President Joe Biden’s administration is widely considered to be the most pro-LGBTQ in history, and as he enters his final months in the White House, Biden sat for an historic interview with one of the country’s oldest LGBTQ news outlets.
In a wide-ranging interview published Monday in the Washington Blade, a D.C.-based LGBTQ newspaper founded more than half a century ago, Biden reiterated his commitment to the community while also speaking broadly about former President Donald Trump’s policies regarding the LGBTQ community and sharing his views on Project 2025. The interview is the first time a sitting president has spoken exclusively with an LGBTQ newspaper, according to the Blade.
“My dad used to say that everyone’s entitled to be treated with dignity,” Biden told the paper. “As a consequence of that, most of the things that I’ve done have related to just [what] I think is basic fairness and basic decency.”
Biden expressed admiration for the many milestones the community has reached over his lifetime, from the Stonewall Riots of 1969 to the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” while he was vice president. The Blade also highlighted “major pro-LGBTQ moves” on Biden’s watch, including legal challenges to state laws targeting transgender people and the response to the global mpox outbreak in 2022. They noted that Biden has also appointed more LGBTQ officials to his administration than in any other administration in American history.
“Most of the openly gay people that have worked with me, that I’ve worked with, the one advantage they have is they tend to have more courage than most people have,” Biden said.
Biden said the emergence of LGBTQ representation in government is a reflection of America itself, and he praised the recent primary victory of Sarah McBride, a state senator from his home state, Delaware, who is poised to become the first transgender member of Congress. “We’re on the right track,” he said of McBride’s victory.
Despite such advances for the community, Biden also spoke about the challenges all Americans face. He described Project 2025, a proposed conservative agenda for Trump’s potential second term, as being “full of nothing but disdain” for LGBTQ people, and he said conservatives looking to ban books in schools “want to erase history instead of make history.” Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has publicly disavowed Project 2025 and has said he had “nothing to do with it.”
Biden went on to criticize Trump’s record on LGBTQ issues, saying, “Trump is a different breed of cat.”
He also pledged to continue working to pass the Equality Act, a bill that would federally ban discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, even after he leaves office.
“We need to pass it. So, I’m going to be doing everything I can to be part of the outside voices, and I hope my foundations that I will be setting back up will talk about equality across the board,” he said.
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