The U.S. Senate on Monday confirmed Scott Bessent, President Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, in a rare bipartisan vote of 68-29.

Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager, becomes the first openly gay, Senate-confirmed Republican Cabinet member. He’s also the highest-ranking out gay government official ever, as Treasury Secretary is fifth in the line of presidential succession. 

It’s hard to make sense of the disconnect here: On one hand Trump makes history with a senior gay appointment; on the other, he launches cruel attacks on the transgender community on day one. 

The Republican-led House last week passed a bill that would prohibit schools that receive federal education funding from allowing trans students to play girls’ and womens’ sports. Trump, meanwhile, has already banned Pride flags at U.S. embassies and eliminated the X gender marker on passports and other government documents. Trump’s executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” would prohibit the federal government from recognizing people and populations whose birth sex does not match their gender identity. Additionally, the order directs the attorney general to allow “people to refuse to use a transgender or nonbinary person’s correct pronouns, and to claim a right to use single-sex bathrooms and other spaces based on sex assigned at birth at any workplace covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and federally funded spaces.”

Then on Monday, he issued an executive order banning transgender service members, a move that would impact more than 15,000 brave trans people serving in the military.

So far, Bessent is silent on those attacks. Trump likes his queer people gay, white, cis, rich, and obedient. Bessent has defended Trump’s self-serving tax cut plan for the wealthiest Americans as well as his misguided and destructive tariff obsession. 

Kelley J. Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, released a statement about Bessent’s nomination.

“We need pro-equality LGBTQ+ nominees and LGBTQ+ people at all levels of government. The LGBTQ+ community is counting on openly LGBTQ+ nominees like Scott Bessent to step up for the community,” Robinson wrote. “HRC has a long history of working across the aisle to advance equality and this appointment may be an opportunity to continue.”

We have entered a dangerous time that will require many of us to make decisions about how to respond to these attacks, not just on trans people, but immigrants who are already being arrested and deported in cities across the country. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott is making plans for how the city will operate in the event he is arrested and jailed for refusing to cooperate with these immigrant raids. That’s what courage looks like. 

Will Bessent find his backbone and work to convince his boss that the anti-trans hysteria must end? Does he have a trans person in his life who might inform his views? Trans people are human beings, fellow Americans, and family and friends and they deserve respect from their government. They deserve an advocate in the White House who sees their humanity and can articulate it while standing up to the powerful bigots in Trump’s orbit. I hope HRC’s Robinson is right and Bessent will find the courage to stand up for the full spectrum of the LGBTQ community but we haven’t seen any evidence of that yet. 

It’s not just senior gay officials who need to stand up; many of us will likely face a decision to resist or comply with the unconstitutional actions of this administration. Too many former progressive allies have already folded like cheap tents — including MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. We must look to the example of Mayor Scott and others who are refusing to capitulate to this madness. I hope Scott Bessent finds his voice and advocates for a more compassionate approach to trans humanity. 

Kevin Naff is editor of the Washington Blade. Reach him at [email protected].

What do Snoop Dogg and Caitlyn Jenner have in common? No, this isn’t the setup for a bad joke — it’s a tragic reality. They’ve become poster children for the misguided belief that cozying up to power structures that openly despise them will somehow buy them a permanent seat at the table — or at least a pat on the head from the same people pulling the strings. Spoiler alert: it won’t.

Take Caitlyn Jenner, for example. She’s been an active Trump supporter and continues to actively work to push legislation that threatens her very existence. While she’s off applauding his presidential win, the ink is barely dry on his executive orders mandating she be referred to by her dead name.

Rather than taking a stand against these policies, she’s leaned into her wealth and privilege, banking on it to shield her from the harm those same policies inflict on the trans community. Why? Because she’s rich and insulated from the struggles and discrimination most trans people face. She can retreat to her Malibu mansion and comfortably tune out everyone else’s reality.  Because as long as Trump is coming up with ways to keep her rich — that’s all that really matters.  

Newsflash: privilege isn’t bulletproof and proximity to power doesn’t erase the hate aimed in her direction.

Then there’s Snoop Dogg and his ilk, rappers who once stood as cultural titans now bending over backward to cozy up to the Trump tax bracket.  After years of using the community to build their stacks, they are perfectly content to throw the same people who put them in their comfy tax bracket under the bus for a front-row seat at a table that was never built for them. They’ve swapped authenticity and influence for the illusion of inclusion, all while pretending the check is worth it.  It’s not–they know it, we know it.  It’s the reason at the domino table we say, “All ain’t good money.”

What they don’t seem to realize — or flat-out refuse to — is that their proximity to whiteness (in the case of Snoop and company) or wealth and privilege (in Caitlyn’s case) doesn’t shield them from the systems they claim to have transcended. Those systems will gladly facilitate (and celebrate) their selling out while continuing to dehumanize and disenfranchise the very communities they come from and should be fighting for. It’s not respect they’re earning — it’s betrayal.  

