I actually didn’t go into mourning after the election. Instead I’ve been busy putting a neighborhood support group together. And other people have been doing the same. I ran into an organizer from one of the other groups at the grocery, and she invited me to speak at a local rally in support of trans people last Sunday. They liked what I said and invited me to speak on immigration at the Hands Off! rally today. Though St. Johns is a dinky little neighborhood, we got quite a turnout–maybe 75-100 people last week, and over 100 today, from octogenarians like me down to infants in strollers, with all ages in between. We had a few big guys with hot pink armbands prepared to deal with troublemakers, but we didn’t get any of those. Instead, people driving by honked and waved in support. Even more, I ran into people I hadn’t seen for years–including a woman I had a fling with in NYC in 1972! I’m copying my speeches below:

1. Transgender Visibility Day Speech

I want to thank all of you for coming out to support our transgender neighbors.  But you wouldn’t be here—none of us would be here—if it weren’t for the actions of a small group of people half a century ago. I’m talking about the Stonewall Riot in 1969, and the organizing that followed.

Before Stonewall most of us didn’t know about transgender people, but gays and lesbians like me were considered crazy, or criminal. Gay sex was illegal, and some of us were thrown into prison. Others were thrown into mental hospitals, where the psychiatrists drugged them, strapped them to gurneys and delivered electric shocks to the brain, and even lobotomized them—cutting out a piece of the brain. Outside the hospitals, some headshrinkers made a very nice living administering milder electric shocks in what they called aversion therapy. The “liberal” ones just offered just talk therapy.

In New York City, where I grew up, it was illegal to serve a gay person a drink, illegal for people to wear clothes of the “opposite” sex, illegal for two people of the same sex to dance close together. The places where we did meet, like the Stonewall, were illegal. They were run by the Mafia and they paid protection money to the cops.

The overwhelming majority of gay people were in the closet, cowering in fear. The handful of gay organizations that did exist limited themselves to pleading for acceptance into middle class America.

By 1969, however, this country had changed. Young people had been radicalized by participation in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the antiwar movement. And on June 28, when cops tried to raid a gay bar in Greenwich Village, its patrons fought back. Those patrons, by the way, were mostly young gay men, one butch lesbian and a few who called themselves transvestites—today they would call themselves transsexuals.

The rioting lasted a few nights, and then it was over. But we didn’t stop there. Within a week a group of us—okay, I was one of them—organized a protest march. That march took place exactly one month after Stonewall. Around 400-500 people attended.

One year later, in June 1970, we held a second march. This time ten thousand people showed up! Our little match lit fires all over the country—and around the world. Gay liberation groups sprang up everywhere, from coast to coast, and in London, Paris, Berlin, in Örebro Sweden…more places than I can count.

How did we do that? During that first week our march committee—there couldn’t have been more than 10 of us—started the Gay Liberation Front.

What was the Gay Liberation Front? We were the most radical gay organization of our time. We were young—the majority of us were in our twenties. We had no money and no connections in high places. Yet we changed the world.

We organized demonstrations and joined in demonstrations put on by antiwar and antiracist groups. We burst in on politicians, the media, and the psychiatric establishment, and challenged them. Most important, we formed alliances with other community groups.

During the first year, 1969, we issued a statement of principles. And all of them were based on the right to control your own body, not have the state control it for you. The right to have sex with other consenting adults. The right to ingest the drugs of your choice—this was at a time when Texas gave people life sentences for possession of marijuana. We stood for women’s reproductive rights. The right to NOT have your body drafted and shipped to Vietnam, to kill or be killed. And that would include transgender rights, to what they now call gender affirming care.

We won significant victories, here and all over the world.

Today all the rights we fought for are under attack by this fascist administration. So we’ve got to fight back. We won’t get anywhere by cowering in the closet. We must make alliances with other groups. We must stand together, and not let the transgender people, the immigrants, or anyone else get picked off. Because next they’ll come for us. You know that.

