White House
The Washington Blade interviews President Joe Biden
Oval Office sit-down was the first for an LGBTQ newspaper
Writing about President Joe Biden’s legacy is difficult without the distance and time required to assess a leader of his stature, but what becomes clear from talking with him is the extent to which his views on LGBTQ rights come from the heart.
Biden leads an administration that has been hailed as the most pro-LGBTQ in American history, achieving major milestones in the struggle to expand freedoms and protections for the community.
Meanwhile, conservative elected officials at the local, state, and national levels have led an all-out assault against LGBTQ Americans — especially those who are transgender, and especially transgender youth, who face an uncertain future with Donald Trump promising to strip them of their rights and reverse the gains of the past four years if he is elected in November.
Biden shared his thoughts and reflections on these subjects and more in a wide-ranging sit-down interview with the Washington Blade on Sept. 12 in the Oval Office, which marked the first time in which an LGBTQ newspaper has conducted an exclusive interview with a sitting U.S. president.
Looking back on the movement, the president repeatedly expressed his admiration for the “men and women who broke the back of the prejudice, or began to break the back” starting with those involved in the nascent movement for gay rights that was kicked off in earnest with the 1969 Stonewall Riots.
They “took their lives in their own hands,” Biden said. “Not a joke. It took enormous courage, enormous courage, and that’s why I’ve spent some time also trying to memorialize that,” first as vice president in 2016 when President Barack Obama designated a new national monument at the site of the historic uprising, and again this summer when speaking at the opening ceremony of the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center.
“I think it set an example,” Biden said, not just in the U.S. but around the world.
Stonewall “became the site of a call for freedom and for dignity and for equality,” he said, and at a time when, “imagine — if you spoke up, you’d be fired, or you get the hell beat out of you.”
The president continued, “I was really impressed when I went to Stonewall. And I was really impressed talking to the guys who stood up at the time. I think the thing that gets underestimated is the physical and moral courage of the community, the people who broke through, who said ‘enough, enough,’ and they risked their lives. Some lost their lives along the way.”
Through to today, Biden said, “most of the openly gay people that have worked with me, that I’ve worked with, the one advantage they have is they tend to have more courage than most people have.”
“No, I’m serious,” he added, “I think you guys underestimate that.”
The president has spoken publicly about his deep respect and admiration for LGBTQ people, including the trans community, and trans youth, whom he has repeatedly said are some of the bravest people he knows.
A record-breaking number of LGBTQ officials are serving in appointed positions throughout the Biden-Harris administration. Among them are Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay Senate-confirmed Cabinet member; Rachel Levine, the highest-ranking transgender appointee in history, who serves as assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; the first out White House communications director and press secretary, Ben LaBolt and Karine Jean-Pierre; and 11 federal judges (the same number of LGBTQ judicial nominees who were confirmed during the Obama-Biden administration’s two terms).
Even though “everyone was nervous,” Biden said, “I wanted an administration that looked like America,” adding, “all the LGBTQ+ people that have worked for me or with me have reinforced my view that it’s not what your sexual preference is, it’s what your intellectual capacity is and what your courage is.”
“I never sat down and said, ‘it’s going to be hard, man, she’s gay, or he’s gay,’ or ‘she’s a lesbian’” he said, and likewise, “it wasn’t like the people I work with, I went, ‘God, I’m surprised they’re competent as anybody else.'”
And then there is Sarah McBride, the Delaware state senator who is favored to win her congressional race in November, which would make her the first transgender U.S. member of Congress, a sign that “we’re on the right track,” Biden said.
A close friend of the Biden family, McBride worked for the president’s eldest son, Beau, who died from cancer in 2015. (As the Blade reported on Friday, Biden called to congratulate her on winning the Democratic primary race last week.)
While the president’s close personal and professional relationships with LGBTQ friends and aides has often been highlighted in the context of Biden’s leadership on efforts to expand freedoms and protections for the community, he credits first and foremost the values he learned from his father.
“I think my attitude about this, from the very beginning, was shaped by my dad,” Biden said. “You think I’m exaggerating, but my dad was a well-read guy who got admitted to college just before the war started” and in addition to being well educated was “a decent, decent, decent, honorable man.”
“My dad used to say that everyone’s entitled to be treated with dignity,” the president said, recalling a story he has shared before about a time when, as a teenager, he was surprised by the sight of two men kissing in downtown Wilmington, Del., and his father responded, “Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.”
“As a consequence of that, most of the things that I’ve done have related to just [what] I think is basic fairness and basic decency,” Biden said.
