At a Pride flag-raising ceremony outside the Isiah Leggett County Executive Building in Rockville on Tuesday morning, Montgomery County officials and local LGBTQ+ advocates shared a message: Montgomery County must stand up for the LGBTQ+ community.
“Pride is a celebration, but we have to remember all those years ago, the first Pride was a protest,” County Councilmember Evan Glass (D-At-large), the first openly gay member of the council, told a crowd of dozens. “We cannot ignore the realities that the LGBTQ+ community is facing … there’s a rise in homophobia, a rise in transphobia, a rise in xenophobia. It’s important for us to stand up and to speak out whenever we see injustice, whenever we see our neighbors being victimized and marginalized.”
The county’s official Pride flag-raising ceremony is held annually to commemorate June’s celebrations of the LGBTQ+ community during Pride Month. Speakers at Tuesday’s event said the stakes are higher this year as changes at the federal level impact the LGBTQ+ community.
“We’re not going backward. … We’re going to keep doing the right thing, and nothing is going to change in Montgomery County,” County Executive Marc Elrich (D) said. “It’s just horrifying. It is hard to believe people … care that much about something that doesn’t affect them to any degree whatsoever. This is other people’s lives. They do not need to be concerned with how other people make their choices in their life.”
Several of the Trump administration’s actions have been called out by LGBTQ+ community leaders and elected officials. President Donald Trump has issued several executive orders regarding transgender identity since his inauguration in January, including one declaring the administration would only recognize “two unchangeable sexes,” an order that aims to ban trans people from serving in the military and an order that aims to limit access to gender-affirming health care, PBS reported.
Trump has expressed his support for ending certain rights for transgender Americans, according to The Washington Post, and previously expressed disappointment at the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015.
Project 2025, an initiative from conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation that provided a framework for the Trump administration’s actions, takes a more explicit approach to these issues, according to Axios. The initiative’s agenda proposes stripping anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBTQ+ Americans, including workplace protections. It also calls for ending federal funding for LGBTQ+ health initiatives and is particularly hostile about trans health care access.
U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Dist. 8), who lives in Takoma Park and represents Montgomery County in the U.S. Congress, shared an anecdote with the crowd Tuesday about how he was encouraged during his time as a Maryland General Assembly member to remove references to marriage equality from his speeches in order to appear more “politically center.”
“That made me realize it’s not my ambition to be in the political center, which just blows around with the wind. It’s my ambition to be in the moral center and to try to find what’s right and to bring the political center to us,” Raskin said. “I’m glad that we live in a county and a state where the moral center is the center of gravity for us.”
Some speakers also referenced or alluded to the case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in April pitting Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) against parents who believe their religious freedoms are being violated by a district policy regarding the use of LGBTQ+ books in elementary school classrooms. While a ruling has yet to be made, based on lines of questioning, conservative members of the court appeared to favor the parents’ argument.
Yael Astor, an inclusion specialist with the MCPS Office of Curriculum & Instructional Programs, said it is important for LGBTQ+ children to know they have safe spaces and adults they can trust.
“[LGBTQ+ youth] want to be seen. They want to be held up. They want to be cared for beyond June, they want that solidarity and allyship,” Astor said.
At Tuesday’s event, Elrich announced the county’s long-awaited development of an LGBTQ+ resource center in partnership with the MoCo Pride Center is moving forward, with plans to open the space at the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Regional Services Center in downtown Bethesda later this summer. Plans to develop the resource center were announced to the public at a county Trans Day of Visibility event in March.
Phillip Alexander Downie, CEO of the MoCo Pride Center, an organization that promotes health and well-being and offers services and social events for the local LGBTQ+ community, said he wishes he’d had safe spaces to be himself while growing up as a queer kid in the county. That’s why he wants to open the brick-and-mortar resource center.
“There weren’t conversations about people like me, there weren’t open doors of compassion. It wasn’t that I was told to be silent. It was that the language of acceptance wasn’t spoken around me,” Downie said. “Representation is not a luxury. It is survival. It is an act of radical affirmation that says ‘You belong, you are here, and you have always belonged here.’ ”
