From the beaches to the mountains
Florida queers take mutual aid across state lines
A few days had passed since I first saw video of Hurricane Helene’s floodwaters excavating Appalachian hillsides, carrying sediment downstream and depositing it in a feet-thick layer over rural townships. Clearwater-based, trans-led harm reduction group Kaon City Medics (KCM) put out a call to the Tampa Bay community for generators, tents, cash donations and more to bring up to North Carolina’s mud-inhumed hollers. Shortly thereafter, Denis Phillips appeared on my TV screen studying the latest spaghetti models of soon-to-be Hurricane Milton like a witch divining tea leaves, his voice deepening in sobriety as the forecast became clear. When the storm battered my St. Petersburg home the next week, I assumed there would no longer be a relief trip up to Appalachia—yet before the end of the month, gas still a scarcity, local activist Skyfire and the KCM crew loaded up a van and set a course for the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“Appalachia is an area that is very close to our hearts,” Skyfire says. “I feel like the hills and hollers there are home to a community that very much resembles our own. … They’re often low-income, blue-collar folks who are experiencing the oppression of this capitalistic colonizer regime in many of the same ways that we are here in Florida.” This kinship, Skyfire says, drove KCM’s decision to target the area with mutual aid efforts. KCM made contact with existing mutual aid organizations in Appalachia, including Rural Organizing And Resilience (ROAR) and Holler Harm Reduction, both based out of Madison County in North Carolina. The organizations worked together closely to ensure KCM wasn’t bringing redundant supplies. When material needs changed, existing collections were reallocated to a supply trip headed to Cuba that same month.
Mutual aid—a novel name for a practice older than colonialism—describes a reciprocal relationship in which resources and labor are freely shared between individuals within a community. Skyfire stresses that mutual aid is distinct from charity. While charity comes from a place of power and privilege, he says, mutual aid empowers us to meet our own needs together, eliminating our dependence on being deemed “worthy” of aid by the rich and powerful. He cites the unequal distribution of Helene and Milton-related charity as a primary reason for the supply trip continuing even after our own city was struck by the storms, saying that less densely populated areas often are left behind in the wake of disaster.
Larger organizations like FEMA use mathematical tools like the National Risk Index to assess the need for disaster protection measures and to create mitigation plans, factoring in the “expected annual loss” in dollars to a given area. This could mean that vulnerable rural communities with lower asset values see less money go towards preventing and rebuilding from natural catastrophes than their urban counterparts. Organizations like KCM operate with an understanding that communities generally know what they need better than an algorithm can determine, believing that marginalized communities most often left behind by large-scale aid benefit from ground-up approaches to delivering support.
Mutual aid finds its purpose in covering the gaps where large-scale aid falls short, as well as in undermining dependency on larger organizations and charities. Exemplifying this are queer and trans Floridians, a demographic familiar with feeling left behind by the system; we are let down and beat down time and time again by state and federal governments through negligence and hostile legislation. This has led to a less-than-official network of LGBTQ+ neighbors providing for one another through identifying safe places to work, sourcing hormones, or providing intra-community disaster relief (see last month’s “Hurricane City, USA” article). Many of us live and breathe mutual aid, so it’s no surprise that the dozens of other supply trucks Skyfire helped unload were delivered by who he called “faggots from all over”. Skyfire emphasizes that queerness is one of many demographic factors overrepresented in mutual aid efforts, noting that race, disability, income, immigration status, and more factor in as well. “The common thread of queerness is one that runs through a lot of these organizations, but it's not the only one,” they said. “At the core of it, it's class that we are able to unite on.”
This article was originally published in the December 2024 issue of The Sapphic Sun