Today is October 13, 2025. Today Donald Trump has flown to Israel to celebrate brokering the current ceasefire in Gaza, claiming it is the end of the war and declaring it “the historic dawn of a new Middle East.” He has been welcomed by an overwhelming majority of Israelis as “the greatest friend Israel has ever had.” In his mafioso way Trump told the Knesset to pardon Netanyahu, who is currently facing a multi-count corruption trial in Israel and an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for committing genocide.
Today is October 13, 2025. Today the American government shutdown is 13 days old. Both the Republicans and the Democrats refuse to budge. The Democrats demand huge cuts that hurt the “have-not” Americans be removed from the budget, while the Republicans demand the Dems accept their terms (deeply hurting most Americans while enriching the already wealthy), promising to “revisit” these cuts after they’ve been made. Trump continues his mass firings, now claiming he will be forced to make more firings to punish the Democrats.
Today is October 13, 2025. In the live broadcast from Tel Aviv just concluded, Trump celebrated all the Gulf State oligarchs who facilitated his ceasefire. Trump gave a special shout out to his very good friend, Orbán, the authoritarian president of Hungary, whose process of transforming a democracy into an autocracy the Republican leadership studied in order to do the same with the US. We have been living through that transformation for months now. The obviously staged show ended with the president of Pakistan “spontaneously” recommending Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump claimed this was a surprise he never expected.
Today is October 13, 2025. The warrantless arrests by ICE agents in Chicago have been ruled unlawful. Nonetheless they continue. ICE has been rounding up men, women, and children, even breaking into their homes in the middle of night, claiming they are all illegal aliens. Trump claims Portland, Oregon is a war zone. He is only targeting Democrat-run cities. He has banned all DEI programs, he has been removing the history of African-Americans and LGBTQ people from the public record. That and his current war on transgender people, attacking the weakest in the LGBTQ community, signal his agenda to erase LGBTQ people.
This is such a bad remake of a movie I’ve seen before. Even before the end of Trump’s first term as POTUS I was asking on Facebook, “Why are gay Republicans rushing to be first in line to the gas chambers?” No doubt, most readers thought I was being hyperbolic, paranoid, or hysterical. I was being dead serious. I continued to sound the alarm, realizing I was the voice of Cassandra. In a state of frustration and anger, I started repeating Sheldon Cooper’s famous line, “I informed you thusly. I SO informed you thusly.” All to no avail. How we live now was not inevitable.
As a member of the Stonewall generation I was astounded by how far how fast we came—things I never thought would happen in my lifetime. I remained skeptical that we were as accepted as most of us believed we were. I grew increasingly concerned about what the younger generation would do when the tide turned. Gay liberation, queer nationalism, the struggle for marriage equality were all grassroots movements. Nowadays so much of queer community support comes from organizations staffed by formally trained, credentialed professionals. Organic community has been replaced by top-down social engineering. As gay Jewish German Kurt Hiller (1885-1972) said, “”the liberation of the homosexuals is the task of the homosexuals themselves.”
As a lifelong student of German history, of gay history, and as a gay left activist, I have long been hypersensitive to warning signs. Scapegoating, the practice of singling out a person or group for unmerited blame and consequent negative treatment, becomes particularly pronounced during times of relative economic despair. Unwanted thoughts and feelings within the in-group (majority) are unconsciously projected onto one or another out-group (stigmatized minority), who becomes a scapegoat for the in-group’s own problems. Political agitation is full of such projections, prejudice increases, and violence becomes accepted. In current parlance this is called “otherizing.”
The first gay rights movement began in Germany in the nineteenth century. It grew step by step, reaching its zenith in gay Jewish German Magnus Hirscheld ‘s (1868-1935) Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (“Institute of Sexual Research”), which opened on July 6, 1919. During the short-lived liberal Weimer Republic his organization housed immense archives, a library on sexuality, and it provided educational services and medical consultations for gay men, lesbians, and transvestites (transgender people). The institute also housed the Museum of Sex, an educational resource for the public.
The increasing tolerance of homosexuals in Weimar Germany took place against a background of hyperinflation, rapid social changes, and political volatility. Far-left communists (KPD) and far-right nationalists (Nazis) battled openly in the streets, both rejecting the Weimar democracy. Nazis frequently infiltrated KPD demonstrations, turning them violent and then accusing the communists of being violent. Right-wing backlash demonized homosexuality as an “un-German” Jewish conspiracy and a contagion. Gay men allegedly seduced boys, thereby infecting them with homosexuality.
On May 10, 1933, Nazi students, supported by the SA, looted the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft’s collection of over 20,000 books and materials and publicly burned them in Berlin. This was part of the Nazi campaign against subversive “un-German” ideas. It was an event that became a symbol of Nazi anti-intellectualism and censorship. It was one of their first public acts of force against gay men and aimed to destroy knowledge and erase their history.
As Paragraph 175, which made homosexuality illegal, was intensified and more actively enforced, the first gay prisoners were sent to concentration camps. Here prisoners were required to wear a color-coded triangle signifying the category of the reason for their imprisonment. The yellow Star of David (two overlapping triangles) signified Jew. The pink triangle signified homosexual man. The black triangle was for Asoziale, which included alcoholics, homeless people and lesbians. Transgender individuals were assigned either the pink or black triangle. In these death camps homosexual men “experienced some of the worst conditions that humans have ever been forced to endure.” Jews and homosexuals were ranked at the bottom of the prisoner hierarchy. Homosexuals were shunned even by Jewish fellow inmates due to widespread homophobia. Homosexual Jews fared the worst of all. Sociologist Rüdiger Lautmann estimated that 60% of gay prisoners died.
The buffoon currently in the White House captured the imagination of millions of Americans. In 2020 Charlies Pierce identified him as the “scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides.” In 2024 Paul Eisenstein wrote, “Trump is only symptomatic of a much larger issue of a collective toxicity.” In 2020 Adam-Troy Castro responded to the MAGA complaint that liberals think they’re stupid, writing “thinking of you as stupid may very well be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also…hear me…charitable. Because if you’re NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.” Drawing on Roert Lee White, Paul Eisenstein recently wrote, “I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016, and this second time in 2024, given how emotionally toxic and depraved he is. I no longer do. I actually think he won for that precise reason. His niece summed up the fact that the Incontinent Autocrat hasn’t a single redeeming human value […] Who knew that so many tens of millions of Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans?”
Trump has sustained and continues to consolidate power with the unwavering support of the Republican Party, by playing to his base (the people he exploits to justify his bizarre claims and his juggernaut to whittle Constitutional law down to nothing), carefully following the authoritarian playbook secretly drawn up in Project 2025. And just the other day (October 6, 2025) Stephen Miller said in a CNN interview that “the president has plenary authority.” Then he froze in mid-sentence, realizing he had given the game away. “Plenary authority” means “power granted in absolute terms, with no review of or limitations upon the exercise of that power.” In other words, Trump is asserting he has the authority to name himself king. He is on the verge of invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to declare martial law, legally granting himself absolute power.
Trump’s Orwellian Newspeak redefines “Antifa” as anyone who is not a Trump supporter and therefore a dire, looming menace needing to be eradicated. “Illegal aliens” (a Newspeak term for any brown-skinned person) are the new Jews and “insane, radical, deranged” transgender people are the new homosexuals. As Trump continues to remove anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people and erases us from the historical record, many of us queer folk know it’s only a matter of time before the other shoe drops.
Les K. Wright 