We Were Once Illegal. We Can Do It Again.

We Were Once Illegal. We Can Do It Again.

by kelley dupps

At many points in history, being queer was treated as a crime. Laws named our loves and bodies as unlawful. Courts labeled desire as disease. Police raids closed the doors to the few places we could gather. These legal and social systems forced us into secrecy, into coded lives, into margins where survival and community became the same thing.

Those conditions are not only past. The gains of recent decades such as decriminalization in many places, anti-discrimination laws, marriage equality, visibility in media; were won by struggle: protests, organizing, lawsuits, mutual aid, and the bravery of people who refused to be erased. The existence of these gains can create the comforting story that progress is steady and irreversible. But history warns us otherwise. Laws, courts, political majorities, and public opinion can shift. The fact that queer existence was once illegal in so many places shows how quickly rights can be revoked, how swiftly stigma can be re-legalized when power reasserts itself.

We find ourselves here again because the systems that once criminalized us never fully disappeared. They adapted. New laws and policies that restrict gender identity, limit access to healthcare, or target transgender youth are the latest forms of old logic that police bodies and gender. Undoing rights through courts or legislatures, rolling back protections, and criminalizing survival behaviors (from sex work to homelessness) are all modern echoes of the same patterns that sanctioned queer lives as illicit.

This regression is not accidental. It is fueled by political movements that exploit fear, by institutions that protect some bodies while exposing others, and by media and rhetoric that paint queer existence as a threat to “traditional” values. Intersectional inequalities make the rollback sharper for those already most vulnerable: trans women of color, low-income queer people, queer immigrants, and disabled queer people face compounded harms when the law turns hostile.

Practical solidarity matters. Supporting queer-led grassroots groups, amplifying the needs of trans and nonbinary people, funding legal defenses, and building coalitions with labor, racial justice, disability justice, immigrant, and housing movements makes resistance stronger and more durable. Protecting queer youth in schools, ensuring access to gender-affirming care and safe housing, and pushing for laws that explicitly include marginalized identities are concrete steps that reduce vulnerability and prevent a replay of past criminalization.

Remembering how criminalization operated serves as a decoder ring for quickly recognizing what’s happening now. How laws, medical authorities, and policing enforced secrecy, punishment, and shame. Recognizing this trend helps us spot the same mechanisms reappearing. Archiving stories, centering oral histories, and teaching this past prevents complacency and honors those who fought and suffered so others could live more openly.

We were once illegal. That history should neither depress nor console us. It should sharpen our resolve. The same courage, creativity, and solidarity that overturned past injustices can meet the threats now. If we act with care for those most vulnerable and with the long arc taught by history, we can push back, reimagine our relationship to power, and make sure that when our rights are threatened, we do not comply; we organize, resist, and continue to exist.