The Queerest Podcast
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The Queerest Podcast is your cosmic guide to the Queer Universe. Hosted by Andraé BVR, each episode takes you on an interstellar journey through queer culture, identity, and influence. From dismantling media tropes to exploring queer representation, we invite you to challenge norms and expand your horizons. So, buckle up, set your phasers to fabulous—close encounters of the queerest kind await!
The Queerest Podcast
THE LAVENDER SCARE: Files, Fear & The Closeted State
In the 1950s, queerness was framed as a national threat. While McCarthyism targeted suspected communists, a quieter, but no less devastating, campaign known as the Lavender Scare targeted LGBTQ+ people working in government, media, and culture.
In this episode of The Queerest Podcast, host Andraé BVR is joined by cultural historian Dr. Nicole Rizzuto to dig into this dark chapter in U.S. history and its modern-day reflections. From surveillance of Billie Holiday and censorship of Lillian Hellman to the closet contradictions of J. Edgar Hoover, they unpack how state-sanctioned fear shaped queer life—and how resistance took root through art, testimony, and memory.
With anti-trans laws sweeping the U.S. in 2025, the connections are chilling, but the resilience is familiar. This episode is both a historical reckoning and a call to remember that our fight didn’t start today, and it won’t end here.
Welcome to the Queerest Podcast, your cosmic guide to the queer universe. Hosted by Andre BVR, each episode takes you on an interstellar journey through queer culture, identity and influence, from dismantling media tropes to exploring queer representation. We invite you to challenge norms and expand your horizons. So buckle up and set your phasers to fabulous Close encounters of the queerest kind await.
Speaker 2:Greetings, cosmic queers and allies. I am your host, andre BVR, and this is the Queerest Podcast, your cosmic guide to the ever-expanding universe of queer culture, identity and influence. Today we're drawing a direct line from a powerful movement in queer history, the lavender scare of the 1950s, to our present unfolding conversation. It's the story of state-sanctioned invisibility, deep anxiety over loyalty and moral panic all playing out within government corridors. But it's also a story of resistance, of people refusing to be erased. Joining me to unpack this is cultural historian Dr Nicole Rizzuto. We'll explore how surveillance, fear and bureaucratic power shaped that era and how the same forces are alive today. So here's how today's journey breaks down. We'll first start with an incoming transmission where we'll ground ourselves in the context of what actually happened during the Lavender Scare and how it unfolded. Then Dr Rizzuto and I will unpack the connections of our times and ask what lessons queer resistance still hold in our deep space dive. But first let's scan the queer skies and tune into what's coming through. You are now tuned in to the incoming transmission, our signal check on the queer universe, from culture shifts to policy moves. This is where we track what's changing and how we're moving through it together. Today we're digging into the Lavender Scare, a sweeping purge of queer lives from the federal government that left deep scars beneath the national psyche psyche. Between 5,000 and 10,000 federal employees lost their jobs, definitively expelled or forced out under Executive Order 10450, which defined sexual perversion as a security risk. From 1951 to 1952, the state government alone fired 119 people for homosexuality, far exceeding dismissals for communism. In the same period. By the mid-1950s, 12 million state and local workers across the US faced loyalty oaths and moral scrutiny, trapping queer folks in a web of surveillance. This wasn't just individual harm. It was a deliberate bureaucratic cleansing. It normalized fear, policing and the forced erasure of queer people. My take on the situation, though this is more than buried history. It is the origin blueprint for modern state repression. Fear, surveillance, moral panic those tools that were forged here, but so too was our resistance, and today those tactics echo louder than ever. As queer people, our refusal to disappear is still the most radical act. So let's own that power, and that's today's incoming transmission from the queer universe. Let's theme in today's Deep Space Dive.
Speaker 2:Today I am thrilled to welcome once again to the Queerist Podcast cultural historian Dr Nicole Rizzuto. Dr Rizzuto is a bisexual, cisgender woman living in Chicago's South Shore with her girlfriend and a house full of rescue pets. A New Jersey native, her queerness is a vibrant mix of Springsteen, leftist politics. Jersey native, her queerness is a vibrant mix of Springsteen, leftist politics, solar punk dreams, and Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. She studied at a women's college in New Jersey before earning her PhD in history and culture from Drew University. Now Dr Rizzuto divides her time between her work at an LGBTQ plus organization and teaching women's studies and queer history at St Xavier University on Chicago's South Side. When she isn't in the archives or in the classroom, she's reading vociferously, emotionally invested in the White Sox and volunteering with Marketbox and her community garden. You can follow her on Blue Sky at Floentusia Blue Sky Social. Dr Rizzuto, it is an honor again to have you with us. Welcome back to the Queerest Podcast.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Andre.
Speaker 2:Welcome, welcome. I am very excited to talk about this because I think this is such an important topic of queer history and, as somebody who has studied it, you know, in your capacity, I think this is going to be a really insightful conversation. So I want to start off actually by going into your personal connection to this history and what drew you to studying the lavender scare as a focus of your research and teaching.
Speaker 3:So I did a dissertation that we talked about last season that ends in 1949, and it ends in 1949 because this brilliant, much smarter than me historian, yvonne Keller, wrote an article back in like 2005 where she deep dove into pulp fiction, like lesbian pulp fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. And that was the article that made me do my dissertation Right, because I was like, oh, what comes before this? But in order to know what came before this, I had to know what came before this. I had to know what had like what the 1950s and 1960s looked like. So I started doing some research into that. I found out all about J Edgar Hoover and his decision to get rid of all the gays, and I knew who Hoover was because J Edgar starring Leonardo DiCaprio had come out 2011, right like two years before I started my master's. And I knew who J Edgar was because I was obsessed with history.
Speaker 3:But watching that film broke my heart. In fact, it was showing at this little tiny theater in Morristown, new Jersey, and I went with my ex and there were only four people in the whole theater me, my ex and unbeknownst to me, one of my students and her boyfriend. So we're watching the movie again. It's a huge theater, there are four people in it. I am sobbing, I am hysterically crying. I am on the ground at one point, like why do you kill everything you love, j edgar? And so we're walking out after I have like my face is red'm sobbing, and my student walks by and she's like you, okay though, and that was mortifying.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, I mean, there was this connection to understanding why Hoover was so adamant about getting rid of all the homosexuals, especially when it was so evident to everyone around him that he had these homosexual desires.
