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Gary Carnivele
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Polyamory Isn’t Legally Protected in the U.S. Why?
Andrea, a 43-year-old software engineer, was once open about being polyamorous. She told family and friends that she maintained multiple romantic relationships simultaneously, with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved. Over the years, that’s meant dating partners separately as well as being part of throuples, in which she had two primary partners.
“I honored the structure of monogamy while I was in it and never pursued anyone else but something always felt off. … I felt very isolated,” she says. “Something was missing. And I was always drawn to the family structures of people who were in open relationships.”
Andrea was accepted when she came out as poly at 31 and never felt the need to hide. But that acceptance narrowed after she came out to a handful of colleagues in the break room at work.
“After that, it definitely started making the workplace more uncomfortable,” Andrea, who lives in New Jersey, told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES.
“They made a lot of jokes about all the threesomes I was having, that I wasn’t leaving enough for everyone else,” she says. “One day, a joke was made that I was like one of the people from the fringe Mormon sects that practice polygamy, that I wanted sister wives.”
“The attitude of believing that my polyamorous identity made it okay to use much more sexual and politically charged language in the workplace was the main thrust of my discomfort. They [assume] that the moment I come out as poly, it’s okay for them to abandon professionalism and use lewd terms in the workplace.”
Andrea says that as time passed, the jokes transformed into more bitter treatment and inappropriate remarks about poly relationships. “I noticed the way they treated me changed. I felt iced out.”
After weeks of enduring the comments and coldness, she brought the issue to her boss. Instead of intervening, her boss told her she was “a liability.” The next day, she was fired.
For many protected classes, including disability, gender identity or expression, race, religion and sexual orientation, repeated targeted comments and hostile behavior in the workplace would meet the legal threshold for harassment or discrimination.
Andrea assumed the same protections would apply to her. But when she sought legal counsel, one attorney told her there was no legal precedent protecting polyamorous people from discrimination and that non-monogamy was not included among protected classes. The lawyer warned her that her chances of winning a lawsuit were unlikely. Ultimately, she couldn’t find counsel that would represent her.
Since then, Andrea, who asked to use a pseudonym because of ongoing legal concerns, says she has become “much more hesitant to be out.”
Polyamorous relationships are emerging into public view at a moment when the traditional household is no longer the norm. Only 18% of American families now fit the nuclear model, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. In 2021, approximately one in six Americans reported wanting to engage in polyamory and one in nine said they had engaged in it at some point. Data from last year found that 61% of Americans are open to non-monogamous relationships.
Despite this, individuals with more than two partners remain almost entirely unprotected under the law. There are no statewide legal protections for people in multi-partner relationships, and only five U.S. municipalities offer protections from discrimination to polyamorous residents. That means the estimated 35 million Americans who have engaged in polyamory are left to navigate restrictive housing codes, workplaces and medical systems that discriminate against their relationships.
“You’re not legally protected,” Alex Chen, director of Harvard Law School’s LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic, told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “It runs the gamut from getting fired at work for identifying as part of the community or having a picture of your partners on your desk to being discriminated against in the hospital.”
Housing with a Limit
For Maya, who asked to only include her first name for job security concerns, it took four months for her polycule—the network of people involved in multiple, simultaneous relationships—to find a place to live.
“In Baltimore County, there’s a housing law that says you can’t have more than four unrelated adults living together,” Maya, who lives in Baltimore, Md, told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “There are six of us in our polycule.”
If a landlord does not want to rent to a polyamorous family, Maya says they can simply cite the law. In one case, her family was encouraged to apply for a house that was within their budget. After disclosing their family structure, they were told the next day that they would not be allowed to apply.
“When we confronted them, the landlord said, ‘By law we can do this, therefore it can’t be discrimination,’” Maya says. “Even though we are a family and have been together for years, they said under the law we were just a bunch of adults trying to rent a house together.”
By the end of the search, Maya says the experience was emotionally and financially draining. A few members of the polycule had leases expiring, and the family was forced to keep living apart and delay moving in together.
“We are stronger together,” she says. “We share financial responsibilities. We share a car. We take care of each other. We have dinner together. For all intents and purposes, we are a family. The same opportunities as everybody else. That’s all we’re asking for here.”
Health Care without Legal Kinship
Bob McGarey, a 74-year-old in Austin, Texas, has been poly since he was in his late 20s. In 2015, he had been with his partners Pam and Leah for 24 and 11 years, respectively. Still, his decades-long commitment to each of them did not translate into legal recognition because he couldn’t marry both of them.
“What makes me poly and why I don’t want to get married stem from the same place,” McGarey told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “I’ve seen so much divorce and unhappiness in monogamous relationships. It’s a belief system that says that there’s only one way to do a romantic, loving relationship. There’s nothing wrong with [monogamy]. I just didn’t find that to be true for me.”
Texas, like many states, recognizes common-law marriage, but only when two people live together as spouses and publicly present as married. Texas law does not allow someone to be married to more than one person at a time, meaning polyamorous relationships don’t qualify for legal recognition.
So when Pam passed away in 2015, McGarey didn’t have legal rights that a married partner would have: He wasn’t able to weigh in on the decision to take her off life support, he didn’t have a legal right to her finances and he wasn’t legally entitled to organize the funeral arrangements. As a result, decisions about her care were left to Pam’s sisters.
“Though I’d been with her for 24 years, I had no [legal] say,” McGarey says. “The two sisters … recognized our relationship and agreed with me on what to do,” he says. “I wouldn’t have had any standing otherwise. It was very painful having to navigate it all, like a hole in my heart. … The law doesn’t just distribute rights, it tells the world how to name your love, and whether it knows how to honor your grief.”
Why Polyamory is Still Treated as Taboo
“People don’t understand what polyamory is,” says 39-year-old Amelia Beaei Pardo, adding that her first poly relationship was “tremendously healing.”
She says being able to be openly poly introduced something she had not experienced before: transparency without punishment, secrecy, guilt and emotional whiplash. She found herself in two relationships at once and “utterly in love with both [her] partners.” Instead of being forced to choose or conceal parts of herself, she could show up fully.
Still, she’s experienced discrimination. In the weeks leading up to the wedding between two of her partners, Beaei Pardo had every reason to believe she would be there. The ceremony was meant to include all of the partners in her polycule by having them in the ceremony, even though only one couple could get married.
But days before the wedding, Beaei Pardo learned that the bride’s parents had intervened and the presence of other partners was no longer allowed. “My partner very lovingly told all of us that actually we wouldn’t be able to be at their wedding,” Beaei Pardo says. “We could watch it on video, but plans had shifted. It was heartbreaking to not be there.”
