Joe Saunders, candidate for Florida House District 106, has been through this before.
In 2012, the University of Central Florida graduate jumped into the race to represent a new legislative district centered around his alma mater and won handily. He was just 29 at the time.
Two years later, Democrats suffered a wave of losses in Florida and Saunders, who was considered a rising star in the party and had quickly risen in leadership, lost his seat in a squeaker, by just 714 votes.
Now 41, Saunders is back on the campaign trail and relocated to Miami, where he’s taking on incumbent Florida state Rep. Fabián Basabe, a candidate who could charitably be called “colorful” — his resume includes a starring role in the reality show Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive and charges of misdemeanor disorderly conduct and multiple allegations of sexual harassment by male legislative aides.
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Since Saunders’ election loss in 2014, his own resume has grown to include multiple roles at Equality Florida, the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization where he first worked after college, and political consulting for Florida Democrats and in the U.K. for out gay former Minister of State Simon Hughes’ bid to return to Parliament.
Saunders spoke from his home in South Beach, where he was hopeful about the future and predicted the world will change with the coming election.
“Just like Kamala is saying,” Saunders forecast, “we’re not going back, and some very, very powerful things are possible because of it.”
LGBTQ Nation: You graduated with a degree in Political Science from the University of Central Florida in 2005, and after college you joined Equality Florida, where you’ve worked in different capacities on and off since that org was started in response to the election of Jeb Bush as Florida governor 1996 and a broader right turn in state politics. What are the biggest challenges that the LGBTQ+ community has faced in Florida since then?
Joe Saunders: Today, it’s really about Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ war for censorship and government intrusion into people’s private lives, and that’s shown up as the Don’t Say Gay or Trans law, which Equality Florida has led on — we named the Don’t Say Gay law three years ago, and have seen multiple iterations of it since then here and in other states.
What really just radicalized me around the necessity of engaging in politics was George W. Bush’s campaign for reelection, and the fact that he centered his belief that there should be a federal marriage amendment in the United States Constitution. I mean, to me, that was just so offensive that he would run another Southern state strategy of culture wars and wedge issues.
It’s so interesting because it feels like in Florida, we always have nationalized politics here. Like we’re either informing national politics or informed by it. It always feels like it’s a call and response. And so our fates here in Florida are often tied to what’s happening on the national landscape.
So, you can answer that question in a lot of ways. You could name a bunch of different, separate policy fights that we’re in the middle of, but what we’re really dealing with is this attempt to turn the community against LGBTQ people, parents, and LGBTQ kids, and we’re fighting for the soul of the state right now.
What is it about Florida that’s pushed young people to the front of so many issues? You’re an example with your advocacy in college, and I’m thinking of students who led walkouts over Don’t Say Gay like Zander Moricz, and then David Hogg following the mass shooting in Parkland. What do you think accounts for that?
Oh, such a good question. I’ll answer it in this way: when I think about the tragedy in Parkland and the response from students who managed to pull off in a red state what nobody else had — which is commonsense gun safety law reforms — what I see is that people like David and the students that organized that response, they had been traumatized and affected by the tragedy at Pulse just two years earlier, right? And folks like Zander, too. You have to go back in time and see this series of events that have led to young people understanding their power in this state in response to the tragedy of Pulse nightclub, where 49 people lost their lives.
We saw a global response, not just from the LGBT community, but from a broader community. So when tragedy struck in Parkland just two years later, students from the gay-straight alliances were some of the first to come forward, not just with grief, but with a policy agenda. It was like within days, they were organizing rallies, and they had very clear, sharp feedback for the state legislature, which was meeting at that time.
When you see how Parkland students got on a bus in the middle of the night from Broward County and drove nine hours to Tallahassee — by the way, it was Equality Florida’s public policy team that was there to meet them and train them and tell them about how to navigate the halls of the Capitol and chase Republicans up and down stairwells when they needed.
And just a few years later, again, you saw young people who had been following along after Parkland say, “Okay, the Don’t Say Gay or Trans law has been passed. This is a direct attack on our schools, on our community and our families, on our parents,” and you saw advocacy come from it. These things build on themselves.
One of your jobs at Equality Florida was as program director for Equality Means Business, which was the country’s first state-level Corporate Equality coalition. That effort helped catalyze corporate support for LGBTQ+ people and issues nationally, but there was a backlash in 2023 with the Bud Light boycott and controversy over Target’s LGBTQ+-friendly products and branding. What do you think accounts for that backlash at that time with those companies?
I think we have to understand that there is movement on the right in politics in the United States, and I actually think this is a global thing — the rise of far-right populism, the rise of strong men like Ron DeSantis and Trump and Brexit in the U.K. Strong men come to power because they identify communities that are weaker and more vulnerable. They turn those into boogeymen that allow them to galvanize some base of an electorate and say, “Look at these bad people over here. Only I can save you from them.”
