Anti-queer fascism is coming around again

[marmar]

Anti-queer fascism is coming around again
Queer joy dazzles until Brownshirts storm the stage — honey, it was all in "Cabaret"

By Robert W. Fieseler
Published October 4, 2025 6:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) I recently received a journalism award that I cannot publicize—because it recognizes a profile piece I wrote about a queer businessman, and that article appeared in the pages of a federally-funded magazine. In today’s atmosphere of radical white reassertion, drawing attention to such an honor would risk the disappearance of that now award-winning story, which still lives — and educates the public — on executive branch servers.

I make this observation not for the sin of pride but to showcase how queer folk have received the message that any expression of Pride can attract the stomp. Unsanctioned speech today lives at risk of being dust-binned through powerplays. Despite any overtures about meritocracy, proponents of the white culture war stand at odds with the untamed diversity of excellence, which diminishes humdrum white achievement by making normie mediocrity feel second-rate or, even worse, “uncomfortable,” to reference Florida’s Stop WOKE Act.

The fun-times canvas of our culture is being reconceived through queer erasure. Shedding allies, the LGBTQ+ coalition teeters on the tail of this recent Quiet Pride, with public institutions that have been loudly supportive in the recent past intimidated into whispers, or all-out silence. This tectonic shift signals not a new betrayal of queer folk but a reinforcement of the fundamental relationship between Western society and non-hetero life — a hot/cold union of creative thrill-seeking and fair-weather fascination that can best be captured by a single image from Bob Fosse’s 1972 musical film “Cabaret.”

....(snip)....

What’s unfolding before our eyes will eventually tell us if we are living at the beginning of another clampdown or a mere hiccup in a prolonged cabaret. Realistically, from a human-power perspective, all a queer minority can do in the face of a majority tidal shift is bravely let the show go on until someone burns down the theatre. As Viktor Frankl once wrote, “You cannot control what happens to you. What you can control is what to do with what happens to you.” Inspired survivors might even emerge from the rubble years later to mock-perform their executions as drag. ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/10/04/anti-queer-fascism-is-coming-around-again/