When church and state overlap, brutality follows, and justice bends with the whip. Blurred lines between religion and government produced the Spanish Inquisition, Salem witch trials, the Crusades, the Huguenot persecutions, and the brutality campaigns of the Holy Roman Empire, to list an easy few, all featuring sadism, torture, and bloodlust in the name of religion.

When regimes crack, history reminds us that the fault lines are never only political — they are profoundly human. For LGBTQ people living under authoritarian rule, a regime change is not an abstract geopolitical event. It can mean the difference between fear and freedom, between invisibility and dignity, between life and death.

There are moments in history when silence becomes complicated. We believe we are living in one of those moments now.

I had swum my laps and was lying in 90-degree water, with my neck rolling slowly back and forth on the hot cement rim of the pool, my eyes closed, the sun in my face. I was in heaven, or so I imagined, and asked for the sound of Ray’s voice and Sebastian’s bark.