The Good Page features positive LGBTQ+ news in Central Florida and Tampa Bay, uplifting and inspiring stories highlighting locals in our community. In this issue, we meet writer, director and producer Brandon Goode.
He has a word for what he does: disruptor. Not in the tech-pitch sense, but in the way that matters, finding stories that have been waiting too long for their moment and refusing to let them wait any longer.
As a writer, director, and producer, he’s built a practice around a simple conviction: representation isn’t a trend, it’s a responsibility. He believes he was given a gift, and that the only real failure would be not using it. Right now, he’s doing some of the most intentional work of his career.
Growing up in Brevard County, one of four kids raised by a single mother, he didn’t have cable. What he had was a stack of Disney DVDs and an imagination that kept reaching past what his everyday world could show him.
Those stories expanded what felt possible. What they couldn’t do was reflect him back. He never saw himself, not as a Black kid, not as a gay one, in the stories that shaped him earliest. That absence didn’t discourage him. It planted something.
He started writing in elementary school, a “Charlie’s Angels”-inspired book for a Young Authors program. Poetry carried him through middle school, that teenage place where you have more feelings than you have language for them, and writing becomes the only container that fit. By high school, musical theater had cracked something open and he was competing, performing and eventually landing a spot writing for a teen journalism publication after walking into a room of 25 applicants and deciding, quietly, that he belonged there. He got the job.
“Someone has to do it,” he says. “And I’m not afraid to do it, because I feel like it’s a gift, and you have to use it.”
That sense of purpose is what eventually led him back to Orlando, or rather, to the version of Orlando that most people never see.
His current project is called “407,” the area code, and a deliberate act of reclamation.
Think “Insecure” meets “Harlem” meets “Living Single,” set in the Orlando that locals actually know: Winter Park, Thornton Park, the late nights, the friendships that quietly become a chosen family. The show follows four Black best friends navigating love, careers and one messy secret.
Goode is clear that “407” isn’t just a Black show. It’s a show for everyone, told through a perspective that doesn’t get enough screen time. One of the central characters is a gay Black man, intentionally placed inside a mixed-gender friend group rather than siloed into a separate queer storyline. Goode wants to put on screen the real, layered relationship between Black women and gay Black men: the culture-sharing, the colloquialisms, the history of showing up for each other that rarely gets documented.
“We don’t have ‘Insecure’ anymore,” he shares. “We don’t have ‘Living Single.’ It’s more important now that we have Black queer characters who are main characters, because we’re all layered, and we all have stories.”
The show also gives Orlando something it rarely gets outside of tourism branding: a genuine love letter. Goode lived there from 19 to 30. The city raised him in every way that counts. GOODEYES Productions, the company he runs with his creative partner Yessy Rivera, whom he met years ago working at Disney, recently shot the short film version on location in Orlando. That short is available now on YouTube. The full series is in the pitching phase.
But building something this intentional doesn’t come without its costs. The hardest part right now, he says, isn’t rejection or the industry. It’s the news.
Goode talks about the challenge of staying informed without going under, of absorbing what keeps happening to the Black community, to the queer community, and finding a way to turn it into fuel rather than paralysis.
He wants people to know that GOODEYES Productions is also about the ecosystem, not just the content. Bringing productions to Florida means bringing jobs, opportunities and visibility to local talent. That’s part of the mission too.
The “407” short film is on YouTube now. Follow the work at @GOODEYESProductions on Instagram, and visit GOODEYESProductions.com to see what Goode is building.
Interested in being featured in The Good Page? Email Editor-in-Chief Ryan Williams-Jent at Ryan@WatermarkOutNews.com in Tampa Bay or Central Florida Bureau Chief Bellanee Plaza at Bellanee@WatermarkOutNews.com in Central Florida.
Sign up for the Watermark Out News eNewsletter and follow us for more:
BlueSky | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | TikTok | Threads | YouTube
