From Oslo to Jenin: A Call for a No-State Solution

 The West Bank is on fire again. In fact, that patch of sand hasn't stopped burning since Benjamin Netanyahu hijacked the Knesset late last year. In a seven month stretch that shameless gangster has taken Israel's seven-decade Nakba and pushed it into increasingly genocidal territory. 190 Palestinians have been killed, 174 of them in the first half of 2023 alone. Israel's American armed gestapo in the IDF have carried out near daily raids in the West Bank while swelling mobs of openly fascist illegal settlers have matched them with their own sweeping pogroms, burning entire villages to the ground.

This latest wave of mutilation is all part of a Faustian bargain that Bibi has made with Israel's rising far right. As long as this coalition of religious whack-jobs and Jewish supremacists agrees to keep that hoza's pink ass out of the slammer he is more than happy to hand them what's left of the West Bank on a spit. This was made obscenely clear with Bibi's promise to expand Israel's illegal settlements by 13,000 homes and his decision to toss his openly genocidal finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, the keys to the Nakba with his own customized private army in the Ministry of Defense.

The result has been a whistling pressure cooker of creeping ultraviolence that finally exploded in Jenin this month with a two-day raid that set a new precedent for ethnic cleansing in the West Bank but also raised the bar on their increasingly desperate citizenry's refusal to go down without a fight. For 48 hours the entire weight of Israel's hulking military might rained down on this tiny, impoverished refugee camp. Swarmed by over 2,000 heavily armed troops with hundreds of armored vehicles, Jenin was encircled and completely cut off from the outside world, with bulldozers obliterating all roads leading out of the camp and destroying its capacity to provide its citizens with clean water and electricity. 

Between airstrikes from Reaper drones and Apache gunships, IDF loudspeakers instructed the besieged population to abandon their homes or be obliterated. More than 3,000 civilians out of a population of just over 20,000 heeded their warning under a storm cloud of tear gas. But those who stayed behind had the final word with a brazen message written in fire reading 'fuck around and find out.'

12 Palestinians were killed and over one hundred were injured but they held their own against one of the most ferocious armies on earth with little more than glorified zipguns and bottle rockets. Ultimately, they left the hopelessly bogged down IDF with little option but to retreat. This David-and-Goliath spectacle was made all the more stunning by the fact that the militants in these poorly armed brigades were quite literally children, teenage boys with a whole life of oppression ahead of them and nothing to lose but blood and anguish. The oldest casualty was 23 and five of the dead were minors. Israel retreated with its pointed red tail between its legs, promising to come back for more with their hoza-in-chief declaring the operation to be "open ended." Their unshaken teenage targets shouted back, 'Bring it!' with their fists balled and bloodied at their sides and the watching world shuttered.

The only thing more delightfully consistent than Israel's failure to take their victims seriously in the streets of their own neighborhoods is Palestine's ability to kick their fucking ass with its arms tied behind its back. However, Bibi was right about at least one thing. This isn't over and there is no reason to believe that it won't get worse. If the latest attempt to ethnically cleanse Jenin failed with flying colors to break the iron will of a few very pissed-off Arab kids, it sadly succeeded in proving that even the most obnoxiously PC administration in White House history still doesn't give a single solitary fuck about brown lives on the wrong side of the Dead Sea.

After the Biden Administration made all the usual cowardly noises about their Zionist Gollum's inalienable right to defend itself from crumbling ghettos packed with orphans, Israel's Defense Ministry proudly announced its plans to buy another 25 stealth F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin by 2027 with $3 billion of the American taxpayer's hard-robbed money in military aid. In other words, put your wallet away Bibi, the next ten bloodbaths are on us.

My old comrades on the far left will blame this ongoing holocaust on Bejamin Netanyahu and the rise of Israeli fascism that he is presiding over in exchange for a pardon for his corruption spree and they won't be wrong, but they will be missing the point. The most tragic detail about this deadly new stage of the Nakba is that its results became inevitable the day that Yasser Arafat forfeited the duties to defend the West Bank to its fucked-over orphans by signing the Oslo Accords in 1993. It pains me to no end to admit this, but the roots of the bomb in Jenin were formed by a fuse lit with a flaming peace deal called the Two-State Solution and too many good people on the left continue to foolishly warm their hands by the embers of its smoldering ashes.

Once upon a time, Yasser Arafat was our everything. As the fearless keffiyeh clad leader of the PLO, he was like Che Guevara and Mahatma Ghandhi rolled into one mind blowing spliff. After decades of taking the stick to Israel's ass with bold revolutionary actions on nearly every continent on earth, Yasser switched gears and lead an equally daring campaign to make hay with his street cred by breaking bread with his enemies in exchange for a sovereign Palestinian state. In 1993, his labor led to a historic agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin that was supposed to negotiate a settlement to a two-state solution with a Palestinian national entity on the land occupied by Israel since 1967.

The western world rejoiced but Palestine mourned what felt like a cheap consolation prize for being raped by a winner. Edward Said would famously describe the Oslo Accords as "Palestine's Versailles" but it was actually far worse. For all his lofty ambitions and tireless efforts, the only thing that Yasser Arafat had really achieved with that supposedly historic deal was reducing a vibrant revolutionary movement into an easily corruptible state called the Palestinian Authority.

By the end of the nineties, the number of Zionists illegally colonizing the West Bank had nearly doubled and Palestine had lost its patience with Arafat's broken promises of peaceful coexistence with an unrepentantly abusive spouse. Radical young Islamist upstarts in groups like Hamas launched a fiery second Intifada in 2000. Arafat may have grown corrupt and rich in his new position as king of the ghettos, but he still couldn't bring himself to do the Israeli's bidding against a bunch of headstrong kids who merely picked up the sword he had dropped for a headline. Arafat bravely refused to sick the PA's new western funded security forces on Hamas and Israel responded by putting him under virtual house arrest until he died a strange and mysterious death in 2004.

