Before the internet birthed the Florida Man meme, my youth in 1970s Miami was already setting the standard for the bizarre. As a teenager navigating the sun-drenched, bohemian landscape of Coconut Grove, my after-school routine didn’t involve sports or homework. Instead, I spent my teen years at the legendary happy hours of The Mutiny Hotel alongside my mother—a practicing astrologer looking to build her clientele. While my mother had zero involvement in the drug trade, the bar was a magnet for Miami’s most affluent crowd, including women dressed to the nines and men with gold teeth. I was entirely clueless about the underworld operating around us, trading friendly hellos with patrons while my mother read charts.
Long before the internet turned “Florida Man” into a meme about runaway alligators and lawnmower police chases, the original breed was forged in the humid delirium of the 1970s. It was a sun-bleached era where counterculture clashed with Anita Bryant’s bullhorns, and bizarre survival tactics were just part of daily life.
My own upbringing was no exception. Before I ever wrote Coconut Grove Chronicles—my autofiction novel chronicling queer youth in the closet—I lived through a surreal South Florida reality that blurred the line between ordinary suburban life and wild subtropical folklore.
From working counterculture boutiques to navigating the strange underworld orbits of my mother’s astrology business, here is how I earned my stripes as an original Florida Man:
Hanging out at the swanky Mutiny bar with Mother
I had a front-row seat to the era’s vices early on. During happy hours, I was drafted as Mother’s sidekick at the notorious Mutiny Bar. While nursing manhattans at the ground zero of the Cocaine Cowboys era, she chit-chatted up well-heeled women about astrology. Afterward, she might ask for their hand so they could sample her palm reading. Narco-mysticism was pure 1970s Miami.
Clerking at a headshop and boutique.
On weekends, I hawked gargantuan bongs, chocolate (other flavors too), orgy butter (edible, of course, as I couldn’t resist sucking up the samples), and sterling silver coke spoons (that’s right; no samples).
Bred backyard mosquitoes.
Every Floridian is an accidental mosquito farmer. Between the relentless Florida humidity, daily downpours, and stagnant mud puddles baking in the yard for days, stopping swarms from breeding is completely futile. I spent the entire spring, summer, and fall covered head to toe in itchy mosquito bites, scratching them raw until my skin turned crusty.
Chugging half a bottle of vodka before flying into towering cumulonimbus clouds.
A few hours after midnight, a chugging contest with my brother’s friend left me half a bottle of vodka underwater the night after boarding a twin-engine Cessna 340 to chase developing cumulonimbus clouds—meteorologist talk for severe thunderstorms.
Dunking a government truck into an irrigation canal.
Pure autofiction on my part—I wasn’t the one behind the wheel when our government pickups took nosedives into the irrigation canals lining the endless sugarcane fields. The other student meteorologists handled that disaster all on their own. Backing up a truck for two miles is one skill I’ve kept.
Watched two water moccasins have sex on the side of a canal. Cafe con leche colored reptiles doing the wild thing. It wasn’t hard to figure out, one on top of the other. If only I had an iPhone back then, I could have figured out how they do that.
Catching palmetto bugs in mid-air.
In Florida, giant flying roaches are “palmetto bugs,” which makes them exotic. I never actually took a jar of them down to the local store to buy groceries, but in the realm of Florida Man autofiction, stranger things have happened.
Jump over the dike for a swim in alligator-ridden Lake Okeechobee. Every summer, I thought about scaling that massive Herbert Hoover Dike for a dip, but never actually went through with it. In my early twenties, I’d walk along its grassy hill perimeter in Clewiston, Florida. Between the security fences and towering hilltop barriers, I never even laid eyes on the water. It was just as well: the lake was notoriously murky, shallow, and packed with hungry alligators waiting to make a meal out of anyone foolish enough to jump in.
Observe my best alcoholic friend who ate food that people left behind in restaurants and hotel hallways.
I mean, have you ever had a best friend do that while you were with them? Just goes to prove that right next to a Florida Man there was a Florida Woman.
Put Clorox on poison ivy, even the part I got on my crotch.
As a Florida Teen Man, I’d taken everyone’s advice, even bad advice. A visit to the emergency room, anyone?
Of course those aren’t the only Florida Man lifestyle experiences in which I engaged. Many more are in my book Coconut Grove Chronicles.
One last one is that I love hurricanes. I am one, yet somewhat reformed. The tattoo I got in Chiapas Mexico is above. Is that Florida Manish? Thanks for reading my satire about life in Florida. I was happy I survived it and I certainly don’t regret the past. After all what is insanity? Florida Man Recovery captured my sanity, something that comes to some people from Florida.
I have a Florida Man-focused event coming up at The Center in New York City. Here’s the info: “Florida Man” in the mid-twentieth century lives on as the lively games of rigid gender expectations were torn apart in the counterculture, when resistance turned to campy rainbow colors, blinding Anita Bryant’s preaching into bullhorns.
Join author and photojournalist Matthew Bamberg for an evening of queer quirks in history, outrageous storytelling, and a National Enquirer-like dramaorama of love-ins, drug cartels, and the dawn of the occult new age.
A gay Florida Man belts out the “Floridaesque” landscape of 1970s Miami during a burgeoning hug-everyone counterculture that cracked the sultry closet doors with a bit of fresh air. Drawing on his popular Medium essays and his composite novel Coconut Grove Chronicles, he explores the bizarre, vibrant collision of gay, Cuban, and Jewish cultures in Coconut Grove — a scene that made San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury look second-rate.
What to Expect:
· Retro Party: Journey through 1972 to experience being a suburban working boy selling orgy butter, bongs, and coke spoons in a head shop facing the back patio of The Hamlet, Coconut Grove’s first gay bars.
· The Psychological Closet: A deep dive into the internal realities of growing up in the closet while navigating the auroras of an astrologer mother who charted the planets for cartel wives.
· The Independent Publishing Masterclass: Beyond the wild memoir, Bamberg — an experienced educator — outlines the modern book publishing process. He will share how to harness the power of independent platforms like IngramSpark to transform your own life history into compelling autofiction or memoir.
Part quirky history lesson, part retro multimedia masterclass, and part storytelling hour, this event connects personal history to broader cultural resistance. Come for the “Florida Man” debauchery; stay for the masterclass on how to write your own way out of youth.
Set your calendar for 6 to 9 pm, October 1, 2026, at the Gay Center in NYC
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.