An Invitation Into the Foreign Affairs Family

What One Evening in Washington Taught Me About Service, Association, and What We Inherit

By DeAndre, Duke of Hanumanteshwar

WASHINGTON, DC | September 16, 2026

Sometimes the reason someone invites you into a room tells you something about how they see your life.

Two of my friends were attending the September gathering of GLIFAA in Washington, DC, and one of them thought I should come along. It was not because I work for the United States government. I do not. I am not a diplomat, I hold no position within the Government of India, and I do not represent any foreign affairs organization. His thought was much simpler and, I came to realize during the evening, rather thoughtful. In many ways, I live a life shaped by foreign affairs without holding a foreign affairs position. I am an American citizen married into the Gohil royal family of Rajpipla in Gujarat, India. My life naturally moves between countries, cultures, institutions, histories, public responsibilities, philanthropy, activism, family traditions, and the everyday reality of a marriage that itself crosses borders.

Rajpipla has not exercised sovereign governmental authority since the former princely state merged with the Dominion of India in 1948. That distinction matters, but it is not the same thing as saying the royal institution simply disappeared. The family remains, as do the Crown Palace, other royal establishments, museums, collections, traditions, and relationships built across generations. Members of the family continue to lead and participate in cultural, charitable, community, and other organizations, while remaining visible at civic occasions including Republic Day and Independence Day celebrations. The form of authority changed dramatically after independence, but the relationship between family, history, responsibility, and community continued. The historical record confirms that Rajpipla transferred governance and administration to the Dominion Government effective June 10, 1948.

Living inside that distinction has shaped how I understand institutions. A royal house can lose governmental authority without losing its history or its ability to carry responsibility forward in another form. A palace can stop being a seat of government while remaining a place where culture is preserved, community is welcomed, philanthropy takes shape, and another generation decides what responsibility means in the present. In my own family, I see that through museums, heritage preservation, community relationships, and the work my husband, HRH Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil, has built around LGBTQIA+ advocacy and QueerBagh. I do not confuse any of that with governing a state. What interests me is what happens when the nature of authority changes but the responsibility to people, history, and community remains.

That was the life experience my friend was recognizing when he thought I might enjoy spending an evening with people connected to American foreign affairs.

There was another reason I appreciated the invitation. While spending time in Washington, I have tried to put things on my calendar that give me a reason to go somewhere beyond simply going out to be out. There is nothing wrong with a social evening for the sake of enjoying yourself, but I liked the idea that this evening might also allow me to meet people, listen, learn something, and leave with a different understanding of a community. I accepted the invitation thinking I was going to spend time with two friends and meet some people connected with the Foreign Service.

What I did not expect was to leave thinking so deeply about institutional memory.

As the evening unfolded, attention was drawn to newer members of the Foreign Service community. There was the April A-100 class, the June class, and now the September class. I looked around the room and realized how interesting that picture was. People at the beginning of their Foreign Service careers were standing alongside people who had lived through very different chapters of the institution they were now entering. For a new officer, GLIFAA can be a place to meet colleagues, make friends, ask questions, and find community. Yet the ease with which that can happen today contains a history that younger professionals could understandably take for granted.

GLIFAA grew out of a very different State Department environment. Its history traces its beginning to 1992, when gay and lesbian foreign affairs employees were still navigating an institution in which being open about sexual orientation could carry serious professional consequences. GLIFAA's own historical account describes employees fearful of losing their jobs and recounts how several of its founders came together after experiencing investigations connected to their sexual orientation.

That history suddenly felt much less distant when an AFSA representative spoke to the room. He described himself as belonging to a generation old enough to remember GLIFAA's founders and the struggles they faced. As I listened, I found myself watching the younger people around me. They were talking, laughing, building professional relationships, and simply existing together in a space where their association did not have to be hidden.

There is something important about that ordinary picture.

We are very good at commemorating breakthroughs once they have become history. We remember court decisions, policy changes, legislation, protests, and people whose names eventually become attached to movements. What we sometimes forget is what happens after a breakthrough succeeds. A freedom that one generation had to fight for can become so normal to the next generation that nobody thinks twice about exercising it. That may be one measure of progress, but it also creates a responsibility to remember how that progress became possible.

At one point during the evening, AFSA, the American Foreign Service Association, was described as having been one of GLIFAA's greatest allies. The response came immediately. The relationship did not belong only to the past.

AFSA is an ally.

