Full text of "Toward the Queerest Insurrection"

■ I I : • ' filth is our politics! filth is our life! toward the queerest insurrection Printed clandestinely by the Mary Nardlnl gang, criminal queers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin let's get decadent X To be clear: We've despaired that we could never be as well-dressed or cultured as the Fab Five. We found nothing In Brokeback Mountain. We've spent far too long shuffling through hall- ways with heads-hung-low. We don't give a shit about marriage or the military. But oh we've had the hottest sex - everywhere - in all the ways we aren't supposed to and the other boys at school definitely can't know about it. In 1970, Stonewall veterans, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera found- ed STAR - Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. They opened the STAR house, a radical version of the "house" culture of black and latina queer communities. The house pro- vided a safe and free place for queer and trans street kids to stay. Marsha and Sylvia as the "House Mothers" hustled to pay rent so that the kids would not be forced to. Their "chil- dren" scavenged and stole food so that everyone in the house could eat. That's what we call mutual aid! In the time between the Stonewall Riots and the outbreak of HIV, the queer community of New York saw the rise of a culture of public sex. Queers had orgies In squatted build- ings, in abandoned semi-trucks, on the piers and in bars and clubs all along Christopher street. This is our idea of voluntary association of free individuals! Many mark this as the most sexually liberated time this country has ever seen. Though, the authors of this zine wholeheartedly believe we can outdo them. And when I was sixteen a would-be-bully pushed me and called me a faggot. I hit him in the mouth. The inter- course of my fist and his face was far sexier and more liber- ating than anything MTV ever offered our generation. With the pre-cum of desire on my lips I knew from then on that I was an anarchist. In short, this world has never been enough for us. We say to it, "we want everything, mother- fucker, try to stop us!" I Some will read "queer" as synonymous with "gay and lesbian" or "LGBT". This reading falls short. While those who would fit within the con- structions of "L", "G", "B" or "T" could fall with- in the discursive limits of queer, queer is not a stable area to inhabit. Queer is not merely another identity that can be tacked onto a list of neat social categories, nor the quantitative sum of our identities. Rather, it is the quali- tative position of opposition to presentations of stability - an identity that problematizes the manageable limits of identity. Queer is a ter- ritory of tension, defined against the domi- nant narrative of white-hetero-monogamous- patriarchy, but also by an affinity with all who are marginalized, otherized and oppressed. Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dan- gerous. Queer involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. It is our desire and fantasies and more still. Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world. Queer is a total rejection of the regime of the Normal. As queers we understand Normalcy. Normal, is the tyranny of our condition; reproduced in all of our relationships. Normalcy is violently reiterated in every minute of every day. We understand this Normalcy as the Totality. The Totality being the interconnection and overlap- ping of all oppression and misery. The Totality is the state. It is capitalism. It is civilization and empire. The totality is fence-post crucifixion. It is rape and murder at the hands of police. It is "Str8 Acting" and "No Fatties or Femmes". It is Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It is the bru- tal lessons taught to those who can't achieve Normal. It is every way we've limited ourselves or learned to hate our bodies. We understand Normalcy all too well. When we speak of social war, we do so be- cause purist class analysis is not enough for us. What does a marxist economic worldview mean to a survivor of bashing? To a sex work- er? To a homeless, teenage runaway? How can class analysis, alone as paradigm for a revolution, promise liberation to those of us journeying beyond our assigned genders and sexualities? The Proletariat as revolutionary subject marginalizes all whose lives don't fit In the model of heterosexual-worker. We must create space wherein it is possible for desire to flourish. This space, of course, requires conflict with this social order. To de- sire, in a world structured to confine desire is a tension we live daily. We 0n the night of May 2Ut 1979, in must Understand this tension what has come to be known as the so that we can become pow- WKEbSXETSESS erful through it - we must Un- and wanted justice for the murder derstand it qn that it ran toor of Harve V Mllk - The outraged queers uersiana ll SO mat It can tear went to city hall where they smashed OUr confinement apart. f he windows and glass door of the building. The riotous crowd took to the streets, disrupting traffic, smash- T his terrain, born in rupture in 9. slorefront s and car windows, dis- must . challenge oppression SSSStSSTSSKiSSSSS St?. ?i£ in its entirety. This Of COUISe ri ° tin 9 s P r ead throughout the city as , , . ' others joined in on the fun! means total negation of this world. We must become bodies in revolt. We need to delve into and indulge in power. We can learn the strength of our bodies in struggle for space for our desires. In desire we'll find the power to destroy not only what destroys us, but also those who aspire to turn us into a gay mimicry of that which destroys us. We must be in conflict with regimes of the normal. This means to be at war with everything. If we desire a world without restraint, we must tear this one to the ground. We must live be- yond measure and love and desire in ways most devastating. We must come to under- stand the feeling of social war. We can learn to be a threat, we can become