Ruth Shack, Early Champion of Gay Rights in Miami, Dies at 94

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Ruth Shack, Early Champion of Gay Rights in Miami, Dies at 94

She sponsored one of the nation’s first anti-discrimination ordinances for gays and lesbians and later helped make Miami a global arts center.


Ruth Shack in 2016. As a young political leader in Miami, she sponsored an amendment to add “sexual preference” to the list of characteristics protected against discrimination in housing, education and the workplace. Emily Michot/Miami Herald

By Clay Risen
June 3, 2026

Ruth Shack, who as a freshman commissioner in Dade County, Fla., in 1977 championed one of America’s first local ordinances protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination, only to see it overturned after a high-profile campaign by the conservative activist Anita Bryant, died on May 23 in Cumming, Ga. She was 94. ...Her daughter Barbara Shack said the death, in a hospital, was from a brief respiratory illness. Ms. Shack had moved to Cumming during the pandemic to be close to her family.

Dade County, home to Miami, is a bustling global metropolis with a vibrant gay community. It looked very different in 1976, when Ms. Shack was elected to a two-year term on the county commission. It was seven years after the Stonewall Uprising in New York set off the modern gay rights movement, but in places like Miami, homosexuality still carried a stigma.

A liberal Democrat, Ms. Shack had run with the support of a coalition of gay-rights activists. Weeks after she won, she introduced an amendment to add “sexual preference” to the list of characteristics protected against discrimination in housing, education and the workplace. ... “People forget that back in 1977, gay people could be fired, could be jailed, could be sent out of their homes and out of theaters,” she told Tablet magazine in 2016. “To see my friends going to jail just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time was horrific.”

The commission approved the amendment by a 5-3 vote, but opposition was growing rapidly. ... In a strange coincidence, it was led by one of her talent-agent husband’s best-known clients, Ms. Bryant, a singer, former beauty pageant contestant and spokeswoman for Florida orange juice who had become involved in conservative Christian causes. ... Soon after the vote, Ms. Bryant, who had often socialized with the Shacks, called Ms. Shack at home. ... “I am going to have to oppose you,” Ms. Bryant said, according to “Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South” (2001) by James T. Sears. Then she began to read from the Bible.


Anita Bryant in 1977 talking about her organization’s victory in the Dade County, Fla., gay rights referendum. During this period, Ms. Shack received death threats and denunciations from religious leaders. Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images

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Ms. Shack on the cover of the Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine in 1980. As a commissioner in Dade County, she helped champion the county’s first historic-preservation law. Miami Herald, via Ruth and Richard Shack

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[underpants]

1. 🇺🇸🕯️ how did i never hear her name during the Anita Bryant period?

Ever.

[LoisB]

2. Rest in Peace and thank you.