In February, I was at my computer refreshing the National Park Service webpage for the Stonewall National Monument in New York City with a sense of foreboding. By Valentine’s Day, the agency had quietly removed the “T” and “Q” in “LGBTQ+” from descriptions of the site’s significance. Designated in 2016, Stonewall is the first United States landmark dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights and history. A targeted act of bureaucratic editing attempted to alter that narrative. Anyone who knows queer history understands that erasure rarely begins with a blaze; it often begins with omission.
As a nonbinary and transgender artist who has spent more than two decades making work about systems of power that circulate around sex and gender, the removal landed like a direct threat. So I did what artists do: I responded in my studio. Using salvaged building materials removed during the renovation of the new Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, I constructed a six-foot-tall (~1.8-meter-tall) letter, titled “Capital T,” a literal restoration of what the federal government attempted to disappear.
Built from materials that once formed a queer dance floor at the original Stonewall Inn, the sculpture reminds me that resistance is tactile, heavy, and unruly. Motivated to act up, I joined Fall of Freedom as an artist initiator in August. Fall of Freedom is an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation. This week, we are activating a nationwide wave of creative resistance. In joining the initiators, I stepped into a national movement of artists, organizers, and cultural workers mobilizing against sweeping attacks on civil liberties.
What began as a conversation among a handful of artists has grown into a decentralized creative action, spanning more than 600 events across the country on November 21 and 22, including the opening of An Incomplete Haunting at 601Artspace in New York City, where “Capital T” will make its public debut. Its scale evidences a broader truth: This moment demands collective response, not individualism.
Like many trans people, my personal and professional life have been subject to heightened scrutiny this year. As an artist, educator, and consultant in the philanthropic space, I have watched students, family, and clients navigate intensifying surveillance and urgency. Institutions that once championed risk-taking have caved. Funding is threatened, exhibitions are canceled, and students are arrested for peacefully protesting the genocide in Palestine. The current administration’s posture has infected every space I inhabit. Places I once relied on, as bell hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress (1994), to “practice freedom” have instead become extensions of state-sanctioned violence.
These tactics are not new. Artists have long been targeted when governments drift toward authoritarianism. In the early ’90s, the NEA Four (Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck) became symbols of the government’s willingness to punish queer expression under the guise of “decency.” Exhibitions were defunded or canceled, and individual federal funding for artists effectively ended. A timeline compiled by the National Coalition Against Censorship traces a lineage of punitive backlash that runs directly into the present.
In 2015, I worked at Manhattan’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, where we presented IRREVERENT: A Celebration of Censorship, curated by Jennifer Tyburczy. Through her research, I gained deeper insight into how artists across decades have met suppression with innovation, defiance, and humor. Censorship doesn’t diminish creative expression. It forces it to evolve.
The danger we face now feels both familiar and sharpened. We know what happens when power-hungry regimes target knowledge production and expression. Consider the destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1933. In one of the earliest Nazi attacks on knowledge, the world’s largest archive of LGBTQ+ research, housing decades of scientific work, case studies, and community networks, was reduced to ash. The loss created a generational gap in transgender healthcare and scholarship that we live in today. I hear echoes of that fire as legislators in the US attempt to ban access to gender-affirming care, escalate surveillance of clinicians, and criminalize educational materials. History is screaming its warnings; ignoring them will not liberate us.
Participating in Fall of Freedom is one way I have chosen to respond. A core ethos of the project is the belief that creativity, in and of itself, is a practice of resistance. Our conversations emphasize both taking a stand against censorship and exerting our creative labor in solidarity with those being targeted, silenced, and disappeared. What I have experienced inside this initiative is not only a call to action, but also an invitation into connection and repair. Across regions and disciplines, people are weaving a fabric of care, imagination, and joyful defiance. The coming activations include installations, performances, workshops, exhibitions, film screenings, public actions, banned-book readings, virtual engagements, dance performances, concerts, and many more creative gatherings. Art is not a luxury in moments like this; it is a survival strategy.
As we approach November 21 and 22, my hope is that the public understands this moment not only as a crisis but as an invitation. We cannot fight fascism with quiet compliance, but we can confront it with coordinated participation. Explore the interactive map and find an event near you. Show up for local artists and cultural workers in your region. Join creative communities building coalitions across geography and identity. You don’t need to make a six-foot-tall sculpture to resist; artists are making work for you, the viewing public, and we need you with us.
When the government attempted to erase transgender contributions to American history, my impulse was to rebuild our presence from discarded materials. Under current duress, it is difficult to stay hopeful, yet there is an enormous opportunity in building new futures together. That is the work ahead: taking what we have and constructing something stronger, clearer, and insistent. Because art matters, and courage is contagious.