This death was later proven to be murder years later when an autopsy revealed traces of radioactive polonium in Arafat's exhumed corpse. The culprit was pretty clear to anyone with a functioning set of eyeballs. Israel was the only nation in the region with access to that kind of nuclear material and then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had quite openly admitted to toying with the idea of assassinating the peacemaker for years. But this assassination would have been impossible without conspirators in Arafat's inner circle and the events proceeding his death make it hard not to come to the conclusion that those same people took his place in running the Palestinian Authority on Israel's behalf.

A fat little technocrat named Mahmoud Abbas took Yasser Arafat's place in 2005 and after helping Israel to quickly wrap up the Second Intifada he essentially declared war against his own people by turning the Palestinian Authority into one of the most oppressive police states on earth. With a CIA trained security force of 83,000, the West Bank now suffers from the highest ratio of security personnel to civilians out of any territory on earth. These thugs regularly abuse and torture their own people while acting as de facto security guards for the illegal Israeli settlers who rob them blind. 

With prisons being built faster than schools and entire communities being razed to the desert floor, the people of Palestine finally called bullshit on this raw deal by electing Hamas to a majority in parliament over Abbas' fat cats in Fatah in 2006. Israel and the PA responded swiftly in tandem by turning the entire territory into a prison. The Hamas stronghold of Gaza was blocked off from the outside world by air, land, and sea with a crippling Israeli blockade while Abbas earned his keep ruling by decree in the shrinking West Bank. Oh, that deformed gremlin still grumbles loudly over each of Israel's increasingly sensational war crimes, but he conveniently refuses to spare a single member of his own private army to back up the kids they police in the camps when they do their jobs for them by trying to fight back.

I hate to play the anarchist know-it-all card here, but this is what happens when a revolutionary movement makes the mistake of becoming a state, they become the oppressors. The Two-State Solution isn't a failure just because Israel has no right to exist. It's a failure because no state has the right to exist, especially not a European-style nation state in a region with zero indigenous history of that brand of subjugation. Muslims, Jews, and Christians all coexisted peacefully in the Holy Land for generations back when it was a poorly governed Ottoman outpost. It wasn't until the British showed up and started carving up the desert like a Westphalian birthday cake that things began to get crazy, and this insanity won't stop until the people of that region reject thugs like Bibi and Abbas and stop trying to be Europe.

Fuck Europe. Europe is fucked. Be something better. Look to the roadmaps of regional mavericks like Muammar Gaddafi's Isratin Proposal or Abdullah Ocalan's Democratic Confederalism. Recreate the autonomous tribal democracies that ruled those deserts peacefully without a state long before Israel or Palestine even existed. It's up to you, Palestine, but we can all start right now by giving the brave child soldiers of Jenin a little fucking back-up against the forces of Babylon with a Stateless International Third Intifada. Because there is no state solution like a no-state solution.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.

* Spitting Off the Edge of the World by Yeah Yeah Yeahs & Perfume Genius

* The Bends by Radiohead

* Wave of Mutilation by the Pixies

* Tommy Gun by the Clash

* Ahead by Wire

* Time for Heroes by the Libertines

* Where Eagles Dare by the Misfits

* Anti-Curse by boygenius

* Sonic Reducer by Dead Boys

* My Hero by Foo Fighters

* The Narcissist by Blur

* Heroes by Peter Gabriel 

Poisoned by Prohibition: Sympathy for the Endangered Junkie

 I have a tendency to view most pharmaceuticals, be they therapeutic or recreational, as neither good nor bad, but fentanyl is one lethal concoction that has really sunken its fangs deep into the collective throat of this nation and even a live-and-let-libertine like me has little choice but to shake my weary head sorrowfully at the grim statistics. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than heroin, kills an average of 200 Americans a day, beating out nearly every other drug combined along with cancer and suicide as the greatest single cause of death among Americans under 50. In 2021, the CDC counted 107,375 deaths by overdose in this country with an estimated 67% of these fatalities involving synthetic opioids and most of those casualties likely had little to no idea what the fuck they were even shooting.

To me, that is the greatest crime behind this epidemic and what truly sets it apart from many of the other hyped-up pharmaceutical fads. Unlike most pearl-clutching normies in the straight world, I fully except and even begrudgingly respect the individual right to commit mass suicide by having a good time and I despise all the crowd-exciting tricks that the government and their willing Cassandras in the mass media play to try to horrify the public into embracing totalitarianism as the only elixir worth shooting directly into your prick.

They are playing this twisted fucking game with fentanyl, telling a gasping public that you can overdose just by breathing in the fumes of a junkie's belch on the subway train. The fact that does set fentanyl apart from many other drug hysterias however is that what America is experiencing is indeed by and large a wholesale poisoning, only the population being poisoned has been conveniently obscured by the mass media to mask the fact that most of these individuals are actually just consenting adults being poisoned by the toxic fruit of prohibition itself.

The just-say-no-crowd has only just recently stumbled over their long-anesthetized empathy for the actual addicts caught up in their holy war and the reason behind this sudden sea change is likely that the corpses washing up on their shores are now increasingly white and suburban in nature. Not that this has prevented them from presenting these victims as mere things, like creatures straight out of a George Romero picture, totally devoid of anything in the way of agency. Don't get me wrong, there certainly are plenty of kids keeling over after popping mystery pills from the dark web for the first time, but your average fentanyl casualty is actually an absurdly misunderstood citizen of the western counterculture known as the junkie and the long-term demonization of this population is a big part of what is serving them up to fentanyl like an endangered species.

When most people think about heroin users, they generally think of some filthy derelict slumped over in an alleyway with the rest of polite society's garbage. The reality however is that this lurid narrative bears very little resemblance to the average dope fiend. Your average heroin user is actually a relatively high-functioning adult with a job, a car, a family and all the responsibilities that come with such mundane trappings of the so-called American Dream. Most of these people have also made a conscious commitment to a lifestyle of narcotic dependency because it is preferable to an existence with chronic pain. Many are former users of prescription opioids who have been cut off and forced to seek salvation from the streets after fascistic federal crackdowns brought on by mass media hysteria. But there is also more than one form of chronic pain and more than one legitimate excuse to embrace addiction as a way of life.

