My Confrontation with Rainbow Capitalism and the Pride Industrial Complex

 I grew up very Queer in a very small and very conservative town in Central Pennsylvania. I didn't have the word 'Queer' or really any word to properly describe my feelings of visceral otherness, but I couldn't seem to hide it either. Not from the Catholic priests who saw a child deeply disturbed by their own body as an opportunity for a good time or from their loyal parishioners who seemed to hold biennial conventions at my parochial school over the existential question of 'what should be done with the Reid child?'

I have spent the better part of my life trying to come up with an answer to that question and even once I did, the answer didn't exactly make things much easier. By the time I finally figured out that the 'Reid child' is a transfeminine genderqueer dyke molested into obedience by Vatican protected predators, she had developed five personalities just to deal with the weight of that post-traumatic reality and found herself bumped up to the top tier of the Fox News hierarchy of scapegoats, somewhere between undocumented communists and mouthy Black chicks in hijabs.

On the other hand, I also managed to uncover the fact that I wasn't the only damnable pervert in the holler, forging a small found family of neurodivergent genderfuck hicks to smoke dope and shoot tin cans with. On top of that, it turned out that the college town about thirty minutes down the road from me had a fairly sizeable LGBTQ+ organization, one of the largest in the state, as fate would have it. 

So, once the dust finally cleared from my shattered closet, I decided to pack up my five personalities and get a volunteer job in the big, wicked city with this non-profit in hopes that I might be able to convince someone over there to help my people over here.

The mission seemed to begin with promise. The people at this organization appeared to be very supportive on the surface and had even acquired a government grant to set up a program to provide services for Queer youth in rural areas like mine along with a paid employee to help run them. This was what I had wanted more than anything. The youngest member of my found family is the non-binary child of two of my best friends who calls me Auntie Anarchy and kind of restored my faith humanity after decades of people shielding their children from me like some kind of ghoul. 

This child would become my beloved nibbling (a non-binary term for niece/nephew) and trying to provide them and others like them with the modicum of community and safety that could have shielded me from mountains of trauma when I was their age became a kind of jihad.

Sadly, it didn't take long for me to recognize that the big college town LGBTQ+ center didn't quite share my passion. In fact, they seemed to spend most of their time organizing one of Pennsylvania's largest Pride parades every June. I would take my nibbling to some of these decidedly family friendly events just to show them that they weren't alone, but I was never quite comfortable with the level of police presence at these crowded spectacles or the level of performative gladhanding from the state's Democratic Party for that matter. 

Still, I held my nose for what I believed to be the greater good and I largely did the same thing with my new volunteer job at what I came to call the Center; coming in week after week and harassing the awkwardly placed straight woman who ran their physical location downtown about the progress of what they had promised to what I came to call 'my kids.'

But it was just one excuse after another from that woman. Just week after week of "soon, be patient" even though these people supposedly already had all the resources they needed. Somehow, those resources just never seemed to find their way to my broken neck of the woods.

Then Trump got reelected and I lost patience. Within days of that vile child molester's inauguration, he was passing executive orders targeting Queer kids and my nibbling's school life went from bad to unbearable; receiving death threats that their teachers couldn't seem to be bothered to even address while their friends filtered in and out of various institutions after failed suicide pacts.

To make matters even more maddening, my straight supervisor at the Center seemed to vanish into her office around this time, spending every waking minute on the phone with the door barricaded from the inside. I hoped that maybe at least some of that attention was being spent on the kids on the frontlines, but it never reached mine, so I took actions into my own fragile hands. 

I found a safe location at a volunteer bookstore for the rural youth group to operate from and even offered to provide transportation, but the Center's employed operator never seemed to show when anyone was actually watching. Tensions finally came to a head when my incessant bitching finally got me a meeting with the chairwoman of the whole damn organization.

I did my best. I told her about the small town I grew up in and the nibbling that I loved, about the pain of seeing someone you care about reliving the worst moments of your childhood for the first time in slow motion. I begged her to give us just a fraction of the time and money she splurged on cop-infested parades and bougie gaylas, and even told her that I was a Queer person on disability who would gladly run the program myself if she'd just give me a hand. That's when things got ugly.

The moment this woman learned that I had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, she began to lay into me with ableist microaggressions and straight-up insults. When I finally cut the shit and asked her if she was actually telling me that my neurodiversity should preclude me from being around kids like my nibbling, that elderly white lesbian gently told me, "Well, we need to think about the children." 

It was the Catholic Church all over again, only this time the bigots had dressed themselves in rainbow camouflage.

A series of increasingly infuriating events unfurled very rapidly after that dreadful heart-to-heart that made the true colors of this supposedly inclusive organization grotesquely clear. 

I overheard my straight supervisor talking trash about me with half a dozen of the organization's board members in her office, so I stopped coming into the Center and began working at the bookstore instead where I discovered that the person being paid to run the rural outreach programs was a literal fraud who was simply pocketing the checks without even showing up to what they were supposedly paying for. Upon informing them of this discovery, the Center replaced this charlatan with another straight white woman and then moved the bitch and her virtually non-existent group to a closed location when I continued asking questions.

But perhaps the most despicable development of them all was my discovery that the first thing my supervisor had done after Trump's reelection, what she was too busy with doing in her locked office to even speak to me, was getting on the phone with straight corporate sponsors to make sure that they didn't pull their floats from the Pride parade after Trump's crackdown on trans-everything. This was what took precedence over suicidal children and executive child abuse. 

I was infuriated but not even a fraction as infuriated as I became upon learning that one of those blessed sponsors was none other than Raytheon, a company using its support for Pride parades to cover up its ongoing involvement in profiting off of the slaughter of other poor people's children. 

This! Dearest motherfuckers! Is the Pride Industrial Complex! A network of once-benevolent LGBTQ+ organizations, operated by rich old white lesbians, spending most of their time and millions of your donation dollars on throwing parades just so they can raise enough money to throw more goddamn parades, all of which serve little other purpose than to offer diabolical corporations and two-timing politicians' platforms to celebrate themselves celebrating diversity while they murder entire populations behind the rainbow flag.

