Join us as we chat with Jeff and Todd, LGBTQ+ parents and long-time advocates raising their family in Florida. For decades, the Delmays have been at the helm of protests and lawsuits in support of LGBTQ+ rights, from suing for the right to marry in Florida to testifying against the state’s recent “Don’t Say Gay and Trans” bill.
In this episode, they share their love story, tell us about their path to parenthood — and their path to advocacy — and share why Florida will always be home.
Listen above as we embark on a journey of courage, empowerment, and unity in the midst of adversity, featuring stories that inspire us to stand firm and create a brighter future for all.
Episode Transcript
Jeff:
Well, I think that telling your story is important because we will start to identify how we are more alike than we’re different, and that goes across the board. Intersectionality. I never really even thought about this word until the last two, three years, and it’s powerful because even if you are a cis, white, straight man or woman, if you sit down and you spoke to me a gay Black man, you and I may end up having a lot more in common than we think. I love that about humanity. I love that we intersect in so many ways. But what I don’t love is that we are blind to it or we try to think, you know what? That’s not me. So you stay over there with that because that’s not me. But, if I tell my story and you hear it, then you may find out that there’s a tiny bit of you in there.
Eric:
This is Shining Through the Clouds, an exploration of the resilience of LGBTQ+ families in America. I’m your host Eric Fleming. Jeff and Todd Delmay have been together for over 20 years. These two have been at the helm of protests and lawsuits in support of LGBTQ+ rights since they’ve been a couple. They were one of the six plaintiff couples that, along with Equality Florida sued for the right to marry in the state and won. They and another couple became the first queer couples to legally marry in Florida when the judge lifted her stay. I loved talking to Jeff and Todd because they show us what sustained fighting can look like. It was also really helpful for me to hear what it’s like for folks living in Florida. I think I had this idea that queer people were being spiritually and politically destroyed by these attacks, but to hear from these two, “Nah, we’re fighting!” gave me so much hope.
Jeff:
Hello, we are Jeff and Todd Delmay, and we live in Hollywood, Florida. We’ve lived in Hollywood for almost 20 years, almost as long as we’ve been together. And we live in Hollywood with our 13 year old son who just turned 13 a couple months ago. And we’re gay dads living in this wonderful community. We’re fighting for our family, fighting for equality, running a business together. We’re also very aware of what’s going on in our community and how we can try to make it a little bit better.
Eric:
They go on to tell us how a chance meeting ended up leading to a 20 year partnership. Here’s a bit of the story about how the two met.
Todd:
Well, we met at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. It was the middle of the week. There was an event at the hotel and—very much out of character—I drove all the way to Miami to go to this event. And while I was at the event, I turned around and Jeff was approaching—literally across a crowded room!—and made his way over to make sure that I was enjoying the evening because he was working at the hotel.
Jeff:
Yeah, no, you were doing great. I was trying to see what you remembered actually.
Todd:
Well, that’s how I remember.
Jeff:
Well, like Todd said, for him, it was a little out of character to be there that evening. For me, it was a little bit strange as well because I had been working since about 6:00 AM that day, so I usually would’ve been gone. But because we had this event, I felt like I should make an appearance, and I was literally leaving the party to go home. I had an early morning the next morning as well. I happened to turn into the crowd, and I saw Todd. He’s pretty tall. He’s six four, and so very, you know, you could pick him out in the crowd, and I thought he was of course really good looking. So I turned around and went right back, and I remember going over to where my boss was standing not too far from where Todd was standing, and she said to me, I thought you were going home. And I said, yeah, I was going home, but look over there. And she was like, oh, I see. So I went up to him and his friend that he was there with and just did the very sort of hospitable greeting, hope you’re doing well, hope you’re enjoying your evening, that kind of thing. I don’t even remember what she looked like. I don’t remember. I was just really just zoned in on him. And we had a great chat, exchanged business cards, and then I actually, because that’s what I do, I followed up right away the next day, sent an email and didn’t get a response for two weeks.
Eric:
Check your emails, y’all. Your significant other might be in your junk folder. Okay. Todd finally checked his email and responded, and the two have been together ever since. Super cute story. Early on they connected on common dreams of having a family, but at the time it was illegal in the state of Florida for gay couples to adopt. Here’s Todd telling us about the obstacles they faced informing their family.