Beaei Pardo says she was “very sad” not only because she had to miss the wedding, but because it reinforced a familiar hierarchy: One relationship is real and the others are negotiable.
“The state doesn’t see me as a polyamorous person,” Beaei Pardo says. “Without legal acknowledgment, there is no social expectation that poly partners should be included in moments like weddings, hospital visits or family decision-making.”
Beaei Pardo says even limited frameworks—such as civil partnerships or anti-discrimination protections—could help reduce stigma.
Origins of Stigma
The stigma surrounding polyamory is not new. Legal scholars and advocates trace it to the same logic that once made it dangerous to be openly gay at work. The assumption was not simply that difference was unacceptable, but that it was inherently sexual. If someone disclosed a non-normative identity regarding sex or relationships, many people would think that that person must be doing so in order to make an advance.
“That idea is still with us,” says Lily Lamboy, executive director of the Modern Family Institute, a nonprofit supplying education and community for non-traditional families. “‘Why would you tell me that unless you were trying to have sex with me?’ That logic has been used for decades to justify discrimination.”
Part of this discrimination stems from politics and religion. Lamboy says that Project 2025, the 920-page document that laid out plans for a Republican presidency ahead of Trump’s reelection, structures a vision of government that sharply narrows legal recognition of family and relationships, defining “family” strictly as a heterosexual married couple and their children.
“If your political agenda relies on a narrow, biblically defined idea of family … then anything outside that structure becomes a target,” Lamboy says. “That includes gay marriage, polyamorous families, and any form of care that does not fit that mold. That is intentional.”
How Legal Status Changes Public Perception of Poly Relationships
Advocates argue that legal recognition would reduce stigma for poly relationships.
“Passing a nondiscrimination law really goes a long way toward changing social values about whether it’s acceptable to treat people badly,” Lamboy says. “The legalization of same-sex marriage offered a precedent. Before it passed, queer relationships were widely dismissed as illegitimate or unstable, but afterward, public attitudes shifted rapidly.”
Legal recognition is happening in some areas of the U.S. In the past three years, Somerville, Mass. passed the first of three ordinances defining “family or relationship structure” as a protected class, akin to race, gender or sexual orientation. Berkeley and Oakland in California quickly followed suit. And in 2021, Cambridge and Arlington, Mass. allowed for multiple domestic partnership registrations.
Brett Chamberlin, executive director for the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy, which helped organize for the passage of some of these bills, says that legal clarity can relieve a constant burden placed on people in nontraditional relationships.
“I hope for something similar to LGBTQ acceptance,” Chamberlin told Uncloseted Media. “Where if you come out as non-monogamous, you do not have to explain yourself, defend your legitimacy, or reassure people you are not trying to steal their girlfriend. … There has to be awareness and acceptance and understanding. At the same time, it’s much more difficult for people to open up about their own identity, to drive that social awareness if they are not protected.”
“There’s a concept called the shadow of the law. It’s the idea that the law isn’t just what it tells people to do or not do. It’s how people live differently because of what the law doesn’t protect,” says Chen.
Many people remember that the U.S. Supreme Court recognized marriage equality in 2015, but it wasn’t until 2020 that federal law was interpreted to prohibit employment discrimination against LGBTQ people.
“During that five-year period, people could get married one day and be fired the next day for getting married,” Chen says. “Polyamorous people live under that shadow every day. They have to decide whether having these relationships, these families, is going to cost them access to the material conditions of their lives or subject them to discrimination.”
The Possibilities with Legal Protection
“What’s remarkable is that research shows polyamorous relationships are not more likely to be shorter or less satisfying than other relationships, despite how much stigma they face,” Chen says. “That’s very similar to how people once argued that same-sex relationships were unstable, when in fact the instability came from discrimination.”
Beaei Pardo believes that her experiences of finding polyamorous love is not unusual. “You find that people who stay in polyamory for the long term have experiences like the one I had,” she says. “Somebody shows us how you do it without hurting other people and it feels amazing to accept yourself like that.”
“There’s a confirmation bias. Forty or 50% of marriages end in divorce, but people don’t say that’s because monogamy doesn’t work. With polyamory, people assume breakups prove the model is flawed,” Chen says.
Diana Adams, executive director of Chosen Family Law Center, a legal organization dedicated to achieving legal and social recognition for queer, polyamorous and other non-nuclear families, sees a future for polyamory slowly unfolding.
“For same-sex couples, it was a progressive city saying, ‘okay, let’s do it.’ And then you have a lesbian couple standing in front of a courthouse with flowers and they share health insurance and a year later, everything’s fine. Society didn’t crumble. The kids are fine. And that’s what can build a movement to be able to pass it at a state level,” Adams says. “This isn’t just about polyamory. It’s about whether our laws encourage care, connection, and stability, or whether they isolate people and make family formation harder for anyone who doesn’t fit a very narrow mold.”
For Andrea, who has been with her partner for 11 years, being poly is essential to her happiness. She recounts how something always felt “off” in monogamous relationships.
“I feel grateful I was able to joyfully embrace being poly, and break out of the roles that society expected of me,” she says. “I was spending my lifetime trying to impress people and be what they expected of me and then suddenly realized, ‘wait, there’s no reward for this. Nobody is going to give me anything better than what I would be getting by just living joyfully and being myself.’”
“If the laws could catch up and help support me in that process, it would make living as myself much easier,” Andrea says. “I think that’s why so many people who are non-monogamous of some variety keep it very strictly behind closed doors.”
Brazil had the most murders of trans people globally in 2025
According to the global Trans Murder Monitoring 2025 report, the deaths of 281 trans and gender diverse people were recorded around the world between October 2024 and September 2025.
In Brazil in 2025, the Trans Murder Monitoring report recorded 77 trans women or female-presenting victims, and three trans men or transmasculine victims.
The figures come from the latest edition of a dossier produced by the country’s National Association of Transvestites and Transgender People (ANTRA), released this week.
Eighty-eight percent of the victims were Black or mixed race, and 14 percent were involved in some form of activism.
The result represents a drop of 34 percent from the previous year’s 122 murders – but does not remove Brazil from the top of the ranking, a position it has held since the monitoring project began in 2008.
Brazil has some of the world’s most progressive legal protections for LGBTQ+ individuals, driven largely by Supreme Court rulings.
Rights include legal same-sex marriage, granted in 2013, adoption rights, and the ability for transgender people to change their legal name and gender without surgery.
Homophobia and transphobia are criminalised in Brazil as forms of racism.
“Dystopian”: Trans radio host Ellie Krug explains what it’s like in Minnesota right now
Trans radio host Ellie Krug is an eyewitness to the chaos the Trump administration has unleashed on Minnesota with its nativist immigration dragnet.
