President Joe Biden’s administration is widely regarded as the most pro-LGBTQ administration in history. As he enters his final months in the White House, Biden gave a historic interview to one of the nation’s oldest LGBTQ news organizations.
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 at length about former President Donald Trump’s policies toward the LGBTQ community and sharing his vision for Project 2025. The interview marks the first time a sitting president has spoken exclusively to an LGBTQ newspaper, the Blade reported.
“My father always said that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity,” Biden told the newspaper. “As a result, most of the things I’ve done have to do with [what] I think it’s basic honesty and basic decency.”
Biden expressed admiration for the many milestones the community has achieved in his lifetime, from the Stonewall riots of 1969 to repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” while he was vice president. The Blade also highlighted “major pro-LGBTQ movements” during Biden’s administration, 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 any other administration in U.S. history.
“Most of the openly gay people I’ve worked with have the advantage of generally having more courage than most people,” Biden said.
Biden said the rise of LGBTQ representation in government is a reflection of America itself, and he praised the recent primary victory of Sarah McBride, a senator from his home state of Delaware who is set to become the first transgender member of Congress. “We’re on the right track,” he said of McBride’s win.
Despite such progress for the community, Biden also spoke to the challenges facing all Americans. He described Project 2025, a proposed conservative agenda for Trump’s potential second term, as “filled with nothing but contempt” for LGBTQ people, and he said conservatives who want to ban books from schools “want to erase history instead of making history.” Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has publicly rejected Project 2025, saying he has “nothing to do with it.”
Biden then criticized Trump’s record on LGBTQ issues, saying, “Trump is a different kind of cat.”
He also pledged to continue working to implement the Equality Act, a bill that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity at the federal level, even after he leaves office.
“We have to accept it. So I’m going to do everything I can to be part of the outside voices, and I hope that my foundations that I’m going to set up again will talk about equality in general,” he said.
For more from NBC Out, Sign up for our weekly newsletter.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
