Decorated agent trainee fired over Pride flag warns new ‘Lavender Scare’ is spreading ‘like wildfire’ at FBI
An FBI trainee who was terminated three weeks before graduation from the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, says his October firing over a Pride flag display sparked immediate fear across all 56 FBI field offices. He believes that it reflects a broader political purge under FBI Director Kash Patel. In an interview with The Advocate, 36-year-old David Maltinsky, who is suing the federal government over his unlawful termination, described a workforce suddenly afraid to be visibly LGBTQ+.
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Maltinsky detailed how the decision upended his life and rattled one of the country’s most powerful law enforcement institutions. “People immediately started scouring their desks of Pride flags, anything personal in nature, even,” he said. “People were having meetings for weeks following [discussing how] this threat of dismissal can now come from inside your workplace.”
Related: Gay former FBI official sues Kash Patel & Pam Bondi for Pride flag firing
He spoke with The Advocate on Wednesday, after his legal team filed a federal lawsuit in the Washington, D.C. District Court, alleging Patel and Attorney General Pamela Bondi fired him unconstitutionally and retroactively, punishing him for displaying a Progress Pride flag at his Los Angeles workstation years earlier, a flag the FBI itself once flew and later gave him to keep.
A Lavender Scare in the 21st century
“There’s definitely concern in the federal government, especially the FBI, that a Lavender Scare has been sparked,” Maltinsky said. “I’m hoping this lawsuit will put an end to that, but the reality is, when I was fired and this political signage was in fact a Pride flag, that sent a shock wave throughout the bureau.”
Related: FBI tells employees not to celebrate Pride Month in official capacity or on bureau time
Inside the FBI, news spreads fast. “We do a great job of keeping our work secrets from the public,” he said. “Internally, we can share a lot. The grapevine spreads quickly.” Within hours of his firing, LGBTQ+ employees removed desk decor, scrubbed cubicles, and checked on one another’s workspaces for anything that could be interpreted as political. “It spread like wildfire,” he said.
The original Lavender Scare emerged in the early 1950s, when federal agencies, including the FBI, systematically purged thousands of gay and lesbian employees under the pretext that their identities made them national security risks. Parallel to the Red Scare targeting those suspected of being communists but more hidden in public memory, it became one of the most comprehensive government-backed campaigns of discrimination in U.S. history, stripping workers of careers, clearances, and livelihoods.
“What makes me even more sad and disheartened,” Maltinsky said about the current situation, “is the fear that my firing stoked across the workforce. It is awful that people are afraid to go to work.”
“How did we get here?”
Maltinsky entered the FBI as an intern at 18 and was hired full-time at 19. He came out at 21, already working at the bureau. Over 16 years, he supported high-profile corruption investigations, worked cyber cases, served as a staff operations specialist, and led the Bureau Equality Committee, advising leadership on LGBTQ+ issues.
In 2019, he chaired the FBI’s bureau-wide LGBTQ+ advisory group and earned the Director’s Award for Outstanding Service in Diversity and Inclusion, he said. His work helped the FBI and the General Services Administration, which oversees federal buildings, approve Pride flags on FBI property in 2021, and his own Progress Pride flag became the first one flown in Los Angeles, he noted.
Related: Angry Democratic lawmakers slam ‘despicable’ Kash Patel for firing FBI agent over LGBTQ+ Pride flag
After the flag was raised, Maltinsky said, the FBI’s diversity supervisor and the GSA decided a larger banner was needed. The Progress Pride flag he loaned the bureau, the smaller three-by-five version, looked undersized against the massive American flag above the Wilshire Federal Building. According to his account, the bureau purchased a new, much larger five-by-eight traditional Pride flag for future displays.
After Pride Month, GSA returned the flags to the FBI, and senior leadership gave them to him. He hung the Progress flag on his cubicle wall. It stayed there from June 2021 until he left for the academy in June of this year.
“I want to know how this progressed to where we are now,” he said about the drastic U-turn in his career from administration to administration in an apolitical agency.
Related: This week, Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel started the frightening return of the Lavender Scare
He said he never hid who he was. He kept his sexual orientation listed in the FBI’s voluntary self-ID portal, even when rumors spread early in the administration that such data might be collected or weaponized when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency teams parachuted into agencies to scrape up digital information. “It would be foolish to hide who I am,” he said. “And it would give power to the fear.”
A broader purge
Civil rights attorney Chris Mattei, a partner at Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder PC who represents the terminated trainee and who joined the interview, said Maltinsky’s firing fits into a pattern.
“We represent the senior leadership of the FBI that was fired back in August,” Mattei said. “They were fired because they were perceived not to be willing to carry out politically motivated acts.”
In September, three senior FBI officials, including a former acting director and two field office chiefs, filed suit alleging that Patel oversaw a “campaign of retribution” under pressure from the White House and Justice Department. The officials claim their firings were part of a purge of those deemed insufficiently loyal to former President Donald Trump and argue that the FBI’s operations and morale have been deeply damaged.
Mattei told The Advocate that the unlawful targeting is widespread. “If [the Trump administration’s] perception of your politics or who you are as a person is out of step with the ideology surrounding MAGA, then they’re going to get rid of you. It upends what everybody who’s come up in the FBI has been taught to believe about their work.”
Malinksky added, “That is not the FBI. That is not what the men and women and nonbinary employees of the FBI go to work to do. We’re there for the mission. We’re there to serve the American people.”
Related: Anti-transgender former Missouri AG appointed to FBI leadership
Mattei said Patel likely expected Maltinsky to go away. “He was probably counting on just going quietly, but they messed with the wrong guy,” he said.
An FBI spokesperson did not respond to questions, instead telling The Advocate, “The FBI declines to comment on pending litigation.”
A workforce already in crisis
At a 2018 HR conference, Maltinsky recalled, the bureau warned that “America is getting more diverse, the FBI is getting more white — that is an operational crisis.” The events of the last month, he said, threaten to drive recruitment even lower. “It is already difficult enough to get people to work in public service, and this is not making it any better.”
He remembered marching in Pride parades in an official capacity with the FBI. Every time, he heard someone say, “You can be gay at the FBI?”
“Yes,” he said, “in 2019,” but added, “And here we are in 2025.”
Fighting for those who can’t
Now unemployed and unhoused after giving up his Los Angeles lease to relocate for training, he’s staying with friends while he prepares for the legal fight. “When the FBI kicked me out, I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” he said. “I’ve been leaning on friends. They have been incredible.”
Asked what he would say to LGBTQ+ federal employees now afraid to be visible, he said, “Stay the course. Stay strong. If they have the courage to keep a Pride flag on their desk, I applaud them. And if they feel like they’d rather just put it away for now, I want them to know that I am here fighting for them.”
He added, “I pledged my allegiance to the United States. I took that oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, and I intend to uphold that oath. I’m carrying that out today.”
This article originally appeared on Advocate: Decorated agent trainee fired over Pride flag warns new ‘Lavender Scare’ is spreading ‘like wildfire’ at FBI
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