lgbtq people

San Diego City Councilmember Marni von Wilpert doesn’t generally agree with political parties redrawing congressional maps to gain power.

But after President Trump persuaded Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to redraw his state’s maps in order to improve Republican chances of retaining control of Congress in 2026, Von Wilpert said she decided California’s only option was to fight back with new maps of its own, favoring Democrats.

There’s too much at stake for LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized Californians to do otherwise, said Von Wilpert — who is bisexual and running to unseat Republican incumbent Rep. Darrell Issa, a Trump ally whose district in San Diego and Riverside counties will be redrawn if voters approve the plan.

“We can’t sit on the sidelines anymore and just hope that the far right will play fair or play by the rule book,” said Von Wilpert, 42. “If we don’t fight back now, I don’t know what democracy is going to be left for us to fight for in the future.”

San Diego City Councilmember Marni von Wilpert is challenging Republican incumbent Rep. Darrell Issa, whose Southern California district would be redrawn if voters approve the redistricting plan of California Democrats.

(Sandy Huffaker / For The Times)

Von Wilpert’s challenge to Issa — who did not respond to a request for comment — makes her part of a growing wave of LGBTQ+ candidates running for office at a time when many on the right and in the Trump administration are working aggressively to push queer people out of the American mainstream, including by challenging drag queen performances, queer library books and an array of Pride displays, and by questioning transgender people’s right to serve in the military, receive gender-affirming healthcare, participate in sports or use public restrooms.

They are running to counter those efforts, but also to resist other administration policies that they believe threaten democracy and equality more broadly, and to advocate around local issues that are important to them and their neighbors, said Elliot Imse, executive director of the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute.

The institute, which has trained queer people on running for and holding political office since 1991, has already provided 450 people with in-person training so far this year, compared with 290 people all of last year, Imse said. It recently had to cap a training in Los Angeles at 54 people — its largest cohort in more than a decade — and a first-of-its-kind training for transgender candidates at 12 people, despite more than 50 applying.

“LGBTQ+ people have been extremely motivated to run for office across the country because of the attacks on their equality,” Imse said. “They know the risk, they know the potential for harassment, but those fears are really overcome by the desire to make a difference in this moment.”

“This isn’t about screaming we are trans, this is about screaming we are human — and showing that we are here, that we are competent leaders,” said Josie Caballero, voting and elections director at Advocates for Trans Equality, which helped run the training.

Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) at the DC Blockchain Summit in Washington on March 26, 2025. The summit brings together policymakers and influencers to discuss important issues facing the crypto industry.

(Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Across the country

Queer candidates still face stiff resistance in some parts of the country. But they are winning elections elsewhere like never before — Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware became the first out transgender member of Congress last year — and increasingly deciding to run.

Some are Republicans who support Trump and credit him with kicking open the political door for people like them by installing gay leaders in his administration, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Ed Williams, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, an LGBTQ+ organization, said his group has seen “a surge in interest” under Trump, with “new members and chapters springing up across the country.” He said that “LGBT conservatives stand with President Trump’s fight for commonsense policies that support our schools and parents, put America first, and create opportunities for all Americans.”

Ryan Sheridan, 35, a gay psychiatric nurse practitioner challenging fellow Republican incumbent Rep. Ann Wagner for her House seat in Missouri, said Trump has made the Republican Party a “more welcoming environment” for gay people. He said he agrees with Trump that medical interventions for transgender youth should be stopped, but also believes others in the LGBTQ+ community misunderstand the president’s perspective.

“I do not believe that he is anti-trans. I do not believe he is anti-gay,” Sheridan said. “I understand the fear might be real, but I would encourage anybody that is deeply fearful to explore some alternative points of view.”

Many more LGBTQ+ candidates, however, are Democrats or progressives — and say they were driven to run in part by their disdain for Trump and his policies.

LGBTQ+ candidates and prospective candidates listen to speakers at an LGBTQ+ Victory Institute training in downtown Los Angeles in September.

(David Butow / For The Times)

JoAnna Mendoza, a bisexual retired U.S. Marine, said she is running to unseat Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.) because she took an oath to defend the U.S. and its values, and she believes those values are under threat from an administration with no respect for LGBTQ+ service members, immigrants or other vulnerable groups.

Mike Simmons, the first out LGBTQ+ state senator in Illinois, is running for the House seat of retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and leaning into his outsider persona as a gay Black man and the son of an Ethiopian asylum seeker. “I symbolize everything Donald Trump is trying to erase.”