Speaker 3:And then really understanding this concept that, like in February of 1951, the US government fired 91 people on the belief that they were homosexuals. Of those 91 people who were fired by the federal government, only two of them were women became this homophobic gesture that was against both gay men and lesbian women, despite the huge disparity there, right Like, 89 of them were men and two of them are women. And still there was this deep fear that, like, lesbians were going to become communists and steal your lives and overthrow the government, which lesbians can do. I'm not, I'm not doubting them, I'm just saying that, like in 1961, it didn't seem likely. So it was really interesting to me to understand how misogyny kept women from getting jobs in the federal government and then homophobia kicked them out before they could like establish themselves. So that's a really long winded way of saying. In order to understand lesbian pulp novels in the 1950s, you have to understand how much the federal government was censoring lesbian existence in the 1950s, and that's how I started the MSPAP.
Speaker 2:Now that's fascinating and I know we're going to tap into the J Edgar Hoover of it all, but I think it's just so fascinating to see how internalized homophobia can end up causing so much damage and destruction in its wake. And I think like that is that's the cautionary tale here really is is you know, your own self-hatred can really have a lot of external collateral damage to it. So I think that'll be really fascinating to discuss that further. But going back a little bit just to overall, the Lavender Scare, which obviously happened alongside the Red Scare. So for those who are not familiar, the Red Scare was around kind of the anti-communism movement that was happening in the United States, but we often talk about that, you know, attached to McCarthyism and anti-communism, but the queer purge often gets overlooked within the Lavender Scare. Why do you think that the Lavender Scare hasn't gotten the same level of public attention or historical weight in different studies and reports and media?
Speaker 3:You know, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the anti-communist purge was specifically in Hollywood and the federal government right, those were the two branches of who was getting kicked out for suspicion of being a communist and it was pretty much taken for granted that there were gay people in Hollywood. You know, it wasn't like this huge secret that a lot of people in Hollywood come out of theater and theater is super gay. So I think there was a shock value there of like, oh, they're not just gay, they're also communists, or the straight men are communists and they're getting kicked Like the people with power Right Are also getting blacklisted for being communists. People with power right are also getting blacklisted for being communists. And it also by the 1950s you have this, this huge downswing in communist activity among Americans.
Speaker 3:The 1930s are really the height of communist activity in the US, specifically because of the Great Depression and everyone needing to live together in order to survive the Great Depression. By the 1950s there are many, there are much fewer Americans who are actually enrolled in a communist party, so much so that the communist party is pretty much dead by the mid-1950s, whereas before that, in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, you had communists serving in-state legislatures. There are definitely communists who have some power in California, in New York, in Illinois. So to have this purge take place in the 1950s, when most people are like what communism, was shocking to a lot. The United States today and I think that you know with homosexuality, for the most part we recognize that, like you probably know a queer person, even if you don't like that queer person, you probably know a queer person. It's harder for Americans to grapple with the fact that they probably also know a communist or they also know a socialist. It's just that we don't really use those words anymore to say that we want things like universal basic income. So exactly.
Speaker 2:And I'm curious like what? Why was there such a connection with this purge, with communism and homosexuality as a whole? Like, was there a connection between the two that they thought that because you were you know queer, that you were also a communist, or what was that connection, I guess?
Speaker 3:that's partially it. There's this belief that it's not necessarily that because you are queer you are also a communist. The fear is that if you are queer you can be easily blackmailed into giving state secrets to the communists. So it's not that there's this like deep seated belief that every queer person is a communist, so that there is like some conflation there. The real problem for the federal government is that they're afraid that a homosexual man is going to get captured by the Russians. And the Russians are going to say things like if you don't tell us the codes to the nuclear bombs, we're going to tell your parents that you're gay and your mom's never going to invite you to Thanksgiving dinner again. And that was an innate fear that the federal government was trying to grapple with.
Speaker 3:At the same time, communism was kind of a convenient way to get rid of the gays. At one point President Truman is told by his aides that the American people are more afraid of homosexuals being in the White House than of communists being in the White House. And that's a moral panic, more so than it is this like political fear that people might have. So a lot of the decisions that are made to push homosexuals out of the federal government stem from homophobia much more than they stem from this fear of homosexuals being black, because, I mean, let's face it, everyone can be blackmailed. Straight people also have skeletons in their closet, and I think, if anyone knows this, the president of the United States knows that everyone has skeletons in their closet, and I think, if anyone knows this, the president of the United States knows that everyone has skeletons in their closet. So there's still this homophobia that is overruling everything else. And then being anti-communist and the concept that gay men and lesbian women are closet communists as well makes it easy to get rid of them.
Speaker 2:Right, right, right. And I feel like, could you imagine, though, a government fully run by queer people? Like that would be so efficient? So, like not to get into stereotypes here, but they would. It would be so good on so many levels. Like it would be inclusive, it would be forward thinking, it would be community driven, it would be like all these things that, like our country currently isn't being a very individualistic, hyper-masculinized culture that like is resulted in like the situation that we're in. Like if we were able to tap into more of the queerness of our you know country, I think we would be a much better place than we currently are.
Speaker 3:I would say, you know a hundred, I mean think of the parties that we could throw.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:We've never met a problem a lesbian couldn't fix, like there's so many things that would be better if it was a whole queer federal government.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, absolutely. So I want to now pivot a little bit to discuss some cultural icons of this time period of the Lavender Scare, two that I think of immediately Billie Holiday and Lillian Hellman. Billie was harassed by the FBI for her activism and obviously her art, and Lillian was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Can you unpack how they were targeted and how their queerness or alignment to queer politics factored into that persecution?
Speaker 3:So Billie has an addiction problem and it's understandable why she has an addiction problem. She went to the House of the Good Shepherd when she was nine, dropped out of school at 11, started working in the music industry at 14, which, as we know, for every child star can be really scarring and really difficult to deal with. In her 20s she records Strange Fruit. And Strange Fruit started as a poem written by these two Jewish men who were driving through the Southern United States and saw Black people hanging from trees. And that's the concept is that they were Strange Fruit hanging from these trees. And so Billie's agent hears about the poem.
Speaker 3:Billy records the song. It's an instant hit. She performs it at all of the nightclubs that she performs at people. I mean at one point she has a sold-out crowd in some of the largest venues in new york city because people are so touched and so connected to this song. And the federal government is terrified of the power of this song to like bridge across differences. It's written by these two white Jewish men and then performed by this young black woman. Her voice continues to be one of the greatest voices to come out of the United States. We have a huge cultural following of her music and many of the people who pay to watch her perform are white, middle-class Americans. And when white, middle-class Americans pay attention to things, the federal government is also forced to pay attention to those things. Right, because that means that this is part of the zeitgeist now. So she records Strange Fruit when she's 24 years old and for the next eight or nine-ish years she's very much performing across the country.
