It Could Happen Here - The War on Trans People: Part 5, How the Nazis Destroyed German Queerness

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

In part 5 the crew heads back in time to look at the development of the original gay rights movement in Germany and how it was destroyed by the Nazis.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, boy. Welcome to America, the podcast. Wait. Is that what we're calling it now? I don't think that's true.

We just had like two episodes on international terms. We're we are going we're trying to be a little beyond america i i fucked it up i fucked it up well that's the podcast goodbye everybody see usually at this point you say garrison take over all right well let's uh let's get into this what are we talking about today who are we where are we what is life where it could we? Where are we? What is life? It could happen here. Where is God? Final episode of the war on trans people, which means when this episode is done,

that means the war will be over. We did it, everybody. And whatever gods once were have long abandoned this place. We did get pretty good news about the governor of Utah, kind of surprising me here. Yeah. That just hit. That's nice there's the there's that i mean luckily it looks some of some of the bills that we've talked about actually have been shot down at this point the wisconsin bill got shut got got kind of down in surprisingly and in very very recently like uh yeah past few days yeah um there's a looks like there's still going to be injunctions

on any investigations in texas until the case gets uh put yeah that's still very much in the air yeah it's it's still in the courts but it's like it's it's trying it at least it's kind of paused right now and it's going to get settled at some point in uh either the lawsuit or in higher courts so we'll see yeah we'll see how that develops. But for right now, things seem to be paused and some states are not fully passing it. I know there was a walkout by Disney employees today over the Don't Say Gay bill,

and we're going to see if that's going to get signed. So yeah, still up in the air, but we're going to be talking about something a little bit different we're gonna do some we're gonna do some time travel oh boy that's that's what i had to say was oh boy yeah so we're going to go back to another time in which there was a for a very brief period a uh massive expansion in the knowledge about and sort of but both knowledge about and appearance of and safety of trans people and then it all catastrophically came crashing down oh good and to help us with that is robert evans my boss hi everybody how are we doing

garrison how are we doing oh i'm doing actually fine we doing? Oh, I'm doing actually fine. Yeah. I'm just waiting for you to do your homosexual and trans all have their origins in germany in the not not just in the post-war period but really the last couple of decades of the uh the kaiser and the weimar republic like that is where kind of the modern western attitudes towards what it like is to be homosexual really get formed because obviously like gay people have existed for forever there's quite a bit of documentation but if you look at like for example you know two-spirit folks within some indigenous american cultures that's a very different attitude towards um like

what like trans people i suppose compared to the western idea of gender yeah exactly yeah yeah so this is like they're like western quote-unquote, you know, whatever. Yeah, there's the actual thing that's going on in like the individual sexuality, and then there's kind of the public concept of what it is. And that is really forming in – probably the seminal moment that kind of starts this progress is in August 29th, 1867, when a lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs goes before the 6th Congress of German Jurists in Munich to urge them to repeal laws forbidding sex between men. So again, there is still a Kaiser and like this is before Germany is actually fully a nation, right? Because 1870 is when that happens. So Germany doesn't even really exist at this point. There's a series of like kings kind of being welded together slowly into a German state.

And there is a lawyer getting up in front of like the council of different German jurists to urge an end to the laws that make it illegal for men to have sex with each other. Now, one thing that's important to note is that obviously there are lesbians in this period of time, as again, there have been throughout all of history. That's not really a legal problem, right? They do not face really legal repression. And I mean, not to say that like there's not repression and things that they're dealing with, but it's not the same as it is for like men who want to be in relationships with men. It's in fact a lot easier for women to be kind of like, and this is not just Germany, to kind of say like,

well, we're friends and we live together, right? Like we're aunties and we live together. Gal pals. Yeah, in part because men just like, I think a lot of the men in this period just assume it's impossible that women would do that. Or the other side of it is like, femininity is always presentory