Texas state Rep. Jolanda Jones, who is a lesbian, said she is running for the House seat of the late Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas), in a historically Black district being redrawn in Houston, because she believes “we need more gay people — but specifically Black gay people — to run and be in a position to challenge Trump.”

Colorado state Rep. Brianna Titone, who is running for Colorado treasurer, said it is critical for LGBTQ+ people — especially transgender people like her — to run, including locally. Trump is looking for ways to attack blue state economies, she said, and queer people need to help ensure resistance strategies don’t include abandoning LGBTQ+ rights.

“We’re going to be extorted, and our economy is going to suffer for that, and we’re going to have to withstand that,” she said.

Rep. Brianna Titone speaks during the general assembly at the Colorado State Capitol on April 23, 2025.

(AAron Ontiveroz / Denver Post via Getty Images)

Jordan Wood, who is gay, served as chief of staff to former Rep. Katie Porter of Orange County before co-founding the Constitution-backing organization democracyFIRST. He’s now back in his native Maine challenging centrist Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins.

Collins, who declined to comment, has supported LGBTQ+ rights in the past, including in military service and marriage, and has at times broken with her party to stand in Trump’s way. However, Wood said Collins has acquiesced to Trump’s autocratic policies, including in recent budget battles.

“This is a moment with our country in crisis where we need our political leaders to pick sides and to stand up to this administration and its lawlessness,” Wood said.

Candidates said they’ve had hateful and threatening comments directed toward them because of their identities, and tough conversations with their families about what it will mean to be a queer elected official in the current political moment. The Victory Institute training included information on how best to handle harassment on the campaign trail.

However, candidates said they also have had young people and others thank them for having the nerve to defend the LGBTQ+ community.

Kevin Morrison, a gay county commissioner in the Chicago suburbs who is running for the House seat of Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), who is running for Senate, recently had that experience after defending a transgender high school athlete at a local school board meeting.

Morrison said the response he got from the community, including many of the school’s alumni, was “incredibly positive” — and showed how ready people are for new LGBTQ+ advocates in positions of power who “lead from a place of empathy and compassion.”

In California

LGBTQ+ candidates are running across California — which has been a national leader in electing LGBTQ+ candidates, but never had an out transgender state representative.

Maebe Pudlo, 39, is an operations manager for the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition and an elected member of the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council. She is also transgender, and running for the Central and East L.A. state Senate seat of María Elena Durazo, who is running for county supervisor.

Pudlo, who also works as a drag queen, said that simply existing each day is a “political and social statement” for her. But she decided to run for office after seeing policy decisions affecting transgender people made without any transgender voices at the table.

“Unfortunately, our lives have been politicized and trans people have become political pawns, and it’s really disgusting to me,” Pudlo said.

Like every other queer candidate who spoke to The Times, Pudlo, who has previously run for Congress, said her platform is about more than LGBTQ+ issues. It’s also about housing and healthcare and defending democracy more broadly, she said, noting her campaign slogan is “Keep Fascism Out of California.”

Still, Pudlo said she is keenly aware of the current political threats to transgender people, and feels a deep responsibility to defend their rights — for everyone’s sake.

“This whole idea of rolling back civil rights for trans people specifically — that should be concerning for anybody who cares about democracy,” Pudlo said. “Because if they’ll do it to my community, your community is next.”

Former Palm Springs Mayor Lisa Middleton speaks at a training event for LGBTQ+ candidates and prospective candidates in L.A. in September. Also in the photo are, from left, LGBTQ+ Victory Fund President Evan Low, West Hollywood City Councilmember Danny Hang, Culver City Councilmember Bubba Fish and Virginia state Sen. Danica Roem.

(David Butow / For The Times)

Juan Camacho, a 44-year-old Echo Park resident also running for Durazo’s seat, said he feels a similar responsibility as a gay Mexican immigrant — particularly as Trump rolls out the “Project 2025 playbook” of attacking immigrants, Latinos and LGBTQ+ people, he said.

Brought to the U.S. by his parents as a toddler before becoming documented under President Reagan’s amnesty program, Camacho said he understands the fear that undocumented and mixed-status families feel, and he wants to use his privilege as a citizen now to push back.

