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