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TRANSCRIPT

Kelley Robinson: I think that now’s a sobering moment because we’re actually realizing that we weren’t as close to equality as we thought. And we’ve got to continue the work and anyone that had bounced out of the fight after marriage, hey, you got to get back in because it is not over. [music break]

Jane Coaston: I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show standing with one of our civilization’s strongest soldiers, algae. Even President Donald Trump’s multi-million dollar reflecting pool reno is not above the green machine. A bystander speaking to the New York Post put it best. 

[clip of unnamed bystander] You know, I mean, redoing the reflective wall I mean it’s, it’s I guess good in theory, but uh but they got one guy here only trying to you know get the whole thing blue again, I think he’s going to be here for a few years. 

Jane Coaston: Ask anyone with a swimming pool. You cannot stop it, you can only hope to delay it. Algae always wins. On today’s show, I speak with human rights campaign president Kelley Robinson about Pride, the LGBTQ rights movement, and how we can keep moving forward when some want to hold us back. Before we get into all that, here’s what we’re following today, Tuesday, June 16th. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] This is tax payer free, we have no tax payer putting up ten cents. 

Jane Coaston: Back in March, Trump insisted his supposed $400 million ballroom would not cost taxpayers a dime. And to give him credit, that was technically true. Because the price tag was higher for everyone. According to the Washington Post, a contractor estimate from earlier that month said the project would actually cost $600 million, and taxpayers would foot about half the bill. In May, Trump estimated his ballroom will be up and running in about two years. What a great gift to Americans. Something they didn’t want that they have to chip in for. 

Jane Coaston: Thank you. I hate it. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Israel’s fighting Hezbollah too long, and too many people are being killed. And you don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody. Because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they’re not all Hezbollah, that I can tell you. 

Jane Coaston: Worst person you know making a great point. Trump’s bromance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be on thin ice at the G7 summit today. Israel is a major sticking point in Trump’s plans to end the Iran war. Iran’s top diplomat said that the tentative deal would require Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, a condition Israel has already rejected. But a US official who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity said the agreement did not call for an Israeli withdrawal. So it seems like there is a lot to iron out before Friday, when the US and Iran are set to formally sign the deal in Switzerland. 

[clip of Jamie Raskin] We have insiders who have reported to us um with a great deal of confidence that more than a million dollars has been spent on these supplemental slush fund payoffs, payments made to particular members of the director’s team. And this is just extremely irregular in terms of the FBI and Department of Justice practice. 

Jane Coaston: House Judiciary Ranking Member Jamie Raskin spoke to Crooked’s Washington correspondent, Matt Berg, about a new investigation into FBI Director Kash Patel. Raskan announced his investigation today, citing reports that Patel may be using part of the FBI’s budget to allegedly give bonuses to special agents on his security detail and the Director’s advisory team. If you haven’t heard of that before, it’s new. In May, Nodus reported, quote, “the team is understood to be made up of agents who are willing to pursue political targets set by the Trump administration.” I can’t imagine why they’d be getting extra cash. Raskin is asking Patel for a record of any additional payments made on top of an FBI employee’s salary, as well as a full list of people serving on the director’s advisory team by Monday, June 29th. 

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] Okay, so you say that we’re anti-minority or anti-Black. 

[clip of Whoopi Goldberg] No I didnt say that I asked. See?

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] Okay. Okay. Fine. Be fair fair. 

[clip of Whoopi Goldberg] Don’t starting this stuff with me man. 

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] All right, okay. Alright.

[clip of Whoopi Goldberg] Don’t get me in trouble. [applause] Just don’t start no stuff with me. 

Jane Coaston: Vice President J.D. Vance braved the most intimidating interview known to man, sitting down with the ladies of The View today to promote his new book, Communion. The book is about Vance’s experience converting to Catholicism, but The View hosts covered a lot more than that, grilling the Vice President on the Epstein files, his old criticisms of Trump, and the administration’s immigration policies. Here’s View co-host Anna Navarro on those policies. 

