The Whiplash Generation

The Atlantic

4 days ago

The closing of Dupont Circle felt like a bad omen. The park and its namesake neighborhood, a longtime hub of gay life in Washington, D.C., were expected to be packed during WorldPride 2025. But on June 2, the National Park Service announced that it would be shutting down the place on the celebration's culminating weekend.
The intrusion of federal Washington on the District was unsettling but not unprecedented; the circle, like many of the most popular spaces in the city, is not under local control. More unusual was the chaos that followed. For many residents, there was a sense of fear that the federal government was intentionally excluding queer people from a beloved green space. (The NPS later said that the city's police chief had asked for the closure.) The shutdown order was reversed the next day, then suddenly reinstated. Black security fencing went up on Friday, and then came down again the next morning, opening the circle just in time for the headline parade, on June 7.
The entire affair—the opening, the closing, the paranoia, and then the alarming news of a shooting (which was unrelated and, thankfully, nonfatal)—could be easily put down to the vagaries of big-city life. But it also served as a heavy-handed metaphor for the general vibe of Pride month in the capital and across America: severe emotional whiplash.
For D.C.'s queer community, this was supposed to be an unambiguously triumphant June, one marking multiple important anniversaries. WorldPride, an international LGBTQ festival, had hastily chosen D.C. for its ninth event, after the initial 2025 host, Taiwan, pulled out. The change was fortuitous, in part because it coincided with the 50th anniversary of Pride events in D.C. (first organized in 1975 just a few blocks north of Dupont Circle). And most significantly, this June is the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
Every Pride is a commemoration of LGBTQ history, as well as a celebration of how far the community has come. For many in Washington, by some measures the gayest city in America, the marking of a decade since the Obergefell decision in the city where the Court ruled represented the ultimate victory lap. But the actual event was more mixed. Although organizers initially expected 3 million visitors, attendance was reportedly only in the hundreds of thousands. Many foreigners skipped it, citing the United States' recent detainment of travelers and noncitizens over their public statements or social-media posts. Domestic visitors were wary, too, of partying in the federal government's backyard—particularly in the days leading up to President Donald Trump's big military parade. Trump and his party have made the rollback of LGBTQ rights a nationwide priority, and more encroachments—perhaps even the reversal of Obergefell —appear to be on conservatives' radar. Backlash has officially arrived just as some members of Generation Z, the queerest cohort in American history, take their first steps into adulthood. Instead of reveling in their progress, they're having to reenvision their future and wondering which rights are safe and which they might not be able to count on.
Ten years is a long time for a young person. The teens I saw reveling in the streets in rainbow clothes, hair glitter, and body paint were born recently enough that they might not even remember the day of the Obergefell ruling. Older members of their generation were just teenagers when it came down. The bisexual rapper Doechii, who performed at a free concert near the National Mall on Pride weekend, was 16 in 2015; the lesbian pop star Renée Rapp, a grand marshal of the WorldPride parade, was only 15. The youngest Gen Zers, born in 2012, were toddlers at that time. Today, more than one in five Gen Z adults identify as LGBTQ, a greater share than in any generation before them. They grew up, and many of them came out, in the most gay-friendly social climate our country has ever seen. They have had role models in every corner of mainstream American life: Congress, the cover of Time magazine, the NFL, the military, The Bachelor. Things that felt impossible for so many teenagers in decades past—using gender-neutral pronouns; cutting their hair short; bringing a same-sex partner to a high-school dance—were normal for an unprecedented number of them. Target marketed them so much Pride merchandise that they shared memes mocking the collection.
But now that they're reaching maturity, these same young people are watching their status quo erode. The past few years have been marked by harsh, vitriolic backlash. Homophobic language and slurs are back in vogue among a contingent of influencers. The Target jokes stopped being funny when, in 2023, right-wing social-media attacks on its Pride collection got so bad that the company pulled some of the items from its stores, citing threats to employees. The Republican Party has aggressively challenged transgender people's ability to serve in the military, play sports, update their IDs, and medically transition.
And over the past six months, rescinding rights has become official policy. Trump has targeted individual transgender teenage athletes on social media, while his government has cut funding for HIV research and prevention worldwide. State governments and major religious denominations are challenging same-sex marriage, and corporations with a recent history of unfurling rainbow flags— Booz Allen Hamilton, Mastercard, Pepsi —have pulled out of sponsoring Pride events. The White House called LGBTQ-specific suicide-hotline services 'radical grooming contractors' and abruptly halted its partnership with the Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on preventing self-harm by queer youth. The Supreme Court just ruled that a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors can stand. Meanwhile, support for gay marriage shows a record-high partisan divide, with a major dip in Republican approval and even a slight overall decline.
