Dear Revealer readers,

For many Americans the month of June evokes associations with Pride, the yearly tribute to the 1969 Stonewall riots. Last year, countless Americans directed their attention to protests for racial justice that followed the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Now, June can serve as a rallying point for both queer liberation and the struggles for racial equality. As legislators in several states are concurrently working to disenfranchise people of color and strip rights from transgender Americans, more people will hopefully see racial justice and LGBTQ equality as pressing and overlapping issues that deserve our devoted attention.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

This issue of the Revealer considers how past struggles for inclusion remain with us today. The issue opens with Lynne Gerber’s “AIDS and the Blessings of Staying” where she recounts how the minister of a predominantly gay church in San Francisco helped his community respond to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. Next, in “The Yellow Peril’s Second Coming,” Lucas Kwong explores the history of anti-Asian Christian nationalism to help explain the current wave of hate crimes against Asian Americans. Then, in the newest installment of his “From the Margins” column, Daniel José Camacho interviews New York Times bestselling author Keisha Blain about her new book on Fannie Lou Hamer and what Hamer’s struggle for Black voting rights can teach us about today. In a similar vein, in “Billie Holiday, ‘Strange Fruit,’ and the Resilient Myth of Martyrdom,” Tracy Fessenden reviews The United States vs. Billie Holiday and offers a more nuanced portrayal of Holiday, her faith, and her role in fighting racism. And given the current rise in antisemitic incidents across the United States, Noah Berlatsky explores the history of antisemitic themes in science fiction and reviews the popular new SyFy series Resident Alien to see how that show inverts common antisemitic tropes. Finally, in “The Power and Privilege of Catholicism in France” Revealer contributing editor Kali Handelman interviews Elayne Oliphant about her new book The Privilege of Being Banal and what it reveals about Catholicism’s dominance in supposedly secular France and how that contributes to today’s social inequalities.

Our June issue also includes the newest, and already extremely popular, episode of the Revealer podcast: “San Francisco’s ‘AIDS Church’ and the 40^th Anniversary of HIV/AIDS.’” Lynne Gerber joins us to expand on her article from this issue, discuss how a church in San Francisco helped a gay community devastated by sickness, death and constant funerals, and why knowing this history about the AIDS epidemic matters today. You can listen to this powerful episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

As we confront this newest tide of anti-transgender bigotry, racism, antisemitism, and general xenophobia, let us learn from the past to develop a fuller picture of what we are encountering today. None of these problems started during the pandemic or the Trump era, even though both exacerbated what we are witnessing. I hope the articles in our June issue give you a clearer vision of the world we occupy and how we can make it a more just place. Until then, let the protests continue.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.