Veteran California legislative leader Toni Atkins, who has long been out and is now running for governor, said the recent attacks on LGBTQ+ and especially transgender people have been “pretty disheartening,” but have also strengthened her resolve — after 50 years of LGBTQ+ people gaining rights in this country — to keep fighting.

“It’s what it’s always been: We want housing and healthcare and we want equal opportunity and we want to be seen as contributing members of society,” she said. “We have a responsibility to be visible and, as Harvey Milk said, to ‘give them hope.’”

Donald Trump is waging war on California the way Rome did on Carthage.

He ordered the National Guard and the Marines to occupy parts of Los Angeles, over the objections of Gov. Gavin “Newscum” and Mayor Karen Bass. He’s demanding that my alma mater, UCLA, pay a $1-billion fine over allegations of antisemitism. His Justice Department has sued the state on issues including transgender athletes, big-rig emission standards and cage-free eggs.

Now, Trump is going after our history.

Last month, the White House issued a news release titled “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian,” flagging a grab bag of museum exhibits as offensive — basically anything that highlights racism or is sympathetic toward LGBTQ+ people and undocumented immigrants.

Buried in this trash heap of whines is a complaint that reflects how hell-bent Trump is on bending California to his will.

Describing a “Californio” family as losing their land to Anglo “squatters,” which the yet-to-be-built National Museum of the American Latino does on its website, is apparently a DEI thought crime, according to the news release.

My query to the White House, asking what exactly is so offensive about this characterization of the Mexicans who stayed in California after it became part of the U.S., was acknowledged yet not answered.

But the focus on “Californio” and “squatter” — and putting those words in quotes, as the news release did — suggests the underlying issue, said UC Santa Barbara history professor Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, who specializes in 19th century California.

“They’re trying to question the legitimacy” of the Californios, she said. “Who matters as an American? [To Trump], it’s not people who come from Mexico. It’s people who came from the East.”

“The level of minutiae on this — it’s not him,” she added of Trump. “He’s not a reader. It must be a vast team doing this.”

Worrying about scare quotes around two words in a White House news release might seem like distracting piffle compared with Trump’s other anti-California volleys.

But how the U.S. government frames our yesteryear is one of this administration’s main battlefronts and something I’ve repeatedly warned about in my columna. History is written by the victors, goes the cliche, allowing them to shape a people’s sense of self and decide who’s important and who isn’t.

That’s why Trump and his goons have tried to remake our nation’s past as a triumphalist, so-called Heritage American story, in which people of Western European heritage are always the main actors and the heroes. They’ve done it with the obsession of a pharaoh chipping away all mentions of his predecessors from obelisks.

Trump’s campaign started on Inauguration Day, when he signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has removed the name of LGBTQ+ hero Harvey Milk from a Navy ship and restored the names of Army bases that had honored Confederate officers. The Department of Homeland Security keeps posting images and artwork that celebrate Manifest Destiny — the idea that white people, and white people alone, saved this savage continent.

Next up: a review of exhibits at national memorials and monuments to ensure they don’t “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” an “extraordinary celebration” for this country’s 250th birthday and a National Garden of American Heroes to “reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism.”

In Trump’s mind, the United States has never done any wrong, and anyone who thinks so hates this country. It’s not surprising that casting Californios as victims of rapacious gringos might offend him or his lackeys. But this isn’t wokoso propaganda — it’s well-documented history.

Pio Pico State Historic Park in Whittier was home to its namesake, the last governor of California when it was part of Mexico.

(Ringo Chiu / For The Times)

In 1850, Sacramento’s sheriff and mayor died while attempting to remove white squatters, in what was quickly deemed the Squatter Riot. The following year, the U.S. government forced Californios to prove they owned the land they lived on, even though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, had ensured their property rights. In the meantime, white settlers could largely claim rancho land as they pleased.

California’s most famous historians — Hubert Howe Bancroft, Kevin Starr and Robert Glass Cleland, to name a few — wrote extensively about so-called squatterism, with Bancroft describing what happened to the Californios as “oppressive and ruinous.”

A new generation of scholars has focused on the writings of Californios, including “The Squatter and the Don,” an 1885 novel by María Ruiz de Burton based on her family’s fight to keep their rancho in what’s now San Diego County.

This was the book described on the National Museum of the American Latino website, prompting the ignominious “Californio” mention in the White House news release.

Until now, “there’s never been much opposition, really” to the narrative of the Californios’ decline, Chavez-Garcia said, calling it “foundational” to the state’s mythology. She cited festivals in mission towns, such as Santa Barbara’s Old Spanish Days Fiesta, where people dress up like the Californios of yore to remember a romanticized era that was destined to end badly.

