by Wayne Besen • August 23, 2025 • Opinion, Politics, Truth Wins Out, Weekly Column • Comments (0) • 329

Fascism is Here, So The LGBTQ Movement Must Pivot

This Week Removes All Doubt That We Are Under Attack

This has been a clarifying week for the LGBTQ movement. We are under direct attack, and an unwanted war has viciously been declared against us. The Trump administration is rapidly consolidating power and exercising it to roll back LGBTQ rights at a rapid pace. It is working hand-in-glove with its Project 2025 allies and its lackeys at the state level. Project 2025, of course, is the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s nefarious plot to disfigure American democracy and reshape it in their theocratic image.

Our aggressive foes are mostly authoritarian religious extremists who want us expunged from the public square and unceremoniously forced back into the closet. The LGBTQ movement must immediately wake up from its long slumber to pivot forcefully and unapologetically into a weapon of outright defiance. In the spirit of Stonewall, we must rise to counter the mounting threat, or we will suffer enormous setbacks and face a bleak future.

In Orlando, under the direction of Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis painted over a rainbow crosswalk commemorating the Pulse nightclub massacre in 2016, where 49 people were killed and 53 wounded by a gunman.

“They did this in the middle of the night because they were scared of the resistance because they know what they did was wrong,” said Democratic State Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith.

Only a year ago, it would have been unthinkable that the state would tyrannically intrude upon a city to remove a local monument honoring murder victims. But now we are living in a Project 2025 world, where it’s apparently acceptable to brazenly spit in the face of the LGBTQ community and use raw governmental power to erase the memory of hate crime victims. Are we ready to spit back?

In the same way the Boston Tea Party was more than about tea, the pitched battle over symbols is much larger than rainbow crosswalks. Accepting taxed tea was seen as accepting Parliament’s authority over colonial legislatures. If we succumb to this purge of visibility without a feral fight, we will unilaterally be ceding our LGBTQ power. Cities would also be surrendering their local control to meddling, heavy-handed authoritarians who will keep returning with ever greater demands.