Photo Credit: Paramount Studios
“When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” –Sinclair Lewis (allegedly)
Life in the Wilkerson household could be rocky growing up, but there were a few things we all loved and would put aside our differences to enjoy together: Classic Star Trek, Dr. Who, Star Wars, Buck Rogers, and Whoopi Goldberg (since Jumpin’ Jack Flash, mind you). I’m not sure how all of these became my family’s go-tos when we wanted to hang out together but not strangle one another. I just know that my personal favorite is the classic Star Trek. It’s my favorite because I happily remember feelings of safety, contentment, and belonging from watching Star Trek after school with my brothers. When I think about how family love feels, that’s what springs to mind. Maybe it isn’t so surprising that with the way Oklahoma’s been going lately, I decided to settle down to comfort-binge this particular show.
As I browsed the available episodes and seasons, I came across “Patterns of Force.” I remembered hearing about “the Nazi episode,” and seeing stills and interview clips about it, but that was it. I thought and thought and thought about it, and realized I couldn’t remember much of the plot. The conclusion I drew from the synopsis was that I absolutely needed to see Spock and Kirk putting the smackdown on Nazis. Besides that, the certainty of some sort of end to the fascist menace by the episode’s end reflected my own deep longing for an end to Oklahoma’s current fascist menace. I hit “play.”
Knowing conservative male historians as I do, I can 100% believe some asshat like John Gill would convert a group of aggressive folks into Nazis because it was the most “efficient” way to “civilize” them. Honestly, dude, what was the hurry? The Zeon Peace Corps was already there helping them advance at a sustainable pace. That the Ekosians hadn’t already devolved into fascism themselves suggests that the ideology would NOT have naturally occurred to them as any sort of solution. There was no reason to turn them into Final Solution fascists for efficiency’s sake! Then Gill turned around and gave them nuclear technology. Upon reflection, I actually do find his motivation plausible, given that the man thought fascism was a good idea, too. Now, how he accomplished that is anybody’s guess: He’s a Doctor of Philosophy in History, dammit, not an engineer!
Even so, my aim was true: “Patterns of Force” was exactly the thing I needed to see, but I had to watch it in small doses. Every so often, this casual dread would creep up my spine and ruin the vibe I’d hoped to sustain by watching my boy Spock beat Nazis. So I’d hit pause, watch a few baby sloth videos, and then go back to it. Unfortunately, Spock beating Nazis wasn’t enough to make me feel better. Eventually, neither were the baby sloths. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the episode, but real life washed right over me again as soon as I finished watching it.
The whole reason I set down to comfort-binge was that earlier today, two things popped up in my news feed. The first was an article about an Oklahoma judge stripping an adoptive lesbian parent of parental rights and having the child’s sperm donor listed on the birth certificate instead as he is now petitioning for custody. The second was the news of Oklahoma’s draconian abortion ban. It leaves a handful of limited exceptions for legal abortion–that must be obtained before the six-week “fetal heartbeat” threshold–but empowers random racist redneck Christians to sue anyone they even THINK might be willing to provide abortion services, shuttle someone to abortion services elsewhere, or have possible procured abortion services themselves.
Two weeks ago, after reading an article about the landslide of LGBTQI+ civil rights losses that would likely follow the overturn of Roe v. Wade, I called my brother. Larry is the 50-year-old gay father of an adopted son, who he co-parents with Jason, his ex. They live in Dallas. When we spoke, I basically laid out the article’s concerns for him and asked if we could get guardianship and POA paperwork arranged just in case I needed to take Nate elsewhere. He did not want to hear it. Which is understandable. He said he’d just paid off the 10K in medical bills racked up by the heart attack he had back in March. He was trying to keep his job amidst an increasingly toxic and hostile environment with increasing amounts of homophobic microaggression. Even if I was right, he told me, he did not have the time or the means to make those arrangements.
When I offered to get papers drawn up for him, he got very upset and could not continue the conversation. I suggested we could table the conversation for two weeks, and he agreed. I also told him to watch his news feeds for signs that the things we talked about really were happening. If they weren’t, I would be all wet and he would be right. If they were, then we needed to talk; the pace at which these things started happening is the measure of how fast things are moving and where they are going. He agreed to keep watch and check in again in two weeks. Then today, exactly two weeks later, I see that Oklahoma has started to politically realize the very dangers he and I had talked about.