Speaker 3:She's getting deeper into her heroin addiction, but there are times when she's able to kick it. So she is able to kick the addiction, perform sober. And then in 1947, she's arrested for narcotics because her husband had been working with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. A man by the name of Henry Anslinger was in charge of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics at this time and Anslinger makes it a point to target Billy and he's willing to spend a lot of money to do this, including paying off her husband who helps Anslinger not just put drugs in Billy's way, but make sure that Billy gets re-addicted to the heroin. She relapses, she's addicted to the heroin again. Anslinger and his men come in. They arrest her.
Speaker 3:When you get arrested for narcotics in the 1940s, you lose your license to perform in New York City. She can no longer perform in any nightclubs, which is a huge problem because that's how she makes her money. Like recording, music doesn't do what it did or what it does now. It very much was how many tours can you do, which is actually how music works now again. But in the 90s and the early 2000s the records mattered. Back in the 1940s the records did not matter. So she gets arrested. It's 1947. She gets out because the drug charges aren't super serious. She wasn't trying to sell, she just had them on her person. A year later she finds a venue and she's able to perform to a sold out crowd and for the next like 10 years she basically just hops around at venues that aren't night clubs, performing to crowds that continue to show up for her and show out and pay the money so that she can continue to perform.
Speaker 3:In 1956, when she's only 51 years old, billie writes a memoir explaining her life thus far, and it's very lucky for us that she did this, because no one thinks about writing a memoir when they're 51, right, 51 is very young, and yet by the time she's 54, she has died. And this was a relapse on the heroin. Her body was failing, her systems were failing. She went to the hospital. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics came in and put her under house arrest in her hospital room. There is a belief among historians that they actually blocked her from getting medical care in time. That would have saved her life, and she ended up dying in the medical room at the age of 54. Wow that is awful.
Speaker 3:So I mean primarily. Billie was not targeted for being bisexual, she was openly bisexual. She was targeted because of the power of Strange Fruit to connect white audiences with the horrors of lynching in the American South. At the same time her bisexuality may have actually hurt her more, because there is an actress, tallulah Bankhead, who was an actress out in Hollywood and her and Billie were good friends. Tallulah finds out that billy has been arrested and she writes to j edgar hoover and is like hey heard you had billy locked up. Can you release her? We're best friends.
Speaker 3:She, talula, actually pulls from racist tropes to try to like suggest to hoover that billy didn't know what she was doing. She didn't know heroin was bad. She has a childlike mind. You can't expect her to recognize the ramifications of this. Hoover ignores her letter and so she calls him and so he has to answer like a phone call from Tallulah Bankhead. He's also friends with her father. So there is like some connection there. But it's very strange that this random white actress is calling on Billy's behalf and that may have actually suggested to Hoover and to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics that Billie was a bigger threat than they thought she was because she already had these cross-racial connections with famous people in Hollywood at the time.
Speaker 2:That's wild. And so a question for you With all that was happening around this period, do you feel like Billie was a victim to the circumstances by which she was in? Or do you like, how would you kind of unpack, like you know her, the intersectionality of her identity and how that affected kind of the life outcome she had?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think that black girls raised by single moms have it hard, regardless of what decade we're talking about, right? And she gets sent to the House of the Good Shepherd at nine years old. I mean, I don't know if people know what that means. The House of the Good Shepherd is the Magdalene laundries. So the Magdalene laundries were these homes that young girls were sent to, where they learned how to be good girls by doing laundry for the community. It was ran by nuns.
Speaker 3:It was super violent, according to the oral histories about it, and you would be sent there for anything from like your mom not being able to feed you, to a lot of unwed mothers were sent there to have their children. It just wasn't a communal place, there wasn't a lot of support and it probably was a very white space. There probably weren't a lot of other black girls around when she was nine years old. There she drops out of school. No one swoops in to save the little 11-year-old black girl and bring her back to school, right, she's just accepted as a problem with blackness and forgotten by the school, and then she starts performing at 14. And that's rough for everyone, right? Like we see that with performers today. Performing at 14 is rough.
Speaker 3:Going through adolescence under the public eye, under public scrutiny, is rough, you know, I think there's. There's something to be said about the audacity of being a young person in your twenties and being like I'm going to record strange fruit and I'm going to make it a hit and it's going to be fantastic and everyone's going to have to think about lynching when they hear this song. And so she does that, and maybe she didn't know what the consequences were going to be. But it becomes very immediate to her that, like recording this song, as a black woman, has now put a target on her back and she has to spend the next 30 years of her life before she dies with this target on her back, because she is a very proud Black woman who is singing to the world about this very personal issue, to the Black community, saying like, hey, they're killing us, they're still killing us. Does anyone care? And she's singing this song, she's asking this question to crowds of white middle-class Americans.
Speaker 2:Given what happened with Billie. I would love to kind of discuss now a little bit about Lillian Hellman's journey around this McCarthy era period as well, because they both have culturally significant you know moments that happened during this time period. Can you discuss a little bit more about Lillian Hellman's journey?
Speaker 3:Sure. So Billie Holiday is an openly bisexual Black woman who is growing up in the 30s and 40s. Lillian Hellman is a very closeted bisexual white woman who grew up in the 20s and 30s. In 1936, Lillian Hellman writes a play called the Children's Hour and it's it's rooted off or it's based on this actual story that took place in Scotland about 50 years before the 30s in the late 19th century, and the story that Lillian Hellman reads is about these two teachers who open up a boarding school in Scotland. They're accused of being homosexuals and they're forced to spend all of their money fighting these charges of homosexuality. Eventually they're found to not be homosexuals and they're able to kind of rebuild their lives very slowly. The story comes from a book called Bad Companions by William Roughhead that's published in 1931. Lillian is given the book by her boyfriend at the time, Dashiell Hammett. Dashiell Hammett wrote the movie the Maltese Falcon. He's a very well-respected writer in Hollywood at the time and Lillian's just starting out. There's a 10-year age difference there. Hammett is very much established. Lillian Hellman has not published anything big yet and Hammett's basically like here, honey, you should read this book and maybe write a story about it. And so she does.
