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BLADE EXCLUSIVE: Vice President Kamala Harris details what’s at stake in November

‘When we fight for our rights, we see progress — and we win’

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Vice President Kamala Harris (Washington Blade photo by Jono Madison/Jono Photography)

Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with the Washington Blade by phone on Monday for an exclusive interview in which she outlined the stakes of November’s election for LGBTQ communities and all Americans who are now facing “a profound, unapologetic, and intentional movement to restrict rights.”

The conversation comes at the outset of the Biden-Harris campaign’s roll-out of an aggressive organizing and paid media push for Pride month, which will feature appearances at more than 200 events in June as part of an effort to mobilize LGBTQ and “equality voters” in key battleground states.

Thirty-nine percent of survey respondents in a 2022 poll by the Human Rights Campaign said they consider LGBTQ equality a “make or break” issue, and queer Americans, who comprise a larger share of the electorate than ever before, are considered critical for the president and vice president’s reelection effort.

Harris stressed that these constituents are not monolithic. “What is important to me,” she said, “is that I am in the community where those voters may be, in addition to every other community where I’m listening to their priorities and needs and then being responsive to that.”

America’s first woman, first Black, and first South Asian vice president, Harris, 59, has broken barriers throughout her career in public service, beginning with her election as San Francisco district attorney in 2003, and then as California attorney general in 2010 and U.S. senator for California in 2016.

Harris has also been credited with playing a major role in the establishment and expansion of rights and protections for LGBTQ communities at the local, state, and federal levels over the past two decades.

Along with the election, she addressed subjects ranging from the need to protect queer spaces to her relationships with LGBTQ staff over the years and the trajectory of the queer and civil rights movements in America.

Later this week, the Blade will publish interviews with two gay men who served as longtime advisers to Harris and shared reflections on their work with her on initiatives including climate policy and criminal justice reform.

Preventing hate violence

Last June, the Biden-Harris administration established an interagency LGBTQ+ Community Safety Partnership to confront the spike in hate crimes and bias-motivated violence against the community. (The White House introduced new CSP resources on Friday.)

Nearly a year later, the FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a joint public service announcement about the risk of terrorism at Pride events and venues this month — and Harris told the Blade she is “very concerned” by the agencies’ warning.

This is familiar terrain for the vice president, who in September was tapped to lead the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and who noted that she was responsible for compiling and publishing hate crimes reports and for prosecuting “hate crimes against members of the LGBTQ community” when running the country’s second largest department of justice and serving as district attorney.

Bias-motivated crime targeting queer people “is not a new phenomenon, sadly, but it is growing,” she said, “I think in large part because of the powerful voices that are fanning the flames of hate. It is outrageous.”

“What it does is it creates fear in the community, not to mention the possibility of real and serious harm, including crimes of violence,” she said.

Harris highlighted that issues of safety are among the major priorities for LGBTQ communities and equality voters, pointing to the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando and the November 2022 Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs, crimes that she said the country must never forget.

“Gun violence,” when “being used because of hate” can “destroy the lives of so many innocent people,” she said, adding, “we know that for so many in the LGBTQ community, those clubs are the only place that a lot of people can go in certain communities to just have joy and [to] feel safe having joy, and now those places have been targeted.”

Vice President Kamala Harris (Photo credit: The White House/Lawrence Jackson)

Marriage, LGBTQ families, and the movement to restrict rights

In 2004, when 61 percent of Americans opposed the legal recognition of same-sex marriages (per Gallup), then-district attorney Harris officiated some of the first weddings between gay and lesbian couples in defiance of state and federal regulations.

Later, as attorney general, she refused to defend Proposition 8 and petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to repeal the ballot measure, which had amended the state’s constitution to recognize only opposite-sex unions between one man and one woman.

Of the roughly two-dozen Democrats who led major presidential campaigns in 2020, Harris boasted the earliest explicit on-record support for marriage equality — by a long shot. However, even though virtually every elected Democrat and the majority of the American people have since come around on the issue, today the vice president is deeply troubled by the observation that “for the first time, we are seeing a profound, unapologetic, and intentional movement to restrict rights.”

At the nexus of these threats to the rights of LGBTQ Americans and other communities, Harris said, is Donald Trump and his right-wing extremist allies.

“Look at what he has done with the United States Supreme Court and the justices that he chose,” she said, “including the Trump-selected justices, who ruled last year that small businesses can discriminate against LGBTQ people” in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis.

“And listen, I do believe that if reelected, he would appoint more conservative judges — and you see where this is heading.”

Shortly after Trump sent three right-wing justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, its conservative supermajority overturned Roe v. Wade (1973), revoking constitutional protections for abortion that had been in place for nearly 50 years.

