GLR January-February 2025

cluded frequent use of the wrong pronoun to refer to Ms. Roem. By all accounts, the Democrat ran a brilliant cam paign, making herself as visible and available as possible, even as her opponent refused to debate. Had they done so, Roem may have been forgiven for uttering those immortal words: “I’m your worst nightmare.” January-February 2018 The End of Sex A prominent white nationalist, Nick Fuentes is telling his male supporters that having sex with women is— wait for it—gay! He makes this astonishing assertion thus: “Having sex in itself is gay. ... Think about it this way: What’s gayer than being like ‘I need cuddles. I need kisses. I need to spend time with a woman.’ That’s very sus[pect].” In other words, the sex act is a girly thing, so by abstaining totally, Fuentes boasts: “That makes me really more heterosexual than anyone.” A leader of the right-wing “Groyper Army,” a vio lently racist, anti-Semitic group that participated in the Jan. 6th

uprising, Fuentes has admitted that he once kissed a girl in high school, but after that he never wanted to kiss a girl again. At some point he starts to sound like General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove , whose disgust over spilling

Nick Fuentes

his “essence” with a woman leads him to start a nuclear war. It’s tempting to see Fuentes’ views as bizarre and unprecedented, but really it’s an old obsession he has stumbled upon, a rejec tion of (heterosexual) sex because of its association with women and the values they represent (love, nurturance, compassion). From the Puritans to the Nazis to today’s white nationalists, it’s baked into authoritarian movements past and present. July-August 2022 Banning Books Is Bo tt omless A school district in Texas actu ally banned the Bible itself for a time—along with Toni Mor rison’s The Bluest Eye, The Diary of Anne Frank , andmany other titles that were found to be in violation of the Keller dis trict’s guidelines on sex and violence. The Bible was banned for its “sexual content, violence, including rape, murder, human sacrifice,” and so on. Some of the 41 banned books were later reinstated, but the point was made: any book is fair game if you look hard enough for something to be offended by, including the very book whose religious teachings these school boards are ostensibly trying to uphold. Needless to add, the book-banning effort in Keller is part of a movement in red states across the U.S., and the resonance with past episodes of book-banning is obvious. Today such bans are a largely sym bolic gesture, since kids find out about sex and gender on the Internet and not at the library. But it has always been about the symbolism. What the Nazis were saying when burning whole libraries was: “If we can burn your books, we can burn you.” And that’s a sobering message in any age. November-December 2022

Also available at yo MAC To learn more a

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January–February 2025

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