Opinions
The only thing I want from Santa
Yariel Valdés González remains in ICE custody in La.
Editor’s note: Yariel Valdés González is a Washington Blade contributor who won political asylum in the U.S. on Sept. 18. He remains in U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement custody at Bossier Parish Medium Security Facility in Plain Dealing, La., because ICE has appealed Judge Timothy Cole’s ruling in his favor.
PLAIN DEALING, La. — In my homeland of Cuba, Santa Claus has never been very recognizable. The Communist dictatorship does not think much of this fat and jolly character who it says only indoctrinates children in order to cover up the “capitalist consumerism” the U.S. sustains. Cuban children and adults, nevertheless, adore the Christmas spirit that Santa brings each December. We decorate trees, we get together to eat and share with family and even the little ones — and others not so much — receive and give presents to each other before the end of the year or on Epiphany. Stores in Cuba, which are all run by the government, are, contradictorily, decorated with lights and fake pine trees not for Christmas, but to celebrate the end of the year and to mark a new anniversary of the Cuban revolution’s triumph on Jan. 1.
This is what matters!
The regime maintains its anti-Christmas façade, a kind of “parallel world” in which it only lives because Cubans are tired of such a false and ridiculous display. So much so that I had to bite my tongue (not literally, of course) many times while working as a radio presenter in my city because I could never mention the world “Christmas.” This vocabulary provoked and to this day provokes terror among the directors of any official media outlet, where you cannot legitimatize this anti-Communist tradition. Santa never appeared on Cuban television or in newspapers. The spirit of Santa, to the government, and all that it represents brings with it too many frivolities that are typical of the “enemy of the North” and can ideologically “contaminate” the people. Cuban Christmas is a bit clandestine, quasi-illegal, underground, present for the people and non-existent to those who govern the country. My Cuba is so complex and ambivalent. Despite this reality, I always enjoyed Christmas in my own way in my country. It was an opportunity to visit my family and partner and surround myself with feelings of happiness and love. I am, however, looking forward to my first Christmas in the U.S. and not just for the presents as many may think.
I came to this country at the end of March to ask for political asylum because of the persecution that I suffered in Cuba as an independent journalist. I faced work and ideological sanctions in the island’s official press, expulsion from the state-run media system, interrogations and arbitrary detentions, travel bans that did not allow me to leave the country for journalism events. State security officials also carried out voracious and excessive interrogations against my family and friends in my neighborhood. All of this is part of a strategy to persecute and instill fear against independent reporters, those who can neither be controlled nor censured. Freedom of expression, and freedom of press even more so, does not exist in Cuba. Only the Communist Party, with an absolute reign of more than 60 years, is responsible for controlling each written and spoken word. The relationship between the party and media is like the relationship between a master and slave. The consequences will clearly be harsh if you don’t follow orders. These are the rules of this unjust and totalitarian power game.
I was able, with a lot of luck, to escape such a hell and on Sept. 18, six months after I arrived in this country, Judge Timothy Cole determined I was worthy of asylum. He granted me the protection for which I had searched so much and for which I fled my country, leaving behind my family, my boyfriend, my friends and colleagues who are still living through a real witch hunt for the simple reason of telling the truth about Cuba.
Repression against independent Cuban media professionals has increased to extremely worrying levels with house arrests, illegal detentions that last several days, physical and psychological violence, registration and confiscation of work equipment, assaults and personal threats or those made on social media by an army of digital combatants who engage in so-called cyberbullying.
Prohibitions on traveling from the island to professional events and conferences under the absurd pretext the independent press is doing the bidding of foreign powers that finance it to force a regime change in Cuba and other barbarities have also increased. This and much more is what awaits me if I am forced to return to Cuba. The possibility of being deported is once again hanging over my head after ICE appealed the asylum granted to me in September. I remain incarcerated at this moment while an appeals court (the Board of Immigration Appeals), comprised of three judges in Virginia, considers my case for a second time.
My life and my future is literally in their hands.