It’s not just disappointing — it’s dangerous when public figures like Snoop Dogg or Caitlyn Jenner trade their influence for proximity to power, they’re not just letting down their communities — they are actively legitimizing the systems that harm them. They are showing the next generation that progress is negotiable, everyone can be bought, and that fighting for equity can take a back seat to personal gain. 

There’s a gut-punch of disappointment we feel after building up people like Snoop, only to watch them back systems that harm their own. And the pity for someone like Caitlyn, who thinks her money outweighs her self-respect. We need to hold folks accountable — mark this date on your calendar. So when these celebs inevitably flip-flop and come crawling back for the community’s support — be it a new album, reality television series, film — whatever — we remember, decline the call, and leave them on read.

Selling out isn’t just a choice for them — it’s become their brand.

Singing the hook to Chris Brown’s Loyal, “Aww, these h*es ain’t loyal.”

A member of hip-hop generation, Jasmyne Cannick is based in Los Angeles and is an award-winning journalist and political commentator who speaks and writes to challenge, critique, and hold the culture accountable.

Thank you, President Biden, for the Israel/Hamas ceasefire agreement and for all you have done for the country.

I know President Felon will want to take all the credit for the Israel/Hamas ceasefire. The fact is, the blueprint for this ceasefire was announced by President Biden on May 31, and hailed by the UN. Clearly Trump’s threat to Hamas moved the needle, and I am sure his envoy, who President Biden invited to join the talks, was helpful. But as the Biden spokesperson told Craig Melvin on the “Today” show, there is more than enough credit to go around, and the hostages surely don’t care as long as they come home. I really think the media need to stop dealing with the minutia, and focus on what’s important. 

The nation needs to thank President Biden, and his team, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and his deputy, Jon Finer along with all the other negotiators including Brett McGurk, part of the Biden team, and Steve Witkoff for Trump. Clearly strong roles were played by Egypt and Qatar, all working diligently to bring this day about. 

With the support of the United States, Israel remains strong. President Biden helped put together the coalition, which helped Israel defend itself against Iranian attacks. Now will come an even harder part, and it will fall to the Trump administration. We will see Trump’s true colors. Will he simply help his company build new hotels in Israel, which they are trying to do, or will he move to help in the rebuilding of Gaza, and give full support to the Palestinian people. We as a nation must be a big part of rebuilding Gaza. We must move to bring about a free and stable Palestinian state, one that can support itself. That may be a dream, but it is one the United States, and the rest of the world, should be working toward. It is the only way there will ever be a true, lasting, and fair peace, in the region.

I listened to President Biden’s last speech to the nation, and was really proud of him, and proud to be an American. History will view Joe Biden as one of our best presidents. He took office when the COVID pandemic was still in full swing, and people were debating how to start getting back to their lives as they knew them. Trump left the nation in a mess. The economy stalling, millions of jobs lost, and people suffering. More than one million people died of COVID. Our troops were still in Afghanistan and inflation was beginning to rise. President Biden signed the American Rescue Act, which among other things sent checks to millions of Americans. His mistake was that contrary to when Trump sent out checks, he didn’t sign his name to them. He followed that with the Inflation Reduction Act, making huge investments in the American economy, in the areas of energy and climate, among others. He followed that with the first gun control measure in decades, and then the infrastructure bill. He next signed the CHIPS Act, and more. While inflation rose to 9%, his administration worked hard, and with their effective economic policies, have brought it down. Trump will inherit the best economy in the world, with inflation at 2.9%. The stock market is booming, and Biden added nearly 16 million jobs during his term, more than any other one-term president in history. Manufacturing in the nation is booming.

President Biden stood strong against China and Russia. His efforts strengthened NATO and so far, seen that Ukraine remains a free and independent country. Our troops are not fighting anywhere on foreign soil. 

President Biden is right, and we must definitely fear the oligarchy that surrounds Trump. We must fear the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and the other multi-billionaires who have attached themselves to Trump for their own greed and betterment. They don’t care about truth, and they don’t care about the rest of us. 

The next four years will be a time to join the resistance to prevent us from going backwards. We must resist legally, and without force, but for those of us who want our democracy to survive we need to keep speaking out. We must work to win elections in Virginia and New Jersey in 2025. Then focus on taking back the House of Representatives in 2026. We can do both, and we must, if we are to ensure the experiment that is the United States, survives and thrives, as we celebrate 250 years in existence. 

Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.

In 1977, Anita Bryant, who recently died, made the career mistake of a lifetime when she began an anti-gay campaign in Miami. Her campaign failed for two important reasons.

First, Bryant mistook the political strength of the gay movement across the U.S. Secondly, her use of religion to promote a campaign of bigotry raised serious questions about her honesty.

After being crowned Miss Oklahoma in 1958, Bryant spent the next two decades performing at state fairs, veterans’ events, religious and charity events, and churches. She performed with Bob Hope’s U.S.O. tours and visited veterans’ hospitals. She promoted Christian living and Florida orange juice. She once said she had abundant energy because “the Lord Jesus is my Vitamin C.” 

