next time because you’d make a very good mayor.” These are the types of weird things that I was now navigating through not expecting what was a personal story I thought that would be worthy enough that the Miami Herald actually ran a whole weekend section. Not the whole section, but I was the front cover of that Tropic magazine, if you remember that. I was the front cover of that, and they had a big interview inside.
And it’s like, I wasn’t expecting all this because I didn’t realize that I was the first, at least as far as… There were a couple of judges who had run for judge and gotten elected as openly gay candidates. I guess because judges, once they get elected, can hide a little bit because they’re not allowed to go to public forums and talk about issues and give their opinions; they’re supposed to remain removed. Once they got elected, their stories didn’t get told so much because they didn’t… And they still can. They’re lucky in a way. They get to hide from any real issues. You make your decision when you’re on the dais when you’re a judge, but you’re not going forums and talking about anything that’s hot button for that moment, so I guess their stories didn’t live on and that’s why when I came out that it got the attention that… I guess I still don’t know why other than I was the first sitting elected official, at least locally.
Jeff Guin:
How specifically did you come out? Was it a press release? Or how did the Herald find out?
Scott Galvin:
Yeah, there was a press release. I’m almost certain it wasn’t a press release. I had a website when I was first running for the city council in 1999, I mean when I got elected the first time. A buddy of mine said, “Scott, you got to have a website.” And I’m like, “A website? What would a political candidate need a website for?” But he’s like, “No, bro, you got to do it, you got to do it.” I’m like, “Okay, let’s start it. Okay, give me an email address. Let’s have the thing.” I have been using that website for 25 years to push my stories out so that the community can know.
Now, of course, back then people were still reading the newspaper and getting their news from one or two TV channels; nothing like what it is now. But thank God I’ve been using it because as print media fell off, the Miami Herald hasn’t sent a reporter to a City of North Miami council meeting in 10 years unless somebody had just gotten arrested. They don’t have the bandwidth, the cover. How does my community know I’m doing anything if I’m not telling them? I posted the story about being out on the website. And I was using email, although it wasn’t a sophisticated system, it was just blind copying a bunch of people. I would cut and paste 50 people a time and send. I sent it to my residence and I posted it on my website.
Somewhere in there, I guess a reporter got it. And it was more of me consciously trying to use those mediums to tell my story as it was to, oh wait, it’s going to catch on to a bigger… I just would’ve never thought that would have any interest of anybody outside of my voters. I was trying to keep my voters, my community cool with me by being open about my story.
Jeff Guin:
The website was the press release. The Herald accessed that, they used it, and then did they interview you? How did that go?
Scott Galvin:
Yeah, I got a call then probably momentarily, you know what I mean?
Jeff Guin:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Galvin:
Quickly from the beat reporter. And they used to have a reporter who covered solely North Miami. And they were always looking for the juicy gossip story to tell anyway, and so this was Juicy gossip. And like I said, I wouldn’t have expected that call. What were the questions that they asked? I don’t remember. I know I have copies of it somewhere. But it ran simultaneously the next morning in the Dade Miami Herald and the Broward Miami Herald. At that stage, there were separate editions where the Broward Miami Herald would cover… They were calling it the Herald, not the Miami Herald. But the Broward version would cover Broward local. It ran in both, and so everybody saw that article, and my mom’s friends at church saw that article. I had not told anybody at church, so my poor mom and dad had to deal with their circles of friends finding out that I’m gay by reading it in the paper. Okay. Not the way I would’ve planned it, but who could have… I was naive. I would’ve never guessed that it would have any value as a story beyond just North Miami.
Jeff Guin:
And so how did it affect your relationship with your parents?
Scott Galvin:
They were good about it. By that point, I lived on my own. I’m in the neighborhood of 30 years old. And TWN, that newspaper, there used to be a gay newspaper, they put me on the front cover too. When I told my family, again, they were just supportive. My dad smiled, and the smile told me I already knew. You know what I mean? He didn’t vocalize it. Because I lived on my own, I knew I had a job. You know what I mean? I had a public name already. I knew that if they were to have had a negative reaction, there wasn’t anything… They weren’t going to be able to throw me out. They weren’t going to be able to cut me off financially. I wasn’t taking anything from them. I didn’t live at home. I knew I had that level of insurance and protection there. But they were super good about it. Always have been.
Jeff Guin:
What about your sister?
