Opinions
10 ways Trump is attacking LGBT rights
Ignore the tweets, focus on the assault on our Democratic norms
President Donald Trump (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
Keeping track of the endless Trump scandals is a Sisyphean task: As soon as you fully dissect one anti-Democratic transgression, the rock rolls back down the hill as our faux president torches another American norm.
Attacking the free press, embracing murderous dictators, retaliating in the pettiest of ways against critics, enforcing an overtly racist ideology, demonizing longtime allies and late night tweets ridiculing everyone from Oprah and Meryl to Trudeau and Merkel. The list goes on.
Sadly, too many of us are taking the bait and wasting time and resources playing along with social media posts of our own responding to Trump and his enablers. Mainstream cable news outlets have devoted endless hours of pearl-clutching commentary to all the tweets. Instead, we should remain focused and resist being distracted by the sideshows. They are a smokescreen intended to hide what’s really going on, which is a systematic dismantling of the U.S. government. And it’s happening across agencies, from the State Department to the Department of the Interior. As Trump tweets, his sycophants roll back environmental regulations, abandon treaties, gut healthcare. And make no mistake that Obama-era LGBT protections are in the crosshairs. The Blade chronicles these attacks on a near daily basis so it’s hard to keep up. Here’s a primer on what’s been going on while you were vacationing this summer, in no particular order.
#10 Abandoning LGBT people in need around the world. The State Department used to advocate on behalf of LGBT rights in hostile countries. Now we have Trump kowtowing to Vladimir Putin behind closed doors. Do you think he raised the issue of Chechnya’s anti-gay crackdown in that meeting? Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) recently told the Blade that there is no policy in place that addresses the needs of LGBT immigrant children the Trump administration has separated from their parents. Where the United States once strived to set the example for equality, we now inspire autocrats in other countries to crack down on their press and suppress the rights of minorities. Our example matters. The bully pulpit is real. And it’s being used to embolden dictators and to green-light attacks on free speech and assembly.
#9 Undermining LGBT adoption rights. A House committee just last week approved an amendment that would allow taxpayer-funded adoption agencies to deny placement to LGBT families over religious objections. The measure would empower the secretary of health and human services to withhold 15 percent of federal government funds from states and localities if they penalize adoption agencies for acting on their religious beliefs in child placement decisions, as the Blade reported.
#8 Pushing federal workers back into the closet. As we reported, in a letter dated June 28 to Defense Secretary James Mattis, eight House Democrats expressed concern about lack of formal recognition of Pride this year, saying the Pentagon is “backing away from supporting and celebrating” LGBT service members and Defense Department employees. That issue crops up across the government. Where federal workers were proudly out and happy to talk to us about their Pride plans during the Obama years, now they are largely afraid to talk on the record. Trump and his anti-LGBT cronies like Attorney General Jeff Sessions have cast a shadow of fear across the government. The Justice Department, meanwhile, hosted a Pride event for its LGBT attorneys and law enforcement officials — but for the first time in 11 years, the ceremony wasn’t held in the building’s Great Hall. It was closed to media and attendees were too afraid to talk about it afterwards. The Small Business Administration removed LGBT references from its website, even though the agency won a prestigious award from Harvard University for its groundbreaking outreach to LGBT entrepreneurs during the Obama years. When the SBA reached out to me to assist in putting together its Pride celebration, I declined citing the removal, which was later reversed after much protest, including from the NGLCC. And for the second year, Trump declined to issue a proclamation recognizing June as Pride month.
#7 Stacking government panels with anti-LGBT zealots. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell named Tony Perkins, president of the notoriously anti-LGBT Family Research Council, to a two-year term on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Perkins, whose organization was long ago labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, presided over a three-day “religious freedom” conference the State Department held last week in D.C. The event brought together some of the most bigoted homophobes of the far right, granting them the prestige and legitimacy of being endorsed by the U.S. government.
#6 Banning the Pride flag. A Republican lawmaker in the U.S. House has introduced legislation aimed at barring U.S. embassies from flying the Pride flag. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) introduced the measure last week, which seeks to “prohibit the flying of any flag other than the United States flag over United States diplomatic and consular posts, and for other purposes.” The State Department didn’t respond to the Blade’s inquiries on the matter. Will our openly gay ambassador to Germany, Ric Grenell, have anything to say about this effort? Although it’s not a Trump initiative, make no mistake that the anti-LGBT forces of the far right and their supporters are now unleashed thanks to Trump and the base tone he has set for the country.
#5 Undoing bias protections for trans people. The Trump administration has asserted that transgender people aren’t covered under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars sex discrimination in the workplace. In addition, Sessions has rescinded Obama-era guidance requiring schools to allow transgender kids to use the restroom consistent with their gender identity.