In 1977, Bryant and husband Bob Green, a former Miami radio disc jockey, began an anti-gay campaign called “Save Our Children.” The campaign’s goal was to reverse Miami-Dade County’s policy barring discrimination against gays. She raised concerns about gay teachers in public schools.  

Bryant’s anti-gay campaign raised questions about her professed Christian faith. She criticized “cowardly clergy” for their silence on fighting gay rights.

By the late 1970s, Bryant and her husband had published several books about their Christian faith. Bryant’s book tours were a mix of entertainment, self-promotion, with a dose of religion. When reporters asked her who wrote the books, Bryant arrogantly said, “The Lord wrote my books.” When it was later revealed she hired a ghost writer, Bryant’s honesty became an issue.

Celestine Sibley, a veteran columnist for The Atlanta Journal, wrote “The Truth is I Don’t Care for Anita Bryant,” on Sept. 7, 1978. Sibley disliked Bryant’s sanctimonious claim that Jesus wrote her books when the books were ghosted.

In support of gays, Sibley quoted sections of Lord Alfred Douglas’s letters to his mother about his love affair with author Oscar Wilde. His mother urged her son to leave Wilde. Douglas asked her what she could give him in exchange for his lover. Douglas wrote: “Who is going to ‘feed my soul with honey of sweet bitter though?’ Who is going to make me happy when I’m sad, depressed, and ill at ease?” The column was fine journalism for its time. It was an eloquent way of supporting gays.

The newspaper published dozens of reader letters in response to Sibley’s column. One writer said Bryant was “a loudmouth ignoramus.” Writers overwhelmingly supported Sibley. Many writers called Sibley courageous for opposing Bryant’s anti-gay campaign.

In a 1978 Knight-Ridder article, Jean O’Leary, a former nun and an executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said Anita Bryant was “the best thing that ever happened to us.” Her appreciation for Bryant was shared by other gay activists. The anti-gay rights movement had a face. The face of Anita Bryant.

In San Francisco, gay activist Harvey Milk, as quoted in “The Mayor of Castro Street” by Randy Shilts, said, “Anita Bryant herself pushed the gay movement ahead and the subject can never be pushed back into darkness.” If Bryant had felt the gay rights movement was weak, unorganized, and unable to fight against her campaigns, she soon learned a lesson.

In the May 1978 issue of Playboy magazine, Bryant said that she had survived “numerous close calls with mayhem” and that she “expects to be killed by homosexuals.” She said that “twenty years in jail would rehabilitate homosexuals.” Husband Bob Green said, “let’s face it – when some militant homosexual kills Anita, the guy will be an instant hero.”

Christian Century magazine, in 1978, published poll results on religious influencers. President Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist layman, and Anita Bryant were among the top influencers.

By the time of her 1980 interview in Ladies’ Home Journal, Bryant was a changed woman. She was divorced. She admitted to suicidal thoughts. She admitted to taking tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and wine due to “the pressures of her work and family life.” She declared bankruptcy.  

Bryant made another important admission in Ladies’ Home Journal. She admitted to an attitude of “live and let live” toward gays. One New York journalist called this admission Bryant’s “Coming Out” as a human being.”

James Patterson is a Washington, D.C.-based writer.

Land back. 

The rest of it should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. 

For too long we have relied on unreliable and unsustainable forms of living that are disconnected from nature and connected to colonization. It is time to not only recognize the importance of indigenous practices and decriminalize them, but to also give the land back to indigenous communities that know how to care for the land and learn from their way of life.

After spending two days in the Altadena neighborhoods ravaged by the Eaton Canyon fire last week, I went home feeling defeated, distraught and overwhelmed by the amount of destruction and loss I witnessed. After I decompressed and changed into fresh clothes, I engaged in conversation with my dad, who was watching the evening news in the living room. The segment was on the updates of the fires ravaging through Los Angeles. The news camera focused on the single aircraft carrying water over the fire and dropping it from above. In comparison to the scale of the fire, the water seemed to do little to tame the flame. 

My dad watched in amazement, not because he was impressed by the aircraft or the size of the out-of-control fire, but because he was genuinely convinced that if it were up to him, the fires would have been extinguished long before it reached the neighborhoods it burned through. 

This scene seemed to send him on a trip to the past – to a time where he was one with the land, manipulating the elements to produce a rich harvest in his family’s riverside ranch. 

My father is one of thirteen children who contributed to the daily chores on the small family ranch. My father and grandfather worked tirelessly side-by-side to produce harvests that were not only enough to feed their family, but also enough to share with their neighbors. 

My father’s side of the family is from Guadalajara – a city in Jalisco, the state known as the birthplace of Mariachi and tequila. Jalisco is also known for its deep revolutionary history that is recorded as far back as the year 1540, with The Mixtón Rebellion which formed after the Indian population of western Mexico rebelled against Spanish rule. 