What more can I say without literally smashing things? Big money does hideous things to beautiful people and beautiful things for hideous operations. Just please do me one big goddamn favor, keep it all the fuck away from my children and don't make me tell you twice.

As for me, I ended up running the youth group myself out of the bookstore because no one else could be bothered to give a fuck about rural Queer kids when the cameras weren't rolling. I was too busy organizing to even think about indulging in another parade this year. I helped organize a block party in that very small and very conservative town with Food Not Bombs instead. My kids were there and I'm proud to say that not one red cent was exchanged for anything during the entire affair.

The only Pride parade I'm still interested in marching in is the one that leads to the White House and ends with that temple of Raytheon being burned to the ground once and for all. That would be one fabulous spectacle that I'd like to think we could all take pride in. Until then, the pink jihad rides on.

Peace, Rage & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Atmosphere by Joy Division

*  Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers

*  Walking in My Shoes by Depeche Mode

*  What's Wrong with Me by Olivia Rodrigo

*  Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails

*  In Bloom by Nirvana

*  Head Over Heels by Tears for Fears

*  Bruised Violet by Babes in Toyland

*  Man-Size by PJ Harvey

*  How Does It Feel by Bob Dyland

Queers are Everywhere You Bomb

 There is a narrative running through the western zeitgeist and slowly trickling out to its various victims in the Third World that 'Queer' or at least 'LGBTQ' is somehow synonymous with colonialism and imperialism; that queerness in and of itself is an inherently western 'ideology' being enforced upon the indigenous people of the Near East and the Global South by the barrel of a gun. This notion sickens me to the core because I am, perhaps above all else, a Queer anti-imperialist... But I get it.

It is a sad and disturbing fact that the white supremacist cis hetero chauvinists behind the mirage factory that is Atlantic neoliberalism have adopted the notion of 'LGBTQ rights' as one of their many excuses for flattening the planet and turning it into a colossal beige fulfillment center at the service of the global 1%. But this must be seen for what it truly is; fickle, empty and totally deceptive propaganda.

Over the decades, as the metropolitan West has grown increasingly diverse as a direct result of its endless international adventurism, the same predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant cisgender men who have always run this imperial cartel have had to get increasingly creative to sell their mission of vanilla hegemony to the increasingly Neapolitan masses within their own palace gates.

'White power for straight white men' just doesn't quite have the audience it once had even if it still does very much represent the intentions and demographics of its masters. So, we have been sold secular humanism, liberal progressivism and humanitarian interventionism among other sexy new brand names for western cultural domination. Cis women have been afforded a very well-publicized selection of spaces amidst the power elite so long as they kill like men and cover for their rapist husbands. And the Queer community has been tokenized and sanitized beneath the logo of LGBT.

Thus now, whenever some fag-bashing Evangelical Zionist goes on a murder spree he can claim to the more sensitive westerners in the audience that he is merely cleansing the Arab savage beasts with fire in the name of rainbow flags and girl power.

Never mind any of the inconvenient facts: That Queer people are much more likely to be found in western prisons, asylums, foster care harems and the various other bureaucratic dungeons than we are in goddamn parades, or that we are far more likely to become victims of the rape culture cultivated by the Epstein Class than our more conventional peers, or that said predator class still remains overwhelmingly cis-het male-WASP in its own cultural make-up... 'Some Muslims kill Queers and flog their wives, so dropping bombs on their children is a celebration of diversity!'

This is not Queer culture. This is a bunch of bloodthirsty breeders hiding behind a sanitized mockery of Queer culture. Queer culture; truly Queer culture, is not a pink monolith, in fact, it is the polar opposite by nature. Queer culture is above all else indigenous and individualist in nature. Indigenous in that it is a call for a return to the local tribal diversity of interpretations regarding sexuality and gender identity once commonplace in pagan society. Individualist in that we reject the ability of any material body, be they church or state, to define said sexuality and gender identity. All of which is quite violently anathema not only to imperialism but liberal progressivism as well.

Queer culture was born out of the maelstrom of Romanized Christianity. Colonialism of the modern western variety began with the forced Christianization of Pagan Europe and quickly advanced to the forced Christianization of Africa and the New World. Before this Queer culture was Norse culture, Yoruba culture, Apache culture... A million tribes with a billion gods and just as many interpretations of gender and sexuality... All violently snuffed out by the cultural universalism of organized Christianity which would go on to inform the cultural universalism of liberal progressivism after the Enlightenment declared the state and its various institutions to be the new gods.

Modern Queer culture was a tapestry of heathen shards gathered by wounded hands in the shadows until the anti-colonialist movements of the 1950s and 60s created a platform for us to define ourselves outside of the closet. There would be no Queer liberation without Black Power and Chicano pride and there would be no Black Power or Chicano pride without the Battle of Algiers and the reckoning at Dien Bien Phu.

Stonewall was an uprising against police brutality lead by Black and brown gender outlaws like Marsha P. Johnson, Storme DeLarverie and Sylvia Rivera, all of whom had track records with the American Third Worldist Movement and it showed through the movements that rose from the flames of the Stonewall Inn.

The various Gay Liberation Fronts founded across the West in the late-sixties and early-seventies chose that name in reference to the Algerian National Liberation Front and the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. The Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries founded by Rivera and Johnson included references to the Black Panthers, Pagan Third Genders and Third World liberation in their founding documents. 

And a chapter of the GLF participated in the Black Panthers' 1970 Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia right alongside the Young Lords and the American Indian Movement with Huey P. Newton's vocal support and approval.

The current mainstream LGBT movement is a domesticated farce. Queerness is an expression of anti-imperialism writ intimate and much of the bigotry towards this expression in the Third World is actually a relic of imperialism. Indigenous gender identities and sexualities throughout the Global South were violently altered and criminalized under colonial rule and even after this rule, many otherwise liberated nations failed to liberate themselves from legal constructs introduced by the supposedly tolerant West. But even this is not the case universally.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, the latest target of American imperial bombardment may allow the death penalty for homosexuality, but they are also the only Islamic nation on earth to recognize gender confirmation surgery, not just as a right but as a responsibility of a truly Islamic society, with none other than the Ayatollah Khomeini issuing fatwas regarding the right to gender confirmation as early as 1964 and Shia Islamic jurists deciding that since it is not possible to change the soul but it is possible to change the body then not only should such surgical interventions be permitted but they should be treated as a kind of rebirth complete with corresponding ID and certification.

