As the Trump administration celebrates America’s historic semiquincentennial – the two and a half centuries that have passed since the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence – it’s important to note that the president and his political party have spent the past several years actively erasing LGBTQ+ Americans and other marginalized groups from public history.

The administration removed words like “transgender” and “queer” from the official website for the Stonewall National Monument; it has cut funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and grants that support LGBTQ+ community programs and research of all sorts; Republican school and library boards have removed LGBTQ+-related books from shelves as a form of “pornography;” conservatives are erasing rainbow crosswalks and Pride flagsfrom public display; and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is now suggesting parental warnings for children’s shows that acknowledge the existence of trans people.

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Sadly, queer erasure is nothing new. Historians have long sanitized the life stories of queer historical figures by scrubbing same-sex relationships from their biographies; the American film industry’s Hays Code strictly banned any mention of homosexuality in movies from 1930 to 1961 as a way of preserving public morality; and the U.S. military and federal government have long purged their devoted LGBTQ+ members as alleged threats to cohesion and national security.

Conservative justifications for erasing queerness from public view are always the same: to preserve and protect standards of public decency. But the real reason comes down to anti-LGBTQ+ hostility – our enemies prefer we just simply didn’t exist – and the effect of this erasure is to deny LGBTQ+ people and the wider American public any sense of our power and presence throughout history.

LGBTQ+ people have classically challenged toxic gender roles and social institutions to become more radically inclusive, rejecting outdated notions of what it means to be a man or a woman, confining expectations of how both “should act,” and rules about what people are allowed to do with their bodies, their bedrooms, their hearts, and their lives. 

These radical challenges to pre-existing power systems are the real reason that conservatives seek to erase us from public view: Our existence reminds others that sexuality and gender are mind-bogglingly complex and that non-conformity is an incredibly powerful way to challenge power structures and contemporary culture.

Conservatives want us to forget our own power, to deny that it ever existed. But we refuse.

That’s why, as a way to celebrate our somewhat hidden existence throughout our nation’s history, LGBTQ Nation‘s summer edition will highlight lesser-known LGBTQ+ figures and moments.

Our cover story profiles Jean Malin, the witty and captivating gay New York City performer who embodied the “Pansy Craze” of the 1920s and ’30s, a golden age of queer performance that coincided with the Harlem Renaissance and disappeared with the onset of the Great Depression. Malin and his ilk commanded large audiences and transformed nightlife culture, even as state laws criminalized cross-dressing and same-sex relationships.

Another feature examines the enduring spiritual legacy of Harry Hay, the communist gay rights activist who co-founded one of the earliest gay organizations, the now-defunct Mattachine Society, as well as the radical faeries, a liberationist queer spiritual group that rejects assimilation into capitalist and hetero-supremacist mainstream culture and that continues to thrive at annual gatherings worldwide.

We’re also re-examining the legacy of lesser-known figures like Hosteen Klah, an intersex and Two-Spirit Native American who co-founded one of the nation’s first-ever museums dedicated to preserving Navajo tribal heritage (yet another community that the U.S. government has long sought to erase).

This raises a troubling point: anti-LGBTQ+ governments and historians aren’t just seeking to erase queer people from the record; their attacks extend to Native Americans, Black people, women, labor activists, and other marginalized groups who have long fought for equality. Conservative forces are also advocating for policies that deny us social funding, legal protections, and healthcare, pushing us even further to the margins of society and denying us the right to survive and protect ourselves. 

Put bluntly, erasure is the first step towards eradication. The administration may be starting with us, but it’s quickly expanding its campaign to immigrants, the poor, the non-white, non-Christians, and everyone else they see as “un-American.”

But just as America’s founding started with a revolt against the British monarchy, so too does our queer revolution continue with our refusal to be silent or to participate in our own destruction. Our edition and the work we do every day at LGBTQ Nation are reminders that queer Americans have always existed throughout history, that we have always had immense cultural power, and that we refuse to go quietly into obscurity.