Now I’ve got to tell you that even if we give our best, we may not win. But if we don’t fight, we will surely lose. The bastards will roll right over us. If we do fight, if we all stand together, we have a damn good chance of winning!

2. Hands Off! Demonstration Speech

At last week’s rally I spoke about the Trump administration’s attacks on trans and queer people. Today I’d like to speak about its attacks on immigrants—especially those who don’t have papers. Both Trump supporters and even folks who consider themselves liberal call the undocumented “illegal aliens”—like they’re talking about invaders from another planet.

People have always migrated. They left their homes when the crops failed and they had nothing to eat. They fled war and persecution.

A couple thousand years ago there was a pogrom. A mad king decided to kill all the newborn boys, because a prophet predicted that one would grow up to replace him. One family with a newborn boy fled the country to save him. Fortunately Egypt let them in, and they were able to return after the massacre was over. Their child grew up to be a champion of the poor and oppressed, whether native born or foreigner. His name was Jesus.

The first undocumented immigrant I met, many decades ago, was Gitl Dina Bojankosky. She was born in Poland in 1914, at the beginning of World War I. She’d gone hungry because people hadn’t been able to plant crops with bullets flying overhead, and because the invading armies confiscated whatever food they had. Then, one winter, there was a pogrom. Gitl’s mother grabbed her and her infant brother and hid in the woods, and the baby froze to death.

In 1921 her parents left Poland. But the United States had just passed a law restricting immigration from Eastern Europe, so they went to Havana. There they were desperately poor. While Gitl didn’t starve, she wasn’t well nourished, nor did she get an education—she was taken out of school and put to work.

In 1929 the Great Depression arrived. Things were even worse in Cuba than the United States. At age 16, Gitl got on an overcrowded little boat and crossed the open ocean to Florida. From there she made her way to New York City and found work in a garment factory. She wasn’t used to the climate—Havana, as you know, is tropical—so she was very cold that first winter, until she saved up for a winter coat.

In 1939 she met Jacob, a man whose family had emigrated before the new law. They got married and she became a citizen, and later was able to sponsor her parents. During World War II, Jacob worked in a factory making ammunition. Gitl, who was pregnant, sat out in front of the movie theater selling war bonds. Their younger brothers served in the military.

Most of Gitl’s relatives—aunts, uncles, and cousins who hadn’t made it out of Poland—were slaughtered during the Holocaust.

Gitl had two children. She was determined that they would have a better life than she had. She made sure they got their vitamins. She and Jacob filled the house with books they collected at garage sales, and told the children they would be going to college. And she continued her own education, reading her children’s textbooks after the kids were through with them.

Gitl Dina Bojankosky was my mother.

During my life I’ve met many undocumented immigrants, almost all of them hard working and honest—so unlike that prevaricating ignoramus who sits in the White House, that adjudicated rapist, that thief with a history of stiffing anyone who works for him, that scam artist with his fraudulent “university.” That traitor who attempted to overthrow the government when he lost an election.

Trump calls immigrants criminals—including those here legally. His thugs have even arrested Navajos in New Mexico and Arizona, demanding they prove their citizenship. In Wisconsin, they arrested Puerto Ricans caught speaking Spanish in public. Hiding behind masks, they grab people off the streets and throw them in unmarked cars.

The first Trump administration threw tens of thousands of migrants into overcrowded “detention camps”—let’s call them what they are, concentration camps—where they had to sleep were on the floor. There were no showering facilities. They were often denied food for days, and denied medical care. Many died.

Children were forcibly torn from their parents. As many as 1,360 have never been reunited. The current administration is shipping migrants to torture prisons at Guantánamo Bay and El Salvador.

We, the people, must stand up for the all the hard-working, honest migrants—documented or not. We must tell Trump’s thugs, “hands off!” And if we have to deport a few criminal types—I’m thinking of Trump, Musk, and Vance—we should put them in a ship. A space ship. With a one-way ticket to Mars.