“The thinking was that the state’s prosperity was never meant to happen” to Californios, she said. “They were meant to die off.”

As a high school student in San José, Chavez-Garcia knew none of this history — “we learned more about the Homestead Act in the Midwest,” she joked. At UCLA, when she finally learned about the Californios, she was “outraged” and questioned why her beloved high school history teacher “didn’t teach us this basic thing.”

“Many people … don’t know our history, so whatever the government tells them to read, they’re going to accept,” she said. “You can’t just let someone take an eraser and erase these histories willy-nilly lo que no le gusta [what someone doesn’t like] and then put in whatever the hell you want because it makes you feel good.”

It can’t fall only on scholars such as Chavez-Garcia and nerds such as me to push back against Trump’s ahistorical assault. All Californians need to stand up to people who not only want to remain willfully ignorant about the bad parts of our history but also want to stop others from learning about them. Speaking only about the good prevents us from doing better and leads to a juvenile worldview that’s sadly taken hold in the White House and beyond.

We must take the stance expressed by Doña Josefa Alamar, a protagonist of “The Squatter and the Don.”

At the end of the novel, she is living in exile in San Francisco. Her husband has died from the stress of trying to keep their rancho, her sons live in hardship and her daughter is married to a white man. A friend urges her to stay silent and not malign the “rich people” who caused her so much grief. But Doña Josefa refuses.

“Let the guilty rejoice and go unpunished, and the innocent suffer ruin and desolation,” she replies. “I slander no one, but shall speak the truth.”

WASHINGTON — Wall Street veteran Frank Bisignano was confirmed by the Senate on Tuesday to lead the Social Security Administration, taking over at a turbulent time for the agency that provides benefits to more than 70 million Americans.

The Senate confirmed Bisignano in a 53-47 vote.

Bisignano’s confirmation comes after a months-long series of announcements at the Social Security Administration of mass federal worker layoffs, cuts to programs, office closures and a planned cut to nationwide Social Security phone services, which were eventually walked back.

Many of the changes are driven by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, headed by billionaire advisor Elon Musk, who said this week that he is preparing to wind down his role with the administration. The upheaval has made Social Security a major focus of Democrats, including former President Biden, who said in his first public speech since leaving office that Republican President Trump has “taken a hatchet” to the program.

Bisignano, a self-professed “DOGE person,” has served as chair of Fiserv, a payments and financial services tech firm since 2020. He is a onetime defender of corporate policies to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination. Bisignano takes over from the agency’s acting commissioner, DOGE supporter Leland Dudek. Bisignano’s term ends in January 2031.

Asked during his March confirmation hearing whether Social Security should be privatized, Bisignano responded: “I’ve never heard a word of it, and I’ve never thought about it.”

Democrats and activists have for weeks railed against Bisignano’s confirmation, holding rallies and other events protesting his nomination.

During the final roll call vote, Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden called Bisignano “unfit” to be the steward of Americans’ Social Security benefits. Wyden said Trump wants Bisignano to “gut” Social security, and that Republicans who support Bisignano’s confirmation would be responsible if their grandmother misses a Social Security check and can’t pay rent.

“By confirming Mr. Bisignano, the Senate will be signing a death sentence to Social Security as we know it today,” Wyden said.

The chaos at the the agency began shortly after acting commissioner Michelle King stepped down in February, a move that came after DOGE sought access to Social Security recipient information. That prompted a lawsuit by labor unions and retirees, who asked a federal court to issue an emergency order limiting DOGE’s access to Social Security data.

Most recently, the full panel of judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 9 to 6 not to lift restrictions on the access that DOGE has to Social Security systems containing personal data on millions of Americans.

Also in February, the agency announced plans to cut 7,000 people from the agency payroll through layoffs, employee reassignments and an offer of voluntary separation agreements, as part of an intensified effort to shrink the size of the federal workforce.

Dudek also announced a plan to require in-person identity checks for millions of new and existing recipients while simultaneously closing government offices. That sparked a furor among lawmakers, advocacy groups and program recipients who are worried that the government is placing unnecessary barriers in front of an already vulnerable population. That plan has since been rolled back.

The Social Security Administration provides benefits to roughly 72.5 million people, including retirees and children.

Hussein writes for the Associated Press.