Welcome to Lakeland, Florida. It’s not the first place most people would think to look for LGBTQ+ history, but it has more than most realize.
It begins with a bar: the Green Parrot, still open today at 1030 E. Main Street under a shortened name. It’s had other monikers, but it has been a gathering place for Lakeland’s LGBTQ+ community since at least 1969, years before the Stonewall uprising had finished making headlines. It was a time when consensual same-sex activity was still a felony under Florida law.
By 1976, the offense had been downgraded to a misdemeanor, still punishable by a $500 fine and up to 60 days in jail. The following year, the city’s police chief told a local news outlet homosexuality was “a crime against nature, morality and Christian ethics.”
The Parrot kept its doors open anyway. By some accounts, it is one of the oldest operating LGBTQ+ bars in the Sunshine State, a small building with an outsized legacy.
Lakeland’s LGBTQ+ community has been here, meeting, dancing and looking out for one another, since long before it was safe to do so openly. That legacy has only picked up momentum in recent years.
Polk Pride, an event of the nonprofit Lakeland Youth Alliance, launched in 2015 to build awareness and acceptance for the LGBTQ+ community across the county. By its 10th anniversary in 2025, it had grown into a full week of programming.
In 2024, that momentum reached a new milestone when the Rose Dynasty Foundation opened Polk County’s first dedicated LGBTQ+ center.
The center gives residents a place to gather, seek mental health counseling and access affordable medical care without having to make the drive to Tampa Bay or Orlando. In a moment of unprecedented legislative pressure on the community nationwide, spaces like it are needed more urgently than ever.
None of this happened by accident or all at once.
A bar that refused to close. A Pride organization that kept growing. A foundation that built a physical home for a community that had spent decades finding each other anyway. Each layer built on the one before it.
Without The Parrot, there may never have been a critical mass of people who knew each other well enough to organize Polk Pride. Without it, there may never have been the local infrastructure and goodwill that host several major events showcasing that Lakeland is welcome to the LGBTQ+ community — including two independently produced opportunities coming in October, detailed here.
LGBTQ+ HISTORY AND ARTS
The Rainbow Roots Festival will take place at Lake Mirror Auditorium, one of Lakeland’s signature civic venues. It returns for a second year Oct. 4 from 12-5 p.m.
The free celebration is a family-friendly event built around a straightforward but ambitious goal: celebrating our community’s history and art together, in the same space, for anyone who wants to walk through the door.
The festival is produced by the Rose Dynasty Foundation in partnership with Pineapple Healthcare, a local clinic whose staff is largely LGBTQ+, and which fills a real gap in low-cost, culturally competent medical care for residents of Polk County. The inaugural outing was held last October, drawing families, local vendors and performers into a space designed for celebration.
The timing is on purpose.
“We chose October for this event because it is LGBTQ+ History Month and National Coming Out Day,” Rose Dynasty Executive Director Jason DeShazo said at the time. He explained that the foundation wanted to build something around the community’s history and art because organizers see both as essential components of Pride itself, not an afterthought to it. The result is an event that functions less like a parade and more like an open-air museum crossed with a block party.
Attendees can browse and purchase merchandise and original art from more than 30 local vendors, most of them LGBTQ+ owned, take in live performances throughout the afternoon, and, for families with kids, spend time in a designated art area built specifically so children can express themselves alongside everyone else.
The list of organizations backing the event tells its own story about how deep the local support runs. Sponsors and partners have included Equality Florida, the Tampa Bay Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Imperial Sun Court of All Florida, Christ the King Episcopal Church, the Interfaith Coalition of Polk County, Black Swan Counseling Services and local fixtures like the Lakeland Punk Rock Flea Market and Art Crawl.
Rainbow Roots isn’t a single organization’s event so much as a citywide collaboration wearing one name.
Behind all of it is DeShazo himself, best known as Momma Ashley Rose, his family-friendly drag persona crafted after growing up in a “very conservative household,” he recalls, with “church every week and no room to be different, no room to even ask questions.”
Momma Ashley Rose was the answer to that exhaustion.
“She’s who I wish had been around when I was a kid trying to figure myself out,” DeShazo says. “Somebody who’d pull you into a hug instead of pushing you out the door. That’s the whole character. Honestly, that’s the foundation, too.
“Momma Ashley Rose is just Rose Dynasty with a wig on,” he continues. “Love, hope, acceptance, say it plain and it sounds like a greeting card, but that’s genuinely the assignment every time she walks out.”
