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Max hears the plane before anyone else.

A low hum threads through the morning air above the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya’s central highlands. As it grows louder — a small propeller drifting in from Mount Kenya — Max is already moving.

He snatches a dry branch, paces the electric fence, and begins shouting — ah-ah-ah — his cries rising into a scream at the sky. He swings his arm and sends the stick flying upward. His hair bristles along his spine.

“It’s because of the plane,” says Stephen Mukundi, the sanctuary’s head caregiver. “He is remembering Burundi during the civil war.”

Max was born in Burundi in 1988. Captured as an infant — his mother presumed killed — he spent his early years with a French film crew before being confiscated in 1990 at around two years old, and transferred to the Jane Goodall Institute’s rescue center in Bujumbura. 

When the Burundian civil war broke out in 1993, the Institute evacuated — a crisis that led to the founding of Sweetwaters. Max was one of three chimpanzees airlifted across borders, a founding resident of what remains the country’s only refuge of its kind.

Today, Max is one of roughly 35 chimpanzees at the sanctuary — each rescued from the overlapping pressures of conflict, habitat loss, and the illegal wildlife trade. Some were repatriated from the Middle East, where they had been kept as pets or displayed in private zoos. Others arrived as infants with bullet wounds, or were discovered in crates at airports mislabeled as other animals.

The forces that brought them here are sustained by demand far beyond the forests they were taken from — wealthy buyers, private zoos, and commercial attractions that turn infant apes into status symbols and entertainment. While sanctuaries like Sweetwaters absorb the consequences, the trade continues to grow. For every chimpanzee rescued, many more are not.

Second Family

The sanctuary lies on the southeastern edge of the 360-square-kilometer Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia County, where the last two northern white rhinos on earth remain.

The Ewaso Nyiro River divides the sanctuary’s chimpanzee enclosures into western and eastern sections. Chimpanzees are not native to Kenya — their range extends from Senegal across the Congo Basin to western Uganda — making Sweetwaters the only place in the country where they live.

Chimpanzees arrive to live out their lives here. Sweetwaters is not a breeding facility; females are placed on contraception, though occasional unintended births mean a small number have been born at the sanctuary.

Max is 38 now. “He doesn’t like people — large groups, cameras, long lenses, anything that reminds him of the film crew that handled him as a baby,” says 49-year-old Mukundi. Max also moves against the grain of his own society, picking fights and disregarding the social codes that hold the group together. Although he distrusts adult humans, he shows a particular affinity for children. 

“Maybe they were kind to him during his captivity,” says Mukundi, a father of five. When two children arrive during visiting hours, Max, lingering near the fence, looks up immediately and begins to play, running along it and urging them to follow.

Mukundi has been at Sweetwaters almost as long as Max. He arrived at Ol Pejeta in 1996 at 19, starting as a gatekeeper, then a night guard, then a caregiver. The work is demanding. The sanctuary’s 16 caregivers live on-site around the clock; Mukundi’s family lives 30 kilometers away and he sees them once a month.

“I’ve grown to really love these chimpanzees,” Mukundi tells TRNN, smiling. “They’ve become like a second family. I’ve raised most of them, known them since they were babies. I’ve seen them go from trauma to becoming chimpanzees again.”

He knows each animal by temperament, and every evening decides who sleeps where in the holding house — a decision with real stakes. If the wrong two males are placed together, “they might kill each other at night.” 

Each caregiver has a favorite. For Mukundi, it is Manno, who arrived in 2016 from Iraqi Kurdistan.

Manno was taken from his mother in Central Africa shortly after birth and trafficked through the Middle East to Iraq, where he spent three years at Duhok Zoo. He was kept alone in a small cage stacked above a crate of boa constrictors. He never saw, heard, or smelled another chimpanzee. Zoo staff dressed him in children’s clothes; visitors handed him candy, soda, and cigarettes, which he learned to smoke.

In his last months in Iraq, a Syrian refugee worker at the zoo took him home at night, where he slept in a bed and was treated as part of the family — reinforcing a childhood shaped entirely by human contact.

When Manno arrived at Sweetwaters — after a year of planning his rescue — he was terrified. “I stayed with him the whole time,” Mukundi recalls. “He had never seen or heard another chimp before. I was like his father and mother. Every morning, he would run to hug me. I had to wait until he fell asleep to leave.”

Integration follows a sequence the sanctuary has refined over decades. New arrivals are introduced in stages — first to a calm female, then to others, followed by juveniles and lower-ranking males. Dominant males come last; their reaction can determine whether integration succeeds.

Today, Manno is competing for dominance in the eastern group, and Mukundi believes he could become the next alpha. “He just has about two more males to fight,” he says, with quiet pride.

“He came here alone, knowing nothing — not even that he was a chimpanzee. Now look at him. He’s finding himself and fighting for his place.”

Inside the Supply Chain

Chimpanzees like Max and Manno are survivors of a trade that removes thousands of great apes from the wild each year — captured for the pet and entertainment industries or killed for bushmeat — with chimpanzees among the most heavily targeted. 

There are as few as 170,000 chimpanzees remaining in the wild — down from about 1 million at the start of the 20th century. All four subspecies are endangered. The western subspecies, critically endangered, fell by 80% between 1990 and 2014. The International Union for Conservation of Nature says the subspecies is now on a trajectory toward extinction without drastic intervention.