In his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” Biden writes that the country was too slow to understand “the simple and obvious truth” that LGBTQ people are “overwhelmingly good, decent, honorable people who want and deserve the same rights as anyone else.”
Plus, “It’s not like someone wakes up one morning says, ‘you know, I want to be transgender,’ that’s what I want to do,” he said. “What do they think people wake up, decide one morning, ‘that’s what I wanted’ — it’s a lot easier being gay, right?”
As vice president, Biden had pushed for the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and for the designation of a national monument to honor Stonewall, but he took a lot of heat — along with a lot of praise from the LGBTQ community — for voicing his support for same-sex marriage before Obama had fully come around to embracing that position.
His remarks came in the heat of the 2012 reelection campaign during an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Biden told the Blade he had just “visited two guys who had children” and “if you saw these two kids with their fathers, you’d walk away saying, ‘wait a minute, they’re good parents.’”
At the event, a reception hosted by Michael Lombardo, an HBO executive, and Sonny Ward, an architect, Biden pointed to the children and said, “Things are changing so rapidly, it’s going to become a political liability in the near term for someone to say, ‘I oppose gay marriage.’”
Nevertheless, “I remember how everyone was really upset, except the president,” Biden said, when he told David Gregory, “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men and women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying men and women are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties and, quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that.”
It was a watershed moment. Obama would pledge his support for marriage equality three days later. And 10 years later, as president, Biden would sign the Respect for Marriage Act, a landmark bill codifying legal protections for married same-sex and interracial couples, rights that conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has expressed an interest in revisiting.
The president glanced at a print-out with bullet points, presumably a list of the various ways in which he and his administration have advanced LGBTQ rights over the past four years. “I forgot half the stuff I had done,” he said. “But you know, I’m just really proud of a lot of things we did.”
Ticking through some highlights, Biden started with the Respect for Marriage Act. “I was very proud” to sign the legislation, he said, with a ceremony in December 2022 that included Vice President Kamala Harris, first lady Jill Biden, and second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
Biden pointed to several advancements in health equity, such as the FDA’s decision to change “the law so that you could no longer discriminate against using the blood of a gay man or a gay woman,” progress in the national strategy to end HIV by 2030, an initiative coordinated by HHS, and a push to expand access to prophylactic drug regimens to protect against the transmission of HIV.
He added, “I directed the administration to promote human rights for LGBTQ [people] everywhere, particularly, for example, Uganda — they want help from us; they’ve got to change their policy, in terms of the discrimination.”
President Yoweri Museveni in May 2023 signed a law that carries a death penalty provision for “aggravated homosexuality.” The U.S. subsequently imposed visa restrictions on Ugandan officials and removed the country from a program that allows sub-Saharan African countries to trade duty-free with the U.S. The World Bank Group also announced the suspension of new loans to Uganda.
Several of the administration’s pro-LGBTQ accomplishments and ongoing work address Republican-led efforts to restrict rights and freedoms. For instance, the president noted the importance of protecting in-vitro fertilization treatments, which are threatened by Trump “and his buddies” who were involved in Project 2025, the 900+ page governing blueprint that was drafted in anticipation of the former president’s return to the White House. The document contains extreme restrictions on reproductive healthcare and provisions that would strip away LGBTQ-inclusive non-discrimination rules.
“Fighting book bans” is another example, Biden said, adding, “I mean, come on, these guys want to erase history instead of make history.”
Last year, the president appointed an official to serve in the Education Department for purposes of advising schools on instances where their restrictions on reading material, which have been shown to disproportionately target content with LGBTQ characters or themes, may run afoul of federal civil rights law.
Before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed, Biden said, “I spoke up when they were dismissing people, discharging people in the military because they were gay.” In 2021, just a few days after his inauguration, the president issued an executive order reversing the Trump administration’s ban on military service by transgender service members.
Lowering his voice for emphasis, Biden added, “They can shoot straight. They can shoot just as straight as anybody else.”
Other major pro-LGBTQ moves by the Biden-Harris administration include:
- • Issuance of a new Title IX policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools, educational activities, and programs;
- • A proposed rule from HHS that would protect LGBTQ youth in foster care;
- • Expansion of mental health services, including the establishment of a 988 suicide and crisis lifeline, which provides the option for callers to be connected with LGBTQ-trained counselors;.