In an interview from her home in Victoria, Minnesota, pop. 10,546, Krug is quick to point out that Trump’s immigration raids aren’t just happening in Minneapolis, but in small towns like hers across the state.
“This is red country,” she says of Carver County, about 40 miles southwest of the Twin Cities. “It’s everywhere.”
Krug is a lawyer by training and the author of Getting to Ellen: A Memoir about Love, Honesty and Gender Change and Being Ellen: A Second Chance at Life. Her weekly podcast and radio show, The Illegal Trans Woman, airs Saturday afternoons on AM 950, “The Progressive Voice of Minnesota.”
Ellie Krug: Well, I mean, it is literally people who are masked, who have arsenals on their bodies, who are literally pulling people from their cars, or if you’re an observer, either spraying you with pepper spray or just pummeling you to the ground. This is like the kind of stuff you expect in a communist country, or a country that’s going through a civil war. It’s not what you would expect here in Minnesota.
Trump thinks that he can get away with it because people think in Minneapolis there are all these radical liberals who accept criminals in their midst and want to coddle them. But what people don’t understand is that ICE is throughout the state of Minnesota, out in greater Minnesota. This is red country. It’s everywhere.
There was a video out of St. Peter, 70 miles south of the Twin Cities. What they did to that woman — they came out of their cars with guns pointed at her for doing nothing other than following them at a respectful distance, right? That is dystopian.
We’ve all seen the images out of Minneapolis: the videos of the two shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the memorials to them, the protests on the streets and at churches, the whistleblowers alerting neighbors to ICE, car windows being smashed by agents, officials like Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino cosplaying jackbooted thugs to strike fear in the heart of your community. Is what we’re seeing in the media and on socials an accurate depiction of the scene?
Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, I don’t think the media fully understands the breadth of it. Because out here where I am, all of that stuff is going on, too. I mean, I’m on the school board of my local school district. They’re stopping high school students on the way to school and asking them to produce papers. They’re taking parents at bus stops. I mean, my superintendent and principals of some schools have had to ride school buses to protect the kids.
I went to an MLK breakfast a week ago Monday in downtown Chaska, Minnesota, population 25,000. Half a block from us, they boxed in a car. She tried to get to the police station. She couldn’t make it. They boxed in her car. She was an observer. They smashed the driver’s side window, pulled her out of the car, and hauled her away.
What’s the reaction been like in your town?
So, you’ve seen the protests, you’ve seen people showing up in Minneapolis, but they’re showing up out here, too. My county is a red-to-purple county. We have protests weekly at different locations, from one or two standing on a street corner to, on Saturday, I was with somewhere between 1100 and 1200 people in a town of 25,000, lining a roadway probably close to three-quarters of a mile down towards a Target, where ICE has been staging to go on raids. They’re doing this out here in my county.
It sounds like it’s not possible for the media to grasp just how widespread the actual ICE operation is. I mean, multiply your small town by how many times…
Right? No, they’re not.
How are local officials dealing with the siege?
There was the county sheriff here, who was contemplating signing an agreement with ICE to host detainees. And we launched this movement to prevent that from happening. We met with the county sheriff. We presented him with a petition of 500 names, you know, against this. It was a frank conversation, but he was respectful. It went on for an hour.
So then we went and spoke to the county commissioners, because they kind of control the sheriff. And you know what? On the day that we spoke with the county sheriff and presented to the county commissioners, the sheriff came out and said he didn’t think he had enough capacity to fulfill the ICE contract.
This was very strategic on our part. So, logistically, if you think about it, if you just detained somebody, you’ve got to get them somewhere where they can get processed. If they can bring them to the county jail, then ICE can be in the community longer, because they don’t have to go the 45 miles to drop somebody off in Minneapolis and then come back.
Now I will tell you that the Minnesota County Sheriffs Association, apparently, is talking to ICE about opening up more county jails to be detention places, right? I’m like, uh oh, may all have been for naught. So I don’t know.
What’s the mood like among people you talk to? I mean, Minnesota has been under siege for months. Are people growing weary, or are they growing more outraged as time passes?
More outraged. Not weary at all. The caucuses were last night, both for the Republican and the Democratic Party. I got to the caucus site 10 minutes early. I thought, you know, it’ll be a little bit of a line. It took me 40 minutes to get into the caucus site because of how long the line was. And that line did not get finished until the caucus was already running.
And as I stood in the line — you know, me being me — I’m asking, “Have you ever done this before?” And people around me are like, “Nope, I’ve never done this before, but I’m here because I’m really angry.”
But, no, to answer specifically, people are not worn out. People are angry. They are incredibly angry at what’s happening. And one of the things I noticed at that Saturday protest was the larger number of younger people that I had not seen before. Now, you’ve got to understand that it was, what, 11 or 12 degrees out that day? So I think that the murders of Renee and Alex have activated the younger people in a way that we weren’t seeing before that had happened. You see that happen in your community enough times, then you’re like, “No, this is real.” And then the question is, what’s next?
What could be next?
I mean, we’re already hearing about nationalizing elections, okay, which would mean, you know, we’re not going to have free elections.
I will tell you, on a personal note, within the trans community, what’s next is, we’re going to be the next people they’re going to take. There’s this great fear within the trans community that they’re just teeing everything up to come after us after they’ve done this, after they’ve gotten people used to the idea that people can be taken.
[Attorney General] Pam Bondi put out a paper two months ago about categories of domestic terrorists: being anti-capitalist, being anti-family, being anti-Christian. All could be deemed domestic terrorists. And included in that was people advocating “gender ideology.”
There is an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation called the Oversight Project, which has been angling to get the FBI to designate transgender advocates as domestic terrorists. Their example of domestic terrorism by transgender people would be advocating that transgender people have the right to exist. Publicly advocating for that would be a sign of domestic terrorism. I wish I was making all this up.
It is dystopian, isn’t it?
Well, it is. And me, I’ve been torn about how much that I can do out here. I feel very guilty about not being an observer, about not following ICE around. I mean, yes, I’m doing protests. But common sense, when it filters into my head, is like, Ellie, how much of a target do you want to have on your back? You’ve already got this radio show called the Illegal Trans Woman. I mean, how much more do you want to be a target, you know, and with your face scanned.
Let’s talk a little about the shootings. Pretti’s shooting was a tipping point in the reaction to the siege of Minneapolis. How was his killing different from Renee Good’s?
First of all, it was the second. To the extent somebody could say it was an aberration with Renee Good, obviously, now it’s not an aberration. This is a modus operandi.
