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The right has been waging an outright war on Pride flags. Why does a colorful piece of cloth make them so mad?

Alex Bollinger at LGBTQ Nation:

Last October, on a Sunday evening, workers from the Florida Department of Transportation bulldozed and sledgehammered an iconic Pride crosswalk located in the center of the predominantly gay South Beach neighborhood in Miami. The move was repeated in other Florida cities after the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) told local governments to remove rainbow crosswalks, claiming that they are “associated with social, political, or ideological messages.” Other red states – notably Texas – also cracked down on the rainbow crosswalks, and while the directives to remove them have come from state governments, they all happened after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a letter to governors in July 2025 telling them to remove “distractions” from intersections.

But this wasn’t the first time conservatives attacked the crosswalks. They have been subject to vandalism for years, with the perpetrators often citing political motives. This past month, LGBTQ Nation has taken a deeper look at LGBTQ+ people’s love of flags, and most of the reasons we’ve written about involve making our often invisible identities visible.

But what about the haters? Conservatives really don’t like Pride flags. They remove them from public buildings and ban people from flying them whenever they get in power. They vandalize private businesses that fly them and attack people who own them. If anything, their anti-flag campaign has been ramped up since the current president retook the White House. Power didn’t appease them; it encouraged them. Conservatives have put a lot of effort over the past few years into repressing what is basically a colorful piece of cloth. Why would they care? It’s not enough to say that they don’t like Pride flags because LGBTQ+ people like them; they direct a disproportionate amount of time and energy towards eliminating them.

“When people fight over a Pride flag at a public building, a Pride crosswalk, or a rainbow logo, the argument is rarely about the object itself,” Ash Orr of the Alliance for Trans Equality (A4TE) told LGBTQ Nation. “It’s about whether LGBTQI+ people—and especially trans people—should be visible and affirmed in public life. The symbol becomes a stand-in for a much larger debate about who belongs and whose identities are recognized.”

MAGA hates flags

It’s not just rainbow crosswalks that they hate; it’s all institutional uses of Pride colors. Several red states have banned city governments from flying rainbow flags. The administration banned Pride flags from some government buildings, while House Republicans are trying to pass a ban on Pride flags at U.S. embassies. And, perhaps most notably, the administration even removed Pride flags from the National Stonewall Monument this year, the only federally managed monument that recognizes a moment in LGBTQ+ history. But it’s not just government uses of the flag that bother homophobes and transphobes. In 2023, it became a trend for conservative influencers to go to Target and record themselves performing outrage in front of the chain store’s Pride displays, pointing at items like rainbow onesies and getting mad for their audiences. Stories about Pride flags at private homes, churches, and businesses getting vandalized and torn down happen so often that we can’t even cover them all. And in 2023, a 66-year-old woman – Laura Ann Carleton – was shot dead by a man who complained about her hanging a Pride flag in front of her small business.

To say the right hates Pride flags would be an understatement. “When marginalized communities gain visibility and make progress toward equality, opponents often focus on the symbols associated with that progress,” Orr said. “Pride flags have become a particularly powerful target because they are widely recognized and highly visible.”

[...]

Visibility vs. invisibility

LGBTQ+ people’s existence is also an attack on conformity, with “queer” literally meaning “odd” or “strange.” But while we are defined by a fundamental difference from societal norms, we can momentarily and strategically avoid oppression, discrimination, and violence through invisibility. Depending on how we dress and present ourselves, queer people can often look like cishet people. Hiding is a survival strategy that will always be a part – hopefully just a small part – of our lives. While it can help us get through the day, maintain a job, and avoid a hate crime, it’s also exhausting and self-effacing. It’s a dreary and miserable way of moving through the world, and it denies our very human need to be seen for who we are, to express ourselves, our identities, our love for our partners, in a way that cishet people take for granted.

This explains part of why queer people love Pride flags so much – they’re colorful symbols that express our identities in a positive way. The rainbow flag, specifically, is very loud. As Australian lesbian comic Hannah Gadsby described in her 2018 Netflix special Nanette, it’s “just six very shouty, assertive colors, stacked on top of each other, no rest for the eye.” Institutional uses of Pride flags can signal a safe space for queer and trans people, showing us that we don’t have to hide or that we have the support of society, in general, even if there are still some haters out there. [...]

This visibility, though, is antithetical to conservatives’ desire for conformity. They’re used to seeing the world as following a set of rules and norms. They assume that society, generally, supports their anti-LGBTQ+ views, which is why they often talk about pro-LGBTQ+ attitudes as if they’re being forced on society by an insidious force (corporations, Democrats, etc.). The Pride flag, then, is a symbolic threat to authoritarians’ sense of “oneness and sameness,” to use Stenner’s vocabulary. A rainbow flag flying above a city hall is a “shouty, assertive” sign that society in general is not conforming to certain sexual and gender norms. A conservative can either get with the program or find some way to blame that rainbow flag on an outside other that somehow imposed itself on the city’s leadership.