The illicit great ape trade operates within the same forces destabilizing chimpanzee habitats: armed conflict, extractive industries that carve roads into once-remote forests, and the poverty they produce pushing rural communities into the low-paid end of the poaching chain.

Scientists attribute the decline to a combination of habitat loss, poaching, and disease — pressures driven by poverty, conflict, extractive industries, and infrastructure expansion. Africa has the highest rate of forest loss in the world, losing roughly 9.6 million acres each year.

The illicit great ape trade operates within the same forces destabilizing chimpanzee habitats: armed conflict, extractive industries that carve roads into once-remote forests, and the poverty they produce pushing rural communities into the low-paid end of the poaching chain. State officials, meanwhile, often do more than fail to stop the trade; in some cases, they profit from it.

Across Western and Central Africa, these dynamics are embedded in land use itself: more than half the range of western gorillas and chimpanzees now falls within active logging concessions, where new access routes and labor camps both expand poaching and create sustained demand for bushmeat — wild meat often sold to urban elites.

“Mining and logging don’t create the trade — but they accelerate it,” says Ofir Drori, a wildlife law enforcement strategist who has spent two decades pushing governments to prosecute wildlife crime. “They open the forest, build roads, and make transport easy. These industries are facilitators, and at times their own personnel are directly implicated.”

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), armed groups embedded in artisanal mining for coltan and gold drive much of the bushmeat poaching that produces trafficked infant apes. A 2018 Global Financial Integrity report identified a similar pattern in Sierra Leone, where post-war mining expansion has been linked to sharp declines in chimpanzee populations.

“The profit margins for great apes are far higher than any other species,” Drori tells TRNN. “The rarer the species, the more valuable.” While armed militias are heavily involved in poaching, Drori says he has found no clear evidence linking them to great ape trafficking. The trade runs on a different infrastructure — organized crime families and corrupted officials.

At the center are trafficking dynasties — extended families spread across multiple countries in West and Central Africa, laundering wild-caught infants through fraudulent CITES documentation.

Under CITES — the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species — chimpanzees are listed in Appendix I, prohibiting all commercial trade. However, captive-bred specimens of Appendix I species can be traded commercially — provided the breeding operation is formally registered with CITES. No such registered facility for great apes exists anywhere in the world.

Traffickers exploit this gap through what enforcement specialists call the “C-scam.” Corrupt CITES authorities in exporting countries stamp permits with a “C” source code — designating an animal as captive-bred — for apes that were taken directly from the wild. In some cases, wild-caught apes are funneled through unregistered breeding operations in the Middle East — along with private zoos and safari parks that pose as conservation centers — where their wild origins are rewritten as captive-bred on paper. But no facility in the world is recognized by CITES for great ape breeding — meaning any permit claiming a great ape is captive-bred is inherently fraudulent.

“A corrupt CITES authority can turn an illegal shipment legal with a single signature,” Drori notes.

Prosecutions of traffickers and corrupt government officials have followed, but the illicit network has adapted faster than the law, Drori explains. When one node is dismantled, smuggling routes shift while remaining largely intact, and corruption migrates with them — more recently to the DRC, where the US State Department sanctioned senior officials at the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) for trafficking great apes and other protected wildlife to China on falsified permits.

According to Daniel Stiles, a leading specialist on the live great ape trade, ICCN officials continue to issue fraudulent permits for wild-caught great apes.

“For the first time, we’re seeing poaching bands specifically targeting great apes — not for the meat,” Stiles says. “They kill the adults, take the infants, and leave the carcasses behind.”

The supply runs through a short list of transit hubs. Kano, in northern Nigeria, has been a primary hub since the 1990s. Istanbul has emerged as a key transit point: on December 22, 2024, Turkish customs intercepted a flight from Nigeria carrying a five-month-old gorilla named Zeytin in a crate bound for Bangkok labeled “50 rabbits.” The investigation traced the syndicate back to Kano. Cairo, Sharm el Sheikh, Khartoum, and Dubai have also been documented as launder points.

For decades, poaching was driven by the elite bushmeat economy, where great ape meat is sold in urban markets as a status symbol — luxury “big man’s meat.” The infants orphaned in these hunts were a secondary product. That equation has now been inverted: what was once a byproduct of the bushmeat trade is now a targeted, high-value extraction. As prices for live infants have surged — rising roughly tenfold over the past decade — the infant has become the primary target of a demand-driven international trade, fueled by status-symbol pets in the Middle East and commercial attractions in Asia, and now outpacing the profits of any other forest commodity.

“For the first time, we’re seeing poaching bands specifically targeting great apes — not for the meat,” Stiles says. “They kill the adults, take the infants, and leave the carcasses behind.”

When poachers locate a troop in the canopy — anywhere between 10 to 150 individuals — they fire directly. The adults die defending their young. The infants are pried from their mothers’ bodies and sold alive, sometimes with gunshot wounds of their own.

Accounting for adults killed and infants who die in transit, researchers estimate each surviving orphan can represent up to 25 chimpanzees killed. By this measure, each chimpanzee at Sweetwaters stands as evidence of potentially hundreds of deaths.

Written on Their Bodies

The geographies of this violence are written onto the sanctuary’s residents.

