Before Florida became the land of mouse ears and retirement communities, it was America’s most magnificent freak flag, planted firmly in sandy soil and waving proud. In the early 1900s, while the rest of the country was busy clutching their pearls at anyone different, Florida opened its arms and said, “Y’all come on down, and bring your elephants.” It wasn’t charity—it was genius. The circus folks brought money, mystique, and the kind of magic that turned swampland into something special. Two towns in particular became the ultimate odd couple of sanctuary: Sarasota, where circus royalty built Venetian palaces, and Gibsonton, where you could keep a tiger in your backyard and nobody blinked twice.
John Ringling didn’t just winter in Sarasota—he conquered it like a sequined Caesar. In 1911, he took one look at this sleepy fishing village and decided it needed more gilt, more grandeur, and definitely more elephants. By 1927, he’d built Ca’ d’Zan, a mansion so ostentatious it made European nobility look understated. But here’s the delicious irony: while Ringling was importing Venetian facades and throwing champagne-soaked parties for society’s finest, he was still fundamentally a carnival barker who’d made his fortune displaying “human curiosities.” Sarasota’s old-money wannabes had to swallow their snobbery because Ringling’s money spent just as well as theirs—better, actually. The town became a glittering sanctuary where circus performers practiced on the beach and aerialists hung their practice rigs between palm trees, transforming the entire coast into an open-air big top.
Meanwhile, forty miles north, Gibsonton was writing its own love letter to the peculiar. If Sarasota was circus aristocracy, Gibsonton was its beating heart—raw, real, and absolutely refusing to apologize for anything. In the 1940s, carnival and sideshow performers didn’t just visit; they moved in permanently. The town actually rewrote its zoning laws to accommodate its new residents. Where else could Al “The Giant” Tomaini serve as police chief, standing at eight-foot-four in his custom uniform? Where else could Grady “Lobster Boy” Stiles Jr. drink at the same bar as Percilla “The Monkey Girl” Bejano without anyone staring? This wasn’t tolerance—it was belonging.
The magic of both communities was that they understood something the rest of America didn’t: sanctuary isn’t about charity, it’s about recognition. These circus folk weren’t seeking pity or acceptance; they were seeking a place where their gifts were seen as exactly that—gifts. In Sarasota’s manicured gardens, retired circus stars taught local kids to juggle. In Gibsonton’s trailer parks, the “World’s Strangest Couple” raised perfectly ordinary children who went to perfectly ordinary schools where having a bearded lady for a mom was just Tuesday. Both towns became liminal spaces, thresholds between the mundane and the marvelous, where the usual rules dissolved like cotton candy in rain.
The cruel irony? These performers who’d spent their lives behind glass, displayed as oddities, created the most normal American dream imaginable: communities where your kids could play in the yard, where you knew your neighbors, where you could retire in peace. They built churches and schools, established burial funds and mutual aid societies. The International Independent Showmen’s Association, founded in Gibsonton in 1968, still maintains a cemetery with a section specifically for circus performers—because even in death, carnies take care of their own. Florida didn’t save the circus; the circus saved Florida, transforming sleepy coastal towns into something extraordinary.
Today, the elephants are gone from Sarasota, and Gibsonton’s special zoning laws are mostly memory. But drive through either town and you’ll still feel it—that electric sense that normal is negotiable, that magic prefers warm weather, and that sanctuary can wear both a diamond tiara and a tattooed face. These weren’t just winter quarters; they were proof that America’s outcasts could build their own promised land, complete with orange groves, ocean views, and the radical notion that being different wasn’t just acceptable—it was the whole damn point.
In my series The Last Ringmaster, I’ve taken these two magnificent truths and woven them into one: Midway City, where Venetian fountains splash just blocks from trailer parks, where the theater owner might be a retired strongman and the society matrons could all have secret tattoos. It’s Sarasota’s grandeur dancing with Gibsonton’s grit, a place where both kinds of sanctuary exist in the same zip code. Because sometimes fiction needs to tell the truth that history kept in two separate towns—that outcasts and aristocrats, freaks and royalty, are all just different acts in the same grand circus. And in Midway City, just like in the real Florida that inspired it, everyone gets their place in the spotlight, and more importantly, everyone gets to go home when the show is over.