[clip of Ana Navarro] I would urge you, as a Christian and as a father, to visit those detention centers where the children are being held and make sure that the conditions are held to the values that we hold in this country. 

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] So you guys have thrown a lot at me and I see we got 30 seconds left here, but let me say number one–

[clip of Ana Navarro] You’re the vice president, you can go long.

Jane Coaston: Never a good sign when you’re watching the clock. And that’s the news. Let’s talk about Pride. It’s June, which means it’s Pride Month. A month to celebrate the achievements of LGBTQ Americans and the impact they’ve had on our past and present. From the Mattachine Society of the 1950s, to activists with ACT UP in the 1980s, to Supreme Court Plaintiff Jim Obergefell in 2015, to the millions of LGBTQ people right now who are living, loving, and continuing the fight for our rights. Without them, I would not be here, an out-and-proud married homosexual, talking to you, today. But this is also a weird and very scary time for many of us. The Trump administration’s anti-LGBTQ backlash has pushed thousands of trans people from their home states, and given some of the worst people in the world permission to start fantasizing about taking away our right to marry. To which I say, no! So what do we do now? At a time that feels both like the greatest dreams of those who came before us and increasingly terrifying for many of us. To find out, I talked to human rights campaign president, Kelley Robinson. Kelley, welcome to What a Day. 

Kelley Robinson: Hey, thanks for having me, Jane. 

Jane Coaston: The human rights campaigns declared a state of emergency in 2023 for LGBTQ people in the U.S. How would you compare the environment then to now under the second Trump administration?

Kelley Robinson: Everything is exponentially worse and here’s the thing, in 2023, when we declared that national state of emergency, people said, oh, aren’t you overreacting? You know we know all the bad bills are happening. We see hate crimes increasing, but is it as bad as you say? And now here we are a few years later, and every warning has turned into a reality. 

Jane Coaston: I want to hear a little bit more about that. Like, I think that that was something that for so many people in 2023 and 2024, you kind of felt like the queer person crying wolf. Like, this was happening. This was starting to happen. You could kind of feel it. But what has been escalating? Because it feels like it’s it’s not just red states. It’s not just the federal government. It’s a little bit of everything. 

Kelley Robinson: Yeah, well, it’s not by accident. Look, in 2022, when Roe v. Wade was overturned and there was a wave of elections where our opposition flat out lost. They lost on their efforts to undermine democracy and the power of the vote. They lost on almost every ballot initiative to protect abortion freedom in the country. And so they went to the drawing board again to see what could be the next issue that they could draw divisions in the United States on. And the executive director of the American Principles Project is actually on record as saying, we threw issues at a wall to see what stuck and attack on the trans community is what stuck. So from then, we’ve seen them pour hundreds of millions of dollars, not into only anti-trans attacks, but also into undermining marriage equality. So much so that right now, nine states in the country have introduced some sort of bill or amendment in states that undermines marriage equality, so anyone that thought that these fights were over, anyone that thought that our rights were solid or safe, you know, you gotta get back in the fight. We have to make sure that we continue the effort to move equality forward because it is truly under attack. 

Jane Coaston: I think that that’s something that’s so hard for me as a gay woman, and I’m sure for you, someone running the organization that is supposed to move us forward, is that it’s been 50 odd years of like two steps forward, three steps back. And you go back to the 1970s and you have the beginnings of gay pride, the first Christopher Day march. You have people who are themselves out in public for the first time in a lot of major cities. And then you have the 80s, you have massive backlash and the AIDS crisis. And you have the 90s of kind of this forward, backward, forward, backward, forward, backward. And we get to Obergefell v. Hodges, we get to the you know the legalization of marriage equality nationwide. We get to the mass acceptance of marriage quality and then we have backlash. How do you deal with that? Where it’s like, you wanna be moving us forward. You wanna be talking about issues that are, you know, talking about making it easier for LGBT people to build families you want to be talking about, you know, what do we need to be moving forward as part of the American fabric and then you’re still having to deal with this old bullshit. 

