Sep 24, 2025, 9:00am Imani Gandy
The target on my back got bigger once I stepped into the light.
Queer people don’t have the luxury of treating Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ actions as a simple policy debate. Cage Rivera/Rewire News Group
I often joke about being a Meredith Baxter gay. You may remember her as Meredith Baxter Birney, the woman who played Elyse Keaton on Family Ties. She came out as a lesbian in 2009, when she was 62. I don’t know why Baxter is stuck in my mind as the quintessential “coming out later in life” queen. Plenty of people have come out late in life, but I’m firmly Gen X, so somehow she became my northstar of late-stage queerness.
When I finally came out at 50 in 2024, it wasn’t particularly dramatic. It was quiet and overdue. Something inside me had been waiting for years, tapping its foot, wondering when I’d finally be ready to stop pretending. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this column—to elicit a reaction that’s more dramatic than “no shit, Imani.”
Coming out later in life means you’ve probably already got bad knees and sciatica. I certainly do. I can’t drop it low anymore unless there’s a paramedic nearby to hoist me up. I missed the whole glamorous L Word era because, even though I knew I was at least a little gay around the edges, I had no idea what to do about it. I was even living in Los Angeles when The L Word was on the air. I knew all the places I could go if I wanted to spread my gay wings.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just kept plodding on and trying to date men. I even considered marrying two different men in my 20s and 30s. And I bless the rains down in Africa that I didn’t, because both marriages would have ended up in disaster.
Sometimes I grieve for the queer Imani who could have been tearing it up in Los Angeles in 2002. But I can’t go back; I can only move forward. And I’m moving forward with an additional identity that colors the way I move through the world.
And on top of that, I’m moving through that world under Trump 2.0.
As a Black woman, I never needed Donald Trump to show me who he was. I clocked him from the jump. Racist, misogynist, wannabe strongman—it was all right there. His first term was terrifying. Not in the politics is messy way, but in the this man will torch democracy if doing so makes him feel powerful way.
But this time hits different. Because now I’m out.
Project 2025’s ‘dark plan’ for LGBTQ+ rights
When Trump was in office the first time, I wasn’t living openly as a queer woman. I fought his administration on reproductive rights, voting rights, immigration, and racial justice in part by highlighting the misinformation and half-truths that are the core features of the conservative effort to impose Christian theocracy on queer people, immigrants, people of color—on basically anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into their straight, white, Christian box.
That’s because I’m a person who deeply believes in justice. Hell, I’ve dedicated my life to reproductive justice even though I’ve never been pregnant. Never had an abortion. (My girlfriend says it’s because I’m extremely empathetic and I hate injustice.)
But I didn’t feel the daily, stomach-clenching fear of watching a government try to erase LGBTQ+ rights while knowing my own life was on the line.
Now I do.
(Imani’s new podcast drops on Sept. 25, 2025. Subscribe to Boom! Lawyered to be the first to hear it.)
Trump’s first term was hardly neutral on queer people. He banned trans people from serving in the military. He rescinded guidance telling schools to protect trans students. His Department of Justice claimed in court that businesses should be able to fire workers just for being gay. He proposed gutting nondiscrimination protections in health care so doctors could refuse to treat trans patients. He appointed judges who seem to pride themselves on being hostile to LGBTQ+ rights.
Now, we’ve got Trump 2.0—and the plan is even darker. His allies wrote it all down in Project 2025, a 900-page blueprint for turning the country into a Christian nationalist theocracy. Project 2025 is about reframing queer identity and sexual expression as obscenity, criminalizing it, and pushing LGBTQ+ people out of public life.
The Supreme Court is already helping this project along, as I wrote back in July. This past term, the Court handed Christian conservatives two major wins: Mahmoud v. Taylor and Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton.
In Mahmoud, religious parents in Maryland didn’t want their kids reading age-appropriate LGBTQ+-inclusive books like Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, Prince & Knight, Pride Puppy! These children’s books don’t contain anything graphic or explicit; they just acknowledge that queer families exist.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court sided with the parents. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said parents should get a heads-up and the chance to opt out of any lessons with LGBTQ+ content “until all appellate review in this case is completed”—a process that could take years.
Alito gussied up his argument as “religious liberty,” arguing that requiring parents to submit their children to instruction that contradicts their religious beliefs constitutes a burden on religious exercise. But let’s be real: It’s a green light for parents to purge classrooms of queer content. Schools under pressure won’t build complex opt-out systems for kids whose parents object to these texts. They’ll just pull the books from classrooms.
Then there’s the Free Speech Coalition case. The Supreme Court upheld a law Texas passed in 2023 requiring age verification to access “sexually explicit” content online. Sounds like it’s about porn, right? But Project 2025 calls for a ban on pornography not just in the good, old-fashioned sense of the word. It expands the definition of porn in a way that can easily be interpreted to cover materials commonly found in a high school library, like books on sexual health, puberty, and information on sexual orientation and identity for LGBTQ+ youth.
To the architects of Project 2025, a book on puberty or a novel with queer characters is basically Hustler magazine.
(Read more: SCOTUS Gives Project 2025 Two Big Anti-LGBTQ+ Wins)
Put Mahmoud and Free Speech Coalition together, and you see the playbook: Queer identity equals obscenity. Queer books? Obscene. Queer websites? Obscene. Porn? Criminal. Once you collapse all of that into the same bucket, it’s open season on LGBTQ+ people and culture.
This is the blueprint Trump and his allies are running with. Not just another round of chaos, but a coordinated effort to erase queer life—through schools, libraries, the internet, and the courts.
That’s why this second term feels different
It’s not that I didn’t know Trump was dangerous before—I did. But because I’m out now, I feel these attacks land in a new place.
It’s my life. My love. My newly-formed family. My right to be visible without being treated like contraband or pretending that my girlfriend, Portia, is my sister.
Coming out didn’t make Trump more dangerous. It made the danger he presents impossible to intellectualize away.
Straight people can treat this as just another policy debate. Queer people don’t have that luxury. We know our lives and relationships are bargaining chips in a theocracy that Christian nationalists are trying to build one opt-out, one website ban, one court case at a time.
So yeah, Trump’s second term hits different because the target on my back got bigger once I stepped into the light.
And that’s the gut punch: Trump doesn’t just threaten democracy in the abstract now—he threatens the most personal parts of my life.
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