All over the country, there are efforts to ban books featuring the stories of marginalized and historically underrepresented minorities such as LGBTQ+ and Black, Asian, Hispanic and Latinx, and Indigenous people and youth.

I wanted to do something special for LGBTQ+ pride month so here's a short reading from my memoir "Moon in Full: A Modern-Day Coming-of-Age Story" and brief soapbox of why we celebrate pride.

Now, over two decades since the fall of the Khmer Rouge, my biological mother and yeay hold in their hands a new memoir written by their son and grandson.

It really boils down to two issues, which helped to bolster and grow Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the evangelical movement: LGBTQ+ rights and women’s reproductive rights.

When writing about trauma, self-care is important. My memoir "Moon in Full" took me eight full years to write. Partly because I kept myself busy finishing law school, trying to make ends meet, and engaging in political and community organizing.

We keep fighting. That’s how. We keep fighting for our loved ones, for the things we love about this country. We keep fighting for country we want and dream of. We keep fighting for the America we believe in and the America we believe we can be.

And here I am celebrating the 9th Pride Month since coming out and the enormity of it all is still sinking in. All the people I met and all of the things I’ve done and, yes, the mistakes I’ve made.

This means devoting more resources to hire more asylum officers and immigration judges to reduce administrative backlog. It also means putting an end to family separations and indefinite detentions. In the long term, we need compassionate, comprehensive immigration reform and a foreign policy that doesn’t contribute to the global refugee crisis.