The Kids Are, As They Say, Alright

or: to the graduating class of 2025

Yesterday I spoke at a graduation for the first time, the Lavender Graduation (for LGBT+ students) at Warren Wilson in western North Carolina. I’ve never been invited to speak at a graduation before, and I wasn’t sure I ever would be. I’m… not shy about being about what I’m about.

But some students requested that I come keynote their graduation, and so I packed my van and drove to Asheville, the first time I’ve been back since immediately after the hurricane last fall. Rintrah (my dog) obligingly waited in the van in the parking lot (it’s a climate controlled van and I get an alert if the temperature deviates too far) and I walked down to the pavilion. I felt entirely, utterly welcome.

It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced something that reminded me so deeply that we’re in this together. That queers are out of the closet now, that there are just too many of us, and we care about each other too completely, for the fascists to break us.

I wrote my speech in a rest area en route to Asheville, after mulling over the themes I wanted to hit on for weeks. I used to not write speeches out, but instead put bulletpoints down on paper. But I’m getting more used to reading from scripts and then riffing thanks to my podcasting, so I wrote this one out.

I wasn’t sure how people would take my speech. They had an anarchist history nerd come down and talk to them during the rise of totalitarianism, speaking to a crowd that is not inherently political. There’s no reason why we should have to be politically radical to be queer.

But it seemed to go well. Not everyone was excited about how much I cuss, but people are quite aware of the crisis we’re all living in. It’s not particularly possible to have your head in the sand in this moment… a silver lining, perhaps.

Anyway, here’s what I told them.

To the graduating class of 2025

Hello! First of all, thank you so much for having me. I’m genuinely honored to be here talking to you all, I’m honored that you’ve decided I’m the one you’ve decided to hear an inspiring speech from. It’s going to be a talk about hard times. If you wanted a purely positive speech, don’t hire someone named Killjoy.

The thing is… the speech I would have given you a year ago is entirely different from the speech I’m going to give you today.

The speech I would have given you, it would have been about the storm on the horizon, a storm that might or might not hit, and how we’re all getting our shit together in case it does.

Instead, I’m telling you that the storm has hit. You don’t need me to tell you the news. But authoritarians are in power and they’ve decided that trans people specifically, and queer people broadly, are, alongside migrants, the face of evil. We’re not, of course, and we can’t let our enemies define us for us. We have to continue to define ourselves.

So you’ve graduated into a world that is entirely different from the world you were raised to inherit. We’re all in trouble. We’ve all got to deal with the fact that we’re in trouble. We’re capable of doing so, and we’re going to win, and it isn’t going to be easy, but it’s going to happen. Partly because we’re going to understanding “winning” in a complex way.

I want to start this off with a story, because I run a history podcast, and the stories that I learn from doing that are stories that live inside of me and come out in casual conversation way too often. But I’m also at the core of it a storyteller, so I remember the story more than the details, and I’m not going to be able to tell you everything about this story exactly right today.

It’s a story about gay artists in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. The Dutch resistance wasn’t the most firey resistance to fascism, but as far as I can tell, of any Nazi-occupied territory, it involved the highest percentage of the general population. And I don’t think our current situation maps one-to-one to the Nazis (I think it maps more closely to Putin’s Russia), but I think there are a bunch of lessons in it regardless. Especially because western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was well, one of the first times in the Western world where gay people were really starting to come out.

As for these lessons—first of all, there was this editor of a gay newspaper. I don’t remember his name, but I remember what he did. As the German troops approached the border, he memorized the names of their subscribers, hundreds of names, then he ate the list. After the fall of the Nazi regime, he wrote the whole thing down again and they were able to find each other again, those who’d survived.

The lesson here, from my point of view, is that frankly this isn’t the right moment to get yourself on lists. This is a moment for security culture. We can’t lose track of one another, but we might need to adapt to the circumstances.

Okay the other lesson… there was this crew of gay artists. Theater kids and sculptors and fashion designers and shit. And they realized this was the moment to apply their skills outside of what they were otherwise used to. With their skills as printers and artists, they started forging identity papers for Jews and other people under threat from the fascists. With their skills in acting and fashion design, they… well, a crew of them sewed up some Nazi uniforms, then went to a Nazi record storehouse, and were like “how do you do, fellow Nazis?” and they went inside and they lit the fucking place on fire and burned thousands of records.

Eventually, a bunch of them got caught, and those who were caught were executed. One man, Willem Arondeus, while he was waiting to get shot, he gave a final message to his lawyer—a lesbian herself. He told her: “let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.”

I think about that shit almost every day, if I’m being honest.

We’re not cowards. We do not come from fearful people. Our queer ancestors fought incredible odds, and just by fighting, they won. Because what fascists want to do is not just kill us, but drive us into subserviance. Instead, we burned their shit. We rioted across the country and world, everywhere it’s been illegal for us to love one another.

Gay liberationists in the 60s and 70s had a slogan, one that referenced the gay ancient greek shock troops from thousands of years ago: an army of lovers cannot lose. We will fight next to one another and we fucking love one another, so we’ll fight together. And we’re not cowards.