There are still many horrible things about the treatment of trans people in Iran but the fact that their laws on the issue are more humane than most Bible Belt states proves the total absurdity of the notion of imperial queerness. Persia has recognized the existence of Third Genders for over 3000 years and has totally indigenous laws that represent this history, and American bombs have murdered Iranian transwomen right alongside their cisgender sisters. Those bombs have also killed feminists struggling against the Mullahs and children who will never come out to their parents.

I mourn those people because they are my people and they were killed by bombs from a government that pays for them with the money they take from my purse with their taxes. This is also the same reason that I will not march in any parade sponsored by Raytheon or Lockheed Martin. 

Because I am a Queer person, and that is why I am an anti-imperialist.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Running Up that Hill by Chromatics

*  You're One by Imperial Teen

*  Better Angels by the Menzingers

*  Kim's Watermelon Gun by the Flaming Lips

*  Lola by the Raincoats

*  The House that Heaven Built by Phoebe Bridgers

*  I Fought the Law by Dead Kennedys

*  Headache by Frank Black

*  Mississauga Goddam by the Hidden Cameras

*  Gary Floyd by Butthole Surfers

Movies for Queers Who Like Revolution

 If it's June, then it must be Pride and straight people everywhere are celebrating how far you've come. You know, out of the closets and onto MTV. But what if you don't particularly feel like celebrating? What if you're actually pretty goddamn pissed off right now, what with the bipartisan police state feasting on shattered trans bodies like undead fiends just behind the rainbow curtain and known sexual predators demonizing our kids as perverts for pissing in the wrong bathrooms... 

What if all this primary season, tightrope chicanery actually has you in the mood to hurt people, straight people, including the ones who pose as allies and then vote blue no matter who? Not that you would ever act on such unspeakable compulsions, but sometimes it feels more than a little cringe marching around in rainbow merch surrounded by pigs and newly progressive church ladies dolling out mom hugs. Sometimes inclusion feels like a party favor at a Jonestown jamboree.

So, what then do we do with these angry faggot feelings that won't get us chucked in a prison cell with a bunch of equally pissed-off breeders of the wrong gender? Maybe we escape the heat and go see a movie, a Queer movie, a really Queer movie, like the kind of Queer movie where Queers actually get to hurt people, straight people. Naturally, you might have a hard time finding anything that bad for you in the Marvel clogged megaplexes of suburban Ozymandias. But if you've got yourself a couch in the basement and an autistic girlfriend who pirates movies on the dark web, maybe you can join me in checking out some of these decidedly politically incorrect movies for Queers who like revolution.

Monster (2003) by Patty Jenkins

Unfortunately, best known as the movie Charlize Theron was brave enough to make herself look like an actual fucking woman for; Monster is not simply a serial killer flick, it is a daringly sympathetic look at how a Queer sex worker like Aileen Wuornos could be driven to murder seven of her own johns in just under two years. The woman wasn't a monster. She was a victim who never learned how to become a survivor and she isn't alone. It took a lifetime defined by sexual violence and the brief flickering opportunity to save another abused Queer woman from the same fate to drive Aileen to kill and as horrifying as it might sound, she did it for love and paid a price that most of her tormentors never did. I wish I couldn't relate. 

The Doom Generation (1995) by Gregg Araki

If you loved Natural Born Killers but kept finding yourself asking "where is all the Queer sex?" then Gregg Araki's very nineties cult road flick is for you too! Loosely inspired by a Mark Beyer comic strip, The Doom Generation is essentially a movie about a bicurious teenage couple who find themselves on the run from the law after hooking up with a mysterious bisexual drifter. It is an incredibly violent movie but most of the violence seems to be triggered by the questionable sexual reputation of a single foul-mouthed teenage girl (a gloriously profane Rose McGowan). There are plenty of bodies and severed limbs by the time the credits roll, but when it all comes down to it, this is a movie about the impossibility of liberation for Queer youth without a downright suicidal dose of nihilism and it fits in perfectly during the era of Trump.

I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) by Mary Harron

Based on the tragically true story of how Andy Warhol attempted to swindle an emotionally fragile radical lesbian named Valery Solanas and ended up getting shot for pushing the 'Queen Bitch' act just a little too far, I don't think I can say anything about this movie before praising Lili Taylor's seething performance as Solanas. The monologues of her simply reading exerts from the SCUM Manifesto alone are nothing short of electric. With that being said, it is an incredibly sad movie about the ways that even the most brilliant Queer people can be set against each other by a society that views them as little more than party favors. Andy and Valery were two very lonesome, beautiful people who had to destroy each other just to be heard. What else can we do but light a candle for each of them.

 Love Lies Bleeding (2024) by Rose Glass

The most lesbian movie on this already highly sapphic list and quite possibly the most lesbian movie on any fucking list; Kristen Stewart finally went full tilt butch with this one as Lou, a reclusive gym manager with a shady past and a glorious mullet who falls in love with a femme bodybuilder and then goes on a bender of sweaty finger fucking and testosterone shooting that bounds recklessly into decapitating wife beaters and confronting creepy old dads with equally glorious white skullets. It's fucking insane and it's fucking beautiful. A sapphically charged tour-de-force about crushing the patriarchy like glass, both literally and figuratively. I feel dehydrated just typing about it.

Thelma (2017) by Joachim Trier

This sadly little-known Norwegian supernatural thriller hits painfully close to home for me on multiple levels. Thelma is a sheltered coed, away from her stiflingly conservative parents for the first time at college, trying to figure out who she is in an alien environment after years of both conscious and subconscious shame and repression. When Thelma finds herself face to face with her buried lesbianism for the first time upon meeting another enchanting coed named Anja, she short circuits and begins experiencing a rash of psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (been there) and uncontrollable psychonetic powers (I wish) that nearly destroy her and Anja. 

In the end, Thelma is forced to confront her largely blacked out childhood trauma and get revenge on her very passively abusive father before she can gain control of her abilities and take control of her life. Anyone who struggles with any form of traumagenic neurodiversity tied to childhood Queerness should be able to relate in ways both horrifying and liberating. God knows I can.

