Zander Moricz is a rising sophomore at Harvard College. Prior to coming to Harvard, he was the first openly gay class president at his high school in Sarasota County, Fla. He was also the youngest plaintiff in a lawsuit opposing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which was signed into law in March of 2022. In light of the HPR’s “Language of the Unheard” magazine, Moricz sat down with staff writer Mukta Dharmapurikar to discuss his advocacy work and the path forward for youth activism on LGBTQ rights and rights more broadly.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review (HPR): How did you first get involved in political activism?
Zander Moricz: I first got involved in political activism when I switched counties, houses and schools due to the opportunities that existed at Pine View, the number one school in Florida. It is still a public school, but it is a test-in gifted school, so it has higher quality resources and more funding relative to my previous school.
Pine View is a second to 12th grade school, so the students there have no recognition of the quality or the level of education that they receive. When I arrived at Pine View, it was a shock to me: We went from splitting book sets among classrooms to every classroom having an active digital board. I started to ask questions and realized that this was literally due to the price of the houses around the school. That blew my mind, because I had been told that because my friends at my old school had less money than the friends I had now, they did not deserve the same quality of education. That’s heartbreaking.
So I started the Social Equity and Education Alliance to bring students together and create social equity through education. We thought that that work would look like classroom instruction, tutoring, providing resources and setting up summer school programs. But sadly, the job of a teacher is to help and save the student, not to help and save the system. That was a very destructive realization for me personally, because I thought that my life would be spent in the classroom. I thought that I would be a teacher. Then, I realized that the mission I was on and the aims I was trying to achieve could not be done that way. So we started looking at, “Okay, how can we actually create change for the system?” At school boards. It’s policies. These are the people in charge of the problems. Let’s go to them.
HPR: What were the first steps you took to take action on this observation you made?
ZM: Well, one of the problems with being a youth activist who wants to work within their local community is that there is literally no support to do that. In reality, all physical youth organizations are really adults running organizations for youth, and they don’t want young people to have stakeholdership or leadership roles. So we felt unheard. We felt unsupported. And so it was really us deciding, “Okay, we’re going to have to do this ourselves.”
I think the only space where young people are able to launch their activism efforts right now is social media. And so you have so many young people turning to the place that has no barriers to access. But the price you pay for no barriers of access is that a lot of the information is false or does not inform into action. So after focusing on social media for a while, when we sat down and we said, “Okay, what have we done?” It was very, very hard for us to genuinely feel as though we had done anything. So from there we said, “From now on, if we’re putting stuff online, it’s to bring people offline.” So we started setting up speeches at our school boards, protests, walkouts, voter registration drives and using social media to ask people to come and support. That’s when we started to achieve real results.
HPR: What advice would you give to other high schoolers and college students that are looking to enter the space?
ZM: I think one thing would be to think local. Another problem with social media is that you get to see every problem that is happening everywhere at every point in time. But that also means that you, as a teenager, are being handed thousands of global crises that you can’t possibly solve. And all it does is make you feel overwhelmed, sad, and hopeless. Instead, focus on what is happening in your community where you hold agency and power and actual activation energy to do something. You don’t have to solve the problem halfway around the world. The people halfway around the world are doing that. You just have to solve the problem right in front of you.
The second thing is plug into authentically youth-led organizations. Almost every single youth nonprofit in the country is boarded by adults. We are the only nonprofit in the country that has an automatic age limit. The second you hit 27 years old, you are automatically removed from our board, and everyone on our board is youth and a student, and they are the ones that control all of the financing. So that means that we are an authentically youthful organization, and we don’t receive any direction.
HPR: Can you describe your reaction when you first heard about the “Don’t Say Gay” law? How did you feel? And how have your feelings changed since?
ZM: You’re just stunned, and it’s disbelief, and there’s no way this means what you think it means. And so you call for other people, and you call someone on your policy team, and you make sure that the language is actually saying what it’s saying, and then you take a couple deep breaths, and it’s just overwhelming, and it’s horrifying.
And immediately when I read the “Don’t Say Gay” bill for the first time, the first thought that entered my head was, “No one is going to believe that this is what it is. No one is going to believe that this is possible. No one is going to see this for what it is, and that is going to kill us.” People are going to let this fly under the radar. People are not going to believe that this is real. People are going to underreact until the last possible second, and then suicide rates are going to go through the roof, and it’s going to be terrible. When you’re sitting there in the moment, all you can think about is the 250 other anti-LGBTQ bills that passed last year, and the thought of this just being another one of those is sickening.
So immediately our first thought was, “Okay, that’s it. We just have to put this out in front of people’s eyes. People have to react to this somehow; this can’t just disappear. We have to do something.” We organized a rally where we marched with the world’s largest inclusive pride flag down a bridge, and we started talking to the press, and we did the walkouts, and we did protest, and I did things like the curly hair speech.
I think that was our biggest success with the “Don’t Say Gay” law. People heard about it. People from across the nation and across the world understood that this was a huge problem and reacted to it, and that had a ton of positive consequences, because they are now organizers across the country that are looking out for copycat legislation in their legislatures, and they’re able to start the fight earlier, and they’re able to organize around the issues earlier.
HPR: Walk me through your experience partaking in the lawsuit against the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
It was an incredibly emotional process for me. It was. I debated for a very long time whether or not I would join the lawsuit. I’m ultimately very glad that I did, and I’m ultimately very glad that I left it. I think the lawsuit was one of the biggest forms of activism I could take.