Pushback against social progress isn't a new phenomenon, and neither is adversity for LGBTQ people. But prior generations grew up knowing it firsthand, whereas Gen Z has been raised in a world where, each June, huge rainbow parades bearing the imprimaturs of corporations and local governments rolled down the streets of every major U.S. city. That gave them plenty of reasons to believe that the recurrent waves of discrimination their elders faced—the Lavender Scare, Ronald Reagan ignoring the AIDS crisis, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act—had been relegated to history's dustbin. The milestones of their youth, after all, were victories. But these wins lulled the movement into what Sarah McBride, the 34-year-old transgender representative from Delaware, described to my colleague Hanna Rosin as 'a false sense of security.' After Obergefell, there was a 'dynamic where public opinion was sort of a mile wide but an inch deep,' she said. And, in her view, the LGBTQ coalition coasted instead of carrying on the work of public persuasion.
Now the reality of the moment is setting in, and it's taking a psychological toll. 'I always say people come to a doctor's office for two reasons: They're either in pain, or they're afraid,' Max Doyle, a physician assistant at Whitman-Walker Health, in D.C., who treats many queer Gen Zers and Millennials, told me. 'Lately, my patients have been coming in because they're in mental pain and they're afraid.' He's been seeing an increase in depression and anxiety in his patients, and referring more of them to psychiatry.
The ebb of LGBTQ acceptance provokes serious, immediate material concerns for people who are beginning their adult lives. They must ask themselves questions like: Where is it safe to live? Should I pursue gender-affirming surgery before it's too late? Should I get married now? Will we still be able to use surrogacy or IVF to start a family if we wait a few years? The freedom these young adults grew up with was, in part, the freedom not to think about these things. That liberty was incomplete—stratified by class, race, region, or pure luck—but wherever it did exist, it represented the fulfillment of a long-held dream, one in which queer people would be able to pursue careers, relationships, and families without fear of being outed or ostracized. Having to ask Where and when can I hold my beloved's hand? is caustic to a person's dignity. Having to wonder Where can I safely use the bathroom? is abrasive to the soul. It fundamentally alters one's brain chemistry to see Sesame Street accused of 'grooming' for posting a Pride message.
Doyle is 29, and a Millennial. He says he's not entirely surprised by this climate of backlash, especially because he grew up in the more conservative Midwest. But his co-workers at Whitman-Walker, which has been providing LGBTQ health care in the nation's capital for more than 50 years, belong to many generations, and he finds that his older colleagues and patients, especially those who survived the AIDS epidemic, are 'more jaded'—but also 'better prepared.'
This year's WorldPride was loud, colorful, and full of confetti. As anyone who has spent June in D.C. might have expected, the air was thick and humid, and attendees were dripping with sweat basically as soon as the sun rose. Signs implored the crowd to support trans troops, to get tested for sexually transmitted infections, to stand against queer-book bans, to join IKEA's customer loyalty club. Drag queens threw beads and flags from floats; pop hits and disco classics wafted down 14th Street. There was plenty of good humor and an undercurrent of naughtiness and rebellion.
Despite the political climate, WorldPride felt very much like a regular D.C. Pride. These kinds of family-friendly gatherings contain an implicit but powerful argument for acceptance. They glorify the power and importance of love in the lives of all kinds of people. They make gay life visible and diminish stigma or shame. And, crucially, they emphasize similarities instead of highlighting differences, in the hopes of generating wider approval. That spirit can be found in the majority ruling in Obergefell, in which then-Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that gay and lesbian couples respect marriage 'so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves'; in McBride's belief that her allies could have focused more on making the case for expanding trans rights; and in the travel-size trans flag I saw in someone's back pocket branded with the logo of the mayor's office.
That's not the only way LGBTQ people have made progress, though. Today, recognizing that decades of change may not be as irreversible as they'd thought, some Gen Zers look back to their radical elders in search of models for moving forward. They counter homophobia and transphobia with slogans like 'The First Pride Was a Riot.' They argue that the power of Stonewall came from the open rebellion of an unapologetic, unassimilated group. If even Elmo is getting called a groomer, their line of thinking goes, then being palatable doesn't work: You might as well show up, as many did at WorldPride, in leather and drag.
The first D.C. Gay Pride Day, in 1975, was deliberately split across two sides of the street, the organizer Deacon MacCubbin has recalled over the years. He'd struck a deal with local media: They could film one side of the block; the other was for people who didn't want to be outed to friends, family, or co-workers. In light of that history, this year's parade, documented openly by thousands of iPhones and public Instagram posts, feels less like a typical party than a minor miracle.
About 69 million Gen Z people live in the U.S.; perhaps 10 million or more of them identify as queer. They can't possibly agree on everything and may not have much in common at all, but that is a staggering number of people who acknowledge and share something that many born before them took to their graves. They may make very different choices about what their lives will look like, but even if it becomes much harder to be openly gay or trans in America in the coming years, five decades of history cannot easily be undone.
'We've been through this before, and it's really hard on people, but we're gonna get through this,' Doyle told me. This is what he counsels his patients, based on decades of knowledge about how, for instance, AIDS activists made medications more available and affordable, and trans people shared and used hormones long before they were widely prescribed. Those 10 million people represent a durable cultural change because they have grown up feeling entitled to be themselves in private and in public. That word— entitled —is frequently thrown around to insult this generation, but there are some cases in which the unabashed expectation of fair treatment is a clear source of strength. Personal liberty is an American entitlement, and these young people will not readily give it up.