Many people may think I am too dramatic, but those who think differently than the Cuban dictatorship and publicly show it in digital journalism outlets unleash the most ferocious anger.Us freelancers are considered a “national security threat,” dangerous and subversive traitors who don’t even deserve the air they breathe and the punishment will be double if they are part of the LGBTQ community because the island recently has not been afraid to reveal itself as it truly is: An intolerant and homophobic tyranny. The government has deemed me persona non-grata because of my collaboration with publications branded “counterrevolutionary and subversive” like Tremenda Nota, the Washington Blade’s media partner in Cuba, CubaNet and others like YucaByte or this weekly, whose international news editor, Michael K. Lavers, is on the list of those who are “prohibited” from entering the country. I am afraid of how I will be treated if I were to set foot on the island. You can rest assured that I would have never given up my mom’s hug or my elderly grandparents’ affectionate kiss if my fundamental rights as a human being were not viciously trampled and my life was not in danger. I guess it was a survival instinct that made me close my eyes and suddenly abandon these bonds of blood and love.
I have fought for my salvation from inside a prison for nearly eight months. From detention at the Bossier Parish Medium Security Facility in Louisiana, the Deep South, I intend to remain optimistic and keep the faith, even though my hope withers a little with each passing day of this confinement. The constant support of my family in Miami and Cuba, my lawyer, as well as my closest friends and colleagues in this country and on the island are the only things that have kept me from an emotional collapse and a dead end.
Each night before I go to sleep I pray that justice will once again be done, because these judges are considering whether I deserve the opportunity to live without fear in this great nation. I only hope they uphold Judge Cole’s decision that he issued more than two months ago. It would be, without a doubt, the best gift that I could receive this Christmas. Like an excited child, I hope Santa Claus brings his sled to Louisiana and gives me the only present for which I fervently ask each minute: Freedom.
Freedom!
Opinions
Pride in a new world order
White House has dismantled global U.S. LGBTQ rights infrastructure
It can be tempting to feel somber this Pride. In 2025 and 2026, the United States dismantled much of the LGBTQ+ rights infrastructure it had spent decades building — eliminating the Global Equality Fund, defunding local LGBTQ+ organizations, and banning the rainbow flag from federal buildings and embassies. India unexpectedly rolled back transgender rights in March, stripping away the hard-won right to self-identify. Senegal passed an abhorrent anti-LGBTQ+ law in April, and a similar one just cleared parliament in Ghana.
But this is only part of the story. 2026 is also the year Rob Jetten — a proud gay man — became prime minister of the Netherlands, the youngest in the country’s history. It is the year Thailand celebrated the first anniversary of legalizing same-sex marriage, a historic first for Southeast Asia that is already influencing debates across the region. It is also the year “Heated Rivalry” became one of the most-watched shows on HBO, a global phenomenon.
In fact, LGBTQ+ people have never been more numerous, more visible, or more politically consequential than we are today. The question is not whether we have power. The question is whether we are using it to adapt to the emerging new world order.
Three geopolitical forces are redrawing the terrain. Borders and sovereignty are under renewed strain — this year showed us that the rules-based international order can no longer be taken for granted. Power politics is back at the center of global affairs, and when nations turn inward and militarize, those at the margins often pay the price first. And the institutions our movement has relied on most — governments, multilateral bodies, and multinational corporations — are proving unreliable allies.
The conclusion is that LGBTQ+ people cannot tie their future solely to the fortunes of liberal democracies. We need to come into our own power, and this turbulent moment may offer an opportunity to do so.
This requires a change in strategy. The LGBTQ+ movement has largely understood itself as a national movement in the business of changing hearts and minds one country at a time: win the courts, shift public opinion, and trust that progress would spread from north to south. That model delivered real victories on decriminalization, anti-discrimination protections, military service, and marriage equality. But it is showing diminishing returns. Today, political movements, financial flows, cultural narratives, and AI models increasingly operate globally outside of normative frameworks. Our movement has not kept pace.
LGBTQ+ people globally constitute a population larger than that of the United States. Our collective economic power approaches $4 trillion. We shape culture disproportionately in film, fashion, technology, and the arts. We are no longer a niche constituency petitioning for tolerance. We are a global community with growing economic, cultural, and political influence.
Realizing that potential requires three things. The first is unity — not uniformity, but the strategic coherence that allows a dispersed global community to act with shared purpose. The second is infrastructure: organizations and networks capable of operating across borders, pooling resources, and articulating a vision people want to be a part of. The third is abandoning a Western-centric mindset: building deeper roots in emerging economies will be essential.
