National
Nat’l Coming Out Day presents unique challenges for communities of color
‘For some people, visibility equals greater danger’
On the 34th anniversary of National Coming Out Day, LGBTQ people across the country honor the community and its fight for equality. But not everyone sees coming out as a celebration.
“Coming out is not always the best option for persons of color who already — because of our pigment on top of our identity — face discrimination, hatred and violence,” said Kimberley Bush, executive director and director of Arts and Cultural Programs at the DC Center for the LGBT Community.
The first National Coming Out Day was in 1988. Psychologist Robert Eichberg and gay rights activist Jean O’Leary, both of whom were openly queer and white, created the holiday.
In the U.S., being queer — and what that might look like — often centers whiteness. For many, the term “coming out” continues to center whiteness as the norm for LGBTQ identities.
David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition said, “usually the narrative and the images revolve around white folks that sit down with their families and have maybe an uncomfortable conversation, but at some point they celebrate them. Those folks move to gayborhoods like Hollywood, Calif., or Chelsea, N.Y., or Boystown, Chicago. And then they get to join associations around their LGBTQ+ identities that also give them access to forms of capital and privilege that most Black folks don’t get to benefit from.”
The cultural and historical myopia inherent in the term “coming out” can minimize the complicated relationship between pride, visibility, and safety for LGBTQ people within communities of color.
“It is often challenging to be heard, seen, and just simply listened to as a LGBTQ+ person, but when you add on being a person of color, that challenge becomes much more unique and saturated. We are inherently judged, not given credibility to our own life stories and further pushed into the margins and often cannot take or retain the power in the who, when, and how we disclose our identity,” Bush said.
When talking about coming out, Johns, who identifies as same gender loving (SGL), prefers the term “inviting in.”
“The process of inviting in is a term that we use to sort of shift power and highlight the problematic nature of coming out, while also acknowledging and sometimes celebrating,” Johns said.
“Inviting in” signifies that, “no one is entitled to information about the lived experiences of other people that are not voluntarily offered up.”
And “inviting in” reallocates the individual responsibility of “coming out” and challenges the heteronormative expectation that LGBTQ or SGL people should be required to “out” themselves.
The idea of “inviting in” instead of “coming out” for communities of color also intersects with very real safety concerns for many in the community, given the current political climate, the widespread escalation of anti-LGBTQ threats online and attacks on members of the community and providers of trans-affirming healthcare across the country.
“The fact that our lives are dynamic and we face moments, sometimes daily, where we’re forced to think about inviting people in and often have to consider safety, especially now in this current political environment, is often missed,” Johns said.
For people of color living at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, “coming out” can be even more dangerous because of heightened safety issues specific to communities of color.
“Black and brown humans have always had to fight for our freedoms,” Bush said. “Coming out can be a pressured, intense, repressive and oppressive journey that may not allow a person to feel the freedom to choose inviting in versus coming out. In addition, persons of color also exponentially experience various levels of trauma. Coming out can be an extra layer of repetitive trauma and abuse.”
In LGBTQ communities of color, interpersonal and religious violence and parental or familial responses are some of the traumas community members can face.
A Williams Institute study about parental acceptance of LGBTQ identities across different age groups found that parents gave invalidating responses to their child’s sexual identity across all age groups, and parents of children in younger age groups referred to coming out as “just a phase” or something the child was “too young to know about.”
Religion is often used to invalidate marginalized sexual and gender identities in communities of color.
Dr. Sydney Lewis, a lecturer in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, attributes this negative religious response to Christianity.
“Many Christian churches have a history of being homophobic and transphobic,” Lewis said. “And I think that our reliance on Black Christianity for our community, our safety and our growth and development, has been detrimental to LGBTQ folks of color, specifically Black folks.”
Religious homophobia and transphobia complicate the coming out narrative for many queer people. Elle Moxley, a Black trans woman and founder and executive director of the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, has experienced the harms of religious homophobia and transphobia firsthand.
“I didn’t necessarily, as a Black person, feel comfortable coming out or aligning with any rhetoric around that because a lot of times people are forced out,” Moxley said. “In my experience, growing up as a child in the COGIC (Church of God in Christ) religion, there wasn’t an invitation to come out. I was forced out at 12 years old.”
