There’s a lot more mystery and magic to this state than "Florida Man" headlines suggest. Take a drive around the Tampa Bay area and you may wonder about the story behind the UFO perched atop a strip club, Weeki Wachee’s mermaid show or Tampa’s obsession with pirates.
Gabrielle Calise, a culture writer who reports on offbeat Florida, nostalgia and music for the Tampa Bay Times, is an expert guide to all things wild and wonderful about the state.
Calise is the editor of “Florida, a Hyper-local Guide to the Flora, Fauna and Fantasy of the Most Far-out State in America," and she joins "Florida Matters" to share some of the stories behind the spectacle.
Gasparilla, the festival built around the mythical pirate Jose Gaspar, dates back to 1904 and is now part of the city’s DNA.
“Being the mayor of Tampa means that you're gonna participate and have to fight a bunch of pirates and give up the key to the city. No other place really has a tradition quite like that,” Calise said.
If you want to go all-in on pirate fashion, you can do that, too. But there’s another side to the story of Gasparilla. Until the early 1990s, Ye Mystic Krewe, the cast of pirates that invades the city each year, was made up of only white men.
“When Super Bowl XXV was set to be hosted in Tampa, organizers from the NFL realized, 'Wait a minute. Well, where are the people of color who are pirates?' ” Calise said.
Ye Mystic Krewe canceled Gasparilla in 1991 rather than admit Black members, and Jesse Hill, who was on the Super Bowl task force, helped create an alternative festival that strove to represent the city’s multicultural roots: Bamboleo.
Bamboleo only lasted one year. In 1992, Gasparilla was back, and Ye Mystic Krewe included Black members. That year, Hill created a new group of pirates: the Grand Krewe de Libertalia.
“It had women in it, which was a first. And any, you know, race, gender, background, didn't matter who you were, you could join,” Calise said.
“And so he really helped to shift Tampa's cultural expectations, and was, like, a very, very special pirate.”
Across the bay in St. Petersburg, indigenous skater Cynamon Gonzales is working to shift cultural expectations, too.
“The Gay Commie Skate Crew is something that Cynamon has created to have a place where you have all kinds of people who want to get out there and skate,” Calise said.
“Anyone who's ever been to a skate park can tell you that sometimes it can be a little competitive, sometimes it can be a little bit cliquey.”
Calise says Gonzales’ skate crew does mutual aid projects and uplifts the community “but at the same time, they're doing something that's really fun, like roller skating.”
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Another larger-than-life Tampeño that Calise can tell you about is Joe Redner. He’s the owner of Mons Venus, the strip club on North Dale Mabry Highway, across from 2001 Odyssey, the strip club with the "spaceship" on its roof (actually a repurposed futuro house designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen.)
In the 1990s, Mons Venus became the hub of Tampa’s “battle to bare all,” when the city tried to crack down on strip clubs.
“They wanted to implement something called the 6-foot rule, which was dancers could dance, but they would have to be, if they're going to be taking their clothes off, 6 feet away from patrons, which really defeats the purpose of a lap dance,” Calise said.
Redner pushed back.
“Redner became the center of all this because he used his club sort of as a place of protest,” Calise said.
“He would write these antagonistic messages to the mayor of Tampa on the sign, so anyone, you know, driving down this major thoroughfare would see it.”
“Tampa in the '90s was a crazy place,” said Calise, who also wrote about the decade's short-lived "hotdog girl’" phenomenon that sparked turf battles between bikini-clad hotdog vendors.
Other highlights from Calise’s conversation on "Florida Matters" include tips on where to spot manatees around Tampa Bay, where to see a mermaid show (Weeki Wachee), of course), and how an airplane collector tried to create "Orlampa."
There’s also insights into Tampa’s take on a Cuban sandwich, the history of St. Petersburg’s Sunken Gardens and Floridians’ attitudes to hurricane prep.