Ignoring it isn’t possible. A rainbow flag is an impurity, and a loud one that can’t be condemned for being overly sexual or inappropriate in public because it’s just a few colors arranged in a certain order. But the message it sends is very clear. It’s the ultimate “flaunting,” the final boss of “shove your ideology down my throat.” This is why the right often compares rainbow flags to hate symbols like Confederate flags; it’s a symbol that says that queer people are and will always be a natural part of human diversity, which is an attack on how conservatives see the world and makes them feel smaller and less significant. They experience it as an attack because that is how they understand diversity.

Great opinion piece from Alex Bollinger at LGBTQ Nation about the right’s real reason for waging war on LGBTQ+ Pride Flags and rainbow crosswalks: to erase public LGBTQ+ visibility.

#LGBTQ Nation #Alex Bollinger #LGBTQ+ Pride Flag #Pride Flag #Anti LGBTQ+ Extremism #LGBTQ+#Rainbow Crosswalks #LGBTQ+ Erasure

<p>St. Petersburg's new bike rack publicly displays LGBTQ+ Pride while complying orders to keep crosswalks undecorated.</p>

#Florida #Pride bike racks #rainbow crosswalks #Pride #St. Petersburg #Pride ban #LGBTQIA+#News

#the beatles #beatles #abbey road #pride #LGBT #lgbtq #lgbtqia #rainbow #rainbows #rainbow crosswalks

Bylaw forced by petition; vote coming Feb. 22

Westlock voters will be going to the polls Feb. 22 on a bylaw that would ban the town’s rainbow crosswalk, along with any other political, social or religious decorations on town crosswalks or flagpoles. Town of Westlock councillors passed first reading of the bylaw, created in response to a petition submitted under the Municipal Government Act (MGA) at the end of September, and set the vote at their meeting Nov. 27. The petition asked for a bylaw that would mean the town will be able to fly only its own flag, the provincial and national flags in public spaces and at town facilities. As well, crosswalks will only be painted with the traditional white laddered design, with no grandfathering of any existing crosswalks or flags that would contravene the bylaw.

Tagging @abpoli @politicsofcanada

#cdnpoli #canada #canadian politics #canadian news #alberta #rainbow crosswalks #pride #lgbtq+#political expression #religious expression #homophobia #transphobia

Rainbow crosswalks honoring the LGBTQ+ community are always lovely to see, but the history of this particular one is extra-special. It was installed in 2018 to honor the work of Leonard Horowitz, a gay furniture designer who worked with Barbara Baer Capitman to preserve the many Art Deco buildings that I obsess over and specifically brought the color palette that has become The Palette of the Art Deco Historic District.

Miami Beach in the 70s and 80s was not the glamorous place it is today; it was seedy and the gorgeous Art Deco architecture that is beloved today was in disrepair. Barbara Capitman and Leonard Horowitz created the Miami Design Preservation League to preserve as much of this architectural history as possible, and I’ve used their website as a resource a lot because it’s the richest on this particular subject. Leonard Horowoitz in particular was the one who pushed for repainting the mostly-white facades into candy colors to give them all new life, and the colors you see in the crosswalk are the colors that were in his color palette.

Leonard Horowitz died in 1989 due to complications from AIDS, and in the subsequent year Palace Bar was founded as the first and only LGBTQ+ bar on Ocean Drive. Per the Atlas Obscura article cited above, they would paint their curbs in rainbow colors to show that they were a safe space, and in 2018, this crosswalk became a permanent signal to that and as an honorific to the man whose eye and vision helped bring this historic area back to life.

In a time where there is so much backlash to anything related to the queer community here in the United States, talking about why this part of Miami Beach is so beloved and so beautiful feels extra-important this time around knowing that a gay man had the vision to make it pop and he worked with Mrs. Baer Capitman and a band of activists to preserve these buildings. I celebrate these buildings to honor their work.

ETA: in early October of 2025, Florida governor Ron DeSantis ordered the removal of Miami Beach's rainbow crosswalk as part of a state-wide "crackdown" on rainbow crosswalks, as apparently those pose a greater threat to the people of Florida rather than issues like climate change or the skyrocketing costs of living. I can't say I feel optimistic about this or the other rainbow crosswalks across the state that had also been removed coming back anytime soon given the state's recent voting record, but I would be more than happy to be proven wrong.

#travel #travel photography #miami beach #south beach #rainbow crosswalk #art deco #leonard horowitz #barbara capitman #rainbow crosswalks #lgbtq+ history #gay history #art deco architecture #art deco miami beach #miami #south beach miami