And so the attacks on DEI and the attacks on diversity and inclusion programs, both in corporate America, but also in academic spaces across society, across civic society, it’s all sort of stemming from the same source. To me they’re all sort of born from a belief that the growing diversity of the United States — the fact that we’re inches away from being a minority-majority country, where there is no single racial majority — that all of those tensions, added on top of economic tensions from COVID, have led to the possibility of folks coming in and trying to identify bad people that they need to save you from. Trump’s obsession with migrants and immigrants is one example of that.
So what I think we’re seeing in the corporate space is that companies that are operating at a global level, across lines of difference and culture and time zones and language and race and gender, that is in direct tension with the politics that I just described.
But I also think that those tensions are shallow — like, I think that at the end of the day, the market is the market, and there is a very legitimate, real reason why companies need diversity and inclusion programs.
DeSantis signed the Don’t Say Gay legislation into law in March 2022. Describe the real-world effects of that law and the expansion that followed on both LGBTQ+ and straight students, as well.
It was a moment of sweeping censorship, and it was always shallow and inauthentic. But it goes to the narrative around LGBTQ people being groomers because of their advocacy for LGBTQ youth. That’s always been a part of the discourse around LGBT rights in the United States, but for a long time, there was no place for it. Even Republicans, even conservatives, wouldn’t stand next to that frame. But it was our advocacy against the Don’t Say Gay or Trans law that I think created room for Gov. DeSantis, specifically, for that to be their response to our critique of the censorship, right? And it swept the country. I think that’s important to say out loud, because it was all born from the same source.
What they would originally say is, the law was only about K through 3rd grade, and they said, “Why are you so mad about this? It’s only about K through third grade.” We said, “Well, first, the way that your law is written, it’s very clearly not just for that. It clearly made room for the censorship to stretch above 3rd grade.”
The very next year, they came back and expanded it from 3rd grade to 8th grade, and three months after that, the State Department of Education passed a rule — not a lot of law, but a rule — that extended the Don’t Say Gay or Trans law all the way up to 12th grade. So it was never really just about that. It was always about a toe in the door before they could kick it open.
What’s happened since then, though, was Equality Florida convened a bunch of parents who were horrified by the way that stories about LGBTQ people were being censored out of schools and we filed a lawsuit and we won against the Don’t Say Gay or Trans law in court. We reached a historic settlement with the DeSantis administration where they had to admit that the censorship was happening — and that it shouldn’t — and so in many different ways that litigation has since gutted the law.
Some claim DeSantis is moderating his homophobia following the collapse of his presidential campaign and the Don’t Say Gay settlement. Is there evidence of that?
His presidential campaign was a complete flop, and I think he limped back to Florida, but I don’t believe that we’re seeing Governor DeSantis moderate. In fact, I think we’re seeing him doubling down. Does he have the same influence that he did as he was building his presidential campaign? I think that’s a different question.
Just one example of how he keeps doubling down on the extremism is he made the decision when finalizing last session’s budget to veto all funding from arts and cultural organizations in the state. We’ve never seen a governor veto all — every single line item for these grants. And after the backlash from the arts community begins, his response to why he vetoed it was that there were “sexual festivals” in Orlando and Tampa that gave him the belief that this funding was going to “woke” organizations.
Now, these are theater festivals that are predominantly LGBT, that have a lot of LGBT content. I think he’s doubling down on everything, but there are signs that legislative leaders here in the state, that business leaders like Disney and the business coalitions that they work with are done with the war on woke and they’re ready to go back to a state that they recognize.
It just sounds like DeSantis is vindictive.
Oh my gosh, yeah. We became the poster child for anti-LGBTQ extremism after years of being what a lot of people thought of as the hope for the South. We had a moderate Republican coalition that I worked with every day, had businesses that were supporting LGBT rights and non-discrimination, and then Ron DeSantis decides he wants to run for president. But the very next year after Ron went to Iowa and three out of four voters in Iowa rejected him and his terrible retail politics and terrible story, we saw almost every anti-LGBT bill in the following session die.
Last week DeSantis removed the LGBTQ+ pages from the Florida tourism site.
LGBTQ tourism generates millions of dollars in economic development in Florida, especially in my district, which includes Miami Beach, a major LGBTQ tourism destination. He is actively hurting businesses and our economy, and for what? This is just more of the same from a governor who cares more about manufacturing culture wars than solving real problems. People are done with a version of politics in Florida that puts us to the right of Alabama.
In your first race in 2012 you faced a fairly conventional Republican in your Orlando district. Now you’re up against a very unconventional Republican in Miami, Fabián Basabe. We’re not even sure if this guy’s gay or straight. He’s married to a woman, but he’s faced multiple charges by male staffers of sexual harassment. He calls himself a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal. How do you describe him, and what’s your strategy to defeat him?
