Before rainbow flags fluttered from corporate storefronts and dating apps put
desire in our pockets, the gay community survived through institutions it built itself.
They were imperfect, messy, sometimes dangerous, but they were ours. Bookstores,
bars, bathhouses, theatres, newsletters, switchboards, and back rooms formed an
infrastructure of survival long before “visibility” was a promise anyone could trust.
These institutions did not arise from abundance. They emerged from exclusion.
Shut out of churches, schools, unions, and often our own families, queer people built
parallel systems to meet needs the dominant culture refused to acknowledge. What
developed was not just a social scene, but a shadow civic life, one that carried history,
ethics, pleasure, and care from one generation to the next.
I often think about gay bookstores, because they were never just retail spaces. For
many of us, they were the first place we encountered our own reflection without shame.
Walking into one felt like stepping into a room where the rules had quietly changed.
These shops didn’t simply sell books; they curated lifelines. A paperbound novel,
a slim volume of poetry, a stapled zine could whisper: you exist, and others like you
exist too. Clerks acted as informal historians and guides, slipping recommendations
across counters with the discretion of conspirators. Bulletin boards advertised support
groups, activist meetings, and apartments that would rent to “friends.” When many of
these stores disappeared, priced out by rising rents, hollowed out by online retail, we
lost physical archives of queer thought and rare public spaces where queerness was
assumed, not explained.
Gay bars, for all their contradictions, functioned as town halls. They were places
to exchange news, mourn losses, flirt dangerously, and feel briefly unafraid. In them,
elders and newcomers shared the same air. Culture was passed down not through
manuals but observation: how to signal interest, how to watch for danger, how to leave
together, how to stay alive. Police raids, moral panics, and later gentrification made
these spaces perpetually fragile. As mainstream acceptance grew, many bars closed, not
because they failed, but because the world around them decided they were no longer
necessary. Their disappearance left behind a hollow question I still feel:

where do we gather now?
Bathhouses, perhaps the most misunderstood of these institutions, were not
merely sites of sex. They were sites of intimacy and recognition, especially for those who
lived closeted lives. During the early years of the AIDS crisis, many became informal

centers of education, distributing safer sex information and condoms long before public
health systems responded with urgency or compassion. When fear and stigma shut them
down, it wasn’t only sex that was criminalized. It was a form of embodied belonging that
had no easy replacement.
Beyond physical spaces, the queer community built networks that ran on paper
and phone lines. Newsletters were mailed in plain envelopes. Classified ads were written
in code. Hotlines were staffed by volunteers who listened through the night to callers
wrestling with identity, isolation, and terror. These systems were slow by today’s
standards, but they were intentional. To find community, you had to risk being known
by a bookstore clerk, a hotline volunteer, or a stranger across a bar. The internet
promised speed and access, but it also dissolved many of these structures before we fully
understood what they provided beyond information.
What makes these lost institutions worth remembering isn’t nostalgia, but
function. They trained generations of queer people in how to care for one another when
no one else would. They taught us how to pass down knowledge, how to grieve
collectively, and how to celebrate loudly in a world that preferred our silence. They
provided continuity, allowing culture and memory to survive even when individuals
were lost to violence or disease.
Today, queerness is more visible than ever, yet many of us report feeling more
isolated. Algorithms replace gathering places. Dating apps prioritize efficiency over
intimacy. Pride events balloon while local spaces quietly vanish. Rights exist on paper
while community infrastructure erodes in practice. We are told we are free, but often we
are alone.
Oppression has not disappeared; it has simply changed tactics. It is quieter now,
more bureaucratic, more polite (unfortunately). It shows up in funding cuts, housing
precarity, healthcare barriers, and moral panics recycled under new names. It tells us we
are included while quietly removing the structures that once kept us alive. The danger is
not just hatred; it is neglect.
I believe the queer community survives oppression not by waiting to be
protected, but by rebuilding infrastructure with intention. Not everything needs to look
like the past, but it does need to serve the same purpose: connection, care, and
continuity. We need spaces that are not optimized for profit, but for presence, spaces
where queer life can unfold slowly, awkwardly, honestly.
Today, that looks like community libraries and archives that treat our stories as
sacred. It might look like sober queer spaces, intergenerational housing, mutual aid
networks, and skill-sharing circles. It might look like small gatherings in living rooms,

reading groups, potlucks, choirs, covens, and collectives, places where people can be
seen not as profile pictures spir out by an algorithm, but as neighbors.
Coming together now requires resisting the idea that visibility is enough. It
requires remembering that rights without relationships are fragile. When laws shift, and
they always do, it is the community that catches us. The queer people who survived
before us did not survive because they were accepted. They survived because they found
each other and built something sturdy enough to hold grief, desire, fear, and joy all at
once.
To overcome oppression in the modern age, we must practice being inconvenient
to systems that profit from our fragmentation. We must choose slowness in a culture of
speed, care in a culture of extraction, and solidarity searching in a culture that rewards
isolation. We must invest in one another, not as brands, not as demographics, not as a
hunt through apps to find the next best lay, but as people whose lives are bound
together.
Remembering the lost institutions of the queer community is not about longing
for a vanished world. It is about recognizing an unfinished project. Survival was never
just about being allowed to exist; it was about building places where existence meant
something. Places where lives were witnessed, stories were kept, and no one had to
invent themselves alone.
Rights matter. Visibility matters. But infrastructure matters too. It always has.
And it is not too late to build it again, together.

