Last year, a little-known office in the U.S. Department of Labor helped Black workers at a Texas medical center recover $900,000 in back wages, and Black workers at a Caterpillar manufacturing plant in Illinois recover $800,000, each time over allegations that those applicants lost out on jobs because of their race. Called the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, this division investigates and fights employment discrimination for one-fifth of the U.S. labor force. It was created in 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed an executive order strengthening the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned racial discrimination by employers. The O.F.C.C.P. specifically enforced the law among businesses and institutions that contracted with the government or received federal funds. The landmark law also banned segregation and discrimination in all public places, including schools, libraries, restaurants and buses.
For more than 60 years, the executive order helped many thousands of workers who had endured discrimination. Yet despite the law, research shows that Black Americans continue to face pervasive employment discrimination at a rate that has not declined since the late 1980s.
On his second day in office, President Donald Trump labeled O.F.C.C.P.’s efforts to enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act illegal and discriminatory — presumably against white people. He signed his own executive order revoking Johnson’s on behalf of, as he put it, “hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American dream.”
Within the week, Trump’s acting secretary of labor ordered the O.F.C.C.P. to “immediately cease and desist all investigative and enforcement activity” and close all open cases. A few weeks later, O.F.C.C.P.’s acting director proposed slashing its staff by 90 percent. In fewer than two months, six decades of civil rights enforcement was essentially dead.
Trump has justified these actions by claiming he is rooting out racial discrimination disguised as “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Indeed, the other federal agency charged with investigating employment discrimination, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, recently created a page on its website dedicated to helping white Americans file complaints based on being victimized by diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
But to see what Trump is doing as simply eliminating so-called “D.E.I.” is to misunderstand the scale and the consequences. What’s at stake is not only corporate diversity trainings, equity offices and the use of pronouns in email signatures. Many diversity, equity and inclusion programs were put in place to help ensure compliance with civil rights laws and to foster integration in a society that for most of its history explicitly discriminated against Black Americans. No court has deemed these programs illegal. Yet in the opening months of his second term, Trump has capitalized on the unpopularity of equality efforts among some Americans, glibly wielding the language of D.E.I. to initiate the broadest and most significant assault on civil rights and racial integration in this country in more than a century.
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President Lyndon B. Johnson meeting with civil rights leaders (from left, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young and James Farmer) in January 1964, months before the signing of the Civil Rights Act.Credit…GHI/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images
Since returning to power, Trump has used his singular authority as the head of the federal government to recast the white majority as the primary victims of systemic racial discrimination — though no evidence, not even self-reporting among white people, shows this to be true. In addition to upending long-established enforcement of civil rights law in employment, he has undermined civil rights protections in housing and education and environmental policy; crippled or shuttered entire federal civil rights agencies; and retracted federal findings of civil rights violations against police departments.He has forced by mandate, threat and coercion the elimination of policies and cultural norms focused on integration and equality throughout government, education and the private sector. Trump has claimed — though he has no authority to do so — to have repealed birthright citizenship, which was embedded in the Constitution at the end of slavery to guarantee Black Americans citizenship by birthright and grants automatic citizenship to all people born on American soil.
Trump’s actions have not materialized out of nowhere. Conservatives have spent decades chipping away both at civil rights protections and the national will to address racial inequality. Since the racial reckoning of 2020, Republicans have toppled affirmative action in college admissions and waged an enormously successful campaign to make the language of equity and inclusion anathema, to label books and lessons about the nation’s history “anti-white” and “divisive” and to prohibit everything from Black studies to university diversity offices. And earlier this month, the Supreme Court, which over the years has made it increasingly challenging for Black Americans to prove discrimination, has now made it easier for straight white people to do so.
The notion that equality efforts have gone too far has proved seductive to many white Americans, who are the least likely of all groups to believe that racism is an obstacle for Black Americans. Polling shows the majority of Republicans see efforts to ameliorate racism as “making life more difficult for white Americans” and believe that racism against Black Americans was a problem in the past, but that now white Americans suffer from racism more than any other group.
And Trump’s message is most likely finding a broader audience. Pew Research Center polling on racial attitudes six months before the 2024 election showed that the percentage of Democratic voters who believed white people “benefit a great deal from advantages in society that Black people did not have” plummeted 15 points in just two years. The legal scholar Ian Haney López explained what he believes caused the rapid decline. “Many white liberals were themselves skeptical of diversity, equity and inclusion, were themselves disposed to complaints about ‘wokeness’ and its demands that people be sensitive about speech around racial issues,” he told me. “And so now when there are all these attacks on D.E.I., there are surprisingly few defenders.”
Still, the efficiency with which Trump has collapsed the civil rights and equality infrastructure of the federal government has stunned the nation’s veteran civil rights leaders. “This is a full-on assault on all that we have gained in the last 125 years,” Maya Wiley, president and chief executive of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told me. “Civil rights is the architecture of democracy, so the only reason you do this is because you are trying to steal democratic power from people.”
Civil rights activists fear that the threat of losing federal funds or being investigated and punished for trying to integrate, combined with the decimation of the entities charged with defending them, is creating an environment where institutions will be afraid to admit too many Black students, hire too many Black staff members or put scientific, medical or economic resources toward alleviating the singular disparities Black people still face across American life. The Trump administration is “actually creating incentives to exclude Black folks,” says LaTosha Brown, a community organizer and co-founder of Black Voters Matter.
The resounding success of the civil rights movement was in largely convincing American society that racism was wrong. But its citizens never agreed on how best to correct racism’s harms. While it seems clear that, say, when it comes to crime, passing laws alone is not enough (that’s why we have law enforcement), we can lose sight of that principle when it comes to the rights of minority groups. If you are a member of the racial majority, or the group that holds power, rights can feel both innate and abstract, invisible and assumed. But for Black Americans and other historically marginalized groups, the right to be treated as equal citizens, to be treated fairly by the government, private companies and individuals, has for most of the history of this country not been guaranteed. These rights needed to be codified and enforced precisely because the deprivation of those rights was codified and enforced for almost as long as this country existed. When in the past the federal government stopped enforcing these laws, those rights have always deteriorated.
Today, as the Trump administration is systematically taking apart the enforcement apparatus of the federal government, agency by agency, it is sending a powerful message to American institutions that discrimination will not be punished. This may once again leave Black Americans with rights that exist largely on paper.
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No cornerof the massive federal bureaucracy is being left untouched by Trump’s dismantling of civil rights. In March, Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, shuttered the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and announced he was eliminating all 10 of its regional divisions. President George H.W. Bush established the office in 1992 because he saw the disproportionate exposure to deadly pollutants, toxic waste and pesticides faced by Black people and other marginalized groups across the country as an issue that the federal government needed to address. Over three decades, the office has worked to protect communities suffering and dying from industrial pollution and to track the impacts of pollution and climate change.
To Zeldin, these efforts amounted to “D.E.I.” and “forced discrimination” — though it is unclear how or against whom. In March, the administration moved to dismiss a landmark environmental-justice suit in Louisiana against a chemical plant located in a poor, predominantly Black community where the cancer risk was so high — the highest in the country, in fact — that a nearby elementary school had to be shuttered. The government had been moving to curb the plant’s dangerous emissions, and the case was set to go to trial in April, before the administration abandoned it. The Trump administration has also terminated a settlement requiring officials in a rural Alabama town to help families in another poor Black community that had been exposed to raw sewage for decades.
Trump has scuttled the entire civil rights divisions of the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, and closed the division in the Department of Veterans Affairs that sought to address longstanding racial disparities in how veterans receive compensation for their disabilities.
In April, Trump issued another executive order that seeks to abolish the linchpin of modern civil rights enforcement, known as “disparate impact liability.” Sixty years after the civil rights movement made racial discrimination illegal, discrimination is rarely explicit. Disparate impact recognizes that nearly all discrimination today is covert and hidden behind race-neutral policies or actions. When state legislators create new congressional maps that eliminate majority-Black districts, for instance, they are not going to declare that they are doing so to dilute Black voting power. But under disparate impact, Black residents don’t have to prove that legislators intended to discriminate. They can prove discrimination if the accused cannot show that there was a legitimate reason for the disparity and that there weren’t other actions they could have taken that would have done less harm. Without disparate impact, it would be impossible for most people who have experienced discrimination in housing or employment or education to prove it, and so its elimination would essentially gut any remaining ability to enforce civil rights law today.
In the realm of housing, the administration has repealed a federal rule making clear that cities, counties and states that receive federal funding must take seriously their obligation, enshrined in the 1968 Fair Housing Act, to take proactive steps to integrate housing. It has also slashed funding for enforcement against housing discrimination and promised to cut in half the staff of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which enforces the Fair Housing Act.