- • Legal challenges of anti-trans state laws, such as those restricting access to health treatments;
- • Repeated pushback against these bills by the president and other officials like Jean-Pierre;
- • The president’s remarks reaffirming his support for the LGBTQ community, including in all of his State of the Union addresses;
- • The administration’s work tackling the mpox outbreak;
- • Expanded non-discrimination protections in the healthcare space;
- • Issuance of new guidelines allowing for changes to gender markers on official government-issued IDs;
- • Efforts to bring justice to veterans who were discharged other than honorably under discriminatory military policies, and;
- • ‘The biggest Pride month celebrations ever held at the White House.
“But the one thing I didn’t get done was the Equality Act,” Biden said, “which is important. important.”
The president and his administration pushed hard for Congress to pass the legislation, which would codify LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination protections in areas from housing and employment to lending and jury service.
Biden raised the issue again when the conversation turned to his plans to stay involved after January 2025. “Look,” he said, “when a person can get married” to a spouse of the same sex but might “show up at a restaurant and get thrown out of the restaurant because they’re LGBTQ, that’s wrong.”
“That’s why we need the Equality Act,” Biden said. “We need to pass it. So, I’m going to be doing everything I can to be part of the outside voices, and I hope my foundations that I will be setting back up will talk about equality across the board.”
“Lawmakers, aides, and advocates say that significant obstacles to progress on the Equality Act remain, including polarized views on how to protect the rights of religious institutions that condemn homosexuality and Republicans’ increasing reliance on transgender rights as a wedge issue,” the Washington Post wrote in 2021, after the bill was passed by the House but left to languish in the Senate.
On LGBTQ issues more broadly, Biden said, “I think there are a lot of really good Republicans that I’ve served with, especially in the Senate, who don’t have a prejudiced bone in their body about this but are intimidated.”
“Because if you take a position, especially in the MAGA Republican Party now, you’re going to be — they’re going to go after you,” he added. “Trump is a different breed of cat. I mean, I don’t want to make this political, but everything he’s done has been anti, anti-LGBTQ, I mean, across the board.”
Project 2025, the president said, “is just full of nothing but disdain for the LGBTQ community. And you have Clarence Thomas talking about, when the decision was made [to overturn] Roe v Wade, that maybe we should consider changing the right of gays to marry — I mean, things that are just off the wall — just pure, simple, prejudice.”
“What I do worry about is I do worry about violence,” Biden said. “I do worry about intimidation. I do worry about what the MAGA right will continue to try to do, but I’m going to stay involved.”
“I’m going to remain involved in all the civil liberties issues that I have worked for my whole life.”
White House
Trump-appointed judge restores White House TV pool access
Judge called in to question president’s justification of the ban
A federal judge ordered the White House to restore West Wing press credentials to three news organizations after President Donald Trump attempted to bar their access for unfavorable reporting.
Early Thursday morning, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted a temporary restraining order brought by POLITICO, CNN, and MS NOW as part of a joint lawsuit. The lawsuit cites the imperative role of a “free press” and ordered the 78 journalists’ credentials returned to the three outlets for at least the next two weeks as litigation plays out.
In the eight-page ruling, the judge goes over a slew of laws that Trump may have violated in banning the three media groups — from stepping on their First Amendment rights to a free press to the Fifth Amendment right to due process.
The judge also questioned Trump’s justification for removing the outlets, originally saying it was a matter of national security.
“The court is skeptical — at least on this record — that defendants’ interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation for, or is even advanced by, the revocation of plaintiffs’ hard passes,” Kelly wrote in an 8-page ruling issued just before 1 a.m. ET.
“Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ plaintiffs from the White House — instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of plaintiffs’ reporting,” the judge added.
The Washington Blade reached out to the White House press office asking if the administration would file an appeal to keep the journalists out of the West Wing but did not hear back before publication time.
White House
White House press pool pushes back after Trump bars three outlets
As President Trump refuses entry to outlets he deems unreasonable, lawsuits have been filed to regain access to the West Wing
Past the first checkpoint to get into the White House, multiple carts filled with camera equipment sat along a fence. Wagons loaded with tripods, cables, mics, and cameras sat just past where they normally would be working at full power. Today, they were turned off and packed away.
Last week, President Donald Trump decided to bar CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO from the White House following reporting he considers “FAKE NEWS.”
Trump, in a post on Truth Social on Monday morning, described his move as “instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS,” which he said has “grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America.”
“It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control,” he wrote on the social media site he owns. “It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”
As a result, all of the major television networks that comprise the television press pool — ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News — suspended their White House TV pool coverage. They decided to no longer send camera crews to cover President Donald Trump’s events.