Ali Kaka, current alpha of the eastern group, was kept as a pet by the South Sudanese army for his first 18 months; in 2003, soldiers handed him over when they learned chimpanzees were being rescued to Kenya. Safari, an elderly male, spent his early years in a small outdoor cage at a Burundi hotel, taunted by holidaymakers until the Belgian manager surrendered him in 1989.

And then there is Poco.

Poco was born around 1981 in the forests of Central Africa. Captured as an infant — likely around three years old, after his mother was killed — he was sold to a shop owner in Bujumbura, who kept him in a narrow cage hung from the ceiling to attract customers. Poco lived in that cage for nine years. It was too small for him to lie down or move on all fours. Over time, his musculature, spine, and shoulders adapted to that constraint, and he developed an upright gait.

Rescued in 1989 by the Jane Goodall Institute and later transferred to Sweetwaters, Poco, now in his late 40s, is the only chimpanzee documented to walk bipedally by default.

What Dr. Stephen Ngulu, a wildlife veterinarian and former head of the sanctuary, learned over a decade there is how to read a chimpanzee’s history in its body.

“When they arrive, they are often dehydrated, malnourished, and sometimes injured,” he says. “Behaviorally, they are always withdrawn. They don’t want anything to do with humans or other chimpanzees.”

Many injuries are not visible: stunted growth, unhealed fractures, muscle wasting from years chained in place, dental disease from diets of chocolate and fried food. Chronic stress leaves deeper damage — suppressed immunity, delayed sexual maturation, neurological impairment.

“You can at times see a traumatized chimpanzee stargazing — not looking at anything,” Ngulu explains. “Unable to have proper cognitive abilities.”

The behavioral signs are consistent across arrivals: rocking side to side, the same motion seen in humans under extreme distress. Research has shown chimpanzees who survived prolonged captivity exhibit symptoms closely matching human complex PTSD. Chimpanzees and humans also share more than 98% of their DNA — our closest living relatives.

“A frightened chimpanzee can recover with time,” Ngulu tells TRNN. “But a deeply traumatized chimpanzee will show persistent abnormal behaviors. Even with optimal care, those behaviors can last for many years.”

In 2018, an infant named Bo arrived from Guinea-Bissau, confiscated from traffickers who had killed her mother for bushmeat and intended to sell her. “She was missing one tooth,” Ngulu remembers. “She was fearful and withdrawn.”

Bo survived and is now 11. “But to this day,” says Ngulu, “you will still see her sometimes sitting alone and slightly rocking back and forth.”

But not all the chimpanzees arrive at the sanctuary carrying scars. Alley came from a private home that treated her well. Nicknamed “the engineer,” she is caretaker Martin Kinyua’s favorite.

“She’s so intelligent we had to separate her from the other chimps,” says 45-year-old Kinyua, a father of three who has worked at the sanctuary since 2000. “Whenever she’s in the group, she has a big influence on the other chimps, even helping them break out of their enclosure.”

By observing sanctuary staff, Alley learned that dry wood does not conduct electricity. She used sticks to hold the live wires of the electric fence apart, making a gap for herself and the others to pass through. Caretakers also observed other chimpanzees in her group collecting sticks and handing them to her to assist in the escapes.

Alley has a record of trying to bite people after her breakouts — but not Kinyua, who describes a special bond with her. He recalls standing alone in the holding house when she appeared in the doorway after an escape, close enough to grab him. She didn’t raise her hair or advance.

“Alley trusts me,” he says, with a grin. Alley’s ingenuity — and repeated breakouts — became such a persistent problem that the sanctuary was forced to rebuild, separating her during the day in an enclosure with elderly Poco and reinforcing it with chicken wire.

“The more you understand how intelligent these chimpanzees are, the more anger and grief you feel at the way they’ve been treated,” Kinyua says. “These are not pets. They are very intelligent beings.”

A Global Demand

While the supply chain runs across Africa, the demand that drives it lies largely outside the continent. In the Gulf, Russia, and Eastern Europe, infant chimpanzees are kept as status-symbol pets — sometimes gifted between elites — while in China and Southeast Asia, growing demand from private zoos, safari parks, and tourist attractions fuels a commercial market.

Across these contexts, infants function as luxury commodities and entertainment — appearing on social media in children’s clothes, posed on private jets, or used as selfie props — within a global trade driven by high-paying international buyers.

“Prices have quadrupled over the past decade,” Stiles tells TRNN. “An infant chimp can sell for up to $200,000, bonobos $300,000, and gorillas $550,000.” At the bottom of the chain, poachers are paid “peanuts,” often no more than $100.

For decades, the primary buyers were wealthy individuals in the Gulf who kept great apes as pets. That shifted in 2016, when the UAE banned private ownership of dangerous animals, restricting them to licensed facilities, Stiles explains.

“So these traders, who had been dealing in animals for years, started registering private zoos,” Stiles says. “To finance them, they opened them to the public. They make money through selfies and direct interaction — but for that, you need young animals, before they reach puberty and become dangerous.”

The result has been a proliferation of “private zoos” across China, the Gulf States, especially the UAE, Pakistan, and parts of South Asia — facilities that function as legal cover for private collections. Stiles alleges that major commercial operators in the Gulf have become significant players, relying on “a combination of legal and illegal acquisition.”