While queer people have always existed, there is an intentional erasure of gay, trans, and non-binary people within Christianity that stems from colonialism.
The visibility of queer sexuality in Black culture can be traced back to the Harlem Renaissance, where literature and music were full of stories about lived queer experiences. And non-binary identities have always been visible and integrated in some communities of color like in North American Indigenous cultures and Pacific Island cultures. Terms like “fa’afafine” in Samoa and “māhū” in Hawai’i are used to signify that someone identifies as non-binary (or “third gender”).
In LGBTQ communities today, the idea that “coming out” means being more free to openly be yourself in public often elides the very real danger of visibility in trans lives of color.
“There’s this idea that visibility somehow equals greater freedom, but for some people, visibility equals greater danger,” Lewis said.
The Human Rights Campaign reports that 31 trans people have been killed so far this year, while a Williams Institute study found that transgender people are four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime.
On a day like National Coming Out Day, which is thought to not only symbolize pride but also inclusion, people like Elle Moxley are asking not for inclusion, but equity.
“I always say that inclusion is something that happened after the fact. I don’t subscribe to that,” Moxley said. “But what I do subscribe to is that reparations are an essential part to how equity in society happens.”
People like David Johns are also calling attention to how complicated a celebration like National Coming Out Day can be for LGBTQ communities of color.
“For the Black trans woman with a disability in Jackson, Miss., or my parents’ state of Texas, given the position that those governors have them in, it probably is not safe for them to come out even on a day we’re raising awareness as a part of a goal,” Johns said.
(Editor’s note: This story is part of a new Blade Foundation initiative focusing on the intersection between race and LGBTQ identities. It is funded by a grant from the Leonard-Litz Foundation.)
U.S. Supreme Court
Activists rally for Andry Hernández Romero in front of Supreme Court
Gay asylum seeker ‘forcibly deported’ to El Salvador, described as political prisoner
More than 200 people gathered in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday and demanded the Trump-Vance administration return to the U.S. a gay Venezuelan asylum seeker who it “forcibly disappeared” to El Salvador.
Lindsay Toczylowski, president of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a Los Angeles-based organization that represents Andry Hernández Romero, is among those who spoke alongside U.S. Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) and Human Rights Campaign Campaigns and Communications Vice President Jonathan Lovitz. Sarah Longwell of the Bulwark, Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett, and Tim Miller are among those who also participated in the rally.
“Andry is a son, a brother. He’s an actor, a makeup artist,” said Toczylowski. “He is a gay man who fled Venezuela because it was not safe for him to live there as his authentic self.”
(Video by Michael K. Lavers)
The White House on Feb. 20 designated Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, as an “international terrorist organization.”
President Donald Trump on March 15 invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which the Associated Press notes allows the U.S. to deport “noncitizens without any legal recourse.” The Trump-Vance administration subsequently “forcibly removed” Hernández and hundreds of other Venezuelans to El Salvador.
Toczylowski said she believes Hernández remains at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, a maximum-security prison known by the Spanish acronym CECOT. Toczylowski also disputed claims that Hernández is a Tren de Aragua member.
“Andry fled persecution in Venezuela and came to the U.S. to seek protection. He has no criminal history. He is not a member of the Tren de Aragua gang. Yet because of his crown tattoos, we believe at this moment that he sits in a torture prison, a gulag, in El Salvador,” said Toczylowski. “I say we believe because we have not had any proof of life for him since the day he was put on a U.S. government-funded plane and forcibly disappeared to El Salvador.”
“Andry is not alone,” she added.
Takano noted the federal government sent his parents, grandparents, and other Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II under the Alien Enemies Act. The gay California Democrat also described Hernández as “a political prisoner, denied basic rights under a law that should have stayed in the past.”
“He is not a case number,” said Takano. “He is a person.”
Hernández had been pursuing his asylum case while at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.
A hearing had been scheduled to take place on May 30, but an immigration judge the day before dismissed his case. Immigrant Defenders Law Center has said it will appeal the decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which the Justice Department oversees.