it's always like it's used as soon as a beauty symbol so it makes more sense for women to find other women attractive because that's what beauty is is when is performative femininity so like that's like way more obvious and it doesn't make sense for but and it makes less sense for men to find other men attractive and that's way more taboo because of the way that messes with like patriarchy um so yeah there could be a like gender studies and sexuality studies you know have a lot of theorizing for how this has developed but yeah this this idea you can even see in like victorian era and like renaissance era of yeah women who who live together and are very good friends very very right very close friends i hope people don't feel like i'm trying to like flatten the history of like the concept of being a lesbian in the west no no no yeah to that at all

or trying to for that matter flatten like uh homosexuality between men but i am kind of making the point and i i am not the the person who kind of initially made this point the scholarly work that i'm kind of basing my research on this on largely right now. And we're going to do an episode of Behind the Bastards that gets in to more of this, I think, in the near future. But it's a book called Gabor Lin by Robert Beachy. And in the book, one of the things that Beachy argues is that even though obviously same-sex love is as old as the existence of, quite a bit older actually than the existence of human beings. The public discourse around it and like the political attempt to win rights for gay people starts in Germany in the late 1800s and it starts in this conference in 1867.

And the guy who does this, Ulrichs, is a – number one, is man um and he had he had been open kind of to his relatives he had started in the period before he gets up in front of all these lawyers to be open with like his family members that he was homosexual um but he had never like he was not publicly out and so on the same day that he appeals for a change in the legal code to make homosexuality legal in the German states is the day he comes out publicly as a gay man. Like he does both of these things at the same time. And I want to read a quote from a New Yorker. Yeah, it's quite a moment.

What a move. Holy shit. I want to read a quote from a New Yorker article that's covering all of this. And it's based again on the book Gay Berlin. Quote, he faced an audience of more than 500 distinguished legal figures, and as he walked to the lectern, he felt a pang of fear. There is still time to keep silent, he later remembered telling himself. Then there will be an end to all your heart pounding. But Ulrichs, who had earlier disclosed his same-sex desires in letters to relatives, did not stop. He told the assembly that people

with a sexual nature opposed to common custom were being persecuted for impulses that nature, mysteriously governing and creating, had implanted in them. Pandemonium erupted, and Ulrichs was forced to cut short his remarks. Still, he had an effect. A few liberal-minded colleagues accepted his notion of an innate gay identity, and a Bavarian official privately confessed to similar yearnings. In a pamphlet titled Gladius Furenz, or Raging Sword, Ulrichs wrote, I am proud that I found the strength to thrust the first lance into the flank of the Hydra of public content. This guy rules!

I feel like that sometimes, buddy. Incredibly based. Wow. If there's a heaven, I hope this dude made it there, because wow. What an absolute champ. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. what if if there's a heaven i hope this dude made it there because wow absolute yeah unbelievable so no but like what like like yeah the astonished like the astounding bravery that that takes yeah um and he's essentially the first gay activist in a modern western political context. And it's interesting, like within kind of the next couple of years,

things start to happen very quickly. Two years later in 1869, an Austrian writer, I know, right, named Karl Kurt Benny, who is kind of fighting sodomy laws. And sodomy laws are laws that make everything that's not like missionary position sex illegal. They're obviously targeted towards gay men primarily. So Carl Kurt Benny create – like he's the guy who invents the term homosexuality. Like two years after this as part of his like fight against these anti-sodomy laws. In the 1880s, a Berlin police commissioner makes the decision to stop prosecuting gay bars.

And in fact, not only does he stop doing this, but he starts leading tours of the gay districts in Berlin just to like show off. Like, look at how tolerant Berlin is. It's kind of dope, right? That's such a weird. Wow. Yeah. What a weird picture to put in your head. At least even like, yeah.

Yeah, there's a fucking cop being like, why are we arresting these people? Let's show this off. Yeah. Wow. That is boggling. Yeah. So in 1896, the very first gay magazine starts publishing in Germany, in Berlin, really. Do you want to know what it's called?

