shut in the nuthouse

President Donald Trump’s massive immigration crackdown has made headlines for what many view as Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s aggressive tactics and alleged inhumane conditions at detention centers.

But what is less talked about are the hundreds of thousands of children navigating the immigration court system as they face deportation.

Trump: Would you go to Moscow?

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.

Desiree Guerrero at The Advocate:

Newly released data reveals that a record-breaking amount of sex-enhancing medications were prescribed to active duty troops in 2025. In a recent New York Post article with a headline proclaiming “U.S. soldiers having more sex than ever under President Trump,” new data revealed that 108,332 prescriptions were dispensed last year to active military personnel for erectile dysfunction. The Post obtained the official statistics from the Defense Health Agency through a Freedom of Information Act request. This marks an all-time high for erectile pill prescriptions within the military, but only slightly higher than the previous record of 108,323 prescriptions set in 2024. It’s also a significant jump (16.5 percent) from the 92,996 prescriptions given for such drugs under Biden in 2021.

The wider military community, including veterans and dependents of servicepeople, actually showed even higher numbers, with a reported 639,355 sex-enhancing prescriptions given in 2025. This is a slight spike from the 627,121 prescriptions recorded in 2024. These staggering numbers come at a time when the U.S. is upholding a policy that prevents military clinics or insurance from covering gender-affirming care, including for veterans. Arguably, erectile enhancing drugs for cisgender men could be considered gender-affirming care, leaving LGBTQ+ advocates to point out the current policy’s hypocrisy. In February, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced a new rule that bans gender-affirming medical care for trans service members, as well as prevents new enlistments of individuals with a “history of gender dysphoria,” making it the harshest anti-trans military order yet.

The Pentagon: erectile dysfunction pills A-OK.

Dan Sabbagh at The Guardian:

Donald Trump has declared that the ceasefire with Iran is over as he arrived at the Nato summit in Ankara, launching an angry broadside in which he complained about the military alliance and repeated his demand for Greenland. The US president, sitting alongside the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, called Iran’s leadership scum and “sick people”, and added that he was “very upset” with the alliance and even threatened to cut off all trade with Spain in a row over defence spending. Overnight, the US had launched strikes on more than 80 Iranian targets around the strait of Hormuz and revoked a temporary sanctions waiver for Tehran to export oil after Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels on Tuesday.

When asked whether he thought the ceasefire was still in place as he met Rutte in Turkey, Trump said: “I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them any more. They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. “They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people and they’re vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” However, he added that US negotiators wanted to keep talking. European leaders were concerned Trump was in a bad mood after a Nato dinner on Tuesday night and were bracing themselves for a difficult summit meeting on Wednesday morning as the situation in the Middle East deteriorated.