They didn’t just forget. They are actively engaged in the architectural restoration of the closet, one deleted calendar entry at a time.
The silence was the first thing I noticed back in 2006. It wasn’t a lack of noise; emergency rooms and clinics are never quiet. It was a lack of acknowledgment. When I was the Director of Emergency Services at Parkland, navigating the chaotic tides of trauma and triage, I spent my off hours volunteering at an HIV/AIDS clinic. I was a young gay man in a world that had decided the worst of the dying was over, yet I was watching men my age wither away in rooms that smelled of antiseptic and neglect. We lived in the shadow of the Reagan/Bush era, a time when the government treated a plague like a moral hygiene issue, something that could be ignored until the “right” people started dying. We fought for decades to drag that reality into the light, to force the state to say the word “AIDS” without flinching. We thought we had won the battle for visibility. We thought the government could never again pretend we didn’t exist.
We were wrong. On December 1, 2025, the Trump administration proved that the closet is not just a piece of furniture; it is a federal infrastructure project. For the first time since 1988, the United States government let World AIDS Day pass without official commemoration. There was no proclamation. There was no red ribbon on the North Portico. Instead, there was a quiet, cowardly directive from the State Department instructing staff to avoid using federal funds or channels for recognition, accompanied by the chillingly bureaucratic justification that “an awareness day is not a strategy.”
Let’s be clear about what this is. This is not fiscal conservatism. This is not a strategy shift. This is a targeted, precision strike in a broader culture war designed to erase LGBTQ people from the public square. It is the administrative equivalent of turning off the lights in a room full of people and telling them they no longer cast shadows. By scrubbing World AIDS Day from the national calendar, the Trump White House is signaling to its base that the era of empathy is over, and the era of “traditional values”—a euphemism for “straight supremacy”—is back in session.
This silence is the logical endpoint of a political movement that views LGBTQ existence as a contagion. We have watched this administration spend months dismantling protections, attacking trans healthcare, and scrubbing diversity language from federal websites. They have turned “woke” into a slur that encompasses everything from Black history to queer survival. Now, they are coming for our memory. They are coming for the rituals we built to mourn our dead and fight for our living.
The phrase “an awareness day is not a strategy” is a masterpiece of gaslighting. It sounds pragmatic, like something a consultant would say in a boardroom. But in the context of HIV/AIDS, awareness was the only strategy we had when the government left us to die. Awareness was ACT UP throwing ashes on the White House lawn. Awareness was the Quilt covering the National Mall. Awareness was the force that shamed the world into funding PEPFAR and saving millions of lives. To dismiss it now is to spit on the graves of every person who had to scream to be heard.
But this isn’t just about history. It is about the present. This administration knows exactly who bears the brunt of the HIV epidemic today. It is Black and Brown men. It is trans women. It is the poor. It is the very people the MAGA movement has targeted as enemies of the state. By refusing to acknowledge the day, they are engaging in a soft eugenics of neglect. They are saying that these lives are not worth a press release, let alone a funding package.
The cruelty is the point, but the erasure is the goal. When you stop talking about a disease that disproportionately affects a marginalized community, you are helping that disease do its work. You are assisting the virus. The funding freezes and cuts to global HIV programs that are accompanying this silence are not accidental. They are part of an “America First” doctrine that defines “America” in incredibly narrow, exclusionary terms. If you are queer, if you are positive, if you rely on the state for your survival, you are not part of the America they are putting first. You are overhead. You are a liability.
I think back to those days at the clinic, holding the hand of a man who had been disowned by his family, ignored by his church, and failed by his government. I promised myself then that we would never go back to the darkness. I promised that we would keep the lights on, no matter what. And now, I watch as the President of the United States reaches for the dimmer switch with a smirk.
This is what it looks like when a government turns against its own people. It doesn’t always look like a raid or a prison camp. Sometimes it looks like a blank page where a proclamation used to be. Sometimes it looks like a memo on a State Department server. It is the banality of evil, upgraded for the digital age. They are deleting us from the official record, betting that if they ignore us hard enough, we will simply cease to be a political problem.