the queerest of insurrections. What began as an early morning raid on June 28th 1969 at New York's Stone- wall Inn, escalated to four days of ri- oting throughout Greenwich Village. Police conducted the raid as usual; targeting people of color, transpeople and gender variants for harassment and violence. It all changed, though, when a bull-dyke resisted her ar- rest and several street queens began throwing bottles and rocks at the po- lice. The police began beating folks, but soon people from all over the neighborhood rushed to the scene, swelling the rioters numbers to over 2,000. The vastly outnumbered police barricaded themselves inside the bar, while an uprooted parking meter was used as a battering ram by the crowd. Molotov cocktails were thrown at the bar. Riot police arrived on scene, but were unable to regain control of the situation. Drag queens danced a con- ga line and sang songs amidst the street fighting to mock the inability of the police to re-establish order. The rioting continued until dawn, only to be picked up again at nightfall of the subsequent days. We need to rediscover our riotous inheritance as queer anarchists. We need to de- stroy constructions of nor- malcy, and create instead a position based in our alien- ation from this normalcy, and one capable of dismantling it. We must use these positions to instigate breaks, not just from the assimilationist main- stream, but from capitalism itself. These positions can be- come tools of a social force ready to create a complete rupture with this world. Our bodies have been born into conflict with this social or- der. We need to deepen that conflict and make it spread. IX Susan Stryker writes that the state acts to "reg- ulate bodies, in ways both great and small, by enmeshing them within norms and ex- pectations that determine what kinds of lives are deemed livable or useful and by shutting down the space of possibility and imaginative transformation where peoples' lives begin to exceed and escape the state's use for them." Lenin and Marx have never fucked the ways we have. We need something a bit more thorough - something equipped to come with teeth- gnashing to all the intricacies of our misery. Simply put, we want to make ruins of domina- tion in all of its varied and interlacing forms. This struggle inhabiting every social relation- ship is what we know as social war. It is both the process and the condition of a conflict with this totality. IV In the discourse of queer, we are talking about a space of struggle against this totality - against normalcy. By "queer", we mean "social war". And when we speak of queer as a conflict with all domination, we mean it. v See, we've always been the other, the alien, the criminal. The story of queers in this civi- lization has always been the narrative of the sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic inferior, the traitor, the freak, the moral imbe- cile. We've been excluded at the border, from labor, from familial ties. We've been forced into concentration camps, into sex slavery, into prisons. The normal, the straight, the american family has always constructed itself in opposition to the queer. Straight is not queer. White is not of color. Healthy does not have HIV. Man is not woman. The discourses of heterosexual- ity, whiteness and capitalism reproduce them- selves into a model of power. For the rest of us, there is death. In his work, Jean Genet' asserts that the life of a queer, is one of exile - that all of the totality of this world is constructed to marginalize and exploit us. He posits the queer as the criminal. He glorifies homosexuality 2 and criminality as the most beautiful and lovely forms of conflict with the bourgeois world. He writes of the se- cret worlds of rebellion and joy inhabited by criminals and queers. Quoth Genet, "Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of Its diversity. Nothing in the world was Ir- relevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, I Jean Genet was a queer, criminal, vagabond who spent his early li e travel.ng around Europe leaving a trail ol sordid affairs In his wake He was sentenced to life In pr.son alter nearly a dozen arrests tor theft, proslltution vagrancy and lewd behavior. While in prison \w took up writing and inspired Sarte and Picasso to petition the French SETS or K his r ? lease A,,er * release ' ,,e was dra,ted ^ ■» military, only to be released for fucking fellow soldiers. The remainder of his l.fe was marked by flirtations with various revolutionaries phi- losophers, uprisings and intifadas. Genet's life is a beautiful example of revolulmnary-criminal-queer-decadence. 2 "homosexuality used only as Genet uses it When snoakin/i of queers, we mean infinitely more. speaking Now they don't critique marriage, military or the state. Rather we have campaigns for queer as- similation into each. Their politics is advocacy for such grievous institutions, rather than the annihilation of them all. "Gavs n„ , ... au - ^ay* One weekend In August of 1966 - can kiii poor people around Compton's, a twenty-four-hour caf- the world as well as straight KSS^^^ASySK people! Gays Can hold the ,,s usual late-night crowd of drag reiqns Of the State and ranital ^ ueens - hustlers, slummers, cruis- yuo vi ire bidie ana Capital ers, runaway teens and neighbor- as well Straight people!" "We hood regulars. The restaurant's man- are iust likP vni i" agement became annoyed by a noisy are JUSl lIKe you . y0U ng crowd of queens at one table who seemed to be spending a lot of Asqimilatinnictc uiant ««*ui« tlme without spending a lot of mon- MbSimiiailoniStS Want nothing ey, and it called the police to roust less than to construct the ho- [ hem - A sur| y police officer, accus- mosexual as normal - white, S^JCTSWoSBftS monogamous, wealttlV 2 R arm of one of the queens and tried to rhilHmn ciiwo m >; dragheraway. She unexpected threw Children, SUVs With a White her coffee in his face, however and picket fence. This Construe- HHS? eru P led , : Plates, trays, cups JL« , wnauuc and