Zander Moricz Fights the Battle for LGBTQ+ Youth to Live Their Truth – Voices of the Year – Seventeen

Zander Moricz is the first openly gay class president in the history of his alma mater, Pine View School in Osprey, Florida. If his name sounds familiar, that’s because he made headlines after his school’s administration prohibited him from saying the word “gay” during his May 2022 graduation speech, which originally called out Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill that bans conversations surrounding sexual orientation and gender identity from school settings.

In response, Zander rewrote his speech and used the phrase “curly hair” as a metaphor to emphasize the constant injustices that the LGBTQ+ community faces. Zander’s revised speech quickly went viral and made waves on social media platforms like TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook, inspiring his peers and older generations alike to lead with love and acceptance. No matter which platform it landed on, the video earned more than 155,000 views and earned comments from both supporters and resisters, sparking conversations about equality and the power of young people in politics. “Reaching these people and changing their minds wasn’t a form of power or high-level verbiage,” Zander tells Seventeen of his viral speech. “It was simple humor and direct personal communication that made the connection.” He doesn’t see his revision as a “powerful move,” but as an explanation for what he has gone through in “a way that made humans connect.”

His activism efforts started at least three years before his high school graduation through his student-led organization, the Social Equity and Education Initiative (SEE). The initiative started in his high school as an educational equity movement, and according to Zander, it ultimately gained momentum as the students continued working across Florida to “energize voters and empower activists” amid the rise of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the United States.

Now, the 18-year-old activist is a freshman at Harvard, executive director of the SEE Initiative, and the youngest plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging Florida’s Don’t Say Gay legislation. His dedication to advocating for himself and the LGBTQ+ community is not wavering any time soon, which is why he’s one of Seventeen‘s 2022 Voices of the Year.

How did your involvement with the Social Equity and Education Initiative begin?

Zander Moricz: SEE was founded in 2019 due to a lot of the inequities and troubling experiences that have been going on in school boards across Florida, especially in my hometown of Sarasota. Our school board members helped write the Don’t Say Gay law, and we are the first school district in the country to initiate an outing policy — so teachers have to out students to their parents if they come out or change their pronouns. [Sarasota has] always had one of the most oppressive school districts in the state, and creating an educational equity movement was something that we needed. SEE grew really quickly in 2020, and ended up being kicked off of campus due to discussions of critical race theory.

That gave us the opportunity to become independent, and we did statewide lecture circuits at two high schools in Florida where we informed everyone about their county’s specific policies. We quickly grew to 1,000 and then 2,000 organizers, and we continued to steamroll. Our theme throughout the work has really been giving young people the opportunities, support, resources, and connections to do actual organizing beyond social media. There’s a misconception that Gen Z doesn’t want to or know how to do any type of organizing beyond reposting something to their story or retweeting something, and that’s just not the case. Young people are [usually] not supported to do anything beyond social media, so they stay there because it’s accessible. But when you give them the support and infrastructure to do real action in their communities, when you bring the work back to local spheres of influence and action, real change can happen.

That’s what people started noticing from SEE, and when my speech went viral, a lot of people started examining our work and looking into what we were doing and were really excited about youth mobilization being back on the streets. We received a lot of exciting investment and great resourcing, so now we have record-breaking grants and we are one of the most historically well-funded youth organizations in global history. We are opening a community center in my hometown to create a safe space so that queer and trans students have a place to learn and exist, and that is affirming and loving for them.

How did you decide that you were going to be a plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill?

ZM: So my organization, the Social Equity and Education Initiative, did tons of organizing work around the launch of Don’t Say Gay. We didn’t want this piece of legislation to become one of the hundreds of the last two years that have just been lost in this mosaic of violence against the [queer] community. There have been so many bills introduced in the last two years — each piece of legislation isn’t receiving the energy and response it deserves because we’re overwhelmed, we’re exhausted, and we didn’t want [Don’t Say Gay] to be lost to that trend. We did a ton of really public outward-facing organizing about informing, sharing, and trying to put this piece of legislation on the map.

At one of the rallies that we organized, we brought a ton of political leaders, we brought some of the people that run Planned Parenthood, mayors, and commissioners. Tom Kirdahy, who is a producer and friend of [my lawyer for the lawsuit] Roberta Kaplan, was there because he had been sent to Florida to discover young people, plaintiffs, and organizers who had stories to share. He heard my speech at the rally and decided that this type of organizing and this type of story is what would make the difference for the lawsuit, so he connected me to Roberta and the rest is history.

What accomplishment are you most proud of achieving in your activism and advocacy journey?

ZM: My proudest accomplishment is that SEE remains an authentically youth-led nonprofit. Almost every organization that is purported to be run by or for young people is directed by adults. SEE’s board is made up entirely of students and they alone control over one million dollars.

How have you grown since your activism and advocacy journey began?

ZM: I’ve allowed my activism to become more selfish as time has gone on. I think there’s a really unhealthy culture about youth organizers and how young people should approach the activist space. A lot of people get confused and believe that they’re supposed to be martyrs for their community and sacrifice their childhoods and sacrifice their energies — that’s not what this is supposed to be about at all. The reason young people need to be involved in organizing is to respond to the experiences they’re having productively and create systems of protection and support for their peers and for their communities.

When I am a student advocating for rights, it is not just a community service — it’s a self-service. I’m a person who deserves and needs my rights. If you’re organizing in a way that is unsustainable, putting you in a bad position, making your work unproductive — or you’re losing happiness, productivity, or comfort at the expense of your organizing — it is not doing what it’s supposed to, because the entire reason that we organize is to improve our quality of life.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your activism journey, and what have you learned from that?

ZM: I have always avoided social media activism and I have always avoided digital work in general. As I said, the thesis of the SEE Initiative is to bring young people back into the streets. I was unprepared to be thrown into the deep end of every social media platform at once, especially as I had avoided them for a while. I went from these [profiles] that are very personal narratives of who I am and [that show] all these personal, cute, simple stories about my life, and suddenly, they’ve been displayed to a national audience. Anyone who was in my tagged column ended up receiving tons of DMs and people would try to dox my friends on Twitter. I had to start tearing apart my social media by deleting people and carving apart my life to fit what everyone else wanted and needed it to be. That was really dehumanizing and very upsetting, and no one warned me that strangers would invade not only my life, but the lives of the people I care about.

What inspires you to keep advocating for equal rights and fighting for the LGBTQ+ community?

ZM: With everything that my organizers in Florida are experiencing, it’s less a pull from inspiration, motivation, or hope as much as it is a painful push from fear, pain, and constant awareness. There is no off-day or self-care day for the students in public schools in Florida right now. There is no moment of peace of respect. There is this constant energy within the SEE Initiative and within myself to do something about that — not because it’s an inspiring moment or a moment where I feel this golden light beneath my wings — it’s instead this moment of need. It is me seeing a need and needing to do something about it. This is wartime. We need to stop treating this like it is anything but wartime. In war, you don’t ask soldiers why they are motivated to go to battle. It is because they’re under attack. We are under attack and unless everyone starts pushing back, we will lose.

Parts of this interview have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Photo Credit: Barbara Banks. Design by Yoora Kim.

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