I often joke about being a Meredith Baxter Gay. Maybe you remember her as Meredith Baxter Birney, the woman who played Elyse Keaton Family ties. She came out as Lesbienne in 2009, when she was 62. I don’t know why Baxter is stuck in my mind as the typical “later in life” Queen. Many people have come out late in life, but I am firm Gen X, so somehow she became my northern internship of queernness.
When I finally reached 50 in 2024, it was not very dramatic. It was quiet and too late. Something in me had been waiting for years, pulled on his foot, wondering when I would finally be ready to stop pretending. Maybe that is why I write this column – to generate a reaction that is more dramatic than “no shit, Imani.”
Coming out later in life means that you probably already got bad knees and sciatica. I certainly do that. I can no longer drop it unless there is a paramedic nearby to hoist me. I missed the whole glamorous L word Era because, although I knew that I was at least a bit gay at the edges, I had no idea what to do about it. I even lived in Los Angeles then The L word Was in 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 it. I just kept peeing and trying to date men. I even considered marrying two different men in my 1920s and 30s. And I bless the rain in Africa that I did not do because both marriages would have ended up in a disaster.
Sometimes I mourn to the queer Imani who could have teared it up in Los Angeles in 2002. But I can’t go back; I can only move forward. And I am moving forward with an extra identity that turns the way I move through the world.
And moreover, I go through that world under Trump 2.0.
As a black woman I never needed Donald Trump to show me who he was. I clocked it off the jump. Racist, misogynist, wannabe Strongman – it was fine there. His first term was frightening. Not in the Politics is messy waybut in the This man will focus democracy in the torch if this feels strong way.
But this time it turns different. Because I’m gone now.
‘Dark Plan’ from Project 2025 for LGBTQ+ Rights
When Trump was in the office for the first time, I did not live openly as a strange woman. I fought his administration on reproductive rights, voting rights, immigration and racial justice in part by emphasizing the wrong information and half-truths that are the core characteristics of the conservative effort to impose Christian theocracy on queer people, immigrants, people of color-in fact everyone who does not fit neatly in their right, white, Christian box.
That’s because I am a person who believes deep in justice. Damn, I have devoted my life to reproductive justice, although I have never been pregnant. Never had an abortion. (My girlfriend says it is because I am extremely empathetic and I hate injustice.)
But I didn’t feel the daily, abdominal fear of seeing a government trying to erase LGBTQ+ rights while I know my own life was at stake.
Now I do that.
(Imani’s new podcast will fall on 25 September 2025. Subscribe to Boom! Gemeealtered To be the first to hear it.)
Trump’s first term was hardly neutral with queer people. He Forbidden transgender people to serve in the army. He Entrance guidance that schools tells to protect transstudents. His Ministry of Justice claimed that in court Companies must be able to dismiss employees only because they are gay. He proposed underlay of non -discrimination protection In health care, doctors could refuse to treat transcatients. He Judges appointed who are proud of being hostile to LGBTQ+ rights.
Now we have Trump 2.0 – and the plan is even darker. Are allies wrote it all in Project 2025A blueprint of 900 pages for changing the country into a Christian nationalist theocracy. Project 2025 is about reformulating foreign identity and sexual expression such as obscenity, criminalizing and pushing LGBTQ+ people from public life.
The Supreme Court already helps this project, as I wrote in July. In the past term, the Court of Christian Conservatives handed over two major victories: Mahmoud v. Taylor And Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton.
In Mahmoudreligious parents in Maryland did not want their children to pay attention to the age of the age of LGBTQ+inclusive books, such as Uncle Bobby’s wedding” Prince & Knight” Pride Puppy! These children’s books contain nothing graphic or explicit; They simply acknowledge that queer families exist.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court chose the side of the parents. Write for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that parents should get a heads-up and the chance to sign up for all lessons with LGBTQ+ content “until all vocational review is completed in this case”-a process that can take years.
Alito has performed his argument as ‘religious freedom’, with the argument that parents must subject their children to instructions that contradict their religious beliefs. But let’s really be: it is a green light for parents to purify classrooms from queer content. Schools under pressure will not build complex opt-out systems for children whose parents object to these texts. They will just get the books from classrooms.
Then there is the Free intercalation coalition case. The Supreme Court maintained a law that Texas adopted in 2023 that requires age verification to gain online access to “sexually explicit” content. Sounds like it’s about porn, right? But Project 2025 requires a ban on pornography, not just in the good, old -fashioned feeling of the word. It expands the definition of porn in a way that is possible Easy to be interpreted to cover materials that are often found in a high school librarySuch as books about sexual health, puberty and information about sexual orientation and identity for LGBTQ+ young people.
The architects of Project 2025 are a book about puberty or a novel with queer characters actually Haker magazine.
(Read more: Scotus gives Project 2025 two large anti-LGBTQ+ victories)
Put down Mahmoud And Free intercalation coalition Together, and you see the playbook: Queer identity is the same as obscenity. Queer books? Obscene. Queer -websites? Obscene. Porn? Criminal. As soon as you collapse all that in the same bucket, it is an open season on LGBTQ+ people and culture.
This is the blueprint Trump and his allies are walking with it. Not only another Tour of Chaos, but a coordinated attempt to erase the strange life – by schools, libraries, internet and the courts.
That is why this second term feels different
It is not that I did not know that Trump was more dangerous – I did. But because I am gone now, I feel that these attacks land in a new place.
It’s my life. My sweetheart. My newly formed family. My right to be visible without being treated as a smuggling or pretending that my girlfriend, portia, is my sister.
Trump did not make it more dangerous. It made the danger that he is impossible to intellectualize.
Straight people can treat this as just a different policy debate. Queer people don’t have that luxury. We know that our lives and relationships are negotiating in a theocracy that Christian nationalists try to build one opt-out, one website ban, one lawsuit at the same time.
So yes, the second term from Trump hits differently because the goal on my back became bigger as soon as I got into the light.
And that is the gut punching: Trump now not only threatens democracy in abstract – he threatens the most personal parts of my life.
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