(Photo by Dave Decker via Equality Florida)
Stratton Pollitzer’s fight for civil rights didn’t start with Equality Florida, which he co-founded in 1997. Its new executive director says “social justice activism is in my DNA.”
“It’s been in my family for generations,” he explains. “My family were abolitionists who moved to South Carolina in the 1860s as Union officers in the Civil War, and after the war they stayed and became major figures in the Suffragette movement and went on to be staunch de-segregationists.”
Rather than send him to an all-white school for Kindergarten, Pollitzer adds, his mother founded South Carolina’s racially integrated E.C. Montessori & Grade School in the 1970s. He would later draw on this penchant for inclusive education as a principal before becoming Equality Florida’s deputy director, helping the nonprofit become the largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization in the state.
“I grew up in the shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in a family that has fought racism, literally, for more than a century,” Pollitzer says. “So it was no surprise to anyone to see me dedicate my career to a social justice cause. My family has stood behind me in the fight for LGBTQ equality all the way.”
That fight’s next chapter officially began in December, when Pollitzer became Equality Florida’s second executive director. He stepped into the role after the resignation of Nadine Smith, who led the organization for 28 years.
Smith departed to lead Color of Change, billed as the nation’s largest online racial justice organization. She was among those to praise Pollitzer’s appointment.
“I cannot wait to see how he unfurls his wings and takes this organization to the next level,” she said at Equality Florida’s Tampa Gala Nov. 21. “There is nothing that we have achieved that his fingerprints aren’t already on. I am proud to call him my friend, and I’m even prouder to call him the next executive director of Equality Florida.”
“The board has full confidence in Stratton and the extraordinary team he leads,” Equality Florida Board Co-Chair Annie Hiotis also noted ahead of time. “Stratton has been a driving force behind every major victory Equality Florida has achieved. His commitment, strategic clarity and deep roots in this movement make him exactly the leader this moment requires.”
Pollitzer is frequently seen across the state but leads Equality Florida from Miami, where he’s lived for two decades with his partner of 32 years. He and his husband wed when marriage equality came to Florida in 2015 and have 29-year-old twins.
“They’re six months older than Equality Florida, so that’s how I always know how old Equality Florida is,” he muses.
Pollitzer looks back at Equality Florida’s origins — and trajectory — with pride.
“When I met Nadine Smith in 1997, it was the year that Florida had passed its super DOMA, a Defense of Marriage Act that that said no LGBTQ relationship would be recognized, domestic partnership or otherwise,” he recalls. “There was no statewide organization to fight back at the time … and what was really clear was that this was the missing piece in the national LGBTQ equality movement.
“In Florida and across the country, the far right had mobilized in force at state capitols and our community had not,” he continues. “There were national organizations and a handful of ‘big blue cities’ that had local groups, but almost nothing at the state level. Equality Florida was one of the very first.”
Pollitzer says that convincing LGBTQ+ Floridians and their allies that Equality Florida was needed was “the hardest part of the job.”
“We could not let another session pass without having our community represented in Tallahassee,” he notes. “We went city by city and asked LGBTQ leaders, activists and organizations to chip in enough money for us to have a lobby team in Tallahassee when they reconvened in 1998 — and we did.”
Significant victories followed. In announcing Pollitzer’s promotion, Equality Florida cited the organization’s work in “securing marriage equality before any other Southern state; overturning Florida’s ban on gay and lesbian adoption; transforming classrooms with nationally recognized best practices for supporting LGBTQ youth” and blocking years of discriminatory legislation.
“For 25 years, we stopped every single anti-LGBTQ bill that was filed in the legislature, and there were probably more than 100,” Pollitzer says. “We did that at a time where all across the South you were seeing so many of these bad bills pass.”
Things changed in 2021, when Governor Ron DeSantis signed Florida’s first explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ bill since 1997 into law. It targeted transgender youth who play sports. Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” law followed, designed to restrict classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Florida Republicans also gained a legislative supermajority in 2022, when DeSantis secured a second term. It paved the way for what Equality Florida deemed the state’s “slate of hate,” four anti-LGBTQ+ bills signed into law in 2023.
They included an expansion of “Don’t Say Gay or Trans,” a ban on gender-affirming care, a law prohibiting transgender Floridians from using certain restrooms and Florida’s “anti-drag” bill, prohibiting youth from attending “adult live performances.” Legal challenges and settlements have followed, some of which are ongoing.
What changed, Pollitzer says, were the governor’s ambitions.
“DeSantis decided that he was going to run for president and embraced a right-wing agenda that was the precursor to Project 2025,” he explains. “But what also changed was that for a long time, there was a strong moderate Republican faction in Tallahassee that we had built great alliances with. Then politics got ultra polarized during [Donald] Trump and DeSantis, and most of those moderates either bent the knee or were primaried.
“It all came to a head when we saw that slate of hatred pass,” he continues. “We realized then that the playbook we had used — which was to educate, story tell, reason with and build alliances across the aisle — wasn’t going to work anymore. We had to come up with a new strategy of mass grassroots participation to just turn the volume all the way up.”
That’s what’s happened since. Equality Florida has added 165,000 members in the last three years and now has nearly 500,000 supporters. Over 16,000 people sent hundreds of thousands of emails to elected officials through the organization last year alone.
