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. use for them.” The normal, the straight, the american family Now they don’t critique marriage, military or the has always constructed itself in opposition to state. Rather we have campaigns for queer as- the queer. Straight is not queer. White is not similation into each. Their politics is advocacy of color. Healthy does not have HIV. Man is for such grievous institutions, rather than the not woman. The discourses of heterosexual- annihilation of them all. “Gays One weekend in August of 1966 - ity, whiteness and capitalism reproduce them- can kill poor people around Compton’s, a twenty-four-hour caf- eteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin selves into a model of power. For the rest of the world as well as straight neighborhood - was buzzing with us, there is death. people!” “Gays can hold the its usual late-night crowd of drag queens, hustlers, slummers, cruis- reigns of the state and capital ers, runaway teens and neighbor- In his work, Jean Genet1 asserts that the life of hood regulars. The restaurant’s man- as well straight people!” “We agement became annoyed by a noisy a queer, is one of exile - that all of the totality are just like you”. young crowd of queens at one table who seemed to be spending a lot of of this world is constructed to marginalize and time without spending a lot of mon- exploit us. He posits the queer as the criminal. Assimilationists want nothing ey, and it called the police to roust 2 them. A surly police officer, accus- He glorifies homosexuality and criminality as less than to construct the ho- tomed to manhandling Compton’s the most beautiful and lovely forms of conflict mosexual as normal - white, clientele with impunity, grabbed the arm of one of the queens and tried to with the bourgeois world. He writes of the se- monogamous, wealthy, 2.5 drag her away. She unexpected threw cret worlds of rebellion and joy inhabited by children, SUVs with a white her coffee in his face, however, and a melee erupted: Plates, trays, cups criminals and queers. picket fence. This construc- and silverware flew through the air at tion, of course, reproduces the startled police who ran outside and called for backup. The custom- Quoth Genet, “Excluded by my birth and the stability of heterosexual- er’s turned over the tables, smashed tastes from the social order, I was not aware ity, whiteness, patriarchy, the the plate-glass windows and poured onto the streets. When the police re- of its diversity. Nothing in the world was ir- gender binary, and capitalism inforcements arrived, street fighting relevant: the stars on a general’s sleeve, broke out all throughout the Comp- itself. ton’s vicinity. Drag queens beat the 1 Jean Genet was a queer, criminal, vagabond who spent his police with their heavy purses and early life traveling around Europe leaving a trail of sordid affairs in his If we genuinely want to make kicked them with their high-heeled wake. He was sentenced to life in prison after nearly a dozen arrests shoes. A police car was vandalized, for theft, prostitution, vagrancy and lewd behavior. While in prison he ruins of this totality, we need to a newspaper box was burnt to the took up writing and inspired Sarte and Picasso to petition the French make a break. We don’t need ground and general havoc was raised government for his release. After his release, he was drafted into the all throughout the Tenderloin. military, only to be released for fucking fellow soldiers. The remainder inclusion into marriage, the of his life was marked by flirtations with various revolutionaries, phi- military and the state. We need to end them. losophers, uprisings and intifadas. Genet’s life is a beautiful example of revolutionary-criminal-queer-decadence. No more gay politicians, CEOs and cops. We need to swiftly and immediately articulate a 2 “homosexuality” used only as Genet uses it. When speaking of queers, we mean infinitely more. wide gulf between the politics of assimilation and the struggle for liberation. simultaneously struggled against capitalism, the stock-market quotations, the olive har- racism and patriarchy and empire. This is our vest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat history. exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details VIII were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.” If history proves anything, it is that capitalism has a treacherous recuperative tendency to pacify radical social movements. It works rath- VI er simply, actually. A group gains privilege and A fag is bashed because his gender presen- power within a movement, and shortly there- tation is far too femme. A poor transman can’t after sell their comrades out. Within a couple afford his life-saving hormones. A sex work- years of stonewall, affluent-gay-white-males er is murdered by their client. A genderqueer had thoroughly marginalized everyone that persyn is raped because ze just needed to had made their movement possible and aban- be “fucked straight”. Four black lesbians are doned their revolution with them. sent to prison for daring to defend themselves against a straight-male attacker.1 Cops beat It was once that to be queer was to be in direct us on the streets and our bodies are being conflict with the forces of control and domina- destroyed by pharmaceutical companies be- tion. Now, we are faced with a condition of ut- cause we can’t give them a dime. ter stagnation and sterility. As always, Capital recuperated brick-throwing street queens into Queers experience, directly with our bodies, suited politicians and activists. There are log- the violence and domination of this world. cabin-Republicans and “stonewall” refers to Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality, Ability; while gay Democrats. There are gay energy drinks often these interrelated and overlapping cat- and a “queer” television station that wages war egories of oppression are lost to abstraction, on the minds, bodies and esteem of impres- queers are forced to physically understand sionable youth. The “LGBT” political establish- each. We’ve had our bodies and desires sto- ment has become a force of assimilation, gen- len from us, mutilated and sold back to us as trification, capital and state-power. Gay identity a model of living we can never embody. has become both a marketable commodity and 1 Free the New Jersey 4. And let’s free everyone else while a device of withdrawal from struggle against we’re at it. domination. Foucault says that “power must be under- can critique and attack the apparatus of capi- stood in the first instance as the multiplici- talism. We can analyze the ways in which ty of force relations immanent in the sphere Medicine, the Prison System, the Church, the in which they operate and which constitute State, Marriage, the Media, Borders, the Mili- their own organization; as the processes tary and Police are used to Cooper’s Donuts was an all night which, through ceaseless struggles and control and destroy us. More donut shop on a seedy stretch of importantly, we can use these Main Street in Los Angeles. It was confrontations, transforms, strengthens or a regular hangout for street queens reverses them; as the support which these cases to articulate a cohesive and queer hustlers at all hours of criticism of every way that we the night. Police harassment was a force relations find in one another, thus regular fixture of the Cooper’s, but forming a chain or system, or on the con- are alienated and dominated. one May night in 1959, the queers fought back. What started with trary, the disjunctions and contradictions customers throwing donuts at the which isolate them from one another; and Queer is a position from which police escalated into full-on street fighting. In the ensuing chaos, all lastly, as the strategies in which they take to attack the normative - more, of the donut-wielding rebels effect, whose general design or institution- a position from which to un- escaped into the night. al crystallization is embodied in the state derstand and attack the ways apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in in which normal is reproduced and reiterated. the various social hegemonies.” In destabilizing and problematizing normalcy, we can destabilize and become a problem for We experience the complexity of domination the Totality. and social control amplified through hetero- sexuality. When police kill us, we want them The history of organized queers was borne dead in turn. When prisons entrap our bodies out of this position. The most marginalized - and rape us because our genders aren’t simi- transfolk, people of color, sex workers - have larly contained, of course we want fire to them always been the catalysts for riotous explo- all. When borders are erected to construct a sions of queer resistance. These explosions national identity absent of people of color and have been coupled with a radical analysis queers, we see only one solution: every nation wholeheartedly asserting that the liberation and border reduced to rubble. 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 VII speak of sexual liberation in this country were The perspective of queers within the heter- anarchists, or that those in the last century onormative world is a lens through which we who struggled for queer liberation also