Okay, I hear you say, but why do I give a fuck about this? It might be vaguely historically interesting, and Johannes Kerkorrel was a great queer icon who died too young, but what's relevant about it today?

I was thinking about the upcoming European elections, and the events in the US, and in the UK, and about the genocide in Palestine. I was also thinking about the lecture that Achille Mbembe gave yesterday, which I have listened to three times now, because he's far smarter than I am and so it takes a while for me to understand what he's saying.

The experience of living under fascism is hard. There is no button you can press that says "end fascism", at least not a button that they let non-fascists near.

The experience of living under fascism as one of its favoured children is a lot easier, but still not easy. It's a metaphorical tightrope. If you were White in South Africa, and you pretended to be straight, and you kept your mouth shut and followed orders, they would let you get away with some shit. If you didn't have all that privilege, things would go a lot harder for you - and likewise if you did have that privilege but you tried to protect those who didn't.

If you live in the global North, then I think the next ten years might be uncomfortable for you. You're going to be told that everything's normal, that everything's necessary, that you should avert your eyes from what's happening to the minoritised people on the other side of the barbed wire. A lot of people will avert their eyes, because it's hard to admit that you live under a regime rather than a government, and that your culture has turned fascist.

What's often overlooked is that the Afrikaners who actively took up arms against the regime - Bob Hepple, Hein Grosskopf, etc - didn't come from nowhere. They emerged from families or communities or social spaces that had formed to express dissent. These communities may look like a weak and insufficient response to the brutality of the regime, but they're the springboard for more radical resistance.

Let's build those networks and communities. Whether you do it through cultural rejection, cultural subversion, or by being as queer as hell, find something to remind yourself that what the regime is telling you to do is bullshit.

One day we'll all be as free as a bird.