“Freedom, not fear. Compassion, not cruelty,” were core messages of Maine Governor Janet Mills last week at the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute’s 2025 International LGBTQ+ Leaders Conference in Washington, DC. Gov. Mills delivered opening remarks at the conference, along with Victory Institute President and CEO Evan Low and Congressman Robert Garcia (Calif.), the self-described “gayest” of the “12 LGBTQ+ members of the U.S. House right now.”

Reports the Advocate:

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.

[Victory Institute President and CEO Evan] 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.

Read the compete Advocate story here.

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