There is a broader point. LGBTQ+ people should not be reduced to merely enduring or surviving this moment. We are entering a turbulent period in which humanity faces serious challenges — armed conflict, climate disruption, and technologies advancing faster than governance. LGBTQ+ people have often had to imagine a different future before it existed — and build the communities to sustain it across borders, generations, and class lines. That experience gives us a comparative advantage in this global context.
Pride, at its best, has always been a declaration of existence and a demand for dignity. In 2026, it should become something more: a reckoning with how much power our community has accumulated — and how seriously we intend to wield it to shape what comes next.
Fabrice Houdart is a former World Bank and United Nations staff member. He has taught at Georgetown University and Columbia University, and chairs the Institute of Current World Affairs in D.C.
Opinions
A vice president marches by our side
New exhibit explores Pride in the 2020s and asks what’s to come
A photograph can change how we understand ourselves. In Rainbow History Project’s exhibit “Pickets, Protests, and Parades: The History of Gay Pride in Washington,” one pairing does exactly that: 10 Washingtonians in their Sunday best picketing the White House in 1965, and, a few panels later, Vice President Kamala Harris in a “Love is Love” Tshirt marching down Pennsylvania Avenue for Capital Pride in 2021. Between those two moments—anxious, buttonedup defiance on one side of the White House fence and a sitting vice president cheering among rainbow flags on the other—lies the story this exhibit tells.
Last year, we stretched that story along Freedom Plaza for WorldPride 2025, just three blocks from the White House. Over seven weeks, visitors from around the globe walked a timeline that showed how a small, risky White House picket helped ignite six decades of increasingly visible, intersectional Pride in the nation’s capital. They met organizers who insisted that gay history did not start at Stonewall, and that D.C. has been a laboratory for LGBTQ resistance since at least that first 1965 picket.
This June, as part of Dupont Underground’s “Matters of Pride” programming, we’re inviting you back underground to revisit what we showed the world last year—and to look harder at what it asks of us now. The tunnels below Dupont Circle will host the early eras of the exhibition: the White House picket; block parties at Lambda Rising bookstore, the first National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979 that brought more than 100,000 people onto the Mall; and the first D.C. Pride march that began at Howard University, led by BIPOC activists who carried every part of their identities into the streets.
Seen together, these moments make the theme “A Vice President Marches By Our Side” less about a single VIP participant and more about a changing relationship between our movements and the state. In 1965, picketers carefully followed dress codes to appear “employable” enough to be heard at all. By 1979, marchers filled the National Mall with banners that linked sexuality to feminism, racial justice, and antiwar activism. By the 2020s, a vice president could show up at Capital Pride, call for the Equality Act, and speak explicitly about protecting trans youth and communities of color. None of those shifts were guaranteed. All of them were built, step by step, by people who kept organizing whether or not anyone in power joined them.
The reinstall is also a chance to notice details you may have rushed past on a crowded WorldPride weekend: a handlettered sign demanding federal jobs in 1965; a quote from a 1970s organizer about the sheer relief of dancing in public; a photograph of local pioneers like SaVanna Wanzer, the founder of D.C. Trans Pride and Black Trans Pride, whose work helped make today’s Pride more fully trans inclusive even as Black trans folx remain under attack. These are not just artifacts; they are reminders of how much was risked so that we could take Pride for granted at all.
We are reinstalling this exhibit at a moment when very little about the future feels guaranteed. America’s 250th birthday is around the corner, and national debates over whose stories “belong” in the classroom, the public square, or in the archives, are already shaping policy. In that context, going back to the origins of D.C. Pride is more than nostalgia. It is a strategy lesson. The 1960s picketers, the 1979 marchers, the BIPOC activists leaving an intersectionality conference at Howard and marching to the Mall—all of them faced hostile climates, limited resources, and no certainty of success. Yet they showed up anyway, and in doing so, they expanded what was imaginable.
That is why, at the end of the reinstall, the exhibit turns back on you. The final section, “The Next 60 Years of Pride,” remains intentionally unwritten. Instead, you will find a simple question on the wall: “What will you do?” Visitors will have the chance to add their own commitments—large or small—to the story: what they will march for, organize for, or quietly sustain in the years ahead.