I honestly can’t blame Larry for feeling like he does. Like many other Americans, the hellish rigors of trying to survive as a marginalized, vulnerable single dad in a bigoted, contemptuous and vampiric capitalist society have left my brother with insufficient time, energy, or mental focus to mount any sort of effective resistance to what is coming. The hardest part of the entire conversation was trying to explain to my brother that as LGBTQ+ people, we cannot rely on the protection of the law to keep us safe. In fact, we never really have been able to.
This is the whole entire issue with those of us queers who don’t want to see cops in uniform marching in Pride parades, by the way. We remember how the cops treated gay men before and during the AIDS crisis. We remember how Christians and fascists have been murderously obsessed with eliminating us from polite society, and how law enforcement has always dropped the ball on crimes committed against us. We know it from how the police handle the murder of our trans siblings and how the judges and politicians handle our trans children. The law was pushed reluctantly to our side in the last two decades, and it seems pretty eager to abandon us post haste.
Law is no protection in a fascist regime because fascists rig the system to exclude the undesirable. The very first step to mobilizing German society to accept and participate in the genocide of the Jewish people was rewriting the laws. Passed on March 15, 1935, the Nuremberg Laws painstakingly defined the blood quanta that defined what a Jewish person was, and then stripped that person of all citizenship rights while yoking them with the highly vulnerable and easily targetable status of “national.” This one legal maneuver created the entire legal framework needed to facilitate the Final Solution. History has made it clear that “the law” is no protection if you don’t have rights to begin with.
We queers cannot continue to act as if the law will be around to protect us, either. The fascist powers that be are legislating from the bench or writing new laws to make us second-class citizens with no legal protections or human rights whatsoever. The mistake everyone–especially members of the LGBTQ+ community–needs to stop making is thinking that fascism isn’t really here where we live so long as homophobia has not been legally codified at a national level. Fascism is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed. Our constitutionally established Federal-State power divide is why.
The USA is a FEDERAL government system that balances power between the central federal government and the various state governments. Any rights that are not explicitly enumerated in the FEDERAL constitution or already codified into FEDERAL law are up for grabs: i. e. every past SCOTUS human rights decision that was not followed up by FEDERAL legislation addressing it. This means that for each STATE without that same legal follow-up to guarantee those rights in its STATE constitution, then that state’s judges and governors hold a monopoly on how many SCOTUS-adjudicated human rights each of its different groups of state residents will actually get. At no point should any of these United States get to determine how many American citizenship rights its various groups of residents enjoy. Americans REALLY need to start seeing through this whole “states’ rights’” canard that has persisted since pre-Civil War times. “States’ rights” is just a pretext for any given state to dehumanize the groups of people who they wish to exploit or eliminate. All Americans need to start recognizing these efforts for what they are and defeating them at every opportunity.
Far too many states are like Oklahoma–or trying to be. Occasionally they may vote blue for president or governor, but it’ll be red for everything else on that ballot. Oklahoma is very focused on decimating the rights of LGBTQ+ people in this process. With the judicial and legal action set in motion this week in Oklahoma, it looks to me like we’ve begun the piecemeal process of legislating our own Nuremberg Laws into being.
This thought stops me cold. As a little girl, the Holocaust was a preoccupation of mine. Not because I wanted to know so much about it, but because my mother was obsessed with telling me about it (we were Mormons, in case you were wondering). She didn’t pay much attention to me in general, so I took what I got. What interested her, interested me. If ever there was an Anne Frank exhibit somewhere, or “The Hiding Place” was on TV, or there was a speaker at TU talking about the Holocaust, my mom dragged me front and center to bear witness. I went gladly.
I was 9 when my mom took me to the Gershon and Rebecca Fenster Gallery of Jewish Art (now the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art) in Tulsa to see a traveling Anne Frank exhibit from D.C. I’d been to two others–one at the Tulsa Central library and one at the University of Tulsa library–but I remember this one seemed to be much nicer. It affected me very strongly. So strongly that I remember being weepy by the end of it. My mother was also strongly affected. By the time she caught up with me near the end, her face was wet with tears. We just kind of stood there for a minute, looking at each other. It made me feel kind of anxious. I had no idea what was happening with my mom. Then, all of a sudden, she kneeled down on the floor in front of me and hugged me. After a few moments, she pulled back and, with one hand on either side of my head, she looked me right in the eye and said, “Wendi, don’t you ever forget this happened. And if you ever see things like this start to happen, you do something! Never forget.” I was too stunned at the time to do anything but nod in agreement and hope my mom was okay. To this day, though, I have never forgotten.