Yeah, of course I do. The German name is Der Eigen, and that means the self-owning. That's great. It's pretty fucking cool. So the very next year, 1897, one of the primary heroes of the early gay rights struggle, physician Magnus Hirschfeld, starts the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which is the first organized gay rights group in Western history, at least.

So by the start of the 20th century, a lot of stuff is in place, right? And I think I'm even, have been a little bit guilty of this in the past of kind of focusing so much on Weimar Germany and all of the stuff that happens around gay rights there and how progressive it was. This is building in Germany.

Again, we don't consider the Kaiser Reich as a particularly progressive, but all of this is happening under the Kaisers. And there's so many things that are happening in the 1890s and the start of the 1900s that directly mirror things that are happening in the United States in the 1980s. In fact, right as the century turns, you start getting an advocate, one of the first gay rights advocates in gay literature, uses the phrase, coins the phrase, staying silent is death.

To like talk about the importance of gay literature. Which is essentially the same slogan that gay rights activists picked during the AIDS epidemic. The same stuff we're talking about right now. With all of the book bannings taking you know doing a massive sweep of that the past the past few years yeah this is 1900 like basically that this is starting to happen so yeah and there's you know there's even there's's a lot of activists start to complain and start to try to complain both within like their own magazines and within like more public magazines about things like negative depictions of gay people in popular novels.

Yeah. There start to be the first arguments about whether or not it's morally right to out people who are gay but who are attached to anti-gay organizations because that starts happening in this period of time. Wow, yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. It's fucking wild how bold all of this is. Nothing new under the sun. Yeah. No, but this is also the first time it happened

in these types of countries, in these societies. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it is, so yes, time is a flat circle, but this is also the first time it's happened, and it's just kind of been re-happening ever since then. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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It's important to note, I didn't cover this when we start talking about Ulrichs. Well, there's a lot of people who get angry, and obviously Ulrichs is not successful in repealing the anti-homosexuality laws. When he makes his speech, in addition to the people who are like yelling at him to sit down, there are like German deputies yelling, no, no, no, let him continue. Let him continue.

Like he needs to be allowed to talk. So even like in this period of time, there are non-gay people at a fairly high level in German politics who are like vocal allies and starting to become vocal allies, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty fascinating. So obviously World War One happens. Doesn't go great for Germany. But, you know, we get after that, the Weimar Republic. And the Weimar Republic is kind of the traditional era in which we talk a lot about, you know, gay rights starting to really move forward in significant ways. And so there's a lot of even kind of into the early 1930s, some pretty interesting things that are happening in German society in like the mainstream elements of it. There's a film called Mädchen in Uniform in 1931, which is the first like positive

portrayal of lesbians in Western cinema. Like 31 is like, again, we're talking like right before the Nazis kind of come around. And yeah, there's these like, this police commissioner that we chatted about earlier, I think is one of the people who's most interesting to me. We're gonna get to Hirschfeld a bit in a little bit. But this guy is named Leopold von Mierscheidt-Hulsheim. I'm not gonna get that right.

But he's a big part of, when we talk about gay Berlin, particularly during the Weimar years, even though he's like during, well, the Kaiser's in, he's why gay Berlin really happens in a lot of ways. And it's in part because like he decides to stop cracking down on gay people. And like he's not gay, although his boss is, which is part of like what makes it easier for him to do this. And there's like a lot of debate about why he does this because he's not like a gay rights activist. Some people say that it's because he's worried that like gay people will become politically radicalized by the Reds.

