By Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis–
For many of us, the first ten days of the second Trump administration have left us either shocked, fearful, angry, sad, or any combination of those feelings. It’s a natural reaction to the head-spinning number of brazen actions that the new administration has already taken. Indeed, it’s likely that Trump and his allies intended their actions to have that effect on us and leave us feeling hopeless and defeated.
When we learned that some people had gathered atop Bernal Hill to release a collective “primal scream” at the very moment Trump was sworn in on January 20, 2025, it seemed to us like an appropriate and amusingly unconventional, communal first response to the new administration. We recalled the famous “scream scene” in Cabaret, the award-winning 1972 movie musical set in Berlin during the ominous beginning of the Nazis’ rise to power, based on a book by the renowned gay writer Christopher Isherwood who actually lived in the German capital at that time. In the scene, Liza Minelli’s character Sally Bowles grabs the arm of the character modeled after Isherwood, and dashes with him to the spot beneath a railroad bridge where she periodically comes to scream at the top of her lungs at the moment the deafening noise of the passing train drowns out all else. In the scene, Bowles lets it all out.
But, of course, we cannot continuously scream physically—or metaphorically—for the next four years. Doing so would impede our ability to maintain our personal well-being and to limit the harm that Trump and his allies inflict on so many of us, as well as the earth itself. While pretending that nothing detrimental is going on or always looking the other way is no solution, being in a state of perpetual rage solves nothing and interferes with our ability to see openings for hope or resistance.
Many things could be considered counterpoints—and sometimes complements—to screaming; laughter and music immediately come to mind. Perhaps the polar opposite of screaming may seem to be silent meditation. But it, too, in a very different way, invites something elemental deep within us to come forth and be seen and heard. Many meditation techniques offer a person the opportunity to follow the sensations of their breath, connect to the felt sense of their body, and let go for a period of time to attachment to the myriad thoughts and emotions that arise in the mind and heart. Many people experience over time that their minds quiet and more space opens up within them.
When we sit down to meditate on any given day, we might have a pretty good idea of what we expect our minds to do based on what has been going on for us that day, but we don’t know for sure what will happen. It’s kind of like the beginning of the Trump administration. We have strong indications of what they want to take place, but we don’t know how things will actually unfold and how unexpected events, or our active engagement, may alter expected outcomes.
In meditation, when a person gives themselves a period of time to be free from following their thoughts and emotions to their logical conclusions, insights and creative thoughts and solutions often arise that had been obscured behind frenetic mental activity. And meditation can also allow us to experience the ever elusive “present moment” whose evanescence can ironically offer nurturing sustenance.
Another reaction to the advent of the second Trump administration is to try to reassure ourselves and others that everything will eventually turn out fine. Doing so in a pollyannaish way is too facile.
However, Stuart and I as well as countless other queer people have seen our community confronted with seemingly impossible odds—such as the Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick legitimizing the criminalization of our love, the horrors of the AIDS epidemic, the passage of Prop. 8 along with ballot measures in 30 other states that denied queer people the right to marry. Sometimes, it seemed as if change for the better would not come in our lifetimes. Although countless people suffered senselessly along the way, things did change. We must never relinquish this hope. We cannot be assured that the arc of the moral universe will eventually bend toward justice, but maintaining hope that it will is vital to us in the present moment.
Although LGBTIQ+ Americans today face nothing as drastic as what queer people faced under the Nazis 80 years ago, the observations of the Nazi concentration camp survivor and writer Viktor Frankl about how to survive the camps have relevance today. Frankl (who sadly pathologized homosexuality) famously wrote that, when he witnessed some prisoners’ generosity toward others even under such dire circumstances, he learned that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Sometimes that inner freedom may move us to do extraordinary things; at other times, negative thoughts and emotions may be so strong that realistically our only choice in a given moment is to try to refrain from acting on them.
The English translation of Frankl’s account is entitled “Man’s Search for Meaning,” but the original German title offers far wiser counsel: “ … Still Say Yes to Life.” It comes from song lyrics a Jewish prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp wrote when the SS ordered the prisoners to compose a song that they would be forced to sing at roll call and when marching in seemingly unbearable conditions to their forced labor assignments. After the SS terminated this usage of the song, groups of prisoners on their own began singing it to themselves as a song of hope. The complete line of the song from which the title is taken is: “We will still say yes to life, for one day the day will come: then we will be free!”
Today, we, the LGBTIQ+ community, and many other communities, must say “yes” to life as well.
John Lewis and Stuart Gaffney, together for over three decades, were plaintiffs in the California case for equal marriage rights decided by the California Supreme Court in 2008. Their leadership in the grassroots organization Marriage Equality USA contributed in 2015 to making same-sex marriage legal nationwide.
626 and Beyond – Leaders of the Emerging Resistance
Published on January 30, 2025
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