China has driven much of the parallel demand: roughly 10,000 zoos opened there between 2013 and 2020, nearly doubling the national total. Registered zoos can obtain import permits for strictly protected species far more easily than individuals — making them, Stiles notes, ideal laundering facilities for animals smuggled in and sold as captive-bred.

The pipeline also extends into India. Vantara — a vast private facility operated by the Ambani family and marketed as a wildlife rescue center — is alleged to have received chimpanzees exported from the DRC on CITES permits listing them as captive-bred. India’s Supreme Court ruled last year that Vantara’s imports were legal and barred further legal actions; however, a CITES Secretariat verification mission to India later flagged the captive-bred designations as questionable.

The United States is not immune to these dynamics. In July 2025, Bhagavan “Doc” Antle — owner of Myrtle Beach Safari and a figure popularized by the Netflix documentary Tiger King — was sentenced to federal prison for conspiring to violate the Lacey Act, a law prohibiting the illegal trade of protected wildlife. Antle paid $200,000 each for at least two chimpanzees and disguised the payments as donations to his conservation nonprofit — part of what prosecutors described as a years-long pattern of trafficking federally protected species. 

Court filings described him as “a key player in the illegal chimpanzee trade” that others have sought to emulate. Yet despite the convictions, the United States still has no federal ban on private primate ownership. The Captive Primate Safety Act, which would amend the Lacey Act to ban private possession of primates, was reintroduced in May 2025 after previous attempts since 2005 failed to pass both chambers of Congress.

Stiles has advocated for legal accountability for social media companies facilitating the illegal trade in wildlife, and is currently working with a legal team on a lawsuit against Meta.

Social media has further accelerated the market. Since 2015, Stiles has documented more than 684 advertisements for great apes posted by at least 152 individuals across 19 countries, mostly on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. In 2014, most images showed apes in private homes. “Now it’s transformed,” Stiles says. “Ninety percent — they’re at a zoo.”

Stiles has advocated for legal accountability for social media companies facilitating the illegal trade in wildlife, and is currently working with a legal team on a lawsuit against Meta. “Meta could put a stop to this overnight,” he says. “But they’re allowing it because they’re making money from it.”

Enforcement outside Africa remains largely ineffective. Ofir Drori’s EAGLE Network has helped put more than 3,000 wildlife traffickers behind bars — mostly in Africa. Beyond the continent, he says, “there is no real enforcement. It’s a joke worldwide, especially in Europe.” At a CITES conference last year, member states moved to revive a long-dormant Great Apes Enforcement Task Force.

But Stiles believes supply-side enforcement alone is futile. “We have to put our attention on the demand side — the people buying,” he says. “You can arrest as many poachers as you want. But if the demand continues, those poachers will be immediately replaced.”

The enemy, Stiles says, is not a discrete set of criminals. It is a global market.

The Afterlife

Late afternoon at Sweetwaters is the quiet hour. The light begins to go orange along the ridge.

Poco turns and walks, upright, back toward the trees, the gait itself a record of the cage above the shop in Bujumbura. That cage — the one that held him for nine years — sits on display in the sanctuary grounds, preserved as a teaching object for tourists who ask how chimpanzees end up here.

Across the river is Kisazose, or Kiza for short, confiscated from a Congolese trafficker and brought to Sweetwaters in 1994 as an ill, undernourished infant. Timothy Njuguna, a 52-year-old caretaker at the sanctuary since 1995, cared for him then. “We used to go inside [the enclosure] with them when they first arrived,” he says, “because they were just babies. We used to even cuddle them.”

Years later, when Kiza had grown, a group of chimpanzees broke through the fencing undetected and escaped into the holding facility where Njuguna was preparing their dinner. One of the males pinned him to the floor. Others moved in.

“I thought for sure they would kill me,” says Njuguna, a father of two. “But Kiza, because he was a friend of mine, protected me. He immediately started fighting with them. At that moment, I got a chance to run away. Kiza literally saved my life.”

“Before I started working here, I didn’t realize chimpanzees were so close to humans,” he continues. “They use tools, they think the way people think, they solve their problems. After working with them, I came to realize they are very close to human beings.”

Florence Kangethe, a 31-year-old wildlife veterinarian who has worked at the sanctuary for nearly four years, arrived at the same conclusion through clinical practice.

“If you sit down with them for one hour, you’ll pick up so many different things,” she says. “Two best friends probably gossiping together, then grooming, or a mother-child bond here, then the introvert sitting by themselves. They’re really like a mirror to ourselves.”

By early evening, the keepers begin moving the chimpanzees into the holding house. Mukundi stands at the gate, calling each one by name. Most come. Max does not. He sits at the edge of the enclosure, ignoring the call.

“He’s stubborn,” Mukundi says, with a chuckle. “He knows he has to go in. But he wants to make it difficult.”

Max is among the least liked by his own troop. He cannot sleep with the dominant males; they would attack each other by morning. According to Mukundi, he gets away with his rebellions because he has formed a close bond with the group’s alpha, who always comes to his defense.

“If Max likes you, he really likes you — and you will know,” Mukundi says. “And if he hates you, he makes it very clear. He will even collect feces or find big rocks and throw them at you. He doesn’t hide anything.”

