Wilton Manors: The gayest two square miles in America

Just north of Fort Lauderdale, Wilton Manors is a small town with the second-highest concentration of same-sex couples in the country.

(Note: This article appears in the April 2026 issue of SE Magazine.)

There are gay-friendly cities, and then there is Wilton Manors. The distinction matters. Just north of Fort Lauderdale in Florida, tucked into barely two square miles of land bordered on all sides by the winding forks of the Middle River (which is why locals call it “The Island City”), Wilton Manors has become something that most places only claim to be: a community where LGBTQ+ life isn’t a subculture, a neighborhood or a marketing angle. It’s just life. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, it ranks second in the nation for the highest concentration of same-sex couples relative to total population, behind only Provincetown, Massachusetts. With roughly 12,000 residents, it is a small town that has built something large and lasting.

It didn’t happen by accident, and it didn’t happen quickly. In the early ‘90s, as Fort Lauderdale’s gay bars began facing rising rents and social friction, LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs looked north and found something useful: cheap storefronts on a quiet commercial strip called Wilton Drive. The neighborhood was unassuming, the rent was manageable and nobody was paying much attention. That changed in 1997, when George Kessinger opened Georgie’s Alibi on the Drive, effectively lighting the fuse. Within a few years, rainbow flags lined the street, and the businesses followed: restaurants, boutiques, real estate offices, bars and cafés, most of them LGBTQ+ owned or operated. Today, Wilton Drive is home to more than 30 restaurants, bars, lounges and nightclubs, and draws visitors from across the state, the country and the world.

It was also in 1997 that Tom Scog opened the first My Tropx, just steps from the action on Wilton Drive. He’ll tell you he did it for the health insurance, and that’s true, but timing has a way of making things possible that planning never could. Scog arrived at the exact moment a neighborhood was finding its identity, and his store grew up alongside it.

That’s the thing about Wilton Manors that’s easy to miss from the outside. The nightlife gets the attention, and it’s legitimately worth the attention, but the community runs far deeper than the bars. In 1988, the city elected Broward County’s first openly gay elected official. By 2000, it had become only the second city in the U.S. with a gay-majority governing body. In November 2018, it went further still, becoming the first city in Florida, and only the second in the nation after Palm Springs, with an all-LGBTQ+ city commission. The police cars are wrapped in rainbow graphics. The department has its own LGBTQ+ community liaison. In 2023, the city launched a formal Safe Place Program, with 45 local businesses displaying decals identifying themselves as designated safe havens for anyone facing harassment or feeling threatened. When a city’s police department is as invested in this as its bar owners, you’re dealing with something different.

The Pride Center at Equality Park, one of the largest LGBTQ+ community centers in the Southeast, provides year-round healthcare, counseling and programming. Both the Stonewall National Museum and Archives and the World AIDS Museum and Educational Center have a branch there. On Valentine’s Day 2015, when same-sex marriage became legal in Florida, Wilton Manors and Broward County hosted a mass wedding ceremony at City Hall, where 37 couples, many of whom had been together for decades, finally legally married in the place they called home. Every member of the city commission took part.

For a store like My Tropx, all of this context isn’t background; it’s the business model. Scog figured out early that Wilton Manors wasn’t just a place people passed through. It was a place people lived, celebrated and returned to on a calendar that never really stopped. Wicked Manors fills the Drive every Halloween with thousands of costumed revelers. The annual Stonewall Pride Parade and Street Festival draws roughly 35,000 people each June. Gay cruise ships departing from Fort Lauderdale and Miami send a steady flow of shoppers through My Tropx door before every sailing. When Scog stocked themed merchandise ahead of cruise night events, white parties, leather nights and ‘50s-themed evenings, he wasn’t being clever. He was just paying attention to where he lived.

“You have a place to wear the clothes you buy,” he says. And in Wilton Manors, that’s not a small thing.

The Drive itself has been remade to match the community that built it. After years of advocacy, the city completed a major streetscape transformation in 2023 with narrowed traffic lanes, widened sidewalks, added crosswalks and more landscaping. They converted car-centric roadways into something more aligned with the community’s vibe: a place for people to walk, linger and belong.

Success has brought its complications. Property values have climbed steadily; the city’s taxable property values reached $1.48 billion in 2019, and some longtime residents, many on fixed incomes, worry they are being priced out of the community they helped create. It’s a tension familiar to beloved neighborhoods everywhere, and Wilton Manors hasn’t escaped it.

But spend an evening on the Drive and the dominant feeling is something else entirely. It’s the particular ease of a place where nobody has to explain themselves. Where the drag queens aren’t performing for tourists. They live here. Where the older gay couple, the young queer kid in festival gear and the straight woman who is visiting from Orlando can all have dinner in the same restaurant and still feel entirely at home.

Tom Scog spent 25 years watching that world from behind his shop window. You could do a lot worse for a view.

Larry Kaplan is a broker specializing in the sale and purchase of adult retail stores and adult nightclubs, and the Executive Director of ACE of Michigan, the state trade association for adult nightclubs. For 25 years, Mr. Kaplan has been the Legal Correspondent for ED Publications. Contact Larry Kaplan at 313-815-3311 or email larry@kaplanstoresales.com.