It's a scary time to be LGBTQ+. But we can't let fear win. | Opinion

I can’t help eyeing headlines around backsliding support for LGBTQ+ folk with a mixture of fear, exhaustion and determination. It’s a frightening time to be openly queer. That’s why we must be so, anyway. 

A recent Gallup poll identified regressing support for LGBTQ+ issues after nearly two decades of growth. A 2025 survey from the Trevor Project revealed that 1 in 10 LGBTQ+ youth attempted suicide. Halfway through 2026, nearly 800 anti-trans bills have been filed across 43 states, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker. This follows back-to-back years of record-breaking growth, peaking with 1,022 anti-trans bills filed in 2025. 

We have so much to lose – including ourselves. 

It’s what makes this moment so critical. We have arrived in this cultural moment, ferried by the people who carved out the freedoms we enjoy today, so that we might enjoy the mundane pleasures of holding our partner’s hand on the sidewalk or to steal a kiss in the heady light of a dive bar. 

But any freedom comes with the opportunity to squander it – and, in this case, we face a largely conservative-led effort to strip us of what we’ve only recently achieved. As anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment climbs, it’s a necessary reminder that liberation isn’t passive; we must seize it in our very identities. It’s a disservice to yourself to think you owe anyone a sanitized, palatable version of who you are. 

It’s a scary time. We have to do it scared.

Queer history is often overlooked. It shouldn't be.

History has a road map for this. It looks a lot like perseverance in spite of our suffering, not that many would necessarily be aware.

I know they didn’t teach me about New York City's Stonewall uprising – a historical watershed moment led in major part by queer people of color, including Marsha P. Johnson – in my rural Ohio high school. And I graduated the year the Supreme Court ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges gave me the same rights as my classmates and parents to marry who I loved. Today’s Pride Month, parades and celebrations are all extensions of the resistance of our queer forebears. 

Nor did my teachers lecture us on the HIV/AIDs crisis, which ripped through the LGBTQ+ community in the '80s. President Ronald Reagan didn’t publicly address it until 1985. By that time, 13,000 cases had been diagnosed with the disease that researchers in 1982 called “gay-related immunodeficiency.”  

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 50,000 people died with the virus between 1981-87. Throughout the crisis, protest, art and community became lifesaving care. 

When the Food and Drug Administration banned men who had sex with men from donating blood in 1983 (a protocol that was only updated in 2023), lesbians banded together to host blood drives and coordinated their provisioning to HIV/AIDs patients. Queer people created art to break down stigmas around who could actually contract the virus (everybody, not just gay men) and in mourning and celebration of those who would ultimately die of the disease. 

Because of the prejudice and fear around queer people then, we’ll never truly know just how many of our own we lost, but we’ll forever feel their absence where our queer elders should be. 

LGBTQ+ people and our allies have always risen to the moment

Just 10 years ago, a gunman opened fire on Pulse, a gay night club in Orlando, killing 49 and wounding 58. In the immediate aftermath, one man crawled from the nightclub and worked his way down the road, triaging victims as he went. Other victims’ loved ones and survivors, according to Them, went on to found nonprofits for LGBTQ+ youth, advocate for a memorial on the site and push for accountability around the police response to the shooting. 

These are all notable, historic occurrences in queer history. They do not encompass our entire narrative of resistance, one that loops around itself with kiss-ins and marches, but they illustrate the same point: that in the face of – or fueled by or in spite of, depending on who you ask – its own tragedies, the LGBTQ+ community and our allies have always risen to the needs of our own. 

Those among us who have learned the bitter failure of self- or society-induced repression know we cannot outrun ourselves. So we might as well make where and who we are a nice place to live (for us, and for the people like us).

I am not asking you to ignore the perils of what it means to live openly and queerly. I am saying that we have to do it scared. That tragedy will strike anyway. That I refuse to flatten my identity and sacrifice myself in service to a section of society that thrills at the thought of the erasure. Homophobes weaponize their shame because they want your silence. It is not your shame to carry, nor will your silence set you free. It is a shackle. Do not latch it. 

Because why would I capitulate to someone who doesn’t see the beauty in queerness?

I watch moms at Pride giving out free hugs to gay people who may have been rejected by their own. I revel in the blissful mundanity showing the cashier photos of my best friend’s lesbian wedding. I think of my trans siblings and the constant attacks they still suffer despite the sacrifices that have paved our way to the rights we enjoy today, the silence of their should-be allies, and I taste the tears before I feel them running down my cheeks. 

You can’t empathize with or bow to hate. Don’t bother. Your queerness isn’t for them. 

It’s for you. 

Drew Atkins is an opinion digital producer for USA TODAY and the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at [email protected]