Speaker 3:She writes a play based off of the story that Roughhead has captured in Bad Companions. She does make a few changes. The first is that the young girl who accused the two women of being homosexuals in real life was Black or Indian. That's a questionable. But her father was a Scottish sailor who had gone to India, gotten a woman pregnant. The woman had died giving birth. He brings his daughter back to Scotland and the daughter is raised by her grandmother. Lillian Hellman decides that that's a lot and makes the child that accuses the women in the play a white girl, and so she has to explain to the audience why this white girl would know about homosexuality. In William Roughhead's story it's just assumed that a person of color would be more sexual, even though she's a child. But with the play the Children's Hour we have to give them a reason, and so in the play Lillian Hellman has the young girl read a book. She reads a book about homosexuality, and so she knows what homosexuality is, and that's why she accuses these two women of being homosexuals. The play ends with one of the characters, Martha, realizing that she is actually gay and she is actually in love with her best friend. But Karen is not a homosexual. There was no homosexual activity taking place. Karen was engaged to a man who she loved very deeply, and so Martha realizes that she's queer. She goes upstairs and she commits suicide, and that's the end of the play.
Speaker 3:When asked about this play, which does numbers right it's on Broadway for two years, Everyone loves it. The Pulitzer Prize Committee will not consider it because of the homosexuality and the obscenity in it, and this makes a lot of New Yorkers very angry because they love this play. This play is very beloved in the New York community. It tours the United States. It's not allowed to be performed in like Boston and Chicago, but other than that it tours the United States. It's made into a film two years later, which Lillian Hellman does write, but she does change it so that they're not homosexuals. Instead she makes Martha in love with Karen's boyfriend Joe, and so Martha and Joe, Martha's boyfriend Joe. But it's, I mean, it's the same concept. And so Martha and Joe, Martha's boyfriend Joe, but it's, I mean, it's sim concept. And Lillian Hellman is very adamant about the fact that the play is not about homosexuality.
Speaker 3:The play is about the power of a secret and the power of rumors, right, and so the rumor here that the young girl starts is oh, they're homosexuals. And we know that she starts it because she's mad at both of her teachers. And we know that she starts it because she's mad at both of her teachers. She has no proof. There is zero proof here. She just is mad at her teachers. She goes home and she tells her grandma I thought that these two teachers were doing inappropriate things. They giggle and they close the door and I hear some weird noises and grandma's just convinced from that point forward. And so the play is written in 1934.
Speaker 3:The movie comes out in 1936 with a spin to heterosexuality and then in 1952, a year after the House Un-American Activities Committee is founded by McCarthy and his cronies, Helman brings it back to Broadway. Right? So she restages this play in 1952, kind of as like a smile and nod or a tongue in cheek moment to McCarthy and everything that he's doing. So McCarthy, with his unlimited power, calls her in to the House Un-American Activities Committee. And this is hard for Hellman, because she was part of the Communist Party in the 1930s and she does know other communists and this could get messy. And so she goes and she says I invoke my Fifth Amendment. Right, I will not talk. I'm not going to answer any of your questions Over time. She's like you know what If you want to ask me questions about my activities, I will answer those questions, but she's a small fish Lillian Hellman is not like, because her first play was homosexual in nature.
Speaker 3:She's a well-known writer but she's not a big star. Mccarthy is after big stars and he thinks that Hellman can tell him things about big stars and that she's on the hook and she's going to squeal. And Hellman says I'm not talking about anyone else. She publishes a letter in a bunch of newspapers in New York City where she explains that she's not going to say anything to the House Un-American Activities Committee. She's not going to squeal on her friends. She says I'm not going to cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, and so she keeps her mouth shut. In response, McCarthy blacklists her and she is unable to basically work in Hollywood for the rest of her life. She's a teacher like she does okay, she's not in squalor or anything, but she definitely is unable to share her creativity with the world. From that point forward, that's wild.
Speaker 2:Like the fact that this man, mccarthy, would go out of his way to ruin so many people's lives, I think is just so cruel and heartless. And like the fact that he was trying to get bigger stars, I think is just so wild that he was on wild goose chase, I guess I will say, in trying to, you know, villainize all these people in pursuit of like, power and legacy, I think is just so disgusting. And you know, looking at just the different stories of both Lillian and Billy, like seeing how the government was used to go after people so that they could create this, almost like a political circus, if you will, you know what I mean Of like trying to make an example of these people so that they could validate their POV. And I think there's a lot of connections to what's happening right now in modern day politics, as I would imagine you would agree with that is that there is a same level of McCarthyism that's happening within our country. How could you connect those to the present day, to what was happening during this lavender scare?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think the through line here is the power of culture wars to separate anyone who believes in workers' rights or anyone who believes in the ability of, like the American people, to govern ourselves. Right, this is very much the lavender scare. The red scare was the government cracking down on the socialism of the 1930s and 1940s. Right, it was this fear that Americans liked socialism. Right, we have the numbers. We know that Americans were leaning into socialism in the 30s and 40s, and so McCarthyism is a pushback against that. It's very much a. We need to police everyone so that we can control the narrative and we can keep people from organizing based on their own self-interest. And I think today we have the same problem within American society versus the elite. Right, the American society, like American society as a whole right now, is very much pro universal healthcare. Right, we have a majority that are pro choice. There's understanding among the average American person that we need to come together, we need to build community, we need to protect ourselves and that we have common interests, and those common interests are the right to exist and the right to like not be overworked to the extent that many people in the United States are today. You know, the parallel that I think is really important here is that McCarthyism comes about 10-15 years after the Great Depression and the current administration comes about 15 years after the Great Recession, and that's not a mistake, right. When people hit rock bottom, when poverty becomes a constant in people's lives, when people know what it's like to be hungry, there is a desire to come together and build a working class coalition and unionize and have these unions that are going to be effective against the government and against repression. And after McCarthy, unions were gutted right, like unions were not. Unions used to be super strong in this country in the 20s and 30s and then McCarthy came in and was like no more unions. And here we are and, as we've seen in the last 10 years, unions are having a resurgence, right, and this is the reaction to that.
Speaker 3:I'm not saying that culture wars are a distraction. I don't think that they're a distraction. I think they are very much a tool used by the government to keep us focused on moral issues when material issues are the things that are going to get us all killed, right? Not having health care for most Americans is a problem. The fact that most millennials are working two jobs, the fact that the housing market is ridiculous and the number of unhoused people continues to grow, the fact that we have wildfires in every part of this country right now. There's actual material conditions that we should be coming together to fight, but the culture wars keep us disconnected and keep us squabbling over things that do not impact us economically, unless you're the most marginalized.