And so if you stop cracking down on them, they won't go communist. There's a lot of like debate about like why he does this. Like there's a lot of like debate about like why he does this. He's also – there's a number of things that he – like he takes a lot of data on gay people in Berlin and he does this on everybody. He's a big data guy. So it's not particularly harmful in his era, but some of the stuff that he gathers will be used by the Nazis later, which is kind of a broader thing about like the wisdom of not letting the government get access to this. Like he has, he founds a department of homosexuals in 1885 that like lists the people that they know are gay. And again, like this is all, so it's really a complicated thing that's happening here because he's not, he's not this like thoroughly

sympathetic figure. He's doing a lot of stuff that's weird and that will later have negative outcomes, but he's also, by ending police persecution of gay people, at least in an organized way, really allowing gay culture to blossom in Berlin. And it's – yeah, I'm going to read another quote from that New Yorker article here. For whatever reason, Mearscheidt-Holzenheim took a fairly benevolent attitude towards Berlin's same-sex bars and dance halls, at least in the better-heeled parts of the city. He was on cordial terms with many regulars, and none other than August Strindberg testified in his autobiographical novel The Cloister, which evokes a same-sex costume ball at the Café National, and this is in 1898. So he's kind of like going on safari, like among the gay people in Berlin. Like there's a lot of – it's weird in a lot of way. the gay people in Berlin. Like there,

there's a lot of weird, it's, it's weird in a lot of way. Um, but he's also, one of the things he does is he provides police help to gay people who are being blackmailed and like threatened with outing. and he'll even like counsel them on how to handle it.

Like he provides like counselors and stuff. And he does this in part because like, he's worried about, um, them committing suicide because they're being blackmailed, which is like a real problem in Germany and a bunch of other places. Yeah, and this guy, like this police commissioner winds up killing himself kind of in the early 1900s, I think, because he wound up getting found to be taking bribes from some millionaire who gets in a lot of legal trouble for raping somebody. So again, he is a sketchy dude, but he's also like, because he's got this weird, almost like voyeuristic fascination with gay people and some legitimate,

because there are legitimate humanitarian concerns. He's really worried about people committing suicide as a result of blackmail. So he's one of these figures we don't talk about enough in history where it's like the overall outcome of this guy's work is pretty positive, but he does it for this like really confusing mix of reasons. He's just a very strange figure in history. Well, I think it's interesting looking at him, like, like comparing him to like,

if you look at like what the U S is doing in the fifties, right. Where there's this whole thing about like gay people are getting, are going to get, are getting blackmailed and you know the the u.s the entire u.s security state loses its mind and becomes convinced that like these people are all going to become soviet agents and you know and instead of like doing counseling that there's their the thing that they do is they they do the lavender scare and they start purging every gay person they can find from the entire u.s government and it's like you know it's it's it's interesting that like yeah this is this is a guy in like late 1800s early 1900s like like literally ruled by a monarch berlin and his policies are enormously better than like anything you're gonna see for like half a century

he's he is way more woke on on on this than like any new york police officer for a century? He is way more woke on this than like any New York police officer for a century. Today. Up to the present day in a lot of ways. Yeah. So let's talk about Magnus Hirschfeld a bit. Hirschfeld is very influenced by Ulrich, the guy we started the story with. His first like publication on the matter is called Sappho and Socrates in 1896, which is again, it's a story of a gay man who gets coerced into marriage. So this like, and who commits suicide as a result. So there's like a big with both, you know,

this police commissioner with Hirschfeld with a lot of people who are becoming activists in this period. A big part of why is for one reason or another the suicide rate among gay people, which is a huge problem today for trans people in particular. And this is what – it's interesting like that Utah governor made the announcement today that like he's vetoing this trans sports band in Utah. And he specifically cites like the suicide rate among trans people is so like high. cites like the suicide rate among trans people is so like high and it it he he could not morally conscience doing anything that would like make these kids feel othered and likelier to commit well i mean okay let's let's let's not go that far he he was he was willing he was willing to do the commissions he just wasn't willing to do a full ban yeah i'm just saying the the justification he gives for what he's doing is like is the rate of

suicide attempts among trans people not to like whitewash that guy or Utah like again we've been doing this whole week's episodes but it's interesting that you get again it's just kind of like the issue for a long time has been that when you like other people and make it dangerous for them to be

