You and I were in Berlin at the same time then, in 1989. I lived there for roughly 5 years before the Wall fell and for several months after. I used to pass the Reichstag sometimes on my way to or from work. I’d look at the bullet holes and imagine the time Hitler made that speech.

I’d look at the bombed-out church preserved on the Ku-damm, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial, and remember that the entire city was once turned into rubble in a civilizational struggle that included fighting against anti-semitism.

I’d sit with German friends around kitchen tables that sometimes included elderly former Nazi family members. I’d talk to youth my age about how they coped with that, what anti-semitism of Nazism meant to them as a new generation of Germans without direct experience of it but with family members who participated in it still alive.

I think I learned a lot, and I think my experience living in Berlin helped form my progressive attitudes, but I could never have predicted what would happen to my own nation.

Just a few days ago in Ohio, where I was born and raised, a mob of heavily armed literal Nazis took to the streets waving Nazi salutes as they protested drag queens and other queer people.

These self-described Nazis and "Christian fascists," who were NOT run off the streets by their neighbors, intensely hate Jews, Black people and LGBTQ people. They have support in places like Congress, where powerful people take them seriously.

Am I scared? You bet your ass I am. People tend to dismiss and minimize what’s happening, but I’ve seen the Reichstag. I’ve put my fingers in the bullet holes. I’ve broken bread with ordinary-looking old people who let the horrors of the Nazi regime happen, or who helped make them happen.

So I don’t dismiss the threat. I can’t. I destroyed a small part of the Berlin Wall myself with a hammer and a screwdriver. And while that might seem like an empowering action, 1989 was an eternity from the fall of the Reich.

And in 1989, queer people (whom the Allies did not liberate from the death camps like other people) were still failing to clear their criminal records.

I think about this a lot.