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President Trump signing executive orders, including “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing,” on Jan. 20, 2025, hours after being sworn into office.Credit…Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Civil rights enforcement at the Department of Education is similarly being taken apart. The administration announced that it was eliminating seven of the department’s 12 regional civil rights offices, which compel schools to integrate, collect educational data that reveals racial and other disparities and investigate discrimination in schools and universities.
The Education Department sent a letter to all educational institutions receiving federal funds asserting without evidence that they were engaging in “pervasive and repugnant race-based” discrimination against white and Asian students. Federal data shows that Black students are disproportionately concentrated in schools with fewer resources and less funding, and experience significant academic disparities. And yet the letter told public schools and universities that they had 14 days to purge all diversity and equity efforts — which include programs that try to help diversify teaching staffs and help Black students close the achievement gaps they suffer from nationwide — or lose access to federal funds.
This reveals another powerful tool the Trump administration is using to subvert civil rights: the might of the federal dollar. By withholding federal money from integration and equity programs, it is turning the Civil Rights Act against its aims. The law originally derived its tremendous power not just from the authority it gave the federal government to sue to force compliance but from the way it deployed federal money to incentivize integration and fair treatment. Recognizing that schools, local and state governments, universities and thousands of private employers, from airplane manufacturers to pharmaceutical companies, received billions of federal dollars to do their work, the law gave the government the power to strip funds from any organization that discriminated against not just Black people but anyone based on their race, color or nationality (and later gender, disability, sexuality and veteran status). These categories of people were called “protected classes” precisely because they belonged to marginalized groups whose rights needed protection from the majority.
It was the threat of both lawsuits and losing federal funds — a full decade after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision made school segregation illegal — that finally forced recalcitrant Southern school districts to desegregate. Now the Trump administration is dismissing longstanding federal court orders against school districts that still have never fully integrated, and using the law to force the end of programs designed to eliminate racial disparities that Black and other students face.
But probably the starkest change is the redirecting of the Department of Justice away from fighting anti-Black discrimination and toward eliminating integration efforts. Harmeet Dhillon, the new head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, sent a memo to the staff making it clear the mandate going forward would be to enforce Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity programs.While Black Americans have historically relied on the federal government to vindicate their rights when facing discrimination from state and local officials, the Trump administration has moved to dismiss voting rights and civil rights cases involving police departments and close Department of Education investigations into anti-Black discrimination, at the same time that it is bringing new investigations against institutions that have diversity programs. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 precisely for the purpose of protecting the voting rights of Black citizens and prosecuting crimes against civil rights workers. The remaking of the storied division into one that no longer focuses on defending the civil rights of marginalized groups has led to a mass exodus, with some 70 percent of its attorneys leaving or planning to leave, according to recent news reports.
Black Americans may now struggle to find protection of their civil rights in the private sector as well. In mid-March, the E.E.O.C.’s acting chair, Andrea Lucas, sent letters to 20 of the nation’s most prominent law firms questioning whether their employment practices, including their work to integrate the profession, are violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Lucas demanded that the law firms provide extensive hiring and compensation data for staff and fellowship programs, and has encouraged employees to report their firms for engaging in “potentially unlawful” diversity efforts. Lucas used the firms’ own promotion of their integration work as evidence that they may be discriminating against white people. But this claim stands in stark contrast to the data: Despite these diversity efforts, just 4.4 percent of lawyers at law firms nationwide are Black.
A few days after Lucas sent her letters, Trump announced that one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, Paul Weiss, agreed to eliminate its integration programs and allow an auditor to search out any diversity and equity employment practices, among other concessions. In a statement sent to colleagues, the firm’s chairman said it was retaining its “longstanding commitment to diversity in all of its forms,” but agreed to “follow the law with respect to our employment practices.”
By targeting these law firms, Trump seems to be trying to kneecap the private civil rights enforcement infrastructure as well. Most of the firms that received Lucas’s letter have partners or other attorneys who sit on the board of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which was formed in 1963 after President John F. Kennedy convened a meeting of more than 200 lawyers to help defend the rights of Black Americans. Last year, the Paul Weiss firm was recognized for its pro bono work with the organization, including partnering on suits against the white-nationalist groups the Proud Boys and the Patriot Front. Private firms and in-house corporate legal departments have donated more than one million pro bono hours to the Lawyers’ Committee and its clients in the last decade alone. Now Paul Weiss has agreed to do pro bono work for the administration. The capitulation roiled the profession.
“The Lawyers’ Committee got the commitment of America’s most prominent, most powerful law firms to assure fairness and equality through enforcement of civil rights,” says William Robinson, a former executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee. “That’s what Trump is attacking.” Trump, he said, is dismantling the Civil Rights Act “by executive fiat.”
President Trump claims that destroying what he calls “D.E.I.” will return the United States to a meritocracy, and, in his words, bring a new American “golden age.” But the metaphor reveals more than it perhaps intends. America’s last golden age was called the Gilded Age, an era around the turn of the last century known for its rapid economic growth and ostentatious wealth. But there’s a reason that era evokes an image where Black people exist outside the frame. What Trump calls the golden age, Black Americans call the Nadir, the lowest point, a term coined by the historian Rayford W. Logan to describe the period when, with the blessing of the federal government, the rights that Black Americans achieved following slavery’s demise were violently and systematically taken away.
It can be hard to imagine how quickly racial progress can disappear. But consider that during Reconstruction, Radical Republicans in Congress propelled the establishment of the first national civil rights in the country’s history. Congress passed a series of laws and constitutional amendments granting Black Americans citizenship by birthright; protecting their right to vote, hold office and serve on juries; and prohibiting discrimination in housing, public places and on public transit. Under the protection of the federal government, Black Americans were able to own land, start businesses, build schools and colleges, work middle-class jobs in the federal government, vote and serve in office. In 1870, for example, Hiram Revels became the first Black person elected to the U.S. Senate, representing Mississippi, and in 1873, Henry Hayne became the first Black man to attend the University of South Carolina, making it the only integrated public university in the South. These were stunning feats in majority-Black states that less than a decade earlier enslaved nearly all the Black people within their borders. Progress must have felt inevitable.
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A woodcut from 1870 depicting Hiram Revels, Republican of Mississippi, taking the oath of office to become the nation’s first Black senator.Credit…Bettmann/Getty Images
But just four years later, in 1877, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, following a contested presidential election, secured Southern Democratic support by agreeing to withdraw federal troops who protected Black Southerners from the violence of their former enslavers and insured their ability to cast a ballot.
Though the rights of Black Americans remained enshrined in the Constitution, almost immediately states began to pass both explicit segregation laws and so-called “race-neutral” laws such as grandfather clauses, which dictated that men whose grandfathers had cast a ballot before 1867 were the only ones guaranteed the right to vote. These laws almost completely disenfranchised Black people, of course, because before then nearly all Black people had been enslaved and were therefore unable to vote.
Forced to live under what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “veil” of codified segregation and racial oppression, Black people were vanquished from institutions, workplaces and public spaces they once shared with white Americans. Under the cover of law, states stripped Black Americans of their ability to vote, to serve on juries, to ride on integrated train cars, to shop in integrated stores. For nearly a century, there would be no more Black senators and no Black students at the University of South Carolina, as the America that could have been succumbed to the America that always was.
As racial apartheid was being systematically erected on a state level, Black people looked to the federal government for protection. But in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson, whose father was an enslaver and a chaplain in the Confederate Army, nationalized Jim Crow when he allowed the federal government to segregate its work force, putting the presidential stamp of approval on discrimination against Black citizens.
It is no accident that we remember so little of this time when Black Americans won their rights and then quickly lost them. Much of this amnesia was a consequence of a sophisticated disinformation campaign promulgated by a turn-of-the-century version of the Moms for Liberty — a group of white women called the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Following the Civil War, the United Daughters worked to cement the “Lost Cause” narrative across the South by successfully advocating that school textbooks and curriculum and public monuments valorize the white slaveholding South and justify the stripping of Black Americans’ rights. They advanced a narrative that Reconstruction had been a failure because Black people — unscrupulous, ignorant and incapable of self-governance — had ascended into positions that were rightfully white. In her 1895 textbook, “A School History of the United States,” Susan Pendleton Lee, a member of the Lexington, Va., chapter of the U.D.C. who said she aimed to give children “a just and interesting account of the whole country,” wrote that “many of the Negroes in the legislatures, in the courts of justice, and in the magistrate’s chair could neither read nor write, and were unable to understand any of the important questions of the troublous times. Government administered by such irresponsible hands, became every day more unjust and corrupt,” while “ the hard lot of the intelligent, cultivated white population … saw the States they loved so well thus ruined and degraded.”