Eventually, Max relents. He passes Mukundi and slips into the narrow entrance of the holding facility. Mukundi watches him go, laughing softly — like one might at a troublesome relative — knowing he has made many enemies inside.

“Sweetwaters was set up to offer lifelong care,” says Ngulu, the former manager. “So if there are no more chimpanzees that need to be rescued — if the systems in the countries where they are found are working properly — then there is no need to have a sanctuary. The animals would live out their lives here, die, and we can close because everything now is perfect.”

“But, unfortunately, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction.”

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After an April decision by the US Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Tennessee became the first state to redraw its Congressional district maps, resulting in the 9th District—a solidly Democratic seat representing the only majority-Black district in the state—being erased. We speak with Tennessee State Representative Justin Pearson, who has been running to represent Tennessee’s 9th District in the US House of Representatives, about why he is still running despite Republicans’ attempts to rig the electoral process, and what is at stake for Tennessee and the country this midterm election season.

Additional links/info:

Credits:

• Videography: Stephen Janis, Maximillian Alvarez
• Post-Production: David Hebden

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’re here in Philadelphia at the 2026 Net Roots Conference and I’m sitting with Representative Justin Pearson from the Tennessee House of Representatives who is now running for the US House of Representatives. Representative Pearson, thank you so much for joining us. I know you only have a few minutes and we got so much to talk about, so I kind of want to just throw a couple things at you and let you go, right? I got you. Tennessee was the first state to redistrict its congressional maps after this Supreme Court hearing. So you were at the center of that. What the heck can people do about this attempt to rig the midterm elections and everything moving forward? Second, you are in Memphis, one of the epicenters of this data center crisis, black, brown communities being poisoned, energy being taken, billionaires ruining everything. So what is it like on the ground in Tennessee?

What can be done at the state level and what do you hope to accomplish at the national level with this by being a member of the House of Representatives?

Justin Pearson:

Absolutely. Thanks so much again for having me. But look, the first problem is we are seeing a deleterious impact to our democracy with the Supreme Court now being captured and operating as a partisan entity instead of an independent one. The consequences of that are real. We have a new district now with 15 counties, but listen, go to votejustinj.com, sign up to volunteer. You can phone bank from anywhere in the country and it’s going to take a mass mobilization effort for us to win, but it is possible. And it didn’t make it impossible for us to win. They just made it more difficult and we’re okay taking on a challenge. But our message is clear. We are standing up against billionaires in the status quo that has not worked for people. We understand that politically, Democrats and Republicans too often have done the same things that have led us to the consequences of decisions where billionaires have captured our government, are polluting the air that we breathe, taking the water that we drink and polluting it just for their companies to make more profits.

So we’re a voice for working class people and addressing these issues head on at the state level. We’ve introduced the moratorium similar to what Senator Sanders and Congresswoman, the AOC and others have been putting forward. And at the national level, that’s going to be something I push for. We have to slow this down, address the causes and the issues of working class people and stop billionaires from taking over our government and our country.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And do you think that the Democratic Party is ready for that, especially with the 2024 autopsy being so sparse on real critical details of what the party did wrong to lose to Trump. Again, what do you think it’s going to take to defeat MAGA, Trump and the Republicans today?

Justin Pearson:

Yeah, we have to build power. We have to make sure that we are increasing our turnout, our education, our information. We have to go to places other people have not gone. We went and knocked some doors in rural communities. We knocked on doors where someone said, “No one’s ever been here in the 40 years that I’ve lived here.” That is what it is going to take precinct by precinct, county by county, state by state. And we can’t negate or neglect the south in particular where the mass majority of black folks in the United States of America live with the bedrock of the Democratic Party. We need everybody to come to the south and support, whether that’s virtually or in person because this is the moment and this is the time to defend what we believe.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And final question, like when you are going around talking to folks in rural areas, in the cities, in the south, people have a lot of ideas about who lives there, what they think, where their politics come from. What do you think people need to know about the potential for building working class political coalitions? What are the issues that are uniting working people in Tennessee that the political pundit class just totally misses?

Justin Pearson:

It’s economics. People are struggling financially. Everybody’s dealing with the consequences of an Iran war that has led us with high gas prices, high grocery prices, and they want an economy that works for everybody, not just for the people at the top. Everybody wants to have, everybody we talk to wants Medicare for all, wants an expansion of healthcare, and particularly in a state like Tennessee, where we have the highest number of people with medical debt in the United States of America. 16 rural hospitals have closed. Folks know that this is not the way that things need to be. This is not the way that things have to be. And they want to have voices that stand up to these billionaires, building these data centers all across our state, all across our country without regulations, without permissions, just doing it, taking farm land, taking communities land, destroying our water, destroying our air quality.

They want leaders that are going to fight for them and not just continuing the same political machine, the same status quo that’s happened before.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Sorry, final question because we just talked to Representative Summer Lee and she had a great point, which is like the Republicans are trying to rig the elections and redraw these maps because they know that they are deeply unpopular and they can’t win the popular vote, but the reality of them trying to rig it and take away the Democratic enterprise is very, very real. So what’s your message out there to folks who are already feeling defeated about the upcoming midterm election season and American democracy as such?