With that decision, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), “the highest court in our land took a fundamental freedom from the people of America, especially the women of America,” Harris stressed. “Understand what that means in terms of how that weakens our country for everyone. America has always prided itself on the fact that our strength and the growth of our strength is based on an expansion of rights.”

She noted Clarence Thomas’s issuance of a concurring opinion in Dobbs in which he expressed interest in revisiting other precedent-setting cases like Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which established the right to marriage equality nationwide. (In response, President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats led passage of the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified into federal law many of the legal rights held by married same-sex and interracial couples.)

Meanwhile, conservative jurists across the country, many appointed by Trump, have taken aim at other freedoms including access to contraception, medication abortion, and in-vitro fertilization, which has been met with pushback from the Biden-Harris administration via regulatory action and litigation.

Harris pointed out that “the hypocrisy abounds” provided that “on the one hand, you’re saying that we’re going to prevent you from ending an unwanted pregnancy” and “on the other hand, we’re going to prevent you from starting a family.”

“We know that for LGBTQ couples, IVF is one of the most critical and essential ways that they can start the family they dream to have,” the vice president said. “And the idea that access to IVF would be at stake, at risk, much less denied, means to deny loving couples,” same-sex and opposite-sex alike, “the ability to start a family.”

More broadly, she added, “let’s just think about the various civil rights movements that the community has been involved with, and where the rights of LGBTQ people have been at stake, including the successful movement that we had for the freedom of people to love who they love openly and with pride and to have that love recognized by law if they want to marry and choose to marry.”

“Freedom, the concept of freedom, has always been an undergird of the movement for LGBTQ equality and rights,” Harris said.

The need to stay vigilant and engaged

Across the board, Harris said, “the range of [issues] we’ve already discussed are priority, right? So everything from the fear of violence and hate, what we need to do to continue to be vigilant to protect the gains we’ve already made around equality, but [also] ensure that we also fight against those who are trying to erode the progress that we have achieved here, on LGBTQ rights, specifically.”

Harris noted that there are “a variety of other issues that include, for example, discrimination in housing. I’m doing a lot of work on that in affordable housing, but in speaking of discrimination in housing, we know that part of the history of the discrimination against members of LGBTQ community includes that issue.”

There is also a need to shore up protections for teachers and students, she said, “especially when we look at a state like Florida that has a ‘don’t say gay’ law, and what that means for LGBTQ teachers in one of the most populous states in the country.”

The past few years have seen a deluge of anti-LGBTQ laws proposed (and passed, in many cases) by conservative state legislatures across the country, Harris noted. The ACLU is tracking 515 so far in 2024. Disproportionately, these bills target the rights of trans and gender expansive Americans, especially youth.

The vice president pointed to Iowa’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, signed by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds in April. Opponents and LGBTQ advocates argue the law’s primary aim is to provide a pretext and legal cover for discrimination against queer Iowans.

Harris also noted the prevalence of book bans, a substantial percentage of which target titles with LGBTQ characters and themes. (Last June, the White House appointed a coordinator at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to provide training for schools on “how book bans that target specific communities and create a hostile school environment may violate federal civil rights laws.”)

The vice president emphasized, “You look at the election cycle, and yes, it’s about Trump,” but there are also “anti-LGBTQ extremists running in down-ballot [races] across the country,” including North Carolina gubernatorial candidate and current Lieutenant Gov. Mark Robinson (R) “who refers to LGBTQ people as filth.” The White House issued a statement calling his June 2021 remarks “repugnant and offensive.”

Emphasizing the contrast to win in November

“Joe Biden and I are very proud to be the most pro-LGBTQ administration in history,” Harris said, “and I think that on the other side of this equation in November, you’ve probably got one of the most anti-LGBTQ administrations in modern history.”

“I am an eternal optimist and I’m also a realist,” she said. “When we fight for our rights, we see progress — and we win. We have to be vigilant, though. We have to see what’s possible and then fight to get there, like passing the Equality Act,” legislation championed by the Biden-Harris administration that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in areas from housing and employment to lending and education.

“We’ve got to participate to get the Equality Act and things like that passed,” Harris said, adding, “I’m also clear-eyed” about “what’s happening on the other side of the ledger” which means taking “seriously that these extremists are making their intentions clear, and we should take them at their word.”

Along with her experience growing up in the Bay Area, “which, proudly, was on the front lines of the gay liberation movement,” Harris said her perspective and approach have been influenced to a significant extent by LGBTQ leaders she has worked with over the years, including her first campaign manager, Jim Rivaldo, who had previously advised Harvey Milk in the history-making 1977 election in which he became the first openly gay man to hold public office in California.

“I grew up in politics believing in the coalition,” Harris said, “that no one should be made to fight alone. We all stand together in the fight for freedom and equality and civil rights, and so let’s balance out how we think about all of this stuff. We know what we stand for, so we know what to fight for, and therefore we will win.”

