Gay Key West - A History

A history of gay Key West starting in 1954, when the city police chief Bienvenido Perez promised to rid the island of the "scores of sex deviates" that had supposedly flocked to the island to escape a crackdown by Miami police. "The town is full of them," he said at the time. "We don't want that kind of people in Key West."

Twenty-nine years later Richard Heyman, an out-and-proud homosexual, was elected mayor. But no one in 1954 would have believed it possible. There were gay rights protes...