“We will not stop fighting for Andry, and I know neither will you,” said Toczylowski.
Friday’s rally took place hours after Attorney General Pam Bondi said Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who the Trump-Vance administration wrongfully deported to El Salvador, had returned to the U.S. Abrego will face federal human trafficking charges in Tennessee.
National
A husband’s story: Michael Carroll reflects on life with Edmund White
Iconic author died this week; ‘no sunnier human in the world’
Unlike most gay men of my generation, I’ve only been to Fire Island twice. Even so, the memory of my first visit has never left me. The scenery was lovely, and the boys were sublime — but what stood out wasn’t the beach or the parties. It was a quiet afternoon spent sipping gin and tonics in a mid-century modern cottage tucked away from the sand and sun.
Despite Fire Island’s reputation for hedonism, our meeting was more accident than escapade. Michael Carroll — a Facebook friend I’d chatted with but never met — mentioned that he and his husband, Ed, would be there that weekend, too. We agreed to meet for a drink. On a whim, I checked his profile and froze. Ed was author Edmund White.
I packed a signed copy of Carroll’s “Little Reef” and a dog-eared hardback of “A Boy’s Own Story,” its spine nearly broken from rereads. I was excited to meet both men and talk about writing, even briefly.
Yesterday, I woke to the news that Ed had passed away. Ironically, my first thought was of Michael.
This week, tributes to Edmund White are everywhere — rightly celebrating his towering legacy as a novelist, essayist, and cultural icon. I’ve read all of his books, and I could never do justice to the scope of a career that defined and chronicled queer life for more than half a century. I’ll leave that to better-prepared journalists.
But in those many memorials, I’ve noticed something missing. When Michael Carroll is mentioned, it’s usually just a passing reference: “White’s partner of thirty years, twenty-five years his junior.” And yet, in the brief time I spent with this couple on Fire Island, it was clear to me that Michael was more than a footnote — he was Ed’s anchor, editor, companion, and champion. He was the one who knew his husband best.
They met in 1995 after Michael wrote Ed a fan letter to tell him he was coming to Paris. “He’d lost the great love of his life a year before,” Michael told me. “In one way, I filled a space. Understand, I worshiped this man and still do.”
When I asked whether there was a version of Ed only he knew, Michael answered without hesitation: “No sunnier human in the world, obvious to us and to people who’ve only just or never met him. No dark side. Psychology had helped erase that, I think, or buffed it smooth.”
Despite the age difference and divergent career arcs, their relationship was intellectually and emotionally symbiotic. “He made me want to be elegant and brainy; I didn’t quite reach that, so it led me to a slightly pastel minimalism,” Michael said. “He made me question my received ideas. He set me free to have sex with whoever I wanted. He vouchsafed my moods when they didn’t wobble off axis. Ultimately, I encouraged him to write more minimalistically, keep up the emotional complexity, and sleep with anyone he wanted to — partly because I wanted to do that too.”
Fully open, it was a committed relationship that defied conventional categories. Ed once described it as “probably like an 18th-century marriage in France.” Michael elaborated: “It means marriage with strong emotion — or at least a tolerance for one another — but no sex; sex with others. I think.”
That freedom, though, was always anchored in deep devotion and care — and a mutual understanding that went far beyond art, philosophy, or sex. “He believed in freedom and desire,” Michael said, “and the two’s relationship.”
When I asked what all the essays and articles hadn’t yet captured, Michael paused. “Maybe that his writing was tightly knotted, but that his true personality was vulnerable, and that he had the defense mechanisms of cheer and optimism to conceal that vulnerability. But it was in his eyes.”
The moment that captured who Ed was to him came at the end. “When he was dying, his second-to-last sentence (garbled then repeated) was, ‘Don’t forget to pay Merci,’ the cleaning lady coming the next day. We had had a rough day, and I was popping off like a coach or dad about getting angry at his weakness and pushing through it. He took it almost like a pack mule.”
Edmund White’s work shaped generations — it gave us language for desire, shame, wit, and liberation. But what lingers just as powerfully is the extraordinary life Ed lived with a man who saw him not only as a literary giant but as a real person: sunny, complex, vulnerable, generous.