In grade school, I learned that the Holocaust was the attempted genocide of the Jewish people, six million of whom were massacred. I also knew that an uncertain number of Christians were also killed. What I didn’t learn until grad school is that millions of under-documented others were also killed. Of the remaining miscellaneous millions still unestimated were: The first generation of biracial Afro-Deutsche born to black French soldiers from WWI who’d fought in North Africa and married German wives, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religious minorities, political dissidents, 25% to 30% of Europe’s Sinta and Romani population, and many others, including all others considered “undesirables.”
A few of the things I learned about the Holocaust between grade school and grad school left me particularly horrified. At the exact same time as I was coming into my own as a young pansexual, I saw the documentary Paragraph 175. Paragraph 175 of the 1871 German penal code outlawed sodomy. The law was used from 1933 to 1945 as a pretext for sending 10,000 gay men to concentration camps. Not long after my autism diagnosis, I discovered an expose on Nazi pediatrician Hans Aspberger. Through an intense process of experimentation and research on “undesirable” children who’d been ripped from their parents as part of the Aktion T4 program, Asperger developed the diagnosis “autistic psychopathy” to describe high-functioning autistic children (like I once was). After he finished experimenting, Aspberger sent the children to die in Am Spiegelgrund, one hospital where undesirable children were sent to die.
Then a few years ago, I discovered that the famous “Nazi book burning” photos were actually documentation of the Nazi-leaning German Student Union’s 1933 raid on and incineration of the archives of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology). The Institute’s psychology research on LGBTQ+ issues made ground-breaking discoveries about gender identity and sexual orientation, and that is why they were targeted. Just this past year while planning my AP World History fascism unit, I discovered that Hitler borrowed the idea for concentration camps from President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act in the 1820s. The Indian Removals stole people from their ancestral homeland and sent them to reservations in places like Oklahoma to languish in the throes of subsistence living and cultural genocide.
I am an autistic, pansexual, AFAB human living in Oklahoma whose Cherokee and Muscogee ancestors were marched here on the Trail of Tears; the irony of my situation is not lost on me. Given that, I believe it honestly makes sense for me to worry about finding myself in the crosshairs of potential fascist aggression in the future. Especially given that I’m known by local fascists who harassed me during my Barnett/Yiannapolous debacle and might just find a reason to start up again. Honest to God, the only thing I can really think right now is HOW the FUCK is this happening again? How did we forget that there were other vulnerable groups who were targeted for extermination? Why did we forget this?
LGBTQ+ peoples’ historical record may have been new and very strange–but it wasn’t “nothing.” Who knows where humanity might be if we’d had that taboo-shattering knowledge about sexuality and gender for the last ninety years? In general, the more full and open a society’s acceptance of LGBTQ+ people is, the likelier it is they have evolved beyond the more toxic aspects of gender, sexuality, and inequality that define American culture at this moment–and our fascism. You’ll never convince me that one result of having an intact modern European LGBTQ+ history would not have been the making of a much better society than this hellish, stupid, fascist, shitshow we’re all experiencing in bullet time.
When I’m out and about and interacting with my fellow Oklahomans, I never forget that most of these smiling people are perfectly nice to my face, but will gleefully participate in stripping away my human rights at the ballot box without a second thought. Both my mother and my father have chosen to support Oklahoma’s fascists, even if it stands to harm their LGBTQ+ children. When I ask them about this discrepancy, my parents will say how much they love me, my gay brother Larry, and my lesbian sister Kim. Then they will justify their fascism by claiming that “one single vote doesn’t really make a difference, so you can’t hold that against me” or “Christian businesses should be able to discriminate against any customer whatsoever if it’s to protect their sincerely-held beliefs, but not everyone hates you, so you have no reason to be upset!” Neither of those arguments is particularly reassuring as they willfully ignore how my siblings and I are being politically and socially erased by our parents’ voting choices.
Somewhere along the line, my mother forgot what she’d learned about the Holocaust. Her willful ignorance is all of ours. Our collective forgetting of the Nazis’ persecution, massacre, and complete historical erasure of the Weimar LGBTQ+ community happened for the same reason that LGBTQ+ folks are now being persecuted in places like Oklahoma: homophobia runs deep and LGBTQ+ people are easily expendable. Especially under fascism. If our history isn’t worth the trouble of remembering, our lives certainly aren’t worth the trouble of saving.
At the end of the day, all I’m left with are these facts: The historical record of my queer elders’ existence was burned in 1933–thus erasing us from history and society. Now, everyone around me is trying to make it happen again. Nobody is stopping it. This is motherfucking terrifying.