It was a small correction in tense, but I understood why it mattered.

AFSA and GLIFAA share a history reaching back through earlier struggles involving LGBTQ+ employees, workplace treatment, security concerns, and equality within the foreign affairs community. But the person speaking was not interested in allowing that relationship to become something safely historical. He was talking about the present, at a time when AFSA itself is involved in a significant dispute over collective bargaining and the rights of Foreign Service employees.

That was where what could have remained a pleasant social gathering opened into something larger.

On March 27, 2025, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14251, excluding the Department of State and other specified agencies and subdivisions from certain federal labor-management programs on national-security grounds. The administration's position is that the covered agencies and subdivisions perform intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national-security functions and that the collective-bargaining provisions at issue cannot be applied consistently with those national-security requirements.

AFSA challenged the application of that action to most of its State Department bargaining unit. According to AFSA's lawsuit tracker, last updated September 10, 2026, AFSA v. Trump remains before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, with a decision pending on questions including jurisdiction and the status of a preliminary injunction issued by the District Court and currently stayed on appeal.

Those legal questions belong in court. The administration has stated its national-security rationale, and AFSA has stated its legal objections. What interested me in that room was something neither an executive order nor a court filing can fully communicate.

What does institutional uncertainty feel like to the people living inside the institution?

That question became much more human when the conversation moved away from collective bargaining as a legal concept and toward the individual representation AFSA provides to Foreign Service members. We heard about situations in which an employee may suddenly find themselves dealing with an investigation, a disciplinary matter, Diplomatic Security, or the possibility of separation from service. Those are moments when an institution stops being an organizational chart and becomes very personal.

One example shared during the evening involved a Foreign Service employee serving overseas whose spouse experienced a medical emergency. As the situation was described to us, the employee attempted to use a personal credit card to pay for treatment, but the card was declined. The employee then used a government card so the spouse could receive care and later faced disciplinary consequences connected with that use.

I do not know everything contained within that personnel matter, and I would not pretend to know what properly belongs inside a confidential employment file. What stayed with me was the larger question the story raised.

How does an institution leave room for judgment?

Government money must be protected. Rules governing official cards exist for good reason, and public employees carry responsibilities that come with access to public resources. But human beings do not always experience emergencies in ways that fit neatly into policy language. Sometimes two things can be true at once: a rule can exist for a legitimate reason, and a circumstance can arise that forces someone into a decision nobody would choose to face. That is the place where policy meets humanity, and it is often the place where an institution reveals how much room it has left for judgment.

The same feeling returned when the discussion moved toward employees receiving separation notices late in a workday, with very little time between notification and the effective end of employment. Again, every personnel action has its own facts and procedures. I found myself thinking less about any one case and more about how differently institutional change looks depending on where you are standing.

From the top, change appears in executive orders, organizational charts, regulations, budgets, restructuring plans, and litigation. From the perspective of an individual employee, the same change may be the moment someone realizes a paycheck is ending, a conversation with a spouse about whether the family must move, children leaving a school, an assignment suddenly disappearing, or the end of a career someone expected would last another decade. It may be trying to understand your rights at 4:45 in the afternoon when something becomes effective at 5:00.

This was where the evening began connecting with something I often find myself writing about. Institutions are usually discussed in terms of the authority they hold. We spend much less time discussing how that authority is experienced by individual human beings.

The LGBTQIA+ history of GLIFAA makes that question especially difficult to ignore because its founders once occupied both positions at the same time. They were employees serving an institution, and they were people asking that same institution to reconsider how it treated them.

There is a complicated kind of loyalty in that.

We sometimes assume that questioning an institution means being against it. History gives us many reasons to reconsider that assumption. Sometimes the people asking the hardest questions are people who believe deeply enough in an institution to expect it to live up to its own principles. They continue serving while asking for change. They challenge a policy while believing in the broader mission. They organize not because they want the institution destroyed, but because they want to remain inside it without surrendering part of themselves in order to stay.

As I looked around the room, I kept returning to those three classes: April, June, and September. The months themselves were not what mattered. They represented people beginning careers while standing among people carrying memories from another period of the Foreign Service.

Imagine entering the profession now and trying to absorb everything expected of you. There are languages, security procedures, reporting structures, assignments, consular responsibilities, protocols, relationships with foreign governments and communities, and the enormous responsibility that comes with representing the United States abroad. At the same time, you are joining an institution experiencing significant restructuring and legal disputes over the relationship between management, employees, and their representatives. AFSA says the March 2025 executive order affected collective-bargaining rights for most of its State Department bargaining unit while it remains the recognized bargaining representative for other Foreign Service groups, including the Foreign Commercial Service and Foreign Agricultural Service.

