Dear Gay Republicans: Here Are 25 Ways _____ Has Attacked Our Community In Six Months

I’ve often said I don’t get Gay Republicans, Log Cabin Republicans, whatever. I mean, sure I get that they are other things to consider when voting for someone, other than their stance on LGBTQ issues, but how can you goose-step along with a party that treats you with such disdain, or downright hatred, just because you have conservative values?

So, this is for you, Gay Republicans, and Gay Democrats who didn’t vote last November and allowed that fool to gain access to the White House ... here are 25 ways that President [For Now] _____ his administration has attacked the LGBTQ community since taking office on January 20:

1.20.17 - Minutes after _____ was sworn in, any of the LGBTQ community was erased from White House, Department of State, and Department of Labor websites. Yes, you were erased ... you no longer exist.

 1.27.17 – A week later, _____ issued an executive order to indefinitely ban Syrian refugees from entering the United States. This ban includes LGBTQ refugees fleeing the nation in fear of discrimination. 

2.02.17 - After previously committing to protecting LGBTQ Americans from discrimination—remember when he said, after Orlando, that he would be our greatest ally—_____ and his administration had drafted a "License to Discriminate" executive order which to allow across-the-board discrimination against the LGBTQ community. 

2.22.17 - With help of Keebler Elf, and Attorney General, Jeff Session, _____ rescinded Title IX protections for transgender students in our nation's schools. 

3.20.17 – The _____ Administration erases the LGBTQ community from The National Survey of Older Americans Act Participants and the Annual Program Performance Report for Centers for Independent Living, key surveys that are used to help provide care to American seniors.

3.24.17 - _____ appointed anti-LGBTQ activist and former Heritage Foundation employee Roger Severino to lead the Health and Human Services Civil Rights Office, putting the LGBTQ community at risk of losing access to critical and affordable health care.

3.28.17 – In his proposed budget, _____ planned to cut HIV and AIDS research funding under the National Institutes of Health.

3.28.17 - The _____ Administration cancels plans to add the LGBTQ community to its upcoming 2020 U.S. Census, a survey conducted every decade by the federal government to help collect data about living Americans and the United States of America. Again, we don’t count.

4.10.17 – The _____ Administration appointed James Renne, a Bush-era staffer involved in an anti-LGBTQ purge of gay government employees, to a senior role at the Department of Agriculture.

4.14.17 - The _____ Administration files to dismiss a lawsuit accusing North Carolina of discriminating against the LGBTQ community in response to HB2, despite the similarities of the HB142 replacement.

 5.4.17 - _____ signs a "religious liberty" executive order. Although it doesn’t target LGBTQ Americans, it is the first step in what could be a broader permission slip for discrimination against the overall LGBTQ community. 

 5.8.17 – The Department of Agriculture issues a new "religious freedom" policy statement, a move praised by the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council. “Religious freedom” is conservative religious code for anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

 5.22.17 - The _____ Administration grants White House press credentials to a "reporter" from Infowars, a conspiracy outlet that regularly peddles dangerous, offensive, and anti-LGBTQ content. 

 5.23.17 - The _____ Administration reveals their budget which includes proposed slashes to programs and departments critical to the LGBTQ community, including Medicaid, Planned Parenthood, and the Center for Disease Control’s HIV and AIDS programs.

 6.1.17 - _____ declines to issue a presidential proclamation designating June as LGBTQ Pride Month, breaking with an eight-year precedent set by President Barack Obama.

 6.15.17 - The Department of Education rolls back the Office for Civil Rights' expansive approach to investigating civil rights complaints that protect LGBTQ students and other marginalized communities from discrimination at school.

 6.15.17 - The Department of Education invites Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, two anti-LGBTQ organizations, to be speakers for a day-long conference on engaging fathers in their children’s education and welfare.

 6.15.17 - Department of Commerce removes sexual orientation and gender identity from the agency's Equal Employment Policy; after fiercely vocal opposition, Commerce Secretary Ross changed it back.

 6.16.17 - An obtained internal memo from the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights reveals guidelines to dismiss complaints about bathroom access filed by transgender students. 

 6.17.17 - Six members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS resigned saying _____ "simply does not care" about combating the HIV and AIDS epidemic.

 6.27.17 - The _____ Administration failed to mention the LGBTQ community in their National HIV Testing Day statement. 