#4 Attacks on trans health. The Trump administration plans to roll back an Obamacare rule barring health care providers from denying treatment to transgender people, including gender reassignment surgery.
#3 Advocating for “religious liberty.” This is a common theme now, as the far right often pivots from overtly anti-LGBT statements, which don’t play well with independent voters, to their favorite code term for anti-LGBT bias, “religious liberty.” The White House in June hailed as a win for religious freedom the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to serve a wedding cake to a same-sex couple.
#2 Trans military ban. A federal appeals court recently reaffirmed an injunction barring the Trump administration from enforcing its cruel and discriminatory transgender military ban. That’s good news, but the move sets up a potential showdown at the Supreme Court. So far, the Trump administration is mum on its next steps.
#1 Anti-LGBT judicial appointments. Last November, New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote a column about the “conservative plan to weaponize the federal courts.” She cited a 37-page plan written by Northwestern University law professor Steven G. Calabresi, founder and board chair of the conservative Federalist Society, in which he declared their intention: “undoing the judicial legacy of President Barack Obama.”
To that end, we have Neil Gorsuch and now Brett Kavanaugh likely headed to the Supreme Court. But while the mainstream media are focused on Kavanaugh, there are scores of lower-level judicial appointees moving toward confirmation, many of whom have disturbing anti-LGBT records. Mark Norris, for example, was nominated by Trump for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Tennessee. Norris served for 17 years as a member of the Tennessee Senate, where he advanced anti-LGBT legislation as Senate majority leader. A lawyer who defended Prop 8 in court is nominated for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah. And so on.
These attacks, as reported by the Blade, have occurred in just the last few months. They will only increase as the midterms approach and Trump needs more red meat to feed his brainless base of bigots and rednecks. This motley crew was aptly described by Hillary Clinton as “deplorables.” They disdain education, ignore hypocrisy and racism and even basic facts, in defense of a bloated con man who will stop at nothing to line his pockets and those of his equally corrupt family and friends. Congressional Republicans in their blind allegiance to Trump have lost the moral authority to criticize any Democrat for any behavior for a generation. They have cast their lot with a wannabe demagogue and are in bed with the murderous Putin, whom they admire for his zero-tolerance of dissent and diversity.
There is one way out of this mess: Everyone offended by it must vote in November and again in 2020. Sadly, a new poll suggests that only 28 percent of millennial-aged voters plan to vote this year. You can march every weekend in protest and launch a million petitions on change.org, but if you don’t vote then the deplorable one-third of Americans who still support Trump will win again.
Kevin Naff is editor of the Blade. Reach him at [email protected].
Opinions
Let love and compassion guide our response to Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis
Former president is diminished, but he and family deserve love and prayers
When I heard Joe Biden had serious prostate cancer, I felt immediate compassion for him and his family. I am a prostate cancer survivor myself. Then I heard how Trump, and some of his MAGA Republicans, responded and was amazed at how they are able to constantly sink to new lows. Trump’s son posted on X “What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another cover-up???” Clearly, they will never give up on being vile human beings.
The equally disgusting Joe Scarborough had on a doctor who declared he positively knows Biden must have known about his cancer years ago, although he knows nothing about the case. The reality, coming from many specialists, is at this time only Biden’s doctors know when he was diagnosed, and whether he even had regular PSA tests done, and when. Based on the latest research, the American Urological Association (AUA) age guidelines are that they do not recommend routine PSA screening for men 70 or older. This is because prostate cancer is normally very slow growing, and if you were to be diagnosed after 70, you will likely die of something else. Then you had the felon in the White House talking about “stage nine” cancer. Is he really so dumb? Guess he is as he tries to prove it nearly every time he opens his mouth. Talk about diminished.
Now is Biden diminished from what he was years ago? It is clear he is. Should the people around him have tried to hide that in order to have him run again, no! But the-then president’s hiding health issues is nothing new. Wilson was severely impaired and it is said his wife Edith ran the country for his last year in office. The same was said about Nancy Reagan when they hid Reagan’s Alzheimer’s. Kennedy hid his Addison’s disease and other infirmities, and Trump hid how sick he was from COVID, when being helicoptered to the hospital. Is it wrong to hide these things from the American public, yes, but clearly not unusual. Actually, the media is often complicit in this, which many said they were in Biden’s case. Then you have a guy like Jake Tapper who is happy to be complicit, so he can now write a book about it and make loads of money. Very sad.
I think the time has come in the case of Joe Biden, for us to just offer him and his family some love and prayers, and the hope he will be able to manage his cancer and live a long life. Then turn the page and deal with the things that will matter more to the lives of the American people today.
