The Fire this Time: Echoes of the Forgotten Purge

They are making lists again.

The names have changed—transgender soldiers, drag queens, librarians who refuse to ban books—but the machinery hums with the same bureaucratic precision. The Trump administration did not invent this cruelty; it merely dusted off the ledgers, oiled the gears, and set them grinding once more. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes, its verses inked in the blood of the vulnerable.

In 1953, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, branding homosexuals as “perverts” unfit to serve. In 2017, Trump tweeted in the pre-dawn dark, banning transgender troops “in any capacity.” The language had softened—no longer “deviates,” but “burdens”—yet the intent remained: to erase, to shame, to codify fear into law. Roy Cohn, that architect of McCarthy’s witch hunts, would have admired the efficiency. Cohn, who died of AIDS while denying the epidemic, who prosecuted queers by day and prowled bathhouses by night—his ghost grins from the shadows of Mar-a-Lago.

The Ritual of Erasure

They came for us then as they come for us now, armed with scripture and spreadsheets. McCarthy’s men leaned across mahogany desks, demanding: Have you ever engaged in homosexual acts? Today, Florida’s legislators lean into microphones, sneering about “groomers” and outlawing healthcare for trans children. The interrogation rooms have moved to school boards and X feeds, but the questions remain the same: What are you? Why do you insist on existing?

I think often of Frank Kameny, the astronomer dismissed in 1957 for being gay. The government called him unfit. He declared war—not with riots, but with words. We are the experts on our own lives, he wrote, a manifesto in an era of whispers. His defiance birthed a movement. Decades later, in Tennessee, black-clad teens chain themselves to capitol doors, screaming as police peel them from the marble. The children have learned their history.

The Alchemy of Fear

McCarthy knew what Trump’s machine still exploits: fear is currency. In the 1950s, they peddled Red Scares and lavender lists. Now, it’s “critical race theory” and “bathroom bills.” The goal is not to govern but to terrify—to keep the majority trembling at specters while the powerful pick their pockets.

But here’s the paradox: oppression breeds its own resistance. When Mississippi outlawed drag, the queens of Jackson paraded in church robes, hymns on their glittered lips. When Texas hunted trans families, mothers formed caravans, spiriting children to safety under cover of TikTok codes. This is the lesson of the Mattachine Society, of ACT UP’s Silence = Death posters—that the hunted, when cornered, become architects.

The Ledger of Resilience

Do not mistake me—I do not romanticize survival. There is nothing noble in a trans girl learning to staple her tuck in a gas station bathroom, nothing poetic in HIV clinics shuttering under Medicaid cuts. But there is power in the way we keep living, keep naming ourselves, despite their manifestos and mandates.

Consider “X,” a nonbinary teacher in Oklahoma (they’ve asked me not to use their name; the lawsuits are ongoing). When the state banned mention of LGBTQ+ identities in classrooms, X pinned a photo of Harvey Milk to their desk. Who’s that? a student asked.

X smiled. A man who taught me some silences are louder than speeches.

The Unbroken Chain

The Trumpists, like the McCarthyites before them, believe they can burn us out of history. They scrub libraries, ban pronouns, force teachers into closets deeper than any 1950s State Department purge. But the past is not a corpse—it is a compass.

In 2023, during a Wisconsin school board hearing on book bans, a board member read aloud from The Homosexual in America: I have written this book to tell others who I am… She paused. The men in suits shifted uncomfortably. Then, one by one, students in the gallery stood, reciting the next lines from memory.

Epilogue: The Book of Names

They are making lists again. Let them.

We will write our names in bolder ink—on protest signs, court filings, hormone vials, love letters sealed with rainbow stamps. We will teach our children to read between the lines of laws meant to vanish them. And when they come, as they always do, with their warrants and their warrants and their warrants, we will meet them—not with pleas, but with proof of life.

The lavender scare never ended. Neither did we.