who they are openly they they will kill themselves. A lot of them will. And that's a thing that is even by very problematic people in Germany in the 1890s, folks recognize that like this is a huge issue. So yeah, Hirschfeld starts this first organization, this like gay rights organization. And he also is doing like a huge amount of research. He is – again, he's following in Ulrich's footsteps because he too believes that homosexuality is congenital, right? It's something you're born with as opposed to like a choice people make because of deviance or whatever, which is still the big fight that we're having to this day. And he's also like, it's hard to, there's a lot that like you can criticize about Hirschfeld scientifically and a lot of the research he does, among other things, there's like difficulty with like control groups and actually like being the kind of scientific

sort of detachment that is necessary to study. There's like critiques of his research that are valid. necessary to study. There's like critiques of his research that are valid. But one of the – he's really like – it's wild how far ahead of the curve he is because one of the things that Hirschfeld introduces is the idea that sexuality is a spectrum where there's what he calls sexual intermediaries between male and female. He doesn't believe that like those are even particularly useful terms, that sexuality kind of like – again, that it's a spectrum, which is this thing that we are just now really starting to have good wider kind of range in conversations about today. scientifically study and understand where homo, like what homosexuality is and that it is an innate characteristic that people will stop being bigoted against gay folks.

Right. Like his, his belief is that science will end prejudice just because the German people are so scientific and like, they'll have to accept this if I can just like prove it with enough rigor, which is heartbreaking. Yeah. Heartbreaking that he was very, very wrong.

And yeah, there's a number of things that are like really worth kind of within sort of the, because he's not, he's kind of come down now as this sort of like saint-like hero of the gay rights movement for good reason. But that does tend to flatten the fact that within his day and within kind of the gay rights movement for good reason. But that does tend to flatten the fact that within his, his day and within kind of the gay culture in Berlin in particular, there were a lot of people who were frustrated with him for a lot of reasons. There were a lot of, so there's this, there's this split in gay culture in this period of time between gay men who

are seen as more effeminate and what are called the masculinists. And the masculinists, they are not all or even mostly Nazis, but all of the gay Nazis are what you'd call masculinists, right? Who are like, I'm not having like, I am so manly that the only person I can have sex with is a man, right? Like I'm flattening even that quite a bit. But like you have guys like um ernst rohm who is the head of the brown shirts and is is a is a gay nazi and is like that's that's a significant not an insignificant chunk of the nazis they all get murdered in the night of long knives and it is interesting that that rohm was outed by anti-fascists yeah he sure was like two

years before he was murdered and it was it was it was he was specifically outed to so division within the nazi party yes um and that does like also just playing it you know you're you're talking about like you know people having debate over whether it's okay to out somebody um if they you know are part of bad organizations right that was something we mentioned previously and yeah just like an interesting historical tidbit. Yeah. And it's, so again, among like one of the things that the masculinists are doing is like a lot of them are married to women and they're actually fine with this. Because again, they think that like, well, you still need to like procreate and have

like not, it's not even all just about being, having like a beard or whatever you want to call it. Some of it is just like this attitude that you have a responsibility to make more germans for the fatherland but like then when it comes to it's kind of like the greeks there were not wildly dissimilar concepts and a lot of the masculinists ideologically are wrapped up in the work of max sterner um and in fact like the self-owners, that first gay magazine is a reference to Sterner. I was like, oh, that sounds like Sterner's egoism. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. There's a lot of that going. And we, again, I want to at some point provide a lot more detail on this because it's all fascinating. But there are these big sort of like this big split. And there's, he gets a lot of shit from the masculinists for, because he also studies lesbians heavily. Like there's a decent chunk of the gay male population in Berlin who is against the research and the medical practice he's doing to help trans people who is against his research

on lesbians. Cause they're like, well, this is, this is the fight, right? Like we're the ones who are being legally cracked down on or whatever. Like, so there's a bunch of like different cleavages and fractures kind of within the community at this time. And Hirschfeld is not universally beloved. There are people kind of within the gay community who have a lot of issues with him. And I just think it's important to note that because we often do, again, kind of flatten things because the Nazis flattened things, right? Because it was all the same to them. And we often flatten them in a different way to where like, yeah, you've got this guy and he's the hero of gay Berlin and he's this like thoroughly positive. No, there were a lot of people who hated