AfterI left for college, the fact that I just wasn’t in Florida became a way for the judge to dismiss the case or devalue the stories. It just became disingenuous to the fight to stay on it. And so it was emotional to leave it. I’m still going to be involved, and I’m not done organizing around the issue. But I would say it’s been dehumanizing to put my story of oppression and name on a piece of paper and then have to take it off when someone tells me it doesn’t matter anymore, and all of this happening as I made the transition to college was not ideal — it’s one reason I’m now taking a gap semester.
HPR: Like you mentioned, the lawsuit has been thrown out repeatedly by judges, many of whom argue that the plaintiffs haven’t outlined clear harms caused by the law. What would your response to this be?
ZM: My response to the Trump-appointed judges who have repeatedly thrown out the lawsuit is that throughout this process, the political actors that have supported this legislation and ensured that it is able to continue to harm young people have never tried to convince anyone that this wasn’t invidious.
So when we receive these rulings, and when we receive these explanations, you just kind of look to everyone else in the room, roll your eyes, throw up your hands and move on because harm doesn’t have a definition that exists for a judge beyond a human being’s life being uprooted, huh?
But beyond that, the question that should be asked, is, “Well, where do you draw the line for harm?” Because there have been sexual assault cases in history where it has been decided that a woman has to literally show signs of going insane for there to be proof of sexual harassment in the workplace. That is obviously no longer the case. But the question there remains, “When are you going to start drawing the line of harm?” And when is it going to be too late, and if young people are not feeling safe or having to hide their identities in an environment they’re legally required to be in. Unquestionably, beyond any legal definition, a human being with a soul should be able to recognize that the child has been harmed.
HPR: As of January 2023, Ron Desantis is outpolling Trump nationally on the right. What implications do you think that the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” in Florida might have for politics and people across the country?
Human rights can be commodified by the wrong person, and if that person is able to concentrate power and agency within people that look and think like him, then we will enter a full blown dictatorship.
I don’t think Ron DeSantis will be President. I think Ron DeSantis has attracted all of the people foolish enough to vote for him in his state, but while he is obviously rising and very popular, I think when the smoke clears from “Don’t Say Gay” and “Stop Woke” and all of these very polarizing political actions, what’s going to be left is the fact that Florida’s cost of living is despicable. We are unhappy. Teachers are poorly paid. Food access is not there. Healthcare is poor. And people are going to see that this man does not have the ability to care for the daily needs of his constituents.
HPR: How has your involvement in activism shaped the way you approach your college education, whether that’s the classes you take, the things you’ve been involved in, people you meet, taking time off, and has it influenced your vision for your future work?
ZM: Activism has always felt like a knee-jerk reaction, and it’s always felt a little bit selfish. I never felt like “Oh, I’m going to go do this selfless thing. I will become a martyr.” It was always, “My community is bad. The people I care about are suffering. I am suffering. I must do something to alleviate the suffering.” So it has never occurred to me that I will not die an activist. It has never occurred to me that doing this work will not be my life’s path forever.
And so, because of that, it changes how I approach and think about everything. I am never not thinking about my life through the lens of the fact that I’m an organizer. I befriend people who care about social justice issues. I join social justice-focused clubs and initiatives on campus. I took a class last semester on youth based educational movements. It is my life.
HPR: Outside of what you’ve already mentioned, what are your goals for your own future role in political movements? And what direction do you think LGBTQ+ activism should be headed more broadly?
ZM: In the same way we evaluate SEE’s initiatives, the key question for me is, “How high is the need for other people, and how high is our opportunity for impact?” That’s exactly how I’m gonna approach the rest of my political career. I am going to go to the places that I am needed most, and I’m going to go to the places where I can have the most impact. If I were to guess, that would be in the nonprofit sphere.
Where I think the LGBTQ+ queer movement should be headed is that it needs to be handed off to young people right now. The queer movement needs to be given to young people because young people have been able to make an entire generation exponentially more inclusive than every other one, just by relational organizing. Queer people talking to other people and posting themselves starting conversations and explaining things and going over microaggressions is relational organizing, and it is why Gen Z is so progressive and so pro-queer, and it is also why the country is so rapidly evolving to be pro-queer, and we need to stop fighting this progress. We need to stop hooking ourselves onto movements, and we need to allow ourselves to give the reins over fully to young people.
After we achieved marriage equality, the queer movement essentially smiled and said, “Okay, we did it. We are done.” And when we did that, Trump came into office, Ron DeSantis passed legislation, and then suddenly, 2020 was a record-breaking year for anti-queer legislation, and everyone turned their heads and said, “Wait! What just happened? I thought we were done. I thought we had fixed this!” We can never allow ourselves to fall asleep at the wheel again, and the only way to ensure that our movement is constantly energized, that we’re constantly on top of it, is to make sure that we are constantly handing off power to young people, and that’s not specific to the queer movement. If your movement is not growing generationally, it is done.
HPR: Is there anything else that you want to say that I didn’t ask about?
ZM: One of our core efforts for the next 2 years will be voter registration. I think a reminder needs to be that while midterms went incredibly, and it was thanks to young people in places like Florida where there is legislation and culture that suppresses voters, young people did not make it to the polls. If we are going to see change in the places that it’s needed most, we need to direct nationwide energy and resources to Florida.
Also, don’t give up on Florida. That’s one thing, I think — everyone’s ready to give up on Florida. Florida is not a lost cause.