Todd:
Yeah, our family has been, I think, very intentional. On our first date, we talked about being parents. We knew that that was something that we could probably make happen. We never talked about getting married because we just thought, oh, that’ll never happen in our lifetime. And Jeff had always had in his mind a name for a son and had shared that very early that if he had a son, he wanted it to be named Blake. And so that was very intentional and thought out well in advance. He said, adopting our son all had to be very intentional, right? There were very intentional plans in terms of how to make the adoption happen, how just knowing the birth mother that we were able to be there and make those plans. When he was adopted, it was against the law in the state of Florida to adopt if you were gay.
So our attorney told Jeff he had to do it as a single parent, and our attorney told me to bring some friends and try to blend into the background so that it would make the judge suspicious. So again, we were being very intentional how we were making this happen. And then we got the opportunity to be part of marriage equality, and again, it was just like there were these things that we wanted for ourselves, and every time an opportunity came up, whether it was, “Hey, I’m five pregnant, would you be willing to adopt the baby?” to,” Hey, would you be part of this lawsuit to fight for marriage equality?” We took those opportunities at every step of the way. There was never a time where we said, no, we just were all in because again, we had this very intentional idea of building a family that was more than just us and our son, but also the community of family that has been built around us as well.
Eric:
Something that stands out to me about this story is just how intentional queer people have to be in family formation. We hear from Jeff and Todd just how creative and resilient they had to be in the process. There were lots of ups and downs, closed doors, and red tape before this came to be. And even when it finally did, Todd had to “stand in the background and not bring attention to himself.” I mean, talk about feeling devalued and dehumanized really, even at that point where Jeff could legally adopt, Todd still didn’t have legal parental rights, so the story wasn’t even close to being over.
Jeff:
We wanted to be parents, but how’s that going to happen? How do we do that? Are we going to adopt that? We can’t. It’s illegal. Should we go via surrogacy? We did get to know people that had children, gay men that had children via surrogacy. What does that entail? How expensive is it? Et cetera. So we decided, we got to a point where we’re like, all right, we can start looking at surrogacy. What’s that really look like? How much is it going to cost? What are the legalities, et cetera. And we had an appointment scheduled for a Monday with the attorney, and the appointment had been changed because of scheduling – a scheduled conflict to be a little bit later. So it was that Monday. We got the call Saturday from my cousin, who’s the birth mom, that she’s pregnant and there’s this opportunity possibly to adopt.
So we’re like, okay, that’s great. We’ll look into this. Go to the attorney. We talked to the attorney about a surrogacy for an hour, and then we’re like, by the way, my cousin called and is pregnant. We don’t know if this is possible, but can we adopt the baby? And she’s like, oh my God, why didn’t you start with that? We could absolutely do that. Here’s what we can do. But the possibility we didn’t think was there because it was illegal. But after kind of talking to her and thinking about how we could get around this law and really make it happen, and in the end we did, it was challenging. But it was not how you’d want it to be because I had to do it as a single parent and Todd had to blend it in the background, et cetera.
Eric:
I was curious about the emotional space that Jeff and Todd were in when thinking about getting married. It took us down a rabbit hole of a conversation about access. Who has access to these privileges and what does it mean to limit who does? There’s the psychological impact of feeling less than due to not having access, but there’s also the legal implications and protections piece. I’m just thinking about how impressive this system of oppression is where a lot of us, self included, have been conditioned to not want this thing that gives us rights and protections. I mean, I think that’s largely a defense mechanism that developed because we couldn’t have it for so long. But still that’s powerful.
Jeff:
What was kind of disheartening was to see our, for instance, we have two, we’re the oldest of two, and we both have a younger brother. Both of our brothers and I have other half siblings, but the brother that I grew up with in the same household as my younger brother, same with Todd, both got married to women at the same year within a couple of months of each other. We had been together at that point for a few years. And we – you’re kind of there enjoying this occasion. We’re a part of it because we’re family, and you’re think – and I’m thinking to myself, wow, why can’t I have this? Why can’t I be a part? Why can’t I see the families coming together and the joy and that occasion and the celebration of love? The celebration of togetherness, which we have just as much as they do as far as the bond that they share as a couple and what they’re doing with having a marriage or a wedding to start their lives.