Speaker 3:Right Because like why are we fighting over 10% of the population? It just seems unnecessary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's the biggest thing that I find so confusing of it all is the fact that we have so many resources, so many hearings, so many just different elements of the government that are going after such a small segment of the population, going after a minority of people to distract, to take away from the fact that there are bigger issues at play that they don't want mainstream or they don't want the general population worried about, so that they can say, hey, let's look over here.
Speaker 2:There are homosexuals, there are communists, there are all these people who are trying to destroy the country, and then the stuff that we actually really need to do with, like you mentioned, the health care, the housing, whatever those things are, the names of the people change, but the tactics themselves remain the same and they continue to bring those up as a way to get people to.
Speaker 2:A lot can be overwhelming within the media cycle, and so if you're able to get people incited and angry and confused and fearful, you're able to direct their attention to a specific target so that then they don't actually have to deal with, like, the actual issues at hand, which plays into.
Speaker 2:You know the people that they're representing, in the sense of you know the corporations or the special interest groups that are trying to keep the status quo and protect themselves from, you know, having to be more equitable, having to actually address the issues that people really want, and then it creates this cycle where it's an us versus them complex, with, you know, the majority of people going after these minority groups who are victims in these situations, and I think that's just so frustrating because it's the same thing from then to now and it's like they just changed the names, they changed some of the tactics, but like it's it's really truly the same, and I think that's just so frustrating that, like as a as a whole body of people, we fall for it every single time and I'm like, how does this keep happening?
Speaker 3:I think the most interesting. I worked for a Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center for four years, between like 2017 and 2021. And there is a book that came out during that time called why the Holocaust, and in it I found out that the Jewish population of Poland was only 2% at the beginning of World War II. So 1939, germany invades poland and immediately starts rounding up the jews. The jewish population of poland is only two percent.
Speaker 3:Hitler and goobles and the propagandists who are trying to like make poland agree with what germany is doing very much tap into one of the smallest groups in poland and make them the scapegoat for all of the problems. Again we are coming out of the Great Depression. Bread in Germany and Poland is ridiculously expensive. Obviously, it makes sense to create a scapegoat and if you go after the smallest, most minoritized group of people in the country, the only way they're surviving is if they have allies. We fast forward to 2025, eggs are $9 a carton. I mean not in Illinois, thank God, because we have farmland here, but the rest of the country, I'm told eggs are $9 a carton.
Speaker 3:People are angry about the state of the world and it makes sense for the administration, for the far right, to go after a group of people that two to five percent of the United States like make up two to five percent of the United States, because the only way trans people survive this is if they have allies, and I think that's like that is what I hope is changing over time. Yes, there were people who there were. There were non-Jewish people in Poland who laid down their lives to protect the Jewish populace. I'm hoping that in 2025, I'm hoping that, because Holocaust education is required in like 14 states now, I'm hoping that the fact that we learn about the Holocaust in school means that more people will not only be allies but will be accomplices, will do the work to protect trans kids, protect trans Americans, protect trans elders because we need them desperately and make sure that, yes, they might be two to five percent of the population, but you're going to have 50, 70 percent of the population standing up and making sure that these people are protected protect it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And I think also just even even more simply, if it's a, it's two to 5% of the population, and that means there's 95 to 98% of you know people that don't you know identify as that. How could you, how could that even possibly be a central focus of anything that's such a minuscule amount of people to go after? Like, oh, 2% of people are causing all these problems, Like I don't know about that. That feels a little disingenuous and I think it's also just like ridiculous to like, just on its face, just looking at the numbers, like really folks like come on now, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's a heavy focus on this small group having much more power than they actually have. There's the stereotype or the I don't know the common knowledge that Hollywood is ran by the Jews. Right, right, right right. There's no proof of that. If you look at numbers, it's not true. But by saying things like that, mccarthy was able to say oh, hollywood is ran by the Jews. All the Jews are communists. I'm not sure what. What is it? The belief they need? They need, I think they need to be. That's the reality.
Speaker 2:Well, they make the world a better place, truly, exactly.
Speaker 2:And you know I want to, you know, pivot the conversation a little bit to discuss a little more about, kind of the figures within government. And I well let's we've talked about it briefly before around J Edgar Hoover, who is obviously the director of the FBI for nearly 50 years, which that is wild to me. Like the fact that he had so much power for so long that he was able to dictate policy for our country on such a broad scale, is both scary and just really just upsetting and disappointing to me. Like that no person should have that amount of power for that long, and I think hopefully we've learned the lesson, hopefully right. But obviously many historians believe that he actually may have been closeted himself which I know you mentioned before a closeted gay man, and he even led the charge to purge queer people from federal employment. How do we make sense of this? Like the internalized homophobia of it all. But also like the fact that he went after the people that he himself was a part of, like what's that about?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that we forget the, the allure or the seduction of power and we forget that absolute power corrupts. Absolutely right. Hoover realizes very young that if he denies who he is and he like goes full, full speed ahead into the Federal Bureau of Investigation which you know, he helps found, right Like he's an important part of the beginning of this organization that he has the power now to have blackmail on everyone. This man knew everyone's secrets, everyone's secrets. He knew about JFK and Marilyn Monroe. He knew about Dr Martin Luther King Jr and all the white women he was hooking up with. Every president had a file.
Speaker 3:This man had the ability to blackmail everyone and I think that there was a cognitive disconnect there where he was like oh, I'm fine as a homosexual because I'm not sleeping with nine women while my wife waits at home for me, or I'm fine because I'm not selling stock and making millions while being a senator. So he is able to justify what he's doing because in his mind he is not blackmailable, right Like, he is above the concept of blackmail. So he has to make sure that he has blackmail on everybody else and that allows him to keep Americans safe, because if he knows everyone's secrets, he knows who the risks are and he can get rid of the risks and make sure that none of the secrets of the federal government fall into the wrong hands. He's not mad that people or he doesn't target people that are gay because they are gay. He targets them because they're acting on their homosexuality and there are pictures of them acting on it or there are letters of them acting on it.
Speaker 3:And I think what he's able to do is he's able to repress all of his desires and he's able to say like, oh yes, I have this desire for my partner, who I've been with for years, who was my second in command, but I'm never going to act on it, so it's fine.
