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I think one of the reasons that it's important to think about this right now is, yeah, sure,

partly because actually some things, like that, that feeling, that kind of hunch, that sort of

sense, and particularly, I think the kind of resurgence of references or cultural interest

in a lavender scare, like, there is something that that's telling us, right? But I think,

you know, precisely what it's telling us is not that we're living in a 1950-style lavender

scare or that we moved on from 1950-style lavender scare. But my my guess is more

that some of the political dynamics and some of the unanswered questions, deliberately

unanswered questions from that time period, are the structuring kind of premises for political

conflicts that are playing out in real time today.

And so I think like it's important to go back to that time period in part because the kind of project of official state homophobia,

that kind of way that it implies like the state can just, like, literally repressive kind of role with a minority population.

That whole kind of, like, arrangement, that whole kind of chessboard for understanding sexual politics was constructed during the lavender scare.

Like, that's the time period in which we not only get, you know,

official federal policies on homosexuality.

But we also, that's the time period where a certain class of gay people invent the

idea of gay people and lesbian people as a minority group in a lot of pretty

complicated and often fairly racist ways,

vis-à-vis the Black Freedom movement in particular.

And so it's like, I think there's that.

And then just to say, like, there are these intervening histories that have basically spun

the liberal story we hear about the lavender scare. And I think probably a first wave of that

...