Los Gatos will be raising the Progress Pride flag in June after the Town Council voted 4-1 to adopt a process to fly commemorative flags.
Council instructed staff to return with a resolution to fly the flag for Pride Month in June 2026. They also planned to discuss creating a commemorative flag structure and how to decide which flags will be flown. The town’s flag policy allows the U.S., California and town flags to be flown, but it does not address commemorative or nongovernmental flags. Councilmember Mary Badame cast the only dissenting vote.
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“At a time when LGBTQ+ people, especially young people, are seeing their rights questioned and their identities debated, visible acts of affirmation carry real weight,” said Mayor Rob Moore during the meeting.
The issue of raising a Pride flag came up in June when a group of people led by Kylie Clark, advocacy director for the Los Gatos Anti-Racism Coalition, drew attention to the lack of Town Council agenda items in relation to Pride Month. Clark also spoke during the Dec. 16 meeting in support of the town raising a Pride flag next June.
Over 30 people spoke during public comment at the meeting. Although several people spoke against raising any type of Pride flag, the majority of comments were supportive of the effort.
Several speakers in favor of raising a Pride flag were representatives of LGBTQ+ community organizations, public figures and youth advocates. They said the act would make all people feel welcome, especially since Los Gatos is in the minority of local governments in Santa Clara County that do not raise a Pride flag in June. They also argued against misconceptions that progressive views of gender and sexuality were considered an “ideology” and asked the town to stand on its values of inclusion by raising the flag.
“We cannot use political rhetoric to compromise with hatred, and we cannot use people to advance political interest,” said a teenager named Alex at the meeting. “By debating (LGBTQ+ people’s) identity, we are debating and undermining their value as people.”
A queer 21-year-old woman named Erica Weinstein, who has lived in Los Gatos her whole life, lamented the homophobia she experienced growing up in the town. She urged the council to raise the Pride flag so queer youth would feel accepted.
“Growing up queer in Los Gatos was not easy,” Weinstein said. “Not only has our town experienced multiple accounts of egregious public displays of homophobia while I was a student here, casual homophobia was a common experience for me.”
Craig Gleason, a parks and sustainability commissioner and vice president of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space board of directors, said that displaying a Pride flag at Midpen’s offices has not only been met by positive feedback but has helped with the recruitment and retention of employees.
Former San Jose councilmember Ken Yeager spoke about how he introduced raising the Pride flag in the South Bay’s largest city in 2001 and was met with “no controversies, no protests, no problems.”
Those who spoke against the raising of the Pride flag disavowed LGBTQ+ identities as an ideology that confuses children. They urged the council to not fly the flag because it would create more division and alienate a significant proportion of residents by showing favoritism to a specific group of people. Some worried that allowing the Pride flag to be raised would open the town up to petitions to raise Nazi or Communist flags.
Town attorney Gabrielle Whelan clarified that as long as the flagpoles are reserved for government speech, the town would prevail in any First Amendment litigation that would challenge what flags they could raise, including the Progress Pride flag. In other cities, like Millbrae, Dublin and Sunnyvale, the flagpoles are not open to public expression.
In her dissent, Badame insisted that the town should stay neutral and that she preferred taking no action to change the flag policies. Councilmembers Matthew Hudes and Rob Rennie were open to flying a Pride flag, but worried about how to create a fair policy. They discussed having town staff come back with options for having a supermajority vote to approve a flag or requiring a councilmember’s support when petitioning for a flag. According to the staff report, other cities treat flagpoles as non-public forums and limits flag displays to those that the city itself intentionally chooses to express its own views.
“A flag is not going to change somebody behaving poorly or in a bigoted way,” said Vice Mayor Maria Ristow. “However, if someone comes to our community and sees a Pride flag, they will understand what our community and what our government stand for.”
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