him for like all these different reasons because this was – these – like all people had a million different kind of fractures and ideologies sort of running within what someone who was not – well, looking in from the outside would have just called gay Berlin, you know? And yeah, obviously, this all falls apart or is cracked down horribly when the Nazis come to power. Hirschfeld is doing a lot of some of – I mean, all of the very earliest research on like what it is to be transgender. And he is, uh, performing surgery on like gender operations on, on trans people for the very first time. Um, and, and that gets all kind of destroyed in, in May of 1933, uh, which is about three months after Hitler becomes Reich's chancellor. Uh, Nazis sack Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science.

They burn its library. They go after a lot of the people he had been working with and on are killed. Others have to flee. Hirschfeld is thankfully out of the country on tour when the Nazis rise to power and just doesn't come back. Yeah. just you know doesn't come back um yeah he sees he watches his institute get burned and all of his his research get burned in a newsreel in paris uh and he dies the next year um yeah so that's the that's the the the the broad details of kind of the story of this early period of the birth of kind of like a lot of our legal fights around gay rights and like the birth of kind of Western gay identity. Like this is where it comes from.

And there's a lot that's important in understanding this. And this is one of the points that gets made in Gay Berlin. We often see the Weimar years as this kind of inevitable march towards fascism. And the reality is that there was 50-something years of incredibly progressive movements on gender and sexuality. And, you know, even outside of gay rights, just in terms of like attitudes towards democracy and attitudes towards the nature of like the state that were very progressive and very powerful and very popular. And they do get, you know, it's important to understand both that like the Nazism was not inevitable. The regressivism and the violence and the like that kind of flattening of human life under the fascists was not an inevitable progression for Germany. But it's equally important to understand that like a tremendous – so much progress had been made in German culture by the period of time when the Nazis rise. And it does get wiped out.

It does not recover right away. It's still recovering now in Germany. Yeah, exactly. And in fact, one of the groups of people when the Allies liberate the concentration camps, we don't free imprisoned gay people. They go back to prison because what they were doing was still seen as criminal. If you have the pink triangle, you don't just get out because the Nazis, because you were in a concentration camp with these other people, because the allies, to a large extent, are like, well, that was, it was okay for them to punish those people. Anyway, that's the story.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them.

Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds

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Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Now, another interesting thing is, kind of on the same note, is that if you look through old German war photography from World War II, you will actually see a higher than average rate of men cross-dressing inside photos now

there's always cross-dressing during war is not uncommon especially during like performances yeah for like theater and stuff um because there's not as much women around but specifically uh comparing like the documentation of uh the nazis and all of all the german soldiers there was like yeah absolutely higher than average amount of people comfortable cross-dressing despite, you know, being a soldier for the Nazis. It is like, yeah, it is an interesting thing in terms of how some of those kind of

more advanced views on sexuality still carried over, at least in terms of like gender presentation among you know even even if you're among this genocidal group who's imprisoning gay people by the hundreds of thousands um yeah it's it just it just it just it just like kept happening yeah it also sort of points to just like how bad everywhere else was also oh yeah like it's yeah it's a it's a rough world for berlin just got so progressive that even when suppressed there was enough like stuff there that things could kind of there was there was still there was still a bit there's still a bit of some remnants.

