It seems not a day passes that doesn’t take us further back. An eternal violent night of fascism is extending over the world, its shadow cast further and further. Dark days indeed.

I often reflect on how shame, and fear, affect queer lives, or at least mine. It locks us in the closet, hiding nature from the harsh judgement of an artificial construct. It poisons all minds; it enables and reinforces the cruel, self serving bigotries of the selfish and predatory.

Coming out symbolises a conquering of that fear and shame. The imagery could not be more apt – a pure rejection of constraint, expressed outwards into the world. But it’s a common misconception that you only come out once. And just as you constantly come out to the world, the pressure of the world constantly falls back onto you.

The cishetereonormative construct of society damages everyone who exists within it. Those who perform its bizarre rituals are as affected as those who don’t. But to those who exist outside its parameters, the damage inflicted upon them can be horrifying. Murder, suicide, isolation from a complete life. Dehumanisation – transgressors must be terminated.

For me, born into relative peace and privilege at the cusp of history, shame kept me from expressing feminine as a child and teenager. Shame had me denying an attraction to men for over twenty years. A deeply subconscious shame has kept me from Pride. Despite truly living the best three years past.

And I can’t actually explain why I felt such intense shame in a way that satisfies me. Aside from the perpetual message from all of society to conform or perish.

Our society is structured such that every human must perform a precisely designated role, in the service of capital. Our culture is hyper-gendered and fatally cisheteronormative; religious justifications of the essential masculine and feminine have given way to a self-fulfilling cultural construct. And yet, its construction still reinforces the old world.

And I wonder if the only reason why queer shame is beaten so deep into every person because the deconstruction of that system dismantles the supposed legitimacy of extreme power. If queer humans did not stand beneath “straight” humans, but rather we stood together, undivided by artificial boundaries, the force of pure humanity would silence those who exploit prejudice for the rest of time.

The terror of fascism is quickly returning, and no decent person is safe from its march. The only way to win is to purge from your mind the remnants of hopeless tradition, and to see and join a single humanity, united.