For centuries, artists, philosophers, and seekers have flocked to the poppy fields to sooth their aching spirits while the more well-behaved citizens of western civilization have scratched their heads and shrugged their shoulders at this pervasive trend. Some of the greatest poets of the 19th century drew inspiration from the altered states of consciousness they conjured up under the influence of opioids. Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud championed these narcotics and the "Fantasias" they elicited for taking them to spaces where rapture was bottomless and detachment from the modern world around them actually allowed them to comprehend it more clearly. This same form of toxic meditation was later mined by the greatest jazz musicians in American history, pharmaceutical daredevils like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, who boldly celebrated the transcendent relaxation of heroin with bebop and the sonic aesthetics of cool.

Heroin would later come to define the work of many of my own tortured musical heroes on the outskirts of rock n roll. Analog outlaws like Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, Lou Reed, Tom Verlaine, Johnny Thunders, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love would all follow the lead of bebop and Baudelaire by using that dirty water to step outside themselves and touch our lives in ways that sobriety may or may not have afforded them otherwise. I'm not trying to sugarcoat addiction here. Many of these same brilliant artists would also ultimately destroy themselves but I think it is foolish for us to simply blame the tool they chose to do that with while totally ignoring the magnitude of the art that came out of that same experience. Alex Trochi, the resident junkie laureate of the Situationist International once referred to his own addiction as an act of "artistic self-destruction" and I believe that this observation cuts to the very heart of the so-called Opioid Epidemic.

All opioids including heroin are essentially painkillers but as I noted above, who is to say that physical pain is the only kind of pain worth killing? Why not psychological pain or even spiritual pain? How about philosophical pain? The collective pain of entire generations forced to endure the deep bottomless ache of an empty, vacuous, and materialistic civilization that seeks to render the human spirit into a veritable commodity to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. Heroin is an undeniably toxic substance, but it is also a substance that affords the individual with a level of deep introspection that allows them to divide themselves from the herd. This is what makes the junkie such a vile caste in the eyes of mainstream society. Because the junkie represents a lifestyle which is arguably the most radical rejection of mainstream society available. A kind of chemotherapy for the domesticated spirit. And now that these sullied renegades are becoming a downright endangered sect, mainstream society is suddenly all broken up about it?

Mainstream society brought this poison on with its war on certain drugs and the drug users that they fail to control. No seasoned junkie goes out looking for fentanyl. Fentanyl came looking for them when the US government decided to clamp down on their own opium farms in Central Asia and the Golden Triangle after white people started spiking up and bringing the ghetto to the suburbs. The cartels only turned to fentanyl because prohibition required them to come up with something cheap, lethal, and easy to manufacture and this isn't the first time we've seen this kind of police state blowback either. During this country's disastrous prohibition against alcohol up to 50,000 consenting adults looking for a good time dropped dead after ingesting bathtub gin or rotgut whiskey manufactured on the cheap using industrial alcohol. We have also seen this with vitamin E acetone in THC vapes, synthetic cathinones in MDMA, levamisole in cocaine and now even animal tranquilizers like xylazine in fentanyl.

All of this is the direct product of prohibition, and yet the state's response to this product is more fucking prohibition. That is because the state and its various industrial complexes are the real cartels and they don't just traffic in prisons, borders, and 24/7 surveillance, they traffic in an endless cycle of misery that makes consensual behavior toxic and then sells the violence that caused it as the solution. It is a massive con, and it is a con that requires a virulent form of chemical bigotry to grease the gears that it dismembers us all with.

If people really truly want to stop other people from using certain drugs, then they need to ask themselves why those people choose to use those drugs in the first place. They should also probably ask themselves why exactly it is so goddam important for them to stop other people from doing things they don't like with their own bodies. Is it truly a concern for their wellbeing? If so, then why aren't they equally committed to stopping people from using cars or cellphones or the government? Perhaps these people should look towards their own addiction to controlling other people's choices and ask themselves when was the last time a junkie put an entire generation in prison to achieve their fix? Consider this an intervention.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones

* Loaded by Primal Scream

* Heroin by the Velvet Underground

* The Bird by Charlie Parker

* Hit So Hard by Hole

* Dirty Water by the Standells

* You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory by Johnny Thunders

* Blue Train by John Coltrane

* Pennyroyal Tea by Nirvana

* Head On by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* You Can't Always Get What You Want by the Rolling Stones

* Marquee Moon by Television

Stonewall On a Farm or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Agorism

 

"Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now! Whatever you would do then, do it now. When you run up against obstacles, people, or things that won't let you live that way, then begin to think about how to get over or around or under that obstacle, or how to push it out of the way, and your politics will be concrete and practical."

-Paul Goodman

• "If you don't like what you're doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove."
• 
  
• -Timothy Leary

2023 was a pretty cruel year to be a Queer revolutionary. While one half of America's two-party junta excitedly stoked the flames of transgender genocide with a slurry of unabashedly fascist laws that exploited the full weight of the breeder pig state to police Queer bodies back into the shadows of the closet, the other half effectively colonized Pride Month and turned a celebration of revolutionary insurrection into a corporate coronation welcoming LGBTQ people like terrified sheep into the bloodthirsty jaws of capitalist assimilation.

And somehow, I can't seem to convince my people that these two campaigns are not a coincidence but a conspiracy. Just like my Irish ancestors before them, my beloved tribe of sexual mavericks and gender outlaws are being offered two choices by the same double headed serpent in the garden of Babylon. You can either embrace the prison industrial complex that Pappa Biden built before losing his marbles or you can be mowed over by it. Assimilate or be destroyed. 

Both of these heinous choices end in the erasure of Queer culture as anything but a tacky knickknack on the warden's bookshelf. But try as I might, I can't seem to convince other Queer people that they have become the latest pawns in a very old con job known as the melting pot. I have screamed this hideous truth until I'm blue in the face from the rooftops of the Stonewall Inn, waving a flaming rainbow flag and dressed like Carry in a prom gown bathed in swine's blood, and I still haven't been able to illicit much more than a shrug from the passing parades.