So in that moment, I’m just thinking that kind of sucks that I can’t experience this, that I don’t have that equality. So to start the process of the lawsuit and thinking that this could possibly happen, it’s almost like you want to get really excited and we really want to think, you know what? It’s going to happen. We’re going to do what we need to do as plaintiff couple, work with the attorneys, work the media, whatever we need to do, what have you. You’re also thinking, oh man, what if this doesn’t happen? What if we can’t? What does that mean? Does that mean we’re not equal? Does that mean…? So I think there was a lot of nerves…
Todd:
Well, in the sense that when our brothers got married, there’s some weird sense of almost like being left behind. Everybody’s kind of moving on to the next phase of their life, and as much as we’ve been together and we were building a life together, so brothers got married, what year did they get married?
Jeff:
‘05. Yeah. ‘05.
Todd:
So we’d been together and left behind in a sense that we couldn’t have what they had. It wasn’t like we were just holding off. It wasn’t like we were just deciding, you know what? We’re not ready or we’ll wait a couple more years. It wasn’t our choice. It was out of our hands. That option wasn’t open to us. I mean, there were people who would say, oh, well just go to another state. It’s legal in other states, but then you come home and what? Nothing really changes when you come home. And we felt that where we live is where we had to make that happen. We had to be able to get married here.
Eric:
One of the biggest questions that I had for Jeff and Todd was: why are you still in Florida? Honestly, I think about safety. I think about preservation. I think about ease of life and with all of the attacks happening in terms of legislation, it doesn’t really feel like the safest space for queer people as an outsider. So I was really curious to hear their insider perspective and what it’s actually like and what makes them feel invested, what makes them want to stay. Here’s that answer.
Jeff:
It’s a very interesting situation because why we don’t move or leave is because we love Florida. We live in a community in a neighborhood that we absolutely love, and I don’t personally see myself living anywhere else in the world. If I could afford it, maybe I’d have an apartment in New York or have another somewhere else…where Todd is from in Michigan, near the lake, that kind of thing. But I feel more at home in Florida, so I’m not leaving. I’m staying here and I’m fighting for my home because it’ll be 30 years this year that I’ve lived in South Florida, and probably 29, almost 30 of those years, I have worked and paid taxes in this state. So I deserve to be here and I deserve to have my rights protected like everybody else. But to live here now is interesting because it has been such a progressive blue LGBTQ friendly place for the past, I would say 15 to 10 to 15 years where we felt very, very safe.
We’ve made some great in roads, and I came out in Miami living down here, so I felt safe in my area and where we live, and I still do, but it’s this feeling that it’s a threat. You really feel like there’s a threat on your happiness, a threat on your just being content in your community. It’s not really to the point where I feel like it’s going to be completely doom and gloom tomorrow, but you can tell it’s a bright sunny day out. But there’s some clouds just looming. They’re just kind of there and they’re approaching a little bit and you can see them. But we’re doing everything that we can to push those clouds away. So to here in this moment is an interesting dichotomy because again, I love it. I want to be here. I love everything about my surroundings, but there is this overlying cloud of people, of racism, of homophobia, of whatever. What’s going on is there. So day-to-day for me is trying to keep positive that I’m going to keep fighting and do whatever I can to fight the opposition because I love it so much because it’s worth fighting for, but also kind of having that little bit of something in your gut.
It’s an anxiety. You’re just anxious, a little anxious about it, nervous about what could happen.
Eric:
Okay, yeah, I get it. If you’ve lived in a place for 30 years and you’ve paid taxes that whole time you’re staying! I would feel the same way. I would be Effy from Dream Girls. Okay, I’m staying. But I wanted to hear more about what is it like on the ground, what’s the impact of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and similar legislative attacks. What are they noticing? What’s different now? What’s it like?
Jeff:
The most frustrating part of this whole process is they’re trying to protect children and protect parental rights, but they’re using children as a political pawn, like clearly. And they have created such a problem just under the guise of, because to get politically ahead and to push their agenda, but they’ve created such issues in schools with teachers’ anxiety about what they can or can’t say, with kids what they can or can’t say. Just they’ve created such tension when it wasn’t there before, when it wasn’t needed before, especially for trans children. And all trans children want are just to be who they are, and that’s all you want to be as a kid. There’s so much besides all this, there’s so much pressure you have sometimes in school with your friends. Maybe you’re an out, maybe you’re not as popular, maybe you’re not, whatever. And then to put this onto children, it’s just…For me, that has been the hardest thing is to really see how it’s creating this real tension in our schools and in our school activities.