Justin Pearson:

Yeah, you cannot quit now. This is the time to give everything that you possibly can for this constitutional Democratic Republican experiment that we have. The next six months are the most important six months I think for all of us who are alive because I don’t ever think, again, you’ll see the stars aligning with the white supremacist president, states that are captured by that presidency, billionaires able to buy government in this kind of way. These six months, you actually need to knock more doors than ever before, make more phone calls to your family, making sure people are registered to vote and that they turn out, support candidates, whether they’re in your state or outside of your state, especially in the South who are dealing with the consequences of racist redistricting. Now is not the time to give up. Listen, I’m still running for Congress. My family hasn’t given up.

My community hasn’t given up. So this isn’t the time for you to sit down and sit back. This is the time to get engaged and get off the sidelines more than ever before to defend what we believe.

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Florida has a magic that only Floridians truly understand. The mix of whimsy, bravery, and devotion you find here is unique, as is the land itself: lush acres of forest and marshy wetlands, puppy like creatures found in springs and slow-moving rivers, beaches of white sand, and off-the-beaten-path trails.

It’s tough to be from here—we’re plagued with hurricane season, mocked with GIFs like Bugs Bunny sawing from the rest of the country, and absurd “Florida man” jokes reflecting the tired 2010s-era cliché that our state is a den of drug-addled chaos and bizarre misadventure. If you mention Florida in conversation, you’re often met with a disgusted or concerning gaze.

The state has also long served as the country’s playground—or, as scholar Julio Capó Jr. describes it in his history of queer Miami culture, a “fairyland” that lures in tourists with the promise of a quick getaway surrounded by Disney animatronics and dreamy beaches. It may be unrecognizable to visitors from outside of the state, but Florida has always been a little queer, even beyond the periphery of the gay club scene in Miami.

In the past several years, however, Florida has become increasingly known for being hostile to queer people. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis—whose term began in 2019, less than three years after the June 2016 mass shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub that killed forty-nine people—is fixated on decimating Florida’s queer population and crushing the morale of our indomitable spirit. In 2021, DeSantis signed into law a provision that redefined a public demonstration of more than three people who “commit a breach of the peace” as a “riot,” giving police officers leeway to enforce it against queer and trans protesters. The next year, DeSantis and the Republican-led state legislature passed a blitz of oppressive laws: the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which restricted public school curriculum related to LGBTQ+ people and issues; the “Stop WOKE Act,” which restricted protected speech in the workplace related to systemic racism and sexism; and a ban on abortion after fifteen weeks. (This was replaced when a near-total abortion ban went into effect in 2024.) In 2023, DeSantis oversaw a rightwing takeover of the governing board at New College of Florida, resulting in seismic institutional and culture shifts at the Sarasota public liberal arts college.

Viewed as a gay utopia for queer and transgender youth, New College had been the obvious choice for Nya Jacobson. During Jacobson’s freshman year, DeSantis appointed a slate of conservative trustees at the school; within a year of the takeover, the gender studies department was eliminated, hundreds of library books were tossed in the dumpster, and students and faculty left New College in waves.

As a firsthand witness to this hostile takeover, Jacobson organized New College’s LGBTQ+ organization, Queery Club, even if it meant jeopardizing their future career. “I wasn’t sure of the implications, but I was like, ‘OK, I need to basically make a decision right now,’ ” they tell The Progressive. “ ‘I’m in my first year of college; I’ve got these big plans for my life and my future. Is this fight worth it?’ But I remember thinking, ‘I guess I’m gonna be a delinquent now.’ ”

Jacobson continues to see queer students enroll at New College, despite the incessant attacks on LGBTQ+ freedom. “Every time I see a new class of little baby gay freshmen,” Jacobson says, “I want to be able to show them that . . . they’re finally out of their parents’ homes; they can be who they want to be here, and they don’t have to be freaks for that.”

As this June marks the ten-year anniversary of the mass shooting that claimed forty-nine lives at the Pulse nightclub, queer Floridians have a grim and destabilizing decade to look back on. Our once-purple state has emerged as the nation’s petri dish for extreme rightwing legislation as an influx of wealthy conservatives into the state has weakened the voting power of those opposed to their government’s homophobic and transphobic agendas. In this climate, how do we stay afloat?

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Floridians are desensitized to the violence of gun culture at a young age: friends’ parents owning guns, walking past a case of rifles at the big-box store near your school, seeing countless gun show billboards on Interstate 10. If you’re Black, you learn about guns at an even younger age than your white peers during conversations about Trayvon Martin, gun violence, and deadly encounters with the police. Reliable data is hard to come by—as so many guns are unregistered—but Florida is second only to Texas both in terms of the number of guns and the number of adults who report living in a home with guns. It means neighborhoods don’t feel safe. It makes it feel like gun violence could happen anywhere, like at the nightclub on a weekend. It’s inescapable.

On June 12, 2016, at one of Pulse’s weekly Latin Nights, Omar Mateen opened fire in the gay nightclub, resulting in what was then the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history and is still the deadliest attack against LGBTQ+ people. Forty-nine people were killed and fifty-three were wounded. A majority of the victims were Latine, placing it within the culture of targeted violence faced by queer and transgender Latines in Florida.

