We've Always Been Queer

The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma.

It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII.

It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality.

Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld. It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception.

It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway.

But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it.

Which is all the time, we always need these accesses.

And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books out into a pile and they burned them.

They didn't want people like us to exist, to be happy, and to get the help we need.

But we're still here.

We've always been here.

We know shape of something lost and it hurts.

Nazi Party members at the Opernplatz book burning in Berlin

Often I think queerness of any kind scares bigots so much because there's no way to make sure we're all gone. We can lose the memory of a generation, have all access to our history be gone.

Then kid number eight in an insular family who's never even heard of being gay will realize they're different.

Burnt remains of book, Le Marquis de Sade et Son Temps. Part of the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection

That the gender markers they're supposed to follow are an ill-fitting suit. They don't want to be a parent, or perhaps they do, but with a person their parents wouldn't accept, or to kids who didn't come from their body.

They might think they're all alone, that no one else has ever been so strange.

They don't know there's ever been another person in the world with this thought, but it's there.

That they're different.

They don't know if they want to kiss that boy or be him, maybe first one then the other, but it's tangled up and lonely and fierce.

The bigots are so scared of us that they'd rather break the whole internet than leave us in peace.

But the corollary to the idea that we've always been here is that we are everywhere.

We're in every community, on every side, even the ones that don't want us there.

Take care of each other.