And I mean, it did get horribly obliterated, and we're still recovering now in terms of our views and medical knowledge on gender and social contracts, again, after it was briefly more okay than it had been, doesn't get repealed until 1994. Yeah, I mean a lot of sodomy laws do not get repealed until the 90s. And in a lot of cases, they're actually still around. You just don't enforce them. Like a lot of – there's a lot of laws that are actually just still just hanging out. like a lot of this a lot of flaws that are actually just still just hanging out texas had anti-sodomy laws on the book until uh a 2003 supreme court case uh yeah it invalidated all sodomy laws right that's that's why there's some that are still on the books but they but they're now invalid yeah prosecute people um yeah uh yeah magnus herschfeld was pretty based though so was fucking olrix

some pretty based there's some really interesting stuff and that's why we wanted to talk about this is to kind of show the historical background and show like there's precedent for all of the same stuff happening before uh and you know there's ways people fought against it back then who didn't necessarily succeed um succeed but also did have a lot of progression and a lot of views socially on these types of topics you just need to make sure that you're also

very aware of the rise of fascism and being able to counter that as well because they can just do so much damage in such a short amount of time despite 50 years of progress yeah and I think understanding the fragility of everything that exists that i don't know i mean there's this is you know one of the sort of american mythoses right is that like the moral arc of the universe bends towards progress that everything's getting better and

that's not true nope it's not and like like every everything good that you see in this world is there because people fought for it was fought for yeah and and if they lose it all goes away yeah yeah it we we we absolutely could go back it's like you have that i mean he backpedaled but you have that republican uh legislator who was like um making comments about how he didn't think the state should be forced to honor interracial marriages. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, there's people who want to go back on all of that stuff and they could do it. It doesn't even and it doesn't matter. I like when people criticize kind of like some of the the attitudes we have the fear we have towards this

especially on on the subreddit i've seen people be like well look these are not popular laws and it's like it doesn't matter they weren't yeah absolutely they weren't as popular they weren't like necessarily all that popular in in in germany you know when some like a lot of the thing not specifically even talking about what was done to gay people but a lot of the things that were done by the nazis were not necessarily popular it doesn't matter what matters is power yeah this like plays into how like what is worth focusing on on electoralism and being like yeah these laws obviously aren't being uh pushed as far in blue states because there's not enough electoral power there but that doesn't mean that we can flip Texas blue if we will it into being. Like there's so many other cultural factors that are keeping red states red. And yes,

of course, voting suppression, all of those things, gerrymandering, all these things are contributing factors. But the overall political bent of those states right now seems to be pretty firm because there's so many people invested in maintaining that power so when we complain about kind of how electoralism is not often a super reliable solution to securing these things over long stretches of time it's more kind of talking about that because even though we have you know democrats in power in the executive branch and they you know make statements about trying to secure things they make they make some gestures the follow-through on those things is always so minimum and so bare um and there's it's like it's it's the thing here like trump was able to do so much um and now we have biden so

less willing to use executive power this is the same thing that like like with with obama and the supreme court when the senate would refuse to put through any any candidates obama technically had the power could because the senate refused to do to do their job um there is a very strong argument that obama could just put someone into the supreme court uh because of the failure of what the senate was doing it was specifically doing a thing that meant because they were not doing the job at all, that he can't get fully put through. And so we could

have, that could have happened, and Obama just didn't. Because you want to play, you want to be the good guy. You want to be the person who follows the rules. But the other side doesn't care about that. They're not playing a genuine game. They're not following the rules. They're doing whatever they can to win. So this isn't about being plugged into lefty Twitter. I get almost none of my takes from lefty Twitter. I get them from reading stuff and thinking about how electoralism affects all of these issues and where to focus my attention. Because no matter what I say or what I do, that's not going to affect whether Texas is blue or red. Yeah, and there's this, I think like one of the things

that is an argument against Obama, you know, intervening in that way is like, well, that would have created precedent that would have like further centralized executive power and could have been used by the Republicans. Only if the Senate refused to do their job. Yeah, but you know, I mean, look at what we got. Look at the Supreme court that we have

which now has a six to three bent conservatively no there was just another fucking shadow ruling today that was um about um uh gerrymandering and god i was was it wisconsin um one sec i'll look it up but yeah like you're getting like that we're we're already living through that scenario. Yeah. And it's like. Like in this, I mean, in terms of centralization of power, like Obama claimed the legal authority to kill any man, woman or child, regardless of their citizenship as a U.S. citizen without trial the moment they left the United States. Like that is the authority that he claimed like when, you know, to in order to run the drone assassination program and it's yeah so like at that point like yeah okay we we literally have a person who can go i'm going to press a button and kill you like like oh no we might centralize

