Log Cabin Republicans — and others who continue to support this administration — were warned that its policies would bring real harm to our community. That warning has now come true: the Trump administration has cut funding for LGBTQ+ suicide hotlines, effective July 17.
This isn’t hyperbole, anti-Trump rhetoric or “fake news.” Even Fox News reported it: “The Trump Administration announced on June 18 that it has directed the national suicide prevention hotline to stop offering specialized support to LGBTQ+ callers.”
The stakes could not be higher. The Trevor Project estimates that 1.8 million LGBTQ+ young people in the U.S. between the ages of 13 and 24 consider suicide each year — and at least one attempts suicide every 45 seconds.
I ask those in the Log Cabin Republicans: how many of you, in your youth, considered suicide? How many of you reached out for help? No matter where we stand politically — left, right or center — there is one experience nearly universal in our community: the fear and panic of realizing who we are, and the anxiety of telling our families and friends. Some young people — faced with rejection, abuse or hopelessness — decide they can’t go on. Others simply feel they have nowhere to turn.
Those are the young people this hotline was saving.
This is deeply personal to me. At 19, as a member of Gay Youth in New York, I ran a suicide hotline out of my apartment. I spoke to countless kids in pain — bullied, beaten, abandoned, institutionalized. One call I’ll never forget came from a girl whose parents had her committed after catching her kissing another girl. She escaped and called us. She told me how unbearable the institution was, and how she couldn’t go home — she felt she had no future.
That was in 1970. And until June 18, young people like her could call someone who would not only listen, but help them find shelter and discover a community that would embrace them.
Thanks to Trump and those who enabled him, including the Log Cabin Republicans, we are back in 1970.
And when LGBTQ+ kids die because they have no one to turn to, those who stood by and did nothing — or worse, applauded these actions — will have blood on their hands.