It's in hybrid moments like this that my chemically imbalanced passion converts over to depression, and I begin to lose hope. What is the use of scribbling these cantankerous diatribes if nobody fucking listens? What is the point of belonging to anything when people only let you down? Why not just draw the curtains, crank Elliot Smith songs at eleven and cuddle up with that large hunting knife that I keep conveniently close to my bed while watching the parade go by with pinpoint eyes full of smoldering anger. It's in moments of dark despair like this when I have to unplug my computer, grab my car keys and drive out into the holler to escape from myself.

About forty miles from the middle of nowhere, in the junk strewn heart of central Pennsylvanian tetanus country, just passed the outlaw biker bar and the half-charred scarecrow in the melting latex Donald Trump mask, there is a poorly paved winding country road off a poorly paved winding country road that leads to a little shack that used to be a barn in a past life. You'll know it when you see it because it's the only hovel in fifty miles standing beneath a battered rainbow flag and it's covered from head to toe in anarchist graffiti like a Charles Bronson era New York City subway car. This is my sanctuary. A feisty little love shack that my found family affectionately refers to as Misfit Manor.

It is the fulltime home of two and a half trannies, nine ducks, four cats, an old German shepherd and a recovering crystal meth addict. I met Archie and Em during group therapy, and we congealed into something of a perverse family unit during the post-apocalyptic panic of the pandemic. Their story reads a bit like the lyrics of a John Mellencamp song hijacked by Lou Reed on a moonshine bender. Just a couple of farm raised furies who became high school sweethearts, switched genders and had a kid who defies both of them. You know, the American dream, little pink strap-ons for you and me... and all the redneck chicks go doo do doo do doo do doo do do doo...

In addition to Kiddo, their eleven-year-old non-binary smart-ass who self-identifies as a threat, calls me Auntie Anarchy and is clearly more mature than the rest of us sown together, Archie and Em have also adopted Revo, a thirty-something bisexual troubadour, Iraq War vet, recovering everything addict and unrepentant nihilist who lives in the attic, breathes cannabis and pays his rent in folk songs and prison tats. His nom de guerre is short for Repeat Violent Offender, a charming little moniker he picked up while doing a dime in one of Pennsylvania's finest maximum-security gulags.

Besides the faggot Waltons on acid, Misfit Manor has also become a second home for a roving circus of other lovable losers too Queer to qualify as full-blooded hillbillies. Apart from me, the poet laureate and yammering minister of propaganda for this motley crew, there is also my best friend Lily, a wispy, pixiesque, transgender hacker who I've formed something of a plutonic mommy-domme/little girl relationship with over the years. Then there's Brendan, a permanently stoned bisexual masochist who never seems to run out of lethally medicated gummies, and a Queer Civil War reenacting gun-nut named Bruce who is attempting to teach the rest of us how to shoot straight.

On a clear night with a full moon, it's something just next door to paradise. A cozy little hole in the mountainside with a roaring campfire out back, haunted by the friendly ghosts of long-lost drunken uncles and the howls of lonesome coyotes. Archie earned this square acre of paradise fair and square, inheriting it from his hardscrabble grandparents as a reward for being the hardest working black sheep in show business but he and Em have selflessly opened its doors to all the local Queer freaks that the Pride parade left behind and it's the only place outside of my basement that I have ever felt safe enough in to call home. But it's also so much more than that. For a few weird kids without a penny to our name, it's a future.

It is a place where we are all learning to grow our own produce and raise our own livestock. It is a place where we are learning to bear arms, not just to feed ourselves but to defend ourselves from the roaming pick-up trucks full of fag-bashers that still buzz the Manor and attempt to run us off the road at every turn. It is a place that we are preparing to take off the grid with rooftop solar and it is a place where we are trying to cut the umbilical noose from Walmart by bartering goods and services with the local breeders who still remember that we're all just country folk with our backs to the Appalachians and our fingers held out firmly to the metropolitan elites who sneer at us for our peasant ways.

It is a place where I have found hope. Don't get me wrong, we are far from the survivalist preppers that we all need to become to survive the coming collapse of the Kali Yuga. We're always broke, and we probably spend more time getting stoned and playing Dungeons and Dragons than we do with the Mosin-Nagant. But this is what a real revolution looks like in 2023. This is how the adventure begins. Not with dead bankers swinging from the lampposts but with a tight-knit tribal community building their own little pirate utopia right here and now that doesn't need Joe Biden's filthy hand-outs to survive the bigots he shares cocktails with when the cameras aren't rolling. 

It's about two little words that mean something far bigger than bombs. The first one is Agorism, a theory of revolutionary resistance that rejects party politics in favor of starving the toxic conglomeration of big government and big business by creating a counter-economy of subsistence level gray market institutions that rely on things like bartering and mutual aid while offering the system nothing to tax or profit from. To put it in simple terms, this monster cannot thrive if we simply refuse feed it anymore.

The second word is Panarchy, which I believe should be the ultimate goal of Agorism. Panarchy is the creation of not one, but thousands of stateless little pirate utopias devoted to everything and anything from Maoism to Objectivism so long as they all remain completely voluntary in nature. You chose your own damn nation, not the other way around, and you choose when you've had enough of it and want to take off and start a new one down the street. Once again, to put it in the simplest of terms, keep your monsters small enough to drown in the crick.

The dream isn't a climactic final gun battle with those fag-bashers in the white pick-up truck. It's to show them that they don't have to like our utopia to coexist with it. Quite the contrary, they themselves will need a diverse collection of allied weirdos like us if they ever want to escape Brandon's boot like we do. We don't have to be enemies or friends. All we have to do is abandon the state as a bludgeon to wield against each other for the sin of choosing to live our lives differently. That game is a trap that only guarantees that we all get bloody and stupid while the state gets strong on a steady diet of our battered brain matter. Panarchy is for everybody, even faggots and assholes.

I wish I could get the entire Queer community to see the sun set on this place. I wish Misfit Manor could become the new Stonewall. But if there is one thing that my new family has taught me it's that you can't force change on the people you love without strangling them in the process. It's far better to simply start your own little revolution in the backyard and leave a space for them by the fire in case they come around.