During this time, the area that encompassed the state of Jalisco, was known as Nueva Galicia and it also stretched over Aguascalientes, Zacatecas, Nayarit and the northwest corner of San Luis Potosí. 

In 1621, Domingo Làzaro de Arregui wrote in his Descripción de la Nueva Galicia, that 72 native languages were spoken in the Spanish colonial province which stretched across 86,733 square miles. Jalisco has an extensive history of indigenous uprisings and rebellions. 

What I learned from my father during our conversation last Thursday was that he and his father practiced a type of pseudoscience that worked for them and the land they farmed on. They practiced the indigenous method of starting controlled fires in an effort to produce soil rich with nutrients and free of impurities that would stump the growth of the crops they grew – rice, corn, cucumbers and more. 

“When we didn’t want the fire to spread past a certain point in the field, we would create a ring of fire by hitting the line of fire with green shrubbery,” said my father in Spanish.

When they were satisfied with the plot of land that was to be burned, they extinguished the fire entirely and without the use of other resources such as water. 

California has a record of several historic fires that have wiped out thousands of square miles worth of land and hurt many communities. Global warming has brought on many challenging years for California such as many record-breaking years of little to no rain, high wind conditions and a landscape that makes it particularly difficult to extinguish larger scale fires. 

In 2018, I was living in Lake Elsinore when the Holy Fire broke out in the Cleveland National Forest, a piece of land stretching from Corona to Irvine in southern California. It was the closest I had ever been to what seemed like the opening of a portal to the underworld – prompting evacuations of the small city of Lake Elsinore and the small population living in the forest area. 

That same year, the Camp Fire grew into one of the state’s deadliest and most destructive fires on record, devastating the towns of Paradise and Concow in northern California. In 2021, the Dixie Fire raged on for months, ravaging through northern California. 

In 2022, The University of California published an article and produced a video about the cultural practice of burning forests. 

According to the article, it isn’t just a cultural practice, it is a way to populate the dense forests we see today in places like Yosemite. It is a vital practice to ensure that more vegetation thrive and impurities in the soil are burned to make way for native plants to flourish. According to the article “…ecological records and oral Indigenous history alike describe how fire, sparked by lightning or planned by tribes, played a vital role in shaping California’s landscape for thousands of years.” 

In the early 1900’s it was suggested that anyone who started a fire would be shot – a remnant of European rule that regarded cultural burning as primitive or the opposite of civilized. 

In September, CalMatters published an article written by Russell Attebery, chairman of the Karuk tribe – a federally recognized tribe overseeing more than 1 million acres of land in Humboldt and Siskiyou counties along the Klamath River. 

In the article, he points out that California’s history of out-of-control fires are due in large part, to ignoring the wisdom of indigenous people that have worked for them and the land for thousands of years. 

Attebery makes the argument that not only is fire essential to Karuk culture, but that it is also “…not just a tool — it’s a lifeline, a means of renewal, and a vital part of our culture. For generations, our ceremonies have honored the essential role of fire in maintaining the health of our forests, the regeneration of plants and the sustenance of our communities.” 

Since the article was published, SB 310 was passed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, acknowledging tribal sovereignty over cultural burning for the first time in California’s history. 

This became the first step toward the process of righting historical wrongs and although it is progress, this law only decriminalizes the cultural practice. It does not grant Indigenous people the right to control the land that is rightfully theirs. 

When Andrew Joseph White, a 26-year-old transgender author, released his third novel, “Compound Fractures,” a young adult thriller, last fall, it became an instant New York Times, USA Today, and Indie bestseller. 

This book is a story about an autistic trans* boy who was dragged into a generational feud. It also mentioned President-elect Donald Trump and his influence on the working class in the American South. The popularity of this novel among young readers shows that modern day teenagers are more political than some folks from older generations expect them to be. 

The novel became a bestseller in the midst of the 2024 presidential campaign and White, in his letter to readers, confessed that he wanted to give it a different intro, but had to speak about how tough it is to be a young trans* person in modern-day America. 

Donald Trump on Dec. 22 confirmed the fears of A.J. White and millions of other LGBTQ folks from Z and Alpha Generations. At the AmericaFest conference, Trump promised to “stop the transgender lunacy” on the first day of his presidency. He was particularly speaking up against trans* young people’s rights, and against trans* adults’ rights to work with young people. 

Donald Trump’s election also increased worries about censorship around children’s and young adult literature, especially in public and school libraries. 

A new report by PEN America showed that during the 2023-2024 school year, book bans increased by nearly 200 percent, targeting not just books about gender and sexuality, but also about racial discrimination, mental health, substance abuse, and other social problems that young people are facing in the everyday world. Such bans are not just making printed books unacceptable for youth who cannot afford buying their own copies. They may prevent authors from writing new books for younger generations, which will also affect American mass culture.

Republicans throughout the U.S. for a long time have behaved more and more authoritarian toward youth. Republicans are trying to attack LGBTQ youth everywhere, erasing them from academia and implementing social media restrictions.

