Okay, real talk:
It looks like things are going to get really bad for minorities in the near future, and they probably won't get better for a while.

It's easy to give up all hope, so lets talk honestly about what's coming and what we can do to survive.

A lot of queers who only came out in the last 10-15 years have never dealt with the kind of world that's coming, and it can look hopeless staring down the gun at civil rights rollbacks. And I won't lie: it's really, really gonna hurt.

But our community can survive.

I transitioned in a conservative backwater in the '90s. I endured discrimination, humiliation, violence, poverty, and sexual assault. I don't say that be be depressing, I say that because I survived hell thanks largely to the power of community and mutual support.

What I'm about to say applies more to the LGBTQ community. While we'll all have difficulties soon, the queer community faces very different challenges and advantages than racial o religious minorities.

Also: What I'm about to say is going to cover a lot of shit that twitter hates, like appeasement. This isn't about being a model minority, it's about being strategic, picking your fights, and survival. High standards are a luxury and we might not get that again for a while.

So if shit goes bad and we loss legal protections, medical access, marriage, or worse, what can we do?

Here are the major actions our community has taken in the past:
-Overt Action
-Discrete Action/Education
-Community Action
-Woodworking

OVERT ACTION
This means putting your ass on the line with protests, lobbying politicians, putting on parades, and pursuing lawsuits. This is important work, it gets attention, it can make flashy gains. All good. But high-visibility.

Overt Action also makes you a target. It can also make your family a target. And your friends. If things get really bad, these are the people targeted first, because they're the easiest to find.

So be cautious doing overt action and consider who can be affected by your visibility. I know the internet adores a glorious death, but we're queers not klingons. It's okay to not make a target of yourself.

DISCRETE ACTION/EDUCATION
Discrete actions are the quiet actions you can take without putting your name in the news, or only on the news in ways the straights love. This means going to your family members of friends to patiently teach them about terminology and culture...

It also means creating queer media intended for straight consumption to foster empathy, and working in broader education to teach a new generation via metaphor. Aside from education, it means working in less-glamorous advocacy like contract law to find space for queer to survive

Discrete action can still make you target, but generally on a smaller scale. It can mean losing your job when, say, the parents of the classes you teach find out you're queer. When it doesn't get you fire, it can and will hobble your career and hold you back.

Discrete action also include less-than-legal activities to undermine abusive authorities—losing or modifying paperwork, sabotaging vehicles, diverting resources—which is dangerous in a hostile nation b/c if you get caught, you WILL SUFFER disproportionately.

DON'T GET CAUGHT.

COMMUNITY ACTION
Community action means focusing inward rather than outward, sheltering and supporting your community rather than trying to change the world. This means running charities and housing groups, professional training, support groups or just running a queer bar

As a nation gets hostile, community work usually involves finding creative ways to get around official notice or funding. In the '50s, '60s, and 70s, that meant an understanding with organized crime. We aren't going to have the luxury of choosing perfect allies.

Community action can still lead to losing your job or legal consequences, but the risk is greatly reduced because your efforts are inward-facing, and most of the charges you'll face will probably be misdemeanors. Your bigger risk will be vigilantes and an angry public

WOODWORKING
The last major strategy is woodworking, as in "blending into the woodwork." You smile and eat shit and pretend you're not queer when straight people can hear you. It's safe, but often humiliating, but sometimes what you need is safety.

In an era of out-and-proud uncompromising queerness that we've recently enjoyed, there's a lot of anger at the idea of swallowing your pride and hiding, but it kept a lot of us alive in bad times.

If you do hide, do what you can to shelter others and archive resources that will become scarce: books, films, TV shows, government archives and documents, community records. If you survive, you're the only ones who will carry these things forward.

Whichever of these options you pick, we as a community are going to need to be a lot more strategic about how we interact with each other and the straights. We're going to need to learn to curb the community infighting to get shit done and protect each other.

Our two major goals if the Supreme Court it weaponized against us or Trump goes full fascist and the same as recovering from any disaster:
1) Survive
2) Rebuild

It sucks, and its going to hurt, but the Nazis couldn't wipe us out, so Trump's halfwit nazi fanclub isn't going to.

Survival means picking the level of discretion you're comfortable with and taking appropriate precautions: Know who you can trust, have an emergency kit you can throw in your car and haul ass if necessary, have a fallback position for yourself and your loved ones

In a perfect world, you'll have a friend in another country who can offer you shelter, but don't overlook rural friends who can help you lay low. If things get really grim, look into camping supplies.

Look into ways to communicate that can't be easily monitored like encryption but also physical letters. Consider a storage space you can rent ahead of time for any materials you want to archive, just in case conservatives neighbors burn your house down (or, y'know, flooding).

Rebuilding is also important, but you can only rebuild if you're alive. Rebuilding means looking at what we did the first time around while also looking at where we fell down and how the monsters succeeded so we can stop them from winning again

Until it's time to rebuild, take care of yourself. It's not 100% on you to save us all. Anything you do is something, so stay safe, comfort yourself and your friends, and do whatever you can no matter how insignificant you think it might be. Because it might keep someone alive

Be safe.

We need you.

I love you.