See y'all at the holler, dearest motherfuckers. Come by and see us sometime and feel free to come as you are because we're all misfits by light of the flames.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Ballad of Big Nothing by Elliot Smith

* Hybrid Moments by the Misfits

* Love Shack by the B-52s

* Tarmac by Blondeshell

* Jack & Diane by John Mellencamp 

* Take a Walk on the Wildside by Lou Reed

* When I Come Around by Green Day

* Come As You Are by Nirvana

* I Found a Reason by the Velvet Underground

* Where I Find My Heaven by Gigolo Aunts

Bash the Real Groomers, Destroy the Compulsory School System

 As someone who proudly self-identifies as an aggressively open genderfuck anarchist, I get called a lot of ugly words and I've made something of a tradition of owning most of them. In fact, coming from the Eazy-E school of pejorative reclamation, I actually take a great deal of joy in picking up the slurs that bigots hurl at me like stones and hocking them right back in their pig faces. Truth be told, I'd much rather be tarred and feathered as a carpet munching tranny faggot any day of the week than to pass for another normie vanilla breeder. I work hard to stir up the status quo like a cocktail and I welcome their hatred with arms wide open and a kiss on each cheek.

But if there is just one word that I cannot fucking stand for even one withering second, it is the toxic title of "groomer" and this is the new pejorative of choice for those pious cunts in the so-called Christian Right as well as their limp dick Zionist flunkies in the GOP who they ride like a bumper car. According to current popular Republican lore, fierce queens like me are little more than mincing sexual predators, targeting their children so we can indoctrinate them into becoming unwitting participants in our perverted lifestyle. It's an insane and downright evil conspiracy theory that triggers the high holy hell out of me like a shotgun because it couldn't be farther from reality if were scribed by Roald Dahl.

I spent over a decade of my childhood being groomed and violated by legitimate sexual predators in a tiny country Catholic school in more ways than I can count, and I was targeted specifically because of my disharmony with the gender identity written on my birth certificate. I have jagged fractured memories of faceless adults putting their hands on my naked body in anger and being too terrified to say 'no' because I honestly believed that they wouldn't let me go home if I did. I was four years old, and these traumatic flashbacks are the only memories that I have from my childhood in which it was quite literally painfully clear that I was a little girl that just happened to have a penis and they hurt. Those papist cunts got exactly what they wanted. I spent the rest of my childhood numb from the neck down and when puberty finally awakened a storm of rage in my soul, I got called a monster, and I believed them, because I was groomed to believe them.

I wish I could say that I was alone. This is the one time when I honestly do. And I wish that I could say that it's just the Catholic schools too, but it's not. Queer kids are groomed every single day by an overwhelmingly cis-hetero adult establishment to believe that they are weird and broken and abnormal and that they have no say whatsoever on how their bodies are defined or who gets to define them. But this is even bigger than Queer kids too. Our entire compulsory school system is a device designed with the intent to groom all wild children into domesticated citizens.

The American compulsory school system was an invention of the Protestant Reformation of the mid-19th century. Using the Prussian model of martial schooling, a bunch of racist bible thumpers built our supposedly liberal public-school apparatus for the express purpose of force-feeding immigrants and Indians the King James Bible until they choked. The classroom was modeled after a church with desks lined up like pews and a pompous instructor standing above them and lecturing fire and brimstone like a preacher. Over the years this system dropped God from the act and turned its attention to preparing children for the assembly line with bells triggered on the hour like a factory but the product being manufactured remained unchanged and America's schools, both public and private, continue to churn out that product to this day.

The product I'm talking about is obedient subservient children who are socialized to believe that they have no rights, only privileges granted to them by benevolent adult authority figures in exchange for staying in line and following the rules. There is a word for this, another terrible slur, and it's called 'victim.' Children in this country and in most other modern nation states around the world aren't easy marks for abuse because they're stupid or innocent. They are fodder for pedophiles because they have been coached by petty authoritarians into believing that their own bodies don't even belong to them, and the sickest thing is that they're right.

Children have all the rights and dignity of farm animals in modern western society. They can't vote. They can't work. They can't leave the house unattended. They can't even empty their bladder without a stamped document from an adult and these Jesus creeps have the nerve to bitch about "parent's rights?" In a country bereft of youth rights, parent's rights amount to little more than property rights and I'm sick of tiptoeing around the subject matter of abolition just because I'm a faggot. I'm an abolitionist because I'm a fucking faggot and the only thing that I'm grooming your kids to do is fight back.

The statistics have shown us repeatedly that Queer children are far more likely to be targeted for abuse than their straight counterparts. These same statistics have also shown us that their victimizers are overwhelmingly heterosexual men. That's because child sexual abuse has very little to do with sexual orientation and everything to do with power. This is precisely why I was targeted, because the fear and shame that I experienced in relation to my own body made me an easy mark. I already blamed myself before anyone even laid a finger on me. I can't take this back. I mourn the loss of that little girl that those creeps broke into jagged little pieces every fucking day, but I can't put her back together. However, I will be goddamned if I let the pious adults who make all the rules in this country get away with breaking another generation against their wheel just because they can.

This next sentence will probably put me at the top of every parental rights group's hit list but fuck them, somebody needs to say it. According to the bullshit order that American puritanism has established, all kids are Queer because all kids are questioning. None of them have figured out who or what they are yet and the last thing that they need is for some role crazy adult to tell them who or what they should be. Queer people need to re-dedicate themselves completely to the fight for youth rights, but we also need to abandon the public school system as a tool for doing this. The only thing the parental rights Nazis get right is that the state shouldn't be parenting their kids. Their community should. But that can't happen until children have been restored as equal participants in their own communities. 

The compulsory school system was designed for the opposite purpose. It was designed to segregate children from their communities until they could be properly groomed into abandoning them in favor of the cold bureaucracy of wage slavery. This system must be destroyed. Queer people and our allies need to dismantle the entire adult managerial state as defined by the incestuous marriage of big religion, big business and big government and we must replace it with something that empowers young people to define themselves however they damn well please.

