We all have stories we tell ourselves about the kind of people we are, about our values, about our presence here, about our reason for being.
But those narratives are often largely subjective: a combination of unrealized aspirations, wishful thinking, and subtle main character energy narcissism that needs to make ourselves the heroes.
Eventually, though, who we are is revealed, not in who we imagine ourselves to be, but in who our actions and inactions declare we are.
We’re well into PRIDE month, which, as much as it is a time for members of the LGBTQ+ community to celebrate themselves, is far too often a time for self-identified LGBTQ+ allies to congratulate ourselves on how enlightened, tolerant, and progressive we are.
We wrap ourselves in glittery rainbow garb and rush into parades, concerts, social media feeds, and drag shows to loudly declare our allyship.
But here’s the thing: that is the easy stuff. It’s low-risk advocacy, it is cheap activism, and it might even cover up our culpability in the violence against the very people we claim to support.
The Republican Party has declared war on the LGBTQ+ community.
There isn’t any debating this at this point.
The grotesque body of work speaks for itself.
Donald Trump, along with his sycophantic foot soldiers in the GOP, Conservative media, and the Evangelical Church, have spent the entire last election cycle vilifying the Transgender community: conjuring fictional Right Wing nightmares about monsters lurking in public bathrooms, about children going to school and coming home a different gender, about librarians and middle school school teachers grooming children through supposedly dangerous literature, and about doctors allegedly treating kids without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
The Trump Administration, serving as the grim executors of Project 2025, are working to erase LGBTQ people from existence: terminating DEI initiatives, eliminating words like Transgender and queer from Federal organizations and websites, and continuing to try and rollback marriage equality laws.
This week, the Republican-packed Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for young people.
And after months of speculation, it was announced this week that Donald Trump is cutting funding for an LGBTQ+ suicide hotline, even while this community faces a suicide rate far higher than any other segment of the population.
There is no question that the Trump Administration is fiercely predatory toward the queer community, especially its young people. In light of this, there are some painful truths we all need to sit with:You cannot be an LGBTQ+ ally and vote Republican or support Donald Trump. This is a moral impossibility. There is no grey area here. It doesn’t matter what story you tell yourself about why you vote the way you vote, or the supposedly disconnected policies you support. If you contribute to the political capital of this Administration, you are complicit in its war on our LGBTQ+ friends. It’s time for every Republican voter in this country to decide whether they will partner with their queer family members, friends, co-workers, and neighbors—or the political party working incessantly to erase them.
You cannot be an LGBTQ+ ally and attend a church that denies their humanity.Millions of people who see themselves as queer allies will spend this Sunday in the pews and chairs of religious communities that either explicitly through incendiary sermons or implicitly in thinly-veiled code language, perpetuate the dangerous myth of queer people’s moral inferiority. The heart of the teachings of Jesus is the command to love one’s neighbor, and it is an act of spiritual rebellion against that command to contribute to an entity that has contempt for its LGBTQ+ neighbors.
And you really can’t move fully into allyship if you stay silent in the face of those who are complicit in the war on the queer community. For all of us, that means having the courage to step into family holiday conversations, neighborhood gatherings, school board meetings, lawmakers’ offices, and social media feeds and directly, unequivocally, and boldly declare the humanity and dignity of LGBTQ+ human beings. T-shirts and bumper stickers aren’t enough anymore. We need to get our hands dirty, friends. We need to have a costly advocacy.
However we vote, wherever we worship, whatever bumper stickers we have on our car, it’s time for each of us to decide whether we truly love our queer brothers and sisters enough to make difficult choices, experience discomfort, and change our political/religious affiliations—or whether we’re just telling ourselves a nice but ultimately fictional story.
In the comments, talk about the disconnect you see in people's politics and religion, and the stories they tell themselves. Share your own difficult decisions you've had to make to move more fully into being an LGBTQ+ ally. For members of the LGBTQ+ community, what makes someone a good ally?
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