Today conservatives rely on a similar forced forgetting, rebranding their attacks on civil rights as an attempt to defend them. This subversion reduces the 1964 Civil Rights Act to a simple mandate to make colorblindness — a blindness to the existence and saliency of race — the law of the land. It is an ahistoric interpretation that treats those who today try to use race to integrate as equivalent to those who once used race to segregate. By this logic, the Civil Rights Act itself becomes unmoored from the very legacy of anti-Blackness that forced Congress to pass the law in the first place.
But all the civil rights acts going back to the 1800s — all of them — were passed by Congress to try to end the subordination, discrimination and segregation of a people whose ancestors were enslaved. Millions of Americans living today took their first breaths in a country where, because they are Black, they were excluded by law from homes, from neighborhoods, from loans, from schools, from parks, from universities, from jobs, from stores, from restaurants, from hospitals, from libraries and, in some parts of the country, from entire professions.
There is no resemblant history for white Americans, and no evidence that white Americans today face systemic discrimination in a nation where they remain the majority and where the federal government and most institutions, especially this nation’s most elite ones, are still overwhelmingly run by white people. This is how the efforts to erase the history of racism and Black American freedom struggles intersect with the efforts to roll back civil rights. Over the last few years, in the name of equality, many Republican-led states have passed laws that forbid accurate teaching about racism and encourage the purging of books and curricula about Black Americans and other marginalized groups. President Trump is now federalizing these laws, forcing them onto states, universities and communities. He is promising to take over this nation’s most prestigious public museums and purge them of exhibits that “divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”
That’s because every lesson plan and plaque that recounts slavery or legal discrimination, every commemoration that celebrates Black firsts, reminds us why civil rights laws and enforcement agencies, race-conscious research and diversity hiring and educational policies were required to begin with, and why they remain necessary today.
By deploying the Civil Rights Act against the very people it was created to protect, conservatives hope to get as close to their ultimate goal as possible: repealing it. The mainstream conservative writer Christopher Caldwell argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forced upon society a new Constitution irreconcilable with the first. He has argued that efforts to enforce the law robbed the South of its democracy and created onerous rules that limited American freedoms.His analysis diminishes the fact that “democracy” in the South before the civil rights acts existed only for white people, and that the act vastly expanded freedoms for Black Americans and other marginalized groups. White men, Caldwell wrote in his 2020 book, “The Age of Entitlement: Americas Since the Sixties,” “fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”
That sentiment about the Civil Rights Act is evidently shared by Mike Gonzales, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published “Project 2025.” He wrote in February that Trump is “on the warpath against the radical ’60s,” adding “many of the things that conservatives are setting out to dismantle have their origin in that fateful decade.”
An America without the ’60s, of course, is an America without civil rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, disability rights and gay rights. It is an America where meritocracy did not and could not exist.
The astounding ambit of Trump’s first months has made it possible to imagine a future that looks eerily like the past. An America where the Constitution still stands, but Black people and other marginalized groups receive virtually no protection from the federal government, and the actions of that government instead encourage discrimination. An America where Black people may nearly disappear, first from textbooks, curriculum and museums, and then from predominantly white institutions and entire professions, such as law, medicine and science, where they are already severely underrepresented. And since conservatives are also threatening and defunding medical and other programs at historically Black colleges and have sued even Black organizations that have tried to specifically help Black people, the America Trump may be bringing about is an America that the vast majority of Black Americans alive today have never lived in — a second Nadir.
It may seem unfathomable. But history provides a warning: In this country, when the circumstances are right, the fragile norms around race can be dislodged, and freedoms can erode and then evaporate.
Read by Janina Edwards
Narration produced by Krish Seenivasan
Engineered by Alec K. Redfearn
Source photographs for top illustration: George Doyle/Stockbyte, via Getty Images; Gravity Images/The Image Bank, via Getty Images; Mint Images, via Getty Images.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice and civil rights.
This is about racism and misogyny. It follows the Russian all white male jacked up soldiers who are getting their asses handed to them in Ukraine. This clown “Kegseth” is clueless what a modern military is and can be. Remember he was picked because he was a weekend host on Fox opinion net work. Hugs
Hegseth doing pushups with sailors aboard the USS Dewey | Department of Defense
Pete Hegseth loves to have his picture taken doing jumping jacks, jogging with the troops, and hanging with buff special ops commandos. In fact, the Secretary of Defense is all about appearances, making a constant show of being more virile than anyone who’s ever preceded him.
In the name of warfighting and military readiness, Hegseth is self-appointed commanding general of the war on wrinkles.
His obsession has provoked a slew of new rules and regulations about “standards” of grooming and appearance, a deadly serious effort encompassing everything from banning eyelash extensions to offering government-funded laser hair removal procedures. With an emphasis on rules that most impact women and minorities, Hegseth wants to establish his own wokeness, a campaign that stresses looks over actual excellence.
Looks like DOGE missed a spot
The new grooming standards, one Army directive says, are “in support of Army readiness” — military speak for the ability to act swiftly and effectively. Far from some obscure policy, Hegseth believes that disciplined hair care will lead to a disciplined military, restoring the “warrior ethos” he often laments the armed forces have lost.
“We’re looking at overall fitness standards, overall grooming standards, overall basic standards across our formations that we believe have slipped certainly under the previous administration, but over decades,” Hegseth told Congress last month.
“It’s almost like the broken windows theory of policing: when you ignore the small stuff from criminals … it creates a culture where big stuff you’re not held accountable for,” he pontificated at a town hall meeting in February.
Army briefing on “Male Grooming Standard” | Defense Department
Here are three new grooming standards that particularly caught my eye:
Shaving, particularly for soldiers who seek waivers to standard policies due to health complications that daily shaving can cause. This is most common for black and brown folks who have curly hair; so common in fact that the directive makes explicit mention of “pseudofolliculitis Barbae,” or razor bumps, which can become infected.
The directive enumerates three phased treatment plans corresponding to mild, moderate and severe cases. A fourth phase provides the option of laser hair removal to soldiers unresponsive to the previous treatments or with chronic issues.
Eyelash extensions are now banned. No real justification is given but I’m sure it’s a coincidence that this also impacts black and brown people the most. Similarly, nail polish must now be “clear or French or American Manicure only,” a sacrifice to the gods of uniformity which feels more arbitrary than purposeful.
Petty changes to uniforms are being directed, from a ban on duty identifier patches, to shorter boots (“8-12 inches”), to important contingency plans on how to wear one’s sleeves (“the cuffs will remain visible, and the sleeve will rest at, or within 1-inch of, the forearm when the arm is bent at a 90-degree angle”; though “Commanders may prohibit rolling of sleeves and folding of cuffs.”)
It is a hodgepodge of “new” directives that are mostly costly annoyances but overall leave enlisted soldiers I’ve talked to feeling like the Pentagon and “leadership” are just playing a sadistic game of Simon Says.
Clean-shaven soldiers, however, aren’t going to bring the U.S. military closer to an end to the war in Ukraine or create greater security in the Middle East. More creases aren’t going to help tackle the challenges of drones and artificial intelligence, or fight the new Cold War with China.
In fact, Hegseth seems to be taking a page out of the Russian military playbook, which upon suffering over one million casualties in Ukraine, is also trying to stress appearances over serious failures of policy and humaneness.
Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov has launched his own campaign to improve troop discipline by clamping down on non-standard haircuts, according to British intelligence, which assessed that this caused him to be “focused on presentation over substance.” In Russia’s case, a laughably undisciplined and corrupt force indeed needs to reform. But emulating Gerasimov is more of an insult to the men and women of the U.S. armed forces.
But this is more about Hegseth, for whom “presentation over substance” seems like his entire worldview. Here he is posing on the Pentagon lawn while signing an order on drone production, a piece of paper that was delivered by drone. The contents of the order didn’t get much attention but the image of the smartly dressed Secretary plucking the paper from the drone instantly became a meme.
Since his first appearance at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in February, when Hegseth mistakenly got ahead of President Trump’s negotiations by declaring Ukraine’s intent to regain its territory as “unrealistic” — prompting criticism from his own party’s Chair of the Armed Services Committee Sen. Roger Wicker, who called it “amateur” — Trump’s secretary has not had a hair out of place.
In every photo I can find, Hegseth’s hair seems painstakingly coiffed, right down to the occasional, ostensible cowlick. He looks like Christian Bale’s depiction of Bruce Wayne but with a MOAB-sized helping of hairgel.