Kelley Robinson: Yeah, well, I mean, look, my perspective is a little different. I think that day by day, things feel hard and challenging and like we’re not making progress. But if you zoom out and look at the story over decades or over generations, we absolutely are. You know, like you said, all of those accomplishments that happened from the 70s to the 80s to the 90s to the early 2000s. That was one generation. And I even think about myself, like I’m a queer lady living with my wife in a house that we own in the suburbs with two kids, and we’re on the verge of buying an electric vehicle. 

Jane Coaston: Oooh. 

Kelley Robinson: This is somebody’s wildest–

Jane Coaston: I know I know. 

Kelley Robinson: –wildest dream and imagination, you know? So, I mean, I think that we are making progress, but the reality is, and I think this is the hard part, that that progress is fragile. And that’s true for every civil rights issue in our lives. And I think that for the fight for equality, people actually thought that we were further along than we are. Like a lot of people don’t know that it’s one Supreme Court decision, Bostock, that protects us from being fired at work because we’re gay. There’s one supreme court decision and one federal law, Obergefell and the respect for marriage act that guarantee marriage protections. And in fact, there’s no federal non-discrimination protections for us to exist across the board. We don’t have equal civil rights across this country. So I think the now’s a sobering moment because we are actually realizing that we weren’t as close to equality as we thought. And we’ve got to continue the work and anyone that had bounced out of the fight after marriage. Hey, you got to get back in because it is not over. 

Jane Coaston: We’ll get back to my conversation with Kelly in a moment, and because it’s Pride, you have to listen. It’s the law. But if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. 

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Let’s get back to my conversation with human rights campaign president, Kelley Robinson. Yeah, I think that that was something I remember after the marriage decision is that there were a bunch of organizations that were like, well, we did it. We’re done now. That was the thing. That was our fight. We are good to go. And I think the pivot has been so hard because so many people believe that marriage was it. Like that was like, we get marriage and that’s that’s the whole ball game. But what have you been hearing from people in the LGBT community who have been impacted by the Trump administration’s actions beyond marriage? Because the Trump Administration will be like, well, you know, we’ve got married gay men in the administration, but I don’t think that means very much to someone who’s had to move their family out of state because of anti-trans policies. Someone for whom you’ve seen the ways the Trump administration takes anti-trans invective to levels that repulse pretty much everybody. Like it just seems to be, so many people checked out after marriage, but so many people didn’t have the privilege to do so. What have you been hearing from them? 

Kelley Robinson: Look, people are hurting right now. This administration has done everything that they can since day one to undermine our rights and our lives. You know, I talked to trans people that were kicked out of the military and I talked to somebody who had served this country for 20 years with honor, only to be denied the dignity of retiring in her uniform. How is that patriotic? Just because she’s trans. I hear from families all the time. They’re debating whether or not they can stay in the state that they’ve lived in for generations or even stay in this country. Because they’re afraid for the safety of their kids. Look, I even talked to a parent of a trans kid the other day who said, you know, I pray for the day where one day I can worry more about my kid finishing his vegetables than whether or not he survives to the next day. This is life and death and whether you are, you know somebody that cares about HIV in this country and access to care, somebody that cares about healthcare premiums, somebody that cares about civil rights, somebody that cares about democracy. Everything is on the line and so many of the actions of this administration and extremists are not undermining some of our rights. They’re undermining all of them. 

