Museum

November 2024 marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Paul Chalfin, a queer artist and visionary who helped build Villa Vizcaya (today known as Vizcaya Museum and Gardens), an Italian-style palazzo located on the shores of Miami’s Biscayne Bay. It is one of the city’s most visited landmarks and the host of many community events—from farmers’ markets to garden tours to musical performances. And yet, despite Vizcaya’s popularity, few people know that Chalfin lived openly as a gay man over one hundred years ago.

A white man of considerable privilege, Chalfin’s successful career and life story help us better understand how we think about gender and sexuality in the past and why reclaiming these histories matters now. Chalfin’s story reveals how members of a local community search for—and, at times, conjure up—a shared and usable past to help them make sense of the present.

Chalfin was born in New York City on Nov. 2, 1874. He attended several prestigious schools and training programs, including at Harvard, the Art Students League of New York, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the American Academy in Rome.

When Chalfin arrived in Miami in the 1910s, the city was attracting mostly wealthy white people who believed its tropical climate and untamed swampland could serve as a remedy for the social ills of the overcrowded and unsanitary industrialized cities of the north. James Deering, a Chicago tycoon whose father co-founded a leading manufacturer of agricultural equipment, was one of these elite snowbirds. He hired Chalfin as the chief designer and artistic director for his winter villa.

To build this new home, Chalfin and Deering traveled Europe together, scavenging for objects from the “Old World” that they could stage in the tropical home. Chalfin, an intermittent resident of Miami from 1914 to 1922, blended classical craftsmanship with contemporary sensibilities in an attempt to give the site both a sense of history and modernity. Across the country, Vizcaya became a symbol of Miami’s transformation from a sleepy frontier to a vibrant destination. It helped shape the city’s image as a cultural and architectural beacon of the Americas.

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In many ways, Chalfin helped build this image of Miami, a tropical “fairyland” for mostly white women and men where one could counter the humdrum life of the industrial north. This metaphorical playground created many opportunities for people to suspend gender and sexual norms. And, indeed, while LGBTQ identities did not exist in the same way in the 1910s and 1920s as they do today—for example, most people did not yet identify as either gay or straight—the historical record is clear: Chalfin’s same-sex relationships and desires were at least tacitly known and tolerated among many in Miami and beyond during the first few decades of the 20th century.

In Miami, Chalfin lived with his male partner and assistant Louis A. Koons, Jr. aboard a houseboat docked on the Vizcaya property. Deering’s private secretary, Althea McDowell Altemus, used not-so-coded references to describe Chalfin as “One very ladylike old dear” who lived “with his boy friend and Chows.” Altemus understood that the houseboat had been financed by Deering, who knew about the men’s relationship—and how Chalfin bred pedigreed Chow Chow dogs. Koons died of pneumonia at age 47 in 1929. By that point, Koons was living primarily in New York City, and their relationship had changed.

Chalfin was linked to another man, Anthony Cerullo, listed in Census Records as Chalfin’s “servant,” “secretary,” “partner,” and, by 1950, adopted son—possibly a strategy, common at the time among those with privilege to protect the “adoptee” much in the same way a legal marriage would do. It was also a way for queer women and men to establish a legal relationship with their partners and avoid taxes. By the 1950s, American politics and culture had also significantly changed. As people increasingly came to identify as either gay or straight after World War II, new waves of anti-gay purges emerged—making these kinds of legal and social strategies all the more necessary.

Indeed, both Vizcaya and Miami underwent dramatic changes in the 1950s and ‘60s. Deering’s heirs transferred ownership and management of the private residence to Dade County in 1952 and it became a public garden and museum. Amid dramatic demographic shifts as migrants moved from across the United States as well as Latin America and the Caribbean, Miami also experienced its own version of the “lavender scare,” a purge that blamed gay people for many social ills—from breaches to national security to communism to juvenile delinquency. Raids on gay nightspots and gathering areas increased and Florida’s legislature even created a committee that investigated and sought to remove LGBTQ people from positions of influence, especially in schools.

This may have even affected the way Chalfin was remembered in the 1960s. Amid the national anti-gay movement, Colombian-born Diego Suarez, the landscape architect behind the Vizcaya gardens, recorded an interview calling Chalfin “absolutely the worst pansy I have ever known.” He stressed how Chalfin was “unusually effeminate,” and remembered how Koons “simply hung around Chalfin.” While some of this aligns with reports from decades earlier—and Suarez had long been at odds with Chalfin, who had undermined the work of Suarez and Vizcaya’s other architects—the sentiment seems to have moved away from a tacit tolerance of Chalfin’s queerness. While it may have captured Suarez’s feelings about Chalfin, it also seems to reflect the broader political climate of the era in which the interview was conducted.

For decades after Chalfin’s death in 1959, his story and the experiences of LGBTQ people in Vizcaya largely faded away, and other unsubstantiated narratives of the historic site’s LGBTQ history emerged as some in Miami sought to uncover a local queer past. A popular story emerged, for example, that questioned whether Deering was a queer man. In the 1960s, one newspaper even referred to the long-deceased Deering as “the prissy bachelor who preferred bourbon to women.” While Deering was a lifelong “bachelor,” a term that could signal homosexuality, some evidence seems to suggest that he could have been having an affair with his friend’s wife.

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And yet, a search for Vizcaya’s queer past—one that continued to center on the mystery behind Deering—only grew stronger by the 1980s and 1990s, as it became a place for community healing for the LGBTQ community ravaged by the spread of HIV/AIDS. With the third-highest number of people with HIV/AIDS in the nation and in response to government apathy and neglect, Miami community members formed the Health Crisis Network (now Care Resource) in 1983. The following year, they launched the White Party, a modest fundraiser for those affected by HIV/AIDS.

The White Party quickly grew into an international gathering, attracting thousands each year. Attendees dressed all in white, sometimes scantily, for a series of parties and celebrations—all in the name of raising funds for HIV/AIDS. The White Party became synonymous with Vizcaya, as the site hosted the event until 2010, and a testament to queer community and resistance.

In 2014, President Barack Obama’s Administration and the National Park Service announced a new theme study to identify and promote sites of significance to LGBTQ people and history. Vizcaya was among the sites featured, and it has launched—with community efforts such as the Miami AIDS Memorials Project—initiatives to preserve, document, and offer programming around these and many other lesser-known histories. This includes the lives and experiences of Black Bahamian laborers who built the structure and much of early Miami’s infrastructure, and the life of people like Chalfin and Koons, who remind us how central the bending of gender and sexual norms was to the shaping of Miami’s early culture.

Along with preserving the memory of the White Party, Vizcaya also hosts Pride events and, to celebrate Chalfin’s birthday, is currently showcasing Pastiche, a site-specific exhibition by Miami artist Lauren Shapiro. It honors Chalfin’s creative legacy by exploring the blending of history, architecture, and technology through her ceramic sculptures.

These and many other efforts at Vizcaya show the importance of community in shaping historic memory. Together, these important steps to preserve, commemorate, and share stories that are generally lesser known or told reveal the porous lines between the past and present.

Julio Capó Jr. is a history professor at Florida International University and Vizcaya Museum & Garden’s inaugural Scholar-in-Residence.

Helena Gomez is the Curator at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, where she leads research on the museum’s art collections and oversees the Contemporary Arts Program.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.