dancing. And then things shifted, kind of, later in the night. The feds had put up a fence around the Justice Building. It was illegally constructed, and so the Portland residents are trying to take it down. So once they started shaking a fence and banging on it, the federal officers—like a movie scene— lined up across the street and came out, just shooting projectiles and fireballs at people. It was really like a war zone. They shot me in the leg. My husband got shot a couple times. It was shocking. You know, I’m a little bit of a rebel myself. So I had my leaf blower. They put it on really heavy with the tear gas. So we had like a line of like fifty people with leaf blowers and we were just blowing the gas back at them.

SYLVIE THODE, 21

NEW YORK CITY

I went to a march on the day that would have been the Pride march in New York City. It was called the Queer Liberation March. And it was a Black Lives Matter-oriented march specifically centering Black trans lives, and we marched up towards Stonewall and past Stonewall and near the AIDS memorial. That was a very moving experience for me, especially because I ended up joining up at that march with a professor of mine who was involved in ACT UP. I wrote my thesis on poetry in the AIDS crisis. And so being there and sort of feeling this lived history at a place I’d written about, with a person who had experienced it thirty years ago… He was talking about how this moment felt like it felt then.

ÉZÉ AMOS, 46 CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA

Right after the whole conversation about the monuments started, the Lee statue became the focal point for any kind of resistance or protest in town. We all start from there and spread around town. During the summer protests, people just started writing stuff on the statue. It became a community gathering place. So people would come every evening, every afternoon, and they came with their spray paint. And they’d write whatever they wanted

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