Jane Coaston: I think something else that’s been weird to observe is that, you know, if you go back to ten, eleven years ago, Pride Month was kind of overwhelming because it was like every company covering themselves in rainbows, which I’m aware a lot of people had problems with. But it turns out it’s worse when they’re not. And there’s been a 65% drop in Fortune 500 companies participating in HRC’s Corporate Equity Index, which ranks companies based on their diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, especially with regard to LGBT people, like, you know, with regard to parental leave or helping people, you know, start families. It’s been, it turns out that having everybody turn their Twitter bio into something LGBT related was way better than having people pretend pride just isn’t happening. What’s that experience been like for you at HRC and why do you think so companies are being so weak? 

Kelley Robinson: Look, the whiplash effect is real, right? Um. And right now, we need companies to stand on their grounds for the future. Look, 30% of Generation Z identifies a member of our community, one in ten of every adult. We have $1.4 trillion of buying power. We are not a small, marginal community. We are a growing force. So I think that we have to act like it. So, you know, this Pride Month, we’re going to have a little bit of swagger when we have those hundreds of millions of people in the streets all across the country because you’re right, there are some companies that have relented in this fight. They’ve acquiesced to an administration that is threatening them from the left and from the right, right? Now’s the time that we actually have to push them to get on the right side of equality and ask ourselves, if we felt like the commitment was not deep enough before that it only showed up in rainbow logos, what do we have to do right now to make more meaningful and enduring change? And I think some of the work that we’ve done with companies to- look at their internal policies and practices to ensure that there’s equitability, to ensure they’re actually doing self-ID work so that we know who is in their company and if they’re having different experiences from others. And yes, visibility matters. We need to get folks back in the street because the way that we are going to fail in this movement is if our powerful allies are silent in the midst of attacks. So I think this Pride Month is really a critical one. It is one where we’re learning a lot, where folks are you know struggling, especially in some of the mid-size and smaller cities with lack of pride sponsorships, but you still have people showing up. Like for HRC, we’ve gained a million new members in the last two years alone. That’s because, especially when people see the cruelty and the harm and the hate, they still wanna show up for the fight. We gotta be there to catch up. 

Jane Coaston: I was struck by something you were just mentioning, talking about how, like, you’re a married queer lady with a wife and two kids and a home and you’re going to buy an electric vehicle. I’m a married queer lady, you know, we’ve been married for 11 years. I think that for both of us, I think, you know, we’re close to the same age. I never thought this would be possible. 

Kelley Robinson: Right. 

Jane Coaston: Absolutely never once in the history of me being a little queer kid. What would you say to young people now, for whom, young people now, people younger than us, they’re like, you know, they are 11, 12, and they know who they are. They’re coming out. They’re talking about it. But they also are witnessing this kind of chud backlash because, you know, they are in our context too. What would say to them where they’re experiencing simultaneously, I think, the greatest openness LGBT people have ever experienced in the history of ever, but also a backlash of assholes. 

Kelley Robinson: A backlash of assholes is exactly what they’re experiencing. But you’re right, the first thing I want any young person who is coming into themselves to know is that they are not alone. That there are millions of people that are literally standing beside them and ready to fight for their rights, for their lives, for their love, for them to be who they are. And as horrific as things are today, we can together create a different tomorrow. It’s like you said, I couldn’t have imagined that my life would be possible. So, I hope that together we can manifest a future for our kids, for the next generation, that’s more free and more equitable than anything we can imagine today. But that is gonna take work. And that’s always been the story of America, right? To turn our dreams and our ideas into policies and actions that can actually change the course of history. 

Jane Coaston: Kelly, thank you so much for taking the time to join me. 

Kelley Robinson: Thanks, Jane. Happy to hear and happy pride!

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson. 

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, welcome Venus and Serena back to Wimbledon, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how Serena Williams will play at Wimbeldon for the first time in four years when she joins her sister Venus in women’s doubles, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter? Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston. And not only do the Williams sisters have 12 singles titles at Wimledon between them, they also won six titles as doubles partners. That is so many titles. What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily Fohr, Erica Morrison, and Adriene Hill. Our team includes Hayley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Joseph Dutra, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]