The site of the former Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where forty-nine people were killed in June 2016 in the deadliest attack against LGBTQ+ people in U.S. history. In March 2026, the remnants of the nightclub were demolished, and a public memorial is expected to be finished in 2027.

In 2019, a group of survivors, family members of Pulse victims, activists, and scholars established the Community Coalition Against a Pulse Museum (CCAPM) to oppose the onePULSE Foundation’s $45 million plans to build a private museum. An open letter on CCAPM’s website reads, “We demand a tasteful and respectful public memorial to honor our loved ones where one can come to reflect, not a tourist attraction that charges admissions and sells mass shooting merchandise.” Additionally, the coalition seeks to hold the City of Orlando, the Orlando Police Department, and Pulse owner Barbara Poma accountable for the wide scope of unpermitted renovations and code violations at the nightclub, which further impeded the victims from escaping.

In 2023, the city of Orlando took over the memorial project, purchasing the property from Poma. In March 2026, the remnants of the nightclub were demolished. Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer announced that the memorial is expected to be finished in 2027.

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With Lux, a feminist magazine, I co-organized a multistate campus tour this past spring with stops at the University of Central Florida, Florida International University, and New College of Florida to encourage students to connect campus struggles to the larger political world. What my colleagues and I saw on this tour reflected my own experience as a student organizer at Florida A&M University (FAMU): Political action by college students is made a great deal stronger by support from off-campus community grassroots organizers.

Alongside student organizations, professors are grappling with the state’s war on education, including Evan Lauteria, an assistant instructional professor in sociology at the University of Florida. In March 2026, the state university system’s board of governors voted to remove Introduction to Sociology—deeming the course to be an alleged avenue for professors to promote leftwing ideologies and social justice advocacy—from the mandated core general education curriculum for freshman students.

“Less as a sociology professor and more as a Floridian, I think higher education is an avenue for young people to become engaged citizens, and so any attack on the education system is fundamentally an attack to democracy and an attack to civic engagement,” Lauteria tells The Progressive. “The attempts to eradicate history, to revise it, to prevent faculty from being able to talk about really well-established research on issues of stratification, inequality, or poverty, is fundamentally a threat to the whole citizenry and all of the people of Florida, and it should be treated as such.”

Lauteria ties the push to remove sociology to the Don’t Say Gay and Stop WOKE bills, and says that the goal of DeSantis’s administration is to “minimize the capacity of anyone to have critical thinking skills around these issues, which is why general education became their focus.”

While professors try to prevent the erasure of history and culture from their curricula, local organizers are also stepping up to the plate. The Walrus, a vegan restaurant in Jacksonville, dually serves as a third place for anarchist and Afrofuturist reading groups, drag shows, punk bands, and mutual aid drives. The owner, Alexander Eli, tells The Progressive that running a business as a trans person leads to security issues and tokenization, but their mission leads him to organize his rage and protect the “radical queer vegan bar that the city deserves.”

“People should have a place where they can wear a dress for the first time or be a part of nightlife culture in the South without feeling ostracized,” Eli says while drawing attention to the lack of nightlife catered to sapphic and femme-presenting people. By spotlighting queer joy as an act of resistance, dance parties—like Masisi Radio (Miami’s queer Caribbean collective) or Dyke Nite in Orlando—make space for underserved communities.

In the less than two years since it was founded, Dyke Nite has hosted a lesbian arm-wrestling party, craft nights, a “campy” strip spelling bee, and in April, a kiss-in rally on Lesbian Visibility Day, which included speakers from Central Florida Queers for Palestine and CCAPM. Alexia Clarke, one of the co-founders, says being in solidarity with strong grassroots movements in Florida is a necessity.

As Clarke recalls her college memories of clubbing at Pulse, which now feels like “a haunted house” on Orlando’s bustling Orange Avenue, she says that her unshakeable drive to create sapphic spaces led to Dyke Nite, because there is “power in numbers.”

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Operating as the only queer and feminist bookstore in Tallahassee, Common Ground Books is decorated with kitsch, colorful stickers opposing the patriarchy, middle school graphic novels, and copies of Rachel Reid’s famed gay hockey romance Heated Rivalry. Although the best-selling Game Changers series is a hit, the top-selling category at Common Ground Books is nonfiction. “Perhaps it’s because of the demographics in Tally,” says Alex Spencer, the bookstore’s owner. College students at Florida State University and FAMU, as well as a strong presence of organizers and feminists in Tallahassee, make up a large share of the store’s customers. “A lot of people turn to books to further their education and fill in the gaps.”

Spencer, who opened the award-winning bookstore in 2022, recognizes that the influx of customers is not just because of the store’s proximity to the state Capitol and universities. Common Ground Books attracts queer elders, curious young readers, and those craving a third place where locals can explore their gender with binders or a new wardrobe of clothes, accessories, and makeup. Aside from the literature, the store offers free contraceptives, Narcan, bilingual informational cards about Constitutional rights, nonperishable goods, and hygiene products—plus you can always find a flyer for an upcoming rally or craft night.

Spencer had to cease the bookstore’s “Drag Story Hour” due to threats from counter-protesters and the political fallout from Florida’s vague “Protection of Children” act, the 2023 law which sought to prohibit children from attending any “adult live performance” that features sexual or lewd conduct. She insists, however, that the community of drag queens, transgender people, and grassroots organizers offer enough support to sustain business.

