The Letter They Keep Erasing

This is the fourth post in the Pride 2026 Series.

In Season 5 of Brooklyn Nine-Nine , Detective Rosa Diaz comes out to her parents as bisexual. Her father accepts her immediately. Her mother needs more time. The episode is called “Game Night,” and it is, by any honest assessment, one of the better pieces of television writing about coming out in the last decade—not because it resolves cleanly, but because it doesn’t. The mother loves her daughter. The mother cannot yet hold what her daughter has told her. Both of those things are true simultaneously, and the show does not ask you to choose which one matters more.

What makes the episode worth naming here, in a post about erasure, is a smaller thing: the word. Rosa doesn’t come out as gay. She comes out as bisexual. The show uses the word, honors it, and does not let it dissolve into something more legible. That specificity turns out to matter—because the erasure is always, in the end, about the word.

The National Park Service removed transgender and queer references from the Stonewall National Monument website in February 2025. That was the first pass. By July 2025, bisexual people had been erased as well—the monument’s history rewritten to describe Stonewall as a milestone solely for “gay and lesbian civil rights.” When the bisexual removal drew public outcry, those references were quietly restored. The transgender and queer references were not.

Read that sequence carefully. It is not a story about protecting some letters while targeting others. It is a story about a process—methodical, incremental, calibrated to what the traffic will bear. T and Q first, because the current political climate has made them the most acceptable targets. Then B, testing whether anyone was paying attention. When enough people were, B came back. T and Q did not. And for those who believe L and G are safe: in his concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that “in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell” —naming the right to same-sex marriage explicitly, by case name, in a Supreme Court opinion. The erasure of the B from a federal monument website is not the ceiling. It is a data point in a sequence that has not finished.

This is what the erasure of bisexual people looks like at the federal level: not permanent deletion but provisional restoration, the kind that can be reversed again whenever the moment is right. It is a different kind of erasure than what transgender and queer people are experiencing—more deniable, more easily walked back—but it is the same logic. Your identity is not quite real enough to protect unconditionally. You exist at the pleasure of whoever is currently managing the record.

There is a sentence you have probably heard, maybe at a kitchen table, maybe in a conversation, or even a sermon at church, maybe from someone who considers themselves broadly tolerant: bisexual men are just gay men who haven’t figured it out yet. Its companion is equally familiar: trans women are just men in dresses. It is worth noting what that second sentence obscures: the panic over transgender women and girls has rendered transgender men and boys functionally invisible—a different form of the same erasure, applied to the people whose existence most complicates the argument being made. Both sentences do the same thing regardless. They deny the stated identity by assimilating it into something the speaker already understands—something simpler, more legible, less demanding of accommodation. The bisexual man becomes proto-gay, a way station rather than a destination. The trans woman becomes a man in costume. In both cases, the person’s actual experience of themselves is treated as a temporary misunderstanding on the way to something more familiar.

These sentences are not only said with malice. They are said, often, with the confidence of someone who believes they are being perceptive—cutting through confusion to the real truth underneath. That is what makes them so clinically significant. The harm is not only in the hostile version. It is in the benevolent version too: I think eventually you’ll realize you’re just gay. The identity is erased in both cases. The person is told that what they know about themselves is not quite real.

The NPS bisexual removal is the institutional expression of exactly this logic. Bisexual people were not erased from Stonewall because anyone hated them specifically. They were erased because the administration was sorting the world into legible categories—gay and lesbian on one side, everything requiring removal on the other—and bisexuality doesn’t fit either bin cleanly. So it disappeared. Not necessarily with malice. There is an old maxim—often attributed as Hanlon’s Razor—that one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence. Minority stress theory has a clinical name for what it costs to live in that ambiguity: one of the most consistent proximal stressors identified in the research is precisely this—the exhausting cognitive labor of having to read every encounter, every policy change, every administrative decision, for intent. Is this ignorance or hostility? Does the person across from me not know, or do they not care? That question, repeated across a lifetime, is itself a form of harm. The NPS didn’t need to hate bisexual people to erase them. It needed only to treat their existence as a problem to be sorted—and the effect on the people erased is the same either way.

The health consequences of this kind of erasure—double erasure, from both straight and queer communities simultaneously—are measurable and consistent across the research literature. Bisexual people report higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicidality, and substance use than both gay and lesbian people and heterosexual people . They experience higher rates of poverty and food insecurity than their lesbian peers. The cognitive dissonance of occupying a position that neither community fully claims produces the specific health burden that minority stress theory predicts —and then compounds it. Being told you are not quite queer enough for one community and not quite straight enough for the other is its own form of being left on the road.