But I think that it was also different in the sense that we clearly saw it unfold from multiple angles. And it unfolded after, clearly, Alex went to help someone, a woman who was being beaten, pushed down, and manhandled by ICE. So he’s going to their aid. On top of all of that, because it was overkill. It was with Renee Good, but with Alex, you’ve got two guys shooting, what was it, 10 times?
Then the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. They’ve got a warrant from a state court judge that says, “We need to be allowed at the crime scene.” They won’t let them in, and then they just take off. They don’t cooperate. So I think that here in Minnesota, we’ve come to understand that this is all part of a modus operandi and that it’s going to happen again. It’s just a question of when.
Trump has said he’s dialing back Operation Metro Surge “a little bit,” and border czar Tom Homan announced they’re drawing down 700 agents and leaving 2000.
Well, well, hold on. When Homan came in at first, he disclosed that there were 4000 in Minnesota, so now we’re down to 3300. So, Greg, I can’t believe a word coming out of this administration. You just can’t believe anything that they say. Even if they are drawing down, for how long? And are they going to send them back?
One reason Trump claims he’s dialing the crackdown back was the reaction of gun owners to Pretti’s shooting. He had a gun and a license to carry. How else do you think the siege is antithetical to once-core Republican principles?
Well, I think the thing to remember about Pretti is that he did not display the gun. He didn’t brandish it. It came out in the course of him being beaten. So there’s that. Of course, Jeanine Pirro came out this week saying, “You come to D.C. with the gun, we’re gonna arrest you.” Okay. You’ve got multiple problems on the Second Amendment with that.
But I mean, antithetical? They are masked, okay. They have no ID. In some instances, they have nothing on their body other than the tactical vest, okay. They are armed to the teeth, and they are disregarding the Constitution in plain sight. They’re breaking into houses without warrants. They’re breaking windows, pulling people out of cars when they’ve done nothing at all. This is so far afield of what we were taught in school, what we stood for, the thing that you took pride in about America: it’ll never happen here, we have the guardrails, we have the separation of powers. And I think that all of this in Minneapolis has coalesced to show that nothing — nothing — that you believed in is actually true. It’s no longer there, right? And then that leads us back to what is next.
Do you think the siege will change gun rights opponents’ views about the freedom to own one?
Yes, I sure do. Because I think they’ve seen how quickly things can change for them. Because this is an unpredictable government. It’s a — and you can quote me on this — it is a fascist government that cares for no one other than the people who have money.
I read a story recently about a reporter who witnessed his fruit vendor’s arrest. He asked the guy one day why he hadn’t been around as much lately, and he replied, “La migra.” And as the reporter was getting into his car, he heard SUVs pull up behind him, and watched immigration agents immediately hustle the guy into a vehicle without an interview, without asking for ID. That implies that he’d been targeted beforehand. Is there a sense in Minnesota that there are operatives on the street spying on the population, and others snitching on those targets? And does that make you and other Minnesotans paranoid about who you can trust?
Like snitching on your neighbor? I’ve not heard any fear or sentiment about that. ICE using dirty tactics? I mean, apart from what you and I have already talked about, yes.
I mean, there was a report — and I can’t verify this — about them offering food baskets to folks. Putting them on the doorsteps of immigrant families who are not coming out — of course, they don’t have a warrant, so some people are following that rule — and then hoping that people would open the door to get the food baskets.
There have been other reports about ICE trying to get into hospitals. They brought a guy in whose skull was fractured in eight places. They said he ran into a wall. The doctors said it’s impossible that that happened. But they handcuffed the guy to the bed as he was recovering, and then they were going around in the hospital looking for people to pick up.
And there’s the story out of Wilmer, where they went and had lunch at a Mexican restaurant, and then that evening they go and pick up the server and whoever else from the restaurant when it closed.
So these are people who have no moral compass. They obviously really don’t get trained, and they’re just out there armed with pressure from Stephen Miller to just bring people in.
I mean, it is a remarkable sight just to see these guys in regular civilian clothes, like somebody off the street, with all this armor thrown on them, and they’re in Nikes and jeans and a mask.
Well, it is. But I think the country’s becoming accustomed to it. We are not becoming accustomed to it here, though. It’s not becoming normalized here, because it is in our neighborhood, and it’s our people.
Do you think that anything Democrats are doing with holding up the Homeland Security bill is going to have any effect?
No, I don’t. Trump has already learned that you just hold out and they’re going to fold. The only thing that’s going to make a difference is the midterms. And he knows that, and he’s planning for it not to be fair elections. I think he’s angling for that to happen. I’m afraid that he’s going to be able to just declare it like he’s declared so many other things.
I mean, this whole thing about transgender people, okay? There’s no law saying that there’s only a man and a woman, but boy, there’s a whole damn government running with that.
As well as the videos of the Pretti and Good shootings, there’ve been a couple of other notable images among many from the siege, one real and one fake. There was five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from Ecuador…
Oh, Liam. Oh my God.
…wearing his bunny-eared hat and Spider-Man backpack. He and his father were released from a Texas detention center over the weekend, with a searing ruling issued by the judge, if you’ve read that. The other image was fake: a photo doctored by the White House to show the Black woman organizer of the Cities Church protest in St. Paul, Nekima Levy Armstrong, sobbing as she’s perp-walked, when she was anything but. What does that image say to you about the crackdown specifically, and the Trump administration in general?
Well, I mean, certainly what it says about the administration is it’s both cruel and that it can’t be trusted. But there are millions of Americans who now believe that that is how she appeared when she was arrested. And, of course, it’s a Black woman. Same thing with Don Lemon. He’s Black, and the other journalist, Georgia Fort, she’s Black. And so all of that fits into their white supremacist orientation.
But again, as we’ve been talking about, it’s about breaking constitutional norms. Journalists who cover an event, if they start getting arrested, they’re not going to go to the events. And if you don’t have news about the event, you don’t know what happened.
What lessons can Americans across the country take from Minnesotans’ reaction to the siege?
Oh, that you can fight back.
I think that the major takeaway is that we all care about each other. I mean, that’s what I’m hearing all the time: caring about our immigrant community, caring about our neighbors who are out there on the front lines watching or protesting. You know, caring about, obviously, people who are murdered. Just caring. I mean, the Food Bank has got way too many volunteers. It’s getting too much food, you know, because people want to do something.
And so the major takeaway is, we have not lost our heart in America. We haven’t. We’ve not lost our heart. We’ve lost our way, but we haven’t lost our heart. And we just need to empower people to think that they actually can do something about what’s happening, as we’re proving it here in Minnesota.
