Two days after 9/11, landmark author/ journalist Patricia Nell Warren uncannily predicted the next train of events that led this country into war — and into an era when GLBT civil liberties are at frightening risk.

On September 13, 2001 the following statements were delivered on her behalf to the Business Alliance of Los Angeles (BALA) and published in The Advocate on 9/14/01. In the four years since, every prediction Warren made has come true — from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the speeded-up dismissal of GLBT people from our armed forces, to the systematic suspension of civil liberties in the name of "fighting terrorism."

Good Evening!

I regret not being with you in person tonight. I am writing these words in Tampa Bay, where I am still stranded by the FAA’s ban on flights, and am grateful for the willingness of my business partner (writer/producer) Tyler St. Mark to share my thoughts with you.

Like all of us, I am just beginning the deeper processing of those terrible events of the last two days—the clearer, starker thinking about how they are a turning point in history for all of us. We still have our minds on friends, family, or business colleagues in New York City—our hopes that they be found safe and sound if they’re still missing. Beyond that is the imminent military response by the United States government, whatever it will be.

And beyond that is my concern about what life will be like for Americans from now on. All Americans, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, ability, way of thinking. All Americans—including gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Americans.

For civilians as well as for soldiers, wartime is not the same as peacetime. I lived through World War II as a young civilian, and vividly remember how that war engulfed the lives and consciousness of every civilian, even though the huge battles fought in Europe and the South Pacific had no bombs falling directly on the continental United States. Not even during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any other foreign war that our country has fought since the 1940s, did wartime conditions affect the daily lives of all Americans so deeply. For civilians, there were not only the losses of loved ones, and long-term anxieties, but also high-level security, blackouts, censorship, curtailment of civil liberties, food rationing, the civil air patrol watching the skies.

Last but not least, there was the unjust sweeping imprisonment of Japanese-Americans under the belief that they threatened national security. Americans who remember these things are now as old as I am or older. Younger American civilians have little sense of how a major war changes things for everybody in a nation, even the so-called noncombatants.

Historically, wartime brings a narrowing of civil liberties. We in the gay world have grown used to whatever liberties we have won, in the context of life as we have lived it. Now we must be prepared for the possibility of profound changes. For the first time in 70 years, Americans have the bombs falling right in their backyard.

In the military, gay people in uniform may feel as deeply patriotic and ready to fight for their country as anyone. Yet they may find themselves under heightened scrutiny. Already in peacetime, we were deemed to be threats to security and unit morale. Wartime may bring an intensifying of these torturous pressures on our men and women in the armed forces. It may give homophobic commanders and troops more transparent excuses for antigay brutality.

Military attitudes, in turn, may create greater strictures on gay civilian life. In the field of political expression, our society has already shown itself to be more and more reactionary and hostile to dissent of all kinds. New criminal laws are already imposing heavier prison sentences on protesters, even peaceful protesters who harm no one and destroy no property. This shock of awakening has come to a wide range of protesters, from farm workers to disabled persons to environmentalists. Arrests that used to mean a few days in jail and a small fine now often bring up to a year behind bars, occasionally even a felony conviction.

Already this year a number of gay protesters—notably those at the Bush rally in Florida—have been arrested in the name of “security.” Yet even in wartime, we gay people will continue to be concerned about our issues, and may be motivated to take to the streets with placards. There, we may find that the police view our dissent, our peaceful protest, as something that jeopardizes national security.

Historically, in wartime, there has always been less respect for the First Amendment. So we may find the media less responsive to our issues in wartime. Already in the two days since the World Trade Center was destroyed, there have been changes on the Internet, with anonymous remailers vanishing and escalating surveillance by federal authorities. Indeed, some Americans have already declared themselves willing to have fewer civil liberties in order to defeat whatever enemy brought down the World Trade Center. Inevitably the conservatism that drives every country in wartime may find our GLBT expressions unwelcome now, whether on the Net or in conventional media.

Inevitably the narrowing of civil liberties during wartime brings a scapegoating of certain minority groups. In World War I, it was the German-Americans. In World War II, it was Japanese-Americans. If Congress now declares war again, I fear that we will see a massive scapegoating of Muslim Americans. On the news, I’ve already heard the angry rhetoric from Americans who see all Muslims, even those who are good American citizens, as allies of foreign terrorists. With that anger comes scapegoating of other groups, including ourselves.

And with greater censorship and wartime strictures, we may see some greater limits on the gay world’s ability to do business—a fact that is of vital concern everyone sitting here in this room.

In the field of public health, the CDC has already been under direction of the National Security Agency for over a year now, because of our government’s heightened fears about biological warfare. Where our public policy on AIDS will go in wartime, and how much concern it will have for the civil rights and needs of sick people, is anybody’s guess.

These are just a few of the things that I’ve been thinking about, as I sit in front of a friend’s TV set in Tampa Bay and watch as events continue to unfold.

What’s clear to me is this:

Today is a moment when the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people in the United States need to pull together. We have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, if we continue to tolerate the factionalism and separatism that have marred our political life, that have often kept us so busy fighting with each other and operating at cross-purposes. Just as the United States is being called upon by its leaders to demonstrate its unity of purpose, so we too are being called to a unity of our own. Without it, I think, we will find it difficult to resist the pressures and rigors of wartime. We will find it hard to speak for ourselves and to defend those civil liberties and those personal realities that are so dear to us all.

I don’t have all the answers for how we’re going to do this. What I do have is hope—hope that we in the gay world can meet the challenge of the moment as all people do when their own back yard is threatened—with courage, and clarity about what the life-and-death priorities are, and with a tremendous will to be victorious.