Those are the things the felon in the White House, and his Nazi sympathizing co-president, along with the MAGA Congress, are trying to do to them. Things like taking away their healthcare, and thereby also causing the closure of some rural hospitals. Things like the mass firings of federal workers, including thousands of veterans. Things like making it harder for our veterans to access their healthcare by cutting services at the Veterans hospitals. Things like increasing costs for groceries, and other items, due to the felon’s ineffective use of tariffs. Things like seeing college costs go up, as foreign students who pay the full fare at most schools, are sent home or denied visas. Things like making it harder to file for social security by closing so many offices, and pretending to lower drug prices, but not really doing it. Things like cutting research looking for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, MS, HIV/AIDS, and a host of other diseases, which will hurt people for decades to come. Things like creating havoc in the world, and bowing down to dictators. Things like walking away from our allies and making the world a less safe place for all of us, including abandoning Ukraine, and cozying up to his friend Putin. I always believed Putin has some dirt on him. Trump said Zelenskyy would be responsible for WW III. But it’s Trump who will be, if it happens. Then we must put a focus on the idiot who is secretary of HHS, RFK Jr., and whether he will allow the flu and covid vaccines, being readied for the fall, to be available in a timely manner. Will he continue to disparage all vaccines, and by doing so, cause deaths here, and around the world. Things like abandoning the fight against climate change and thereby screwing the planet and future generations.
These are the things the American public really needs to know about, and care about. It may have been wrong to hide Biden’s being diminished, but he is no longer in office, and he no longer impacts people’s lives on a daily basis. The felon in the WH does, and that is where the focus must be.
A first generation American from Queens, N.Y., Kameny was a decorated WWII veteran. With a prodigious 148 I.Q., he earned a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University. In 1957 he was recruited by the Army Map Service, a pioneering agency in space exploration.
In 1953 in the wake of McCarthyism, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450 that prohibited homosexuals from military or civilian employment. Having nothing to do with workplace conduct, the Army learned that Kameny might be a homosexual. When confronted, he equivocated and was terminated. Unlike then thousands of other homosexuals terminated from government employment, Kameny fought back.
He took on the military and Civil Service Commission including being the first openly gay man to file an appeal about gay rights to the U.S. Supreme Court. He helped co-found and chair the Mattachine Society of Washington, the first gay rights organization in the nation’s capital.
He wrote letters to, among others, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He founded and chaired the Eastern Conference of Homophile Organization, the nation’s first regional gay organization.
In the 1960s homosexuality, even with a consenting adult in the privacy of one’s bedroom was criminal. The police entrapped and extorted gay men. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness. A bar could lose its license if there was more than one homosexual in their establishment. Homosexuals were considered dangerous, deviant and demented.
Kameny coined the phrase “Gay Is Good.” He organized picketing called Annual Reminders each July 4 from 1965 to 1969 at Independence Hall. The picketers were the first to call for gay equality. The 1965 Annual Reminder had 39 activists making it then the largest demonstration for gay rights. In the mid-1960s the country had an estimated 300 gay and lesbian activists.
He published a newsletter that became the Washington Blade, now the nation’s oldest LGBTQ weekly newspaper. Kameny and Barbara Gittings, the mother of the movement that demonstrated for the right to be heard at the 1971 American Psychiatric Association meeting. Their panel at the 1972 meeting with a masked psychiatrist using a pseudonym and voice modulator was so impactful that the APA created a panel to determine if homosexuality as a mental illness was based on science or discrimination. In 1973, that classification was removed.
He advised gays and lesbians who were the subject of discharge from federal government service. He identified test cases and referred them to the ACLU, Lambda Legal and other counsel. Slowly, but surely those cases began a process for LGBTQ equality.
His efforts led D.C. to be the first city to overturn its sodomy criminal laws. He helped found the first national LGBTQ organization, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations. His efforts laid the groundwork for HRC and National LGBTQ Task Force.
After Stonewall in June 1969, he chaired a meeting of NY, Philadelphia and D.C. activists that authorized and helped organize to help remember Stonewall the first New York Pride Parade. He believed that Stonewall could be the movement’s Boston Tea Party. He marched in that 1970 parade holding a picket emblazoned with “Gay Is Good.”
He was the first out person to run for Congress as the D.C. delegate. Money left over from his campaign was used to fund the first gay rights television commercial. In July 1975, he was the first to be advised by the Civil Service Commission that it would eliminate homosexuality as a basis for not hiring or for firing a federal civilian employee. In 1977, he attended the White House’s first meeting with gays and lesbians.
Kameny died on Oct. 11, 2011, National Coming Out Day. He lived to see marriage equality approved in several states. He attended the signing by President Obama of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which enabled gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Kameny is buried in the Congressional Cemetery. On his tombstone is inscribed “Gay Is Good.” Over 70,000 of his documents are in the Library of Congress and picket signs from the pioneering demonstrations are housed in the Smithsonian Institution.
