On May 11, 1999 the South Florida LGBTQ community was preparing for Y2K and still dealing  with the horror of AIDS. But on that date, Scott Galvin was elected to the North Miami City Council.  It would begin a long run as the longest serving LGBTQ elected official in Florida history.  That milestone came to an end this week when he finished his service to the community.. His last act was attending his 620th City Council meeting in a row.  He did not miss a single meeting in 25 years.

As LGBTQ+ people, many of us grow up alienated from our biological families. In the bad old days before PFLAG, most of us hid our sexual orientation and/or gender identity from our parents or grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts, or cousins. Often, when our family members did find out, they rejected us for being who we are. Since marriage equality is a recent phenomenon, most of us lived our lives without the benefits that legally-sanctioned, opposite-gender spouses take for granted. Instead, we in the LGBTQ+ communities created new forms of relationships that were for us what biological families, heterosexual marriages, or parenting were for others. We call those relationships families of choice, as opposed to biological families we were born into and grew up with. Queer authors and activists have written extensively about this topic, most notably Kath Weston in her dated but still-relevant book Families We Choose (1991). In it she writes, “Gay (or chosen) families dispute the old saying, ‘You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your relatives.’ Not only can these families embrace friends; they may also encompass lovers, coparents, adopted children, children from previous heterosexual relationships, and offspring conceived through alternative insemination.”