For Dakota, a 17-year-old transgender high schooler from the San Gabriel Valley, it was an older trans girl at school who made the difference — who helped ease Dakota’s loneliness and give her hope.

“It really just let me know that, OK, I’m not alone in this. There are other trans people. They exist,” Dakota said. “If she’s real, maybe I can be real, too.”

With queer lives and culture under threat, Our Queerest Century highlights the contributions of LGBTQ+ people since the 1924 founding of the nation’s first gay rights organization. Order a copy of the series in print.

Judith Webb, an 89-year-old grandmother raised in a progressive Hollywood film family, said she inherited her parents’ acceptance of LGBTQ+ people early in life. “I was ‘woke’ when I was 10 years old,” she said.

Today, she cherishes visits at her San Pedro mobile home with her gay grandson and his husband. During one, he played the piano for her for an hour. During another, they went for an early-morning walk in the rain as his husband slept in.

“We had my little dog with us. It was the first time I’d really had a chance to chat with him since they were married,” she said. “He’s just an absolutely great kid.”

In the past year, LGBTQ+ people have become a favorite punching bag of the political right — including President-elect Donald Trump, whose campaign spent millions on anti-transgender ads and who has promised to roll back transgender rights during his second term.

Misinformation about queer people — and especially queer youth and their healthcare — has spread, thanks in part to Trump, his followers and some of his recent picks for administration posts.

Tony Valenzuela, executive director of the One Institute, speaks during an event with L.A. Times journalists during the Circa Festival in October.

(Nicolette Jackson-Pownall.)

But across the country, Americans are also interacting with, getting to know and learning to love LGBTQ+ people like never before. Queer communities are growing and thriving, the average American knows more about transgender people, and queer kids are coming out earlier and to wider acceptance.

Young people identify as LGBTQ+ today at the highest rates in history — dwarfing the number in prior generations.

The hyperpoliticization of LGBTQ+ issues is part of a broader backlash to that expansion of LGBTQ+ knowledge, understanding and community. In some parts of the country, anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment is robust and getting stronger. But such retrenchment of queer rights is not the only LGBTQ+ trend at work.

LGBTQ+ Americans are also having daily positive influence in the lives of those around them — strengthening America’s acceptance of LGBTQ+ folks along the way.

‘Real people, with real lives’

In June, The Times ran “Our Queerest Century,” a retrospective look at the vast and indelible contributions of LGBTQ+ Americans from 1924 to 2024.

Queer issues had swept to the center of the nation’s political discourse, and a slew of anti-LGBTQ+ laws had been proposed nationwide. Efforts to erase queer people — to ban LGBTQ+ books, drag queen performances, gender-affirming healthcare and the mere mention of LGBTQ+ identities in schools — were cropping up all over.

The project placed those shifts within the broader context of our shared LGBTQ+ history. It included essays by queer writers on the contributions of LGBTQ+ people since the 1924 founding of the nation’s first known gay rights organization, and a news analysis of a national poll on LGBTQ+ issues today — which showed that people who know someone queer are less likely to hold anti-LGBTQ+ views.

The project also asked readers to tell us how queer people had positively influenced their lives, and dozens wrote in, mostly about their own loved ones — their LGBTQ+ uncles and aunts, cousins and siblings, children and grandchildren and friends.

“You couldn’t find more kind, loving and fun relatives if you searched the whole earth,” one respondent wrote.

Another wrote that her LGBTQ+ family had “normalized the issue” for her simply by being “who they are, real people, with real lives, real emotions, real feelings, just like the rest of us.”

A third wrote that her queer loved ones had taught her “to be less judgmental and more curious, not just about sexuality, but about many other human differences, such as race, family structure, faith, etc., and to put myself in other people’s shoes.”

‘Hope for the future’

Dakota — whose full name is being withheld to protect her safety — was the youngest respondent. She wrote about the “out-and-proud trans girl” at her school — who was also popular and nice — becoming “an instant role model” for her.

In a recent interview, Dakota said this election cycle has been “absolutely crazy” and “very frightening” given Trump’s use of “a lot of anti-trans rhetoric.”

Her mother said it’s been “terrifying as a mom of a trans kid,” too. “I try to have reassurance with the California wall we basically have — the metaphorical safety wall for all marginalized groups — and I just don’t know how strong that’s going to be two, four years from now after Trump unleashes whatever tsunami of hate he’s going to release.”

Dakota said she is especially scared for her fellow trans Americans in red states, but doesn’t want to be hung up on feeling down — because there’s too much else to life.

She’s been accepted socially at school, where peers have no problem with her pronouns. She’s applied to colleges — all in California — and is excited about starting a new and more independent chapter. She plans to major in political science after loving a high school course and seeing the importance of this election.

“I wish people understood that being trans doesn’t define who we are as people,” she said, “because we’re still normal people and there’s so much else going on in our lives.”

Webb was the oldest respondent. She wrote to The Times that she was grateful for her “long exposure” to the queer community, which began with a gay friend of her parents who visited often during her childhood.