On May 21 LGBTQ national organizations gather in front of the Supreme Court. One hundred activists will each hold a candle for his 100th birthday. Fifteen national leaders will engage in picketing similar to the 1965 picketing at the White House and Independence Hall. They will honor Frank Kameny; celebrate the 10th anniversary of marriage equality (Obergefell v Hodges, 2015); and push back on those who would attempt to render us invisible, deny our history and undermine our equality. We will remember the nation’s loss when it fired a Harvard Ph.D. in astronomy because of his status as a homosexual. History repeats itself. This month the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the federal government to terminate transgender servicemembers solely because of their sexual orientation. How far we have come. How much farther we have to travel.
Malcolm Lazin is the national chair, Kameny 100. He is the executive director, LGBT History Month and executive producer of three LGBTQ documentaries including Gay Pioneers. He was an adjunct professor of LGBT History and Rights at New College of Florida. www.kameny100.org.
Opinions
Returning to Alcatraz: Memory through a queer lens
Trump would like to ‘rebuilt and reopen’ notorious island prison
When I arrived at Alcatraz Island, what I felt wasn’t curiosity — it was discomfort. Standing before such a photogenic landscape, something felt off. As if the place was trying to erase what it truly was: a mechanism of punishment, a machine built to control and define who should be excluded. I couldn’t walk those corridors without thinking about what this place represents for so many of us: a symbol of how the state has decided, time and again, that some lives matter less.
As a queer person, what struck me wasn’t just the past Alcatraz holds — but how that past is still alive in today’s policies. As I looked into the empty cells, I thought about the many LGBTQIA+ people who have been punished simply for existing. People like Frank Lucas Bolt, the first prisoner of Alcatraz — not convicted for violence, but for “sodomy,” a label the legal system used to persecute gay men.
He was not the only one. For decades, being gay or trans was enough to end up in a federal prison or a psychiatric hospital. Not for a crime, but for defying the norm. The legal and medical systems worked hand in hand to suppress any deviation from prescribed gender and sexuality. In prisons, queer people were subjected to physical punishment, solitary confinement, and even conversion therapy. Alcatraz was not an exception — it was one of the system’s most brutal epicenters.
But the queer memory of this place isn’t found in tourist brochures. To uncover it, you have to read between the lines, search through archives that are never taught in schools, and listen to those who still carry the scars. Walking among those walls, I realized that remembering isn’t enough — we have to contest the meaning of memory itself. What isn’t told, is repeated.
That’s why, when a few weeks ago President Trump said he’d like to “rebuild and reopen Alcatraz,” I didn’t take it as just another symbolic gesture. I took it as a warning. In times of crisis, punishment becomes an easy offer: lock them up, expel them, make them disappear. And in that narrative, queer, migrant, and racialized bodies are always the first to be targeted.
The danger isn’t just in the idea of a reopened prison, but in what it represents: The longing to return to a social order that was already deeply unjust. The nostalgia for “tough-on-crime” prisons is the same one that criminalizes unhoused people, persecutes migrants, and stigmatizes queer and trans youth in public spaces. Anyone who dreams of locking up more people isn’t thinking about justice — they’re thinking about control.
In 1969, a group of Native American activists occupied Alcatraz for over a year. They did it to denounce land theft and the government’s betrayal of treaties. During their occupation, they painted a message on the island’s water tower: “Peace and Freedom. Home of the Free Indian Land.” That gesture was a radical reclamation of space, a way of saying: this island can also be a place of resistance.
Alcatraz holds many layers. It was a high-security prison, yes, but it also became the stage for one of the most powerful acts of civil disobedience in the 20th century. That tension still lingers. The question is not just what happened at Alcatraz, but what we want it to represent today. A renewed model of punishment — or a site of memory that helps us prevent more harm?
As I walked its halls, I couldn’t stop thinking about the migrant detention centers that are still full today. About trans people held in inhumane conditions. About arbitrary detentions. About those of us who, like me, crossed borders just to survive. The distance between that Alcatraz and our present is not as wide as we’d like to believe. The walls may change, but punishment still operates on the same bodies.
Standing before the empty cells, I felt what many must have felt there: the weight of abandonment, the state’s mark upon their body, the feeling that their existence was a problem. But I also felt something else: conviction. The certainty that we will no longer walk into those spaces in silence. That we will not let ourselves be labeled as “mistakes” or “deviants.” That if they try to lock us up again, they will find us organized, with memory, with dignity.
Alcatraz does not need to be rebuilt. It needs to be understood. And we — queer, racialized, migrant communities — need to transform that understanding into action: to push back against hateful rhetoric, to protect those still living under threat, and to tell our full stories. Let no one be punished again for being who they are. Let history not become a locked cell once more.
The views expressed in this article are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, colleagues, or any affiliated organization. They are shared from a personal perspective shaped by lived experience and advocacy work.
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