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Hey Friends,
Greetings from Florida! Wish you were here.
If you’re a longtime reader or lurker on my socials, you may have noticed I’m a born-and-raised Floridian. It’s a fact I proclaim proudly, although my pride sometimes confuses any non-Floridians I meet, and even some Floridian friends who moved away.
A picture of me as a small child looking at the scariest starfish I’ve ever seen, circa 1989 or something.
When I was a kid in the ‘90s, I don’t think there was much to be ashamed of (although maybe I was blissfully unaware). The South Florida of my youth was a vaporwave paradise full of palm trees, sunsets, black and gold furniture, and glass-block walls. The airwaves were crowded with Cuban music and Miami Bass. As I grew up, I realized those sounds weren’t entirely universal, and I’m prouder of them because of it.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to escape my surroundings, but in the way any teenager wants to set fire to their hometown. Then I went to college in north Florida and fell in love with the state in a whole new way; riding inflatable tubes down lazy rivers and doing scandalous things in the dense hammock forests.
After I graduated, I made my career in Miami and was amazed by the small city’s legendary excess. I had a lot of fun (maybe too much), but I also got a lot of work done. You can read more about my ongoing love affair with Miami in the essay below. #syngery
Further Reading: Kat Says: “Miami Is The Moment” (January 2023)
Some five years later, I finally untethered from Florida and traveled the world for three years while working from my laptop. At the time, I didn’t really think I’d come back, but I knew I always could.
Unexpectedly, what I found in the jungles of Asia and the shores of Europe was a real appreciation for the tropical paradise that raised me. Flying thousands of miles to see the world’s most beautiful destinations only proved how special my hometown really was, and after a couple of COVID years spent in California, I found an excuse to come back.
Here’s a picture of a giant iguana in my neighborhood, because fuck it. Gecs.
I know people think Florida is goofy, but I didn’t understand how much some people hate it until I started telling Californians about my plans. I guess people have faked it for me my whole life because they knew I was from Florida and therefore had to be dealt with kindly—but not these folks. They’d hear me say, “I’m moving to Florida,” and screw up their faces and literally say, “Ew, oh my god, why?”
Look, I’m not stupid. I understand why people turn their noses up at my state. Our current governor (sadly a Presidential hopeful) is evil incarnate, and every day he unearths some new political plot to turn back the hands of time. On paper, Florida is ground zero for the patriarchal Puritan revival, but the Florida I know and live in every day is anything but a breeding ground for hate and censorship.
My Florida is super weird and doesn’t give a fuck who you are. It’s overly tan people walking their dogs past giant iguanas while smoking at 8 in the morning. It’s skinny dudes riding bikes through rain puddles in cheap flip-flops, and old gay couples who can tell you exactly who Madonna was fucking some random night in 1992. It’s heavily-accented Europeans who want to hang out by the pool in tiny bathing suits and celebrate life, and queer dudes who work in beach-side biker bars who just wanna show you their favorite blonde wig.
My buddy Zach (a fellow Floridian) recently came to visit in an attempt to escape the urban chokehold of New York City (hey, it’s a great place to be, but not when you’re in the middle of a mental breakdown). He wanted wide-open skies and heart-stopping thunderstorms. He needed shitty sports bars that still allow smoking and at least three trips to Laspadas (iykyk).
We had a lot of fun together, and his visit spurred more than a handful of impassioned lamentations about the outside world’s comical rejection of all things Florida.
“They just don’t get it, dude!” Zach would whine between yelling “woooaaah” at lightning strikes that filled half the sky. “Florida is a vibe!” and it is, but it’s easy to get caught up in the national narrative.
Zach and I vibin’, doin’ Florida shit.
As much as I love living in and repping for Florida, it’s scary. Governor DeSantis’ so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws have made it a crime to speak openly about homosexuality in public schools. That and his rejection of Critical Race Theory have been the cause of our infamous book bans, which have seen more than 350 books pulled from school shelves since July 2022.
I find this roll-back particularly disturbing not only because of the important role reading and writing has played in my own life and career, but because I know for a fact that only 57 percent of Florida school children are currently reading at a grade-appropriate level.
There’s even a teacher from Hernando County that lost her job and currently faces charges for showing her students the Disney film Strange World which happens to include a gay character.
