SNEAK PEEK NO. 2...BEAUTIFUL DOWNTOWN SODOM! Coming Soon on Substack
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READ THIS and YOU’LL KNOW WHY WE ARE DANCING ON A TIME BOMB
BREAKING NEWS: WASHINGTON, D.C., JANUARY 20, 2024
President Donald Trump announced today at his inauguration that the first executive order in his new administration would ban the word Stonewall throughout the United States, its territories, possessions, and foreign embassies. Anyone using the word, whether in public or in private, will be suject to arrest, with penalties ranging from one to ten years imprisonment.
Vice President Marjorie Taylor Greene, standing beside the President, raised her hands in prayer to heaven. “We have won the great battle,” she proclaimed. “Praise the Lord! Sodom and Gomorrah will burn again! Throw the ungodly faggots and their books on the fire!”
Before nightfall on Inauguration Day, gay archives, bookstores, and GLBTQ establishments had been looted and burned and all gay websites shut down. Massive arrests were underway.
“Oh come now, Staggs, you’re being hysterical. It can’t happen here; we live in a democracy, we are protected by the Constitution. I’ll say Stonewall as many times as I want to and I’ll post it online. You’ll see; nothing will…” [CENSORED BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES]
Many gay men, lesbians, liberals, and anti-fascists liked to say the same thing in Germany in 1932. “Das ist bei uns nicht möglich!” One heard it in the 300 Berlin gay bars, in the bathhouses, the lesbian clubs, in the city’s thriving gay bookstore. The matter was discussed in the country’s two dozen gay publications: “Our editors are of the considered opinion that the Nazi party will soon disappear from lack of interest in our progressive nation of Germany.”
Unmöglich? Impossible?
In 1932, “Germany under the liberal Weimar Republic boasted the biggest and most vibrant gay culture yet,” according to historian James M. Saslow. “Once Adolf Hitler was named German chancellor in 1933, his totalitarian regime set out to extinguish a supposed conspiracy of Jews, leftists, and the artistic and erotic avant-garde. Gay bars were padlocked, lesbian magazines shut down, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s institute [i.e., Institut für Sexualwissenschaft/Institute for Sexual Science] sacked while propaganda photographers recorded Nazi youth gleefully burning its unique library.”
“I don’t think the real advances that have been made since Stonewall are necessarily etched in concrete,” said historian Martin Duberman in conversation with Sam Staggs a few years ago. “Homophobia is still very much alive. We could see a reversal; we’ve already seen a partial one.”
Then Duberman drew a chilling historical parallel.
“Blacks have seen this kind of reversal,” he said. “The Reconstruction period following the Civil War was at first an advance for blacks, then a reversal practically back to the starting point. Until 1877 there had been a considerable commitment by the government not only to freeing the slaves during the War, but to helping in the immediate post-war period to educate them and to protect them from the wrath of their former masters. But during the ten-year period following the end of the Civil War, that commitment was sapped. American racism was still so profound, just like homophobia, that under provocation it resurfaced. The provocation was that Northern businessmen wanted to get on with capitalism, but continuing racial strife in the South was interfering with commerce. So it was easier to turn the southern states back to their original slave owner masters, and that’s what happened. President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South in 1877.
“Blacks were once more reduced not to official slavery, but to peonage, which was a system of semi-slavery. They stayed in peonage until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, and in some pockets of the South they are still in it. I think it’s comparable to the dangers gays are facing now. Americans have a very low tolerance for differentness, whether it’s racial, ethnic, or sexual. When differentness begins to seem like a threat to the mainstream they’re going to step on it.”
One further instance, again from James M. Saslow. “In 1250 sodomy was still legal in most of Europe, but by 1300 a majority of new civil laws decreed the death penalty. Mounting theological pressure began with the Catholic Church’s third Lateran Council in 1179, and secular legislation matched the pace.”
Sodom and Gomorrah have gotten bad press for a long time, most often from religious fundamentalists who misread the biblical text. What if the Bible got it wrong? What if those so-called Sin Cities never existed except in feverish ancient imaginations?
All that and more…Beautiful Downtown Sodom, coming soon on Substack.