Rep. Robert Garcia on LGBTQ rights: ‘We’re in a really dangerous moment for the community’

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), an openly gay member of Congress, said the LGBTQ community is facing dangerous territory in the current political climate in an interview published Friday.

“We’re in a really dangerous moment for the community,” Garcia said in the interview with LGBTQ Nation on the conservative leanings of the Supreme Court. “Which is why we need to be very honest and focused on pushing really hard, winning the White House, on flipping the house and making sure that we do everything we can organize in these states.”

Garcia, a member of the pro-LGBTQ Congressional Equality Caucus, was elected to Congress in the 2022 midterms.

“Congress needs more radical homosexuals,” Garcia said in the interview. “I’m proud and openly queer, and we have ten members of Congress that are gay — we need a lot more. We need a lot more folks that are aggressive, that stand up for the community: They’re going to talk about trans rights, health care, and the attacks on our community, and be proudly open while doing it.”

Data from the LGBTQ media advocacy organization GLAAD released Thursday found backing of equal rights for the LGBTQ community dipping from the previous year among non-LGBTQ adults that the organization surveyed. From 2023 to 2024, the support went down from 84 percent to 80 percent, per GLAAD’s yearly Accelerating Acceptance report.

“While acceptance for LGBTQ people remains at supermajority levels, the data this year also sounds substantial alarms about threats to this progress and to freedoms valued by every American,” Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD’s president and chief executive, said in a Thursday press release.

In recent years, right-wing figures have ramped up attacks on the transgender community, banning gender-affirming care for minors and barring transgender athletes from playing sports on teams in line with their gender identity.

A previous report from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles found 93 percent of transgender teens from the ages of 13 to 17 living in states where there are laws or proposed laws “banning access to gender-affirming care, participation in sports, use of bathrooms and other sex-separated facilities, or affirmation of gender through pronoun use.”