(https://www.peacebuttons.info/)

Some bits from each one since the last time. Still NSFW. Tissue alert for some.

Queer History 128: The Day The Initiative Died by Wendy🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🌈

Also The Day California Told Bigots to Go Fuck Themselves Read on Substack

How Teachers, Ronald Reagan, and Harvey Milk Crushed the Most Dangerous Anti-Gay Ballot Measure in American History

Picture this: It’s 1978, and a conservative state legislator from Orange County wants to ban every gay and lesbian teacher in California. Not just fire the ones who are out—he wants to hunt down anyone who might be gay, anyone who supports gay rights, anyone who so much as suggests that maybe gay people deserve basic human dignity. This wasn’t just about removing teachers. This was about erasing an entire community from public life.

John Briggs thought he had the perfect plan. Fresh off Anita Bryant’s homophobic “Save Our Children” crusade in Florida, he figured California would be easy pickings. He was dead fucking wrong. On November 7, 1978, California voters didn’t just reject Proposition 6—they obliterated it. The Briggs Initiative went down by more than a million votes, losing even in Briggs’s own conservative Orange County stronghold.

Behind that victory was one of the most unlikely coalitions in American political history: a martyred gay supervisor, a future Republican president, grassroots activists, Catholic bishops, and thousands of teachers who refused to let fear win. This is the story of how they did it—and why it matters more than ever today. (snip-MORE)

Queer History 131: Michelangelo by Wendy🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🌈

The Divine Cock: Why Michelangelo Was Almost Certainly Gay as Hell Read on Substack

You think you know Michelangelo? The guy who painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling and carved David from a massive chunk of marble? Here’s what they don’t teach you in art history class: the Renaissance master was probably queer as a three-dollar bill, and the evidence is splattered all over his life’s work like paint on a studio floor.

For nearly 250 years, Michelangelo’s own family censored his love letters and poems, changing every masculine pronoun to feminine ones to hide the uncomfortable truth that the “divine one” was divinely attracted to other men. When scholars finally uncovered the original texts in the 1890s, they found a treasure trove of homoerotic passion that would make even modern romance novels blush. (snip-MORE-do go read it!)

Queer History & Culture 127: Alan Turing by Wendy🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🌈

A tortured genius whose code-breaking saved millions, only to be destroyed by the very society he protected Read on Substack

The bastards killed him. Not with bullets or blades, but with something far more insidious—the slow, methodical destruction of a man’s soul through legal persecution, chemical castration, and the systematic erasure of his humanity. Alan Mathison Turing didn’t just die on June 7, 1954; he was murdered by a society so goddamn backward that it chose to destroy one of the greatest minds in human history rather than accept that he loved men.

(snip)

The Making of a Revolutionary Mind

Born in 1912 to a British colonial family, Turing’s brilliance blazed early and fierce. At Sherborne School, while other boys were playing cricket and learning to be proper English gentlemen, young Alan was already wrestling with mathematical concepts that would have made university professors weep. His first love affair wasn’t with numbers, though—it was with Christopher Morcom, a fellow student whose death from tuberculosis would haunt Turing for the rest of his tragically short life.

That early loss carved something deep into Turing’s psyche. Here was a boy-genius, already grappling with his sexuality in an era when homosexuality was not just taboo but literally criminal, watching the person he loved waste away and die. The philosophical implications would torment him: if consciousness could be snuffed out so easily, what made it real in the first place? This question would drive his later work on artificial intelligence, but it also planted the seeds of a profound existential loneliness that would follow him like a shadow.

At King’s College, Cambridge, Turing found his intellectual home among the mathematical elite, but he also found something else: a community of gay men who lived in the shadows, speaking in codes, loving in secret. The irony is fucking brutal—here was a man who would become history’s greatest codebreaker, learning his first lessons in cryptography from the necessity of hiding his own identity. (snip-MORE, it should be known)

Queer History 129: The Genital Mutilation of the 1880s by Wendy🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🌈

Read on Substack

In the fucking darkness of the 1880s, American medicine—that supposed bastion of healing and hope—turned into a goddamn chamber of horrors for LGBTQIA+ people. What began as medical “curiosity” quickly devolved into systematic torture disguised as treatment, launching over a century of medical persecution that would destroy countless lives and shatter the trust between queer people and healthcare forever.

The medical establishment, drunk on its newfound authority and desperate to appear scientific, decided that love between same-sex individuals was a disease to be cured. These weren’t healers—they were executioners in white coats, armed with instruments of torture and backed by the full weight of societal approval. The brutality that followed would make the Inquisition blush. (snip-MORE)

Queer History 130: The Lavender Scare by Wendy🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🌈

When Joe McCarthy Declared War on America’s LGBTQIA+ Read on Substack

n 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy stood before a crowd in Wheeling, West Virginia, and launched what would become the most sustained attack on LGBTQIA+ Americans in the nation’s history. While his speech focused on supposed Communist infiltration of the State Department, McCarthy’s paranoid rantings about “security risks” would soon expand into a full-scale witch hunt against homosexual federal employees. This wasn’t just political theater—this was the birth of the Lavender Scare, a systematic campaign of terror that would destroy thousands of lives and poison American democracy for decades.

McCarthy didn’t just stumble upon anti-gay persecution as a political tool—he weaponized it with surgical precision. The bastard understood that while Americans might eventually get tired of hunting Communists, they would never tire of persecuting queers. Homophobia was the gift that kept on giving, a renewable resource of hatred that could fuel his political ambitions indefinitely. What began as anti-Communist hysteria quickly metastasized into something far more insidious: the systematic elimination of LGBTQIA+ people from American public life. (snip-MORE)