The week before the election, I went to a gay bar in New York City. Every thirty minutes or so, the bar staff — a troupe of loudly and perfectly gay men — would get up on the bar and do a (sort of) synchronized dance. (They were dressed as cheerleaders, and I couldn’t tell whether this was because of Halloween, or whether that was just how things rolled here.) Looking around, I was struck by how similar it was to every other gay bar I’ve visited. The people and faces might be slightly different, but the politics, the personal mini-dramas, and even the decor are all basically the same. I thought of these people on election night, when I started to get that sinking feeling.
As the realization sets in that Donald Trump will once again be president, after a campaign that was terrifying in its extreme and often-violent rhetoric, a heaviness has taken over my body and mind. There is a specific dread I feel about America being dragged back to the past, where queer people were second-class citizens. In these moments, I am sometimes envious of those people — the ones we all know, in different strands of our lives — who appear not to care about politics so much, perhaps because they’ve never had to care. Wouldn’t that be so much easier? But strangely, times of darkness or even hopelessness are when I feel luckier than ever to be queer.
The day after the election, I spent time thinking about the elders of the LGBTQ+ community. A couple of days before my visit to the gay bar with the bar-top dancing, I visited the Stonewall Inn. I mean this in the nicest possible way: I was struck by how unremarkable it was inside. Unless you already knew, there were no obvious signs that, in 1969, this was the site of an uprising that kickstarted the mainstream Pride movement—not just in America, but across the western world.
The Stonewall riots preceded a decade of hope. But by the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic had begun to devastate queer communities. It wasn’t until 1986, five years after the crisis began, that Ronald Reagan gave his first speech about AIDS. (By this point, over 20,000 Americans had already died.) Activists for groups like ACT UP had to fight for the government to even notice them, let alone help them, spawning the slogan “silence = death.” In October 1992—four years after ACT UP first descended on the FDA to demand the approval of life-saving drugs—the group staged a mass “die-in” in front of the White House. “We will carry the actual ashes of people we love in a funeral procession,” the flier read. “In an act of grief and rage and love, we will deposit their ashes on the White House lawn.”
Looking back, I can’t imagine the level of desperation they must have felt at twelve years of government inaction. And after Reagan, when another Republican president was elected. In the U.K., where I live, the Conservative government’s response was similarly chilling: Section 28, a draconian piece of legislation, banned any mention of gay people in schools, libraries, and other public bodies, enshrining silence and stigma into law from 1988 until its repeal in 2003.
I don’t bring this up to minimize the events of the last week. America electing a president that 86 per cent of the LGBTQ+ community voted against, who made anti-trans hate a central part of his campaign, is a sobering reminder of our minority status. There is little in the way of silver lining here, and things are going to get worse before they get better. But I believe that one of the main tactics of authoritarianism is to grind us down. They want to make us feel like there is no point in trying anymore. In this moment, we must resist that temptation. We must summon the strength of previous generations.
Something else that our queer elders understood was the radical power of community — of helping each other and showing up for each other. Queer history is littered with tales that have a cinematic quality to them, from whoever really threw the “first brick” at Stonewall, to the activism of Harvey Milk in 1970s San Francisco, or the story of Pride—a 2014 film about a group of activists who, in 1980s Britain, traveled hundreds of miles to support a rural mining town where workers were striking, because no one would accept their donations.
We don’t have to set the bar so high here. I recently read Revolutionary Acts, a social history of a group of seven Black men in London, written by Jason Okundaye. It told the story of how, over decades, these men fought for better media representation of Black gay people, navigated homophobia and racism, and secured funding for services that met their specific needs. One of my favorite subjects in the book was a man named Dirg Aaab-Richards. He was a more low-key member of the group, who was known to focus on the less glamorous side of activism — of being the one to book the room where people would meet, who would stay late to pack up the chairs at the end of the night. What if we spent even a tiny fraction of the time we spend online being that person, too?
Today’s LGBTQ+ community, which spans across nations and borders, represents the dreams of the generations who came before us. (It sounds cliche, but cliches are often true.) If our elders could persevere toward this world, in which we get to live a life that they might not have been able to imagine, then how could we possibly give up now, or succumb to despair? Not only would that be an insult to them, but it would be a betrayal of future generations who depend on us to pass on a better world. We have to be strong—and dream big—for them.
At the NYC gay bar, there was a rickety staircase that took you to the bathroom. Here, an American flag was hung on the wall—one in which the red and blue stripes were replaced with the rainbow colors of Pride. A picture of this symbolic banner is now giving me a sense of comfort, as I think about how much has changed since artist Gilbert Baker hand-stitched the first Pride flag in 1978. As Kamala Harris said in her concession speech: “Sometimes the fight takes a while—that doesn't mean we won't win.”