It is tough to be a young person in modern-day America under any administration, even without new laws. All American citizens under 18 can easily be prevented from expressing their religious and political beliefs, forced to stay in abusive environments, can be medicated and institutionalized without their consent, can be separated from their supportive community if their parents say so. Young people under 18 can also be tried in adult court, but they cannot vote or run for office. 

All the decisions about their rights are made by people from the older generation. 

It is legal to pay young people less for their work, and deny the right to manage their property. Young people from non-supportive families are denied any chances to have normal lives until they turn 18, or even 21. This is basically the situation in most Western cultures, but American teenagers could start to change the system with more informational freedom and support.

But now Donald Trump and his supporters are trying to make everyone believe that young people cannot have their own gender identity, do not have any rights to their body autonomy, and should not be asked about their own feelings until they turn 18. Republicans have also tried to deny young people basic knowledge about the complicated world around them, as if this knowledge could be magically downloaded into a person’s mind when they turn 18. 

These dangerous trends will create a generation who is used to obeying, but not very used to thinking for themselves and trusting their own feelings. It is basically a very anti-American, anti-individualistic, and authoritarian tendency. 

This tendency could have a long-lasting impact on world politics. 

It is not an exaggeration to say that no other culture has had such a global impact on the way people around the world think than the American culture, and it is especially true on LGBTQ issues.

When I was an LGBTQ activist in Russia and Ukraine, my fellow post-Soviet activists spoke more about Stonewall and the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco than about the persecution of LGBTQ people in the Soviet Union. By my own experience as a person who was into LGBTQ blogging and journalism in the post-USSR; the videos, posts, features, and essays on LGBTQ issues that you could find on Ukrainian and Russian social media were either a direct translation from English or based on language that American LGBTQ activists created. 

Young LGBTQ people around the world are learning to speak for themselves by watching their peer influencers on English-language platforms.

As a young transgender person from Ukraine who had never heard the word trans* until I was a teenager, I understood that I was trans* since I could remember myself. I began accepting myself only after I read more about the American LGBTQ movement.

I saw a lot of young people from Eastern Europe and the Middle East for whom Lana Watchevski became a first name when they came out to their parents, or the first person who helped them to believe that yes, they could be trans* and have a fulfilling life. Folks accepted their transgender peers because there was a transgender person in a Kardashian show. And we badly need more LGBTQ films, cartoons and books for young people, and more freedom for LGBTQ youth to find their own communities. All of this will more likely come from the U.S.

I think Americans would wonder if they find out how often I saw a situation like that — a young queer Gen Z Tatar person from a small, almost isolated Russian village — or situations when a Gen Z refugee person from Iran felt comfortable to chat about American LGBTQ culture, and use it to explain their own cultural context. American culture, and America’s online spaces are quite universal. 

The same rules work for conservatives. 

It is not enough that such dictators as Vladimir Putin, who mirror old American anti-LGBTQ conspiracies in his statements, say that LGBTQ ideas are dangerous for children, or conservative people all around the world began to use “groomer” rhetoric to describe people who support LGBTQ rights for young people when the pro-Trump Q-Anon movement went global. It is not just endangering LGBTQ youth worldwide, but increasing a gap in mentality between different generations. 

But LGBTQ young people already know that there is something unusual about them, and they need information to figure out who they are. Americans could provide it via mass culture. It is worthy to note that Gen Z is much better at understanding the power of the internet, and American Gen Zers could literally make America greater by helping marginalized people in other countries.

Moreover, LGBTQ young people in America are speaking about their experience. 

They are able to say what they need. All we need to do is listen, or we will have an international atmosphere where the new generation was raised in denial of basic rights to be themselves, and prevented from learning and thinking independently. 

Editor’s note: The author uses trans* in order to be inclusive of nonbinary and gender queer people.

It’s September 1998, and I’m at lunch with several other journalists and a grandmother. As I sip my Coke, I hear a friendly male voice. You can tell he’s smiling. “Time to shake hands now,” he says.

We’re at the Carter Center in Atlanta for a few days. The other reporters and I have received Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. The grandma sitting with us is former first lady Rosalynn Carter, and the man with the warm smile is former President Jimmy Carter. “As soon as we get on a plane,” Mrs. Carter says, “Jimmy walks down the aisles and shakes hands with everybody. He knows they want to say hi to him.”

Jimmy Carter died Dec. 29 in hospice care in Georgia. President Biden declared Thursday a National Day of Mourning and Carter’s funeral will take place at Washington National Cathedral that day. After the funeral, Carter and his family will return to Plains, Ga. to Maranatha Baptist Church for a private funeral and then to Carter’s private residence for interment.

Twenty-five years ago, we journos were at the Carter Center to meet with experts in mental health so we could report accurately on the issue.  