The Handmaiden (2016) by Park Chan-wook

Park Chan-wook's spellbinding masterpiece has way more Hitchcockian twists than any paragraph-long review could ever do justice but it all comes down to an unlikely pair of conwomen falling in love in turn-of-the-century Japanese-occupied Korea and then turning the tables on the wealthy and powerful men attempting to play them off of each other. It's Park Chan-wook, so the violence is deliciously baroque, but it's the sapphic sex scenes that are the most visually arresting. A touch male-gaze-y but still too powerfully intimate for even the most jaded lesbian feminist to write off as anything less than divinely inspired. I can almost hear the ben wa balls clacking over the crashing waves.

I Saw the TV Glow (2024) by Jane Schoenbrun

Quite possibly the most terrifying thing I've seen outside of a PTSD flashback, I don't think any artist has ever caught the sheer horror of childhood gender dysphoria as mind-bendingly accurately as Schoenbrun has with this instant classic, which makes perfect sense when you consider that she wrote it during her own tumultuous transition. The story goes that two emotionally awkward kids named Owen and Maddy bond over a shared obsession with a strangely prophetic YA TV show called The Pink Opaque all while going through the motions of adolescence like carsick passengers on a funhouse ride. That is until Maddy disappears one night after failing to convince Owen to run away with them. 

Ten years pass before Maddy shockingly shows up at Owen's dead-end job and tells him that they have been living in The Pink Opaque this whole time and insists that the long-canceled show is the real world and that it is in fact Owen's quietly haunted existence in cis gender suburban purgatory that is the true fiction. 

A lot of cis people leave this movie feeling shaken but deeply confused however every other trans person that I know gets it right away. I Saw the TV Glow is a ghost story about the terror of living a lie that everyone around you insists is real and the ghost is the childhood this existence leaves in its wake.

True History of the Kelly Gang (2019) by Justin Kurzel

While not technically a Queer movie in the traditional sense, Justin Kurzel's glam-punk reimagining of the life and death of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly (based on a Peter Carey novel of the same name) might be the Queerest movie ever written about straight people, with Ned Kelly reborn as a crossdressing anti-colonialist son of a slain Irish convict and an imprisoned matriarchal whore, seeking bloody revenge against the British Empire for centuries of puritanical oppression. 

I can't help but feel like this is what Pride should really be about; an oppressed minority declaring war against the status quo, dressed in lace and armor, with guns blazing and heads unbowed. Pride should be at least as fucking dangerous as the forces that oppress us and ten times as bold. 

Maybe next year, dearest motherfuckers. Until then, see you in the Pink Opaque.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

The Difference Between LGBT and Queer is a Revolutionary One

 Joe is a gay man. A real swell guy who parts his hair down the side, says his prayers, and pays his taxes. He just so happens to suck cock. Well, one cock at least; his husband's cock. They've been married for almost twenty years, have two adopted Filipino children, a labradoodle, and a mid-century craftsman with a white picket fence in the suburbs. Joe is also an usher at the local Lutheran church, works 9-to-5 for a Fortune 500 company and votes blue no matter who. Joe is LGBT, but he isn't Queer.

Sue isn't quite sure what the fuck she is, but she definitely isn't straight. She fucks guys, lots of guys, sometimes more than one at a time, but she fucks girls too or really anybody willing who happens to turn her on in the right way. She uses she/her pronouns but doesn't really consider herself to be anymore female than she does straight. She wears a dress but also wears a mohawk, six piercings, and more tattoos than she can count on two hands. She lives in a trailer on the weird side of town with two drag queens she calls sisters and a teenage runaway who calls her mom. Sue hasn't been to church since she was molested, makes just enough cash to get by making kinky videos on OnlyFans, and wouldn't vote for another Democrat if you paid her double. 

Sue has zero interest in mainstream society. Sue may or may not be LGBT, but she is definitely fucking Queer and often feels too Queer for any of those letters.

This is a distinction that I feel needs to be made but nobody seems to want to make it because nobody wants to hurt anyone's feelings. I get it, and the last thing that I want to do here is play the gatekeeper telling who can identify as what and when. But there is a very big difference between being LGBT and being Queer and that difference seems to be growing. So, I feel that a few distinctions need to be made here before we cease to be a community at all.

The harsh reality is that while Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender are each specific categories of people who are traditionally Queer, 'LGBT' itself is more of a brand than an identity. It is a label used to market these sexual and/or gender minorities to straight people for mainstream consumption. Liberals love it because it's clean and neat and hyper-specific. Everybody gets a letter and every letter fits into a consumer-friendly box. 

And plenty of L's, G's, B's, and T's embrace this brand but they often embrace it more out of a fear of isolation than anything else. Most of us come from some kind of trauma and the Christian Zionists on the right are always looking for new ways to burn us. But when it all comes down to it, 'LGBT' is little more than a form of domestication. It is a way to normalize people once defined by non-conformity and it's often done from above with the worst of intentions.

America is an empire, a huge conglomeration that is constantly expanding. This kind of megastructure thrives on annihilation; the erasure of any identity that might make its subjects less compliant consumers. Sometimes this means traditional genocide, just straight-up mass slaughter, but sometimes this means assimilation. Breaking down diversity and dissolving entire tribes in the melting pot of the newly secular, white Anlo-Saxon Protestant values that continue to define Western Civilization as we know it. There were too many Irish to kill, so we stuck the Irish in our armies and had them kill other Catholics in Mexico, and soon the Irish were white....

This is what LGBT is really about. Turning our culture into something safe so politicians and CEOs can take pictures next to it and prove how tolerant they are when they aren't busy throwing those too brown or too poor to conform into their marvelous new prisons and having the neurodivergent among us tormented and abused in their crumbling compulsory schools and no-voluntary, for-profit inpatient facilities.

That is LGBT and I won't have anything to do with it during June or any other month. Queer on the other hand is a tribal distinction for all sexual and/or gender non-conformists who wish to define themselves completely outside of mainstream society. We don't fit in and we don't want to fit in. We don't want to join your armies or pray in your churches or vote for your killers. We have our own families and traditions, and we don't appreciate seeing them degraded by Walt Disney so he can cover up the stink of his sweatshops.

