Earlier this month, Jesse Hamner stood in front of torching pines – pulsing heat and sending thick, twisting smoke skyward. That was one of two prescribed burns her crew was on during their first multi-week deployment — or roll — of the year.
“Season's going great,” she told the Mountain West News Bureau on her days off between that roll and the next.
Hamner is a squad boss on a Utah-based U.S. Forest Service hand crew: large, specialized teams whose basic output is fireline: a swath cleared of trees by saw teams followed by a strip of earth scraped by hand tools to unburnable soil that together can halt a fire’s spread.
Hamner is also an out, proud lesbian. In 2024, she walked in Utah’s Pride Parade with other uniformed federal workers. A video she shared shows a boisterous, joyful scene with park rangers and other federal colleagues of hers marching – pride flags waving – through downtown Salt Lake City.
“We got paid for it; we were on the clock doing community outreach and it was incredible,” she recounted. “It felt great.”
But 2025 was different. In addition to mass firings that spared firefighters but hit public land agencies hard, the Trump administration ended so-called diversity, equity and inclusion – or DEI – programs, and even required employees to remove preferred pronouns from email signatures.
“I went from being so supported by the agency – in my sexuality, my identity, they were doing such great work with diversity and inclusion – to the stark opposite almost immediately,” she said.
Hamner’s initial instinct to keep her head down during the personally and professionally turbulent year slowly transformed into a question.
“How can I provide the space that I needed last year?” she asked herself.
And thus Keep Flaming was born. It’s nothing as formal as a nonprofit, just an Instagram account for now. 2022 survey data shows that some 6.5% of wildland folks identify as LGBTQ – higher than the general population at the time. Hamner wanted them “just to have somewhere to go in this instability with the federal government and just the nation’s shifting perspectives on being gay.”
The first post went up on March 8, accompanied by a caption describing the project as “born out of necessity.” She wondered how it would land.
“I guess I was sure that I wasn't the only one out there that was feeling these things. And then I put this account out there, and very quickly I realized, ‘oh, absolutely not. I am not the only one that feels this way!’”
Support the ‘whole person’
In a recent Keep Flaming Pride Month Instagram post, Hamner shared dozens of photos and videos sent in by fellow LGBTQ firefighters on the line set to an Izzy Reign cover of the No Doubt hit “Hella Good”.
“This means a lot to see other queer people doing what I plan to do,” one of many responses reads.
“I was one of you 49 years ago!” reads another.
“I've even gotten messages from people who aren't out, who aren't comfortable with being out – just wanting a lifeline,” Hamner said. “Like, ‘just having this as an anchor is enough for me to be OK in an environment I don't feel safe in.’”
Through Keep Flaming, she can then share those perspectives and advice for fellow firefighters and leadership on how to support their LGBTQ colleagues.
“You have to support the whole person because you're asking the whole person to give away almost all of their life for five months out of the year,” Hamner said.
Pointing to a pair of Trump administration executive orders, the U.S. Forest Service said in response to a request for comment that “federal employment practices must ‘reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work’ without considering DEI factors.”
“While the agency does not endorse or promote identity-based programs, we are firmly committed to fair and respectful treatment of all employees,” an agency spokesperson wrote.
The changes, they continued, only target “preferential DEI policies,” not the protections afforded by federal anti-discrimination law like Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Title VII covers discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender status.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollin’s early 2026 memo on what she described as the agency’s “Golden Age of Civil Rights” is available here.
Opening eyes ‘a little bit’
Bobbie Scopa had a 45-year fire career before retiring in the late 2010s. Now the vice president of the wildfire advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, she said she’s heard many of the same anxieties that Hamner has.
“I am fearful that folks coming out as trans – especially as trans right now – are going to have a harder time than I did when I came out in the 90s,” she said. “Now to me, that's horrible.”