A vice president once marched by our side. This month at Dupont Underground, we are asking something both humbler and more radical: after everything we have learned from the past six decades of Pride in Washington, who will you be standing with, and what will you be brave enough to do next?
In conjunction with WorldPride 2025 the Rainbow History Project exhibited “Pickets, Protests, and Parades: The History of Gay Pride in Washington.” More than two years of planning resulted in seven weeks of outdoor education, centering the voices of Pride’s organizers. In the final of the 10 themes, we discuss “A Vice President Marches By Our Side,” about what Pride looked like in the 2020s and asking about Pride in the years to come.
Vincent Slatt volunteers as the senior curator at the Rainbow History Project.
Opinions
Leaving for a barge trip through canals of Burgundy
Nervous about European reactions to Americans given Trump’s war in Iran
As those who read my columns know, I love cruising, the kind you do on water. I have had many different cruise experiences, including sailing through the Galapagos and the Norwegian fjords. This time, I will be doing something a little different and am off on a new adventure. With 18 others, will be on a barge for six days, going from Lyon to Paris, through the canals of Burgundy. Each day will bring a new adventure. We will be embarking in Besancon, and traveling to Beaune, Arc-et-Senans, Dole, Saint-Jean-De-Losne, Seurre, Chalon-Sur-Saone, and then disembarking in Auxerre, en route to Paris. Of the 18 people, four are friends from D.C. and Rehoboth Beach. I look forward to meeting the other travelers.
I leave for Paris on June 8 and made arrangements for a car in Paris to take me to the Gare De Lyon, to board a fast train to Lyon. A quick two-hour trip. In Lyon I will head to the hotel for a welcome dinner, where I will meet our guide and other travelers. This is a Gate 1 adventure booked by my friends at My Lux Cruise. We will be spending two days in Lyon before boarding the MS Daniele, built in 2016. It is modern, with space for both indoor and outdoor dining, a small lounge, the requisite bar, and very simple staterooms. Mine will have two single beds. Can’t forget the hot tub on the bow. I will be writing a blog during my trip, which will be published in the Blade, likely after my return. I will post pictures during the trip on social media. After six days on the barge, we arrive in Paris, where I will spend a couple of days with good friends. One planned excursion is to see the rebuilt Notre Dame.
I will be away from D.C. on June 16, primary day. Since for the first time there will be ranked choice voting, it is possible we won’t know who wins until I get back on June 19. I hope everyone votes, and urge you to vote, as I already have, for Kenyan McDuffie for mayor. His main opponent, Janeese Lewis George, clearly doesn’t understand how D.C. government really works. She is trying to emulate NYC Mayor Mamdani with promises, but hers won’t happen. We don’t have a governor, and state legislature, to help. Our governor is in essence the felon in the White House, and our state legislature is the Congress. They won’t be helping. In addition, George has claimed the endorsement of an antisemitic organization, DSA, and is going to birthday parties for a guy who calls gay men like me ‘fags’ and says they shouldn’t be teaching his children in the public schools. The winners of the Democratic primary races will determine how D.C. moves forward. It really makes a difference.
The world is a different place today than it was just a short 18 months ago, when the felon began his second term. This is the first time I will be out of the country since he began this illegal war with Iran, plunging the world into chaos. I wonder what the reception for an American will be in Europe these days. I remember back when Ronald Reagan was first elected, which was the last time in my travels, before Trump, I felt compelled to apologize for my country. At that time people would actually come up to me and ask, what did America do, and why? Yet as bad as times seemed then, they were nowhere as bad as they are today. The felon in the White House has made life so much worse for people around the world. Europeans have seen him get on his knees to Putin, and screw Ukraine. Now with this illegal, and unnecessary, war in Iran, he is impacting their lives directly. Fuel prices are rising dramatically, and there is a drastic shortage of jet fuel, causing cuts in flights. They see him work hand-in-hand with the war criminal, Netanyahu, in Israel. They see how he simply wants to enrich himself with things like his ‘Board of Peace,’ and in the long run, screw the Palestinian people. It will be interesting to hear how Europeans feel about all this. I look forward to listening to them. All I can say in response is I didn’t vote for Trump and will continue to demonstrate, and write against him, as often as I can.
Putting politics aside, which is hard to do these days, I am excited about this new adventure, and look forward to sharing some of my experiences with you.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
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