During the exchange, Mast questioned Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy Sarah B. Rogers about a program he referred to as “queer maps.”
“Can you tell me — what is ‘queering’ the map?” Mast asked.
“So I think we were trying to make the maps more gay,” Rogers responded, appearing to joke.
Mast pushed back.
“How do you make a map more gay? Or gay at all?” he asked.
“You know, since the age of cartography, we’ve had pretty good maps, but maybe they weren’t gay enough,” Rogers said. “I do understand that the maps we were trying to make gay were, I think, of Czechia and Slovakia. So maybe those countries asked for it. I doubt it, but I don’t know.”
Mast called the funding “embarrassing.”
“We have to talk about the fact that things like this were funded,” he said.
“Queering the maps” referred to a one-time research grant through the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. The grant was awarded in 2024 to a doctoral student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
According to the grant information sheet, the fellowship awarded over $72,000 for a dissertation related to LGBT community building in Czechia and Slovakia.
The funding allowed the student to travel and create an online interactive map of Czechia and Slovakia. The project would be similar to “Queering the Map,” a community-generated mapping project that geo-locates queer moments.
Mast also criticized several other State Department diplomacy programs during the hearing. He cited a diversity, equity, and inclusion flash mob in Kyrgyzstan, diversity and inclusion programs in Luxembourg, Spain, New Zealand, Canada, and Malaysia, and a diversity roadshow in India.
“Some of them are $10,000 or $20,000,” Mast said.
EUROPE FAVORS TEPID RESPONSE TO TRUMP’S IRAN OPERATION. DOES IT MATTER?
Public diplomacy “convinces countries and their people to partner with, invest in, and defend the United States,” said Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI) in opening remarks. “When done wrongly, it turns people against us, undermines our values, and wastes taxpayer dollars.”
On Friday, Rogers apologized to Czechia and Slovakia in a statement on X. “I’m sorry that my predecessors ‘queered’ your maps,” she wrote. “This is why future public diplomacy grants will be streamlined, accountable — and channeled toward real American interests, like free speech and sports diplomacy.”