I would even go so far as to suggest that we should tear a page from that closet queen Malcolm X and take this shit one step further. It is my closely held belief that Queer people are a stateless nation unto ourselves; a distinct, self-sustaining, cultural minority not unlike a race. While we come from many ethnicities, we have the shared distinction of being people once venerated in pagan societies from the Norse to the Yoruba and then cast out into outer darkness upon the forced Christianization of our former tribes. But from these ashes we formed new heathen traditions in the shadows of backroom speakeasies, all-ages punk shows, and musky bathhouses.

This counterculture was literally brought out into the streets during the revolutionary exorcism of the late 60s and 1970s. Organizations like the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and the Radical Faeries were built using the Black Power and Chicano movements that many of our elders of color were already involved in as models of revolutionary autonomy, and this is what we need to return to, now more than ever.

In a bleeding empire governed by two parties packed with cis-het sexual predators, "fitting in" should be the last item on the agenda. Fitting into what Exactly? Are we supposed to all get married and get rich so we can spend the weekends on some Zionist billionaire's private island, assaulting children that all available statistics show us will be overwhelmingly Queer? Or maybe we should all just join the straight man's army so we can drop more bombs on ancient cultures that still recognize the existence of third genders like the one in Iran?

Fuck that and fuck LGBT. This is a nation built on the same puritanical colonialist ideals that led to us being burned at the stake for being impure vessels of gender-bending gods that couldn't be consolidated beneath one church, and now they want us back! While those same flames threaten to consume their gilded temples of emptiness in one big karmic blaze? I say fuck them and let the fire burn. We will build our own institutions by the light of their flaming ruins. Our schools! Our temples! Our militias! Our nation! Divided under a hundred gods and a thousand genders!

Joe can go ahead and run for president of Hell as an LGBT person you can take home to Netanyahu. Sue will be pegging his husband with a twelve-inch strap-on in the trenches when the grid goes down, living her best revolution as something too Queer to fit in a box.

We are here. We are Queer. And we are ungovernable.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced This Post

*  We Might as Well Be Strangers by Weezer & Wednesday

*  Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill

*  Tilted by Christine & the Queens

*  Rock N Roll N***** by Patti Smith

*  The House That Heaven Built by Phoebe Bridgers

*  Slip Away by Perfume Genius

*  Rockstar by Hole

*  Tonight, Tonight by Snail Mail

*  Breed by Nirvana

*  Songs for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl by Yeule

An Anarchist Defense of the Cuban Revolution

 " a libertarian foreign policy program for America must be to call upon the United States to abandon its policy of global interventionism: to withdraw immediately and completely, militarily and politically, from Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, from everywhere…the United States should dismantle its bases, withdraw its troops, stop its incessant political meddling, and abolish the CIA. It should also end all foreign aid—which is simply a device to coerce the American taxpayer into subsidizing American exports and favored foreign States, all in the name of “helping the starving peoples of the world.”

-Murray Rothbard

"I ask only one thing: Leave us in peace to better our country’s economic situation, to put our planning into effect, to educate our young compañeros. This doesn’t mean we do not feel solidarity toward nations that are struggling and suffering… But it is up to those nations to decide what they want, and if they choose other regimes than ours, that isn’t our business… I ask nothing: neither dollars, nor assistance, nor diplomats, nor bankers, nor military men—nothing but peace, and to be accepted as we are! We are socialists, the United States is a capitalist nation, the Latin American countries will choose what they want. All the same, at a time when the United States is selling wheat to the Russians, Canada is trading with China, de Gaulle respects Ben Bella, why should it be impossible to make the Americans understand that socialism leads, not to hostility toward them, but to coexistence?"

-Fidel Castro

The shit is going down in Cuba and it's going down fast and hard; blackouts, fires, crowds in the streets; the whole shebang. In some respects, this isn't unusual. The shit has gone down in Cuba before. In fact, this isn't even the first time the communist island nation has found itself isolated and surrounded by enemies on all sides. Predicting Cuba's supposedly immanent collapse has become something of a cottage industry among the think tank wonks of the western news-sphere going back to the untimely demise of the regime's one-time benefactors in the Soviet Union. 

But this time feels different because this time is different. Cuba has faced economic catastrophe and the threat of impending American invasion before but never from a Washington Ceasar even more desperate than they are.

While America's now ancient embargo tightens into a downright medieval siege and the grid goes black for weeks on end from Havana to Santiago, Donald Trump is on the losing end of an epic war binge and in desperate need of a relatively cheap win. In a way his decision to lash out at Cuba takes this rampage full circle. Much of Cuba's current predicament was precipitated by Trump's Blitzkrieg helicopter coup against their largest trading partners in Maduro's Venezuela. But since that suspiciously easy victory, our own dear leader has blown multiple limbs off his own regime with his Zionist provoked clusterfuck in Iran. 

This has left Donald Trump a grievously wounded animal in desperate need of a headline that doesn't include the words 'Fucked to Death Dumpster Fire' and Little Havana's own private Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, seems to have convinced the rabid beast he calls boss that another easy headline grabbing Latin American victory awaits him on the firelit streets of a Cuban regime in freefall. This could very well be true, but it would also be quite tragic.  

I know what you're probably thinking. Why the fuck should I care, right? I left communism behind over a decade ago for a decidedly free market-oriented take on post-left anarchism while somewhat uncoincidentally coming to terms with a gender identity that Fidel's macho regime would have had me committed to a sanitorium for until a relatively recent change of heart. 

I do indeed know plenty of ancaps and libertarians who seem to be having a ball at Cuba's expense, celebrating the carnage as more proof that communism has once again been revealed to be a house of mirrors crowded with empty promises. But I can't celebrate with them. In fact, I find their glib opportunism to be downright repulsive.

Some of my readers will chalk this position up to groovy contrarianism or even latent Soviet nostalgia and they won't be totally wrong. However, what truly inspires me to kick my fellow anarchists in the teeth when they spit on Cuba's grave is a simple matter of historical context that I can largely break down into two pretty simple points.