Speaker 3:And he really goes after people who have acted on it and who there's photographic proof of, who there's letters about their homosexuality, because in his mind, if you act on it, you don't have control over your own desires, you're doing the wrong thing and therefore you are a liability. This isn't a new concept. This is very much like a concept that has been in the zeitgeist in the United States, in Western Europe, for decades, possibly generations. At this point there is language in like the House of Parliament records. There's language in church sermon records where it's very obvious that there are men who believe that acting on homosexual desires makes you weak, because everyone has those desires and I'm able to keep my desires at bay. So if I don't act on my gay desires and you do, that makes you weak, and if you are weak, you can be blackmailed and the communists are going to get the nuclear codes.
Speaker 2:Wow, I mean, the levels of paranoia are just astounding, to be totally honest, and the fact that he could do that. You know, on one way he himself was queer or homosexual at the time, I guess and then go after the people who are just living their lives, being able to express their love, being able to just live freely. I think all of us get around homosexuality and queerness and all that that it's. It's a bad thing that it needs to be controlled, it needs to be policed, it needs to be demonized and, and you know, I think with him being with him doing that, I think it's just, it's just so wild. And more broadly, I think about this idea of the closeted state. More broadly, what does this idea of the closeted state tell us about how power operates, especially when those enforcing repression are also themselves hiding from it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think we have this obsession with blueprints in, I mean, specifically, the Western world, but perhaps in every society, to an extent where we want everyone to follow the same steps that we took. And if you veer off course, people get afraid of what you're capable of, of what's going to happen to you. I mean, sometimes it is genuine concern of, like, what's going to happen to you. Right, there are many queer people who will say things like yeah, I came out to my mom and the first thing she said was how are you going to get a job? How are you going to be happy? How are you going to get married? How are you going to have children? Not like, oh, you're disgusting, it's. How are you going to function in a heteronormative society? There is this level of policing so that people do what everyone else is doing, because that is the tried and true method, right?
Speaker 3:Adrienne Rich, in Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience, which she published in 1980, makes it very clear that there is a blueprint that women and men but she's talking about women are supposed to follow in the United States, and that is you grow up, you fall in love with a person of the opposite sex, you get married, you have children and you produce the next generation of laborers for the state. There is a fear that if the state isn't constantly policing people towards heteronormativity, they're going to lose workers generation after generation after generation. It's very much rooted in Foucault's focus on biopower, where you need to have the next generation of laborers coming up or you're not going to have workers, and that's a problem for the state to function. I think there's also, you know, people look at J Edgar Hoover and they're like how could he have been so repressed and also been so violently homophobic and so willing to just like destroy people's lives over the fact that there's one picture of them kissing in Central Park 30 years ago, or like there's you know 10 people who remember them being at a queer party last month. We still have that in the present day. It is very much a thing that continues in the present day.
Speaker 3:My favorite example is JK Rowling, who, you know, liked a transphobic tweet back in 2018 or 2019. And she's called out on it and she immediately writes this essay that she publishes to her website, where she basically says if every little girl who wanted to be a little boy was allowed to do so, there would be no more little girls, and I feel like that's very telling. It's very much like oh, you're mad at trans people because you wanted to explore your gender, you wanted to break down the gender binary, you wanted to exist outside of the gender binary. You maybe had thoughts about trans and your gender as a child and you weren't allowed to explore those, so you don't think anyone else should be allowed to explore them.
Speaker 3:I think there's a like capitalism breeds hazing, right. It breeds this concept that like, oh, I didn't get to do it, so you don't get to do it either. Or oh, I had to go through this challenge and this obstacle, so you have to do it too. And that is how we control people and keep them in line right, keep them on that blueprint of marriage, babies, next generation of workers. Because if we don't have that, if we don't perpetuate the nuclear family, if we don't perpetuate having children, if we don't perpetuate raising the next generation of workers, the state falls apart no-transcript.
Speaker 2:My queerness is not being it, not not conforming, being able to be able to express myself and my identity, and also just the fact that this podcast even exists. It's about literally embracing nonconformity and that we can all be different and we could all still function in a really great way with each other, sharing in communal space where we're all able to celebrate our differences and celebrate what makes us unique and allow us to just be happy with whatever we're wanting to do. I will get off my soapbox, but anyways, I want to now talk a little bit of connecting the past to the present, as we've already kind of discussed a little bit. You know there's been many different things that there's parallels that we can draw from. You know the lavender scare and the red scare to 2025.
Speaker 2:And today we're seeing, obviously, an alarming rate of anti-LGBTQ legislation over like 500, like this year alone which they're way too focused on that when there are so many bigger things that they need to be worrying about. And I'm just kind of like this is not, this is not the thing, like like we discussed the wasted resources of it all right, and you know bills that they've created, the 500 anti-LGBTQ plus bills that have been popping up across the country against healthcare drag shows education. You name it right and you know there's obviously a clear connection between the Lavender Scare and this moment that we're in right now. Can you walk us through some of those patterns and how they kind of align?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think one of the things that is true anytime there's censorship or attempts at censorship is this idea that we have to save the children right and that there is one way to raise your children and that is the state approved way of raising your children, and that parents can't be trusted to know what's best for their children and that children can't be trusted to know what they're actually interested in. And so you know, we have, during the Lavender Scare, during the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, you have this repression that the comic books code is introduced, which is basically like you can't have sex inside of comic books but violence is fine. And so you have culture really shift from like sexual innuendo or, like you know, overly built women to super violent crime. And then we wonder why there's so much violent crime in the United States today. You have the Hays Code that's brought in in 1934 to make sure that there's no homosexuality in film, there's no adultery in film, but holding up a bank at gunpoint and shooting like four of the tellers is fine in film, because that's not part of what they're trying to morally guide people away from.
Speaker 3:And today we see this attack on drag queens reading library books, which is just like. First of all, none of those library books are telling kids to do anything violent. They're not talking about sex, even if they're LGBTQ inclusive library books. It's usually like Joey has two moms and it's just two. It knows how to raise children best. It's that it knows how to raise workers best, and workers don't question things. A good worker in the United States of America, in Western Europe, does not ask questions. Why are you giving these children the opportunity to view other blueprints that don't align with the blueprint that we have set up for what we want a worker to be? Right, so definitely when it comes to like censoring, drag queens, censoring what type of education children can receive, telling students stories about.
Speaker 3:You know, the free breakfast that the Black Panthers offered in the 1960s 1970s is completely anathema to the stories that the United States holds onto about the Black Panthers and how they were this violent, like anti-government group of people who just wanted to slaughter all the police. They were more focused on making sure there was breakfast on the table every morning for these kids in the inner cities than anything else. That was part of their central thesis. Right, just like having the ability to tell children, college students, high school students about, like rainbow coalitions, where you had Huey Newton of the Black Panthers saying you know what. We should be working with the women's liberation movement because they're also being oppressed by the same people. And we should be working with the gay liberation front because they're also, you know, fighting against the same forms of oppression that we're fighting against. And I don't care about your homosexual, your homophobia. You need to get over your homophobia and we all need to work together.