To be clear, courage isn’t the absence of fear. Courage is resilience in the face of fear. You’ve literally got to be afraid in order to be brave.

That lesbian lawyer, she and others eventually made it out, crossing the mountains into Switzerland, and carried the memories of people like Willem Arondeus with them.

The other lessons I take from the Gay resistance in Amsterdam are things like: yeah, don’t let them fucking keep records of us. We’ve all been giving data about our lives to corporations for years and decades, which is almost benign in peacetime (targeted ads are a bit frustrating), but now means that the repressive state has access to incredible amounts of information about us. We’ve got to start working to frustrate their recordkeeping, without disappearing from public life.

Another lesson I take from their struggle is that whatever your skillset, there are ways to apply it to the destruction of totalitarianism.

The final lesson I draw from that story? Look, we’ll remember Willem Arondeus, but we’ll remember him because of a lesbian who crossed the alps on foot. We have a duty to each other to try, hard as we can, to outlive these bastards. We can’t destroy ourselves, because we can’t do the fascist’s work for them.

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I’m telling you this shit because things are bad right now, again, but they’ve been bad before. There is always an ebb and flow with this, and the trick is to start appreciating that ebb and flow. There isn’t a win condition, not really. There’s no static state called utopia, where nothing bad ever happens ever again. To be clear, things can be a lot better, and we can make things a lot better. I want to die in my bed, 97 years old, having lived most of my life in a society without prison or police or capitalism or patriarchy or any of that fucking garbage. That’s what I’m fighting for. I probably won’t get there.

But same as there’s no static win condition, there’s no losing either. They simply, actually, cannot eradicate us. There have always been queer people and there will always be queer people. We’re fucking immortal.

So we can’t win and we can’t lose but we sure as shit can fight and we can find the beauty in that fight, and we’ve got to do so, because romanticization is a powerful tool with which to accept complicated situations. What we have to come to understand is that the lawyer who survived the war and the gay arsonist who didn’t both lived complete and full lives full of beauty and meaning.

I told my partner earlier about how I was going to quote the whole “an army of lovers cannot lose” slogan and they told me about how they found a pin in a lesbian archive, the lesbian response to that slogan. “An army of ex-lovers cannot lose.”

If we want that slogan to be true, if we want to become an unstoppable force, then we’ve got to have each other’s backs. We’ve got to become kinder to one another. We’ve got to be fierce to our enemies and kinder to everyone else. We’ve got to learn to deescalate conflict. There are people who are our enemies—the people who are trying to destroy us. We’ve got to avoid turning each other into enemies in the meantime.

We don’t have to get along with one another, or agree with one another, or like each other, but we’ve got to learn to talk through our problems—or just learn how to navigate space with one another. We’ve got to start remembering that all of us are flawed, deeply flawed, and all of us are fuckups.

It’s a good idea to try not to be a fuckup, just… don’t expect to succeed. Once again, there’s no win condition. There’s no becoming perfect. We just try to be our best selves and try to encourage others to be their best selves but learn to forgive each other as we navigate this flawed world as flawed people.

It’s our responsibility to make the world better, but it’s not our fault the world is fucked up. Maybe fault and responsibility should go hand-in-hand, but they don’t. It is not our fault that we’re the center of a culture war right now. It’s not our fault that our rights are under attack. But it’s our responsibility to deal with it. Because it’s our problem. We can’t look for other people to save us. Saving ourselves is work that we’ve done before and it’s work that we’ll do again. And I say “we” here and not “you,” because when folks who are older than you try to tell you shit like “it’s up to your generation to solve these problems,” that’s just more abdication of responsibility. It’s up to all of us, working as peers, to stop fascism and stop climate change and create a world built on solidarity and mutual aid.

When I was a little kid, there was still a cold war on, a cold war between oligarchic capitalism here in the West and authoritarian socialism in the Soviet bloc. That cold war fucked everything up—most directly, all the people it killed, but it also fucked us up philosophically. It convinced people that there’s this enormous chasm between the individual and the community. You gotta pick one or the other… be an individual and love capitalism, or love the community and you gotta accept totalitarianism and the lack of individual freedom.

It’s nonsense. It’s one of the most dangerous pieces of nonsense we’ve ever ingested. Instead of looking for where the individual and the community are at odds, we ought to look for where they overlap. We ought to focus on the many, many things that help both. As an individual, I am more free if I live in a society with a strong social safety net. I can exert my individual will better in a society than I can alone in the woods. Communities, in turn, are strongest when they are heterogenous and full of different people with different ideas, who are free to follow their passions and then apply those passions to what’s good for the community.

That’s the task in front of us, if you zoom out real big and look at it. It’s our job to find out what we’re passionate about and learn how to apply that passion to help everyone, ourselves included. In that way, we’re able to build relationships of freedom (because to be clear, freedom is a relationship between people, not a static state). In that way, we’re able to live fulfilling lives, whether those lives are short or long—may they be long.

If you zoom in a little though, the task in front of us is a bit more concrete: we need to destroy totalitarianism before it takes hold and destroys us all. We need to survive, when possible, and go down fighting when necessary. We need to make sure it is written, forever, an axiom no one else will ever doubt again, that homosexuals are not cowards.