I know I’m preaching to the choir, but just because a straight kid reads a book or watches a movie with gay characters doesn’t mean they’ll end up being gay, and just because a gay kid isn’t exposed to homosexuality doesn’t mean they won’t still grow up to be themselves. They’ll just be scared and alone for no good reason, left to wonder why they aren’t like all the people on TV. (And what about the kids with gay parents? How are you gonna tell little Billy he can’t talk about his moms?)
Just because you don’t teach kids how black people, immigrants and women are institutionally discriminated against in the United States doesn’t mean those biased systems magically disappear because no one’s calling them out. They just, y’know, aren’t being called out.
As I write this essay, a new rule has been enacted that forces parents to “sign off” on their child’s nickname before it can be used on school grounds. So, if I wanted to go by “Kat” instead of “Katherine,” I’d need a signed fucking permission slip. No way it’s to protect little bio-femmes from calling themselves “Kat.” It’s just further proof of DeSantis’ incredibly anti-trans, anti-queer and anti-poc agenda.
To be clear: Literacy is key to independence and critical thinking, and history is the only tool we have that keeps us from repeating our pasts.
These policies are an outright attack on human rights at best and a malicious mechanism for mind control at worst. Add to that a gratuitous pro-gun policy that literally removes the regulatory need for a carrying license, and you’ve got a truly horrifying recipe for anger and violence.
I guess that’s why my friend Jose didn’t want me and his girlfriend Lisa to go see 100 Gecs in Fort Lauderdale in May.
“You’re gonna go see a band fronted by a trans woman? In Florida?” he said. “I mean, I wanna see 100 Gecs too, but you’re gonna get shot.”
That’s a dramatic statement, to be sure—but is it out of the realm of possibility? Lisa and I weren’t afraid to go. In fact, we thought it was even more important that we did go amid the headlines and toxic culture war.
To be fair, I don’t like to go to the movie theater anymore because every time someone uses the bathroom I have a panic attack that some asshole is about to shoot me during the climax. So I didn’t not listen to his concerns.
Here’s the thing: I’ve been looking forward to a 100 Gecs live show since the first time I stumbled across the “Money Machine” video in 2019.
Two gangly weirdos I’d never seen before (who I now know are Dylan Brady and Laura Les) were headbanging their long white hair around a parking lot, tossing Monster energy drinks around like Steve Aoki sprays Champagne.
The music was a mix of red-lined computer glitches and 808 trap beats mixed with country-western guitar and pop-punk vocal melodies. One of them was wearing the same red-and-black-striped arm sleeves I bought from Hot Topic in 2003. It was manic and cheap-looking as fuck, a celebration of everything that was too low-brow to ever be considered cool and, therefore, nothing short of genius.
Every song I discovered was more unhinged than the last, and I loved it. I started looking up 100 Gecs concerts on YouTube, and it was a giant shitshow moshpit from start to finish. The Internet exploded with videos of people trying to decide if these two 20-somethings from St. Louis were the best or worst thing to ever happen to music. It doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing.
In that way, 100 Gecs is kinda the Florida of music. You can hate it from afar, but that just means you don’t understand it. You either haven’t given yourself enough time to fully appreciate the hidden beauty, or you simply do not like it, and that’s fine.
You don’t have to listen to 100 Gecs. You don’t ever have to come to Florida, but you will respect those of us who fuck with it. We are quite literally fighting the good fight down here—fighting for our right to be weird and voting like hell inside of counties that have been gerrymandered to high heaven to get these piece of shit would-be fascists out of our fucking lizard hole.
I know I’m not alone here, and it showed in ticket sales. The pop industry’s most divisive darlings had sold the fuck out of Fort Lauderdale’s Revolution Live. The tiered bar space can hold 1,300, and promoters had to move the show to the venue’s 1,950-cap patio, which is itself a separate venue called America’s Backyard.
I’m pretty sure all 2,000 of us showed up when doors opened because the line to get in wrapped around the entire block.
“Fuck Kat,” Lisa said as we walked past a gathering of mall goths and e-dorks large enough to give the cheerleaders from my middle school instant hives—and one incredibly sweet all-over Sailor Moon-wrapped car. “These kids are cool. We’re so old, haha.”