Speaker 3:Teaching students about that makes them question whether they realize that they are able to form coalitions across difference, which makes it harder to control the working class, which is not what the government wants. And so we see that in the 1950s. We see that in the 1960s, when Hoover has most of the leaders of the Black Panthers and most Black leaders across the country assassinated. And then we see it today with these crackdowns on anti-racist education, with this like villainization of critical race theory, which is a legal theory that not even I teach at the college level because it's about law school theory. So this concept that, like, kindergartners are learning critical race theory is insane to me. So you definitely see these crackdowns where, anytime, children are learning things that might cause them to question.
Speaker 3:What is being told to them is the narrative of the United States of America. You know, we don't want to tell children that slavery was bad, because then they might think that their great grandpa was bad. And it's like, yeah, no, dude, your great grandpa was bad Like your great great grandpa was bad. And it's like, yeah, no, dude, your great grandpa was bad, Like your great great grandpa was bad. And you have to grapple with that as someone who's living in that legacy, like, yes, all of the money that you have was originally formed by enslaving human beings and beating human beings and torturing human beings. And you have to grapple with that now and telling people that they don't need to learn about the Stonewall riots or they don't need to learn that that, like trans, people have existed for hundreds of years, that we have documented proof, trans people have existed for hundreds of years. Telling us that we can't teach. That makes it harder to let children know, to let college students know we've been here, we've been queer and we're not going anywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's what I find so frustrating about the whole thing is that they purposely villainize all of these different minority groups so that they can decentralize the power of the people and then, when they are able to divide us, they can conquer us right, and it's like that's how you consolidate power by creating enemies of each other within these different minority groups.
Speaker 2:We're all fighting for the exact same thing, just from different POVs and wanting to exist freely, to be able to love who they want, to be able to get jobs, to be able to get housing, to just be able to function on a normal level, and somehow there is this feeling or this sentiment that is perpetuated by, I think, the media, by government, by special interest groups, that these people are trying to take something away from you, you, the person who I'm talking to, you, the community that is fearful of all of these different minority groups, and by creating that division, they are able to then distract again using culture wars, using different propaganda campaigns to create chaos, to create an enemy of people that aren't even the villains of the story.
Speaker 2:They are also the victims, they are also the ones that are being brought into this situation and are also experiencing the same drawbacks and the same challenges that the person that's being, you know, communicated to, is experiencing, but from the different lens of their identity and all that stuff. So I think that's just really, it's just frustrating, you know what I mean. And like when we look at the idea of like, queerness and transness and how it continues to be like a political scapegoat in moments of social panic, like why do you think that is?
Speaker 3:I mean. The first is that we're a minority, right, like the people who are out are even more minoritized than like the number of LGBTQ people in America or in the world, and so targeting a minority means that they need allies in order to survive the targeting. So that's one of the reasons. Right, we're an easy target because there are fewer LGBTQ people in the United States than there are cishet people in the United States, I mean supposedly. Who knows, but I am of the belief that everyone is bisexual.
Speaker 2:I agree fully. I think everybody is queer, everybody's queer, whether they know it or not?
Speaker 3:Yeah, true.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Another reason is that, if you like, in order to come out as a trans person specifically, or as a queer person overall, you have to know yourself well enough to want to self-actualize right, like if you are looking at the blueprint in front of you and you're like actually, I'm just going to veer off here and we're going to see what happens. You have to have the mental fortitude to do that. You have to have reflected, like, on your life enough. You have to know your own desires enough to be like actually. I know you want me to marry a man and have three kids, but that's not what I want and I want to do what I want.
Speaker 3:And the moment a citizen is able to say that about their own personal desires, they are now more capable of revolution.
Speaker 3:They're more capable of being like you know what. It would be safer for me to not throw my body in front of an ice truck, but I'm going to do it anyway because I believe that what they're doing is wrong and I'm going to fight back against it. You have to be self-actualized to be a revolutionary and queer people and trans people have already done the self-actualization to be like actually mom and dad, actually community. Actually, teacher, that's not my name, that's not my gender, those are not my pronouns, like, actually, I don't want a Prince Charming to show up at my house when I'm 18 and take me to the ball. I want a princess To be able to do. That means that you have to know yourself well enough to speak that out loud, and so many people are afraid to do that, are stifled against it and just like adhere to the blueprint because it's easier and because you don't have to do the work to know yourself in order to get there. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And I think, like just knowing how much I think, just being around the queer community and being around like just these ideas that feel so revolutionary but are really so simple, of just being able to say like hey, I just want to choose what I want to do with my life. I would choose your own adventure that, like, I get to decide and I'm not being told by whatever social or familial pressures are are there to guide it, like it's my choice and in doing so, it is like its own active resistance to be able to say like hey, I'm choosing this path. Although it may not be the blueprint, it's my blueprint. And I think like that's, that's all that I need. Right, and it's like resistance. Is this thread that like runs through all of this? Right, it's a revolutionary act of going against the norm, going against the conformity, and like, looking at what the queer archive or our cultural memory, what does that offer us in terms of, you know, strategy or solidarity or survival for queer people?
Speaker 3:You know, we've always been able to find family, right, like we've always been able to build community. We've always been capable of saying, oh, you don't want me blood family, I'm going to go out and I'm going to find people who do, and that is the most important skill for community organizing. It is the most important skill for solidarity building. You, as a queer person, need to know how to go out into the world and find your people and work with your people. So queer people have always been amazing at figuring out who to connect with in order to create a family unit, in order to create people who are going to sometimes lay down their lives for you, right? I mean, we see that in the ballroom scene, where people were able to build these houses that you know, yes, perform together, which is amazing, but also, like, live together and build lives together, and we're willing to fight for each other no matter what. And that is the most important thing when it comes to building solidarity across difference. When it comes to community organizing, you need to know how to go out and find your people. We also like, I think one of the things that we have lost because we lost so many LGBTQ elders to the AIDS crisis is the recognition that, like pleasure, activism is a thing that needs to be leaned into more heavily. You need to know what you're saying yes to. And yeah, sometimes that means like a sex party on a Tuesday night, but most of the time that means like what is going to be your hell. Yes, what? What points are you trying to make? What is the issue in the world right now that matters the most to you and how are you going to push back against that? And also, what sacrifices are you willing to make in order to make that happen? What are you willing to give up in order to ensure that things that you care about are actualized?