We can do this with completely voluntary free schools held in public spaces with no predetermined syllabus and no prescriptive curriculum. We can do this by embracing children as equal participants in their communities with the right to work and the right to quit. We can do this by telling them our stories even when the words burn in on our lips. But we can only do this when we stop preaching and start teaching and the first thing that we must teach them is that they always have the right to say 'no,' to their parents, to their teachers, to their priests and to their government. Their bodies are their property and the only thing that anyone who puts their hands on them has a right to is a face load of buckshot.

You fucking groomers can call me whatever the fuck you want but I will die fighting for the right for your offspring to be counted as individuals with value. If you want to groom these kids, then you're going to have to get through this genderfuck tranny faggot to do it and I'm not afraid to bite anymore. You really should have killed that little girl. Instead, you just pissed her off.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* I'll Keep it With Mine by Judy Collins

* I Think That I Would Die by Hole

* Punching Bag by the Front Bottoms

* War by Sinead O'Connor

* High and Dry by Radiohead

* Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

* Policy of Truth by Depeche Mode

* You're So Vain by Carly Simon

* Sin by Nine Inch Nails

* Silent All These Years by Tori Amos

Ted Kaczynski We Hardly Knew Ye

 On June 10th, 2023, a madman died alone in his cell at the age of 81 in a federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina. This morbid list of details wouldn't exactly be considered news if it wasn't for the fact that this lone madman also happened to be named Theodore Kaczynski. Better known as the Unabomber, Ted was quite possibly the most notorious domestic terrorist in American history, dueling with the FBI in a 17-year game of cat and mouse that would ultimately become the longest and most expensive investigation in that agency's history by the time of his arrest at his one room shack in rural Montana.

However, even with those legendary stats and all the hyped-up true crime mythology that comes with them, at the end of another crowded news day, Ted Kaczynski was still just another number in America's perpetually swelling human zoo and after the world took a moment to spit on his grave with the cameras rolling, they gleefully returned to their business-as-usual of masturbating to celebrity car crash footage while setting the rainforest on fire. Maybe I'm the sick one here, but I just can't seem to bring myself to join them back in the daily grind. Something about leaving that broken old man hanging in his cell gives me a dull ache in the pit of my heart.

I won't sit here and try to pretend that Ted Kaczynski was some kind of folk hero. He was a killer and most of his victims were just innocent civilians. So, why then should I mourn the death of such a ghastly creature? If I had to answer this vexing question in the simplest of terms, I would say that it's because Ted was a fellow outsider and in spite of all his many sins, he was also right about far more things than any truly evil person ever could be. Burn me at the stake if you must but I feel that this lonesome bastard has at the very least earned himself the right to one obituary that acknowledges the uncomfortable fact that he was indeed a human being.

Theodore Kaczynski was born to a working class Polish American family in Chicago on May 22,1942, and it didn't take very long for the world around him to recognize that he was different. Ted was a childhood mathematic prodigy with an IQ of 167. He entered Harvard at 15, completed his PHD in mathematics at 25, became the youngest professor to be hired in the history of UC Berkley that same year and went on to publish several successful mathematical treatises before the age of 30. 

On paper Kaczynski appeared to be riding high but just beneath the surface he found himself chafing against the restraints of the academic rat race that he felt forced into by birthright. These feelings of loneliness and disconnection were only exacerbated when young Ted found himself a guinea pig in what appears to have been an MKUltra study on the power of cruelty as a weapon for social engineering. For at least once a week over a period of three years, Kaczynski, who was still a teenager at the time of the study, met with Harvard psychologist and OSS veteran Henry Murray to be brutally berated and humiliated with an onslaught of verbal abuse while hooked up to machines only to have those traumatic encounters recorded and played back for him on a loop. 

Under these circumstances, it can hardly be considered shocking that Kaczynski developed an intense repulsion to academia, authority and human beings in general. By 1969, Ted had enough. He left his illustrious career and three years later he attempted to leave civilization altogether. Deciding to devote himself to self-sufficiency and simple living, Ted moved to a remote cabin near the small town of Lincoln, Montana with no electricity and no running water, and for a moment he actually appeared to have found peace.

This is the most fascinating part of Ted Kaczynski's story and it's the part that generally gets glossed over by the media in favor of the more incendiary details. For nearly a decade, between the years of 1971 and 1978, Ted lived in virtual harmony with his harsh surroundings. After years of praise and celebrated material achievements from modern society, he had gladly erased himself from existence and found contentment in absolute isolation. In hindsight, I believe that Ted was well aware of his violent tendencies and went as far out of his way as humanly possible to divorce himself from the problem. Like a growing number of modern-day American misfits, Kaczynski found himself allergic to society, so Ted tried to make society go away. But society would not let Ted be.

It began with commercial airliners flying over his cabin and hunters piercing the peace and quiet of his beloved woodland surroundings with the staccato puncture wounds of their bullets. This slow-motion invasion of the modern world on Ted Kaczynski's self-imposed exile escalated with bulldozers and pavement, overpasses and strip malls. Ted initially only gave into acts of petty vandalism and construction site monkeywrenching, but a freeway thrown through his favorite meadow seemed to break Ted's already fragile spirit and he chose to devote himself entirely to a one-man campaign for revenge against the modern world.

Ted taught himself how to build explosives by hand using untraceable scraps of metal and wood that he had foraged on his property and between the years of 1978 and 1995 he carried out a veritable jihad of 16 bombings, killing 3 people and injuring 23 others. His targets were diverse; airlines, universities, academics and executives, but they were all people who in Ted's eyes symbolized the rapacious advance of technology on the natural world.

The FBI used the case identifier UNABOM, standing for University and Airline Bomber, but the press dubbed him the Unabomber and here a legend was born. A legend of an untraceably cagey mad bomber outwitting the experts and shaking the world with his seemingly random campaign of violence. Ted chose to exploit this legend for the sake of getting his message out to the masses. In 1995 he sent a letter to the New York Times promising to cease and desist his campaign under the condition that either they or the Washington Post agree to publish a manifesto.