Webb wrote of being a homemaker before working at USC for decades, where she became friends with gay graduate students, and now being “the grandmother of a talented, delightful, successful grandson” who is “married to an equally delightful young man.”

In an interview, Webb recalled the morning walk and the impromptu piano concert. She also noted a post-election visit, where they had a “really good conversation about what’s going on in the world” and her grandson reassured her he is happy.

“He’s just the most positive person,” she said.

A strong foundation

Jennifer Moore, a transgender woman in her late 60s, called Trump’s victory and the anti-queer rhetoric being espoused by him, some of his nominees and other Republicans “crushing” and “a nightmare.”

Queer support groups are advising transgender members to make sure their driver’s license and passport are up to date, and to consult their doctors about stocking up on transition medications, she said. She feels lucky to live in California, but has friends who are considering fleeing less progressive states or the country overall — or already have.

Against that backdrop, Moore said it has been helpful to reflect on the country’s long history of queer progress — which she said was captured by “Our Queerest Century,” but also exemplified by The Times’ decision to publish it.

Moore said she first started reading The Times as a kid in 1968 and was “always searching for information” about queer people like her in its pages, but only ever found negative things.

That The Times today would publish a lengthy celebration of queer accomplishments “was just incredible,” she said.

Moore wrote to the paper that three LGBTQ+ people had greatly helped her in her journey to transitioning in the last decade: a lesbian former Catholic nun who told her she would be “miserable” until she was authentic, a fellow trans woman who talked her through the first steps of transitioning and a gay co-worker who welcomed her on an AIDS charity bike ride and showed her that there is a whole world full of out, happy queer people.

“The bravery and normality of these three LGBTQ folks taught me it was OK to live freely and authentically,” Moore wrote.

Trevor Ladner, director of education programs at One Institute, looks at the Times’ “Our Queerest Century” project during a Circa Festival event in October.

(Nicolette Jackson-Pownall)

Owen Renert, 24, an associate marriage and family therapist who works mostly with queer clients, said they decided to write in after their grandmother, a longtime LGBTQ+ ally who marched for AIDS awareness in the 1980s, gave them the “Our Queerest Century” section.

“She brought it to lunch, and was like, ‘Here, it’s gay, you should look at it,’” Renert said with a laugh.

Renert, who is nonbinary, wrote that having queer friends and mentors “dramatically shifted” how they view the world and helped tremendously in understanding their own queer identity — from “learning how I wanted to dress as a teen to finding safe places to enter life as an adult.”

In an interview, they said many of their clients have voiced a similar need to be “surrounded by queer people” since the election, and “Our Queerest Century” was a good reminder that there is a strong foundation for such community to build on.

“It’s going to be work, [but] that has always been the case,” Renert said. “We’ve been able to do that.”

The century ahead

Tony Valenzuela, executive director of the One Institute — one of the nation’s oldest LGBTQ+ organizations and a partner with The Times in hosting an “Our Queerest Century” event in October — said highlighting queer history is “incredibly important” today, given the stakes.

“Our work will be even more urgent and necessary, to remind people that it is at times where we’re embattled, when we’re attacked, that both our creativity comes out, but also when we organize, when [we] understand the importance of coalition,” he said.

Valenzuela said queer leaders are eager to use this moment to build out queer networks, including by using the tactics of queer activists at the start of the AIDS epidemic.

“There were activists on the streets. There were folks who were working at the policy level. There were folks who were [in] science and public health. There was this huge growth in the way we fundraise for our nonprofits. There was a call to rich people, frankly, to step up,” Valenzuela said.

Craig Loftin, an LGBTQ+ scholar and history lecturer at Cal State Fullerton, speaks during a Circa Festival event about the Times’ “Our Queerest Century” project in October.

(Nicolette Jackson-Pownall)

Craig Loftin, an LGBTQ+ scholar and history lecturer at Cal State Fullerton, agreed that queer history “provides all of the responses to the right wing politics and the Trump rhetoric” that are needed today — which is why it must be taught.

It is full of hope and triumph.

Years ago, Loftin uncovered and published for the first time a collection of letters that readers had submitted in the 1950s and ‘60s to One Magazine, an early gay rights publication founded in Los Angeles in 1952.

As with the responses to “Our Queerest Century,” they came from all over the country, he said. Somewhat to his surprise, they were filled with as much hope and love as sadness and fear.

“I was braced for gloom and doom, and I found myself riveted and inspired by how these people were existing in that environment and, despite it all, finding happiness, finding love, finding meaning,” Loftin said. “There was still a sense of humor. There was still a sense of hope. There was still a kind of affirmative spirit that taught me as a queer person that, no matter what we’re facing now with Trump and all this rhetoric, we faced much worse in the past.”

“Our Queerest Century” provided a similar reminder “of the sheer abundance of LGBT history” that queer people and their allies can draw on as they chart a path forward today, he said.

“In the wake of Trump’s election, in the wake of the storm that is brewing and already starting to rain on us, we need to do a lot more [to] get this history out there,” he said. “For me, knowledge of the past is the path forward.”