Protest set at NYC’s Stonewall after Trump administration removes Pride flag from national LGBTQ+ monument
A protest is set for Tuesday afternoon at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City after the Trump administration removed the LGBTQ+ Pride flag from the site. That decision has drawn swift backlash from LGBTQ+ advocates, New York officials, and national civil rights groups who say the move is part of a broader effort to narrow how queer history is told on federal land.
By late Tuesday afternoon, Christopher Park is expected to fill with people who know exactly why they’re there. The gathering, advertised as a community rally to defend “our flag, our park, our history,” was organized after the Pride flag was removed from the Stonewall National Monument, a decision that has turned a quiet patch of Greenwich Village into the latest front line in a national fight over memory, power, and who gets to decide what U.S. history looks like.
The protest, set for 5 p.m., is meant as both a rebuttal and a reminder: a rebuttal to what activists see as an attempt to strip one of the most visible symbols of queer identity from the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and a reminder that Stonewall has never been a place where history stays politely on the page.
The Advocate learned Monday afternoon that the Pride flag flying at the monument had been taken down. The change itself was almost antiseptic with no ceremony, no announcement, no crowd. But on Christopher Street, where history has always arrived with noise and argument, the absence landed like a provocation.
The birthplace of a movement, and a missing symbol
Stonewall is not just a landmark. It is a fault line. In June 1969, patrons of the Stonewall Inn fought back against a police raid, setting off days of unrest that helped ignite the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. The park near the bar, now overseen by the National Park Service, was designated a national monument in 2016. Over time, the Pride flag there became a kind of visual shorthand, not just a marker of identity, but a declaration that this place, of all places, belongs to the community that made it.
The Trump administration claims that the flag’s removal is a bureaucratic matter.
In a statement to The Advocate, the office of U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the move reflects long-standing federal rules governing which flags may fly on government property.
“The policy governing flag displays on federal property has been in place for decades. Under government-wide guidance, including General Services Administration policy and Department of the Interior direction, only the U.S. flag and other congressionally or departmentally authorized flags are flown on NPS-managed flagpoles, with limited exceptions,” the statement said. “Any changes to flag displays are made to ensure consistency with that guidance. Stonewall National Monument continues to preserve and interpret the site’s historic significance through exhibits and programs.”
The White House push to reshape public history
On the day of his inauguration in January 2025, Trump issued an executive order that effectively erased transgender and nonbinary people from federal recognition. Then, in March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order argues that the nation’s story has been “distorted” by what it calls “ideology” and directs federal agencies to review monuments, memorials, museums, and exhibits to ensure they reflect a more “patriotic” and “unifying” account of the past. It frames recent efforts to broaden historical narratives, particularly around race, gender, and sexuality, not as overdue corrections, but as political intrusions into public memory.
The order tasks agencies with rooting out what it describes as “divisive” or “improper” ideological content and replacing it with interpretations that emphasize national pride and cohesion.
A pattern of erasure at Stonewall
For LGBTQ+ advocates, Stonewall, already a site whose meaning has long been contested, quickly became an obvious pressure point.
In February 2025, the National Park Service quietly removed references to transgender and queer people from the official Stonewall National Monument website, replacing “LGBTQ+” with “LGB” and scrubbing language that explicitly acknowledged transgender figures in the uprising. The change triggered protests and condemnation from activists and Democratic lawmakers, who said it erased the contributions of trans New Yorkers widely recognized by historians as central to the events of 1969.
Around the same time, advocates raised alarms that bisexual and pansexual identities were absent from the monument’s federal record, despite decades of scholarship and oral history affirming their presence in the movement’s early days. To critics, these omissions were not random. They looked like a pattern: a version of Stonewall that kept getting narrower, simpler, and more politically convenient.
Those disputes now feel like the prelude to something larger.
“This is a deliberate act of erasure. This is a cowardly attempt to rewrite history and intimidate LGBTQ+ people,” said New York state Sen. Erik Bottcher, who is gay and represents the district that includes the Stonewall area. “Stonewall is where we fought back, and we are not going backwards. We will not be erased, we will not be silenced, and the Pride flag will fly again at the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.”
The office of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not immediately respond to The Advocate’s request for comment.
Speaker of the New York City Council, Julie Menin, told The Advocate in a statement that the area is “sacred ground.”
“It is the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, and the removal of the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument is a deliberate and cowardly attempt to erase that history,” Menin said. “This is an attack on LGBTQ+ New Yorkers, and we will not stand for it. Our history will not be rewritten, and our rights will not be rolled back.”
National groups respond: ‘These colors don’t run’
Human Rights Campaign National Press Secretary Brandon Wolf described the flag’s removal as the latest chapter in a longer campaign against LGBTQ+ visibility.
“Bad news for the Trump administration: these colors don’t run. The Stonewall Inn & Visitors Centers are still privately owned, their flags are still flying high, and that community is still just as queer today as it was yesterday,” Wolf said in a statement. “While their policy agenda throws the country into chaos, the Trump administration is obsessed with trying to suffocate the joy and pride that Americans have for their communities. For over a year, they’ve been on a witch hunt, targeting rainbow crosswalks, pride flags, Black Lives Matter murals, and throwing a tantrum about a Super Bowl performance they couldn’t control. But they will fail.”
GLAAD struck a similar note of defiance, but widened the lens.
“The values of inclusion and freedom represented by the Pride flag cannot be erased,” a GLAAD spokesperson said. “The Pride flag and the Stonewall National Monument both exist to commemorate the courage, resilience, and beautiful diversity of our community. Attempts to censor and diminish visibility are tactics that LGBTQ Americans overcame decades ago, and we will continue to defeat [them] long after these mean-spirited and un-American moves by the Administration have been forgotten. The Pride flag will fly again.”
GLAAD also pointed to what it described as a sustained, documented pattern. Its Trump Accountability Tracker counts at least 439 attacks in policy, proposals, and rhetoric related to LGBTQ+ people and rights, and the organization said it is preparing to add another 23 entries, one of them tied directly to the current dispute.
Among them: a January 27 directive ordering 16 national parks to remove dozens of signs and displays related to climate change, environmental protection, and settlers’ mistreatment of Native Americans as part of a renewed push to implement the administration’s history order.
Stonewall Inn co-owner: ‘You can’t rely on the government to tell our story’
Across the street from the federally managed monument sits the privately owned Stonewall Inn, where Pride flags continue to fly. The contrast between government-regulated space and community-held ground has become its own quiet argument about who controls history and how it’s allowed to appear in public.
In an interview with The Advocate on Tuesday, Stacy Lentz, co-owner of the Stonewall Inn and co-founder and CEO of the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, said the flag’s removal only underscores why LGBTQ+ history cannot be left solely in the hands of federal institutions.