me for like it's just i mean it's not even a centralization because it was specifically within the context of the senate not doing their job. And it kind of just all plays into, like, it seems like Democrats are more politically successful when they're losing. Like, it seems like they want the other side to be in power because that's when they actually do things politically. Then when they have power, they're just so scared to use it that they don't even do anything to really help people that much. Well, and I mean, this is the other thing is that, like, yeah, the Democrats like like most of like their actual constituent like they have they have two constituencies right they have like you know they they they have the people they're passing tax breaks for and then they have a bunch of they have a bunch of consultants and the consultants like the thing that they care about is campaign donations right because that's how they get paid yeah and yeah

hey guess what happens when uh you're in power oh people don't give you any people don't give you much money like this is this is this is a problem that i ran into in the 80s they they get more power when they're they get more money when they're not in power yeah because then they're trying to organize to get in power but then once they're in there it's like oh wow you're not really using the same power capabilities that the other side does when they're in charge and they're all willing to play dirty politically and we and for some reason the democrats are not well because i mean it's kind of like they don't like that's something like they don't actually care about any of this stuff right this stuff is useful for them in terms of fundraising right but it's like yep yeah i don't know like they they don't like if if every trans

person in the united states was killed right the democrats would be sad for a little bit and then they wouldn't move on like it's not that's that's not a thing that if you're in a hard blue state we know what's more important than actually voting for support of like this kind of stuff it's actually just giving trans people money like that is going to have much more of a positive political effect it's just give trans people money whenever you see a go fund me for a trans person donate to that instead that's going to have a much more uh lasting effect than voting if you're in you know new york or if you're in oregon right because like that those states are they're they're going to be blue that's always going to happen um but other states like uh like i texas oklahoma tennessee uh alab, like these are going to be red states like this.

And as much as we would be nice if, yeah, if Democratic senators and people in the House were in there instead, then, yeah, these trans bills probably wouldn't be happening as much. But that's not going to happen. So if that's not going to happen, we should focus on other ways to do that politically. And yeah, sure, fixing gerrymandering will be great, but I don't think you need me to tell you that. No. Anyway, we should probably, that's probably more or less a soad. That is a soad.

I will plug next week, on a similar train for kind of talking about queerness and fascism um which yeah we are we are planning a two a two-parter which is a pretty going to be extensive deep dive into explaining the curious case of nazi cat boys and garrison says garrison says we as if any of the rest of us had any choice in this garrison garrison forced this on us through violence yes but yes we will be talking about this which kind of touches on some similar topics in terms of like gender and sexuality and how it intersects with politics and how there can be you know seemingly contradictory

claims of you know gay nazis and all that kind of stuff so similar similar train we'll be kind of discussing that and how that works um but yeah this is uh end of trans week honestly at this point as we're ending as we're ending it i'm kind of more optimistic than i what than i than i was when we started trans week um in terms of like watching kind of how some of these bills have played out how some of them were not were not fully carried through um there is protests and stuff being organized. I know for March, I believe it's March 31st, which is a Trans Day of Visibility, there's going to be protests in a lot of conservative states. I know there's going to be, let me actually, let me check, because I know there's going

to be multiple things happening. actually let me check because i know there's there's going to be there's going to be multiple multiple things happening and i will i'm going to be trying to i'm going to try to be in idaho next next week for that uh because there's going to be a protest in boise which i think boise boise idaho that's the place but there's going to be yeah there's going to be events in austin uh tallahassee montgomery um so yeah i will uh look up uh tear it up dot org at for event for info on all of the events at different at different at in different states for for trans day of visibility march march 31st and yeah uh uh be gay do crime yeah throw bricks at transphobes yeah all that stuff it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever

you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow of Raya. Join me,

Danny Trails, and step into the flames of Raya. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture

in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite

and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his

father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.