“Right after the 2023 session, we said, ‘listen everybody, we’re not going to win every battle, but we have to fight every fight,’” Pollitzer says. “We have to show up every time we’re under attack and we have to try to outnumber our opposition every time — and that’s what we do.”
Those efforts will continue this month with Pride at the Capitol 2026, spanning two weeks in Tallahassee. Over 400 people participated in 2025, attending hundreds of meetings with lawmakers and supporting events like the Let Us Live March for transgender visibility.
“During the 2025 legislative session, we stopped every single anti-LGBTQ bill filed,” Equality Florida announced this year’s venture. “This wasn’t just luck. It was people power — fueled by thousands of Floridians, who showed up, contacted lawmakers and stood firm in every room of the Florida Capitol where these bills were debated every single day.
“That’s a credit to the volunteers, donors, partners and everyday Floridians who stepped up,” they continued. “… Now, we need to do it again in 2026! We know DeSantis and extremists in the legislature are planning their next slate of hate, and it’s up to all of us to defeat it.”
Pride at the Capitol’s first week will be held Jan. 20-21 with training, lawmaker meetings and a family-focused Parenting with Pride press conference. The program is a key Equality Florida initiative and works to make sure “every LGBTQ+ child feels safe, affirmed and loved.”
Advocates will return Jan. 26-28 for week two. It will feature more training sessions, meetings, a priority bills press conference and the third Let Us Live March.
“We keep holding bills back because so many people are showing up in Tallahassee,” Pollitzer says. “Pride at the Capitol used to be one day and now it’s spread out over two weeks because we’ve outgrown every training center in the city.
“It’s great, it works and it also just feels good,” he continues. “… when you actually get out there and are part of the team fighting back, it fills you with hope. We need everybody who can be in Tallahassee to be there with us.”
Pollitzer says there’s a growing number of state lawmakers who are hesitant to advance anti-LGBTQ+ measures, in part because of their efforts.
“I have sat with Senate and House leadership and we know that they are paying close attention to how much volume is being generated around these issues,” he says. “They understand that these bills — which again, stemmed from an agenda that was in service to Ron DeSantis’ political ambition to be president — are all created crises.
“They’ve also seen that they have eaten up so much oxygen in the room in Tallahassee that all kinds of other things people got elected to do have been pushed to the wayside,” Pollitzer continues. “That is where us continuing to bog the process down is beginning to create a real rift … We have got to lean into that with all we have.”
Equality Florida has other priorities going into 2026, including its Safe and Healthy Schools program. It’s trained over 40,000 education professionals to support LGBTQ+ students.
“We have built the largest scale program to support LGBTQ youth in schools anywhere in the country by a mile — by a wide, wide margin,” Pollitzer explains. “… we’ve worked with all 67 school districts as genuine, authentic partners and our team is staffed with educators, school psychologists and folks who worked in school districts for decades. We’ve built real trust.”
Equality Florida’s Health Equity program hopes to mirror that success. The initiative has trained 2,000 therapists to better serve LGBTQ+ Floridians, helping 100,000 clients in Tampa Bay where it was piloted.
“In that area, we’ve already done something big enough that it is changing what that climate is like,” Pollitzer says. They hope to take the program across the state.
“We are thinking about how we create care, support and resources for our community from the day an LGBTQ child is born until you are in your golden years in a retirement community,” Pollitzer notes. “We have to think of all the places that we have to change the culture.”
Chief among them, he says, is advocating for transgender Floridians.
“What I like to remind everyone in this moment — when the transgender community is facing the ugliest, most dangerous attacks of all — is that everything that they are saying about transgender people, they said about … gay men in the 80s and 90s.
“That we were a danger to children, that we were deviants, that we were a made-up thing, that we should not be in the military, we should not be in the bathroom with you,” he says. “It’s the same playbook and we have to understand that.”
Pollitzer points to TransAction Florida, established by Equality Florida in 2014, and efforts that preceded its formation. “We were the first organization in the state to say we would no longer support efforts to pass human rights ordinances that were not gender identity inclusive,” he says. “We said we would actively work to defeat efforts that divide our community.”
Equality Florida’s more recent efforts have included the Voices for Change conference last year, a convening of 60 transgender leaders from across the state. The advocates represented 40 organizations, the most in Florida history.
“We’re seeing this ongoing, deeper collaboration,” Pollitzer says. “We’ve got to get resources, tools and support to those leaders in their organizations because they’re facing an existential threat — and to the parents of trans kids, we are with you. We are building our Parenting with Pride network as fast as we can, all across the state, because we know those parents are scared and need help right now.”
As for what excites him about becoming Equality Florida’s executive director, Pollitzer echoes Smith. She said in November that it’s “hard to leave because so many of the things we’ve planted over these decades are finally coming to bloom.”
“Programs that we dreamed up as ideas are turning into large-scale efforts that really are going to create change,” Pollitzer says. “So as daunting as the current political environment feels, you can see just over the horizon what is possible … what we can achieve in the next 10 years is going to set a whole new standard for what state organizing can look like.”
Equality Florida also continues to support other LGBTQ+-focused organizations across the South, “where we have a little bit of a head start and a few more resources.” That collaboration brings him hope, something the organization plans to leverage in the 2026 midterms.
“I belong on the front line of this fight, and so it excites me knowing that Florida continues to be the front line in this country,” Pollitzer says. “I do not want to spend my life in coffee shops in the West Village or the Castro talking about Florida. I belong here.”
For more information about Equality Florida, visit EQFL.org.
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