I’ve been “fired” from an LGBTQ+ History Month gig with a Pride group in corporate America.

Arranged over the past few weeks to coincide with LGBTQ+ History Month, observed every October since 1994, the midday Zoom event was supposed to be a 15-minute presentation about the history and meaning of history months generally and LGBTQ+ History Month specifically, followed by a 15-minute Q&A session.

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All details – date, time, content, modality – were set and we were ready to go, until I received a message from the Pride group stating that the “higher ups” had found a “Charlie Kirk comment” I made, and the presentation had been cancelled.

Googling my name had turned up an essay, written in the aftermath of Kirk’s brutal murder, in which I discussed being on the Charlie Kirk Turning Point USA Professor Watchlist.

In that essay, I unequivocally condemned the September 10 murder (as I condemn all violence and the American gun fetish) and I expressed heartfelt sorrow for the victim’s family and friends. The last sentence of the last paragraph summed up my feelings: “Everything about this moment is heartbreaking.”

Apparently, the “higher ups” felt I had not used the right language and could not be certified a trustworthy citizen.

Pointing out that the murdered political activist was not a saint (no one is), that he had some abhorrent views (truth), and that his organization had placed me on their watchlist of “woke” professors (another truth) had disqualified me from any connection to their company – even tangentially, even for only 30 minutes, even via Zoom, even with their Pride group. (Unfortunately, oligarchs and their underlings almost always cede their moral power to the autocrats.)

Mine is a small story, really. I’m not suffering professionally or financially due to this cancelled presentation. Others have suffered hardships for speaking their minds.

Longtime political commentator and former Bush-Cheney strategist Matthew Dowd, for example, was fired by MSNBC within hours of the murder – for not using the precisely right words on air.

According to an AP report, Dowd was the first of many who over the next week were fired, suspended, or interrogated for comments about Kirk’s death: a reporter in Florida, a comic book writer with a DC Comics deal, educators in Mississippi and Tennessee, an Arizona sports reporter, and a public relations official for an NFL team in North Carolina.

A rural Missouri sheriff’s deputy was terminated over online remarks deemed inappropriate. Harassment against her became so intense that she is fleeing her town of Salem, located in a county that voted 85% for Trump, and relocating to the St. Louis area, as detailed in a story with an aptly-titled headline: The Salem (MO) Witch Trials.

Some Trumpists scoured the Internet and made lists of those who did not bow deeply enough before their orthodoxy. Trumpist governments did the same. The governor of Florida, for example, warned educators in the Sunshine State against making disparaging social media statements.

And as of this week, a month after the murder, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) is still investigating nearly 300 teachers for social media comments made in the aftermath.

While I would not have used the same language some did, I support their right to free speech that meets constitutional standards and strongly object to government and corporate interference in the right to freely express one’s views, even if done so crassly.

In regard to my little kerfuffle, I felt no ill-will toward the Pride group, whose hands were tied, and initially I felt no need to speak or write a word about what happened. 

After marinating on the situation for two days, however, I recognized the irony of a person named on a man’s bad-teacher list writing an essay about that experience in the aftermath of that man’s horrendous death and a few weeks later having that same essay used as grounds to cancel an LGBTQ+ History Month call when the essay writer also happens to be the founder of LGBTQ+ History Month. These circumstances are a bit too much to remain silent over.

It’s rich, too, that the leader of reactionary forces in the United States hourly spouts off at the mouth with the world as his congregation, rants and raves about nonsense, belittles and demeans everyone who won’t submit to his will, invades U.S. cities, disappears people from the streets, erases Black and LGBTQ+ history, and posts all sorts of defamatory garbage.

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The individuals seeking to cancel everyone who utters or writes a word they don’t like are the same ones who run to the front of the line to defend the high priest of Trumpism for “telling it like it is” and “speaking his mind” and not being “politically correct.” 

What a weird country we live in these days. It boggles the senses.

Rodney Wilson founded LGBTQ+ History Month in 1994. He is the subject of the documentary-short Taboo Teaching. He teaches American history and world religions at a community college in rural Missouri. 

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