Harris puts LGBTQ people in positions of power

The Biden-Harris administration has appointed LGBTQ leaders throughout the federal government in record-breaking numbers, with high-profile examples including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and Adm. Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Likewise, many of the top deputies serving in the office of the vice president are LGBTQ — as were a number of Harris’s closest and highest-ranking advisers from the time she was district attorney through her tenure as U.S. senator.

“Every elected position I have had involves making decisions that will impact, invariably, hundreds of thousands to over hundreds of millions of people,” she said, and “I feel very strongly that decision-making” should “reflect the communities we are serving.”

“I want to have input and perspective from a diverse group of people who will have a diverse set of life experiences and perspectives that will help inform a good decision on my part,” Harris said.

On May 22, the Blade was invited to attend a meeting in which the vice president addressed members of her staff in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building ahead of Pride month.

“Increasingly,” Harris said, “it takes on a different meaning depending on what’s happening in the world, and while we’ve seen so much progress, we’ve also seen a decline.”

“There are a lot of people who are in pain, or afraid, who are being attacked or fear being attacked in many ways that might be physical,” or otherwise by “forces that are trying to demean and trying to separate people and create divisions,” she said.

At the same time, Harris emphasized, “we have great power, those of us who work in this place, to remind people that we stand with them. You all heard me say many times, I strongly believe no one should remain silent.”

“We’re all in this together,” she said. “And there’s so much that’s been part of the movement for LGBTQ+ rights that has been about an acknowledgment of the strength of the coalition.”

The vice president recalled how she had to fight to display the Pride flag outside her Senate office. “I had to fight, well, you know the story,” she said, gesturing to some members of her staff, “and I was just like, ‘I’m doing it,'” adding, “I did it, of course.”

“I’m very proud of every one of you, OK?” Harris said. “Thank you for being a leader in so many ways.”

Vice President Kamala Harris and staff (Photo credit: The White House/Lawrence Jackson)
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Congress

Top Congressional Democrats reintroduce Equality Act on Trump’s 100th day in office

Legislation would codify federal LGBTQ-inclusive non-discrimination protections

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Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and Democratic members reintroduce the Equality Act, April 29 2025 (Washington Blade photo by Christopher Kane)

In a unified display of support for LGBTQ rights on President Donald Trump’s 100th day in office, congressional Democrats, including leadership from the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, reintroduced the Equality Act on Tuesday.

The legislation, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, codifying these protections into federal law in areas from jury service to housing and employment, faces an unlikely path to passage amid Republican control of both chambers of Congress along with the White House.

Speaking at a press conference on the grass across the drive from the Senate steps were Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (Mass.), U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), who is the first out LGBTQ U.S. Senator, U.S. Rep. Mark Takano (Calif.), who is gay and chairs the Congressional Equality Caucus, U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas (N.H.), who is gay and is running for the U.S. Senate, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), and U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (Ore.).

Also in attendance were U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride (Del.), who is the first transgender member of Congress, U.S. Rep. Dina Titus (Nev.), U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley (Ill.), and representatives from LGBTQ advocacy groups including the Human Rights Campaign and Advocates 4 Trans Equality.

Responding to a question from the Washington Blade on the decision to reintroduce the bill as Trump marks the hundredth day of his second term, Takano said, “I don’t know that there was a conscious decision,” but “it’s a beautiful day to stand up for equality. And, you know, I think the president is clearly hitting a wall that Americans are saying, many Americans are saying, ‘we didn’t vote for this.'”

A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday showed Trump’s approval rating in decline amid signs of major opposition to his agenda.

“Many Americans never voted for this, but many Americans, I mean, it’s a great day to remind them what is in the core of what is the right side of history, a more perfect union. This is the march for a more perfect union. That’s what most Americans believe in. And it’s a great day on this 100th day to remind our administration what the right side of history is.”

Merkley, when asked about the prospect of getting enough Republicans on board with the Equality Act to pass the measure, noted that, “If you can be against discrimination in employment, you can be against discrimination in financial contracts, you can be against discrimination in mortgages, in jury duty, you can be against discrimination in public accommodations and housing, and so we’re going to continue to remind our colleagues that discrimination is wrong.”

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which was sponsored by Merkley, was passed by the Senate in 2013 but languished in the House. The bill was ultimately broadened to become the Equality Act.

“As Speaker Nancy Pelosi has always taught me,” Takano added, “public sentiment is everything. Now is the moment to bring greater understanding and greater momentum, because, really, the Congress is a reflection of the people.”

“While we’re in a different place right this minute” compared to 2019 and 2021 when the Equality Act was passed by the House, Pelosi said she believes “there is an opportunity for corporate America to weigh in” and lobby the Senate to convince members of the need to enshrine federal anti-discrimination protections into law “so that people can fully participate.”