The character and the foundation both trace back to a single night DeShazo has described many times: sitting in the audience of a drag show, hearing a parable about tossing a stone into a still lake, watching one small ripple travel farther than anyone expected. Rose Dynasty has operated on that logic ever since. Small, consistent acts of care, repeated often enough to add up to something real.
That philosophy shows up in the foundation’s other offerings too. Peer support groups. Gender-affirming clothing swaps. A curated set of tools known as the True You Collective, which provides workshops and guides tailored to a wide range of personal and professional needs. The kind of practical, layered support that turns a general sense of goodwill into something people can use when they’re facing a decision alone.
Rose Dynasty’s own guiding message is stitched, quite literally, onto the wall of its center in Lakeland: you are loved, accepted and wanted. Rainbow Roots is that message translated into a single afternoon a year.
Proof, delivered through art, vendors, drag, and conversation, that LGBTQ+ history in Polk County isn’t something to be quietly preserved. It’s something to be celebrated in public, in the middle of the day, with the whole family invited, free of charge, in the exact kind of open civic space that would have been unthinkable for this community to gather in only a generation or two ago.
ACCESS AND AUTHENTICITY
The Beyond Gender Conference is an educational event designed to embrace the entire gender spectrum, created to unite not only the LGBTQ+ community but the wider world surrounding it. It comes to Lakeland Oct. 23-24.
Organizers describe its mission in direct terms: all people, at every age, should be able to live their lives authentically, without judgment of gender or sexuality. That is not a slogan. It is the operating premise behind every panel on the schedule.
It is produced by New Beginnings TLC, Inc., a nonprofit whose mission is to support community members through every phase of their journey. Its president is Sir Leland, whose wife and fellow organizer Bonnie Lazarus serves as CEO and vice president.
The couple says they’ve produced large events for over two decades.
“We hosted this conference in West Palm Beach two years ago, and it was very successful,” Leland explains. “After taking time away because of political challenges and health concerns, we are excited to bring it back. We believe this is the right time for our community to come together under one roof to share stories, resources, education, laughter, support and fun.”
For safety and the privacy of attendees, the 2026 conference’s host hotel isn’t disclosed publicly. The address goes out directly to registered guests once they sign up.
What sets Beyond Gender apart from a typical conference is the sheer range of ground it tries to cover in a single weekend. The programming centers on panels addressing the practical, often overwhelming realities that gender-diverse individuals and their families navigate. They include the current political landscape, the legal process of changing one’s name, medical guidance from doctors who can speak to surgical and health-related questions, psychological and relational support for individuals and the people who love them and more.
It’s an attempt to put an entire toolkit of hard-to-find information into people’s hands over the course of two days. Information that is too often scattered, expensive or locked behind consultations most people can’t easily access. Question and answer sessions follow the legal and medical panels, giving attendees a chance to ask questions they may have carried for years without a safe place to ask them.
The need for a conference like this is, at its core, a human one. As social creatures, people thrive when they feel connected, supported and understood.
Organizers know that in a culture that prizes independence over interdependence, it is easy to lose sight of how central community is to overall health, especially for a population that has often had to build its own support systems from scratch. One of the most important aspects of that health is simply the feeling of being heard. In a supportive setting, a person can say what they think and feel without editing it first, without bracing for judgment.
That kind of validation, and the safe space required to offer it, does measurable work. Reducing stress. Easing confusion. Replacing isolation with something sturdier. Beyond Gender is built to manufacture exactly that feeling for two days, then send people home with the legal contacts, medical referrals and psychological resources to keep building on it long after the conference ends.
For many attendees, that combination — real information delivered inside a room that feels genuinely safe — is the whole point.
A legal panel on name changes matters more when it’s followed by a hallway conversation with someone who has already been through the process. A psychology session lands differently next to a parent quietly working up the courage to ask their first question out loud. The panels provide the facts. The room provides the belonging.
That same spirit shows up in unscripted moments at the conference too, not just on the printed schedule.
“For us, an annual conference helps build a chosen family; each year feels like coming home for a family reunion,” Leland says. “We have seen this impact through other conferences we have hosted.”
Beyond Gender, like the Rainbow Roots Festival, shows that while Lakeland did not always make room for its LGBTQ+ residents — and in some corners still doesn’t — times continue to change. They show that to exist there, openly, is not a request for permission but a fact of life.
Lakeland’s LGBTQ+ community continues to show that they are not visitors, they are neighbors, coworkers and everyday people, simply asking to be counted as part of society rather than apart from it. Whatever happens next, that record will keep being written, one October at a time.
For more information about the Rose Dynasty Foundation Rainbow Roots Festival, visit RoseDynastyFoundationInc.org. Learn more about the Beyond Gender Conference at BeyondGenderConference.org.
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