Many gays are fed up with our president, and he won’t be getting their votes this year.
Four years ago, leading up to Joe Biden’s presidential election, 74% of LGBTQ registered voters said they supported Biden, according to a GLAAD poll released in Sept. 2020. Although the data is unclear on how LGBTQ registered voters feel about Biden this time around as he prepares for a re-election, their support for him hangs in the balance as the community’s attitudes shift across multiple issues.
In the lead up to the election this November, they have been vocal about their criticism of the current president. Many are concerned over Biden’s handling of LGBTQ issues like last year’s wave of anti-trans bills.
Prior to his presidency, GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis made a statement along with the 2020 poll on how much queer and trans people’s lives were on the line, and why Biden should win the majority votes in 2020. Now, 51% of Biden voters from 2020 are open to considering a new candidate, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll from last September.
Should Biden and Trump be the presidential candidates this year, ABC News explained on Sunday that this would “represent a battle of markedly unpopular candidates.” This came from a report they released, which showed that the general approval rate of a repeat Biden presidency has dropped to 33%—lower than Trump’s approval rating of 36%.
Earlier in December, two LGBTQ senior advisers working on Biden’s re-election campaign spoke out on how important his re-election is for queer, trans and nonbinary people, in an exclusive interview with Washington Blade.
The Biden-Harris administration “has so much to run on” regarding LGBTQ matters, queer senior adviser Sergio Gonzales told Washington Blade in December, “whether we’re talking about health care, whether we’re talking about the Respect for Marriage Act, whether we’re talking about, you know, some of the ways that we’ve addressed bullying in schools—these are very real policy wins for our community.”
While the LGBTQ+ community is diverse, and opinions within it vary widely, many voters have articulated specific concerns that have led them to withhold their vote for the incumbent president. Reckon spoke with queer and trans people across the U.S. to share why they aren’t voting for Biden this year. Here are the top four reasons they listed:
Biden’s role in the Israel-Palestine conflict has permanently changed many LGBTQ people’s perception of their president— some of whom had voted for in 2020. Following Hamas’ initial attack on Oct. 7 that killed 1,400 people in Israel, the Israeli military’s violent retaliation has now killed over 24,000 Palestinians at the time of publication—a half of whom are children.
Omar Taweh, an Arab, queer, fourth-year med student at UMass Chan medical school is one voter who will not be voting for Biden this year. Taweh, who is 26, and was raised Christian in Lebanon, is currently applying to residency in hopes to be an emergency medicine doctor in six months. Taweh tells Reckon that in 2006, he was in Beirut when Israel bombed political party Hezbollah, and he was evacuated to Cyprus via helicopter. Along with his mother and sister, he flew out three days later, having slept in cots during that time.
“I don’t think that experience had ever really informed my voting until October, when very quickly I realized that I was assigning a lot of hopefulness to the way that the Democratic Party was functioning,” he said.
He will be voting for Jill Stein of the Green Party, whose campaign he worked briefly on.
“I knew it was broken. I knew it was destroyed.” Taweh doesn’t care if people are upset that he isn’t voting for Biden, “because this is my pain. It’s the pain of my community,” he explained.
Thirty-two year old public health worker Laura Luengas won’t be voting for Biden, either. “He’s one step away from being a conservative or a Republican,” she said.
The queer Colombian who is based in Santa Barbara, Calif. voted for Sen. Sanders in 2020 during the primary election and then voted for Biden, even though was and continues to be too moderate for her far left politics.
“Watching him giving [Israel] billions of our dollars while people here are struggling to make ends meet [as he] funds what’s going on in the Middle East to further a political agenda, it’s sad that that’s what it takes, but I just draw the line at supporting a candidate who could do that,” she adds, explaining that removing indigenous people from their homeland is a story that hits home for her as a Colombian.
She says that she will most likely sit this election out, as she watches Biden fund Israel while she struggles to fight for housing equity in California.
Housing has also become a major election issue this year.
In the eight years Luengas has been working in homelessness, she has watched California consistently increase programs and councils to combat homelessness while witnessing the number of unhoused people go up in the state, yearly. California harbors a third of unhoused people in the country.
