Even in the late 1980s, when being gay on Capitol Hill meant carrying secrets heavier than my heart, there was one place in Washington where I could exhale. I was in my 20s, ducking every question about my personal life. And never feeling like I could be free of my secret.
But Dupont Circle Park was a sanctuary. I could walk through its shaded confines, shoulders finally unhitched from their usual tension, and for a few minutes pretend I could be free with my sexuality.
Despite the decades-old symbolism of Dupont Circle as a refuge for closeted souls like mine, the park is now being fenced off and shuttered through Sunday, during the heart of WorldPride.
Try as he might, Donald Trump’s latest move to quash Pride Month will fail. Sealing off a park won’t quarantine our pride. Dupont Circle Park has weathered far worse, from AIDS-era funerals to militant protests, and yet it has always emerged stronger.
If anything, the attempt to barricade us only deepens our resolve. We’ll gather on sidewalks, march through streets, and lift our voices louder, because Pride isn’t confined to a plot of ground. It lives in our unbroken solidarity and refusal to vanish.
It’s only the beginning of Pride Month, but Trump continues to make it clear that: he intends to bulldoze it. But he cannot, he will not, and he has no hope at all of silencing us, erasing us, or dampening the celebration within all of us.
Fittingly, Trump has refused to issue a presidential proclamation. Bill Clinton was the first to do so in 1999. George W. Bush refused. Barack Obama did for each year during his first two terms. Trump didn’t sign any during his first term, and then Joe Biden picked up where Obama left off.
Instead, Trump has declared June Title IX Month, an Orwellian twist meant to justify his administration’s rollback of protections for transgender students under the guise of “saving women’s sports.” He’s not honoring civil rights. He would never do that. He’s weaponizing them. By elevating Title IX while barring trans girls from competing, he’s sending a loud, unmistakable message: Pride has no place in his America.
But this is bigger than a calendar switch, because for over 50 years, June has always been Pride Month to us, so this train left the station eons ago. No, this is a full-scale government-sanctioned attempt to erase LGBTQ+ people from public life by Trump and his homophobes and transphobes, and not quietly, not subtly, but with the brute force of executive power, military compliance, and corporate cowardice.
Trump’s loathsome Defense secretary, anti-LGBTQ+ extremist Pete Hegseth, ordered the U.S. Navy to strip Harvey Milk’s name from a military ship, scrubbing one of the only queer icons ever honored by the armed forces. Milk served honorably in the military, so it’s not like his name was put there on a whim.
The White House has offered no comment on anything Pride-related, nothing about Milk, not about Pride Month, not about LGBTQ+ Americans at all. If Trump is seeking to literally rain on our parade, he will fail because the umbrella of the LGBTQ+ community is stronger than he is.
Meanwhile, across the country, Pride festivals are facing challenges. NYC Pride, the largest in the country, is facing large budget shortfalls after major sponsors, fearing retaliation for supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, are scaling back or canceling altogether.
Delaware’s Pride lost more than half its funding. From Google to Home Depot, corporations are bowing to a president who has made being a visible LGBTQ+ ally a political liability. These companies once covered floats in rainbows; now they’re quietly backing away while our community is under siege.
It’s the kind of coordinated repression many warned about , and it’s only those businesses and individuals who exhibit courage, and hey, just do the right thing, for God’s sake, that need our consumer dollars versus those who chicken out.
For years, Trump’s defenders insisted he didn’t care about LGBTQ+ issues, that his attacks were political theater, not personal animus. I heard from people I talked to who knew or worked with him that he didn’t have it out for us. Wow, were they ever wrong.
With his second term, the mask is fully off. His administration is banning chosen pronouns in schools, revoking gender markers from federal forms, stripping antidiscrimination language from health care policy, and dismantling every DEI program it can reach. He’s also gutting HIV and AIDS research programs.
This isn’t indifference. It’s his obsession. He is using every lever of power to target us. What did we ever do to him?
And yet we’ve been here before.
Pride itself was born from defiance. It commemorates the 1969 Stonewall uprising, when LGBTQ+ people, led by trans women of color, fought back against police brutality in New York City. There were no sponsorships then. No glitter-covered floats. No proclamations. Just rage, resistance, and a collective refusal to be erased.
In 1970, the first Pride marches took place in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. They weren’t parties. They were protests. People marched knowing they could be arrested, attacked, or worse. They marched anyway. Over the decades, Pride has evolved into marches, parades, into celebrations, into joyful declarations of visibility. But the spirit of protest has never left.
So now, as Trump tries to replace Pride with a twisted version of Title IX Month, we remember: Pride was never something he could take from us. Trump can keep us out of parks and ban words. He can cancel parades. He can rip our names off ships. But he cannot stop us from marching. And he cannot erase who we are.
Let this be the year we bring Pride back to its roots. No more waiting for corporations to approve our existence. No more hoping for presidential nods. Pride is not a sponsorship. It’s a survival strategy. It’s an uprising including every pronoun under the sun. And it will outlast any administration, especially this one.
So if Trump thinks he can kill Pride, he’s in for a rude awakening. We’ve fought harder battles than this. And we’ve always won.
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