An OpEd by Dr. Bernard Schlager, Executive Director of CLGS at Pacific School of Religion
BERKELEY, Calif. — Only a month now into the new administration, the cascade of anti-LGBTQ actions on the part of President Trump and his appointees feels overwhelming, but we shouldn’t be surprised given how closely Trump is hewing to the ultra-conservative Project 2025, a plan that calls for, among other things, dismantling the nation’s current and hard-fought legal protects for LGBTQ persons. Not only has the Trump administration called for the government’s recognition of only two genders, it has also banned Transgender persons from serving openly in the US military, sought to prevent access to healthcare for Trans youth, and called for preventing Trans people from participation in sports.
The Trump administration is working at a furious pace to demonize, ostracize, and even criminalize queer people for who we are, and two (among many) recent events demonstrate how Trump 2.0 is seeking to erase us LGBTQ people from the hard-won visibility that we have achieved in the US over the past half century.
On Valentines Day 2025, National Public Radio reported that the website for the Stonewall National Monument in New York City’s Greenwich Village had “been stripped of any mention of transgender people” and that the site had also removed “the ‘T’ from the previously used acronym ‘LGBTQ+’” In addition, NPR reported, the word “queer” has also been eliminated from the monument’s website. With this, we are witnessing an attempt by the federal government under Trump’s leadership to erase Trans and queer people from a national monument that is sacred to LGBTQ people and our allies in the United States and beyond.
For many of us who identify as LGBTQ, we can recall the powerful moment in our own lives when we, to use traditional terminology, “came out of the closet” and acknowledged to ourselves and to others what we knew (and still know) to be true about our gender identities and/or sexual orientations. To come out is an act that can be at once political, spiritual, revolutionary, and life-changing. To come out means not going back into closets of hiding, closets of shame, closets that deny our full humanity, and closets that serve to erase us.
What we are witnessing here, of course, is an attempt by Trump and his followers to erase the absolutely critical role that Trans and queer people played in sparking the Stonewall Riots that began in the first hours of 28 June 1969. Many of those who were at the forefront of the riots were Trans People of Color like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two pivotal actors in this watershed event in LGBTQ history whose role in this uprising went unacknowledged for decades. And now the National Park Service, dutifully following Trump’s orders, is attempting to erase them – once again – from the story of Stonewall.
Another example: on 18 February 2025 OperaWire reported that a long-awaited appearance of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC had been abruptly canceled within only weeks of Trump taking office. This joint performance by the symphony and chorus was to be part of the Center’s May 2025 celebration of WorldPride 2025, which is scheduled to be held in our nation’s capital. Like the erasure of Trans and queer people from the Stonewall National Monument website, the dis-invitation of the Chorus was accomplished by a sudden but stealthy “disappearance” of the event from the Kennedy Center’s website soon after a newly-constituted board at the Center elected Trump as its chairman.
And this from a president who was once quoted as saying that he was one of “millions of allies [of LGBTQ people] who will always have your back” after the horrific 16 June 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando.
What is going on?
M. Gessen, author of The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and an opinion columnist for the New York Times, has written recently in the Times (15 February 2025) that Trump’s many “bad ideas” (including his attacks on Trans people and immigrants) are “standard autocratic fare.” That is, by flooding the world with his many bad ideas Trump is following a script used often by totalitarian regimes: what upon first glance may appear ludicrous becomes normalized by repeatedly forcing people to consider such bad ideas.
It certainly seems that Trump is following the playbook used by his hero Putin in Russia a few decades ago, as Gessen has reminded us in a recent radio interview: the Russian leader successfully seized autocratic power of the country by claiming early on, for example, that Russian sovereignty was under threat from the LGBTQ community. Over time such preposterous ideas, such “bad ideas,” once considered ridiculous can come to seem less preposterous by a public that becomes exhausted by the rapid onslaught of such rhetoric from politicians desperate for more power.
What can we do?
We can turn to our own history for examples of fighting the kind of insidious erasure of LGBTQ people that the Trump administration is attempting to carry out in many areas of our national life. When President Eisenhower, for example, issued Executive Order 10450 in 1957, an order which barred homosexuals from federal employment because they were deemed to threaten national security, there were some brave individuals who refused to take this order quietly. And at the front of the line was the gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny, who was fired from his position as an astronomer employed by the federal government.
In response to his dismissal on the grounds of his homosexuality, Kameny fought back by appealing his case to the courts, and, although he was not rehired by the federal government, he demonstrated to other LGBTQ people that speaking out and demanding equal protection under the law is the only way to counter attempts by those in power to erase us from society.
And these attempts to erase queer people – beginning with Trans people – are only increasing in Trump’s second administration. Just yesterday (27 February 2025) Iowa legislators passed a bill which is expected to be signed by the governor, removes the civil rights of Transgender Iowans which have been enshrined in state law since 2007. As Aime Wichtendahl, a Trans Democrat state representative has noted, “The purpose of this bill, the purpose of every anti-trans bill, is to further erase us from public life and to stigmatize our existence”.
Now more than ever we need to call to mind our queer ancestors who fought their own erasure from society. From Frank Kameny to the 1966 Compton Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco and, yes, to the Stonewall Inn Riots three years later – these are just a few examples of those before us who stood up to injustice and took a stand against politicians, religious leaders, and others in power who have sought to deny us our human and civil rights by demonizing us and attempting to ostracize us from society.
But no: we will not be erased!
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Contact:
Jacob Perez
Pacific School of Religion
510-849-8239
[email protected]
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of RNS or Religion News Foundation.