Scopa wrote about her experience as a transgender fire leader in the 2022 memoir Both Sides of the Fire Line. She said her mid-career transition allowed her to finally abandon what she described as an exhausting “male facade” – and her work got easier. Despite her worries, she said there are also positive, countervailing trends.
“The people who may be anti-LGBTQ, they may feel emboldened because now if the president says nasty things about trans people, then they can too,” she said. “But for the most part, I think young people have come up and realized it's not that big a deal, it's not like it used to be.”
To young trans firefighters, she has counseled grace – as hard as it can be – toward those with bigoted views. Along with commitment to the work. She acknowledged that “there's going to be a check against” trans firefighters.
But “if you're good at your job, folks aren't going to care,” she continued. “If you can keep up getting up the mountain, or if you can cut line as fast, or you can deploy that hose pack, that's what counts. So be good at your job.”
“I'm a decorated veteran of firefighting, I've got medals for heroism, and people are going to come to me now and say trans people shouldn't be firefighters or … I don't trust them for this or that,” Scopa said. “That's just ignorance.”
“I feel like I could sit down with most people and not make them be, you know, pro trans, but at least make them more respectful and open their eyes a little bit,” she argued.
Fire’s diversity problem
Like Bobbie, Liz Skelly has found success as an LGBTQ firefighter. She identifies as pan, or bisexual, but also uses queer – a term she calls “a loving umbrella.”
She runs a 10-person federal training crew based in South Carolina, and they’ve been on a number of prescribed fires across the Southeast. Skelly credits some of her success to playing rugby and roller derby in her 20s – sports she said have a deserved queer-friendly reputation.
“By the time I got into fire, when I was in my early 30s, I was not at all shy about who I am,” she said.
She said she’s largely been spared the harassment other LGBTQ firefighters report. Being a woman, she added, “has been more impactful to me in terms of struggles in fire than my queerness has been.”
Some 84% of federal firefighters identify as men and 72% identify as white, according to a 2022 Government Accountability Office report. The GAO cited “limited workforce diversity” as one of several factors – including low pay and poor work-life balance – behind challenges recruiting and retaining firefighters.
Kyle Trefny, a wildland firefighter and co-founder of the FireGeneration Collaborative, said the challenges faced by queer firefighters like himself are also at play.
“If the fire workforce is anti-queer, it will be unattractive to many young people,” he said, pointing to data showing that more than one-fifth of Gen Z folks now consider themselves LGBTQ. “We grew up much more able to be ourselves than the generations before us.”
A recent report he coauthored argued that building the workforce necessary to address the wildfire crisis requires "engaging more young people from more diverse backgrounds,” including people of color, LGBTQ folks and “other identities historically excluded in the fire field.”
Given the hypermasculine reputation and reality of fire, Trefny and Skelly agreed that fire can be particularly challenging for gay or queer men.
“I've met very few queer men in fire who are out and public,” Trefny said. “It's one of the reasons I'm open about it. Not everyone can be.”
In response to concerns about recruitment and retention, the Forest Service said that “for the past two years we have met and exceeded our firefighting hiring goals.”
‘As myself as I can be’
Now a crew leader, Skelly said she tries to foster a welcoming spirit.
“The first two years in somebody's fire career are the most crucial,” she said. “And my goal in our program is to give everybody a really good first season so that hopefully we can get them a great home for their second season.”
But the work isn’t for everybody, Skelly acknowledged: The shifts are brutal, and the weeks-long deployments push people to their physical and mental limits. Given that “it's a really specific kind of person that's going to be good at this job,” Skelly reasoned, “Why not make the basket of potentials as large as you possibly can by being as inclusive as possible?”
Welcoming crews attract diverse experiences, Skelly said, an asset for complex, fireline problem solving.
“It's super important,” Hamner, the Keep Flaming founder, agreed. “Everyone comes from a different walk of life, everyone has a different experience, everyone's going to see the problem differently.”
“I'm just an out, happy, proud queer person and I'm totally good with that,” Skelly said. “I'm just as myself as I can be.”
And that’s when she’s at her best.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
