What can I say: Week Five of the semester and it feels like it’s been a hundred years long already.

With anti-higher-ed SB1 now the law of the land in Ohio, teaching has been transformed into something that feels more like traipsing through a field of landmines while experiencing extreme sudden-onset paranoia. And that was before Charlie Kirk’s murder, which has put a renewed spotlight on Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist. Because I’m on the list (with my legal name, not Lauren Merry Vale, which is my pen name), I’m preparing for the harassment, the threats, the panic and the fear that come with being publicly named as a professor with a “radical agenda” of “leftist propaganda.”

It’s pretty fucking hard to teach LGBTQ Studies without being accused of being a groomer or a propagandist, but I got on the Professor Watchlist a few years ago for talking to my university’s student media about a conservative student group’s repeated, targeted harassment of transgender students.

These days things are worse than ever for queer and trans students. Ohio’s SB1 required the closure of my university’s Women’s Center, LGBTQ+ Center, and Multicultural Center. The LGBTQ Emergency Fund, a scholarship for queer students facing financial hardship, is gone. I see the concern on students’ faces — an unmoored, wondering look that telegraphs uncertainty and doubt. What will the world be for them, this world being remade by a fascist U.S. regime — aided by billionaires — into something unrecognizably illiberal and cruel?

In my campus office I have a large black-and-white photo of queer trailblazer Dolores Noll, mounted on foamcore. It’s the photo the LGBTQ+ Center used for her memorial service in 2019. She is a young woman in the photo, an English professor in the 1960s — at a time when women faculty were rare, and out lesbian faculty were even rarer. She taught the first LGBTQ course at my university, a class called “Gay Womanhood,” in 1972. She was the faculty advisor for my university’s first LGBTQ group, called the Kent Gay Liberation Front, or KGLF.

Every time I walk in to my office, I see Dolores’ fierce face in that big photo. She did what I’m doing, at a time — like now — when most people didn’t want her to do it. She did not let fear stop her.

I won’t either.