The irony is that, amid all the chaos — of his alleged sexual misconduct, to the mass firing of his staff, to Signalgate and on and on — the man is always perfectly manicured. One has a sense that Hegseth will be more pleased in being named best-dressed of 2025 than anything else.
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When Jason Collins came out in a 2013 Sports Illustrated cover story, he broke down the long-sealed closet in men’s sports by becoming the first openly gay active player in any major league sport. President Barack Obama called him to offer his support, saying he “couldn’t be prouder,” and Oprah Winfrey called him “a pioneer.”
“By not having to hide who I am, just being able to live an authentic life, there’s something powerful about being the one to out yourself and step forward and speak your truth,” Collins told Uncloseted Media. “There’s no greater feeling.”
Many thought that Collins’ announcement would lead to a slew of men coming out in professional sports; commentators called it a “tipping point” and the moment “when things really changed.” But 12 years later, the silence is deafening. Today, there are zero active openly gay or bisexual players in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, MLS, PGA and ATP.
What makes these numbers particularly shocking is that more than 1 in 5 Gen Z adults in the United States identify as LGBTQ+. “It is a legit claim that the last closet for men is sports, especially in the North American context,” says Charlene Weaving, a professor of gender studies at St. Francis Xavier University. “If you look at sport[s], it’s as if what’s happening in society is amplified. Sports is the worst place for sexism and homophobia. … There’s so much pressure to adhere to a heterosexual persona.”
So what’s keeping the closet door shut?
Coaching can help or hurt
Brian Burke participates in the 2025 Toronto Pride Parade on June 29, 2025 in Toronto, Ontario. (Harold Feng/Getty Images)
One key element in men’s sports that can help or hinder someone from coming out is the mentors who surround them.
“The coaches create the culture, right? What you say, what you allow [in] your locker room, that’s all on us,” says Anthony Nicodemo, a gay high school basketball coach in Westchester, New York.
He says he intentionally uses LGBTQ-inclusive language with his team to signal that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. “If we had a game on Saturday morning and it’s Friday night, I’d say, ‘Hey go home with your boyfriend or girlfriend tonight, stay in.’ My kids would laugh, of course, but then after I said it a couple times, they didn’t even blink,” he says. “If there was a gay kid on my team, that gay kid knows that he’s welcome.”
A 2016 study by the Journal of Sport and Health Science found that gay and bisexual male teen athletes feel particularly unwelcome when playing in formal sporting environments where there are coaches. The study also found that they were more likely to play on an informal team without a coach, which would lessen their chances of becoming a professional athlete.
“The hope is that you’re going to create inclusive environments that are ultimately going to allow those kids to get to the point in society where we feel comfortable with them coming out and eventually playing at the professional level,” says Nicodemo, who worked with Collins at the Pride Center’s LGBTQ+ inclusion basketball clinic in San Antonio this March.
Nicodemo says we need more role models like Brian Burke, the former president of hockey operations for the Pittsburgh Penguins. After Burke’s gay son passed away in a car accident in 2010, he made it his mission to explicitly advocate for gay men competing in pro hockey. “If you’re a member of the LGBTQ+ community, you are welcome with the Pittsburgh Penguins,” he said at a 2021 Pittsburgh Pride Revolution March. “You’re welcome to come to our games, you’re welcome to play for our team, you’re welcome to work on our staff. You are welcome.”
Research suggests all players want to participate in more inclusive environments. A 2021 study evaluated college coaches who identified as LGBTQ+, as allies, or as anti-LGBTQ+. In every context, students preferred coaches who embraced nondiscrimination, choosing the ally and the LGBTQ+ coach over the anti-LGBTQ+ coach.
Despite this, Nicodemo says he may be an anomaly when it comes to LGBTQ-inclusive coaches. In fact, a 2015 study concluded that the United States was the most homophobic country in the world when it comes to sports and 80 percent of the study’s participants reported witnessing or experiencing homophobia in U.S. sports.
Just this week, the Wake Forest men’s baseball coach Tom Walter issued an apology after cameras caught him using an apparent homophobic slur during an NCAA game.
“There’s a lot of homophobia in our society. There is a lot of homophobia still in sports, in particular, male sports,” says Collins. “We still have a lot of work to do as far as creating those environments that those athletes do feel comfortable to step forward [in] and share who they are. It’s about education and letting them know it’s okay to say, ‘I am gay,’ ‘I am bisexual.’ You know, you name it, but it’s okay. It’s okay to speak your truth.”
Are the leagues pulling their weight?
Beyond the coaches are the leagues. While some of them have taken steps to create inclusive environments, others have gone in a different direction by rolling back their LGBTQ-inclusive policies amid attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). In March, the MLB removed references to their “Diversity Pipeline Program,” which outlined their diversity-focused hiring initiatives, from their website.
This may have been in response to external pressure. In October 2023, the conservative public interest organization America First Legal, which was founded by Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, filed a formal complaint against the MLB, blasting the league’s diversity pipeline and related initiatives as blatant examples of racial and sexist discrimination against white men.
And in 2023, the NHL banned all LGBTQ+ symbols from uniforms after a handful of players refused to participate in Pride Nights.
While the ban was lifted after pushback from sponsors, players and fans, Nicodemo believes it sent the wrong message to young male players. “I believe wholeheartedly that Pride nights save lives. I think [about] a gay kid that is watching hockey at home and seeing the rainbow flag and how important that is,” he says. “Gay kids need to see people representing pride. When I was coaching before COVID, when we used to actually wear suits when we coached, I wore a rainbow lapel in every game just to show it was okay.”
Some men’s leagues have done more to promote inclusivity. NBA Cares, the social justice arm of the league’s charitable programming, has prioritized including gay youth and men in their initiatives. Nicodemo has worked with NBA Cares, and Collins has contributed as an ambassador.
“This is very important for coaches, for those people in leadership positions, to think about as far as, ‘How do I get the best possible version of my athlete?’ … One way you do that is by creating a team environment where everyone feels safe,” says Collins.
Homophobia and misogyny in the men’s locker room
A player with a ball his hand sits in a locker room. (Jacob Wackerhausen/Getty Images)
Unlike men’s leagues, women’s leagues are more accepting of LGBTQ+ players. Billie Jean King, Brittney Griner and Abby Wambach are some of the many women who have thrived while competing as openly gay athletes.
Homophobia is more common among men. And in the locker room, it isn’t always easy to spot, as it often masks itself in homoeroticism.
“Two male athletes will kiss each other on the lips. And that’s considered to be love and appreciation that you scored that big goal. ‘I’m gonna kiss you and it’s not at all viewed to be perceived to be gay and the grabbing of the bums or the testicle area.’ This idea of showering together, slapping towels, that’s all considered to be like part of men’s sport,” says Weaving. “So it’s this idea where players can be as ‘gay’ as they want and in the context of the field or the locker room, they’re not perceived to be gay. But if they were to act that way outside of that sporting context, then they’re considered to be.”
Collins says this gender divide may be because of sexism and toxic masculinity. This kind of performative homoeroticism is only socially acceptable because it’s understood to be ironic—a joke that relies on not actually being gay. When the behavior slips beyond the bounds of “just joking,” it exposes an undercurrent of homophobia masked as camaraderie.
The financial cost of coming out: something to gain or lose?
Beyond all these pressures lies a monetary component for athletes who are considering opening the closet door while still in uniform. Cyd Zeigler, the cofounder of Outsports, wrote in a 2024 article that he knows “for a fact that agents have told gay athletes to stay in the closet” and that his “best answer has pointed to the agents and managers whose livelihoods depend on athletes maximizing their earning potential in just a few years.”
Weaving agrees. “The general managers and the owners have more traditionally homophobic, sexist thinking. They believe [LGBTQ+ players] will harm viewership,” she says. “It’s still taboo where athletes fear repercussions, predominantly, around sponsorships.”
The fear of losing out on money may be misguided. The first day Jason Collins’ number 98 jersey became available on the NBA website, one year after he came out, it was the top seller of all active NBA players. Carl Nassib’s jersey became a top seller on the NFL’s official online marketplace when he came out in 2021. And Michael Sam, the first gay NFL player, had the second-highest selling jersey in his 2014 rookie class of more than 250 draftees.
The Trump effect on the last closet
Perhaps the biggest factor keeping men in the closet is America’s current political climate, where the Trump administration and corporate America have abandoned DEI and so-called “woke” initiatives.
“The Trump administration asks districts to sign attestations to say that they’re not going to do DEI work in schools. That could be a pride flag hanging in the classroom,” says Nicodemo. “If you’re not creating an inclusive environment for these kids, then these kids are never going to feel comfortable coming out.”
What can be done?
As all these factors create a challenging environment for men to feel safe coming out in sports.