The first point is that what Cuba is going through right now isn't a communist crisis. If that were true, then Vietnam would be in the dark with them right now rather than picking up momentum as a market socialist powerhouse. No, the source of Cuba's economic woes is and always has been purely imperialist in nature. Cuba's grid didn't go dark until America took their largest trading partners in Caracas hostage, but this was only the latest blow in one of the longest shadow wars of the last century. 

Cuba has been existing beneath the weight of one of the most suffocating blockades in modern memory for over 66 years now. All part of a much larger and more violent campaign launched by the United States of America, not in the name of democracy but in the name of bringing Cuba back under our thumb where it belongs. 

After nabbing Cuba from a collapsing Spanish Empire around the turn of the twentieth century, America reigned over that island for over fifty years, using a mix of fascist strongmen and direct military occupation. The last bastard we propped up there was a bloodthirsty thug named Fulgencio Batista who is believed to be responsible for as many as 20,000 deaths in less than a decade. None of which seemed to bother the opportunistic democracy enthusiasts back in Washington and Wall Street, not so long as Batista gave them free access to Cuba's sugar, tobacco, and railroads that is.

It was only after Fidel Castro kicked Batista out of Havana in 1959 and made it clear that Cuba's resources no longer belonged to Yankee conquistadors that America began its long war for "democracy" in Cuba and it was a war defined by what can only be described as craven acts of barely covert terrorism.

This included not only the infamous, CIA coordinated Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961, but a far nastier campaign launched after its failure known as Operation Mongoose which involved a spree of strategic mayhem that included burning crops, bombing industrial sites, derailing trains, and sabotaging power plants amongst other dirty tricks. 

It was ultimately this chapter of the shadow war that would nearly inspire a nuclear apocalypse with the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy actually wanted to take it much farther with the thankfully preemptively aborted Operation Northwoods that proposed American agents facilitating false flag attacks against American civilians in order to provide the popular context for a full-blown American military invasion of the island.

The campaign never really stopped either. America just farmed it out to semi-private terrorist organizations in Havana's Cuban exile community, and we continued to provide these men with training and cover for their attacks on the civilian infrastructure back in their supposedly beloved homeland for decades. This included the men who bombed a Cuban commercial airliner in 1976, killing all 73 passengers on board. This included the men responsible for as many as 638 assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. And this included the men who Donald Trump recently indicted Fidel's brother Raul for shooting out of the sky in 1996.

Before making 25 violations into Cuban airspace with private planes in less than two years, Jose Basulto, the man who led this reckless campaign of leaflet bombing under the name Brothers to the Rescue, was trained in torture techniques by America's infamous School of the America's and participated in the offshore shelling of a Havana hotel in 1962.

Any form of centralized government would crack under the pressure of decades of relentless terrorist attacks and economic isolation, and Cuba's embrace of Soviet-style communism was one of the ways they broke, which brings me to the second historical fact inconvenient to the rabid kneejerk anticommunism of my fellow libertarians.

The Cuban Revolution was not a communist revolution. It was a populist revolution beholden to no single ideology above liberation from imperial rule. Fidel Castro was actually far closer to a left-wing Peronist than an orthodox Marxist-Leninist before the United States began its campaign against his openly democratic 26th of July Movement, and driving this operation to despotism was actually a huge part of Washington's strategy.

In documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, one of the expressed objectives of the JFK approved Operation Mongoose was to force the barely formed Cuban Government to "introduce intrusive civil measures and divert precious recourses to protect its citizens" in an attempt to weaken Fidel Castro's then soaring popularity along with his grip on power. But Castro was never the true target of America's 66-year terrorist plot in the Caribbean, he was merely the result of it.

The real target was and still is the Cuban Revolution itself, a popular grassroots uprising that challenged the supremacy of the burgeoning American Empire in its own backyard and against all the odds won with zero outside funding or interference. 

A popular uprising which actually included Cuba's indigenous anarcho-syndicalists who were a major driving force in their nation's long resistance against foreign rule before Fidel was even old enough to grow a beard. Cuba was driven into the arms of strongmen and their thieving "allies" back in Moscow specifically to derail the Cuban Revolution before it could reach its natural conclusion and that conspiracy is also ongoing.

During the so-called Cuban Thaw, when Barack Obama attempted to rehabilitate his blood-spattered legacy by normalizing relations with the regime during the last years of his presidency, there was a small but vibrant revival of openly anarchist organizations like the Alfredo Lopez Liberation Workshop in Havana and the Anarchist Federation of Central America and the Caribbean in Santiago. 

These groups would go on to play an active role in the post-Covid economic unrest of 2021, using the opportunity to lash out against both the Cuban government and the US Embargo that justified its continued existence.

 Those voices and others like them will be lost in the maelstrom of an American invasion which will once again force the Cuban Revolution to return to the barracks of its first objective to protect its people from imperial intervention and this is quite possibly the most tragic thing about that revolution, the only thing more tragic than its betrayal at the hands of opportunistic caudillos like the Castro brothers. 

The Cuban Revolution was never given the opportunity to move beyond this first objective and, unless America ends its long, dark war against the Cuban people, I fear it never will.

I implore you, all of you anti-imperialists, don't throw the Cuban Revolution out with the bay water just to spite a pig's face. I know for a fact that Murray Rothbard raised you better than that.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Pilot Can at the Queer God by Flaming Lips

*  Lawyers, Guns & Money by Warren Zevon

*  London Calling by the Clash

*  Lessons Learned by Matt & Kim

* (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding by Brinsley Schwarz

*  Easy On Your Own by Alvvays

*  Waiting for the Miracle by Leonard Cohen

*  Jesus Was a Cross Maker by Judee Sill

*  The Mercy Seat by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds

*  International Small Arms Traffic Blues by the Mountain Goats

Iran in Vain: Rooting for the "Bad Guy" is No Vice When Your Guy is Worse

 If you have no earthly idea what in the hot fuck is going on with the Iran War right now, then you are probably paying attention because the Trump Administration and the mainstream news appear to be equally clueless. In fact, their behavior seems downright bipolar from a proper distance. For weeks now, since Trump and the Mullahs kind-of-sort-of-not-really put their hostilities on hold with a temporary ceasefire, everything has been stuck in an endless loop of negotiation, escalation, negotiation, escalation...