In the end, Ed’s final words to his husband weren’t about his books or his legacy. They were about care, decency, and love. “You’re good,” he told Michael—a benediction, a farewell, maybe even a thank-you.
And now, as the world celebrates the prolific writer and cultural icon Edmund White, it feels just as important to remember the man and the person who knew him best. Not just the story but the characters who stayed to see it through to the end.
District of Columbia
In town for WorldPride? Take a D.C. LGBTQ walking tour
Scenes of protest, celebration, and mourning
As Washington welcomes the world for WorldPride, it’s essential to honor the city’s deep-rooted LGBTQ history—an integral part of the broader story of the nation’s capital. The following locations have served as cornerstones of queer life and activism in D.C., shaping both local and national movements for LGBTQ rights. So take a walk around “the gayest city in America” and check out these sites.
DUPONT CIRCLE AREA
Dupont Circle
Central hub of LGBTQ life since the early 20th century, hosting Pride parades, Dyke Marches, and cruising culture. A long-standing site of protests and celebrations.
Washington Hilton – 1919 Connecticut Ave NW
Hosted D.C.’s first major hotel drag event in 1968 and the iconic Miss Adams Morgan Pageant. Protested in 1978 during Anita Bryant’s appearance.
Lesbian Avengers – 1426 21st St NW
Formed in 1992, the group empowered lesbians through bold direct actions. They met in Dupont Circle and launched the city’s first Dyke March.
Lambda Rising Bookstore (former) – 1724 20th Street NW
D.C.’s first LGBTQ bookstore and the birthplace of the city’s inaugural Pride celebration in 1975.
Women In The Life (former office) – 1623 Connecticut Ave NW
Founded in 1993 by Sheila Alexander-Reid as a safe space and support network for lesbians of color.
17th Street NW Corridor – Between P & R Streets NW
Core of the LGBTQ business district, home to the annual High Heel Race in October and the June Block Party celebrating the origins of D.C. Pride.
CAPITOL HILL / SOUTHEAST
Tracks (former) – 80 M St SE
Once D.C.’s largest gay club, famous for inclusive parties, RuPaul shows, and foam nights from 1984 to 2000.
Ziegfeld’s / The Other Side – 1345 Half Street SE
Legendary drag venue since 1978, hosting famed performers like Ella Fitzgerald.
Club 55 / Waaay Off Broadway – 55 K Street SE
Converted theater central to D.C.’s early drag and Academy pageant scenes.
Congressional Cemetery – 1801 E Street SE
Resting place of LGBTQ figures like Sgt. Leonard Matlovich and Peter Doyle. Offers queer history tours.
Mr. Henry’s – 601 Pennsylvania Ave SE
LGBTQ-friendly bar since 1966 and the launching stage for Roberta Flack’s career.
The Furies Collective House – 219 11th Street SE
Home to a 1970s lesbian feminist collective that published “The Furies.” Members included Rita Mae Brown.
ARCHIVES / PENN QUARTER
Archives Metro & Center Market Site – 7th St & Pennsylvania Ave NW
Where Walt Whitman met Peter Doyle in 1865, commemorated by a sculpture linking Whitman and poet Fernando Pessoa.
COLUMBIA HEIGHTS / PETWORTH
Palm Ballroom (former) – 4211 9th Street NW
Mid-20th century venue for Black drag balls and LGBTQ events during segregation.
NATIONAL MALL AREA
National Mall / Washington Monument Grounds
Historic site of LGBTQ activism and remembrance, including the 1987 display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and a mass same-sex wedding. Hosted major civil rights marches in 1979, 1987, and 1993.
NORTHWEST DC
Dr. Franklin E. Kameny House – 5020 Cathedral Ave NW
Home of gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny and the Mattachine Society of Washington; now a national landmark.
LAFAYETTE SQUARE / WHITE HOUSE
Lafayette Park – Pennsylvania Ave & 16th St NW
Historic gay cruising area and epicenter of government surveillance during the Lavender Scare.
Data from: SSecret City by James Kirchick, The Deviant’s War by Frank Kameny, Brett Beemyn, The Rainbow History Project, NPS Archives, Washington Blade Archives.
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