silverware flew through the air at IlOn, OT Course, reproduces the startled police who ran outside the stability of heterosAYiial an . d . cal,ed . for backu P- The custom- aumiy ui i leierosexuai- er's turned over the tables, smashed liy, wniteness, patriarchy, the the Plate-glass windows and poured qender binarv and ranitaliem °'J to the streets - When 'he police re- f „ u,lld 'y. ana capitalism inforcemente arrived, street fighting Itself. broke out all throughout the Comp- ton's vicinity. Drag queens beat the police with their heavy purses and If we genuinely want to make k !? ked them with their nigh-heeled ruins nf fhk tntalitw «#« «««^i t~ snoes - A P° ,lce car was vandalized, ruins oi mis totality, we need to a newspaper box was burnt to the make a break. We don't need 9 ro " nd and general havoc was raised inrlufcinn into ™ • 1 a " throu 9 h out the Tenderloin. inclusion into marriage, the military and the state. We need to end them. No more gay politicians, CEOs and cops. We need to swiftly and immediately articulate a wide gulf between the politics of assimilation and the struggle for liberation. simultaneously struggled against capitalism, racism and patriarchy and empire. This is our history. VIII If history proves anything, it is that capitalism has a treacherous recuperative tendency to pacify radical social movements. It works rath- er simply, actually. A group gains privilege and power within a movement, and shortly there- after sell their comrades out. Within a couple years of stonewall, affluent-gay-white-males had thoroughly marginalized everyone that had made their movement possible and aban- doned their revolution with them. It was once that to be queer was to be in direct conflict with the forces of control and domina- tion. Now, we are faced with a condition of ut- ter stagnation and sterility. As always, Capital recuperated brick-throwing street queens into suited politicians and activists. There are log- cabin-Republicans and "stonewall" refers to gay Democrats. There are gay energy drinks and a "queer" television station that wages war on the minds, bodies and esteem of impres- sionable youth. The "LGBT" political establish- ment has become a force of assimilation, gen- trification, capital and state-power. Gay identity has become both a marketable commodity and a device of withdrawal from struggle against domination. the stock-market quotations, the olive har- vest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile." VI A fag is bashed because his gender presen- tation is far too femme. A poor transman can't afford his life-saving hormones. A sex work- er is murdered by their client. A genderqueer persyn is raped because ze just needed to be "fucked straight". Four black lesbians are sent to prison for daring to defend themselves against a straight-male attacker.' Cops beat us on the streets and our bodies are being destroyed by pharmaceutical companies be- cause we can't give them a dime. Queers experience, directly with our bodies, the violence and domination of this world. Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality, Ability; while often these interrelated and overlapping cat- egories of oppression are lost to abstraction, queers are forced to physically understand each. We've had our bodies and desires sto- len from us, mutilated and sold back to us as a model of living we can never embody. I Free the New Jersey 4. And lei's free everyone else while we're at il Foucault says that "power must be under- stood In the first instance as the multiplici- ty of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the processes which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find In one another, thus forming a chain or system, or on the con- trary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institution- al crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies." We experience the complexity of domination and social control amplified through hetero- sexuality. When police kill us, we want them dead in turn. When prisons entrap our bodies and rape us because our genders aren't simi- larly contained, of course we want fire to them all. When borders are erected to construct a national identity absent of people of color and queers, we see only one solution: every nation and border reduced to rubble. VII The perspective of queers within the heter- onormative world is a lens through which we can critique and attack the apparatus of capi- talism. We can analyze the ways in which Medicine, the Prison System, the Church, the State, Marriage, the Media, Borders, the Mili- tary and Police are used to control and destroy us More hooper's Donuts was an all night y c donul shop on a seedy stretch of importantly, we Can use these Main Street in Los Angeles. It was cases to articulate a cohesive ttSfig^JTtSZSi Criticism Of every Way that We the night. Police harassment was a are alienated and dominated. !S^^tt%?8KiSi! fought back. What started with OiiPPr k a nncitinn fr^ m i**hi#*. cust O'"ers throwing donuts at the UUeer IS a position from Which police escalated into full-on street to attack the normative - more ""ohting. in the ensuing chaos, ail a nociti™ fr^ m „*,uu i ' of the donut-wlelding rebels a position from Which to Un- escaped into the night. derstand and attack the ways In which normal is reproduced and reiterated. In destabilizing and problematizing normalcy, we can destabilize and become a problem for the Totality. ■ The history of organized queers was borne out of this position. The most marginalized - transfolk, people of color, sex workers - have always been the catalysts for riotous explo- sions of queer resistance. These explosions have been coupled with a radical analysis wholeheartedly asserting that the liberation for queer people is intrinsically tied to the an- nihilation of capitalism and the state. It is no wonder, then, that the first people to publicly speak of sexual liberation in this country were anarchists, or that those in the last century who struggled for queer liberation also