Every Monday, Donald Trump announces an impending genocide of biblical proportions and every Tuesday he backs down at the last minute while reminding us that doomsday could still come at any given second but a big-beautiful peace deal is also really, really fucking close. 

The mainstream news mostly just seems to take all this diplomatic madness at face value while reminding us how impossibly complicated diplomacy is and that only their Washington trained experts can lead us through it. The only problem with that explanation is that all their think tank wonks seem to be chasing Donald from one flip-flop to the next like small-town weathermen covering big-town storms.

So, just what in the fuck is really going on here? My speculative populist analysis is that Donald Trump got blackmailed into a war that he was also fooled into believing he could just pull out of at the last minute like his last few war crimes and it was likely his cherished allies in Israel who set him up. 

Even if we are to simply ignore the recently aired Epstein Files confirming that the feds believed Trump to be "compromised by Israel" as early as 2016 and that Epstein himself was a Mossad agent, the Zionist sock puppets within Trump's own regime have essentially confirmed that Netanyahu put them up to this.

Both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson confirmed before retracting that Israel had brazenly informed the Trump Administration that they were attacking Iran with or without us which can only be seen as an act of geopolitical extortion when you consider the thousands of US troops stationed between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea like human shields.

America's last couple of drive-by military interventions probably served largely to convince an incompetent egomaniac like Donald Trump that he could pull another atrocity out of his orange ass at the drop of a hat without facing any major repercussions but that is precisely what those interventions were designed to do; give the impression that not every act of American imperial aggression has to lead to a forever war. 

This was particularly true in regard to the kidnapping of President Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela which wasn't even really an intervention as much as it was a carefully choregraphed strongman-swap made between the Trump junta and corrupt elements within the Maduro regime for the latter to hand over their fearless leader in exchange for being allowed to keep earning so long as they gave Trump a taste of the cut.

I had initially interpreted this weird regime change ballet as being designed to break America's Iraq War Syndrome just before the real onslaught in the Persian Gulf the same way George H.W. Bush had done when he swiftly flipped the dictatorship Reagan bought in Panama to break America's Vietnam War Syndrome leading up to the original Gulf War. However, I am now beginning to suspect that the Donald himself may have been the real target of this grift.

Trump has never been the isolationist he plays on TV every four years to turn the Rust Belt, but he isn't a complete and total imbecile either, at least not until his ego gets revved up and maybe that's just what a few good Zionist neocons in his administration did. They gave him an easy win in a fixed fight before helping their allies in Tel Aviv to lure him into an unwinnable Persian dumpster fire that only they could prosper from and even Bush Jr. was smart enough to avoid.

Either way, Trump's already faulty reputation as anything but an abject failure has been decimated by a war that is clearly totally outside of his control. The Mullahs have no interest in making a peace deal with some asshole who blew them up the last two times they came to the table. They quite literally have nothing of value left to lose but their pride. We killed half of their leaders, including most of the moderates, and their economy has been in the shitter since 1979 when we began sanctioning them for removing one of our favorite dictators in the region.

These people survived a solid decade of mustard gas and trench warfare during the 80s with their downright apocalyptic war with another Reagan rent-a-thug named Saddam Hussein. This shit is nothing to them and our own intelligence has confirmed that with reports that the Mullahs still maintain around 70% of their pre-war mobile missile stockpile. 

Meanwhile, both gas prices and Trump's approval ratings are following Iran straight into a hell that the Mullahs spent half a century booby trapping like the ninth circle of Straw Dogs.

The truth is that Trump's flip-flopping peace negotiations are largely a solo act. While Iran maintains their vengeful hardline and stays the course, the Donald desperately attempts to jumpstart the flailing economy with phony breakthroughs at an empty peace table and then threatens genocide when his dick starts shriveling before the cameras again. 

All the while, Israel goes out of their way to dig him in even deeper with strategically planned atrocities in Lebanon and public declarations of their commitment to drop bombs on Tehran forever regardless of diplomacy.

Those psychopaths don't give a flying fuck about American supremacy anymore. Not when they have every side of the fence to play in an increasingly multipolar game of thrones. Russia, China, India, and Turkey are all doing serious business with a hyper-Zionist regime that can play America's Caligula like a fiddle caught in bed with a fourteen-year-old girl. They'll just switch over to the Yuan while the Dollar burns and keep expanding their borders with no functioning UN bureaucracy left to slow them down.

At some point Trump will either have to pull out or keep bombing, but either way he's fucked and so is America's influence in the Middle East as anything but a Kosher busboy. Our reputation as a superpower will likely never recover from such a devastating humiliation and this is probably the one silver lining still visible from the other side of the mushroom clouds. That and this couldn't have happened to a nicer pedophile.

As much as it sickens me to admit it, this chapter in Donald Trump's meandering tragic comedy really fucking turns me on. After having my own childhood mulched by the white-collared sex fiends of the Catholic Church, I can't tell you how good it feels to see the most powerful rapist on earth pose like Tony Montana with fear in his eyes and shit in his pants.

Right-wing battle fetishists will point at me and scoff over the spectacle of a Queer anarchist rooting for the "bad guy", but why the fuck shouldn't I when America is so much worse? This is typically how empires end and thank God they do because the only other option is likely to end in a nuclear holocaust. Iran isn't going to conquer America. The Mullahs aren't coming to a liberal arts school near you. They are simply ensuring that America can't pretend that they won anything but high gas prices for attempting to unilaterally decapitate another sovereign nation's government.

God help me but that feels like a fairly worthy cause to pay the pump for. I've paid higher taxes for far worse. I just wish that Israel would pay the same price, but if they keep throwing their weight around like a rogue British colony, they will. I seriously recommend that every Zionist usurper pays very close attention while Donald Trump begs for peace and screams for war. He is their future. Sooner or later, every empire ends like this. Sooner or later every reign of terror ends in humiliation.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced This Post

*  Scarface (Push it to the Limit) by Paul Engemann

*  Train in Vain by the Clash

*  Rambozo the Clown by Dead Kennedys

*  Like a Rolling Stone by Drive-By Truckers

*  Falling Apart by Slow Pulp

*  Let's Have a War by Fear

*  Ladykillers by Lush

*  Crown on the Ground by Sleigh Bells

*  Volcano Girls by Veruca Salt

*  Pilot Can at the Queer God by the Flaming Lips

Mental Illness May be a Myth, but Trauma is a Societal Crisis

 "In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients."