“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government,” the five White House TV pool networks said in a joint statement Monday. “No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”
POLITICO, CNN and MS NOW filed a lawsuit Monday to immediately restore access for their reporters, who had their credentials confiscated by the Secret Service.
In the White House, there was a noticeable shift in the atmosphere. The Washington Blade is the only LGBTQ news outlet that is part of the White House Press Pool, and was acting as the primary print pooler as the situation unfolded on Monday.
Whispers about who might be kicked from the press pool next could be heard both in the press area of the West Wing, as well as outside the part of the White House dedicated to filming the president’s office. The area where TV stations normally film their live shots of the White House while reporting looked less busy than a normal Monday — especially as the president made his way to New York City ahead of the UN General Assembly meeting this week.
CNN’s outdoor filming area, which is staffed nearly at all times, sat dark with a green cover over the space that normally houses its cameras and political reporters like Kaitlan Collins.
There were small signs of solidarity from other outlets in the press office. A sign that has hung outside one of the news offices in the West Wing was updated. It originally read, “WE STAND WITH AP” following President Trump’s first attempt at removing a news outlet he deemed unfavorable. It now includes “I STAND WITH AP CNN MSNOW POLITICO.”
The change could also be felt as the press pool attempted to cover the president.
There was a ribbon cutting in honor of the $6 million helipad installed at Trump’s behest — which had nearly no audio as a result of fewer microphones in the space following the outlets’ removal on Monday afternoon, and partly because of the loud sound of Marine One.
Vice President JD Vance defended Trump when asked about the changes to TV access at the White House, standing with the president despite this likely being a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free and fair press.
“He’s not banning media outlets. What he’s doing is saying we’re not going to give you special access to the White House if you engage in what is effectively propaganda,” Vance said, alleging that 92% of the stories from CNN, MS NOW and Politico about Trump are “negative.”
“That’s not representative of the American people. It’s not representative of public opinion,” Vance said.
He pushed back on the notion that this is a hindrance on free speech — claiming access to the president through White House visitation is a privilege — a privilege that in this administration, at least until courts weigh in, could change the landscape of the American media system.
“It’s about basic fairness. They can still report. They still have the access to free speech. They’re just not going to get an office in the White House anymore,” Vance said.
Jacqui Heinrich, the White House Correspondents Association President condemned the president’s actions in restricting media access in a statement sent to WHCA members on Saturday.
“Today’s action revoking access for journalists from CNN, POLITICO, and MSNOW violates the First Amendment. The implications extend beyond these organizations: a standard used to exclude one news outlet because of its coverage could be applied to any outlet in the future.
“The American people, through a free and independent press, must be able to scrutinize those elected to power, regardless of whether government officials view it favorably. That’s why courts have repeatedly held that once the White House provides access to journalists, it cannot deny that access arbitrarily or based on the content of their reporting. The WHCA calls on the administration to immediately restore our colleagues’ access.”
White House
Trump-Vance administration’s LGBTQ brain drain: what you need to know
Several high profile figures have left government since January 2025
Uncloseted Media published this article on Aug. 21.
By SPENCER MACNAUGHTON and HOPE PISONI | Since President Donald Trump regained office in January 2025, he and his administration have waged an all-out war against the LGBTQ community.
This has led queer Americans to move to other countries at unprecedented rates — Rainbow Railroad, a Canadian nonprofit that supports LGBTQ asylum seekers, reported receiving a huge increase in inquiries from the U.S. last year.
The same pattern is playing out within the government. And it’s leading to a brain drain of competent queer employees and allies who are either resigning or being fired, often because of their LGBTQ identity or their belief that queer people deserve basic human rights.
Here are six examples of federal workers who had a messy exit from Trump 2.0:
Demetre Daskalakis
- WHAT HE DID: Dr. Daskalakis is one of the foremost LGBTQ health professionals in the U.S. Under Trump’s first term, he was appointed director of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Under Biden, he also served as the deputy response coordinator for mpox at the White House.
- WHAT HAPPENED: While he continued a lot of this work under Trump 2.0, he didn’t last long. In August 2025, he resigned from the CDC, writing in his resignation letter that he was “unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.”
- BOTTOM LINE: I recently interviewed Daskalakis, where he told me that leadership from RFK Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department justified HIV cuts by saying the virus is “just too woke.”