Collins says what could move the needle the most is an increase in role models who will make young athletes feel like they’re competing in a safe environment. “It definitely got to very dark, lonely places because I felt like I was going through this alone,” he says. “When I was younger, I was constantly looking for those role models, of people who have sort of been down this path,” he says.
Weaving agrees and says that a lack of LGBTQ-inclusive coaches can be more than just a deterrent for student-athletes seeking to grow their career.
“For many children, it doesn’t only make things uncomfortable, it can push them out of sports altogether,” she says. “Coaches play a big role. Youth sport is the starting point. If you can create positive environments, inclusive cultures at that level, it continues and helps to shift the pro culture.”
Collins remains hopeful that there will be more visibility of gay men in professional sports but underscores the need for role models to step up.
“If you’re a coach or if you’re an athletic director or even a headmaster out of school, you have to seek out help. You have to bring other organizations who have expertise. And it can be as simple as a 30- to 60-minute conversation, but at least you’re laying the groundwork down for educating those players, educating those athletes,” says Collins, a two-time NBA championship finalist who married his partner last month.
It isn’t timidity. It’s a complete reconstruction of what is acceptable rhetoric, and it makes gentler more collegial conversation and work impossible.
Whether it’s bloodshed at Glastonbury or starving people on benefits, their ‘irony poisoning’ seeps obscene ideas into the range of the possible
Illustration: Nate Kitch/The Guardian
Imagine the furore if a Guardian columnist suggested bombing, say, the Conservative party conference and the Tory stronghold of Arundel in Sussex. It would dominate public discussion for weeks. Despite protesting they were “only joking”, that person would never work in journalism again. Their editor would certainly be sacked. The police would probably come knocking. But when the Spectator columnist Rod Liddle speculates about bombing Glastonbury festival and Brighton, complaints are met with, “Calm down dear, can’t you take a joke?” The journalist keeps his job, as does his editor, the former justice secretary Michael Gove. There’s one rule for the left and another for the right.
The same applies to the recent comments on GB News by its regular guest Lewis Schaffer. He proposed that, to reduce the number of disabled people claiming benefits, he would “just starve them. I mean, that’s what people have to do, that’s what you’ve got to do to people, you just can’t give people money … What else can you do? Shoot them? I mean, I suggest that, but I think that’s maybe a bit strong.” The presenter, Patrick Christys replied, “Yeah, it’s just not allowed these days.”
You could call these jokes, if you think killing people is funny. Or you could call them thought experiments. Liddle suggested as much in his column: “I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way.” This “humour” permits obscene ideas to seep into the range of the possible.
Academic researchers see the use of jokes to break taboos and reduce the thresholds of hate speech as a form of “strategic mainstreaming”. Far-right influencers use humour, irony and memes to inject ideas into public life that would otherwise be unacceptable. In doing so, they desensitise their audience and normalise extremism. A study of German Telegram channels found that far-right content presented seriously achieved limited reach, as did non-political humour. But when far-right extremism was presented humorously, it took off. (snip-MORE)
Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island gives 300th climate speech on the US Senate floor
Sheldon Whitehouse at a Senate confirmation hearing on 6 February 2025. Photograph: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
The Democratic party and the climate movement have been “too cautious and polite” and should instead be denouncing the fossil fuel industry’s “huge denial operation”, the US senator Sheldon Whitehouse said.
“The fossil fuel industry has run the biggest and most malevolent propaganda operation the country has ever seen,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in an interview Monday with the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. “It is defending a $700-plus billion [annual] subsidy” of not being charged for the health and environmental damages caused by burning fossil fuels. “I think the more people understand that, the more they’ll be irate [that] they’ve been lied to.” But, he added, “Democrats have not done a good job of calling that out.”
Whitehouse is among the most outspoken climate champions on Capitol Hill, and on Wednesday evening, he delivered his 300th Time to Wake Up climate speech on the floor of the Senate.
He began giving these speeches in 2012, when Barack Obama was in his first term, and has consistently criticized both political parties for their lackluster response to the climate emergency. The Obama White House, he complained, for years would not even “use the word ‘climate’ and ‘change’ in the same paragraph”.
While Whitehouse slams his fellow Democrats for timidity, he blasts Republicans for being in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, an entity whose behavior “has been downright evil”, he said. “To deliberately ignore [the laws of physics] for short-term profits that set up people for huge, really bad impacts – if that’s not a good definition of evil, I don’t know what is.” (snip-MORE)
CINCINNATI — The Ohio Lesbian Archives in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood started with a friendship.
Phebe Beiser said that when she and co-founder Victoria “Vic” Ramstetter met in the 1970s, they bonded over being “hidden, secret, teenage lesbians,” growing up in what was then a conservative city and region where there were few gay role models. For a time in their 20s, they shared group houses in Clifton, where they now joke that they “survived the lesbian commune together.” They were young and idealistic. They wanted to “turn being an activist lesbian into something fun and interesting, and maybe help change the world.” Beiser, now in her mid 70s, told The 19th that they had a mantra: “We never wanted to be invisible again.”
When the Crazy Ladies Bookstore, named for the women who history brushed off as “crazy,” opened in Northside in 1979, it became the center of gravity in the Cincinnati lesbian community of which Beiser and Ramstetter were a part. Women bought homes in the neighborhood, gathering at the feminist bookstore for coffee, tea and conversation about being women, and about being gay. In 1989, the Archives opened on an upper floor.
It seemed that the visibility of the Crazy Ladies Bookstore and the Ohio Lesbian Archives — and of the women who made them happen — would be cemented in history in 2023, when the Ohio History Connection, the state’s nonprofit historical society, “embarked on a three-year project to diversify Ohio’s historical markers to include ten new stories of LGBTQ+ Ohioans” via its Gay Ohio History Initiative, or GOHI. At the time, there were roughly 1,800 historical markers in Ohio’s program, but only two commemorated places, events or people from the state’s queer history. A third, recognizing Summit Station, a lesbian bar in Columbus that operated from 1970 to 2008, was dedicated during Pride Month that year. The Archives and bookstore were selected for joint recognition.
That long-overdue acknowledgement has been derailed by the Trump administration’s sweeping war on DEI, which extends beyond diversity, equity and inclusion programs to seemingly include anything that acknowledges the country’s diversity of experience. But the archives — and the volunteers who sustain it — are undeterred, carrying on as the queer community has throughout history, documenting their existence.
We never wanted to be invisible again.” Phebe Beiser
The Ohio Lesbian Archives first began in 1989 in a small room on the third floor above the Crazy Ladies Bookstore in Cincinnati, Ohio. (Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library)
The Marking Diverse Ohio program was financed by a $250,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent agency created by a Republican-led Congress in 1996 that is the main source of federal funding for libraries and museums. Beiser and Branstetter were interviewed for an oral history. Ohio History Connection researchers visited the Archives to peruse the collection. A location was secured in a city park near where the since-shuttered Crazy Ladies Bookstore once was. By early this year, preparations to forever commemorate the Archives and bookstore with a plaque were all but complete. Its installation was expected in June, Pride Month.
Then, in late March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order regarding “The Continuing Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy,” singling out seven agencies for elimination — including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, or IMLS. Nearly all of its employees were put on leave and their emails were disconnected. Days later, his administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, canceled $25 million worth of already-awarded IMLS grants, including the $250,000 for Ohio History Connection’s Marking Diverse Ohio program. The federal agency’s seemingly final Instagram post stated: “The era of using your taxpayer dollars to fund DEI grants is OVER.” The last photo listed erecting “LGBTQIA+ historical markers across Ohio” among the alleged government excesses that would be cut.
Svetlana Harlan, a former project coordinator for Marking Diverse Ohio, recalled that when she looked at the list, and saw the program with other projects she admired, “it almost seemed like a positive thing, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, these are nice initiatives!’”
“And it turns out that [DOGE] was just taking over the account. So then I was like, ‘Oh, they’re cutting those. Oh, our name is on the list,’” she said.
DOGE’s cancellation of the $250,000 IMLS grant to Ohio History Connection threw into question the future of the markers that were supposed to ensure that Ohio’s public displays of its history include LGBTQ+ people. Along with the Ohio Lesbian Archives and the Crazy Ladies Bookstore, there were markers in the works for an LGBTQ+ district in Akron; the first professor of gay and lesbian studies at Kent State University; 19th-century sculptor Edmonia “Wildfire” Lewis; LGBTQ+ journalism in Ohio; Toledo’s first LGBTQ+ member of city council; a Columbus hospice care center for HIV and AIDs patients; an open lesbian pastor in Athens; the screen-printing company Nightsweats and T-Cells in Lakewood; and the Rubi Girls, a Dayton-area drag group that has raised more than $3 million for HIV/AIDs and LGBTQ+ causes since the 1980s.