The fellowship program was founded in 1996 by Rosalynn Carter. Mrs. Carter, who died in 2023 at age 96, was no mere figurehead. She knew every detail about our fellowship projects. Heaven help us, if she’d caught us asleep at the switch.

It takes nothing away from Mrs. Carter to note how essential her personal and professional partnership with her husband Jimmy Carter was to her and her work.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were married in 1946. The first thing that hit you when you saw them together was how deeply they loved each other. There was nothing sappy about how they were with each other.

One morning, President Carter ambled into the conference room before our session on stigma and mental health was about to begin. Kenneth W. Starr had just delivered his report on (then) President Bill Clinton’s alleged abuses and affair with Monica Lewinsky. Naturally, we, the reporters in the room, asked Jimmy Carter how he felt about Bill Clinton. We were committed to mental health journalism. But, a former president was there – standing by the wall.

President Carter didn’t seem to want to hold back. He said he didn’t think that highly of Bill Clinton. But, before he could go on to say more, Mrs. Carter gave him a look. The look you give your spouse after decades of loving togetherness. Especially, if you’re a political couple and your mate’s being grilled by scribes eager to make news. “I know,” Jimmy Carter said, smiling, to Rosalynn Carter, his most ardent supporter and astute critic, “I’m talking too much, darlin’. I’m leaving now.”

You could tell how proud President Carter was of Mrs. Carter. At lunch or dinner, you’d see him nodding approvingly at her when she spoke of her work. You could see it in how he teased her. “Rosalynn talks about mental health all the time,” Jimmy Carter said, with a laugh, one night, as he saw Mrs. Carter chatting with us about how the media reported on mental health.

What I most recall about Jimmy Carter is his generosity of spirit. “I beat Jerry Ford,” President Carter said, “but Rosalyn and I are good friends with the Fords now.”

He wasn’t using the word “friends” in the way politicos often do. The Carters and the Fords were friends who worked together on mental health and other issues.

I hadn’t yet come out as a lesbian when I was at the Carter Center. But I didn’t feel I had to remain closeted or silent about my (then) partner. Carter was, what today likely would be an oxymoron: a born-again Christian, who welcomed everyone.

The Carter Center, which the Carters founded after his presidency, is like a theme park, where, instead of standing in line for attractions, people work to resolve conflicts and eradicate diseases.

Thank you, President Carter for your work, humanity and being an LGBTQ ally. R.I.P., Jimmy Carter.

Kathi Wolfe, a writer and poet, was a regular contributor to the Blade. She wrote this tribute just before she passed away in June 2024.

Jimmy Carter is venerated for his many notable accomplishments including support for African-American civil rights, Nobel Prize recipient, energy security, conservation, transportation deregulation, and remarkable post-presidency accomplishments, among others. As to LGBTQ rights, Carter’s less than admirable White House legacy reflects societal prejudices during his 1977 to 1981 presidency.

At the 1972 Democratic National Convention, the Platform Committee rejected by a vote of 54 to 34 a plank to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. At that convention, Jim Foster and Madeline Davis became the first openly gay delegates to address a national political convention’s plenary session. Foster and Davis’s addresses on July 12 were scheduled at 5 a.m. for Minority Report #8, which Walter Cronkite called “the Gay Lib plank.”

As a 1976 presidential candidate, Carter courageously endorsed the Equality Act, which would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include sexual orientation. Carter appointed Midge Constanza, a closeted lesbian to head his Office of Public Liaison. Constanza, a former Rochester City Council member, had served as Carter’s New York State campaign coordinator. Constanza was the only woman in a senior position on Carter’s White House staff. 

On March 26, 1977, Constanza hosted the first meeting of gay representatives at the White House. The group of 12 included gay pioneer Frank Kameny, Rev. Troy Perry, and Jenn O’Leary and Bruce Voeller, co-chairs of the National Gay Task Force. After being alerted by a National Gay Task Force press release, major news organizations covered the story. The following day, Anita Bryant, who started a Christian crusade against homosexual rights stated that the Office of the President had been duped into blessing an abnormal lifestyle and vowed to “lead such a crusade to stop homosexuals as this country has not seen before.”

By 1978, Constanza was demoted; her office moved from adjoining the Oval Office to the basement; and her staff of more than a dozen cut to one. In August 1978, she resigned.

In November 1977, Harvey Milk became a San Francisco Supervisor. He was one of the first openly gay Americans to be elected to public office. In 1978, Milk was assassinated. That year 70% of Americans opposed discrimination protections based on sexual orientation. In 1979, Carter launched his campaign for reelection. 

At the 1980 Democratic National Convention, 77 of the seated delegates were openly gay and lesbian up from the handful at the 1976 convention. Melvin Boozer, an African-American Ph.D. from Yale and head of the DC Gay Activists Alliance was nominated for vice president of the United States. In Boozer’s remarks, he stated he wouldn’t accept the nomination, but called on delegates to adopt the gay rights plank.