As two women in our mid-30s, we definitely skewed high on the age range. Once we talked our way into the venue (I’m press! Let me in!), we wriggled through the crowd to find a good lookout from the upstairs bar and immediately stood next to the only couple that seemed older than us.
“We saw their show two years ago,” the man named Craig told us. He and his wife were there with their 18-year-old daughter Ryan and her college girlfriend. Craig told us how Ryan makes him and his wife sit in the living room while she shows them music she’s found on the Internet, and then they all three travel the state seeing those underground acts together. A couple months prior to this, they went to Orlando to see Iglooghost. I can’t imagine anything cooler.
Craig offered to get us drinks, and Lisa and I decided we only needed waters (it was a school night, after all). As we chatted with our new friends, I took a look around the patio. The place was swamped with nut burgers in the best way possible. There were two people in full furry headgear and anime t-shirts as far as the eye could see. Everyone danced to a playlist that mixed System Of A Down with Ashanti and Ja Rule. It was like someone took my middle school years and inverted them, like the meek had inherited the Earth.
Someone in the crowd held up a trans pride flag on their phone screen, and the whole place roared in approval. That same person held up a gay pride flag to more of the same. Then they raised a British flag, and it just kept going but with more laughter. It was a whole-ass scene in there, and everything about it felt silly and positive.
Around 8:15 p.m., the opener stormed the stage, and I do mean stormed. Machine Girl threw down one of the most abrasively hook-ridden sets I’ve seen in years. The songs were fast and aggressive, chipped out with mechanical madness and laced with computer-funk groove.
“How are you guys doing tonight?” singer Matt Stephenson asked between songs. “Let’s keep going—oh, and fuck Ron DeSantis, to Hell.” We all cheered.
Stephenson did one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen at a show. About four songs into the set, he walked with his corded mic through the crowd. He was so on beat with the tune that you wouldn’t even know he was doing it if you weren’t right next to him or enjoyed a bird’s-eye view.
He walked right on top of the bar in the back and screamed his lyrics into the faces of the kids in the nosebleeds. Then he jumped into the crowd and started a mosh pit, hitting all his lyrics along the way. I’m pretty sure he passed out at one point, came to and then immediately crowd-surfed back to the stage.
“That guy definitely wants to die,” I thought, “but it’s fucking awesome, I’ll give him that.”
He and his partner Sean Kelly gave a triumphant finish, leaving everyone a bit ravenous for the main event. I didn’t know how the energy was supposed to spike after that, but all it took was the ear-bleeding, ominous bleat of the THX sonic warp and the shadow of Dylan Brady’s giant caution-cone wizard hat.
Laura Les hit the stage, whining the lyrics of “Dumbest Girl Alive” from the duo’s latest album 10,000 Gecs (this follows the band’s debut LP, 1000 Gecs, naturally).
“Fort Lauderdale!” Les shouted through her autotuned mic. “How are we doing out there?
“We are doing!” the effervescent nerd next to me shouted in return. Then he kept going in this incredible one-sided conversation that I captured on video but is worth spelling out for you below:
“Fuck yeah,” Laura said. “We are 100 Gecs.”
“You bet you are!”
“We are going to be playing some songs for you.”
“God Bless!”
“So uh, strap in, strap up, and…we’ve got some new stuff, some old stuff-”
“New stuff!”
“We’re dumping the kitchen sink out at you, so let's get it.”
10,000 Gecs single “757” came next, followed by “Stupid Horse,” “Frog On The Floor” and “ringtone,”—which are all nonsense words but also certified bangers that mean big things to anyone who loves 100 Gecs.
The stage production was sparse but insane. Les shuffled about the stage singing while Brady stood playing computer tracks from his laptop perched on top of a metal trash can, and also sometimes singing. The giant screen behind them flashed violent color bursts bound to trigger seizures in any epileptics within a five-mile radius. The crowd never once stopped jumping. It was beautiful.
“I love Fort Lauderdale,” Les said between tracks. “I love the smell of it. I love the souvenir t-shirts. I got one last time I was here that says, “I don't need sex, the government fucks me every day.’ Can we get a fuck DeSantis out there?”
