'UNTIL EVERYBODY'S FREE'.

• Author: Boddiger, David
• Position: EDITOR'S NOTE

As we enter into Pride Month with this special issue devoted to both celebrating the LGBTQ+ community and highlighting the barrage of threats against LGBTQ+ people from those on the right, tracking those threats has often seemed overwhelming. The onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation from state lawmakers across the country has been so fast and furious that we've had to update the list of repressive bills multiple times during our production process just to keep up.

But those on the right have underestimated the joy, resilience, and tenacity of the LGBTQ+ community. Resistance is nothing new for this community and its allies.

This year is the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which followed a police raid on Manhattans Stonewall Inn and is considered the catalyst for Pride celebrations and the modern-day LGBTQ+ rights movement. But as historian Julio Capo Jr. points out in a 2017 article in Time magazine, Stonewall didn't "happen in a vacuum."

Eighty-five years ago, in November 1937, some 200 Ku Klux Klan members raided La Paloma nightclub in what is today Miami-Dade County, Florida, to attack its gender-and sexual-nonconforming staff and clientele. As Capo relates, "In the end, these raids, and several that occurred before and after, proved ineffective in silencing queer voices and experiences." He adds, "Although wildly different, the reason the events at Stonewall and La Paloma share some general overlapping threads is that queer joints have historically been key sites of resistance, change, and even revolution."

Today, the white robes and hoods worn by those who attacked La Paloma have been replaced by the business attire of GOP lawmakers who follow an agenda set by a rightwing hate machine desperately trying to cling to power. Speak out against this madness, and those lawmakers will attempt to silence you in the name of "decorum," as Democratic state Representative Zooey Zephyr, of Montana, describes in an interview with Norman Stockwell.

V. Jo Hsu peels back the layers of Republican efforts to transform colleges and universities into laboratories of conservative indoctrination. Republicans are following a three-part strategy targeting teaching, student services, and faculty employment by "attacking gender studies and critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and academic tenure."

Brynn Tannehill helps us understand these...