In the early minutes of the short documentary Reclaim the Flag, actor and writer Lena Waithe rests her head in her hand and takes a few moments to consider the small American flag that she has been handed and that now rests in her lap.

“If you’re a person that feels like you belong, that you’ve been embraced, then you’ll wave it with pride,” she said. “If you feel like your people have been killed, wronged, been able to be seen as less than human under the flag, you’re going to be triggered by it. But yet still be born under it.

“And that is really the plight, the existence, of being someone who’s seen as a ‘less than’ in a country that you were born into.”

Waithe lays this out in a tone that is matter-of-fact. She doesn’t say it with dismay or frustration. There’s a hint of sadness, but only a hint. This is the state of her relationship with the American flag. For a lot of people, that relationship requires holding many conflicting thoughts and emotions at once. But it is those very complications, the awful truths as well as the exhilarating possibilities, that may well make their stubborn attachment to the flag exceptionally profound.

Theirs is not a wide-eyed patriotism of marching bands and cheers; it’s warts-and-all, unrequited love.

Waithe is joined by a host of other prominent voices who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community who dissect their relationship to the flag, their estrangement from it, and how to once again embrace it — or perhaps, embrace it for the first time.

Actor Jim Parsons, choreographer Bill T. Jones, writer Andrew Solomon, former Biden White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Ford Foundation president Darren Walker are some of the voices who fill the 30-minute film — which began streaming on Thursday on YouTube — with sometimes emotional, sometimes intellectual, often poetic thoughts about the flag and the ways in which they believe it has been co-opted by Americans who use patriotism as a tool for disenfranchisement.

They have watched as some on the Right, and the far Right, have hoisted the flag high, loudly pledged their allegiance to it and waved it with riotous vigour — alongside a flag celebrating President Donald Trump. They have seen it used as a rallying cry for an insurrection, as a pictogram for mass deportations, as a muzzle on self-expression.

“We have a summer house in Maine,” said first-time director Alexis Bittar, who is married and has three children. “And when we’d drive from New York to Maine, I would just be inundated with American flags, usually with a Trump flag next to it or like the classic pick-up truck where you’d see the American flag, and I was thinking about how did this actually happen? How did the far Right basically co-opt the flag, but then also how did the Left let it happen?”

Dissecting the meaning of the flag is not an unfamiliar subject. Its symbolic power has made it an object to revere as well as one to desecrate as a form of protest. A person’s relationship with the flag is rarely static. It evolves in bold strokes and in minute increments, sometimes with intention and sometimes unconsciously. The connection to it can grow close and intimate in times of national peril; people huddle around it during the Olympics. The bond can fray when it feels as though the country’s governance has let one down or its people have left one confounded by their righteous cruelty.

The meaning of the flag is also wobbly. It is rooted in history, and that history is shaped by the will of the victors, not the victims. Still, it is the American flag. For a citizen to reject it means, in some ways, rejecting oneself. And so, what does it mean when so many liberals, progressives and even centrists have lost the flag — have let go of a piece of themselves?

This question gnawed at Bittar, who is best known as an accessory designer. He worked with producer Bruce Cohen to interview nearly 50 men and women about that sense of loss. Cohen, a husband and father, has a house in Upstate New York in a county fairly divided between Democrats and Republicans. During the last presidential election, when it seemed only Republicans — or Trump supporters — were displaying the flag, and doing so alongside Trump paraphernalia, he and his husband pinned a 20-foot-wide flag to their barn.

“This is our country, too. And we believe in the ideals of America, even though it hasn’t always lived up to that. And we’re not ready to throw in the towel or to give up the flag as a symbol,” he said. “But it became increasingly harder after the election because we realised that so many people driving by are making assumptions” about their politics.

“The dream of this film is that we get people to start thinking about the flag,” Cohen added. “And to start wanting to display the flag.”

Ownership of the American flag as a symbol of a liberal and open-armed democracy means flying it at Pride marches, slapping it on car bumpers alongside the rainbow sticker — waving it at Black Lives Matter rallies and during protests against immigration raids. It means hanging it from one’s home not in the upside-down posture of distress but in the upright stance of ownership.

“There’s nobody coming to save you,” says Bill T. Jones in the film. “You’ve got to be fierce enough.”

The film asks that people reclaim something that is rightfully theirs but that they might not want, an object that might make them feel uncomfortable, an idea that makes them feel naive for having loved it all along. When film-makers asked writer Mickey Boardman how he felt about America today, he said, “Sad.”

Then he removed his glasses and wiped away tears. He continued: “On one level, I think we’re supposed to say we hate America. But I love America.” The flag is a beautiful, overwritten, messy, contradictory love letter. And for the film-makers, it’s worth hanging on to.

• Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press