Nationwide by the end of 2023, homelessness skyrocketed an additional 12% following rent increases and the termination of coronavirus aid.
“We are one of the most powerful and richest countries in the world, and I step outside, and I see someone sleeping in the rain when I know that the apartment above me has been empty for six months,” she said. “Instead, we want to continue to fund colonialism halfway across the world to advance our interests in that area.”
In addition to unhoused communities, asylum seekers have also been a vulnerable group.
Over in New Mexico, Kate Gerhart, a 26-year-old queer artist from Albuquerque, has been doing community work and mutual aid for asylum seekers coming into the U.S. through Central America. Her personal moral outlook is based on strengthening and uplifting from within the community of asylum seekers, rather than relying on electoral politics to help people.
When asylum seekers are let into the U.S.—which Gerhart describes to be extremely traumatizing— “they are given next to no resources, and they’re not allowed to legally work in the country while they’re here seeking asylum,” she said. “Then they’re having to turn to unregulated jobs that don’t have benefits, because even though they’re in the country legally, they’re not legally allowed to work.”
The electoral system and Biden, then, are “so removed from the reality of people’s lives,” she adds. “When you’re working with these vulnerable populations, you often have to find ways to live outside of the system.”
Gerhart will be voting for the candidates of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Claudia De La Cruz and Karina Garcia, whose campaign message is “We need to end capitalism before it ends us.”
Biden’s support for Israel aside, conservative legislators have sparked an unprecedented legislative fight against the queer and trans community throughout Biden’s presidency—many of which have passed into laws. While Biden has been the president most supportive of LGBTQ people, the administration’s powers come into conflict with the Republican congresspeople at state levels.
According to Corinne Green, a queer, asexual nonbinary transfeminine person whose activism focuses on LGBTQ and harm reduction organizing and policy, the onus is still placed on Biden. Green is based in New Orleans, La., where they played a major role in decriminalizing Narcan in the state while serving as the president of the online support group Louisiana Trans Advocates. It was the group’s first ever piece of enacted legislation.
In 2020, Green voted for Gloria La Riva from the PSL, and they will not be voting for Biden this year either because “I’m a communist and he’s barely even a Democrat,” they said, adding that one of his few regulatory actions, the “transmisogynist Title IX Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on trans students, is inarguably worse than simple inaction and has been cited at least three times in court opinions as justification for anti-trans discrimination.”
Even major LGBTQ organizations are feeling the pressure by the community to stand against Biden and his support of Israel at large. Amongst the nonprofits, Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is being criticized for their corporate partnership with Northrop Grumman, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense to manufacture weapons and missiles that are being sent to Israel on behalf of American tax dollars.
As a harm reductionist, the notion that Biden is the ‘lesser of two evils’ or that voting for him is a form of harm reduction makes Green “sick to their stomach.”
Currently, Green founded a queer and femme activist collective that will soon be launching a collaborative platform to track anti-LGBTQ legislation, called Open Policy Forum in hopes to put the “public” back in public policy.
For queer and trans people, student loans can determine whether or not a student can pursue a college degree. Take Salvador, for example, who told Teen Vogue last May that the main resource separating his abusive family from his dream Ivy League schools was money.
A study published in 2021 by The Williams Institute found LGBTQ adults to be more likely than cis and straight adults to have student loan debt. The survey found that 35.4% of adults who owed student loans were LGBTQ, compared to 23.2% of their cis and straight counterparts.
Now, queer and trans people are choosing to not vote for Biden, after his campaign promises of universal student debt relief continue to struggle under the checks and balances while student loan payments resumed last October.
The following day, bisexual transfeminine user @TabulaLuna wrote: “I’m drowning in student debt. I’ve already paid more than the principal and still owe more than I started, and I’m not voting for Biden because he keeps playing with it instead of actually solving the problem.”
For some, there is no problem because the answer is clear; Biden is simply not an option.
On New Year’s Day, another user, @inourwordsprjct posted, “I am a white man. I am gay. I am a registered Democrat (did it just for Bernie in 2020). I’ve been homeless. I’ve had my ribs broken by the cops. I have over $200,000 in student debt. I am 47 years old. I will not be voting for Biden or Trump. You cannot scare me into doing so.”
