{"id":314808,"date":"2026-06-21T13:52:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T13:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/314808\/"},"modified":"2026-06-21T13:52:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T13:52:15","slug":"how-a-florida-city-saved-its-pride-symbol-from-maga-erasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/314808\/","title":{"rendered":"How a Florida City Saved Its Pride Symbol from MAGA Erasure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>(Photo by Jonathan Cohn \/ The Bulwark)<\/p>\n

Miami Beach, Florida
THE DEMOLITION CREW ARRIVED late in the afternoon. The crowd came not long after that\u2014to watch and to protest and to mourn the dismantling of a beloved landmark.<\/p>\n

It was a Sunday night last October. The site was a crosswalk with pastel-colored bricks that officials had installed back in 2018. Its purpose had been to celebrate the LGBTQ community\u2019s contributions to the culture and prosperity of Miami Beach\u2014and to recognize the difficult, still-ongoing campaign for equality in America.<\/p>\n

But that was before Ron DeSantis became Florida\u2019s governor and launched a campaign against \u201cwoke\u201d ideology that targeted pretty much anything with a rainbow or the letters LGBTQ attached. He had made a lot of headway, and by last summer his administration was ordering the statewide removal of rainbow crosswalks, including one in Orlando outside the site of the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre<\/a>. The directive covered any street art with political or social messaging\u2014ostensibly for the sake of traffic safety, though almost nobody believed it given evidence<\/a> that brightly colored crosswalks actually reduced accidents in pedestrian areas.<\/p>\n

Miami Beach officials had tried to save their crosswalk tribute by appealing to the state Department of Transportation for a reprieve. When the last of those bids failed<\/a>, on a Friday, community leaders knew destruction was imminent. But they had not expected the backhoes and crews with jackhammers to show up within forty-eight hours, or just how hard the scene would hit.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A pedestrian walks through the intersection where the Florida Department of Transportation removed the LGBTQ+ rainbow paver crosswalk and replaced it with black pavement on October 6, 2025, in Miami Beach. (Photo by Joe Raedle\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe night that they tore out the crosswalk, it was like witnessing carnage, an act of violence,\u201d city commissioner Tanya Bhatt<\/a> told me this week, as we stood at the site. \u201cThere was the Miami breeze going off the ocean,\u201d she recalled, \u201cand people were stopping and watching and filming and crying.\u201d But while her first instinct was to give everyone a \u201cmom hug,\u201d she and fellow community leaders quickly turned their attention to next steps: \u201cWe were all talking, part of this group saying it was not okay and that we couldn\u2019t just let this happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

They didn\u2019t. And about six months later, Bhatt was with those other leaders at the opening of a new tribute to the LGBTQ community, practically in the same location as the original. It even uses the same brightly colored bricks, which city officials had made a point of retaining. But this marker is on the sidewalk, not in the street, putting it beyond the reach of Florida\u2019s Department of Transportation\u2014and the Republican governor in charge of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey can move the bricks,\u201d Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at the ceremony<\/a>, \u201cbut they cannot erase us.\u201d<\/p>\n

For a community of LGBTQ Floridians that has faced a years-long and at times highly effective political assault, restoring a singular piece of artistic expression may seem like the tiniest of victories. But sometimes symbolic victories matter. DeSantis after all wasn\u2019t simply pulling colored bricks out of the pavement. He was taking away public recognition from a group that for most of human history has had to hide its identity. And if there is one place where that kind of effort seems particularly unconscionable, it\u2019s Miami Beach.<\/p>\n

MIAMI BEACH\u2019S IDENTITY as a refuge for the LGBTQ community traces as far back as the early twentieth century, not long after industrialist Henry Flagler\u2019s railroad<\/a> first made South Florida a destination for northern tourists escaping the cold.<\/p>\n

This was an era when homosexuality was simply not discussed, let alone accepted in polite society. It was also a time when being openly gay meant inviting arrest for deviancy, and when violence against members of the LGBTQ community\u2014even lethal violence\u2014was rarely met with public outrage.<\/p>\n