And what have you. One of the things that we do is we take children on school trips. We get hired to plan these school trips, and something so simple happened where we usually will put a DVD on the bus so that kids can watch DVDs together just as entertainment, and the school wouldn’t allow it. Well, I dunno if the school wouldn’t allow it, but the teachers that were on the trip wouldn’t allow it because they were concerned that something in the video would offend a child and then therefore offend – the parent would find out about it, and then it would be a big problem. That’s where we’re at. You can’t even play a DVD of a G-rated whatever children’s Disney movie because somebody might get upset just for whatever reason. So it’s really — and of course this whole thing about not being able to discuss and talk about your family in school, it really, really is unfortunate that they’re wanting to do this, whatever political, whatever their political motivation is, but to use kids for it.
Eric:
And now the question of the hour, what about the children? Jeff and Todd have a 13 year old son. He’s right in the middle of all of this and deeply affected by legislative changes. Imagine being a middle schooler and not being able to talk about your family. What’s the impact of that messaging? How do you explain it to him?
Todd:
Last year when the first bill was filed, I actually was able to testify against the bill. Our family played a pretty significant role in terms of fighting against the legislation. We did…I think we did every morning national broadcast. Good Morning America, Today Show, CBS, CNN.
Jeff:
We had a crew come asked to come to Blake’s birthday party.
Todd:
Yeah, Blake’s was a 12th birthday party was a CNN story. So I mean, he’s been part of this fight, so he kind of gets it right and that he’ll come home and “Oh, there’s another film crew here. We’re doing something. We’re fighting something. What is it now?” But this one, we had sat down and really kind of talked about what this meant and why this was so terrible. And obviously I was going to Tallahassee a lot last year, and then I came back, I’d seen it pass, and I came back and the next morning we were talking about it and we put it in very clear terms that this was a bill that was preventing conversation about our family.
And so his reaction was horror, and he is like, does this mean I can’t talk about my family? The law hadn’t gone into effect. It hadn’t been signed yet. And we were like, well, he’s fortunate that he is in a public school, which is absolutely under all of these rules. And they’ve known him since kindergarten. It’s a K-8 school, he’s in sixth grade. They’ve been from the very beginning. They’re like, we’ve got him. Right? We understand him. And although they can’t talk about it on the record or put it in writing behind the scenes, teachers are very supportive of him and of our family. And there are queer teachers in the school who also have kids in the school. So we’re comfortable there. We haven’t felt a need to pull him out or take him away or anything, but that whole idea that his classroom might not be a safe space is pretty frightening. Again, we feel fortunate in where he is and the people around him, the teachers and the administrators care for him and know him well, but not every child has that, and certainly not LGBTQ children themselves.
Eric:
There’s a section here where Todd tells us about a time where he testified against the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. He said something that really struck me. He said, they don’t see us. They don’t see us as humans. They don’t see us in normal terms. It made me think about the power of just showing up. Todd being there forced this whole room of people to see us, to hear our stories, and to think about the impact that this has on his child. It was a reminder for me that activism can look a lot of different ways. I think a lot of times people can get lost in the bigness of problems and how to attack them. We don’t do anything because we don’t know what to do, or we think will it actually have an impact? But we hear from Todd, yeah, showing up and speaking out is significant. There’s power in our stories.
Todd:
When I went to testify the first time, and it was just one of those things where nobody had heard about it, and somebody from Equality Florida happened to be talking to him and I said, oh, I don’t really have anything on my schedule tomorrow. Is there anything coming up that I should check in on? He goes, actually, he said, I think you should go testify against this bill. We’re calling it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. And I was like, the what? And I went to the committee and of course read the whole bill. And when I stood up and started talking about it, and I said, and initially they’d written it as it was kindergarten through fifth grade, and he was a fifth grader last year. And so I got up and I said, I’m the proud parent of a public school Florida fifth grader.
