You're listening to the microversion of the Savage Love cast at Savage.loaf.

Willem Orandus was an author and an illustrator. He was born in 1894 in Holland,

and he was a gay man. After the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, Willem joined the resistance.

He started an underground newspaper and put his skills as an illustrator to work,

forging identity documents, or Dutch Jews trying to escape the Gestapo.

But the documents he forged could be checked against the originals, which were kept on file

at a central population registry in Amsterdam. So Willem, along with 13 other members of the

resistance, three of them gay men, blew the building up. They destroyed hundreds of thousands

of identity records and saved countless lives. Willem was ultimately betrayed by someone no one

knows who he was arrested, and he was executed. Before his execution, Willem told his lawyer

that he had a message he wanted delivered to his fellow Dutch citizens. Tell the people,

homosexuals are not cowards. Unsaturday night a man walked into a gay bar in Colorado City with an

AR-15 and a handgun. He shot and killed five people and wounded two dozen others, and he might

have killed more people. But two patrons in that gay bar, according to people who have seen security

footage, rushed the shooter, one grabbed the shooter's handgun and clobbered him with it.

The two patrons then held the shooter down until the police arrived. On the sexuals are not cowards.

Bisexuals are not cowards. Trans people are not cowards. Drag queens are not cowards.

Gay bars are supposed to be a safe space. People who hate gay people, people who hate queer people,

they tell us to keep it private, behind closed doors. Some place they don't have to see it.

And the doors of a gay bar, those are doors we keep it behind. Gay bars are a place we can go

to be together without bothering them, without bothering the haters, without annoying them with

the fact of our existence. When we're behind those doors, they can forget we exist.

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