“It really is about how history is being treated under this current administration at federal sites,” Lentz said. She pointed to last year’s changes to the monument’s federal webpages as part of the same trajectory. “Historically, LGBTQ+ communities have learned not to assume the government will tell our story fully or accurately without oversight. That’s not rhetoric. That’s lived experience.”
From the administration’s perspective, the Pride flag is a display that falls outside existing guidance. But Lentz argued that at Stonewall, the flag is not simply political.
“At the birthplace of the LGBTQ rights movement, the Pride flag isn’t just a political symbol,” she said. “It’s a historical one. Its absence raises real questions about how decisions are being made and how histories are being told.”
Lents added, “Stonewall taught us that our history doesn’t survive unless we defend it. The bar has stayed alive because the community chose not to outsource its story to the government.”
‘They’re taking apart our history piece by piece’
Cathy Renna, communications director for the National LGBTQ Task Force, said assurances from the Trump administration about continued exhibits offer little comfort at a site that is, first and foremost, a public park, not a museum gallery.
“They’re taking apart our history piece by piece,” Renna told The Advocate in an interview. When references to transgender people were removed from the monument’s website last year, she recalled, activists organized a protest that drew about a thousand people within 24 hours. She expects a similar response now, and said organizers are already discussing both visible demonstrations and the possibility of putting a rainbow flag back up through community action.
For people looking for what to do next, Renna urged support for community institutions like the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative and the nearby visitor center, which she described as places still telling the full, complicated story of what happened in 1969, unlike what she called the “drip, drip erasure” unfolding across the street.
These 4 promising breakthroughs are bringing HIV researchers closer to a cure
Nearly 45 years after the first HIV diagnosis, science is closer than ever to a cure for the virus that causes AIDS — but we’re not there yet, researchers say.
While perhaps a dozen people worldwide have been declared free of the virus, those results haven’t been replicated widely, and treatments for some involve continuing therapies or procedures, like stem cell and bone marrow transplants, that aren’t feasible for widespread use.
So far, there is no “magic bullet” to cure HIV for good. But scientists are making rapid progress on several fronts and say a cure is within reach. Here’s a roundup of where the latest progress stands.
A golden “supertherapy” that gives HIV a one-two punch
A study from the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), published in August, details how a team of researchers in Brazil succeeded in eliminating HIV from a patient’s body for 78 consecutive weeks with a “supertherapy”, achieving the result with a combination of medications alone and without stem cell transplants or gene therapy.
The study combined potent antiretroviral drugs with innovative compounds including auranofin, a gold salt, that were designed to both activate and eliminate viral reservoirs of HIV while also stimulating the immune system to destroy infected cells in a one-two punch at the virus.
“The patient benefits not only from drug treatment but also from the ability to reduce the viral load to the lowest possible level. The lower the viral load, the closer the patient gets to a cure,” lead investigator Ricardo Sobhie Diaz, director of the Retrovirology Laboratory at UNIFESP told Medscape.
Self-replicating “Stemmy” CD8 cells could help defeat the virus
While now-common antiviral drugs (AVRs) knock back levels of HIV in both blood and tissues, they don’t overcome one major obstacle for an HIV cure: The stubborn “reservoirs” of cells that harbor dormant viral DNA in the body. When people stop taking the drugs, the virus almost always resurges within weeks.
In two independent studies at the University of California at San Francisco and the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard zeroed in on a class of white blood cells known as memory T cells, studded with CD8 receptors, structures on the cellular surface that are essential to immune defense.
Both studies found that precursors to these “killer T cells” are strongly tied to long-term control of HIV after treatment was stopped in some study participants. The precursors have a stem cell–like quality, and they more readily made copies of themselves when the virus started to return.
Stimulating the production of these “stemmy” CD8 cells “might be the key to getting control [over HIV] in more than the small percentage of people who are currently achieving it,” the Ragon Institute’s David Collins told Science magazine.
Steve Deeks, co-leader of the UCSF study, said those cells “may be the magical biomarker we need for a cure.”
A “kick and kill” strategy that may have actually cured one woman
A years-long study in Rwanda has yielded promising results with a strategy that researchers call “kick and kill.”
“HIV doesn’t live in our blood, it lives in reservoirs, whether in the lymph nodes or the liver or the brain, so you need to kick it out” in order to kill it, Krista Dong, an assistant professor also with the Ragon Institute, told NPR in August.
In the study, 20 young women on antiviral therapy for an average of seven years were asked to pause the drugs, allowing the HIV lurking in those reservoirs to emerge.
Researchers flushed it out of hiding with a unique drug called vesatolimod, followed a week later by a one-time infusion of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). Those antibodies were predicted to bind to the virus and summon immune cells to eliminate it.
By trial’s end, four women remained in remission. One would later experience a viral rebound, while two resumed AVR’s, one to ensure a safe pregnancy and the other because a new job precluded her ability to receive regular monitoring.
More than two years after stopping medication, one woman remains HIV-free and off treatment. She could be cured.
“Novel vaccines” can train the immune system to kill HIV
In tandem with research on a cure for HIV, an HIV vaccine is a priority for scientists. So-called “novel vaccines” are key to that effort.
Two research teams reported in May that HIV vaccine approaches — aimed at training the immune system to produce specialized antibodies against the virus — have taken steps forward, POZ magazine reports.
Both studies showed that different engineered immunogens — substances that trigger a specific immune response in the body — could inspire production of precursor immune cells with the potential to produce those same broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) introduced in the Rwanda study to kill off diverse strains of HIV.
“We’ve now shown in humans that we can initiate the desired immune response with one shot and then drive the response further forward with a different second shot,” William Schief, PhD, of Scripps Research, said of the institute’s study of 18 participants in South Africa and Rwanda. “These trials provide proof of concept for a stepwise approach to elicit custom-tailored responses — not just for our vaccine but for the vaccine field at large, including non-HIV vaccines.”
That second shot, or boosting strategy, is designed to guide the immune response along the path toward bnAb production. All those who received both the primer and booster ended up developing antibody responses — most showed “elite” responses with multiple mutations linked to bnAb development.
“What really surprised us was the quality of the immune response we saw after just two shots,” Schief said. “We didn’t anticipate it would be that favorable.”
Florida restores funding for 16,000 people’s HIV medication — for now
The Florida Department of Health is reversing its funding cuts to a program that provides HIV medication for low-income individuals, but only until they can do it legally.
The department published a notice Tuesday backtracking its decision to gut the AIDS Drug Assistance Program after supposedly failing to find $120 million in the state budget to cover it. Instead, the state will attempt to go through the formal rule-making process in order to make the cuts after a lawsuit from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation accused officials of violating the law.