And the reaction from the bill sponsor and even from the Republicans who were on the committee listening to me, you could see that the reaction was like, “Oh, didn’t expect that.” Let’s target LGBTQ people. And then an LGBTQ parent stands up and says, “My child would be targeted by this bill and wouldn’t be able to talk about his family in school.” They don’t see us as humans. They don’t see us as people that form families. Right? They don’t see us in normal terms. And here I am just in their face, in their face, right, like marriage equality, adoption. And here I am telling you that my child who is not LGBTQ would be directly impacted by this law. And of course, one of the Republicans at the end, she’s like, oh, I do think we need to make some changes on this based on Mr. Delmay’s testimony, they didn’t make any changes. I mean, I think soon after they made it K-3, which meant that my child no longer fit into that definition, but now they’ve gone K-12. So he’s clearly back in that definition, but they never expected a response from an LGBTQ parent. It just didn’t even cross their mind. And you can see even in the video that the sponsor sort of does this reaction like, oh, didn’t see that coming. Right?
Eric:
Jeff and Todd have both spoken about the power of storytelling and the work that they do, more specifically about the power that stories have to change communities, but also to create new communities. Now, that idea really excites me and it gives me hope. I feel like there’s a lot of potential for monumental shifting when we can show up as our full selves and people love us as we are and we form new empowered communities. Maybe I’m being idealistic and romantic here, but man, doesn’t that idea feel good? I ask them what they think is really important for people to know about queer communities, about queer joy, about queer family, what feels pressing to let people know about our stories right now.
Todd:
I hate to use the word average or normal, but there’s something so relatable about our life. There’s nothing that we do that anybody else doesn’t do. It just happens to be that we’re a same-sex couple and we’re fighting for a specific set of rights. But the way that we love to have Taco Tuesday night, and Jeff always makes a really good spaghetti on Wednesday nights, like those kinds of traditional things. And I think even growing up that there were parts of me, even in my own coming out that thought the first time I became aware of who are the gay people in the world? And they were Rock Hudson jokes, and I didn’t even really know what that meant. And then Liberace, and I kept thinking to myself, but that’s not me. I don’t identify with Liberace. But finding your image of what you want your family to look like, you sort of go through your own grieving processes as you’re coming out thinking you can’t have those things. We’ve been very fortunate that a lot of those things I thought I was going to miss out on — getting married, having a child, being a soccer dad. Those are very traditional things that I think we can all experience. We can all experience whatever we want in our own lives, that there really are possibilities and space for anything and whoever you want to be.
Jeff:
I think that telling your story is important because we will start to identify how we are more alike than we’re different. And that goes across the board. Intersectionality. I never really even thought about this word until the last two, three years. And it’s powerful because even if you are a cis, white, straight man or woman, if you sit down and you spoke to me, a gay Black man, you and I may end up having a lot more in common than we think, and that’s even the people that we care about, the people that we love.
Maybe there’s somebody in your family that is gay and is in the closet where I’ve been before in my life, but if I tell my story and you’re like, wow, I didn’t realize that. And you go back and you talk to this person, your family about that…So I love that about humanity. I love that we intersect in so many ways, but what I don’t love is that we are blind to it, or we try to think, you know what? That’s not me. So you stay over there with that. That’s not me. But if I tell my story and you hear it, then you may find out that there’s a tiny bit of you in there or someone you may know. Sometimes for us, we get so busy in our lives that we think, oh, there’s not. We can’t do another thing. We can’t volunteer here. We can’t do this. Another trip to Tallahassee, whatever. But what pushes me or drives me is that I have the physical and mental capacity to do these things and to tell the story and to be a part of it. So if that helps just one person, then it’s worth it. That’s just my little part of what I can do to help this movement.
Eric:
Thank you to Jeff and Todd Delmay. You can find out more about them and support the work that they do with Dolphin Democrats as well as Equality Florida. This has been a Joy Channel production in partnership with Family Equality. As the leading national organization for current and future LGBTQ+ families, we work to advance equality through advocacy, support, storytelling, and education to ensure that everyone has the freedom to find form and sustain their families. Our executive producer is Luna Malborough. Sound designed by Sean Braley. Music and music designed by Will Clemons of Ill Will Rhythms incorporated. Story production and hosting by yours truly, Eric Fleming. You can follow us on socials at Find Your Joy Channel. Don’t forget to rate, subscribe, and review this podcast that helps us out a lot and spread the word. Send this to your friends, send it to your mom and them. Take good care, y’all.