Tallahassee’s fluctuating yet tight-knit environment as a college town has built a ragtag group of working-class avengers: union workers, guerilla gardeners, abortion advocates, climate activists, college students, and librarians.

Delilah Pierre, the president of the Tallahassee Community Action Committee, has a highly regarded presence in Tallahassee’s activism circles for leading rallies against racial and trans injustices and creating the now-defunct citizen’s police review board. Citing Tallahassee’s civil rights-era bus boycott in 1956 led by the Reverend Charles Kenzie Steele, and sisters Patricia and Priscilla Stephens, who organized the Congress of Racial Equality’s sit-in with other FAMU students in 1960, she credits former Tallahassee residents for laying the groundwork to create a legacy of Black activism.

“They put conscious attention into making sure that when they leave—and many of them will leave—don’t just leave everyone else to pick up the pieces,” Pierre tells The Progressive. “We have a plan for what leaving and transitional leadership is going to look like and what it means for someone else to be in a leadership role.”

Although college campuses have been a decades-long route for radical ideologies through student-led feminist, identity-based, and LGBTQ+ organizations, being a born-and-raised Floridian offers a unique introduction to political consciousness. Without the academic language to understand how these historic events affect everyday people—not to mention the actions that remove words like “culture” and “diversity” in textbooks—how does one voice their interest in political education?

Dara Britton, a homeschooled student in Leon County, says that her identity as a queer mixed-race person of Jamaican descent is one of many things that motivated her to participate in direct action, including a protest against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement assembled by a high school student in Leon County and Tallahassee’s No Kings rally in March.

“I’m involved with a lot of homeschoolers and homeschool communities that are very queer and very open about their identities,” Britton, who uses she/they pronouns, tells The Progressive. “We build more surface-level connections about our common interests, and there’s so many people who are not scared to be themselves and their own identities.”

Their closest friends, whom they met through a self-described homeschooling co-op, bond over their shared fear of book bans and attend protests together. “That’s what really brings us together—knowing that we are each other’s safe spaces and that we always have each other to turn to. It’s something that I haven’t really had before I joined this co-op.”

At seventeen years old, Britton says she just “hopes to bring some joy.” Her resilience speaks for itself. “To the people who are feeling hopeless in this situation, look to other people. It’s easy to get wrapped up in [the news cycle] online, but you can’t help anyone if you’re not helping yourself. Turn to your friends, family, and the people who know how to help you. Spread the awareness and kindness that we want to get and hope to bring to the world. We are a community, even if some people don’t want us to be.”

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Despite the obstacles, LGBTQ+ creators and activists with resounding connections to Florida are reimagining a queer utopic version of the state. One that cares about its at-risk citrus trees, doesn’t build prisons over wetlands, prioritizes citizen-led committees instead of creating police training facilities, and supports queer authors rather than banning their books. Recent documentaries display an orange-tinted lens on Florida’s political struggles, such as Sasha Wortzel’s River of Grass, a psychedelic reimagined namesake of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s book, and Patrick Bresnan’s First They Came for My College, which follows DeSantis’s coup at New College of Florida.

Can’t Stop Change: Queer Climate Stories from the Florida Frontlines is another among these projects. The feature-length documentary chronicles climate justice through the eyes of fifteen artists, educators, and organizers. To open the film, Miami-based organizer Valencia Gunder speaks directly to some of the most marginalized Floridians: “Queer people, trans people, migrant people, Black people, brown people—this is your Florida. Don’t you let nobody tell you you need to go back where you came from.” She continues, applauding Floridians for their self-determination—an undeniable trait embedded in the DNA of most residents, allowing them to endure hurricanes and envision a liberated version of Florida.

V Starks, an associate producer who is also featured in the film, understands this self-determination well as a born-and-raised Floridian from Jacksonville, the Southeast’s largest city. After attending a screening of Can’t Stop Change, Starks’s interest was piqued by seeing queer Floridians depicted in a way that didn’t write off the state as the nation’s armpit. Starks—who considers his high school’s Genders & Sexualities Alliance, natural hair club, and feminist club as their entry into radical thought and grassroots organizing—credits their role in the film as a challenge to rethink how he thought about his hometown.

“I have so much love and respect for people who are there, and my heart is there, but I have geographically, physically separated myself,” Starks says of Jacksonville and his decision to temporarily move to Atlanta, Georgia, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thanks to Starks’s involvement, Jacksonville was included in the extended cut of the documentary, introducing characters like Paige Mahogany Parks, the vibrant founder of the Transgender Awareness Project, who publicly condemned the uptick of Black transgender women murdered in Jacksonville in 2018.

Above all, Starks hopes the film encourages people to interrogate queerness alongside the ways that we shape and shift narratives and affect change within our communities. “The film has been so core to my expanded understanding of abolitionist possibility,” he says. “If we can question gender—something that’s taught so neatly and ingrained—we can question anything. We can deconstruct and destroy worlds and build worlds.”

Collective action is the contingency plan that gets us through hurricanes, book bans, and riot bills. Attending drag shows and protests with our neighbors expands our unlimited endurance in our fight for a state that sees and accepts us for who we are. Through the work of countless LGBTQ+ and youth organizers, we can see that Florida is worth fighting for. 

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