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“The Department’s action makes clear that legal processes have not been followed. Floridians will now have a say in what happens to this program and its effect on them,” Esteban Wood, AHF Director of Advocacy & Legislative Affairs, said in a statement. “It will also provide needed transparency, as the Department has not shown why it needs to make these harmful changes, and show how it now has a claimed $120 million deficit. This program should be fully funded to continue the care needed by thousands across Florida.”
The ADAP helps provide medication to those making up to 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Level ($62,600 or less). Under the proposed cuts, it would only cover those making up to 130 percent of the poverty level ($20,345), impacting over half of the more than 30,000 enrolled in the program.
While the state claims it can’t find the money for the program, a December investigation from the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times found that the Ron DeSantis administration diverted more than $35 million in taxpayer funds to defeat two constitutional amendments on the ballot in 2024. The amendments, which would have legalized recreational marijuana and overturned the state’s six-week abortion ban, each fell short of the 60 percent supermajority required to pass, receiving 56 percent and 57 percent, respectively.
Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried previously told The Advocate that it is “absolutely unconscionable to think that a state of Florida or any government in the United States at this moment, with this amount of research and the advances that we have, either was intentionally or as a consequence of intentional actions, giving tens of thousands of individuals potentially a death sentence.”
“We have the damn money. The damn money is in the state of Florida,” Fried said. “They were able to spend $500 million building Alligator Alcatraz with no big contracts. We are still in a state of emergency for now almost two and a half years. They have the money. They can put the money in the coffers. They’re choosing not to.”
LGBTQI+ Community Mardi Gras Benefit Party Set for Feb. 20 in Rohnert Park
A community-driven Mardi Gras benefit party will take place Friday, Feb. 20, bringing music, celebration and fundraising together in support of LGBTQ+ visibility and community resilience.
The event, Mardi Gras 2026, will be held at Sally Tomatoes and is timed to follow Mardi Gras proper on Feb. 17, extending the season of celebration while centering local impact. The fundraiser is produced by community organizer Athena Rowan with support from regional partners and sponsors.
Proceeds from the event will support LGBTQ+ programming, visibility efforts and mutual-aid initiatives in Sonoma County, with an emphasis on safety and inclusion for transgender and gender-diverse community members.
“This is about celebration with purpose,” Rowan said. “Mardi Gras has always been rooted in community, resistance and joy. We’re honoring that history while making sure the benefits stay local.”
The evening will feature live music from Rotten Tomatoes, drag and burlesque, festive Mardi Gras visuals and a community-forward atmosphere designed to be welcoming and accessible. Admissions start at $25. 18+
Sponsors for Mardi Gras 2026 include Sally Tomatoes, SoCo Pride, and Fast Signs, whose support helps keep the event accessible while funding year-round community work.
Event details, ticket information and accessibility notes will be announced through official event and social media channels.
Event Information
What: Mardi Gras 2026 – Community Benefit Party
When: Friday, Feb. 20
Where: Sally Tomatoes, 1100 Valley House Drive, Rohnert Park
Admission: $25 show and dance; $55 show, dance, and dinner; $400 reserved table of 8; sponsor/VIP packages available
CALL TO ACTION: Stand Up for Sonoma Valley High School LGBTQ+ Students
On February 12, SVHS students and supporters will show up at the Sonoma Valley Unified School District Board meeting to talk about the way in which the pride flag was removed from campus grounds without any public notice or legally required governance. Our community and students deserve accountability for the resulting consequences of this action and exposure of the possible underlying motivation for this action.
Wake UP Sonoma calls for School Board President David Bell, to be censured for his abuse of power, and that he be removed as President of the School Board.
Wake UP Sonoma also calls for the School Board to place the public comment bylaw on the agenda to reverse the recently changed public comment policy back to being allowed up front for items NOT on the agenda. We feel this new process is in place to silence dissent and to minimize public input.
California Code, EDC 35145.5.
Wake UP Sonoma calls for greater transparency within the school board process, and that the BP 5157 Policy which addresses Anti- Discrimination and Harassment be reviewed for compliance with ongoing training mandates for staff put in place in 2024. Records show this was only done one time, but was meant to be annual and ongoing training. Policy link below.
View Regulation 5157: ^Gender Identity and Access
(See section on Curriculum and Training and Harassment and Bullying)
Public presence matters. Strong turnout can help ensure the Pride flag remains a visible symbol of safety, belonging, and inclusion on campus. We want to make sure the students have the chance to speak their mind. Just your presence will be important. Although public comment is scheduled to be near the end of the meeting, the proposal to eliminate the position for student services Director of Equity and Inclusion is the agenda item we can speak to at the beginning. Attachment.aspx.pdf
WHO will continue to provide oversight of inclusive practice to implement required Title 9 laws. WHY would they even consider this action? Removing the flag is an example of why we need this oversight.
If public comment does get pushed to the end by a School Board trying to dodge accountability, we hope you can try to stick around, and talk about your own feelings related to the flag issue. Why inclusion and symbols of inclusion are important, and what is YOUR experience as a parent with homophobia, bullying, and harassment in the school system that has impacted your child. You can speak to why you feel that David Bell’s actions are not appropriate and should have consequences.
WE cannot allow this to continue. We are better than this!
This is the meeting where community voices can ask that the Board eliminate any further debate about the flying of the pride flag on campus. THIS SHOULD NOT BE UP FOR DISCUSSION. The flag should continue to fly. The students have a voice, and they need you to stand behind them.
Sonoma City Chambers
177 First Street West, Sonoma
February 12
Open session begins around 6:00 PM
Be visible – wear your dragon pride shirt or bring a rainbow flag and/or signs of protest
Virtual access available:
https://sonomaschools-org.zoom.us/j/97674745649
Zoom Webinar ID: 976 7474 5649
Phone: +1 669 900 9128
Show up for SVHS students. Show up for inclusive schools. Show up for community.
“Erasure is not neutral”: The inextricable link between LGBTQ+ rights & a functioning democracy
As the second Trump administration passes the one-year mark, LGBTQ+ people across the United States are living through a profound and destabilizing shift. What has unfolded over the past year is a deliberate reorientation of federal power away from civil rights and toward state-sanctioned exclusion.
According to advocates at the Human Rights Campaign, this moment is best understood not as a collection of disconnected policy fights, but as a coordinated effort to roll back decades of progress.
“This administration has shown a glaring lack of care for human life,” Bentley Hudgins, Georgia State Director for the Human Rights Campaign, told LGBTQ Nation. “Anything that affirms the dignity of another human being is being undermined because human dignity and connection are the antithesis of authoritarianism.”
