‘The freedom to be fully human’: A Berkeley biology professor’s take on Pride and thriving in academia

Noah Whiteman is a lot of things. He’s a naturalist — he grew up in rural Minnesota, where his dad taught him to hunt with a bow and arrow and make a fire in the rain. He’s an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley, the first in his family to go to college. He’s a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, author of the 2023 book Most Delicious Poison and recipient of the 2025 Genetics Society of America Medal. He’s also a husband, married to a highly creative man he met just after arriving in Berkeley a decade ago. 

When people think about LGBTQ Pride Month and what it means, this is the image Whiteman wants them to have — of a person who is complex, who can’t be easily categorized or boxed into a prescribed identity. 

“Each of us is more than the sum of our parts,” says Whiteman. “I’m a human being — complicated and unknowable, like everybody else.”

Whiteman joined the Berkeley faculty in 2018 and is now a professor of integrative biology and of molecular and cell biology. At his lab, he and his researchers study the genetic basis of coevolution between species.

“I love Berkeley because I can be myself here,” he says, “which allows me to do my science and mentor students and fulfill my potential.” 

In his classes and lab, Whiteman makes clear that diversity is something he values “along every human axis.” It’s a value he experienced himself as an undergraduate at Saint John’s University in Minnesota when he attended Sunday Mass at the Abbey and University Church, a Benedictine monastery.

“It was about welcoming people into your circle,” he says. “I never heard a single homophobic utterance from the monks or nuns. Because of their generous and welcoming spirit, I cannot shake the fact that I was formed as a young adult, in part, through this divine influence.”

For Whiteman, LGBTQ pride represents this same spirit of radical inclusion — one that was formed out of resilience and a refusal to accept the status quo. 

Although President Bill Clinton named June “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month” in 1999, the first Pride Day marches in the U.S. were held on June 28, 1970, one year after the Stonewall riots in New York City, to commemorate the uprising and to celebrate LGBTQ history and culture. Whiteman says it’s this rebellious spirit, where people challenge norms and question authority, that should be at the heart of pride. 

“We must remember the importance of civil disobedience in all civil rights movements,” he says, “and how the waves set in motion thereby have ripple effects that end up benefiting humanity. 

“When institutions celebrate us for pride, they should honor that authentic spirit — the troublemakers and boundary-pushers, who are tough as nails and created change — rather than sanitizing our contributions into comfortable, rainbow-washed programming.” 

In a time when LGBTQ rights are under acute attack in the U.S., with 113 anti-trans bills having already passed in 2025, Whiteman says it’s more important than ever to speak out. This moment mirrors the Red and Lavender scares, which emerged in the late 1940s amid Cold War paranoia about national security and loyalty. During these periods of persecution, Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hearings targeted communists and homosexuals as “security risks.” Tens of thousands of people from the LGBTQ community lost their jobs under the guise of combating communism. Others lost their jobs for not signing so-called “loyalty oaths,” including 31 faculty members from the University of California system, says Whiteman. 

“The same playbook is being used now,” he says. “LGBTQ people and supposed ‘Marxists’ are being linked as twin threats, with professors as the boogeymen. Some politicians are even repeating [President Richard] Nixon’s line [in 1972] labeling professors as ‘the enemy.’”

After years of activism and legal battles following these tribulations, “stronger protections were born from resistance,” says Whiteman, who hopes that will be the case today. 

“The only way this will happen is if people speak up and out, like our forebears did to pave the way for the gains we have achieved,” he says. “To me, pride represents the freedom to be fully human, in all its complexity and glory, flowing from the very same principles as those of our country’s founding.”