“Fuck DeSantis!” we all shouted, middle fingers up.
“I think we need to say that once more.”
“Fuck DeSantis!”
“Yes sir.”
This concert was a protest party. We were rebuking the Republican government simply by existing and having fun. When the band played their latest single “Most Wanted Person in the United States,” Les introduced it by saying “This song is about trying to take a piss in Florida,” and afterward, she led us all in a collective yell.
The band played a slew of other hits, from "Doritos and Fritos" to "mememe" and of course "money machine." I laughed on the way out as we checked the merch. There was a shirt that showed Yoda with tits.
“I can’t believe they can get away with that,” Lisa laughed.
“Didn’t you hear?” I said. “Disney’s on our side now.”
On the way out, I talked to some of the folks from the crowd. This guy Robert, 21, told me it was his first ever mosh pit.
“Thank god I’m 6’1”,” he says, “I would have died.”
This 23-year-old woman in a black-and-white Lolita dress told me she saw a couple sneak up on the roof and cuddle while taking in the sights before security kicked them out.
“Hey, love is love,” Robert said, and we all agreed.
Craig and Ryan and co. chatted us up on the way out. Ryan’s girlfriend told me she had never heard 100 Gecs before but added three songs to her playlist during the set, including “Hollywood Baby.”
Then a woman named Veronica told me that, on a fan-scale of 100 to 10,000 Gecs, she loved the band “a gazillion Gecs.”
“My brain is fried. It’s sizzling right now,” she said. “The show was amazing. Honestly, just seeing them and making sure they’re real. I like them because they make me feel free, and I feel like a fucking freak.”
“Because you are!” I yelled as she and her friends hurried to their Lyft. “You are a fucking freak, Veronica!” And for one beautiful, sweaty, ridiculous night, it felt like the freaks of Florida had won.
I understand why a trans person wouldn’t feel safe staying in Florida, and why some parents feel ill at ease choosing to raise their children in our public school system—but I’m not trans, and I don’t have kids, so I’m not gonna move out and run away.
I’m gonna stay right here and keep voting, keep writing, start volunteering at the local schools, and keep talking to people about the Florida that I live in. The truth of the matter is, DeSantis’ reign isn’t going to last forever, and as long as some sliver of sand still floats above the rising tide, I’m gonna hold on to someplace special.
Yo, I made myself cry a little bit writing that one. Also, sorry it took me literally three months to write it. As you can imagine, it was a complicated story to tell, and I wanted to be sure I did a half-decent job. Hopefully I did. Thank you to all the Gecs that partied with me and Lisa at that show. You’re all beautiful. Hope to see you in the streets sometime soon.
Alsooo
If you’re a Floridian who would like to help public school kids learn to read, check out this volunteer program called Reading Pals. You just need to spend one hour a week working with an elementary schooler in your area. There may still be a little bit of time to get involved this school year, but they’ll need volunteers next year, too.
You’ve probably heard that Hip-Hop just celebrated its 50th birthday. The whole year has been full of awesome journalism chronicling the genre’s beginnings, cultural impact and forever reign. The Miami New Times likewise threw its hat in the ring, publishing a big piece on Miami’s Hip-Hop contributions through the years; a subject very close to my heart! Check it out.
Absolutely Necessary
(This is the part where I share songs that are so good, they’re absolutely necessary to listen to. That’s it. That’s the bar.)
I made two Spotify playlists for this section that you can follow: one weekly playlist updated with just the new stuff every week, and one cumulative playlist that will host every song I pick ever (until Spotify tells me it's full). Check them out! I made them for you—and me, but mostly you.
The playlists are updated, but because this newsletter was extremely long—and because I plan to follow this up with another newsletter about the Smashing Pumpkins and Interpol show I’m going to this weekend—I’ll spare you the five-track highlight and include that in the next edition. Just know that the jams be a-flowin’ out there, and enjoy.
That being said, I’ll end things here. Come and see me in Florida sometime—if you dare. ;)
PS- Join the paid-tier of the newsletter if you liked it and wanna see me do more
Thanks for tuning into my newsletter. Listen to the playlists on Spotify. One is updated weekly with all the songs from each edition. The other is cumulative with all the updates ever!