David Archuleta finished second on American Idol in 2008 at seventeen years old, immediately becoming what he has since described as a “safe haven” for Latter-day Saint music fans—the good Mormon boy whose career was built on the implicit promise that he embodied the values of the faith. He came out to his family as gay in 2014. In June 2021, he posted on Instagram that he was “maybe a spectrum of bisexual,” writing that he wanted to share his experience for those who “wrestle between being LGBTQIA+ and a person of faith.” He had prayed, he said, and felt that God wanted him to be honest publicly. He sent the post without telling anyone in advance except one of his sisters.

What followed was not the torrent of hate he had braced for. Gay and lesbian people in his local congregation came out to him quietly, in ones and twos. “I realized there are so many of us,” he said, “but they’re invisible.” He considered, for a time, whether he could stay in the Church and be honest—whether the institution that had shaped his entire identity could hold both his faith and his sexuality simultaneously. It could not. He left in 2023.

His mother, Lupe Marie Bartholomew, left with him. In an essay she wrote for QSaltLake Magazine, she explained her decision in a single sentence: “I did not teach my children their whole lives to serve and love a God who is not accepting of them.” When Archuleta told her he had left, worried she would be devastated, she told him: “If you’re going to hell, then we’re all going to hell with you.”

That sentence is the counter-narrative to everything the erasure is trying to accomplish. It is the answer Nathan Lane’s mother could not give him. It is what the research on family acceptance consistently identifies as the turning point—not tolerance, not eventual adjustment, but the unconditional refusal to let the institution come between parent and child. Archuleta’s mother did not need a theological resolution. She needed to choose, and she chose her son.

The cognitive dissonance research is unambiguous about what it costs when that choice is not made . The people who report the worst wellbeing are not those who have fully left a religious tradition or those who have fully integrated their faith and queer identity. They are the people caught between—unable to commit to either, holding two identities that the institution has declared incompatible. What Archuleta described as his experience—the anxiety attacks, the near-suicidal ideation, the years of trying to make himself acceptable to the institution before the institution made the choice for him—is precisely the clinical picture the research predicts. The erasure doesn’t only happen at the federal level, on government websites. It happens in the interior life of a person who has been told, in ways large and small, that who they are is too much to accommodate.

PFLAG was not founded by activists. It was founded by a mother.

In April 1972, Jeanne Manford—a soft-spoken elementary school teacher from Flushing, Queens—received a call from the hospital. Her son Morty, a gay activist, had been beaten at a protest dinner while police stood by and watched. She was furious. She wrote a letter to the New York Post: “I have a homosexual son and I love him.” It was the first letter of its kind ever published in a major American newspaper. Two months later, she marched with Morty in the Christopher Street Liberation Day March—which would become New York City’s Pride parade—carrying a hand-lettered sign: “Parents of Gays: Unite in Support for Our Children.” As they marched, gay and lesbian people ran up to her from the crowd, begging her to talk to their parents. She recognized, in that moment, that there was a need. In 1973, she organized the first formal PFLAG meeting in a church in Greenwich Village. Twenty people came.

It is worth sitting with the fact that Morty Manford had been at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, three years before his mother marched with him. He was there for the riot. He helped found the Gay Activists Alliance in its aftermath. PFLAG, the organization that now has more than 550,000 members and 350 chapters nationwide, was born from the same roots as Stonewall—not from a political organization or an advocacy campaign, but from a mother who was seething with rage that someone had hurt her child and had decided she was not going to cross the road.

That origin matters now, in June 2026, because the people erasing LGBTQ+ history from federal websites are counting on families to stay quiet. They are counting on the bisexual person to be invisible, on the trans person to be isolated, on the queer Mormon teenager to believe that their church and their family and their government have all reached the same conclusion about their worth. What Jeanne Manford understood in 1972—what Archuleta’s mother understood in 2023—is that families are not required to reach that conclusion. The institution does not get to make that choice for you.

Rosa Diaz’s mother needed more time. The show does not tell us what happened next, because the show understood something true: that process is not a failure. It is the work. The work of staying in the room, of not crossing the road, of refusing to let the erasure proceed unchallenged—in federal agencies, in faith communities, in living rooms—is what the research identifies as the thing that saves lives .

The letters they keep erasing are still here. So are the people who love them.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or contact the Trevor Project directly by texting START to 678-678 or calling 1-866-488-7386.

If you are looking for ways to act, or for support for yourself or someone you love, these organizations are doing essential work: PFLAG supports families and loved ones of LGBTQ+ people with resources, community, and advocacy; the ACLU is tracking anti-LGBTQ legislation state by state; the Trevor Project provides free, confidential crisis support to LGBTQ+ young people twenty-four hours a day; GLAAD monitors and responds to anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in media and government; and the Human Rights Campaign works toward full legal equality for LGBTQ+ Americans.

This post was drafted and revised by the author. Claude (Anthropic) was used to verify details and sources of current events, clarify and revise the structural arc of the series, assist with revision and editing, and generate ZotPress and WordPress shortcode syntax for citation rendering and post formatting. All positions, interpretations, and personal statements are the author’s own.

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