Guest Opinion: It’s time for San Francisco’s 1st gay member of Congress

This week, President Donald Trump tried to cancel World AIDS Day – but San Francisco recognized it anyway.

This is the grim reality our community faces: an extremist right-wing movement using every opportunity to score political points by erasing the suffering, joy, history, and humanity of LGBTQ people, and by attacking our health care, civil rights, dignity, and at times our very existence.

In a moment like this, it is not enough to have just allies in the room. We need our own people at the table – people who know our lives, our history, our battles – and who will fight back without hesitation.

That’s a key reason I’m running for Congress.

We must pass the Equality Act; restore access to HIV treatment and gender-affirming care; protect LGBTQ seniors who live in long-term care facilities; safeguard LGBTQ youth; and end new HIV infections once and for all. As a gay man, I’ve seen these challenges up close and personal, and I will fight relentlessly to overcome them for our community.

These critical needs go hand in hand with the broader community priorities I’ve fought for throughout my time in public service: Building more housing, expanding access to health care, including mental health and addiction treatment, accelerating the clean-energy transition, defending immigrant communities as they face brutal assaults.

Coming of age as a gay man during the height of the AIDS crisis shaped everything about my life and values. Shortly after coming out in 1990, I volunteered on an AIDS crisis hotline in North Carolina, listening to people in deep despair, some suicidal, as they absorbed life-altering diagnoses. Watching so many die due to government and societal neglect taught me that politics isn’t about slogans – it’s often about life and death.

I also witnessed the incredible resilience of a community facing the worst devastation imaginable. Out of that fear and desperation grew hope and a fierce determination to survive and thrive.

This year, as our political climate grows more frightening, I’ve thought often about that time – how hopeless things felt, and how much changed because we fought. We pushed our government to fund research that transformed HIV into a manageable illness and that created powerful prevention tools like PrEP. We won civil rights protections, marriage equality, and greater visibility. Transgender people stepped into public life, claiming legal rights and dignity they had long been denied.

We won these victories because we organized, confronted power, built alliances, and refused to back down. To meet this moment, we must do it again.

I bring a lifetime of work for San Francisco’s LGBTQ community to this fight. Long before holding office, I devoted myself to community work here, in the city I call home.

I was part of the core team that built San Francisco’s LGBTQ community center – a flagship space for our community to gather, heal, and access services. When gay men were being raped in the Castro, I co-founded Castro Community on Patrol to protect our neighborhood.

My early LGBTQ work also led me to housing policy. As a young attorney in the late 1990s, I represented a long-term HIV survivor facing eviction. He told me he could either return to the South for housing and lose access to quality HIV care, or stay in San Francisco for the care he needed but become homeless. That extraordinary statement helped focus me on the disastrous unaffordability of housing in San Francisco and the need to do something about it. If a longtime resident with HIV had to choose between his health and housing, something was severely wrong.

When I became supervisor, my work expanded dramatically. We passed laws to protect LGBTQ seniors, ensure trans residents received full gender-affirming care in our health system, and backfill every dollar of federal cuts to HIV care and prevention. I fought hard to secure the resources that allowed us to widen Castro Street’s narrow sidewalks – a project that revitalized the neighborhood and still ranks among my proudest accomplishments. Every time you walk across the rainbow crosswalks or see plaques honoring LGBTQ icons, you’re seeing the result of that effort.

In the state Senate, I’ve authored and passed laws making California a refuge for transgender people; allowing pharmacists to dispense PrEP over the counter; addressing health disparities; repealing discriminatory criminal laws targeting people with HIV and transgender people; supporting LGBTQ youth; and creating a Bill of Rights for LGBTQ seniors in long-term care. In Congress, I will fight to make these protections national.

Eventually, Trump and his cronies will end up on the garbage heap of history, and the cruelty of their attacks on our community – and so many other communities – will be clear. But getting there requires hard, sustained work, which means standing up and fighting hard for our community’s future. Every generation, we face forces that try to erase us – and every generation, we’ve fought, organized, and moved forward. We’ll do it again.

It has been a profound honor to serve our community at the local and state levels and to deliver for San Franciscans over and over again. Now I’m ready to take this fight to the national stage and represent the greatest city on the planet in Congress.

Scott Wiener represents San Francisco in the California State Senate and is running to represent San Francisco in Congress. He has lived in the Castro since 1997. For more information, go to scottwiener.com.