20 February 2025

            We have been here before. We have been here for a long time, in many places and times, and we have been here before. We will be here again, and again, and again.

            Our histories have been appropriated, censored, commodified, distorted, erased, falsified, marginalized, pathologized, rejected, silenced, and simplified. We sadly are not alone in this respect. We too readily forget that only a few decades ago, our histories were commonly unknown.

            They think they can remove us from the past, present, and future, but we are historical, we are here, and we will return. They think they can take away our bathrooms, our books, our classes, our education, our health, our jobs, our passports, our stories, our histories, but we will take these back.

            They think they can erase trans and queer people from history, remove trans women of color from the history of Stonewall, pretend that LGBTQ+ people did not exist, did not struggle, did not fight, did not suffer, did not survive, did not thrive. If they think any of this, they have never experienced or witnessed our perseverance, our rage, our resilience, our joy.

            The strength of today’s backlash is evidence of the successes we have had in recent years. Not full equality, not full liberation, but some steps in those directions. The corrupt, ignorant, and pathetic men in charge of the U.S. government would not be as cruel, hateful, and mean as they are without those successes. The magnitude of their reaction responds to the magnitude of our achievements. They cannot tolerate threats to their power, their sense of superiority, their cultural, legal, social, and political supremacy. Our past successes have made it easy for us to forget that we have been here before. We cannot forget.

            We have been living, resisting, and surviving for a long time. In the United States, we have been mobilizing and organizing for more than a century. Our organized movement won its first lower court police entrapment case more than seventy years ago. When they tried to use the power of the federal government to censor our publications via their control of the U.S. Postal Service in the 1950s, we fought back and won a Supreme Court decision. When they sentenced a trans sex worker to prison for decades in the 1960s, she fought back and won a federal district court ruling because she had been denied her right to a fair trial. When they fired LGBTQ+ civil servants and discharged LGBTQ+ military service members in the 1960s and 1970s, some won favorable court decisions. We won these victories in unfavorable times, when the odds were against us. We have been here before.

            In the 1960s and 1970s, we began boycotting, demonstrating, marching, protesting, rioting, and conducting sit-ins. Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals did so, but so did intersex, queer, and trans people, who were key movement participants and leaders. So did our allies. We will remember the disappeared. We have been here before.

            There have been times when the government has been our enemy. There have been times when the government has been our friend. Most of the time, we have not been able to trust the government to protect and defend our lives, liberties, and properties. Most of the time the government has not supported our pursuits of happiness. Most of the time we have not consented to be governed in these ways. We have been here before.

            We have had many comrades, friends, and allies along the way. The best of them have supported us without our having to ask or demand that they do so. We have sometimes reciprocated by supporting them, but sometimes we have not.

            We are not always united. Sometimes we have allowed them to divide and conquer us. We have excluded, hurt, and marginalized one another. Right now they are trying to divide and conquer us by appointing a few gay white men to high-level positions while they simultaneously attack, erase, and kill trans people, deny reproductive health care to pregnant LGBTQ+ people, deny funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, deport LGBTQ+ immigrants, deny LGBTQ+ asylum and refugee claims, incarcerate women in men’s prisons and vice versa. Right now, they are targetting trans and queer people for abuse, erasure, harassment, and violence. We have been here before.

            We confront not just one, two, or three sore losers and mean bullies who have gained temporary power. We confront all of the businesses, media, movements, officials, organizations, parties, think tanks (if we can call them that), and people who are supporting them loudly or quietly. We have been here before.

            What can we learn by reminding ourselves that we have been here before?

            We can learn agendas, ideologies, strategies, tactics, and visions by studying the past. As we do, let’s remember a few things:

            We have economic power, if we choose to use it, and this can inform our purchases, our media, our donations, our support for arts, cultural, historical, and political organizations. LGBTQ+ archives and historical projects need your contributions now more than ever.

            We have political power, if we choose to exercise it, in how we vote, but also in the boycotts, demonstrations, lobbying, marches, mobilizations, and statements we support.

            We have legal power, at least for now, in challenging what is happening in court and supporting those who do so.

            In the coming years, we are going to have to ask difficult questions about placing our trust in government. We have never had a clear and consistent position on this: we wanted government out of our bedrooms but we also wanted government to pass anti-discrimination laws, provide health care, improve education, and more. Some of us trusted our historical archives to public libraries, universities, and other institutions that we now know are vulnerable to changes in government. Some of us worked with public agencies like the National Archives and the National Park Service, only to discover that those agencies cannot protect and defend our work. We have discussed these concerns in the past; now we have new reasons for concern.

            For those of us who still want to place any of our hopes with government, we may have to revisit our civics lessons to remind ourselves that there are three branches of government and three levels of government. We need our states, our local governments, and our courts to step up. We are watching to decide whether they deserve our future support.

            Now more than ever, we need civil society to step up. In authoritarian regimes, it can sometimes seem like everything is reducible to the individual, the family, and the state, but even in those contexts, civil society—non-governmental associations, organizations, and institutions—can serve as a reservoir of resistance. We need non-governmental organizations to archive what governments are censoring and document what we are doing in response. We need progressive corporations, individuals, and foundations to fund our resistance projects, some of which are historical in multiple senses. We need energy, labor, and money to sustain that work. We may well need to start planning for underground resistance.

            We have been here before. And we are not going away.

OutHistory is a public history website that aims to generate, present, and promote high-quality evidence-based LGBTQ historical research for LGBTQ and general audiences. We also work to foster the development and growth of broad and diverse communities of people interested in learning about and producing LGBTQ histories. We are especially interested in under-represented histories and historical research that contributes to positive social change. Most but not all of the current content focuses on the United States and Canada, sometimes in larger transnational contexts.

Marc Stein, the director of OutHistory, is the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History at San Francisco State University. The coeditor of Queer Pasts and the vice president of the Organization of American Historians, he is the author of five books, including most recently The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History (NYU Press, 2019); Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism (Univ. of California Press, 2022); and Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2023).