Then, after work, you enter a GLIFAA gathering and meet someone who remembers when simply being associated with an LGBTQ+ organization inside that same professional world carried fear.

What exactly do you inherit in that moment? A job, a profession, a set of rights, a history? Maybe the answer is all of them.

That may be the conversation we do not have often enough when we talk about representation. We spend enormous energy asking who gets through the door. Who is hired? Who is represented? Who sits at the table? Who can finally look around an institution that once excluded people like them and see themselves reflected inside it?

Those questions matter.

But another question eventually has to follow.

What happens after people get inside?

Are they able to build careers and find one another? Can they seek help when something goes wrong? Can they disagree with a decision while continuing to serve the larger institution? Can they challenge something they believe is unfair without having that challenge treated as proof of disloyalty? Does an institution preserve enough memory to understand why certain protections were created in the first place?

That last question may be the one that followed me home.

Institutional memory is not nostalgia. It is knowledge. It tells a younger Foreign Service officer that the freedom to stand openly in that room did not simply appear one day because society became more accepting. People organized. People risked careers. People found one another. People challenged decisions. Others inside the institution became allies. Policies changed. Eventually, something that once carried fear became ordinary enough to call a happy hour.

My friend's invitation made more sense to me by the end of the evening than it had when I arrived.

My life is not the Foreign Service life. I do not speak for those professionals, and I would never suggest that marrying into a royal family is equivalent to serving as a diplomat. But I understand something about living between cultures and institutions. I understand what it is like for history to enter a room with you even when nobody can see it. I understand that an institution can carry one meaning in law and another meaning in the lives of the people connected to it. I understand that the authority held by one generation may not be the authority held by the next, while questions of responsibility remain.

Rajpipla taught me that in a very different context.

Governmental sovereignty ended in 1948, but our family history did not. The Crown Palace did not disappear. Museums did not erase their collections. Family traditions did not simply stop. Relationships with communities changed and continued. Members of the family found new ways to serve, lead organizations, preserve history, support causes, and participate in public life. My husband's own path as an LGBTQIA+ activist would have been almost unimaginable to some of the generations whose portraits still hang in royal spaces, yet his work has also become part of what that continuing history means in the present.

The past and present are not identical, nor should they be. Institutions evolve because people decide what deserves to continue, what has to change, and what responsibility should look like for another generation.

That may be why I understood the importance of hearing an older generation speak to a younger one at GLIFAA.

The evening was social. People talked, laughed, introduced friends, and enjoyed being together. I am glad it remained that way. Community should not have to turn every gathering into a seminar on its own survival. Yet beneath that ordinary social evening was another story. People were exercising a freedom that others before them had once been afraid to exercise. Young professionals were beginning careers inside an institution that older colleagues were trying to help them understand. An organization born partly from people needing to find one another was still creating a place where people could find one another.

Somewhere inside those conversations was a question that reaches far beyond GLIFAA, AFSA, the Foreign Service, or even the particular political moment surrounding them.

When we inherit an institution, what exactly are we responsible for preserving?

Not everything old deserves to survive simply because it is old. My own life around a centuries-old royal house has made that very clear to me. Tradition without examination can become little more than repetition. But neither should we assume that something we inherited easily was created easily.

Sometimes the most important thing one generation can give the next is not authority. It is memory: memory of what happened, what changed, who stood up, who stood beside them, and why a protection exists in the first place. It is also the honesty to remind the next generation that whatever they inherit will eventually become their responsibility too.

I came that evening because two friends were attending and one of them thought I would find the room interesting. He was right. I went because I wanted something social on my Washington calendar that carried a little more purpose than simply going out. I left thinking about what happens when people who remember stand beside people who have just arrived.

Maybe that is where institutions reveal themselves most clearly. Not only in their buildings, titles, laws, or organizational charts, but in the knowledge one generation quietly passes to another.

What you are able to experience as ordinary today may exist because someone before you once had to fight to make it possible.

The question is what you will preserve, what you will change, and what you will leave for the people who come next.

DeAndre, Duke of Hanumanteshwar
Creative Director, H1927LLC
Empowering Lives Through Culture and Creativity