After erasing a memorial to the Pulse shooting victims, will the GOP try to burn the AIDS Quilt next?

The Pulse shooting in Orlando happened on my birthday, June 12. I wrote about it a few years ago, surmising that with mass shootings occurring so frequently, eventually all of us would have a birthday that fell on the anniversary of one. Each year now, I pause and remember the lives of those lost that night at the Pulse club.

But this week, something unthinkable happened, something astonishingly repugnant; however, in this era of intense hate, it should have been expected.

In the dead of night, the rainbow crosswalk that stood in front of Pulse nightclub was painted over by Florida's Department of Transportation complying to Trump administration overreach. The very ground where 49 queer people were slaughtered in one of the worst mass shootings in American history was desecrated yet again. Each stroke of white paint covering the vibrancy of the collective lives lost.

That rainbow wasn’t just a bunch of colors on concrete. It was a living memorial. A sacred marker of grief and profound loss. It was a metaphorical representation of the rainbow that was crossed by 49 souls in the pre-dawn hours of June 12, 2018.

To wipe it away is to spit on the memory of the dead. To put blatantly bigoted white paint over the horror is Trump, and DeSantis seething, “You never existed. You don’t matter. You can be forgotten.”

This is all part of a coordinated plan by the Christian conservatives, now one and the same with the Republican Party, to condemn us, to ostracize us, and to erase us.

In the past, if you were queer, you were frowned upon in the narrow minds of the GOP. And, you were also a joke. But now? It’s grounds for complete exclusion, not just from school libraries, not just from the protections of law, but from the very memory of society itself.

The virulently homophobic Trump administration and its enablers in state legislatures are going after trans people and marriage equality. They want queer people gone.

That is not some melodramatic hysterical assertion. For the evangelical right that dominates Republican politics, their dream is our disappearance. And by that I mean, complete disappearance.

Pulse was already the embodiment of their darkest wish. Forty-nine lives, mostly young, mostly Latinx, were massacred for daring to live, love, and celebrate openly. And still, even that horror was not enough for them. As they constantly call for our persecution in hell, they now want to take it a step further.

Death isn’t enough. Even memory is too much for them to bear.

The rainbow at Pulse was more than acrylic on asphalt. It was a vow that those lives would not be forgotten. To cover it over is heathenistic. It is an act of desecration.

What if the racist Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott told El Paso city officials to tear down a towering memorial of light, the Grand Candela, that was built within months of a Walmart shooting, where 23 were killed?

What would you think? You’d be appalled, right? How dare they? But if the same situation is applied to the loss the LGBTQ+ community suffered, would there be the same outrage?

Yet queer lives? Our memorials can be paved over. Our grief is optional. Our dead are disposable. That’s the implication of what happened in Orlando.

“It’s just paint on a simple street,” you might shrug.

Removing that paint on the street near the Pulse location doesn’t just dishonor the victims. It honors the shooter. It does so because it lets all his hatred linger. It tells us his violence still wins.

Florida is leading the way in its erasure of the LGBTQ+ community, but Florida’s actions and attitudes are gaining ground around the country — take "don't say gay" laws, for instance. Our history is being stripped from schools. Our books are banned. Our families are denied dignity.

And now, even our dead are erased from the streets.

Trump, and his MAGA enablers in Congress led by Mike Johnson, his administration led by queer-bashers Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth, and his extremist allies on the Supreme Court, including Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, are no different than the shooter who gunned down the Pulse victims. Their goal is the same: to remove us and eliminate us. We don’t belong in their whitewashed world, on their whitewashed streets.

Trump and the GOP have been obsessively targeting trans people, and now they are targeting more of our community. They are already coming for the L, the G, the B, and the Q. For the past few months, especially, I feel us sliding back into a Lavender Scare.

Don't believe me? All you have to do is check The Advocate each day to read about the mounting hateful actions to push us off the streets of America.

If we don’t fight back now, what’s next? If Trump minions are willing to scrub off the rainbow on the road outside the Pulse, will he one day sign and executive order that calls for burning the AIDS Memorial Quilt, reducing the sacred fabric of our grief and resilience to ash?

That is where this path leads. Trump and his ilk are already erasing us from government jobs and websites. From the military, from schools, from churches. They even removed Harvey Milk’s name from a U.S. Navy ship. The logical next step is to remove us from society as well.

The night Harvey Milk was assassinated on November 27, 1978, there was a massive candlelight vigil and march through the streets of San Francisco. It was a watershed moment. The queer community had had enough of being pushed around, discriminated against, and having to endure the shooting death of a local leader.

It was a breaking point. When I read about the rainbow vanishing in Orlando, I thought about what happened the night of Milk’s death. When will our breaking point come in this era of Trump madness? Because if we allow the Pulse rainbow to disappear, without protest, we risk allowing ourselves to disappear too.

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