Enola Gay Aircraft, Which Dropped the Atomic Bomb, Targeted Because It Said “Gay”

It appears that the aircraft photos are on the chopping block simply because they use the word “gay.”

Enola Gay - Public Domain

The Trump Administration’s attempts to erase LGBT history have once again bombed.

In late February, a high-ranking official at the Pentagon sent out a memo requiring that all military branches “spend countless hours poring over years of website postings, photos, news articles and videos to remove any mentions that ‘promote diversity, equity and inclusion,’” the Associated Press reported.

Then, on March 7, the AP obtained a database of some of the content flagged for removal under the directive, including 26,000 archival images. Enter: the Enola Gay.

The Enola Gay was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress used by American forces to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II. It was named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of pilot Paul Warfield Tibbets.

As per the AP, it appears that photos of the aircraft are on the chopping block simply because they contain the word “gay.” Other targeted photographs seem to include personnel with the last name “Gay,” as well as a photo of Army Corps biologists studying fish — evidently because they identified some fish by sex, which seems to have triggered alarms due to Trump's widespread bans on “gender ideology.”

The directive is part of a broader campaign by the Trump Administration and the GOP to destroy government recognition of marginalized communities and eliminate policies that seek to redress systemic discrimination. Women, people of color, and disabled people have also been impacted by these efforts.

According to the AP, the database has not yet been finalized, but tens of thousands of more files may also be removed, such as social media posts recognizing Black History Month. The military, especially, has been a focal point in Trump’s anti-LGBT efforts. In January, he signed an executive order functionally banning trans people from the military. It stated that trans people are categorically “not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”

As Erin in the Morning previously reported, the scramble to apply the dragnet anti-DEI policies has left many agencies, and government materials, in a state of disarray.

For example, the “T” from “LGBT” was removed from Stonewall’s website via the National Parks Service, which oversees the space and the bar across the street as national monuments. This resulted in errors such as in Stonewall’s Virtual Fence exhibit on trans rights activist Sylvia Rivera; where it once read, “at a young age, Sylvia began fighting for gay and transgender rights,” it now says “Sylvia began fighting for gay and rights.” The word “transgender” was removed, and the sentence was left as is — incoherent.