Miami Beach<\/a> was different<\/a>. With its constant churn of people and cultures, including from abroad, it gained a reputation as a place where it was a bit more acceptable to stray from society\u2019s conventions\u2014a community where, as historian Julio Capo Jr.<\/a> put it, \u201cthe confines of the real world, including the boundaries around gender and sexual expression, could loosen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Half a century later, Miami Beach played a central role in the birth of the modern gay rights movement\u2014staging what is considered by some the nation\u2019s first Pride celebration<\/a>, and enacting through surrounding Dade County one of the nation\u2019s first anti-discrimination laws<\/a> for LGBTQ residents. It was at the 1972 Democratic convention, held in Miami Beach, that activists first pushed for an official party plank recognizing the importance of civil rights for the gay community.<\/p>\n

These advances didn\u2019t come easily. Dade\u2019s anti-discrimination ordinance sparked a backlash led by the anti-LGBTQ activist Anita Bryant<\/a>. Her \u201cSave Our Children\u201d campaign, which focused on the supposed menace<\/a> of gay teachers in the schools, succeeded in getting the law off the books and helped establish a model for anti-LGBTQ efforts nationwide.<\/p>\n

But by that point, Miami Beach was seeing a different sort of transformation: an economic one. A group of developers and preservationists led by a New York designer named Leonard Horowitz<\/a> had obtained historical status for the city\u2019s aging art deco buildings. They renovated the buildings and applied their now-signature pastel schemes\u2014all while turning the area into a mecca for wealthy transplants like the designer Gianni Versace<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Versace was gay, as was Horowitz, whose family had shunned him after he came out of the closet. Plenty of other newcomers were gay too, most of them drawn to a place that, like in the 1930s, would let them be who they were and love whom they loved.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole resurgence of Miami Beach was due to the artists and photographers coming here, staying, and then bringing the arts and culture community with them,\u201d Bhatt said. \u201cThe nightclubs and music, photography studios, model agencies, art installations\u2014Miami Beach is built on the shoulders of the queer community.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In 2016, a year after the Supreme Court\u2019s Obergefell<\/a> decision and Florida\u2019s first same-sex marriages<\/a>, Miami Beach officials decided it was time to recognize how much the LGBTQ community had achieved\u2014not just nationally, but locally as well. They opened a design competition and picked as their location the intersection of Ocean Drive and 12th Street, the unofficial center of local LGBTQ life, where a painted rainbow sidewalk they\u2019d approved years before kept fading from weather and street traffic.<\/p>\n

Adriana Savino<\/a>, a Venezuela-born architect whose specialty is design for public spaces, came up with the winning entry: Paving bricks in the pastel colors Horowitz had brought to Miami Beach, laid down in a pattern evocative of art deco style. They would cover and connect three street corners (the fourth side of the intersection fronts a park and the beach) so as to resemble a rainbow\u2014a symbol of particular importance to Savino, whose gay brother had died just a few years before.<\/p>\n

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THE OFFICIAL UNVEILING was in November 2018\u2014as it happens, just days after DeSantis won his first election for governor. He spent his first two years focusing on tax cuts and conservative education reforms, which was conventional Republican fare in those days. But starting around 2021, with his eye on the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he turned into one of the nation\u2019s most prominent anti-woke crusaders<\/a>, pushing for (among other things) a statute restricting mere references to sexuality in schoolrooms in what critics derided<\/a> as a \u201cDon\u2019t Say Gay\u201d law.<\/p>\n

In this and his other pursuits, DeSantis discovered the soft political underbelly of the broader campaign for LGBTQ equality. He focused on issues like transgender athletes and gender-affirming care for minors, about which even many people broadly supportive of equality had qualms. All along, DeSantis and his allies insisted they were not out to undo civil rights for the gay community\u2014that, instead, they were simply maintaining the government\u2019s neutrality, and protecting children from harm.<\/p>\n

