Key West's long-brewing fight over rainbow street art has jumped from Duval Street to a quiet Old Town fence, and now into federal court.
A local couple, Coley Sohn and Linda Bagley-Sohn, sued the city on Thursday after officials ordered them to paint over rainbow-colored pickets they had added to their fence to protest the removal of the city's rainbow crosswalks. Backed by civil-rights lawyers, the pair argues that Key West singled them out while looking the other way at similar paint violations elsewhere. In their telling, those pickets are not just decorative, they are political speech tied to a broader statewide battle over Pride-themed street art.
The ACLU of Florida said in a press release that it filed Sohn v. City of Key West in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on behalf of the couple. According to the organization, the homeowners painted a dozen fence pickets after the city removed Duval Street’s rainbow crosswalks, and city staff later ordered the pickets repainted white or face fines. "The government cannot enforce a law against people who express particular messages or views, while ignoring violations with different content or messages," ACLU staff attorney Nicholas Warren said in the release.
The picket protest grew out of a 2025 state push to scrub rainbow street art after the governor and the Florida Department of Transportation warned municipalities that nonstandard surface markings could jeopardize transportation funding. As reported by WLRN, that law and FDOT guidance triggered removals and coverups of rainbow crosswalks across Florida, including the Duval Street installation that had been in place since 2015.
Homeowners across Old Town responded by painting rainbow pickets on their fences, a quieter kind of protest that nonetheless generated a flurry of complaints and the code citations at the center of the lawsuit. Earlier this year, the Historic Architectural Review Commission weighed an amendment to allow a limited number of colored pickets, with commissioner Bryan Green arguing the tweak would honor Key West’s history of inclusion, Keys Weekly reported. The ACLU's complaint says more than 50 households put up rainbow pickets and that many later repainted them after receiving citations.
What Is at Stake in Court
The lawsuit zeroes in on selective enforcement. The couple claims the city enforced its historic-district white-fence rule only when the color sent a pro-LGBTQ+ message. As CBS News reported, ACLU attorneys argue that treating the same conduct differently based solely on viewpoint violates the Constitution and that the painted pickets qualify as protected political expression.
State Pressure, Local Fallout
The clash in Key West sits inside a larger tug of war between local expression and state transportation pressure. Cities that resisted removing rainbow crosswalks were warned that transportation dollars could be on the line, and some communities chose to fight while others complied. That backdrop has dragged historic-preservation rules, safety arguments and free-speech claims into both courtrooms and city commission chambers.
For now, the Key West case will unfold in federal court, where judges will have to decide whether the city engaged in viewpoint discrimination or simply applied its preservation rules in a neutral way. However it comes out, the ruling is likely to ripple beyond one Old Town fence, shaping how other Florida communities handle small, symbolic gestures on private property that double as political protest.
