When the Canadian government updated its travel advisory to the United States, warning LGBTQ+ people that many American states have enacted laws that would persecute them, it got my attention. A few days later I listened to an interview with Sherwin Modeste, Executive Director of Pride Toronto, where he teared up and concluded that Canada should ask its federal ministers not to travel to the US as a kind of protest. For months I have been watching legislative attacks unfold on queer, queer identified, trans, and even people (usually Black) mistaken for occupying those identities. I have also seen the resulting violence that has been unleashed on us as queer people. This violence is taking place not just in the US, but around the world—in Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Europe, the UK, the Caribbean, and here in Canada. But yet, our federal government appears to suggest that we exist in a place beyond the reach of these forces. How did we get here?

I am of the age where as a child I could not even imagine living the queer life I now live. The closet was the reigning paradigm of my youth. Anyone who was bold enough to be out was ridiculed in the neighbourhoods I grew up in. But there were out gay and lesbian people in those places. And then AIDS happened in my late teens and early twenties, and I bore witness to the emaciated bodies, the hysterical outrage by the religious right and other conservatives, and the tremendous and monumental refusal, organization, and fightback by gays, lesbians, and their friends. The very public and historic refusal of anti-gay hysteria created the foundation of the world that I eventually came out into. Indeed, AIDS really did change the world. I am using AIDS and not the now common HIV/AIDS signifier because AIDS in its singularity unleashed queer possibility and resistance in a manner we had not seen before. It also alerted us to the profound fact that blood family is not always the most important family for queer people. AIDS revealed the depth of homophobia and of familial cruelty. It exposed the reality that blood family can often not have our best interests at heart.

I have lived the gay life. The clubs and their accompanying paraphernalia. The bathhouses. But most importantly I have lived within a queer community in which the question of my being, of our beings, has been unquestioned for more than three decades now. My personal and professional life has been populated with many queer and trans people to the extent that my friends know I often assume people are queer first, and that they have to come out as straight to me. In the age of the AIDS ‘cocktail,’ queer life has come to occupy a way of being that was finally settled. And even with the ongoing difficulty that many queers still experience, especially outside of large urban areas, it seems like, at least in many North American places, the conversation about gay rights had been mostly resolved. But my small niche was never the world. And now my small niche and the larger world that it inhabits has once again come under tremendous pushback, violence and even anti-queer and anti-trans legislation.

I have lived to see gay people reviled and targeted for murder. I have seen us achieve marriage and other rights and now I have lived to see drag queens and trans people attacked, criminalized, and made more openly subject to violence—state violence and everyday forms of gratuitous violence. When gay marriage was won in Canada, I wrote in the pages of the now defunct fab magazine that it would only be a success if straight people adopted queer culture as theirs, too. We failed to convert them all. Queer people by and large adopted straight culture instead. When trans people declared that LBGTQ+ politics had not adequately dealt with their concerns I knew it would be grounds for the next queer war. And it was. The emergence of trans marches at Pride festivals marked that moment of a conflict that has broiled inside queer politics. The queer leaders who thought marriage settled everything have been proven spectacularly wrong. And in the aftermath of what they thought was settled the conservatives have developed new modes of attacking gay life.

In Canada, Premiers Scott Moe, Heather Stefanson, Blaine Higgs and Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce—as well as federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, among others—have now turned to using parental rights to obscure but reinitiate the fight against queer and trans lives. Their opposition to queer and trans people living out and proud and, most importantly, making a claim to the so-called democratic rights that those same people argue distinguishes Canada and the US from other more barbarous places around the world, reveals them as firmly against the changes achieved since the 1980s. We know that parental rights and the limits it seeks to place and have placed on sexuality and gender discussion and protections in schools is a coded attack on trans people especially. If it is successful, it will not and cannot stop there.

The right, with its lodestars like Jordan Peterson, intends to put us back into the closet and if possible, annihilate us. Genocide is not a farfetched political claim to make in this context of global queer attacks. We must remember that Peterson rose to notoriety when he targeted trans students at the University of Toronto, none of whom he was likely teaching, and bashed Bill C-16 and the gender provision of the Ontario Human Rights Code. He cast his opposition as one concerned with free speech and its violation, but it was actually a verbally violent assault on trans students and the simple desire to accord them dignity by respecting their preferred pronouns. Peterson rose to fame after university officials erroneously staged a debate on his odious and deliberate misunderstanding of the Bill and the Code. But we must be honest and recognize that Peterson became the face of an already deep and deepening social compact that was clearly ready to declare its grievances against trans and queer people’s right to rights. He became their convenient guru. So any travel advisory needs to begin at home in Canada where the most lethal debates around trans life began well before they took hold in other places.

“That’s cute,” my Black gay friends in the US say either as endorsement or critique. Travel advisories to the US sound cute, but what about traveling around Canada? What will Pride executive directors across the country do to challenge the premiers who are using policy to target queer and trans youth and to return them to the closet as the reigning paradigm of queer life? Queer and trans people demonstrated in the age of AIDS that we are willing to put much on the line to affirm our lives, to defend the dead, to live as free as we can and to change this world for the better. We are once again at such a moment in history. As we bear witness to these multiple assaults, assaults that are coordinated, state and policy driven, and heading towards even more severe forms of violence, we know what we must do. In fact, we have only one option. It is our tradition now. We will fight back. We will reveal the secrets (yes, outing is a legitimate political practice even if queers debate it still) that the Internet and the apps hold. We will also shoot back if that is what is required. And we will win. It is our destiny.

Rinaldo Walcott is a writer and critic. He is professor and chair of Africana and American Studies at the University of Buffalo (SUNY).