✊🏾✨Still Walking in Our Truth: From the LA Marquee to the Public Sector Margins ✊🏾✨

 By Eric Anthony Devezin, M.P.A.

On June 17, 2026, I had the privilege of serving as a featured panel speaker for the ASPA LGBT Advocacy Alliance webinar, "Still Walking in Our Truth: Queer Backlash in the 21st Century."

The panel brought together a distinguished group of public administration scholars, practitioners, and advocates to explore the political, social, and administrative dimensions of modern queer backlash. Below is the text and framework from my presentation.

At the recent ASPA LGBT Advocacy Alliance panel, I was asked how my personal journey navigating 1970s Los Angeles informs my response to the contemporary queer backlash we are witnessing today. The answer lies in understanding that bureaucratic retaliation is not a new invention; it is an administrative tradition.

The Socio-Historical Baseline: Weaponizing the Bureaucracy

If we are going to deconstruct how socio-political backlash functions today, we have to remember the levels of operation established when our visibility was first created.

Growing up in Los Angeles before relocating to Oakland, California. I witnessed the push and pull between macro-level bureaucratic aggression and grassroots cultural tenacity.

A critique from a public policy perspective views the past as a grim lesson in institutional gatekeeping. When activists attempted to hold the first officially sanctioned Gay Pride Parade on Hollywood Boulevard, the government pushed back violently. When rhetoric failed to stop the movement, bureaucracy was weaponized. The Los Angeles Police Commission created unnecessary, targeted permit stipulations such as a $1.5 million fee masquerading as a safety concern, essentially pricing a minority community out of exercising their constitutional rights.

While local media gatekeepers implemented a vigorous brownout to wipe us from existence, Black community-first leaders directly on Washington Boulevard were creating their own grassroots defiance. Right there on the marquee, the Ebony Showcase Theatre was producing Norman, Is That You?—a groundbreaking comedy that directly and compassionately tackled a Black family's acceptance of their gay son.

Contemporary Regions and Intersectional Vices

Following a successful career as a celebrity makeup artist and cosmetics entrepreneur for over 20 years, I made a conscious decision to re-enter academia to pursue my DPA at California Baptist University. What I have learned in the municipal buildings and academic spaces of the Inland Empire is that the administrative blowback we experience today is deeply systemic.

I describe these experiences as intersectional vices. Institutional friction in public service spaces does not occur solely because of race or presumed queerness but because of the poisonous intersection of racialized gatekeeping and homophobia.

This brings me to the core empirical focus of my current policy work: Administrative Chrononormativity—the institutional enforcement of strict timelines that systematically exclude non-normative life cycles.

We are in the midst of a quiet crisis with our aging LGBTQ+ community. By 2030, there will be four million LGBTQ+ elders living in the United States. The generation who waited outside the doors of the Ebony Showcase Theatre is now entering assisted living facilities, public housing, and public hospitals. They are entering systems with intake forms, statutes of limitations, and operating procedures designed entirely around heteronormative, nuclear-family timelines. Our elders are experiencing terrifying degrees of fragility, forcing them to ask: "Do I go back into the closet to allow the government to provide me with basic care?"

The Case Study: The Financialization of Human Safety

We must transcend superficial diversity statements and demand concrete accountability. In my current policy advocacy work in California, I am collaborating with Assemblymember Dr. Corey Jackson’s office to reform surveillance media retention legislation.

Most schools and municipalities have short-lived policies that dictate the administrative deletion of surveillance media within 30 days. From a policy perspective, a 30-day timeline is an administrative obstruction of justice. When queer or intersectional students and staff face targeted violence and harassment within institutional spaces, trauma and fear often prohibit timely reporting. By the time a victim navigates the emotional and administrative hurdles to report the incident, the strict 30-day chrononormative deadline has passed, the media has been erased, and the institution is protected.

Recently, when advocating for this reform at a local institution, the administrative pushback was the predictable bureaucrat stall: the anticipated expense of cloud storage.

We must name this what it is: the financialization of human safety. In the same way the L.A. Police Commission weaponized a $1.5 million permit fee in 1970, today's public systems weaponize the marginal cost of cloud servers to price vulnerable students and faculty out of their safety.

By working to extend that retention mandate from 30 days to three years, we intentionally rewire the administrative apparatus and remove the bureaucratic cover-up.

A Blueprint for Local Leaders

Our elders leave public administrators and local leaders with three straightforward instructions:

1. Audit Your Timelines: Intentionally design safety nets that make space for authentic realities, recognizing that chosen families do not always adhere to heteronormative life cycles.

2. Fund the Intersections of Care: Invest resources into physical spaces where queer individuals of all ages can grow old visibly and with dignity.

3. If You Don’t Speak Up, We Can’t Hear You: If your public service program or community center does not loudly and proudly state that you welcome queer elders, your silence will be interpreted as hostility.

When you craft public policy with the most intersectionally vulnerable in mind, you create the strongest public system for all marginalized people. We are still marching in our truth, applying thoughtful public administration theory to ensure equity becomes a codified, legally binding reality.

This presentation was delivered virtually on June 17, 2026, as part of the ASPA LGBT Advocacy Alliance Pride Panel Seminar.

This critical dialogue was made possible by the collective efforts of public sector leaders across the discipline. I want to express my deepest gratitude to the team who shared this space:

• Moderator: Dr. Richard Greggory Johnson III (Chair, ASPA LGBT; University of San Francisco)

• Other Featured Speakers: Eliza Farrow (Northeast Wisconsin Rainbow Collective), Diego Galego (Rutgers University-Newark), Samantha Larson (University of Wisconsin Oshkosh), and Wallace Swan (Walden University).

• Discussant & Tech Support: Claire Mostel (Miami-Dade County) and José Luis Irizarry (North Carolina Central University).

Event Co-Sponsors: Journal of Social Equity and Public Administration, ASPA Research Triangle (Pi Alpha Alpha), Northeast Wisconsin Rainbow Collective, Rutgers-Newark School of Public Affairs and Administration, PA Theory Network, Administrative Theory & Praxis (ATP), and the ASPA Student & New Administration Professionals Section.

To view the original event platform or connect with the organizers, visit Luma.