Twelve years later, at the 1992 Democratic National Convention and with the support of party presidential candidate Bill Clinton that Bob Hattoy, a gay man with AIDS and Roberta Achtenberg, cofounder of the National Center for Lesbian Rights became the first openly gay delegates to address the convention in prime time. There were rainbow flags and signs for “Lesbian and Gay Rights Now!” 

Carter did not embrace homophobia. He was one of the nation’s most decent and foresighted leaders. While he disappointingly broke his campaign promise to support the Equality Act, like other historic figures Carter’s record should be assessed within the context of society’s then social constructs and political realities. 

Based on the totality of his legacy, Jimmy Carter left the world a better place. His memory is a blessing.

Malcolm Lazin is executive director of LGBT History Month. Learn more at lgbtHistoryMonth.com.

As we move toward Jan. 20, when Donald Trump and his acolytes complete their takeover of the government, we really have no idea what will happen. Trump and his co-president, Elon Musk, lie with impunity. It’s hard to tell if they believe their own lies. 

For Trump, a decision is often based on who whispered in his ear last. He is easily riled, and when it comes to Musk, it was fun to see him feel he had to respond when Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) called Musk, President Musk. In a Phoenix rally Trump felt obliged to explain Musk couldn’t be president as he wasn’t born here. We know Trump is losing it, often mixing up where he is, names, and dates. Will the media report on that the way they did with Biden?  It is getting more apparent the media is being cowed by Trump. Recently the New York Times reported, “Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Washington Post, said on Friday evening that she was resigning after the newspaper’s opinions section rejected a cartoon depicting The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, (and other media moguls) genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump.” 

The first test of how the Republican Senate will respond to Trump will begin shortly as they start the hearings on his Cabinet nominees. We will soon know if even the few rational Republican senators left keep their lips firmly glued to Trump’s ass, or will at least four of them find their balls? While most of Trump’s nominees will sail through, no matter how bad they are, there are a few we need to watch closely. Those are Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary; Kash Patel for FBI Director; RFK Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services; and Tulsi Gabbard, for Director of National Intelligence. These nominations are an abomination and dangerous. 

Hegseth’s hearings will be conducted by the Armed Services Committee with Chairman Roger Wicker, (R-Miss), and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), ranking member. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will first need to get through the Senate Finance Committee; Michael Crapo (R-Idaho) chair, and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), ranking member. Patel will go to the Senate Judiciary Committee with Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) as chair, and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), as ranking member. Tulsi Gabbard will go to the Senate Intelligence Committee with Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) as chair, and Mark Warner (D-Va.), as ranking member.

I am not holding my breath that any Republicans will ask the tough questions. But we can hope Democrats will. It will be interesting to see what they focus on. Will they ask RFK Jr. the important questions on children’s vaccines? We know he opposes them but will he take away the mandate for insurance to pay for them? Will he try to get school systems to abandon their requirement that children be vaccinated before coming to school? Will he oppose continuing to have NIH do the research to develop a vaccine to prevent HIV/AIDS? What will he do about the polio vaccine and ensuring it is paid for all children? Will he recommend we withdraw from the World Health Organization? 

Then will they ask Gabbard about her meeting with deposed Syrian dictator Assad, her relations with Vladimir Putin, and the war in Ukraine? How she would handle classified documents and what did she think about how Trump handled them? What are the changes she wants to make in the agencies reporting to the Director of National Intelligence? Does she even know what each of them does? How does her background qualify her for this important and sensitive job? 

Then there is Hegseth. What will they ask him? What does he see as his qualifications for the job? Does he understand what the job is, and his relationship to the Joint Chiefs of Staff? What are Patel’s qualifications to lead the FBI? Will he go after an enemies list based on all his previous statements? 

I would assume Democrats on the committees will be prepped with a long list of questions to ask each nominee, and will work together to try to make the American people understand how each is totally unqualified to head the agency they are being nominated to lead. Then we will have to look at how the media report on all these hearings. 

One of the things the American people need to understand is whether or not they believe in Trump’s version of ‘America First,’ each of these nominees will impact how we deal with the world, and whether we are ever trusted again. 

Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.

LGBTQ Global originally published this commentary. The Los Angeles Blade is republishing it with permission.

On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he was stepping down as leader of the Liberal Party, and thus as prime minister as soon as the party chooses his replacement. There’s a lot to unpack about how we got here and what happens next, but it’s important to note exactly how transformative Justin Trudeau was on LGBTQ+ rights in Canada.

When Trudeau came to power in 2015, he was following nearly 10 years of rule under the Stephen Harper Conservatives. Harper’s Conservative Party was new force in Canadian politics, merging the old-school business-minded Progressive Conservative Party with the more radical and frequently explicitly bigoted Canadian Alliance/Reform Party. Harper was able to take advantage of Canada’s badly designed electoral system and fractured political left to win three elections with 36, 37, and 39 percent of the vote. Unbowed by the lack of majority electoral mandate, the Conservatives relished in forcing through their agenda without seeking support from other parties.

