GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The City of Gainesville received a score of 84 out of 100 in the 2025 edition of the Human Rights Campaign’s Municipal Equality Index. The score reflected the city’s performance in policies, laws and services that impact the LGBTQ+ community. This is a 13 point decrease from Gainesville’s score of 97 in 2024.
The Municipal Equality Index evaluates cities nationwide on five core areas: nondiscrimination laws, municipality as a model employer, municipal services and inclusion, law enforcement and leadership on LGBTQ+ equality. A score of 84 is below several other cities in Florida this year, including Orlando, St. Petersburg, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Miami and Tampa, which all received scores of 100.
Gainesville scored higher than cities such as Daytona Beach and Jacksonville, who scored 39 and 73, respectively.
Gainesville’s score decline since 2024 was seen in several categories. The city’s non-discrimination score dropped from 30 points in 2024 to 27 in 2025. Municipal Services saw the largest decrease, falling from 12 points to seven. In Law Enforcement, Gainesville dropped from a full 22 points in 2024 to 17 in 2025. The scores for Municipality as Employer and Leadership on LGBTQ+ Equality remained unchanged.
Recent laws passed in Florida affected scoring in non-discrimination protections, LGBTQ-inclusive municipal services, and the category that measures how cities respond to state-level anti-LGBTQ+ policies. These restrictions reduce how many points cities in Florida can earn, even if local policies remain unchanged.
Advocacy and special interest groups deploy “report cards” that grade elected officials on how closely their actions align with the organizations’ priorities, using the public scoring to reward allies and pressure wavering lawmakers. By publicizing these rankings, the groups aim to shape legislative behavior and signal to voters which policymakers are helping or hindering their agenda.
Carolina Cordero, a 66-year-old trans woman who lives in Gainesville, says a score of 84 is incredible.
Cordero is involved in several advocacy organizations in the area. She is a board member of the Gainesville PFLAG chapter and a board member of TranQuility, a transgender community group. She is a non-voting member of Equality Florida and works with the National Women’s Liberation feminist group.
She has lived in Gainesville for 26 years, and over that time, she said she’s seen the grassroots movement and progressiveness that reflects the community’s environment. Cordero was already familiar with the Municipal Equality Index, and she pays attention to its yearly release.
“I don’t care if it’s at 84%,” she said. “In my mind and in my heart, it is a 100%”
There are many ways Gainesville supports the LGBTQ+ community, she said. First, is the city leadership being present at pride events and supporting LGBTQ+ history. She said actions like having Mayor Harvey Ward read proclamations, and the city commission voting to dual name Northeast/Southeast First Street after Terry Fleming, a local LGBTQ+ activist, have made a difference.
Cordero said she is also moved by the individual citizens living in Gainesville, and how their effort to uplift the LGBTQ+ community has created a common support, a safety net, for all members. This works in tandem, she said, with the network of LGBTQ+ members living in Gainesville who help each other feel safe and welcomed in the city.
Most of all, she said the resources in Gainesville like activist groups and the Pride Center offer opportunities to inform people who are ignorant about the LGBTQ+ community and connect with each other.
“The rest of the community gets to see that we’re not unsafe, that we’re not predators, that we’re not dangerous people,” Cordero said. “We’re just another person who pays taxes, who buys groceries, who votes.”
She said until the next Municipal Equality Index is released in a year from now, she wants to increase education about LGBTQ+ people and topics, and decrease the ignorance surrounding members of the LGBTQ+ community. Cordero said she wants to emphasise participation in LGBTQ+ events in the city to bring more attention to resources and organizations that are here to support the LGBTQ+ community.
Elizabeth Husband, 82, is a board member of one of those organizations, working as the secretary for the Gainesville PFLAG chapter.
“There has always been good representation from this city,” she said.
Husband has a trans son and a nonbinary grandchild and has been active in LGBTQ+ allyship and support for decades. She said the city can often have more inclusive policies than the state, and events like the repainting of the rainbow crosswalks downtown was a heartbreak that was out of the city’s control.
The national pressure on smaller municipalities have brought up a lot of negative feelings toward the LGBTQ+ community, everywhere, she said, but local officials are a positive and progressive outlier.
Casey Willits, a Gainesville city commissioner, said he’s excited the city received such a high score, but there is still room to improve for Gainesville to close the gap with larger Florida cities who received a 100.
One of the areas where the city lost points, he said, was in not having an LGBTQ+ task force in the police department. Willits said he was already familiar with the Municipal Equality Index and keeps up with it year by year. While he said it’s not an official metric the city uses, it does allow for some deeper insight.
“It allows our residents and our voters to see the potential of what we could have,” he said.
Willits said that the city has a personal legislation aimed to make the LGBTQ+ community feel dignified and welcome, and that this is a reputation Gainesville has in the state of Florida. However, he said he thinks recent state and federal actions have created a disconnect between the city and the LGBTQ+ community.
“I think the local LGBTQ community has felt like the city has their back, but not necessarily the state or the nation,” he said. “And in having their back, we need to do more.”
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