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Politics

George Santos sentenced to 87 months in prison for fraud case

Judge: ‘You got elected with your words, most of which were lies.’

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Former U.S. Rep. George Santos (Washington Blade photo by Christopher Kane)

Disgraced former Republican congressman George Santos was sentenced to 87 months in prison on Friday, after pleading guilty last year to federal charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. 

“Mr. Santos, words have consequences,” said Judge Joanna Seybert of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. “You got elected with your words, most of which were lies.”

The first openly gay GOP member of Congress, Santos became a laughing stock after revelations came to light about his extensive history of fabricating and exaggerating details about his life and career.

His colleagues voted in December 2023 to expel him from Congress. An investigation by the U.S. House Ethics Committee found that Santos had used pilfered campaign funds for cosmetic procedures, designer fashion, and OnlyFans.

Federal prosecutors, however, found evidence that “Mr. Santos stole from donors, used his campaign account for personal purchases, inflated his fund-raising numbers, lied about his wealth on congressional documents and committed unemployment fraud,” per the New York Times.

The former congressman told the paper this week that he would not ask for a pardon. Despite Santos’s loyalty to President Donald Trump, the president has made no indication that he would intervene in his legal troubles.

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Congress

Democratic lawmakers travel to El Salvador, demand information about gay Venezuelan asylum seeker

Congressman Robert Garcia led delegation

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Andry Hernández Romero (photo credit: Immigrant Defenders Law Center)

California Congressman Robert Garcia on Tuesday said the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador has agreed to ask the Salvadoran government about the well-being of a gay asylum seeker from Venezuela who remains incarcerated in the Central American country.

The Trump-Vance administration last month “forcibly removed” Andry Hernández Romero, a stylist who asked for asylum because of persecution he suffered because of his sexual orientation and political beliefs, and other Venezuelans from the U.S. and sent them to El Salvador.

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.”

Garcia told the Washington Blade that he and three other lawmakers — U.S. Reps. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.), Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.), and Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) — met with U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador William Duncan and embassy staffers in San Salvador, the Salvadoran capital.

“His lawyers haven’t heard from him since he was abducted during his asylum process,” said Garcia.

The gay California Democrat noted the embassy agreed to ask the Salvadoran government to “see how he (Hernández) is doing and to make sure he’s alive.”

“That’s important,” said Garcia. “They’ve agreed to that … we’re hopeful that we get some word, and that will be very comforting to his family and of course to his legal team.”

The U.S. Embassy in El Salvador in 2023. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Embassy of El Salvador’s Facebook page)

Garcia, Frost, Dexter, and Ansari traveled to El Salvador days after House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.) denied their request to use committee funds for their trip.

“We went anyways,” said Garcia. “We’re not going to be intimidated by that.”

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on April 14 met with Trump at the White House. U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) three days later sat down with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who the Trump-Vance administration wrongfully deported to El Salvador on March 15.

Abrego was sent to the country’s Terrorism Confinement Center, a maximum-security prison known by the Spanish acronym CECOT. The Trump-Vance administration continues to defy a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ordered it to “facilitate” Abrego’s return to the U.S.

Garcia, Frost, Dexter, and Ansari in a letter they sent a letter to Duncan and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday demanded “access to” Hernández, who they note “may be imprisoned at” CECOT. A State Department spokesperson referred the Blade to the Salvadoran government in response to questions about “detainees” in the country.

Garcia said the majority of those in CECOT who the White House deported to El Salvador do not have criminal records.

“They can say what they want, but if they’re not presenting evidence, if a judge isn’t sending people, and these people have their due process, I just don’t understand how we have a country without due process,” he told the Blade. “It’s just the bedrock of our democracy.”

President Donald Trump greets Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele at the White House on April 14, 2025. (Public domain photo)

Garcia said he and Frost, Dexter, and Ansari spoke with embassy staff, Salvadoran journalists and human rights activists and “anyone else who would listen” about Hernández. The California Democrat noted he and his colleagues also highlighted Abrego’s case.

“He (Hernández) was accepted for his asylum claim,” said Garcia. “He (Hernández) signed up for the asylum process on an app that we created for this very purpose, and then you get snatched up and taken to a foreign prison. It is unacceptable and inhumane and cruel and so it’s important that we elevate his story and his case.”

The Blade asked Garcia why the Trump-Vance administration is deporting people to El Salvador without due process.

“I honestly believe that he (Trump) is a master of dehumanizing people, and he wants to continue his horrendous campaign to dehumanize migrants and scare the American public and lie to the American public,” said Garcia.

The State Department spokesperson in response to the Blade’s request for comment referenced spokesperson Tammy Bruce’s comments about Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador.

“These Congressional representatives would be better off focused on their own districts,” said the spokesperson. “Instead, they are concerned about non-U.S. citizens.”

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