Speaker 3:And queer people? We are great at self-sacrifice. I am so good at giving up on like I can sacrifice a lot of things to get what I want, because I've had to do it since I was a teenager, because I had to be. Like my relationship with my parents is never going to be the same once I tell them that I'm bisexual, but I'm going to do it anyway because this matters to me, and so once you do that at 15, giving up other things, like giving up Starbucks and McDonald's, was not hard. I was like oh cool, you all want to support genocide, I'm out. And, yes, I had to learn how to make my own coffee. I now grind my own espresso. It's a whole thing, but giving things up is something that most queer people have had to do at some point in their lives, right? So we know how to create a found family, we know how to organize our community, we know how to make sacrifices in order to achieve our goals, and we also know how to reach out to other groups and recognize that there is intersectionality here.
Speaker 3:Audrey Lorde, emma Goldman, tell us over and over and over again throughout their writings and their speeches we are not free until all of us are free. I cannot be free until every other queer person on earth is also free, and that means that black people also need to be free because there are millions of queer black people. That means that, you know, immigrants also have to be free because there are millions of queer immigrants. That means that people with disabilities have to be free because there are millions of queer people with disabilities. And so recognizing the intersectionality of the world is something that queer people have always had to do, because we exist in every single society. We exist in every single minoritized group. We are here in every marginalized community, and so if we want queer liberation, we need to be willing to fight for liberation for everyone, absolutely queer liberation.
Speaker 2:we need to be willing to fight for liberation for everyone, Abso-freaking-lutely. It is so important because, like you said, it's like if they're able to demonize even just one minority group, that is just the next, that's just the first step on the next group that they're going to go after. Looking like at the history of like queer resistance, what lessons do you think like, what lessons do you think we're at risk of forgetting or failing to apply in today's ongoing fights?
Speaker 3:So Sarah Schulman wrote a book a few years ago I think it was 2020, called the Gentrification of the Mind and in it she really tracks how queer people and trans people have assimilated into society. Right, have assimilated into society right, like it's no longer impossible for a gay couple to have the 2.4 children and the house and the white picket fence and the golden retriever. That is an attainable goal for a lot of queer people these days. And in that assimilation process, as we are capable of falling more in line with the cis heteronormative majority, we're losing falling more in line with the cis heteronormative majority. We're losing our ability to fight back. We are, we're getting comfortable and like the biggest obstacle to working class solidarity, to like a beautiful utopian government that's for the people, by the people of the people, is comfort. We like our comfort things and we are often unwilling to sacrifice comfort for other people's lives. Sometimes, right, like we're willing to turn and look away because we are comfortable and we don't want to disrupt our comfort.
Speaker 3:As queer people have been able to be more comfortable, there is a loss to other members of the LGBTQ community right, especially trans people right now. There are movements, especially in the United Kingdom right now that are rooted in this concept of LGB without the T, where basically, it says you know, we don't need to protect our trans brothers and sisters, we don't need to protect our trans siblings. We are a different group of people and the trans people just have to figure it out for themselves. When you do that, you take a marginalized group and marginalize them further and take away their closest allies, right? I mean most of those.
Speaker 3:The houses from the ballroom scene yes, they're majority made up of trans women, but there are plenty of gay men who were dancing with them. There are plenty of lesbians who were dancing with them, and yet we forget that so many of the so much of the progress that we make has come from trans people organizing Right. Like the Stonewall riots were not led by the average white gay man coming off of the street. The Stonewall riots were not led by the average white gay man coming off of the street. The Stonewall riots were led by trans women of color, by by gender non-conforming women of color, and that's something that, as we as a community, lean further into being accepted. We are forgetting all of the ways that intersectional issues impact us and we're leaving behind the most marginalized people in our communities.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my question to you, though, as we kind of wrap up this interview, is like what is the one key takeaway that people can learn from both the lavender scare, the ideas of internalized homophobia, the concepts of conformity that can help them move forward in this time of great political regression? Like, what is the key takeaway, in your opinion, that people should take away from this episode?
Speaker 3:I think there's a spectrum between J Edgar Hoover and Lillian Hellman.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 3:I'm not saying that Hellman was a saint.
Speaker 3:She wasn't a saint.
Speaker 3:But Hoover's reaction to being a homosexual, to recognizing that he had homosexual desires, was I'm going to repress this and I'm going to police everyone else who has this, this desire, because I believe in the power of the state and I want to hold my own power.
Speaker 3:I have made it and so I'm going to shut the door behind me and I'm going to make sure that my power remains my power and you can't have any.
Speaker 3:And Hellman was like I'm not squealing on my friends, I will go down with this ship. You're going to have to pry the information that you want out of my cold, dead hands, because I believe in my community, I believe in solidarity, and I know that you're targeting people who are at greater risk than I am, who don't have a job in teaching to fall back on and who need me to be the person that stands up right now and as a queer community, like, as queer people, as cis heteronormative allies, like, don't choose the Hoover path right. Like be Lillian Hellman, make the decision to keep your mouth shut when they're asking about your friends and what your friends did, and stand up for what you believe is right, which includes, like, maintaining your own conscience and not making decisions based on how much power you could have, but more how much power we can all have if we're willing to stand up against these oppressive forces.
Speaker 2:Mic drop. That was great, dr Rizzuto, coming in with another one, I love that. Well, I want to say thank you so much, dr Nicole Rizzuto, my former colleague, friend, and I am so honored to have had this conversation with you again on the Queers podcast Would love to know if there's anything you'd want to share with our guests about where they can follow you, any upcoming projects, anything you want to share to the Queers community.
Speaker 3:Well, first, it was great to be here again. Thank you so much for having me back.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:I have divested from Instagram and TikTok so you can find me on Blue Sky at Fluentisona and I'm usually rambling about dead lesbian syndrome or leftist politics on there, so if those are interesting to you, check it out.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Thank you so much. And for those who are curious to learn more, please, please, please, check out also our Dead Lesbian Syndrome episode called why Can't she Live the Tragic Trope of Queer Women with Dr Nicole Rizzuto and without further ado, thank you all and stay curious.
Speaker 1:And that's a wrap for this episode of the Queerest Podcast. Thank you for joining us on this cosmic journey through the queer universe. If today's conversation resonated with you, be sure to like, subscribe and share it with your chosen family. Your voice helps grow the queerest community. Until next time, stay curious.