Scott Galvin:
She was good about it too. She feigned the, “I never knew.” But it’s like, “Okay, girl. You’ve probably heard people talking about me for years.” You know what I mean? Because, look, I didn’t have any girlfriends. I was a decent looking kid. “What’s wrong with him?” I look back at some photos of myself now then, I wish we had video, but I see myself in an effeminate sitting stance or whatever. Seen some pictures of me as a little kid, you see the stereotypical, the kid’s got a hand on a hip and a hand in the air, and you’re like, “Okay, well, clearly people must have known a long time ago.” But yeah, they were all good about it. Did they have internal issues with it? Probably. Did my mom ever question or dad ever questioned, “Oh, did I do something wrong raising him?” Or whatever. I don’t know.
Jeff Guin:
They probably did that when you were a kid and you were breaking everything.
Scott Galvin:
Exactly. “Oh, thank God. We thought you were going to tell us you’d killed five people.” But yeah, they probably had that. I don’t know. I’ve never asked them. I never then went back to it. Hey, it was said; it was out. You’d occasionally meet the new guy that I was seeing at that moment.
Jeff Guin:
You mentioned the reason that you did come out, that you posted it and you made it public was because you were living your teenage years in your 30s. In what way did being out change anything? Was it still the same circumstance? Were you freer to do what you wanted to do?
Scott Galvin:
I had issues. I was teaching school. There was blow back. You know what I mean? The administration in the end was supportive, but it’s hard when parents are coming to your door and knocking, saying, “I want my kid out of his class.” That’s the kind of stuff that I was facing. Did I have residents who probably talk trash about me? Yeah, I don’t remember those instances, but it had to have happened.
Every campaign since, I’ve… Maybe not the last one, because by then who cared anymore about Scott? I think the last time I had to run for office was 2019, it was 2019. But the groomer rumor was omnipresent at every campaign. And every campaign would come and go, and the next time it would come up, I’d be like, “Oh God, yeah.” Now I could proactively say to somebody, guess, “Well, I’m running for reelection.” The story’s going to be… But that’s the kind of damage they try to do to somebody. And I’ve seen that since I was 20 years old. That’s how they were trying to defeat me. It would’ve been enough to just say I was a twenty-year-old FIU Junior because I didn’t know anything and I didn’t serve on anything, but Scott got money from gay causes or something. That’s in one of the stories too from when I was 20.
It’s always used as a weapon, it just became less and less of an effective weapon as the years went by. And had it come out… Let’s say I had been caught at a bar half naked or something like that and the story to come out that way in some photo that an opponent used, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to overcome the rumored stuff because, well, “These rumors must be true. Look at this photo. Look at how he’s behaving.” You know what I mean? I’m lucky that I was able to. And it was a conscious thing. I didn’t want it to be used against. I was never ashamed of being gay. I never went through a fake period where I pretended to be straight. I never was angry at myself that I’m gay, it was just like, well, that’s who I am.
It’s like when I found out I was adopted, I was probably five years old and there was an old church bulletin that I found laying around somewhere at home, and it said, “John and Opal Galvin Adopted a Son, Scott.” I wasn’t familiar with that word, so I went to my parents and I said, “What does adopted mean?” And they told me, and I was like, “Oh, okay.” La, la, la, la, la, went on about my life. It was the same, “Oh, okay,” reaction that I had when I realized I was gay. I was never down on myself or anything like that. I didn’t act on it or anything because I did know that there was a stigma around it, and I didn’t know anybody else either. Who knows? Maybe if at 14 years old had a gay friend come up to me and go, “Hey, I’m gay. You’re cute,” maybe something different would’ve transpired. But it wasn’t part of what I was doing at the time.
Jeff Guin:
Your coming out process, was that the end of… Were all the demons exercised? Did have the intended effect in that you felt freer or your mind was clearer in some way going forward in your career?
Scott Galvin:
Yeah, it definitely was freeing because even though there were the short-term blow backs of parents being angry and all of this media attention, those were unsettling, but they ebbed before too long, and then I was able to go about. And then now I could go to the clubs and not worry, “Who else is here? Oh, I better be careful.” And now I could go to AIDS walks and not feel is it wrong to go to those kind of things? It was freeing, and it allowed me to then explore having relationships with people, something that I didn’t do in the past. It had the intended effect because, look, here I am. I’m leaving office after 25 years. Who’d have guessed that I’d still be doing all this. But I’m leaving with everybody around me knowing… And there’s a building named after me. You know what I mean?
Jeff Guin:
Mm-hmm.
Scott Galvin:
I navigated the waters of 25 years and everything that came with it decently effectively.
Jeff Guin:
And you did have relationships after that, including a very long one that you’re presently in. Talk a little bit about that process and getting there.
Scott Galvin:
And getting to where you have a long-term relationship? Or-
Jeff Guin:
Yeah. And just having a relationship at all, just exploring that part of yourself and then getting into a long-term relationship and the challenges that come with being super busy and being accountable to a whole lot of people.
