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California U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia addresses a packed crowd at the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute's 2025 International leadership conference.
The out ranking member of the House Oversight Committee and the ally who fought Donald Trump got rousing applause for their opening remarks.
The LGBTQ+ Victory Institute opened its International LGBTQ+ Leaders Conference on Thursday in Washington, D.C., with a mixture of celebration, urgency, and unvarnished political honesty, punctuated by out California Congressman Robert Garcia’s now-characteristic blend of candor and camp.
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“I am one of 12 LGBTQ+ members of the U.S. House right now, but I am the gayest of all of us,” Garcia told a packed ballroom. The ranking member of the powerful House Oversight committee added, “I do consider myself the absolute gayest."
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The Victory Institute’s annual convening, held this year at the JW Marriott near the White House, gathers LGBTQ+ elected officials, appointed leaders, organizers, and allies from across the country and around the world. For many attendees, the opening plenary is the emotional ignition point: a chance to reconnect with peers, honor movement elders, and assess the political terrain at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are again under sustained federal assault.
Victory Institute President and CEO Evan Low opened the plenary by asking attendees to take in the room — hundreds of people who, under different circumstances and in other states, would occupy vastly different political realities. “We are so proud to create space for all of us to be reaffirmed in our commitment to each other and to purpose."
Low, newly at the helm of the organization, nodded to the long lineage of leaders who built Victory’s political pipeline, from former Houston mayor Annise Parker to the local officials who used Victory’s training programs to win seats on school boards, city councils, and state legislatures. He also issued a subtle but pointed reminder about corporate allyship: some companies have “shown courage by sticking with us,” he said.
For first-time participants — and there were many — Low’s welcome underscored the purpose of gathering in person during a moment when LGBTQ+ people are facing what advocates call the most coordinated political attacks in modern memory. The room, he suggested, is evidence of a movement that refuses to retreat.
Garcia’s keynote remarks captured that mood of defiant optimism. After joking about his superlative gay credentials, he pivoted sharply to what he called “a really, really dangerous moment for our democracy.” The threats, he argued, are multifaceted: assaults on LGBTQ+ rights, attempts to dismantle reproductive freedom, crackdowns on immigration and asylum seekers, and escalating efforts by the Trump administration to weaken the federal workforce and the institutions of democratic accountability.
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As the recently elected lead Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Garcia said he intends to meet this moment with an expansive understanding of oversight itself. He pledged scrutiny not only of the Trump administration and figures like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem or Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but also the corporations driving up health care and housing costs. “That work is going to be led by a very proud gay person,” he added. He emphasized that oversight is a responsibility for protecting everyday Americans, queer and not, from systems that exploit them.
Garcia reserved his strongest appeal for solidarity with other marginalized communities. LGBTQ+ people, he argued, have a unique obligation to stand with “students who just want their First Amendment rights to protest,” immigrants targeted by mass detentions, and women whose bodily autonomy is under threat. Queer communities, he said, are inherently intersectional, “made up of Black people and immigrants and women and students and gay people," and therefore are “uniquely qualified” to carry forward a movement rooted in collective liberation.
If Garcia represented the plenary’s rallying cry from inside Congress, Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat, brought the long view of an ally whose support predates the current wave of anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
Mills recounted voting more than 20 years ago for statewide nondiscrimination protections, prosecuting anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes as a district attorney, and testifying before thousands in support of marriage equality. As governor, she has worked to eliminate insurance exclusions for transgender people’s health care, restore veterans’ benefits to service members discharged for their sexual orientation or gender identity, ban so-called “conversion therapy,” and block extreme out-of-state policies that threaten transgender residents. And she revisited her now-famous clash with President Donald Trump, who demanded at a White House event earlier in the year that Maine violate its own civil rights laws to discriminate against trans youth. “We did see him in court, and we won,” she said, to sustained applause.
The stakes, Mills warned, remain severe. “Every day we see political attacks and policies designed to erase LGBTQ people from public life,” she said. Her answer: a national commitment to laws “based on freedom, not fear, on compassion, not cruelty" a standard she said the country has yet to meet but must strive toward with urgency.
Low ended the plenary on a lighter note, joking that LGBTQ+ leaders essentially “run the state” of Maine — from the House speaker to the Senate majority leader to Mills’s own chief of staff. The line landed because it carried a deeper truth: representation works, and the political landscape looks different when LGBTQ+ people hold real power.
Former President Joe Biden will accept an award at the conference on Friday afternoon.
The conference continues through Saturday with sessions on governance, public service, movement strategy, and the future of LGBTQ+ political leadership — a future the opening plenary insisted is still worth fighting for.
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