-Thomas Szasz

In the beginning, there were shamans; wild eyed wiseman communing with the ancestors, drawing down the moon, and swapping genders like loin cloths. They were strange and mystical creatures born with a downright uncanny connection to forces beyond the veil of the seen world and every village had one. 

Then progress began and spiritual diversity got in the way of profit. Villages became cities, tribes became governments, and individuals became citizens. A handful of shamans were rebranded as prophets and messiahs, but they ultimately proved to be too unruly to be governed while they were still alive. So, a few dead messiahs were chosen and churches were built around their carefully edited texts while the rest of the shamanic class were simply deemed heretics and slaughtered.

As progress continued and the cities became states and the states became empires, even religion became inconvenient as anything but an anesthetic relic. The heretics were deemed lunatics and asylums were built, first to simply contain them and then to "treat" them. A new religion was established around such treatments. A secular temple preaching chemical subjugation and societal assimilation as its dogma. They called this church Psychiatry, the Clinic was its God, and its Devil was a mysterious affliction known as Mental Illness.

This is the history of people like me, the history of madness, and it is a history that the various organizations behind Mental Health Awareness Month would really prefer you weren't made aware of. That's because mental illness, at least as they define it, is a myth, and these same organizations are a part of a multibillion-dollar industry built to perpetuate this myth for prestige and profit.

Thankfully, a handful of disgruntled psychiatrists and academics broke away from this cult by making the radical decision to actually listen to their patients and blew the whistle on the entire madness industrial complex during the countercultural heyday of the 1960s.   

Chief among these whistleblowing therapeutic renegades was a psychiatrist and professor by the name of Thomas Szasz who continues to shake the establishment to its faulty foundations from the grave with his groundbreaking 1961 bestseller, "The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct" 

In this carefully researched manifesto, the good doctor largely exposes mental illness as a social construct designed to control those of us driven by unconscious forces to violate the social norms of conventional society. As Szasz shows, this conspiracy to domesticate civilization's neurological malcontents is achieved by declaring our numerous eccentricities to be medical ailments treatable by a variety of forms of therapeutic coercion, from the simple quick fix of pharmaceutical intervention to our involuntary internment at glorified prison camps deemed inpatient facilities.

Szasz didn't reject psychotherapy entirely, however. In fact, he encouraged its widespread use as a means for consenting adults to seek outside guidance in order to "learn more about themselves, others and life." In other words, Dr. Szasz advocated that therapists behave more like shamans than priests while deriding any notion of mental health being pathologized as a corrupt junk science that deprives the individual of autonomy and basic human dignity.

As someone who has spent a good portion of my life at the mercy of bad shrinks and overly simplistic diagnoses, I can vouch for the good shaman, Thomas Szazs, but that doesn't mean that I am well. Quite the contrary. I am indeed a deeply disturbed individual, but the source of my disturbance is not medical, it is societal.

I suffer every day from the trauma inflicted upon me from a young age by the systems that toxic constructs like mental illness built. I am a survivor of multiple forms of child abuse only made possible by institutional powers that left me defenseless and at the mercy of the sexual predators who have managed to carve out their own class amidst the midlevel echelons of bourgeoise society: priests, teachers, politicians, cops, doctors and indeed therapists; institutional authoritarians who prey upon the classes constructed beneath them quite simply because the system tells them they can. They're allowed.

This kind of abuse is rampant and takes many forms beyond simple sexual predation. It takes the form of racial profiling and police brutality. It takes the form of coercive compulsory schooling and downright systemic bullying. It takes the form of rigid gender norms and heteronormative grooming. It takes the form of post-colonial subjugation and cultural erasure. It takes the form of industrial warfare and a 24/7 news cycle. 

We live in a very deeply unwell society and the signs that surround us have grown downright dystopian, but our society is not sick, at least not in the medical sense of the word. Our society is traumatized and we are a society traumatized by Western Civilization itself. A civilization built on genocide, slavery, and apocalyptic Abrahamic cultural supremacy. A civilization that raises its young before the unblinking eyes of Silicon Valley's smartphone panopticon and then diagnosis them with brain diseases when they grow up to be broken and "unproductive" adults. 

And far from fixing the problem, the construct of mental illness only serves to acerbate it further, by treating trauma with trauma and then further marginalizing the results.

Studies collected by PubMed indicate that up to 66% of people experiencing their first episode of diagnosed psychosis develop PTSD from the inpatient treatment they are summarily subjected to. Treatment experiences which often include such totally legal indignities as forced medication, mandatory isolation, and physical restraint. Under such civilized circumstances it is really little wonder that 99% of incarcerated men report having experienced at least one traumatic event in their lifetime with an additional 87-97% experiencing further trauma while incarcerated.

And incarceration is really what all of this comes down to. We are all incarcerated in ways both big and colossal every single day; in schools, in churches, in hospitals, in wage slavery, under constant surveillance, in the fog of forever wars, beneath the state. In a civilization defined by global homogeny and ceaseless growth. 

We have become a post-traumatic society, and no pill is strong enough to cure our living affliction. We must end the abuse of progress, unplug ourselves from the global technofascist hivemind and return to an ecosystem built around community, mutual aid, local diversity, and environmental intimacy. 

In other words, we must return to the wisdom of the shamans deemed mad by a debased order. Then and only then can we break the chains of Western Civilization and begin to heal.

This, dearest motherfuckers, is what my madness means to me. so, if you must diagnose me with anything, diagnose me as pathologically allergic to the modern world and the blind men in grey flannel suits willing to follow its dictates into the abyss. 

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

*  Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails

*  Ohm by Yo La Tengo

*  Roots Bloody Roots by Sepultura

*  Lost in My Bedroom by Sky Ferreira

*  (Nothing But) Flowers by Talking Heads

*  The World in My Eyes by Depeche Mode

*  Schizophrenia by Sonic Youth

*  Mother's Little Helper by the Rolling Stones

*  Nervous Breakdown by Black Flag