Julia Curlee
- WHAT SHE DID: Julia Curlee worked in intelligence for nearly two decades between the CIA and the National Security Council. Earlier this week, she wrote an article in The Atlantic explaining how she had served as Mike Pence’s daily briefer and the NSC’s director for intelligence programs. During Trump 1.0, she briefed the president on Air Force One.
- WHAT HAPPENED: Curlee told CNN this week that in Trump’s second term, her treatment by the federal government transformed. She was no longer allowed to use the women’s bathroom on federal property and had to leave her workplace to relieve herself. Her passport was also reissued to read “male,” which led to complications when traveling abroad. In March 2025, less than 70 days into Trump’s second term, Curlee says she received a call while at a rib joint in Virginia with her family informing her that her White House tour was over and that they couldn’t tell her why. She continued to work for the CIA for some months, but she later resigned.
- BOTTOM LINE: Curlee wrote that moments after she learned she was fired from the White House, she saw a post from right-wing political activist Laura Loomer that read “A transgender, Biden holdover who hates President Trump is still working in the NSC intel office. I’m told there are several NSC staffers who have complained that this trans Biden holdover hasn’t been fired yet, but nothing is being done about it.”
Marc Seawright
- WHAT HE DID: Marc Seawright worked for more than eight years at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Most recently, he served as the EEOC’s director of information governance and strategy, where he oversaw tech policy to help combat workplace harassment and discrimination.
- WHAT HAPPENED: During Trump 2.0, Seawright was ordered to develop technology that would erase any mention of LGBTQ identities from EEOC outreach materials. “[My expertise] was being leveraged to perpetuate discrimination against people like me,” he told the Associated Press. In that article, Seawright and other transgender and gender nonconforming federal employees described their “fear, grief, frustration, and distress working for the federal government at a time when it rejects them — often with no clear path for recourse or support.”
- BOTTOM LINE: Seawright quit in June, citing a hostile work environment. “It became overwhelming. It felt insurmountable,” he told the AP. He has now hired lawyers at Katz Banks Kumin and has filed a discrimination complaint.
David Maltinsky
- WHAT HE DID: Until 2025, Maltinsky worked for more than 16 years at the FBI as an intelligence specialist. In 2025, he was training to become a special agent, but three weeks ahead of graduation, he was fired.
- WHAT HAPPENED: On Oct. 1, he was delivered a letter from FBI Director Kash Patel informing him that he was being fired for an “inappropriate display of political signage.” The signage in question, according to Maltinsky, was a Pride flag displayed in his work station at a previous post in Los Angeles. The flag had been given to him by the FBI’s LA Field Office, and Maltinsky says he had been told by multiple supervisors that displaying it would not be a violation.
- BOTTOM LINE: Maltinsky is currently suing the FBI and the Department of Justice, arguing that his firing constituted unlawful discrimination.
Mary Brinkmeyer
- WHAT SHE DID: Brinkmeyer had been working as a psychologist for the Department of Veterans Affairs since 2008. She held multiple leadership roles, including the LGBTQ veteran care coordinator at the Hampton VA Medical Center. She established the first military support group for trans servicemembers and was awarded Navy Psychology Civilian Psychologist of the Year in 2016.
- WHAT HAPPENED: Following an early Trump executive order directing the federal government to purge any practices promoting “gender ideology,” Brinkmeyer says staff at her workplace were told to remove all LGBTQ-affirming materials from both public and private areas, as well as to identify “anything in medical records, training materials, or patient resources that could be considered ‘gender ideology.’” When she refused to comply and confronted her supervisor, she says her concerns were dismissed.
- BOTTOM LINE: Brinkmeyer resigned in February 2025, stating that she “didn’t want to be complicit in something that I knew was wrong.”
Amy Paris
- WHAT SHE DID: Paris was the second-highest ranking trans woman in the federal government, serving as a deputy digital services lead in the HHS Department, where she oversaw the safety of organ donations. Prior to that, she worked in a number of tech-related roles across the federal government since the Bush administration. She helped create cross-agency spending trackers, streamlined unemployment insurance during the pandemic and implemented trans-inclusive policies like gender-neutral passports.
- WHAT HAPPENED: Paris was fired as part of a string of mass layoffs across the federal government in February 2025. While the HHS did not publicly comment on why she was fired, Paris says she was told it was because of her performance, despite the fact that she got a 4.75 out of five on her last performance review and was praised for her work by multiple Biden administration officials.
- BOTTOM LINE: Paris told the 19th she suspected her firing was politically motivated, saying the Trump administration is “trying to sow discord and disrupt confidence in the workings of the federal government.”
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