Painting Over Crosswalks Will Not Make Florida Less Gay

It’snosecret that the current administration has been doing everything it can to isolate and instill fear in trans and queer people all across the country. And in Florida, it’s doing so in a seemingly harmless yet incredibly insidious way. 

For the past few months, DeSantis’ administration has spent thousands worth of taxpayer dollars to rip away rainbow crosswalks— yes, those super gay, colorful, innocuous street art that appear in a handful of gayborhoods across the country. If nothing else, the act feels akin to banning sunshine and bunnies. 

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Joykilling aside, the latest rainbow crosswalk to be destroyed was in Miami Beach, and it was paved over with asphalt on Monday, after the Florida Department of Transportation issued an order “to remove pavement art used for social, political, or ideological messages or lose state funding.” 

Established in 2018, the crosswalk commemorated the thousands of queer people in Miami who faced various forms of housing and workforce discrimination or who have suffered through stigma from HIV/AIDS. Like many blatantly anti-LGBTQ actions from Trump and his symphony of bigots, the destruction of rainbow sidewalks has been thinly veiled through the guise of “unifying the country.” Please, make it make sense.

This latest erasure makes even less sense when you consider that this specific crosswalk in Miami was one of the safest in the area, with half as many accidents occurring there than its nearest intersection to the south, per ABC. That kind of makes sense, if you think about it: It’s way easier to see a flaming gay crosswalk from the distance or even from the corner of your eye than it is to see one painted in the traditional black and white. 

Although scrubbing a rainbow sidewalk might seem nonconsequential and tiny compared to other actions taken against the trans and queer community recently, it should by no means be taken lightly. By making our communities less visible, the administration’s hope, I’m pretty certain, is to make queer people feel more isolated and alone.

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Growing up in Texas, seeing rainbow crosswalks in certain neighborhoods in Dallas (Oaklawn) or Houston (Montrose), signaled to me that there were other queer people, even if I couldn’t see them. These gayborhoods’ visual cues signal, especially in more hostile red states, that I was in a safety zone. When many queer spaces have been driven underground or confined to nightlife, rainbow crosswalks have remained one of very few symbols of queerness that are visible in the daylight. 

Another reason we know these moves are meant to send a message to the queer community? One of the first crosswalks to be painted over in Florida over the summer was the rainbow crosswalk located in front of Pulse, the gay Orlando nightclub where one of the largest mass shootings in American history took place. When protestors repainted the crosswalk in rainbow colors, the Florida Transportation Department painted back over in black. By choosing to focus on erasing such a symbolically important place for the queer community, DeSantis was sending his message, loud and clear.

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need rainbow crosswalks. Every neighborhood in every city would simply be safe for queer and trans people to exist in. That’s not the world we live in, but thankfully, Miami’s queer community is vast and resilient. There are several queer and trans organizations to build community and organize, including SAVE LGBTQ, TransSOCIAL and Latinos Salud. 

In times like these, it’s important to stay informed and involved whenever possible. It might feel like a time to hide, but queer people will do exactly the opposite. We’ll only be louder, gayer and constantly ready to paint a rainbow wherever needed.

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