Next month is LGBTQ Pride Month. Given the completely insane news that gushes from the Trump administration on a near-daily basis, questions about whether the White House will acknowledge that fact aren't top of mind for many journalists.

But the D.C.-based Washington Blade, which has covered the LGBTQ community since 1969, wanted to know, and thought to ask . What the paper found was kind of shocking: LGBTQ Washington has gone back into the closet.

“We were just trying to take a survey of the various affinity groups of the different departments [in government], and we also reached out to the White House to find out if Pride is going to be acknowledged this year. Will there be a Pride proclamation? Will the embassies be allowed to fly the Rainbow flag?” said Kevin Naff, editor and co-owner of the Blade, which is the only LGBTQ newspaper that participates in the pool rotation for the White House press corps.

Only one group would speak with the Blade on the record: the LGBTQ employees group for the Department of Justice. But even they refused to answer a follow up question about Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The trouble Naff’s staff had in reporting the story confirmed something he’d been noticing anecdotally since the beginning of the year: LGBT federal employees are no longer willing to be out in public. On weekends, when Blade photographers cover LGBTQ fundraisers, events and nightlife, they’re having a harder time getting people to agree to be photographed.

“We had none of that in the Obama era. We’re seeing this sort of mass return to the closet in official Washington,” Naff said.

At a moment in history when major LGBTQ issues have gone mainstream — LGBTQ people can serve openly in the military; marriages of same-sex couples are recognized in all 50 states; and states that pass laws that target transgender people risk boycotts from major league sports teams — some of the most powerful LGBTQ people in the country are being driven back into the closet for fear of losing their jobs. And the LGBTQ media, thought to be an outdated artifact of an earlier age when mainstream media ignored those issues, is suddenly relevant again.

When asked to name the biggest stories impacting the LGBTQ community that have come out of the Trump administration, Neal Broverman, executive editor of The Advocate, took several minutes to go through his list before trailing off.

“It’s been just as much of a nightmare as Hillary Clinton warned us it was going to be,” he said.

On Broverman’s list? The Trump administration’s executive order rescinding Obama-era legal guidance to schools requiring them to give transgender students full access to educational facilities. Trump’s appointment of Sessions — who has been “wholly antagonistic to LGBTQ people” — as attorney general. Trump’s appointment to the Supreme Court of Neil Gorsuch, who is believed to be staunchly opposed to expanding rights to LGBTQ people. The fear that Trump will eventually appoint numerous other judges opposed to LGBTQ rights to positions throughout the federal judiciary. The impact that repeal of the Affordable Care Act would have on people living with HIV. The effect that defunding Planned Parenthood will have on the many lesbians, bisexual women, and transgender people who get their health care from clinics run by the organization. The impact on LGBTQ Muslims of Trump’s attempts to ban people from a number of predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. The impact of increased deportations on LGBTQ people. The horrors faced by transgender women who are housed in deportation centers for men. The effect of Trump’s racism on LGBTQ people who are also Black, Latino, and Asian.

Perhaps saving the worst for last, Broverman added, “I know a lot of people thought we crossed the finish line when we had Obama and got marriage equality. But now we have Trump and we might end up with Pence. For LGBT people, Pence is worse than Trump.”

While governor of Indiana, Mike Pence signed a law that would give individuals and business owners a license to discriminate against LGBTQ people by citing their religious beliefs as a defense. His reliance on faith before science in response to an outbreak of HIV in a rural Indiana county slowed the ability of public health experts to find and treat those who’d been infected as well as those vulnerable to infection.

Mainstream media have covered the big items on Broverman’s list. For example, Trump’s executive order on transgender students was front-page news across the country after it happened. But Dana Rudolph, who has written about LGBTQ parents for over a decade on her award-winning Mombian.com blog and in a column syndicated to several LGBTQ newspapers, noted in an email that mainstream coverage frequently reduced the issue to a matter of access to bathrooms, as this New York Times piece did .

“Obama’s guidance on trans students … also covered important safeguards against harassment and unequal access to programs, activities, and facilities,” Rudolph said, “and I think LGBTQ media was better about acknowledging that.”

Meanwhile, with a few exceptions, there has been little mainstream focus on the effect that repeal of Obamacare would have on people living with HIV, which disproportionately affects gay and bisexual men and people who are transgender. Instead, as Oriol R. Gutierrez Jr., editor-in-chief of Poz magazine, pointed out in an email, “mainstream press focuses on matters of widest interest,” such as cost and coverage numbers. (Mainstream media have also devoted a lot of coverage to documenting how ACA repeal would affect voters who backed Trump.)

But the potential repeal of the ACA would be devastating to people with HIV, who have seen their rates of uninsurance fall from 22 percent to 15 percent thanks largely to a provision that makes people with HIV immediately eligible for health insurance coverage through Medicaid. Also troubling, wrote Gutierrez, are the “ total effect of proposed cuts to HIV-specific programs .”

Trish Bendix is a longtime culture critic with bylines in Cosmopolitan, Slate, Punk Planet, and Bitch. She is also editor-in-chief of GO Magazine, a lifestyle publication for queer women. In an email, Bendix said that with Trump as president every LGBTQ reporter, editor, and news outlet now had a “responsibility … to report accurately and truthfully” about the real life impact of Trump administration’s policies on LGBTQ people — particularly those who overlap with other vulnerable communities, such as “queer immigrants of color, trans people who are HIV positive, bisexuals who are at higher risk for STIs, depression, suicide, etc.”

“The mainstream press … aren't aware of the kind of nuances that LGBTQ press are, because it's a part of our daily lives,” Bendix wrote. “It's not something we can afford to ignore, because it's life or death for so many of us.”

Susan Ryan-Vollmar, a communications consultant, was formerly editor-in-chief of Bay Windows and news editor of the Boston Phoenix.