Ephemera collected at the Ohio Lesbian Archives include buttons from past Pride marches, political campaigns and other symbols of lesbian life. (Courtesy Ohio Lesbian Archives)
Preservation on hold
Marking Diverse Ohio and other programs recognizing specific communities weren’t the only programs impacted in the state when DOGE cut IMLS grants and the federal agency essentially shuttered. And, given that more than $250 million is granted annually to libraries and museums nationally, the economic chaos at the country’s museums, libraries and historical institutions wasn’t confined to Ohio.
In Ohio, other entities that received recent IMLS funding include the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Westcott House in Springfield, for post-pandemic, on-site programming; the Cincinnati Zoo for a big cat breeding program; Dayton Metro Library programs that helped low-income Ohioans secure Internet access; and Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, which lost $175,000 slated for programming aimed at the 3,000 or more teens it serves each year.
Institutions in Pennsylvania warned the economic upheaval could scuttle the digitization of The Rosenbach museum’s collection of rare books and manuscripts; the Woodmere Art Museum was mid renovation on a building to house its collection and expected to be reimbursed. In Wisconsin, small-town libraries said without the $3 million from the IMLS they’d received the year before they would have to reduce staff and therefore services. The American Library Association, or ALA, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, the labor union representing government workers, sued the Trump administration. ALA President Cindy Hohl said at the time that, “Libraries play an important role in our democracy, from preserving history to … offering access to a variety of perspectives.” AFSCME President Lee Saunders added: “Libraries and museums contain our collective history and knowledge.”
Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration could continue dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services as the case continues.
For now, Ohioans who want LGBTQ+ history represented among the 1,800 markers in the state will not get the federal funding that was granted and must search for alternative resources in their communities. A couple of the markers look poised to move forward with outside funding from community foundations and other organizations. Others, like the Ohio Lesbian Archives and the Crazy Ladies Bookstore, are still waiting. The remaining cost to install the marker would likely be $3,000-$5,000.
When The 19th reached out to Ohio History Connection to ask if any alternative funding sources were being explored to install the Archives’ marker, spokesperson Neil Thompson said that he was “not able to provide any additional information for an Ohio Historical Marker application that is not in the public domain” and that it is only considered in the public domain once “the markers are finalized, cast and ready to be installed and dedicated.”
Phebe Beiser (far left), who co-founded the Ohio Lesbian Archives with her longtime friend Victoria ‘Vic’ Ramstetter, with Janice Uhlman, Elizabeth Van Dyke, Cathy McEneny, Morgan Kronenberger, and Ruth Rowan (left to right) at the Ohio Lesbian Archives in 1989. (Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library)
‘A reflection of themselves’
The Ohio Lesbian Archives has always been a DIY endeavor, powered by a group of passionate volunteers. When the Crazy Ladies Bookstore’s founder, Carolyn Dellenbach, moved out of the area, she handed it over to its patrons to be run as a feminist collective. A lesbian newsletter called Dinah operated out of the upper floor — they referred to the National Organization for Women’s Task Force on Sexuality and Lesbianism, established in 1973, as FOSAL, or fossil, and Dinah was a play on dinosaur. Beiser laughed explaining the name: It was the 1970s; maybe there were drugs involved. For a time she wrote for Dinah and loved interviewing famous arrivals from the “women’s music circuit” when they came to town.
At some point, the women working shifts at the bookstore, writing for Dinah and organizing talks and other events related to feminist and lesbian issues, realized that the community they had built, and the ephemera they were collecting and creating, were an important part of history — theirs, lesbians,’ Ohioans,’ and women’s.
“We held on to them because we knew they could not be replaced,” Beiser said of the collection. “It’s proof of our existence … so we held on to these things to never be invisible again.”
We held on to them because we knew they could not be replaced. It’s proof of our existence.” Phebe Beiser
Books on lesbian history line the shelves of the Ohio Lesbian Archives. (Courtesy Ohio Lesbian Archives)
In a 1991 issue of Dinah, letters to the editor included one from “Ma” who updated the “wimmin” in the community — they often spelled variations of their gender in ways that did not include “man” — that she was homesteading outside the city with her partner and building a log cabin. Another was from a woman who said she was “shocked” to find out that her being fired for being a lesbian was not a violation of civil rights laws and she was disappointed that the LGBTQ+ community did not come out to support her recent picket, writing: “I hope that in my lifetime I will see the gay and lesbian community get off their asses and together start fighting for their rights.”
Across from the metal filing cabinet at the Archives that houses the Dinah issues, a modern-looking poster from before the Supreme Court decided Bostock v. Clayton County in 2020, which extended employment protections to LGBTQ+ Americans, reminded Ohioans that it was still legal for them to be fired for their sexual orientation or gender identity. Today, Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is aiming to curtail those hard-won workplace protections established by Bostock.
Lüdi Rich, a 27-year-old librarian, was working a recent Sunday afternoon at the Archives’ twice-weekly open hours, organizing books and research materials while the space was open to members of the community to drop in.
When Rich moved to Cincinnati nearly two years ago, she didn’t know anyone in the area, so she looked online for queer spaces so she could start building her community. When she attended a panel on local queer history, one of the speakers was Beiser, a longtime librarian herself in the country’s second-largest public library system.
Beiser mentioned at the panel that the Ohio Lesbian Archives would be having an open house that night at its new location next to Over-the-Rhine’s Washington Square Park, where Beiser was among those who met to march in Cincinnati’s first Pride Parade in April 1973. Rich asked Beiser how she could volunteer.
A couple months later, Rich showed up for her first shift, “And I’ve been here working ever since,” she said.
Nancy Yerian, the 34-year-old president of the Archives’ board, said that when she graduated from college in Massachusetts, she didn’t know if she could return to Cincinnati, where she grew up — until she discovered the Archives. “I thought that to live the kind of life I wanted to lead, I had to get out of what I thought was a very conservative place,” said Yerian, who has been volunteering at the Archives in some capacity since shortly after she finished school.
“Finding the Archives and the people I’ve met through the organization and the community we’re creating, as well as the history we’re preserving — it gave me a lot of hope that I could create a life for myself here,” she added.
It really is just us, preserving our history.”Lüdi Rich
The Crazy Ladies Bookstore marched in a Cincinnati, Ohio Pride parade. (Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library)
The Archives’ volunteers have helped digitize old photos, some of which are now in a collection at the Cincinnati Public Library. They organize the books, arranged by first names instead of last, since so many women, especially in those early years, published works after taking on their husbands’ surnames. There are filing folders of Dinah newsletters. A cabinet holds multiple VHS and DVD copies of the early aughts television drama “The L Word.” A collection of buttons includes those from past Pride marches; supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns; and one with “REMEMBER” and an inverted pink triangle, the Nazi symbol that Adolf Hitler used to identify gay and trans people. There is also one with the logo of the Crazy Ladies Bookstore, the silhouette of a woman reading while reclined in a chair, a cat by her side.
“Many people who are coming to the archives are looking for a reflection of themselves and in many ways that’s why Vic and Phebe started it. It shows models of ways to be in the world and a feeling of not being alone and not being the first queer person or lesbian,” Yerian said.
The Ohio Lesbian Archives, marker or not, is and will keep doing what it always has: making sure that lesbian Americans are visible in the country’s historical record.
“It really is just us, preserving our history,” Rich said.
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Queer History 745: Patricia Highsmith – The Brilliant Fucking Architect of Queer Hope by Wendy🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🌈 Read on Substack
In the suffocating landscape of 1950s America, when being queer could land you in a mental institution, prison, or worse, one woman sat down at her typewriter and decided to tell the truth. Patricia Highsmith didn’t just write a fucking love story—she carved out a piece of literary real estate where lesbian love could exist without punishment, where two women could find each other and actually keep each other. In a world determined to erase queer joy, she smuggled hope onto bookshelves disguised as pulp fiction.
But let’s not paint Highsmith as some sanitized literary saint. This woman was complicated as hell, brilliant as fuck, and carried enough psychological baggage to sink a goddamn ship. She was an alcoholic, a recluse, and often cruel to the people who loved her. She was also one of the most important queer voices of the 20th century, whether she wanted that label or not. Her story isn’t just about one woman’s struggle with her sexuality—it’s about the price we all pay when society forces us to live fractured lives, and the revolutionary act of refusing to let that fracture define us.
