Opinions
LGBTQ autistic people must reclaim narrative about their lives
April is Autistic Acceptance Month
It has been 10 years since I started to work on a project that later became “Autistic Initiative for Civil Rights,” the first autistic self-advocacy group in Russia and Ukraine, created by autistic people for autistic people. In a region where most “psychiatrists” couldn’t distinguish autism from schizophrenia, and autistic people were considered to be a “childhood diagnosis” by many “experts,” the idea seemed weird. Especially because I was promoting a neurodiversity paradigm: An idea that the diversity of human brains is normal. The problem of autistic people is not in autism itself, but in discrimination and stereotypes, and being autistic is an even bigger part of me than being trans. Autistic people need support, not a cure.
No wonder that our first allies were LGBTQ organizations, because LGBTQ people knew better than others what it meant when people considered you to be ill and damaged because of their biases.
But there is another reason why the autistic and LGBTQ communities have always been close. There is a connection between being autistic and being LGBTQ.
“People who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth are three to six times as likely to be autistic,” as the largest study committed on this topic showed. Most of the studies show that the rate of LGB people among the autistic community is two to three times higher.
I started to write about it in Russian, creating special websites and social media projects about LGBTQ autistic people, because Russian is the most common language in post-USSR. I hate Russian politics, but I wanted a wider audience.
I translated a lot of great personal stories written by LGBTQ autistic people from English into Russian, and most of the stories I translated were from the U.S..
For years, autistic communities in different countries used the American autistic community as an example and sometimes even as a role model because so many great disability rights activists and autistic activists came from the U.S.
For example, as a young teenager who’d just found out that they were autistic, I was deeply inspired by the news that autistic activist Ari Ne’eman became the first openly autistic presidential nominee in American history after President Barack Obama in 2009 appointed Ari to the National Council on Disability. I read it in times when, in Russian and Ukrainian, almost all information was written in a way that was telling me that I don’t have a future. And even this information was mostly translations of some old American big charities’ texts. It was American, not Ukrainian or Russian activists who questioned those biases.
For autistic people like me, the American autistic activists, including American LGBTQ activists, were the anchor.
And now, when the autistic community in the U.S. is under attack from the MAGA government, it may have a global impact, harming not just autistic people in the U.S. but autistic people worldwide, and LGBTQ autistic people will suffer the most.
Robert F. Kennedy, the new secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, promoting the idea that autism is caused by vaccines. In Russia, it is a very common stereotype, and many general practitioners believe in it. I used to speak about WHO norms and American and European studies to fight it, and I am sure that many activists in countries with poorer medicine and higher risks of disease that can be prevented by vaccination did the same. But now, when the leading health organization in an extremely influential country is saying that vaccines cause autism, it made people stop vaccinating their kids globally, which will increase the possibility of a new epidemic.
But there is another problem, an even bigger one, from a moral perspective. Kennedy is erasing years of autistic fights to stop making autism look like a health crisis.
Moreover, on Feb. 13, President Donald Trump issued an executive order stating that the administration would be creating a commission to attempt to lower the population of autism. People like me are called to be part of an “epidemic.”
In reality, there is no “epidemic” of autism; it is just more specialists who are able to diagnose autism and more people who are ready to search for a diagnosis for them and their children, and autistic people are not a problem for “our [American] economy and our security.”
I spoke with Sam Crane, an autistic disability policy expert and a former legal and policy director of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, the organization I used as an example when I was creating my own autistic initiative group:
“Calling autistic people a threat to our country and reopening the discussion about autism and vaccines does nothing to help us,” Crane said. “We need access to healthcare, community-based supports, education, and civil rights — all of which are under threat under this administration. We also need to support research on actual quality-of-life issues, including research by autistic researchers ourselves — both of which this administration has defunded. This especially hurts autistic people who face other kinds of discrimination, such as autistic people of color and autistic LGBTQ people. People who have filed discrimination complaints about multiple kinds of discrimination have had their investigations halted — forcing them to drop their complaints about race or gender discrimination in order to keep their disability discrimination claims active. People may soon be forced to decide between getting gender-affirming healthcare and getting community-based services for their disability-related needs. We deserve real support, but instead this administration is treating us like a problem to be solved.”
Indeed, the Trump administration treated both autistic and LGBTQ people — especially trans people — as a problem to be solved.
LGBTQ autistic people will suffer one of the first, partly because they have fewer chances to fight LGBTQ-phobia and systemic discrimination. And there is also a risk that LGBTQ groups may not understand why they should fight for their autistic siblings.
It will have a broader impact because of the visibility of American activist communities — both autistic and LGBTQ communities. Stereotypes about autistic LGBTQ people will travel across borders just like autistic self-advocacy spread across the world.
Also, there were USAID programs that helped disabled people and LGBTQ people abroad, and this help now will be stopped.
MAGA is not just harming autistic LGBTQ people in the USA, it’s harming them globally.
It is April; Autism Awareness Month, promoted by a big charity that was globally demonizing autism, but autistic activists reclaimed April, making it Autistic Acceptance Month.
Now autistic activists, especially autistic LGBTQ activists, need to reclaim the narrative about their lives once again, and the LGBTQ community needs to help them in doing this. This is a fight against the system. Autistic LGBTQ people will always be a part of both the autistic and the LGBTQ community. The question is, would a LGBTQ community help us in this critical moment of our history?
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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