How these LGBTQ+ icons are reclaiming the American flag

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4 days ago

It's 2025, and the American flag, iconic, fluttering, politicized, has become a battleground. For many LGBTQ+ Americans, it marks danger. For some, it marks defiance. And for the creators of Reclaim the Flag, a new short-form documentary, it's a canvas of conflicted meanings, ripped from the grip of reactionaries and rethreaded by the very communities some seek to erase.
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Premiering in July and now streaming online, Reclaim the Flag is a 27-minute documentary produced by designer Alexis Bittar and Oscar-winning filmmaker Bruce Cohen. Bittar also directed. The film features a cross-section of LGBTQ+ cultural figures, including Lena Waithe, George Takei, Karine Jean-Pierre, Symone, Cheyenne Jackson, Marc Jacobs, Raquel Willis, and Jim Parsons. Their reflections span grief, rage, pride, and reclamation.
A flag that doesn't feel safe
One of the voices viewers hear is Harper Steele, the Emmy-nominated screenwriter and co-star of Will & Harper, the 2024 road trip documentary featuring her and best friend Will Ferrell. In that film, Steele said, 'I love this country so much. I just don't know if it loves me back.' In Reclaim the Flag, she returns to that idea with even greater urgency.
Related: 'Will & Harper' is a revolutionary documentary about the power of empathy, acceptance, and allyship
'I am an endless, to the point of boring, [person] who can talk about what the symbol of the flag is supposed to mean, contrasting it with how it has been co-opted,' she said in an interview with The Advocate. 'It hits me pretty deeply.'
Steele recently drove across the country from Atlanta to Los Angeles, her fourth time doing so since filming Will & Harper, and said the flag is no longer an abstraction but a constant in her daily life. 'Wouldn't it be nice if you were in trouble, if you were running from something, if you were afraid and you looked at a house that had an American flag and said, great, I'm safe?' she asked. 'And that is not the case.'
Still, she finds herself drawn to the flag as an object. 'Mainly, the flags I collect are flags I find in thrift stores,' she said. 'They have to be cloth, they have to be sewn, they have to be older. I have, I don't know, 10 of these things because I love the colors so much just from an aesthetic point of view.'
Fighting for a symbol, not fleeing it
For Bittar, that tension, between love of country and fear of it, is what sparked the project in the first place. 'I was genuinely looking at where I could move with my kids,' he recalled thinking after President Donald Trump took office the second time. 'And then it hit me: I'm not letting them take my country. I'm staying and fighting for it.'
He picked up the phone and called Cohen. 'I think he thought it might have been a longer pitch,' Bittar said.
'He got about as far as 'reclaim the flag,' and I was like, I'm in,' Cohen remembered. 'I want to do everything I can to help.'
He and his husband, too, had already felt the discomfort Steele described. 'We had put up a flag on our barn because we felt that it was ours too,' Cohen said. 'But we knew that 90 to 100 percent of everyone driving by just assumed we were MAGA.'
Related: 21 words the queer community has and hasn't reclaimed
What began as a planned 15-minute short grew into something more expansive. 'We got such extraordinary leaders in all these different areas and from all the different corners of the huge task that is the LGBT community,' Cohen said. 'We got more than 15 minutes of super compelling, provocative, entertaining, disturbing, thought-provoking material.'
Symbols stripped and repurposed
Matt Bernstein, the 26-year-old creator and host of the A Bit Fruity podcast, is one of those voices. 'There is just less of a feeling of patriotism on the young American left,' he told The Advocate. 'So much of that just comes from disenfranchisement within a crumbling democracy, where people don't feel like they have a say.'
For Bernstein, the flag doesn't represent unity. It means systems of power. 'What does the American flag continue to stand for on a global stage?' he asked. 'I think it is, among other things, the rising tide of fascism. I think it's the aiding and abetting of genocide. I think it is, on a somewhat more comical level, like, stupidity within government.'
And yet, he's not done with it. 'All flags are Pride flags for something, right?' he said. 'According to the government right now, we're allowed to be proud to feel American, whatever the f**k that means right now, but we're not allowed to feel proud of being gay or trans.'
Deep patriotism and deep critique
MSNBC's The Weekend coanchor Jonathan Capehart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was nearly moved to tears during filming. 'I held that flag and it was emotional,' he told The Advocate. 'A gut punch.'
He recalled a moment during Trump's first term when he was in Amsterdam for a speech. 'I looked over, and [my guide's] lock screen was the Statue of Liberty. To see that, in the middle of what we were going through during 'Trump One,' told me that the world still viewed us as a beacon of hope.'
Even now, he holds onto that belief. 'There is enough goodwill around the world for the American people,' Capehart said. 'And maybe even more so, there is enough goodwill around the world for the symbol of America.'
Related: Reclaiming the Mosaic: Dr. Tyler TerMeer on the weight of intersectional leadership
Capehart, echoing James Baldwin, explained the deeper philosophical framework behind his vision of patriotism. 'I love this country so much, I have the right to criticize her relentlessly,' he said. 'What could be more patriotic than holding the mirror up to the nation and pointing out where the nation is falling down on keeping its promise to all of its people… as written down in its founding documents?'
Contested symbols in a contested nation
Capehart pointed to the current administration's theatrical embrace of the flag as performative and unsettling. In June, Trump installed two 88-foot flag poles with the American flags on the White House campus. 'The beauty of the White House before those sort of car dealership–size flags were put in the North and South Lawn,' he said, 'was the American flag, it's still there, flew atop the White House. And that was all you needed.'
The stakes are higher than ever. As the Trump administration floods government buildings with massive flag displays while banning LGBTQ+ flags from public institutions, the contradictions are impossible to ignore. Steele called out the hypocrisy.
'That is not built into our Constitution or the Declaration of Independence,' she said. 'It's quite the opposite.'
She drew a line between today's flag politics and old Westerns. 'If you look at the movie Stagecoach, everything about this movie speaks to what it means to be an American in the right way—what it means to be forgiving, what it means to be allowing… live and let live,' she said. 'And for some reason, the church town people in this tiny Western are now running our country.'
'I don't mean Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is just a pawn,' she added. 'It's a larger group of people, Christian nationalists, who are now canceling people left and right. They are the uber cancellers of culture right now.'
Related: How a cross-country road trip brought Will Ferrell closer to his trans bestie Harper Steele
Steele sees the crackdown on trans rights as part of a broader authoritarian movement. 'This assault on trans people is just an assault on otherness,' she said. 'Which is happening to a greater extent with Black and brown people in this country and obviously with immigrants.'
She continued: 'The queer community better [pay attention]. There was just an article in The New York Times by Andrew Sullivan suggesting that trans people need to cool it a little bit. And I don't think they're understanding that this is not a war that's going to end at getting rid of trans people.'
Back in upstate New York, Steele flew both the trans flag and the American flag from her porch. 'The flags need to be next to each other,' she said. 'If you have a queer flag out in front of your house, I think it's important to say, 'And I'm an American and I vote.' That to me is an important way to reclaim that flag.'
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This article originally appeared on Advocate: How these LGBTQ+ icons are reclaiming the American flag
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