A Trump Win Could Transform World Pride 2025 Capital Pride 2024 – Photo: Todd Franson READ THIS COLUMN IN THE MAGAZINE
The Queer calendar promises us that come late May/early June 2025, World Pride will fill Washington, D.C.’s streets with affirming, magical mirth. This year, the Capital Pride Alliance gave us a great trial run. While a jubilee in its own right, this year’s festivities illustrated that World Pride 2025 should be safe, secure, and glorious.
It may, however, also be a righteously angry occasion, as 2025 Washington could be the epicenter of a new, awful age. Barring any seismic shenanigans, either President Joe Biden will hold the White House, or Donald Trump and his bully boys and goon girls will move in. If Hillary Clinton’s loss to The Don taught us anything, it is that we live in absurdly uncertain times. (And that the Electoral College should be abolished.)
With a little luck and an engaged electorate, LGBTQ-allied Biden will hold the line and World Pride 2025 will be a boundlessly happy occasion. If it goes the other way, I reckon it will look much more like the monumental Women’s March of 2017.
An ironic twist takes us to Taiwan, that region’s LGBTQ oasis, and the originally scheduled site of World Pride 2025. The rationale for the change from Kaohsiung, Taiwan, to Washington, D.C. is a bit murky. World Pride organizers, InterPride, and Taiwanese principals have somewhat differing takes on the matter.
Did Taiwan Pride partners refuse a World Pride protocol of naming the event for the host city alone, insisting on World Pride Taiwan rather than World Pride Kaohsiung? Did InterPride worry about a Taiwan designation irking that country’s menacing big brother, China, considering InterPride recently gained United Nations consultative status, where China enjoys the powerful position of permanent membership on the UN Security Council?
Don’t ask me. I don’t know. And I’m fairly certain that if I interviewed representatives from both sides, I’d come away with little more than innuendo between two sides that know they’re better off as allies.
Should The Don return to D.C. victorious, however, Taiwan’s identity will likely dissolve. Chinese President Xi Jinping may well be salivating at the prospect of Trump 2.0, which would probably deprive the island democracy of American military support.
Consider that when China turned the screws on a somewhat independent Hong Kong, Trump made no meaningful protest. Or, as CNN reported in 2019, “During a private phone call in June, President Donald Trump promised Chinese President Xi Jinping that the U.S. would remain quiet on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong while trade talks continued, two sources familiar with the call tell CNN.”
For all intents and purposes, Hong Kong is now squarely under Beijing’s thumb, democracy advocates are in jail, and the trade deal The Don was angling for was a dud.
While it’s hard to think of World Pride 2025 and not think of Taiwan, Ukraine comes to mind less directly. This war-torn American ally has no tie to World Pride, but it is literally under the gun from an autocrat who outlawed rainbows. And Trump thinks he’s swell.
Beyond that, Trump had no reservations about risking Ukraine’s congressionally approved arms while playing politics with a “perfect phone call.” Should we find ourselves next year suffering through King Trump II, we’ll likely also be mourning a free Ukraine. Surely, Putin will outlaw rainbows there, too, if given the chance.
Of all the possibilities, the worst would be right here at home, where Heritage Foundation HQ sits just a few blocks from the Pride festival. This right-wing organization has rolled out the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, also known as Project 2025. “Hey, that’s not ours!” says Camp Trump. Sure, Jan.
“Project 2025 details across more than 900 pages how Trump and his allies could dismantle and disrupt the U.S. government,” summarizes The Guardian. “It suggests ridding the federal ranks of many appointed roles and stacking agencies instead with more political appointees aligned with and more beholden to Trump’s policy prescriptions.”
In its own words, it reads in pompously puritanical part, “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” That’s deleting language with doubleplusungood gusto. And deleting our identities, as well.
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At World Pride 2025, this may all be real, if hardly a foregone conclusion. The midterms told us that no matter how many flags they wave, no matter how loudly they shout the lyrics of “Proud To Be an American,” MAGA is guaranteed nothing.
Their Christian-nationalist cohort, emboldened by the end of Roe v. Wade, is getting greedy and simultaneously exposing itself as toxic to mainstream America. For God’s sake, who attacks IVF and expects to be taken seriously?
And thank you, Gov. Gavin Newsom-affiliated Campaign for Democracy, for the chilling ad that dramatizes an American woman getting pulled over for trying to cross state lines for abortion care. It’s not hyperbolic when right-wing politicians are indeed going after women in such situations.
Whatever the world looks like next June, I will be at World Pride 2025, where I hope we’ll all be celebrating joyously. If not, we’ll be organizing and resisting. We won’t be erased and we’re not going back, no matter who’s in the White House, no matter how obnoxiously Heritage and its pals holler.
Will O’Bryan is a former Metro Weekly managing editor, living in D.C. with his husband. He is online at www.LifeInFlights.com.
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