Queer History 101: The Day They Burned Our History

When books burn, humans follow – a warning we cannot afford to ignore

When I tell you that fascists don't start with violence—they start with books—I'm not speaking in fucking hypotheticals. On May 6th, 1933, while the ink was barely dry on Hitler's chancellorship, young Nazis stormed the Institute of Sexual Research. They ransacked the place that night, and then four days later, they took more than 20,000 books from the Institute’s library to Berlin’s Bebelplatz Square and burned them.

They didn't just burn paper. They burned hope. They burned sanctuary. They burned the world's first transgender clinic and decades of groundbreaking research that might have spared generations of queer people unimaginable suffering.

I'm not being dramatic when I say this is one of the most gut-wrenching episodes in queer history. The visceral image of Magnus Hirschfeld—a gay Jewish doctor and pioneering advocate for gay and transgender rights—watching on television as his life's work went up in flames should haunt us all. Because make no mistake: these weren't military ope…