Eccentric and advanced for her time, Dolores Cannon, leader of the new age movement,
has always been an idol of mine. She spent most of her life promoting theories relating to
alternate realities, past life regression, consciousness, and alien contact. She was a
mother, mentor, teacher, and self-trained hypnotist who claimed to make contact with
Nostradamus and extra-terrestrial life through hypnosis and telekinesis. Little did anyone
know the legacy she would leave behind.
Dolores Eilene Cannon was born on Wednesday, April 15th, 1931, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her
mother was Mary Elizabeth, and her father was Arthur Taylor. She grew up in a very stable environment with supportive, somewhat successful parents. In 1947 at just the age of 16 Dolores completed her education. It's said she was always fascinated in spirituality and the metaphysical throughout her studies.
Many discredit Dolores because she didn’t have a traditional documented higher
education. She was self-trained in hypnosis and declared her education came from
decades of self-training. Throughout the years of self-training Dolores developed her own
method of hypnosis. After her education, she continued to focus on her fascination of
consciousness and past lives she called “Higher Self.” She claimed her self-training
focused primarily on healing and spiritual knowledge.
Dolores achieved many accomplishments throughout her life. She founded Ozark
Mountain Publishing which she had many books published such as “The Custodians” and “Between Death and Life.” She has taught at halls and universities throughout the United States. Dolores used her form of hypnosis to heal people individually. She gave group lectures and motivational speeches as well. Cannon knew what her purpose here in the physical was and she pursued and shared mindfulness while teaching and healing
throughout her whole life. Because of her teachings related to reincarnation, alternative
realities, aliens – including her starseed concept that beings from other galaxies occupy
human bodies on earth, and regression therapies; Dolores has become a resource to a
number of conspiracy theories.
Dolores spent the later part of her years teaching through personal experiences and
evolving as a role model. She felt most comfortable helping and healing people. She was a pioneer and respected figure with many accomplishments in the areas of past-live
regression, hypnotherapy, metaphysics, and alternative healing . Unfortunately at the age
of 83 Dolores Cannon passed away due to head injuries she sustained during an accident.
Her legacy will always be that of one who was excited to help and teach. Delores's only
child is her daughter, Julia Cannon. Julia carries on her mother’s legacy today by teaching
the gifts her mother has left behind. Julie is the CEO of Ozark Mountain Publishing and still spreading her mother’s word to this day.

The rights of people
Who differ
from your view of normalcy
Or worthiness
are not a political
debate.

But for a moment
I’ll

P
L
A
Y

along
and
pretend

I’d waste my time
Debating
stripping
the people
of
Their
Rights

But first allow
Me to ask you this
if a specific
type of person
doesn’t exist
By your own words
Why would
You
waste your
time on
debating their
rights?

I’ll beg to be
The first to say
It’s easier for the likes of
you
To
Deny someone’s existence
before you admit
You view
things with a bigot lens.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Poet’s Note

“Lens of Bigotry” was written on 1/12/2026 by Axton Mitchell, for the moments when people try to dress cruelty up as conversation. When someone claims a group of people does not exist, yet still wants to debate their right to live, to love, or even to their identity .

That contradiction is not confusion, it is a strategy.

Denying someone’s existence makes it easier to deny their humanity. Once a person becomes an idea, a category, or a talking point, stripping their rights starts to feel reasonable to those already looking through a distorted lens.

This poem is not here to negotiate anyone’s worth. It is here to expose the trick. To ask why some lives are treated like hypotheticals while others are assumed to be real by default.

If this piece feels uncomfortable, that discomfort is doing its job. It means the lens is being questioned.

HTTPS://Poeaxtry-link.my.canva.site/

I’ll tell you now, I’m not one
who’s used to living in fear…

Not often have I found myself this
afraid… compared to how I have felt these last three
hundred
sixty‑five
days…

I refuse to
exist quietly
while the powers that
be
use pink gum
erasers,
white‑out, and invisible ink…

The white man’s final attempt
to remove their
shameful history…
erasing people like
you and me…

Can’t just agree
their
ancestors’ actions
were disguising when
dissected transparently…

Instead, they’d rather
take the spot of the oppressor
in history…
I know one thing…
it could never fucking be me…

No…
I can’t go quietly…

They have
guns…

We have
whistles…

We
are being
murder
in the streets…

________________________________________________________________________________________
Poet’s Note

Written on 1/9/2026 this poem was written from the place where fear and refusal meet. The kind of fear that does not make you hide, but makes you realize how much is at stake.

“Shameful, Silence” is about what happens when history starts being erased in real time. When people in power try to scrub away the evidence of harm with soft tools, pink erasers, white-out, and invisible ink, as if violence can be made polite by being made invisible.

The silence they want is not peace. It is compliance.

This poem refuses that.

It speaks to the moment when staying quiet feels more dangerous than being heard. When whistles, voices, and truth are all that stand between the living and those who would rather we disappear.

This is not a call for chaos. It is a declaration of presence. Of memory. Of not letting anyone decide who is allowed to exist or whose suffering counts.

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