Jessica Stern is surprisingly upbeat for an LGBTQ activist who’s watched the movement’s hard-won legal and political gains erased by the Trump administration. Especially since she’s played a major role in securing and promoting LGBTQ human rights for more than two decades.

“I’m an optimist,” she told me during an interview for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine. “Our symbol is the rainbow. It’s the intersection of the rain and the sun. We know how to come through a cloudy day.”

You might argue that the LGBTQ movement is facing something more akin to a political thunderstorm than a drizzle. The Trump administration is targeting gender-affirming care for transgender people — especially young people — and has eliminated funding for programs in the U.S. and abroad that provide legal, social and economic support for LGBTQ people and their allies.

It’s even possible that marriage equality could be overturned by a far-right Supreme Court in the coming years. It’s a new world in the Trump era.

Hard-Won Progress

Stern was, until January, the highest-ranking queer diplomat at the State Department, the U.S. Special Envoy Advancing the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons. It’s a job she accepted in 2021 with some reservations.

“I asked myself, did I want to take on the affiliation with U.S. foreign policy, which as we know, has not always been respectful of the human rights and national sovereignty of other countries,” she said. “But in the end, it was not a very hard decision to make because LGBTQI people around the world are radically under-resourced in terms of political, economic and sociocultural support. We need allies. We need powerful allies.”

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On her watch, the State Department made LGBTQ rights a centerpiece of foreign policy, pushing governments around the world to respect those rights.

As the United States retreats from leading on global human rights, Stern advises LGBTQ people and organizations to draw strength from each other and to use their collective energy to advocate for change.

“The way we come through moments like this is by protesting, by taking to the streets, by writing letters to the editor, by holding our elected officials accountable, by electing different public officials if the ones we have now don’t serve us, by making donations to organizations that serve our community, by inventing new strategies for visibility when rainbow crosswalks get paved over in black tar,” she said. “We know how to rise up.”

Stern now serves as a senior fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School.