The reaction from the community has been a mixture of rage and recognition. We know this playbook. We wrote the manual on how to fight it. Madonna, an icon who was there when the bodies were piling up, publicly condemned the decision, her voice cutting through the silence like a siren. Activists are mobilizing, filling the void with noise and protest. City governments and local charities are stepping up, hosting the vigils that the White House abandoned. But let’s not pretend that charity can replace the full weight of the federal government. When the U.S. steps back, people die. It is that simple.
The Trump administration’s rhetoric about “strength” and “order” is a thin veil for their fear. They are terrified of us. They are terrified of our resilience, our history, and our refusal to be ashamed. They erase World AIDS Day because it reminds them of a time when the state failed and we survived anyway. It reminds them that we are stronger than their neglect. A red ribbon is a symbol of defiance, and authoritarians hate defiance. They want compliance. They want silence. They want us to go back into the closet and die quietly so they don’t have to look at us.
But the closet is not a place we fit anymore. We burned it down decades ago for kindling to keep our fires burning. The attempt to rebuild it, using federal policy as lumber, is destined to fail. But the damage they will do in the meantime is real. The budget shortfalls for the Global Fund are terrifying. The disruption to treatment networks abroad will have catastrophic consequences. This is not just a culture war skirmish; it is a public health disaster fueled by bigotry.
The broader cultural message is unmistakable: LGBTQ lives are administratively unimportant. We are being downgraded from citizens to subjects, from partners to problems. The administration is signaling to every homophobe in the country that it is open season on our dignity. If the President can treat the AIDS crisis as a nuisance to be ignored, then what is to stop a school board from banning books? What is to stop a doctor from refusing care? The signal starts at the top and filters down, poisoning the groundwater of our democracy.
We are watching the systematization of apathy. It is a deliberate un-learning of the lessons of the past forty years. They are trying to reset the clock to 1981, to a time when they could pretend that gay people were a rumor and AIDS was a punishment. It is a nostalgic fantasy for them, but a nightmare for us.
I remember the fear in the eyes of the patients at Parkland. The fear that no one would come. The fear that they didn’t matter. I see that same fear now in the eyes of young queer kids looking at their government. They are seeing a President who tweets about “liberty” while actively working to make their lives smaller, harder, and shorter. They are learning, in real time, that their government views their history as something to be scrubbed.
But they are also learning something else. They are learning that we don’t need the White House’s permission to exist. We don’t need their proclamations to know our worth. We built our own institutions when they wouldn’t let us in theirs. We built our own families when ours threw us out. And we will build our own memorials when they try to tear ours down.
The “thrift” excuse is laughable. The cost of issuing a proclamation is zero. The cost of hanging a ribbon is negligible. This was never about money. It was about purity. It was about cleansing the federal government of the “stain” of queerness. It was a ritual purification for a base that demands total ideological submission. They want a sanitized history, a version of America where no one ever died of neglect and everyone is straight and happy.
It is a lie. It is a bloody, dangerous lie. And it is our job to tell the truth. The truth is that silence kills. The truth is that the government is weaponizing bureaucracy to hurt people they don’t like. The truth is that this is not an isolated incident; it is the opening salvo of a new war on LGBTQ rights.
We are not just fighting for a day on a calendar. We are fighting for the right to be remembered. We are fighting for the recognition that our lives, our deaths, and our survival are part of the American story. When they try to edit us out, they are not just attacking a community; they are attacking the truth itself.
So let them have their silence. Let the White House be dark and cold on December 1st. It serves as a perfect monument to the emptiness of their souls. We will light the candles. We will say the names. We will scream the history until the walls shake. Because we know something they don’t. We know that you can’t kill a movement by ignoring it. You only make it louder.
Receipt Time
The invoice for this erasure is being written in real time, and the currency is shame. But the administration is bankrupt of that particular asset, so the cost falls on us. The receipt lists the dismantled clinics, the unfunded programs, and the emboldened bigots who see the silence as permission. It tallies the cost of every young person who looks at their government and sees a blank space where their future should be. The Trump administration thinks they have simply saved some money and pleased the base. In reality, they have purchased a legacy of cowardice that will outlast their tenure. They have bought the silence of the graveyard, but they forgot that ghosts don’t stay buried.