The Making of a Literary Badass
Mary Patricia Plangman was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on January 19, 1921, into a world that would spend the next several decades trying to convince her that everything she was constituted a crime against nature. Her parents, Jay Bernard Plangman and Mary Coates, divorced before she was born, and her mother married Stanley Highsmith when Patricia was three. The family moved to New York, where young Patricia would grow up surrounded by the kind of suffocating heteronormative expectations that could drive anyone to drink—and eventually did.
From childhood, Highsmith knew she was different, and not in the precious, special-snowflake way that adults like to romanticize. She was different in the way that made her feel like she was constantly walking on broken glass, knowing that one wrong step could cut her to pieces. She was attracted to women in an era when that attraction was classified as a mental illness, when “treatments” ranged from electroshock therapy to lobotomies. The psychological pressure of living with this secret would shape not just her personal relationships but every fucking word she ever wrote.
At Barnard College, Highsmith studied English literature and began to understand that stories could be weapons—tools for survival in a hostile world. She was already writing, already crafting the psychological precision that would make her famous. But she was also falling in love with women, conducting relationships in shadows and whispers, learning the exhausting choreography of the closet that would define her entire adult life.
After graduation, she moved to Greenwich Village, ostensibly to pursue her writing career but really to find some semblance of community among other artists and outcasts. The Village in the 1940s was one of the few places in America where queer people could exist with some measure of freedom, though even there, the threat of police raids and social destruction loomed constant. Highsmith found work writing for comic books, including scripts for Captain America and other superheroes—ironic, considering she was creating stories about characters who could live openly as their authentic selves while she remained trapped behind a mask of heterosexual respectability.
The Birth of Lesbian Literary Revolution
In 1951, while working at Bloomingdale’s during the Christmas rush—because even future literary legends had to pay rent—Highsmith had an encounter that would change queer literature forever. She served a beautiful blonde customer buying a doll for her daughter, and something about the interaction sparked what would become “The Price of Salt.” Later, walking through the city, Highsmith felt what she described as a “strange happiness” and knew she had to write this story.
But let’s be clear about what she was attempting: in 1952, lesbian novels ended one of two ways—with the queer character dying or going insane. Those were the only narratives society would tolerate. Happy queers were not allowed to exist in fiction because they weren’t allowed to exist in real life. Publishers, critics, and readers had been thoroughly conditioned to expect punishment for sexual deviance. A lesbian love story with a happy ending wasn’t just revolutionary—it was practically seditious.
Highsmith wrote “The Price of Salt” under the pseudonym Claire Morgan because she knew that attaching her real name to a lesbian novel would be career suicide. Even with the pseudonym, the book was relegated to the pulp fiction ghetto, sold alongside other “deviant” literature in bus stations and drugstores. The literary establishment wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole, and most critics dismissed it as sensational trash designed to titillate straight male readers.
They were wrong, and they were missing the fucking point entirely.
“The Price of Salt” tells the story of Therese Belivet, a young woman working in a department store who becomes infatuated with Carol Aird, an elegant older woman going through a divorce. What follows is a love story that unfolds with the psychological complexity and emotional honesty that would become Highsmith’s trademark. But more importantly, it’s a love story where both women survive, where love is possible, where the ending doesn’t require sacrifice or punishment.
The novel found its audience despite the literary establishment’s best efforts to ignore it. Queer women passed dog-eared copies between friends, smuggled them in suitcases, hid them between mattresses. For the first time, they could read a story where people like them weren’t doomed, where lesbian love wasn’t portrayed as inherently tragic or destructive. The psychological impact was immeasurable—here was proof that queer happiness was possible, that their desires weren’t automatically poisonous.
The Psychological Architecture of Survival
Understanding Highsmith’s impact on LGBTQIA+ people requires understanding the psychological landscape they were navigating in mid-20th century America. This was an era of institutionalized homophobia so complete and systematic that it’s hard to imagine from our current perspective. Homosexuality was classified as a mental illness. Same-sex relationships were illegal in every state. Queer people were barred from government employment, discharged from the military, subjected to police harassment, and often rejected by their families.
The psychological effects of living under this kind of systematic oppression were devastating. Queer people internalized shame, developed elaborate systems of concealment, and often struggled with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. The absence of positive representation in media and literature reinforced the message that queer love was inherently destructive, that happiness wasn’t possible for people like them.
Into this psychological wasteland, Highsmith dropped a fucking bomb of hope.
“The Price of Salt” didn’t just tell queer women that love was possible—it showed them what that love might look like. Carol and Therese weren’t tragic figures destroyed by their desires; they were complex, flawed, human women who found each other and fought to stay together. The novel’s ending, with Therese choosing Carol over societal expectations, was nothing short of revolutionary.
But Highsmith’s psychological insight went deeper than just providing positive representation. She understood the specific ways that homophobia warped relationships, the paranoia and secrecy that poisoned even the most genuine connections. Carol’s ex-husband uses their daughter as leverage, threatening to take the child away if Carol doesn’t renounce her “perversion.” The constant threat of exposure hangs over every tender moment, every stolen glance, every whispered conversation.
This wasn’t melodrama—this was documentary realism for queer people living in the 1950s. Highsmith captured the specific psychological toll of living in the closet, the way fear could poison love, the exhausting vigilance required to maintain a double life. But she also showed that despite all this, love could survive, relationships could endure, happiness was fucking possible.
The Ripple Effects: How One Book Changed Everything
The immediate impact of “The Price of Salt” was profound but largely invisible. Queer women didn’t write letters to newspapers praising the book—that would have been social suicide. Instead, they quietly bought copies, passed them along to friends, and felt something shift inside themselves when they read about Carol and Therese’s love story.
Dr. Eli Coleman, a sexologist who has studied the impact of literature on LGBTQIA+ identity formation, argues that positive representation in fiction serves a crucial psychological function for marginalized communities. “When people see themselves reflected positively in stories,” Coleman explains, “it validates their experiences and provides a roadmap for possibility. For queer people in the 1950s, who had almost no positive representation anywhere, a novel like ‘The Price of Salt’ could literally be life-saving.”
The psychological impact extended beyond individual readers to the broader cultural conversation about homosexuality. While the book didn’t immediately change mainstream attitudes—that would take decades—it planted seeds that would eventually bloom into the gay rights movement. Young people who read Highsmith’s novel grew up with the revolutionary idea that queer love didn’t have to end in tragedy, that happiness was possible for people like them.
This shift in narrative possibilities had profound philosophical implications. If queer love could be portrayed as beautiful, complex, and worthy of a happy ending, then the entire moral framework that condemned homosexuality began to crack. Highsmith wasn’t just telling a love story—she was challenging the fundamental assumptions that justified queer oppression.
The Complex Psychology of Patricia Highsmith
While Highsmith was creating revolutionary representation for other queer people, her own relationship with her sexuality remained deeply complicated. She never publicly came out, never became an activist, and often seemed uncomfortable with the idea that “The Price of Salt” had become a touchstone for lesbian readers. This wasn’t just garden-variety internalized homophobia—though that was certainly part of it—but a complex psychological response to a lifetime of navigating hostile territory.
Highsmith’s personal relationships were often tumultuous and self-destructive. She drank heavily, maintained emotional distance even from intimate partners, and seemed to prefer the company of her numerous cats to most humans. Friends and lovers described her as brilliant but difficult, generous but cruel, capable of profound empathy and stunning callousness sometimes within the same conversation.
This psychological complexity was both a source of her literary genius and a reflection of the damage caused by a lifetime in the closet. Highsmith had spent so many years concealing her true self that authenticity became nearly impossible. She developed what psychologists call “minority stress”—the chronic psychological tension experienced by stigmatized groups who must constantly monitor and modify their behavior to avoid discrimination.
The effects of minority stress on LGBTQIA+ individuals are well-documented: higher rates of depression and anxiety, difficulty forming intimate relationships, substance abuse, and a persistent sense of alienation from mainstream society. Highsmith exhibited many of these symptoms throughout her life, but she also channeled that psychological complexity into her writing, creating characters whose inner lives were as intricate and contradictory as her own.
Her later novels, including the famous Tom Ripley series, explored themes of identity, deception, and the psychology of outsiders—all subjects she knew intimately from her own experience as a closeted lesbian. While these books weren’t explicitly queer, they were infused with the psychological insights that came from a lifetime of living on society’s margins.
Social Impact: Cracking the Foundations of Heteronormativity
“The Price of Salt” didn’t exist in a vacuum—it was part of a slowly building wave of cultural change that would eventually reshape American attitudes toward sexuality. But Highsmith’s contribution was unique in its subtlety and psychological sophistication. Unlike the explicitly political gay rights literature that would emerge in later decades, her novel worked by stealth, smuggling queer humanity into mainstream consciousness through the back door of popular fiction.