Well, my opponent has never once voted out of alignment with Gov. DeSantis’ agenda. Fabián voted for the Don’t Say Gay or Trans expansion law. He voted for the anti-trans bathroom bill. He voted for the license to discriminate bill, which allows people to call in a strongly held religious belief as a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for non-discrimination laws in the state. He famously campaigned as a champion for women’s reproductive freedom and then voted against over 50 amendments that were brought by Democrats to Ron DeSantis’ six-week abortion ban. Fabian voted against every one.
Then when it came time to vote yes or no on the six-week abortion ban, he took a walk, just walked on the vote, and then posted a crazy video, that I think is still available, where he blames the Democrats and the “super minority” for the six-week abortion ban.
What I say a lot about him is that people in this district need to be very, very wary of politicians who will go to Tallahassee and attack you and your family and then come home to pander to you at Pride. Another headline that you maybe caught was where he was told by Miami Beach Pride that he wasn’t welcome to march with them because they thought he was a safety concern, because the community would protest him so aggressively whenever he would show up to LGBT things, and he threatened to sue them in federal court.
It’s like he wants his cake, and he knows that he can’t win a district like this, voting to the right of Attila the Hun, voting as if he’s an Alabama Republican. But he’s only ever voted like he’s an Alabama Republican, and I think that’s been about him going to Tallahassee and reading the room and knowing you get more power if you stay on the team of leadership, but leadership this cycle has been some of the most conservative we’ve ever seen in Florida.
A lot of what my campaign is about is about showing people the balance that we need in the Capitol, reminding them that this is a Democratic seat that’s been held by Democrats for 50 years, and we’ve got somebody who may show up and promise you the Moon, but what he’s promising doesn’t match his votes.
What is the single most important thing the world should do to address the climate crisis?
We have to pivot to an economy that is not just accommodating for renewable energy sources but is centered around renewable energy like solar, which here in the Sunshine State we should be leading on, and instead, we are often fighting against.
Would you support mandatory national service for young people in the military, or some other form of public service of their choosing like the Peace Corps or Teach for America?
I think I would want to understand that proposal a little bit more before I would weigh in on it. I haven’t talked about anything like that so far on the campaign trail.
You and your husband, Edison Aguilera, live in Miami Beach in the district you’re running from now. What can you tell us about him, how did you meet, and who proposed to whom?
Oh, no! I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell parts of these stories. I didn’t ask him yet.
We met during Wilton Manors Pride, up in Fort Lauderdale in 2019, and we actually got married during COVID. Eddie is from Bogota, Colombia, he’s a doctor, and his dream is to transition his medical license here to the United States. Today he’s doing clinical research on different forms of brain cancer at the University of Miami, so he’s much smarter than all of us and doing much more important work than all of us.
But our marriage story really was always about COVID. He was staying with me and traveling back and forth to Colombia, and then when the airports started closing, we knew we had some fast decisions to make to be able to stay together, and I’m so glad we did.
And is there a proposal involved?
Someday, I’m going to have to rent a plane and parachute down to the Eiffel Tower and land on one knee and give him a ring in front of the world. That is still an expectation, but honestly, it was much more raw than that. It was much more like waking up one day after talking about what our options might be to stay together, and to stay in this little bubble that we had. The Broward County Clerk of Courts closed, and the Miami-Dade County Clerk of Courts closed, and we realized that the only opportunity we had was to drive down to Islamorada in Monroe County, right near Key West, and just go for it. That was three years ago. Someday we’ll do a big wedding. That’s the dream.
Are there kids in your future?
Oh, girl. Who can have the time? Right now, we’re trying to decide if we’re getting a dog — that’s the debate today.
I’ve got some hypotheticals. It’s Halloween eve, and you and Edison are heading to a costume party dressed as Gov. DeSantis and First Lady Casey. Who’s wearing the cape and who’s wearing the lifts?
I think we would probably rethink that and show up as Mario and Luigi. I think we do that instead.
Bridget and Christian Ziegler invite you and Edison over for game night and Bridget texts beforehand that you should bring something wet. What do you show up with?
Oh, my God. Um, I think I would show up with the list of all of the Moms for Liberty school board candidates that Equality Florida is kicking out of office in the 2024 election cycle.
It’s New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago and you’re seated at a table with Ye, formerly known as Kanye, along with avowed antisemite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. How did you how did you end up there? A) Trump won the election, and he’s reaching out to the LGBTQ+ community, B) Trump lost, and you’ve been asked to join a truth and reconciliation commission, or C) You ate too much Key Lime pie at your own New Year’s Eve party and you’re having a terrible nightmare.
Yeah, it’s C, and there’s still a lot of yelling.
Predictions!
I think Kamala Harris is going to be president, and I think the world is going to change. I’m going to give you a hopeful prediction, because it is how I feel today. I think the country is going to find itself out of what feels like a really dark, confusing period, and just like Kamala is saying, we’re not going back, and some very, very powerful things are possible because of it.
What are you looking most forward to if you win election to the Florida House representing District 106?
Sleeping immediately. Right away, a nap.
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