From the first week of the administration, that posture was made clear. President Trump immediately signed a barrage of anti-LGBTQ+ executive actions, including a reversal of federal nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people and the dismantling of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives across the federal government.
According to prior estimates from the Williams Institute, nearly 14,000 transgender federal employees and more than 100,000 LGBTQ+ employees of federal contractors had previously benefited from these protections. Their removal created immediate uncertainty in workplaces where discrimination was already widely underreported.
Miriam, a 42-year-old lesbian federal contractor in Washington, D.C., says the shift has been immediate and chilling. “Before, there was at least a sense that HR had your back,” she said. “Now, I don’t know if reporting something would protect me, or paint a target on me.”
Miriam noted that several LGBTQ+ coworkers have quietly removed pronounsfrom email signatures and stopped attending employee resource group meetings. “It feels like we’re shrinking again,” she added. “Like we’re back in a time we thought we had moved past, where to be safe we have to go invisible.”
Compounding this retreat is the rollback of federal data collection on sexual orientation and gender identity. Changes to surveys and reporting practices mean fewer reliable statistics on LGBTQ+ populations, making it harder to document disparities in health care, housing, employment, and education. Advocates warn that when communities are not counted, their needs are easier to ignore.
One year into Trump’s second term, LGBTQ+ people face an unmistakable contraction of federal protection. Yet the movement for equality has adapted. In the absence of reliable federal leadership, communities are organizing locally, building people power, and linking LGBTQ+ liberation to the broader defense of democracy and human dignity.
This isn’t politics to us
Hudgins emphasized that HRC does not attempt to rank harm because harm is experienced differently across communities. Instead, the organization tracks patterns.
“What we have seen is the executive branch using its power to try to prevent people from accessing healthcare, from participating in public life, from being safe at work or at school,” Hudgins said. “That includes federal workers, parents, children, doctors, and educators.”
Health care has emerged as one of the most consequential battlegrounds. HRC has filed litigation to protect access to gender-affirming care for federal workers after the administration moved to exclude coverage under federal health benefit programs. Federal agencies have also sought to reinterpret civil rights statutes in ways that weaken protections for transgender people in federally funded health programs, a shift documented by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“When you say a trans person should not have access to healthcare because of who they are,” Hudgins explained, “you open the door to denying healthcare to anyone because of who they are.”
Elena, a mother of a 14-year-old transgender boy in Texas, says her family’s clinic has warned them that care may not continue. “They couldn’t give us answers, only ‘maybe’ and ‘We’ll see,’ Elena said.
“How do you explain that to a kid who already feels like the world doesn’t want him?” She described watching her son’s mental health improve after beginning gender-affirming care, and the fear of what could happen if that care is interrupted. “This isn’t politics to us,” she said. “It’s my child’s health. It’s whether he feels safe in his own body.” Medical providers report delaying or limiting services out of fear of regulatory consequences, leaving families to travel long distances or turn to overburdened clinics.
Education policy has followed a similar trajectory. With weakened federal guidance, protections for LGBTQ+ students now vary drastically by state and district. Issues such as bathroom access, participation in school activities, and responses to bullying are increasingly left to local discretion. Internal directives within the Department of Education instructed staff to halt programs that supported transgender students.
Avery, a 17-year-old transgender student in Ohio, says the difference is palpable. “Before, I felt like the school had to take me seriously,” Avery explained. “Now, when kids make comments or use the wrong pronouns on purpose, it’s like administrators don’t know what they’re supposed to do – or they just don’t want to deal with it.”
Avery described avoiding school bathrooms entirely, timing their day around when they can safely go at home. “It sounds small, but it controls your whole day,” they said. “You’re constantly thinking about where you’re allowed to exist.”
Advocates warn that this uncertainty creates fertile ground for harassment and isolation, particularly as national rhetoric emboldens anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment.
Beyond health care and education, the administration has targeted LGBTQ+ people’s presence in public life. The reinstatement of the ban on transgender military service has placed thousands of service members in professional limbo. In early 2025, the administration issued an executive order barring transgender people from military service, and the U.S. Supreme Court allowed enforcementto proceed while legal challenges continue. Thousands of transgender service members now face halted medical care and potential discharge.
A warning sign for everyone
At the same time, LGBTQ+ and HIV-related resources have quietly disappeared from federal websites, eliminating access to reliable public health information and sending a symbolic message about whose lives are valued.
“Erasure is not neutral,” Hudgins said. “When the government removes information about a community, it tells people that they do not exist or do not matter.”
Jamal, a 29-year-old gay man living with HIV in Georgia, noticed the changes immediately.
“It might seem symbolic, but symbols matter,” he said. “When the government removes information about you, it feels like they’re saying you don’t exist, or you don’t deserve help.” Jamal, who volunteers with an HIV outreach organization, worries that misinformation spreads when official resources disappear. “People start trusting rumors instead of facts,” he explained. “That can be dangerous.”
Crucially, Hudgins situates these actions within a broader political project. Rather than viewing attacks on LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, unhoused people, or disabled communities as separate agendas, HRC understands them as interconnected.
“This is not just about LGBTQ people,” Hudgins said. “We share human rights with everyone in this country.”
Scholars and organizers increasingly describe this moment as part of what Reverend Dr. William Barber II has termed the Third Reconstruction, a renewed struggle for racial, economic, and civil justice following the unfinished work of the Civil War and Civil Rights eras.
Despite the scale of the challenges, Hudgins stressed that the past year has also revealed resilience. HRC now counts over 3.6 million members and supportersnationwide. It has expanded rapid response efforts, pursued litigation, and invested heavily in state-level political organizing.
“Voters are rejecting the message that hating your neighbor makes your life better,” Hudgins said.
Rosa, a queer organizer in Arizona, describes a shift in strategy. “We’re no longer assuming federal protection will save us,” she said. “We’re building safety at the community level, know-your-rights training, mutual aid, and rapid response networks.”
Rosa noted that younger activists are organizing with fewer illusions about political permanence. “They understand that rights can be taken away,” she said. “So they’re organizing like it matters, because it does.” Advocates are also urging politicians to change how they frame LGBTQ+ equality, connecting it to broader democratic values such as privacy, bodily autonomy, and freedom from government intrusion. “When LGBTQ+ rights are attacked,” Rosa added, “it’s a warning sign for everyone.”
For Hudgins, the lesson of the past year is clear.
“Visibility alone isn’t protection,” he said. “Laws matter. Community matters. And we can’t afford to be complacent.”
In short, the fight has changed. But it is far from over.