Under the urging of an increasingly desperate federal government, the Washington Post agreed, and it took less than a year for Ted's own brother to recognize his prose and supply the FBI with everything they needed for a bust. After firing his lawyers for trying to convince him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, Ted Kaczynski pled guilty to 8 consecutive life sentences and spent the last 25 years of his life rotting in an artificially lit concrete tomb at ADX Florence Supermax.

As I've noted above, nothing excuses Kaczynski's undeniable savagery. I remain steadfast and committed to my opposition to any form of initiatory violence, but I am also a fellow casualty of civilized society. After twenty years of having meddlesome adult authority figures poke and prod and humiliate me in their attempts to shove me into a constricting modern gender construct that clearly didn't fit, I finally broke beneath the pressure and spent the first 6 years of my twenties as an agoraphobic hermit, and the last 8 years struggling to recover from the damage I did to myself in a misguided attempt at self-defense.

It was during this period of post-traumatic turbulence that I first discovered Ted Kaczynski's then-infamous manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, and decided to take the time to do what most of Kaczynski's loudest condemners in the vaunted fourth estate have never even bothered to do. I actually read the goddamn thing. What I discovered was startling and it only seems to become increasingly startling with every passing year.

Kaczynski lays down an airtight case against civilization in general as an existential foe of individual liberty and technology in particular as a steroid that has grown that invention to downright apocalyptic proportions. Ted's basic argument was that technology makes an already toxic civilization truly lethal by reducing the individual to a product with a barcode number. 

This epic drive towards technological slavery and endless expansion has become more massive than any other single human construct including politics and thus any attempt to use politics or technology to reign this runaway system in only serves to make it stronger. The only hope that humanity has for its salvation is to find a way to push this unsustainable machine to its inevitable collapse before it can completely destroy the planet and then exploit the resulting momentary ceasefire in "progress" to enlighten people on the dangers of the system before it can reboot.

But perhaps Kaczynski's most prophetic analysis was his assessment of the nature of human violence during which he seemed to have accidentally caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror of his own skewed perception. Ted posits that technological civilization has resulted in the creation of a superstructure that cannot function without total capitulation to conformity. Humanities inevitable inability to live up to the rigid standards of such a constraining system leads to a growing plague of increasingly crippling social sicknesses.

Symptoms of these sicknesses may include school shootings, suicidal ideation, workplace rampages, self-mutilation, child abuse, agoraphobia and of course terrorism. I am a survivor of this plague and society has chosen to label me mentally ill for the trauma it resulted in. That term is just one of a number of convenient labels that civilization has chosen to utilize to silence its discontents, and another is Unabomber.

What Ted Kaczynski did was undeniably evil, but it was also inevitable considering that it is precisely what civilization commits every single day on a massive scale with its infernal police-warfare machine. Ted's biggest mistake was foolishly believing that he could somehow liberate himself and the rest of us by matching the cruelty of our shared tormentors and speaking to us in the language of terrorism which they invented. Our biggest mistake, if we so choose to make it, is to disregard Ted's lessons simply because the messenger lost his soul to deliver them to us. I have to believe that it's not too late to make sure that all of this death is not in vain and that includes the madman who died alone in his cell.

Unlike Ted, I don't believe that I have all the answers, I don't think anybody does, but I do believe that his initial instinct to simply drop out of this disease we call civilization was a much more revolutionary solution than simply blowing people the fuck up the way the state does. The only problem was Ted dropped out alone. The real revolution only begins when we all pull the plug together. 

One man alone in the wilderness is a hermit, one Billion is a wildfire that no superstructure can contain. Just call this eulogy a spark and pass it along.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon

* Softer Softest by Hole

* Kerosene by Big Black

* Ex-Lion Tamer by Wire

* Veronica Mars by Blondeshell

* See No Evil by Television

* Shove by L7

* Hardline by Julien Baker

* Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers

* Sappy by Nirvana

* (I Blame) Society by Titus Andronicus

Uganda Can Only Be Liberated by Smashing Its Masters in Washington

 This June has been a dark month for the long embattled Queer folks of Uganda and no pinkwashed corporate Pride parade is coming to save them from the jaws of state sanctioned violence. While the paler people of my tribe celebrate another year of survival in the belly of Babylon, our darker comrades in Kampala are being fed to the dogs. This month the Ugandan government's long campaign to annihilate the Queer people within its borders has culminated in the final solution known as the Anti-Homosexuality Act which will undoubtably go down in history as one of the most heinously homophobic pieces of legislation ever written, putting Uganda in the proud company of Wahabi whack-job states like Saudi Arabia when it comes to persecuting those of us who fail to conform to puritanical zealotry.

Not only does the Anti-Homosexuality Act make all acts of same sex love a crime punishable by life imprisonment but it also sentences those found guilty of the ill-defined crime of "aggravated homosexuality" to death. Lumped into this largely subjective category with pederasts and date rapists is virtually anyone caught having sex with a member of the same gender while HIV positive regardless of whether or not they're transmittable. The law might also become an affective death sentence for all of the 1.2 million Ugandans who suffer from HIV thanks to another vaguely worded provision punishing the promotion of homosexuality with up to twenty years in prison, essentially putting anyone promoting safe sex between same sex partners in the crosshairs.

I won't deny for a second that this law and the American Christian jihadists who have actively sponsored it make sick to my very soul but our own dear leader Joe Biden's Pride-friendly virtue signaling response to this travesty actually makes me feel far worse. As word of Uganda's latest act of war on its own people hit the Queer blogosphere like a hammer, Biden quickly made himself available to play the role of our straight white knight in shining armor by calling on the government of Uganda to immediately repeal this law under the threat of international sanctions. I rabidly oppose this chauvinistic act of imperial posturing and the devastation that it promises to inflict if it proves to be anything more than just another idle threat during an election year, and I oppose it not in spite of my own Queerness but because of it and you should too.