The DeSantis administration made a similar argument when it issued its directive to eliminate crosswalk messages: that it was merely preventing the state from endorsing political or social messaging. But however defensible in theory, that position rang hollow from a governor who enthusiastically signed a bill renaming a street after Rush Limbaugh<\/a> and is now expected to do the same for a bill naming another road after Charlie Kirk<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Other items in the DeSantis agenda contained similar contradictions. He insisted he was only out to protect children, even as he crusaded to cut off transgender care for adults<\/a>. He swore he wasn\u2019t anti-gay, even though he tried to defund a program that financed life-saving care for HIV patients. (He backed down<\/a> when many of his fellow Republicans, responding to public outrage, thought that was going too far.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThey start by saying they\u2019re just deeply worried about girls\u2019 sports, and before you know it, they\u2019re introducing resolutions to oppose marriage equality in state legislatures across the country,\u201d Brandon Wolf<\/a>, a survivor of the Pulse massacre who is now senior director of communications strategy for the advocacy group Equality Florida, told me in a phone interview. \u201cThey believe that there\u2019s only one right way to be a man, only one right way to be a woman, only one right way to build a family, only one right way to love and to live your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

In all of these efforts, DeSantis was following the same national anti-woke agenda that Donald Trump\u2019s administration would adopt once he returned to the White House. \u201cOne of the things we say around here is that Florida has been living Project 2025 since 2023,\u201d Joe Saunders<\/a>, Equality Florida senior political director, told me. The crosswalk order was a perfect example of the national and state levels of this right-wing movement working in tandem: The DeSantis order came shortly after Sean Duffy, Trump\u2019s transportation secretary, warned<\/a> states to remove political and cultural street art from federally funded roadways or risk losing money from Washington.<\/p>\n

That was one reason Miami Beach leaders like Bhatt knew that any replacement for the demolished crosswalk had to be beyond the reach of both Washington and Tallahassee. And after kicking around a few possibilities, including a sculpture that would go elsewhere in the city, Savino came up with the idea of simply recreating the crosswalk on the sidewalk, right next to the Ocean and 12th intersection.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>(Photo by Jonathan Cohn \/ The Bulwark)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe thought the location was important, because of that intersection\u2014the Palace<\/a> [a famed gay nightclub] was in that corner, and that\u2019s where the original crosswalk was,\u201d Savino told me in an interview. \u201cWe thought it was more impactful if we basically just mirrored the image, creating a gateway to the park and maintaining the symbolic importance of Ocean Drive.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was an easy sell politically, with unanimous backing from the city commission\u2014something that Alex Fernandez<\/a>, the commission\u2019s only openly gay member commissioner, later hailed as a show of solidarity. \u201cWhen the State forcibly removed this crosswalk,\u201d Fernandez said in a prepared statement<\/a>, \u201cit was our straight allies on the Miami Beach City Commission who ensured our gay community would not be pushed into the shadows.\u201d<\/p>\n

At that point, the only challenge was the timing. Commissioners wanted the installation in place for its world-famous Pride<\/a> celebration, which attracts more than 100,000 visitors annually and is held in April rather than the traditional June in order to avoid the worst of the Florida heat.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Commissioner Tanya Bhatt at the new sidewalk site in Miami Beach. (Photo by Jonathan Cohn \/ The Bulwark)<\/p>\n

They got the job done and, at the ceremony, talked about the one big change designers had made. The old markers had angled corners, because it was meant to be a literal crosswalk. The new one had no such constraints, so the designers used material from some of the broken pavers to round the corners, making it look more like an authentic rainbow.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t just the aesthetics that had changed. It was the sense of purpose too. The 2018 tribute had been created at a time when the LGBTQ community felt confident\u2014maybe a little too confident\u2014about the place it had secured in American society. \u201cThe last one, I think a lot of people took it for granted,\u201d Bhatt told me. \u201cFor this one, we fought back, we made it permanent. And we are very much aware now that we are all collectively fighting for our lives again.\u201d<\/p>\n

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