LGBTQ activists and supporters reacted with anger on Thursday, Aug. 21, when they discovered that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) had ordered state transportation department officials to remove a rainbow-colored crosswalk in Orlando on a street next to the Pulse gay nightclub, where 49 mostly LGBTQ people were shot to death by a lone gunman in 2016.
According to reports by Newsweek and the Washington Post, local residents, after discovering the crosswalk had been paved over the previous night, used chalk to reinstall the rainbow crosswalk later that day.
Although rain washed away some of the rainbow chalk coloring, people continued to reinstate the chalk coloring, the Post reported in an Aug. 22 news story.
With the full support of Orlando city officials and the state’s transportation department, the city’s transportation department installed the rainbow crosswalk in 2017 as a memorial to the people whose lives were lost in the Pulse nightclub shooting.
Newsweek reports that Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said in a post on X that he was “devastated,” by the crosswalk removal. “This callous action of hastily removing part of a memorial to what was at the time our nation’s largest mass shooting, without any supporting safety or discussion, is a cruel political act,” Newsweek quoted him as saying.
The removal of the Orlando rainbow crosswalk follows a July 1, 2025 announcement by U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy that the department, with the support of President Donald Trump, adopted a “nationwide roadway safety initiative” that political observers said could be used to require cities and states to remove rainbow street crosswalks.
The announcement said Duffy sent letters to the governors of all 50 states and to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser informing them of the initiative, and saying, among other things, that street intersections and crosswalks need to be kept free from “distractions.”
“This includes political messages of any nature, artwork or anything else that distracts from the core mission of driver and pedestrian safety,” the announcement said. Although the announcement did not specifically mention rainbow crosswalks, the Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper reported that Duffy stated in a social media post that, “Taxpayers expect their dollars to fund safe streets, not rainbow crosswalks.”
D.C.’s Department of Transportation several years ago installed rainbow crosswalks on a section of 17th Street, N.W. near Dupont Circle. And the transportation departments in Arlington and Alexandria, Va. installed similar rainbow crosswalks in the Crystal City section of Arlington and the Old Town section of Alexandria.
D.C., Arlington, and Alexandria officials have so far not taken any action to remove those crosswalks in response to the Duffy directive. The Sun Sentinel has reported that the South Florida cities of West Palm Beach and Boynton Beach announced plans to remove rainbow crosswalks from their streets in response to directives from DeSantis and the U.S. transportation department.
Washington Blade courtesy of the National LGBTQ Media Association.