 6.28.17 - The Department of Justice rejected reporters from covering a DOJ Pride event hosted by LGBTQ affinity groups for federal workers.

 6.29.17 - Reports surface that _____ hired anti-transgender activist, Bethany Kozma, to the Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Rights at the US Agency for International Development. Let that sink in ... anti-trans, gender equality.

7.10.17 – In a closed-door and unannounced opportunity, _____ poses for a photograph with notorious anti-LGBTQ activists who wish to promote so-called “religious exemptions” that would harm LGBTQ Americans across the nation.

7.12.17 – _____ grants a one-on-one interview with Pat Robertson, a longtime anti-LGBTQ activist and Televangelist.

There you have it ... six months in office and look at the damage he has inflicted on the LGBTQ community; and if you think he’s done, if he stays in office, there will surely be more because he’s out to kiss the ass of his base: evangelicals and Christian zealots.

And, to make this perfectly queer, in my mind, if you call yourself a Christian and you support a three-times married serial adulterer who gropes women, objectifies women, sexually harasses women, mocks the disable, paints an entire country as drug dealers and rapists and an entire faith as terrorists, you cannot be Christian.

And if you call yourself a gay American yet support a regime that had worked blatantly, and secretively, to deny you rights, then you can’t really call yourself gay; because sitting back and doing nothing with _____ and his henchmen try to put us back in the closet, or worse, is like sitting at home watching the Nazi’s march through Germany and thinking the uniforms are pretty.

You’re complicit.

GLAAD

It's As If We Don't Exist

Forty-five years ago this month, four years before the Stonewall riots sparked what many consider the modern day LGBT Rights movement, a handful of men and women, dressed appropriately and politely, put their lives and their careers on the line to march in front of the White House carrying carefully hand-lettered signs demanding "First Class Citizenship for Homosexuals".

Those men and women might be gone now, but their picket signs remain. And four years ago, those very signs were donated to The National Museum of American History because the fight for LGBT rights is history. But the signs were never displayed; no curator fashioned an exhibition. Those signs are stored in a vault at the Smithsonian.

The protest signs were donated to the Smithsonian by The Kameny Papers Project, funded in part by former Congressman Michael Huffington and other allies. The Kameny Papers Project is named for Frank Kameny, considered the still living father of the gay civil equality movement in Washington, D.C. [for those of you who don't know, Frank Kameny led many such picket lines back in the day, and was subsequently fired by the federal government for being gay.]

And this makes one wonder how and why the Smithsonian chose to place these icons of the LGBT movement in a vault and keep them from the public eye? Well, the short answer is that it takes time for any museum, much less one the size and scope of the Smithsonian, to ready an exhibition.

But, more shocking than that, is the fact that if you are to visit The National Museum of American History today, you will find there is not one single gay or lesbian story told in the entire museum.

It's as if we don't exist. It's as if we never existed.

Go there. You'll see the struggle for Civil Rights, Equal Rights For Women, but no LGBT Rights on display. There are major exhibitions detailing "American Ideals", "Public Opinion", "Communities", "The Price of Liberty", "Culture" and "Science in the Public Eye," but they make absolutely no reference whatever to LGBT Americans. Most disgusting of all, is that you won't find a piece of the AIDS quilt, or any mention of LGBT involvement in politics, civics, culture or war.

It's as if we don't exist.

At least, within the confines of the Smithsonian.

The same year, however, that the Kameny Papers Project donated those early picket signs to the Smithsonian, they also gave some 50,000 items to The Library of Congress, and all of those items have been catalogued and are now fully available to anyone with a Library card.

In fact, this month, the Library of Congress will launch an innovative, new web portal that focuses on the Kameny archive, along with the papers of gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and other prominent writers and doers, with a very generous Introduction by our national Librarian James Billington.

The Library of Congress tells the stories of all Americans who helped build and define what this country is, and what it can be, while The National Museum of American History only tells the story of certain freedoms, and the fight for certain freedoms, from the abolition of slavery, to granting women the right to vote, to the African-American civil rights movement of the Sixties, to defending the rights of the disabled. But not the LGBT Rights movement.

It's as if we don't exist there.

It's sad that such a place as the Smithsonian opts to omit our stories, which have been as much a part of the fabric of this country as the stories of anyone else. Because, while we are gay, we are men and women, Black and white, and every other color, and religion and age and ethnicity and, well, we are everyone.

But not in the Smithsonian.