With Pride Month 2025 coming amid dark times for the LGBTQ+ community, pop singer Reneé Rapp wants her fans to know there is still light in the dark — they just have to go looking for it.
In a new cover story for Cosmopolitan on Monday (June 2), the “Leave Me Alone” singer shared a message for her LGBTQ+ fans who are struggling with the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric emanating from the Trump administration. “Find your community. Whether that community is online and thousands of miles away from you or two towns over or in someone who really lifts you up beyond a way you could do for yourself,” she said. “Your community will do the best it can to keep you safe. This extends so much further past gay and trans people.”
Explaining further, Rapp told her fans to look for the people in their lives who can help support them, citing her own experiences with her chosen family as an example. “Rely on people around you who are maybe more comfortable or less at risk than you are,” she said. “We kind of have a pact among certain friends of mine that’s like, ‘I can take a way bigger blow than you can. Let me do that s–t.’ I’m not going to let my friend who exists in a trans body go out and put themselves at risk because they immediately have a way bigger target on their back.”
Since taking office for his second term in January, President Donald Trump has taken aim at the LGBTQ+ community numerous times. Through a series of executive actions, Trump attempted to restrict the legal definitions of “man” and “woman,” ban trans people from the military, bar healthcare providers from administering gender-affirming care and instructed federal agencies to remove words such as “queer” and “transgender” from official government websites, among other things.
With such an unprecedented wave of animosity toward the LGBTQ+ community from the government, Rapp said it is vitally important for queer people to find the care they need from other sources. “There is such a dire need for protection, and the government is not going to give that to you,” she explained. “No one here is going to give that to you but the people you can trust.”
Rapp is currently preparing to release her sophomore album, Bite Me, on Aug. 1 via Interscope Records. The singer shared the project’s lead single, the rebellious “Leave Me Alone,” back in May, before giving the track its live debut during the 2025 American Music Awards.