toward the queerest filth is our politics! filth is our life! insurrection let’s get decadent! Printed clandestinely by the Mary Nardini gang, criminal queers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin X To be clear: In 1970, Stonewall veterans, Marsha We’ve despaired that we could P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera found- ed STAR - Street Transvestite Action never be as well-dressed or Revolutionaries. They opened the cultured as the Fab Five. We STAR house, a radical version of the “house” culture of black and latina found nothing in Brokeback queer communities. The house pro- Mountain. We’ve spent far too I vided a safe and free place for queer Some will read “queer” as synonymous with long shuffling through hall- and trans street kids to stay. Marsha “gay and lesbian” or “LGBT”. This reading falls and Sylvia as the “House Mothers” ways with heads-hung-low. hustled to pay rent so that the kids short. While those who would fit within the con- We don’t give a shit about would not be forced to. Their “chil- structions of “L”, “G”, “B” or “T” could fall with- dren” scavenged and stole food so marriage or the military. But that everyone in the house could in the discursive limits of queer, queer is not oh we’ve had the hottest sex eat. That’s what we call mutual aid! a stable area to inhabit. Queer is not merely - everywhere - in all the ways another identity that can be tacked onto a list we aren’t supposed to and the other boys at of neat social categories, nor the quantitative school definitely can’t know about it. sum of our identities. Rather, it is the quali- tative position of opposition to presentations And when I was sixteen a In the time between the Stonewall of stability - an identity that problematizes the would-be-bully pushed me Riots and the outbreak of HIV, the manageable limits of identity. Queer is a ter- queer community of New York saw and called me a faggot. I hit the rise of a culture of public sex. ritory of tension, defined against the domi- Queers had orgies in squatted build- him in the mouth. The inter- nant narrative of white-hetero-monogamous- ings, in abandoned semi-trucks, on course of my fist and his face the piers and in bars and clubs all patriarchy, but also by an affinity with all who along Christopher street. This is our was far sexier and more liber- are marginalized, otherized and oppressed. idea of voluntary association of free ating than anything MTV ever individuals! Many mark this as the Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dan- most sexually liberated time this offered our generation. With gerous. Queer involves our sexuality and our country has ever seen. Though, the the pre-cum of desire on my authors of this zine wholeheartedly gender, but so much more. It is our desire and believe we can outdo them. lips I knew from then on that I fantasies and more still. Queer is the cohesion was an anarchist. of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world. Queer is a total rejection of In short, this world has never been enough for the regime of the Normal. us. We say to it, “we want everything, mother- fucker, try to stop us!” We must create space wherein it is possible II for desire to flourish. This space, of course, As queers we understand Normalcy. Normal, requires conflict with this social order. To de- is the tyranny of our condition; reproduced in sire, in a world structured to confine desire, all of our relationships. Normalcy is violently is a tension we live daily. We reiterated in every minute of every day. We On the night of May 21st 1979, in must understand this tension what has come to be known as the understand this Normalcy as the Totality. The White Night Riots, the queer commu- so that we can become pow- Totality being the interconnection and overlap- nity of San Francisco was outraged erful through it - we must un- and wanted justice for the murder ping of all oppression and misery. The Totality of Harvey Milk. The outraged queers derstand it so that it can tear is the state. It is capitalism. It is civilization and went to city hall where they smashed our confinement apart. the windows and glass door of the empire. The totality is fence-post crucifixion. It building. The riotous crowd took to is rape and murder at the hands of police. It is the streets, disrupting traffic, smash- This terrain, born in rupture, ing storefronts and car windows, dis- “Str8 Acting” and “No Fatties or Femmes”. It is abling buses and setting twelve San must challenge oppression Francisco Police cruisers on fire. The Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It is the bru- in its entirety. This of course, rioting spread throughout the city as tal lessons taught to those who can’t achieve others joined in on the fun! means total negation of this Normal. It is every way we’ve limited ourselves world. We must become bodies in revolt. We or learned to hate our bodies. We understand need to delve into and indulge in power. We Normalcy all too well. can learn the strength of our bodies in struggle for space for our desires. In desire we’ll find III the power to destroy not only what destroys When we speak of social war, we do so be- us, but also those who aspire to turn us into cause purist class analysis is not enough for a gay mimicry of that which destroys us. We us. What does a marxist economic worldview must be in conflict with regimes of the normal. mean to a survivor of bashing? To a sex work- This means to be at war with everything. er? To a homeless, teenage runaway? How can class analysis, alone as paradigm for a If we desire a world without restraint, we must revolution, promise liberation to those of us tear this one to the ground. We must live be- journeying beyond our assigned genders and yond measure and love and desire in ways sexualities? The Proletariat as revolutionary most devastating. We must come to under- subject marginalizes all whose lives don’t fit stand the feeling of social war. We can learn in the model of heterosexual-worker. to be a threat, we can become the queerest of insurrections. We need to rediscover our Lenin and Marx have never fucked the ways What began as an early morning raid riotous inheritance as queer we have. on June 28th 1969 at New York’s Stone- wall Inn, escalated to four days of ri- anarchists. We need to de- oting throughout Greenwich Village. stroy constructions of nor- We need something a bit more thorough Police conducted the raid as usual; targeting people of color, transpeople malcy, and create instead a - something equipped to come with teeth- and gender variants for harassment position based in our alien- gnashing to all the intricacies of our misery. and violence. It all changed, though, when a bull-dyke resisted her ar- ation from this normalcy, and Simply put, we want to make ruins of domina- rest and several street queens began throwing bottles and rocks at the po- one capable of dismantling it. tion in all of its varied and interlacing forms. lice. The police began beating folks, We must use these positions This struggle inhabiting every social relation- but soon people from all over the neighborhood rushed to the scene, to instigate breaks, not just ship is what we know as social war. It is both swelling the rioters numbers to over from the assimilationist main- the process and the condition of a conflict with 2,000. The vastly outnumbered police barricaded themselves inside the bar, stream, but from capitalism this totality. while an uprooted parking meter was itself. These positions can be- used as a battering ram by the crowd. Molotov cocktails were thrown at the come tools of a social force bar. Riot police arrived on scene, but ready to create a complete IV were unable to regain control of the In the discourse of queer, we are talking about situation. Drag queens danced a con- rupture with this world. ga line and sang songs amidst the a space of struggle against this totality - against street fighting to mock the inability of normalcy. By “queer”, we mean “social war”. the police to re-establish order. The Our bodies have been born rioting continued until dawn, only to into conflict with this social or- And when we speak of queer as a conflict with be picked up again at nightfall of the subsequent days. der. We need to deepen that all domination, we mean it. conflict and make it spread. V IX See, we’ve always been the other, the alien, Susan Stryker writes that the state acts to “reg- the criminal. The story of queers in this civi- ulate bodies, in ways both great and small, lization has always been the narrative of the by enmeshing them within norms and ex- sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic pectations that determine what kinds of inferior, the traitor, the freak, the moral imbe- lives are deemed livable or useful and by cile. We’ve been excluded at the border, from shutting down the space of possibility and labor, from familial ties. We’ve been forced imaginative transformation where peoples’ into concentration camps, into sex slavery, lives begin to exceed and escape the state’s into prisons.