The book’s classification as pulp fiction was actually crucial to its impact. While “serious” literature was consumed primarily by educated elites, pulp novels reached a much broader audience. Working-class people, teenagers, small-town residents—people who might never encounter openly queer individuals in their daily lives—were reading about Carol and Therese’s love story. The seeds of empathy were being planted in unexpected soil.
This demographic reach had significant social implications. When the gay rights movement began to gain momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, it wasn’t starting from scratch. Thanks to novels like “The Price of Salt,” millions of Americans had already been exposed to positive portrayals of queer relationships. The ground had been prepared, even if most people didn’t realize it.
The philosophical implications were equally profound. For centuries, Western society had constructed elaborate theological and pseudo-scientific justifications for condemning homosexuality. These arguments depended on portraying queer love as inherently unnatural, destructive, and incapable of producing genuine happiness. Highsmith’s novel didn’t engage these arguments directly—it simply rendered them irrelevant by showing that none of them were true.
Carol and Therese’s relationship was portrayed as natural, nurturing, and fulfilling. They weren’t predators or victims, sick or sinful—they were simply two women who fell in love. This narrative simplicity was actually a sophisticated philosophical assault on the entire edifice of heteronormative ideology.
The Continuing Revolution: Highsmith’s Legacy in Contemporary LGBTQIA+ Culture
When “The Price of Salt” was reissued in 1990 under Highsmith’s real name with the new title “Carol,” it found a new generation of readers who could appreciate its revolutionary impact. The AIDS crisis had decimated the gay male community, and lesbian feminism was providing crucial leadership in the broader LGBTQIA+ rights movement. Highsmith’s novel was rediscovered as a foundational text, a reminder of how far the community had come and how much further it still needed to go.
The 2015 film adaptation, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, introduced Highsmith’s story to an even broader audience and sparked new conversations about queer representation in media. The film’s lush cinematography and devastating emotional honesty brought Carol and Therese’s love story to life for a generation raised on increasing LGBTQIA+ visibility but still fighting for full equality.
For contemporary LGBTQIA+ people, particularly young people struggling with their sexual or gender identity, Highsmith’s work continues to provide crucial psychological support. In an era of increasing political backlash against queer rights, when transgender youth face legislative attacks and gay marriage remains under threat, the simple existence of stories like “Carol” serves as a reminder that queer love has always existed, has always been beautiful, and has always been worth fighting for.
The psychological impact is particularly powerful for young people from conservative backgrounds or regions where LGBTQIA+ visibility remains limited. Reading about Carol and Therese’s love story can be the first time these individuals encounter the revolutionary idea that their desires are valid, that happiness is possible, that they aren’t broken or sinful or destined for tragedy.
The Philosophical Architecture of Queer Joy
Highsmith’s greatest achievement wasn’t just creating positive lesbian representation—it was constructing a philosophical framework for queer joy that transcended the specific circumstances of her characters. “The Price of Salt” argues, through narrative rather than polemic, that love itself is the highest human value, that authentic relationships matter more than social approval, and that individuals have the right to pursue happiness even when that pursuit challenges conventional morality.
This philosophical stance was radical in 1952 and remains challenging today. American society continues to struggle with the tension between individual freedom and social conformity, between traditional values and evolving understanding of human sexuality and gender identity. Highsmith’s novel doesn’t resolve these tensions—it simply insists that love transcends them all.
The book’s ending is particularly significant in this regard. Therese’s choice to pursue a relationship with Carol isn’t portrayed as a rejection of society or a declaration of war against heteronormativity. It’s simply a young woman choosing love over fear, authenticity over approval, joy over safety. The philosophical implications are profound: if individuals have the right to pursue happiness, and if love between consenting adults is inherently valuable, then society’s objections become irrelevant.
This isn’t the angry politics of later gay liberation movements—it’s something more subtle and perhaps more subversive. Highsmith wasn’t arguing that society should accept queer people; she was arguing that queer people didn’t need society’s acceptance to live full, meaningful lives. The audacity of that position, especially in 1952, cannot be overstated.
The Psychological Legacy: How One Story Saves Lives
The most important measure of Highsmith’s impact isn’t literary criticism or sales figures—it’s the immeasurable number of LGBTQIA+ lives that have been saved by her willingness to imagine queer happiness. In a community where suicide rates remain tragically high, where young people continue to face rejection and violence for their sexual or gender identity, stories matter in ways that straight, cisgender people often struggle to understand.
Dr. Ryan Watson, who studies the relationship between media representation and LGBTQIA+ mental health, explains: “For young people questioning their sexuality or gender identity, seeing positive representation in media can literally be the difference between life and death. When you’re told by your family, your school, your church, and your government that you’re fundamentally wrong or broken, finding stories where people like you are happy and loved can provide the hope necessary to survive.”
“The Price of Salt” has been providing that hope for over seventy years. It sits on countless bookshelves, gets passed between friends, appears on recommended reading lists, and continues to whisper the same revolutionary message to each new generation of readers: you are not alone, your love is valid, happiness is possible.
The novel’s impact extends beyond individual readers to the broader cultural conversation about LGBTQIA+ rights and representation. Every positive portrayal of queer relationships in contemporary media owes a debt to Highsmith’s pioneering work. Every time a young person sees themselves reflected positively in a book, movie, or television show, they’re benefiting from the foundation she laid in 1952.
The Ongoing Fight: Highsmith’s Relevance in Contemporary Struggles
As LGBTQIA+ people continue to fight for full equality and acceptance, Highsmith’s work remains remarkably relevant. The psychological insights she provided about the costs of closeting, the importance of authentic relationships, and the possibility of queer joy continue to resonate with contemporary experiences.
Young transgender people facing legislative attacks and social rejection can find solidarity in Therese’s struggle to live authentically despite social pressure. Gay men navigating family rejection might recognize themselves in Carol’s battle to maintain relationships with her loved ones while refusing to deny her true self. Lesbian couples fighting for the right to parent can draw strength from Carol and Therese’s determination to build a life together despite legal and social obstacles.
The philosophical framework Highsmith constructed—that love transcends social convention, that individual happiness matters, that authenticity is worth fighting for—remains a powerful tool for contemporary LGBTQIA+ activism. While the specific battles have evolved, the underlying struggle between individual freedom and social control continues.
Perhaps most importantly, Highsmith’s work reminds us that representation matters, that stories have power, that the simple act of imagining queer happiness can be a revolutionary force. In an era when politicians and pundits continue to debate the “appropriateness” of LGBTQIA+ visibility, her novel stands as proof that queer people have always existed, have always loved, and have always deserved the chance to pursue happiness.
Conclusion: The Fucking Beautiful Truth
Patricia Highsmith died in 1995, long enough to see some of the changes her work helped create but not long enough to witness marriage equality, widespread LGBTQIA+ representation in media, or the growing acceptance of transgender rights. She remained complicated and contradictory until the end—a brilliant writer who struggled with intimacy, a queer pioneer who never fully embraced that role, a woman who gave hope to millions while often seeming to have little hope for herself.
But her legacy isn’t diminished by her personal struggles—if anything, it’s enhanced by them. Highsmith’s psychological complexity, her understanding of the costs of closeting, her ability to create characters who were both strong and vulnerable, all stemmed from her own experiences navigating a hostile world. She transformed her pain into art, her isolation into empathy, her struggle into a story that continues to save lives.
“The Price of Salt” stands as proof that individual acts of courage can have ripple effects that extend far beyond what their creators ever imagine. When Highsmith sat down to write about Carol and Therese’s love story, she probably thought she was just crafting another novel to pay the bills. Instead, she created a piece of revolutionary literature that challenged fundamental assumptions about sexuality, provided hope to countless individuals, and helped lay the groundwork for the LGBTQIA+ rights movement.
In a world that continues to tell queer people that their love is wrong, that their happiness is impossible, that they should be grateful for tolerance rather than demanding full equality, Highsmith’s novel remains a radical document. It insists that queer love is beautiful, that happiness is possible, that authenticity is worth any price society might demand.
That message, delivered with all the psychological sophistication and emotional honesty Highsmith could muster, continues to resonate with each new generation of readers who discover that they are not alone, that their love is valid, and that despite everything society might tell them, happiness is not only possible—it’s their fucking birthright.
The woman who wrote comic book heroes while hiding behind a mask of heterosexual respectability ultimately became a hero herself, not through superhuman powers but through the simple, revolutionary act of telling the truth about love. In doing so, she proved that sometimes the most powerful weapon against oppression isn’t anger or violence—it’s the audacious insistence that joy is possible, that love conquers all the bullshit society tries to pile on top of it, and that everyone deserves the chance to pursue their own beautiful, complicated, fucking magnificent version of happiness.
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