Harper immediately called a vote on repealing same-sex marriage, which had become national law only a year prior (the vote failed, which Harper’s defenders like to argue was the plan all along.) He immediately slashed funding to civil rights defenders who had won a string of court victories for LGBTQ+ people. Arts, culture, and tourism boards were warned they’d come under scrutiny if they funded queer groups and programs. The Conservatives blocked justice reforms like equalizing the age of consent and protecting transgender people in law.

After a decade of this shit, LGBTQ+ Canadians and progressives were exhausted and demoralized.

Trudeau swept into office in 2015 and set about immediately changing the tone. That first year was a lot of photo ops and press statements and Cabinet appointments designed to ensure that every marginalized community felt that they were represented in the new government. Trudeau even became the first prime minister to march in a Pride parade — something he did over and over in multiple cities.

Conservatives derisively called it all “virtue signaling” or and relentlessly told a certain segment of the electorate that they should be offended by it all.

But for the most part, the Trudeau government delivered, especially for LGBTQ+ people.

Two key reforms came about in its first term: An overhaul of the Criminal Code that removed a number of laws that were still used to target queer people, including a sodomy law that included a higher age of consent and a ban on gay sex if it involved more than two people. Also removed were several obscenity and bawdy house provisions that were used to harass queer communities.

The other was the trans rights bill, C-16, which included explicit protections for trans people in federal human rights law and included them as a protected class in the hate crime and hate speech provisions of the Criminal Code. It’s genuinely astounding in retrospect how much impact this bill had given how little it actually changed. Canadian courts had already ruled that trans people were generally protected under sex discrimination laws, and in any event, the federal human rights code doesn’t really cover much in Canada. The far more important provincial human rights codes had mostly been updated to include “gender identity” years before the federal code anyway.

But the passage of C-16 was also the launching pad for one of Canada’s most notorious far-right cranks, Jordan Peterson. An obviously disturbed and disgraced former university professor, Peterson gained a global following of anti-trans weirdos and incels by spreading lies about C-16. The community that formed around Peterson is now a core constituency of the Conservative Party under opposition leader Pierre Poilievre. Indeed, Peterson’s interview of Poilievre last week on YouTube was treated as some kind of Yalta Conference for cringey weirdos — and may be why Elon Musk took a sudden interest in Poilievre this week.

But that wasn’t all Trudeau delivered for the queer community.

The Trudeau government banned conversion therapy. It restored and expanded funding to civil rights groups, queer organizations, and the arts. It drafted and implemented a strategy to promote 2SLGBTQIA+ rights and inclusion across government (yeah, that the government’s official acronym.) It issued an historic apology, expungement, and compensation scheme for people who’d been convicted or fired from the public service under old anti-gay laws. It added an “X” gender option for federal ID (passports). It ended the ban on gay/bi blood, tissue, and semen donors.

Trudeau also guided Canada through an unprecedented series of global and national crises, including the COVID pandemic, the first Trump presidency, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an insurgency against the government (fully supported by the Conservatives), and a national reckoning with Canada’s shameful treatment of its Indigenous people.

But he was unable or unwilling to reckon with a series of major problems that have only been exacerbated by those crises: A soaring cost of living, a crumbling health care system, and a growing sense that nothing seems to “work” in Canada — from a post office that refuses to deliver packages, to parks that refuse to unlock their bathrooms, to criminals that go free because packed courts can’t hear their trials in time, to infrastructure and defense projects that drag on years beyond schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

The fact that most of these problems are under the jurisdiction of provinces that are almost entirely being mismanaged by Conservatives — sorry, the feds have to wear Canada Post — hasn’t blunted the people’s decision that Trudeau is to blame for every ill in Canada. Heck, that’s basically the Conservative slogan these days.

Trudeau probably should have stepped down a few months ago, to give the party a chance to choose a successor in an orderly fashion. Instead, he’s made himself a lame duck days before Trump takes office, threatening to annex Canada (and Greenland and Panama) through economic power, whatever the hell he means by any of that. The Liberal Party will soon announce rules for how a nationwide vote on the new leader will be held, and candidates are already jockeying into place. A new leader will have to be chosen by March 25, when parliament is recalled and the opposition is likely to force an early election, likely in mid-May.

According to current polls, the Liberal Party is cooked, and the Conservatives are poised to pull a near-sweep of parliament. Of course, it’s also possible that a leadership contest brings a fresh appealing face to the Liberals, and they’re able to recover some position ahead of the vote, whenever it is. Or Canadians will become concerned with the Conservative Party’s growing ties to Trump Republicans.

Poilievre, who cut his teeth in the Harper government as its most unscrupulous attack dog, is trying to position himself as the reasonable person who can unite and fix a fractured Canada. I have my doubts, given his entire public history. He’s also been notably palling around the worst anti-LGBTQ+ bigots in Canada and making vaguely threatening statements about banning trans women from bathrooms.

As Canadians get ready to head to the polls, it’s worth remembering what Conservatives do when they’re in power.