Pride 2025: Harvey Milk, Edmund White and the spirit of fierce resistance

With LGBTQ rights under brutal assault by Donald Trump, we must summon the energy of those who fought back, and make sure Pride is about protest.

Donald Trump is attempting to eviscerate queer rights more brazenly than in his first term, after which we saw Joe Biden able to reverse most of Trump’s most dangerous presidential actions.

Trump now has disappeared the words “gay” and “transgender" from many government websites, purged LGBTQ history and research data in government databases, and erased transgender people from the Park Service’s National Stonewall Monument website.

He’s signed executive orders to negate the very existence of transgender people—declaring there are only two genders that are “biologically” defined, ejected trans people from the military, is trying to stop government funding under Obamacare of essential transition care and pulled funding from any institutions that seeks to aid trans people.

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Trump has slashed millions of dollars in LGBTQ health initiatives, killed funding for AIDS research, and pulled funding from multiple promising AIDS vaccine development programs. He ended distribution of HIV medications to people around the world, an action already leading to death and devastation, as he and the Christian nationalists target HIV medications in this country, seeking religious exemptions in health care plans. Trump’s Supreme Court is consistently carving exceptions for marriage equality, allowing for discrimination of gay and lesbian couples in public accommodations

Those are just a few things Trump has done to target queer people. And this week we learned that Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth is moving to change the name of a Navy ship, named in 2016 for the great gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk, who served in the Navy himself.

What was most enraging about it—and should be a wake-up call to everyone—is that the timing of the administration’s action, according to a Department of Defense official, is “intentional,” during Pride month.

That’s right. It was done with malice during Pride to attack Pride, but also to send a nefarious message: We will come after you and we have absolutely no respect for you.

Make no mistake, this is the complete dehumanization of LGBTQ people. And pay no mind to the fact that there are grotesque, self-identified gay individuals working for Trump, like the catty, often vicious would-be diplomat Richard Grenell, and the completely immoral Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. These people are selling out the community, while they get rewarded from Trump after reaping the benefits of the rights the rest of us won for them.

Trump is a massive threat, but we have been through previous perilous times, from the Lavender Scare of the 50s and the purging of queer people from government through the onslaught of AIDS during the callous, negligent Republican presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Sodomy bans in states have targeted us, and we saw a Supreme Court uphold them in 1986.

But we also saw the immense organizing that would culminate in the Supreme Court reversing that sodomy decision in 2003, after years of demanding—and getting—the government to develop drugs to treat people with HIV so that they could live full lives. We overturned the ban on gays serving the military, and we won marriage equality.

Trump and the MAGA movement are intent on taking away all of that and more, to be sure. Clarence Thomas wants to revisit the Lawrence v. Texas sodomy decision and the Obergefell marriage equality decision. And this radical Supreme Court—created by Trump and now once again presiding over our lives while he is president and creating exemptions to our rights—cannot be trusted. So none of us can rest.

On the same day that we learned of the stripping of Harvey Milk’s name from a Navy ship, the literary giant Edmund White died. He was groundbreaking, a prominent, openly gay man of letters, writing beautiful, powerful novels about the queer world, biographies of major queer figures, and memoirs of his proud, sex-positive, outspoken life.

Edmund White co-wrote “The Joy of Gay Sex,” and was at the Stonewall riots. He documented what happened there, as well as so much of the early liberation movement.

There were, of course, many giants of activism who made Stonewall happen—who weren’t just observing—like the legendary trans activist Sylvia Rivera, who organized within the movement in those years after. We draw upon all their amazing work when we look back on history.

I refer here to Harvey Milk and Edmund White simply because they both made headlines this week, for sad reasons, and yet their enormous legacies live on and should inspire us as we’re under this terrible threat.

They’d both want us fighting back, and bringing Pride—which is now losing sponsors as cowardly companies back away—back to its rightful place as a month of both celebration and protest. So this year during Pride it’s time to summon their fierce resistance, and hit back at Trump and the GOP with everything we’ve got.