Scott Galvin:
Well, and it’s funny, being in a gay long-term relationship I’m sure is zero different than being in a straight long-term relationship. It’s a challenge. My partner and I have been together 19 years, and lots of ups and downs, lots of nights where I’m not at home, lots of nights or afternoons where constituents are knocking on the door. It’s 8:00 AM. “Oh, good. I caught you.” What else did you think of was going to be? Being out at dinner and having people approach you. Even at my father’s funeral, at his viewing, I was approached as I stood next to the casket. When you’re in public office, you are public property, and people come at you like that.
And it’s hard in a relationship when somebody wants you to be theirs and be with them that you have to carve out the space for the public. And partners said to me, and I’m sure their wives and husbands said, “Why can’t you just tell them no?” Because you like when I get, I don’t know, invited to some nice museum opening. This is the negative that comes with that positive. And if you want people to vote for you, they’re not doing it, they’re not approaching me because they’re… And they’d be angry. Some people have been rude. But they’re trying to vent their problem to you because their problem is super important and they’ve had a hard time navigating the system.
I used to say that I was living down Watergate every day of my life because people have had, after Watergate, become so distrustful to politicians that I had to work hard to show them, “No, no, no, I’m a good guy. I’m here for you. I’m a tool for you.” And wanting to give them that access to vent in a point in time when it’s not really convenient for me, it’s convenient for them, and I have to be understanding of that. But that’s really hard in the context of a relationship. “Scott, we’re having dinner right now. Just tell them no.” For right or for wrong, I would carve out at least enough space to get a little bit and then say, “Oh, I’ll call you for the rest of the story tomorrow,” but at least have given them that entree. It’s been tough. We’ve had some rough goes, but-
Jeff Guin:
How do you set boundaries in that situation?
Scott Galvin:
In the situation of somebody coming up at dinner, you minimize that. And same thing I guess when people come to the front door, I open the front door, I have the conversation, but I’ll say, “Hey, I’m having dinner right now,” or, “It is Sunday morning. Let me call you tomorrow. I’ll email you.” You know what I mean? And I’ve done a really good job over the years of directing everything toward email, because that way I can converse at 3:00 AM if I happen to be awake. I don’t have to call somebody and, “Oh, I got your voicemail. Call me back,” and da-da-da. I can just email. And I’ve tried to use that tool very effectively.
But it’s important to allow the person to have some time, I think. And to the person who will take my seat… Keep saying my seat. The District One seat. Been there so long. But the person who will take the seat, I would say to them, “Be ready. These people will come to you, and you can’t just blow them off. You’ve got to listen. I don’t know what your personal space will be, but don’t think that, oh no, I’m never going to deal with somebody coming to my door.” They’re going to come to your door. You’re never going to stop it. And with today’s attitude toward politicians, there are no boundaries anymore. You’re expected to be on duty all the time and take it with a stiff upper lip. You know?
Jeff Guin:
Right, right. I know that some of the LGBTQ organizations, you’ve had some tangential dealings with them and some have endorsed you for your offices. Do you see that as being a part of your potential future is to be more involved in those things? You have safe schools going on, but there’s the larger LGBTQ community out there too. What do you think your role will be in that?
Scott Galvin:
I’m in a super unique position. In Dade County alone, I think right now there are fewer than five openly LGBTQ elected officials. There’s a couple of judges in there, but it’s hard to add them to the total. Again, sorry, your honors, but when you don’t have to come out and talk about issues, you’re just in a little bubble and it gets forgotten. There’s so few openly elected officials in Dade, let alone… Am I the longest serving openly gay legislator in the state of Florida’s history? At 25 years plus, that’s probably the case. I have this wealth of experience and background that’s super unique. In this moment at a national level, how do I then best use those tools? How can I best be of assistance to the gay community as I step away from office? I’m trying to step away from office and create some more quietness for me. I was hoping that Kamala Harris was going to be elected president because it would’ve meant I would’ve been free to be a little bit more removed from what’s happening. But with things being the way they are with President Trump being reelected, I recognize that my biggest political fights are likely still in front of me.
I’d like to have thought that they were behind me and I was settling into more of a real retirement mode. I’m not going to do it to my partner to just turn off the city and turn on this larger national battle. I want to be fair to him. He’s sacrificed a lot to be with me after all these years, but I recognize I can’t ignore that background that I have. And I’m not sure where it’s going to go yet. Don’t worry, Eric, I’m going to be home to have dinner. There’s going to be some sense of normalcy that comes back to our relationship. But at the same time, I recognize that things could go in a dark direction, and I got to be ready to do something because the time will call for it.