All sanctions, regardless of their expressed goals, are acts of colonial terrorism that inflict the poorest subjects of the given nation they target first and foremost. In Uganda that means the Queer community that the Biden Administration supposedly cares so goddamn much about, especially those suffering from HIV. Regardless of what specific industries or individuals' sanctions target, they all have the impact of making the market those targets exist in toxic to foreign investment. The end result is the wholesale starvation of an entire population of its vital recourses, and I do believe that this is in fact the intent. After all, out of the scores of governments across the globe that America has and continues to sanction not one has ever corrected their wicked ways and agreed to toe the line and yet the sanctions continue. That is because economic sanctions have always been defined by a larger campaign to punish a government's civilian populace into conforming to outside influence while creating a level of instability that can be easily exploited to justify regime change.

This kind of brazenly inhumane behavior is immoral regardless of the target, but I have a hard time believing that the Biden regime would commit such a war crime purely out of a bottomless devotion to equality. If this were the case, then career imperialists like Joe and his handlers would have cut ties with Kampala decades ago. Uganda's so-called president, Yoweri Museveni, is currently serving in his sixth five-year term in office after another recent sham election marked by low voter turnout and violent crackdowns against his opposition. Museveni has run that tiny Central African nation like an organized crime outfit for 37 years since seizing power in a coup in 1986 and his continued rule is almost entirely dependent on a Washington slush fund of nearly $1 billion dollars a year in development and security assistance. 

In return for being delivered the tools necessary to bash his own people, Museveni has been a stalwart asset in Washington's imperial campaign to subjugate the African continent beneath its will during the waning hours of the American Century. This includes the deployment of the Ugandan People's Defense Forces to aid AFRICOM in its bloody terrorist campaigns in South Sudan and Somalia, and this also includes providing the CIA with black sites in Kampala to torture those Africans that America accuses of fighting its own terrorism with terrorism. During all this time Uganda has continued to openly maintain a consistently homophobic regime which has penalized homosexuality going back to its time as a device of the British Empire, and they are far from an exception to the rule. America has a long and storied history of sponsoring despotic tyrants who slaughter Queer people like animals, and this tradition continues to this day. 

In spite of the fact that the then freshly elected Biden-Harris administration released a feel-good memorandum in 2021 committing the US to promoting LGBTQ rights abroad, their regime has spent the last year alone forking over more than $12 billion dollars in foreign aid to nearly 50 nations that penalize consensual homosexuality, including $3 billion dollars to nations like Nigeria and Yemen who execute people convicted of being Queer and another $2 billion for regimes like Chad and Tanzania who merely punish our existence with a life sentence in one of their fabulous prisons.

This doesn't even include the trillions of dollars in supposedly private military contracts that the Biden administration has personally gone out of its way to secure for some of the most violently homophobic dictatorships in the Persian Gulf along with the downright genocidal jihadist proxies that they arm to the teeth with our weapons. All the while, the United States uses the hand not busy cutting checks to bigoted psychopaths to wag its boney finger at other bigoted psychopaths who just so happen to run countries who don't do our bidding. You see, the point here isn't that America hates fags or that America hates fag bashers. The point is that America genuinely doesn't give one solitary fuck whether people like me live or die. To them we are nothing more than disposable pawns to be played in order to justify their relevance on the world stage as a benevolent killing machine. 

In recent years this has increasingly meant using Queer rights and really any kind of human rights to justify America's multiplying forever wars to the weary but increasingly socially liberal straight white vote in suburbia. However, the result of this Kalashnikov cabaret hasn't been the betterment of the plight of Queer people at home or abroad. The result has been to make Queer people look complicit in western imperialism which conveniently only serves to proliferate more bigotry in the nations we bomb, thus giving us more conveniently humanitarian flavored excuses to keep fucking bombing them. Just look at Iraq where in less than twenty years they went from merely imprisoning Queer people for a couple years to hurling us from the highest rooftops. Simply put, my people are being used and we are being used to justify an evil to which our resistance has defined our very existence. 

Queer people have always been a colonized people. In fact, we were among the earliest victims of modern western colonialism. After Christianity was embraced and bastardized by the Roman Empire as a means of homogenizing all the world's tribes beneath the banner of a single monolithic religion, the first targets of their imperial conversion therapy were the European peasantry most resistant to centralized assimilation. These peasants, labeled Pagans from the Latin word Paganus, meaning rural, celebrated the existence of a wide variety of third gender people as spiritual leaders and often practiced acts of drag and homosexuality in their rituals and festivals to celebrate their stateless heritage. 

Quite simply, these tribes were too proud to be governed so they were brutally subjugated beneath the cross of Christianity and ultimately forced to purge people like me from their ranks. Queer people are essentially the progeny of the last pagans. The peasant bastards too freaky to be assimilated. So we formed a new tribe in the shadows to survive with our pride intact. Even more beautiful freaks were added to our ranks when this heinous tradition of puritanical violence was continued long after Rome fell with the subjugation of the New World and the African continent, whose own diverse tribes similarly celebrated a wide variety of distinctive sexual and gender arrangements. This included the Langi tribe of Northern Uganda who recognized a third gender known as the Mujoko Dako who were biological males treated as females and aloud to marry men.

This is our tradition, and this is our jihad. Queer people are not defined by a single culture but by a commitment to a decentralized diversity of cultures, to gender and sexuality being a practice defined by a radical commitment to individual spirituality above state defined biological conformity. This tradition of a thousand traditions can never coexist with any form of colonialism or the various states that such a perversion against nature produces. This includes states like Uganda that only continue to exist at the behest of fickle colonial overlords like Joe Biden and his puppet masters in the deep state. But if we truly want to free these people from bondage, we must first free ourselves and destroy the new Rome in Washington. Regardless of whether they choose to drape their sins in crosses or rainbows, they are our true enemy and they must be destroyed in order to give colonized people across the globe the power to take back their own shattered cultures and stand proud in defiance to puritanical cultural hegemony.

Being a proud heathen outlaw has long meant being colonized but being Queer has always meant bashing back against the colonizers. Kampala cannot be liberated until Washington burns like Stonewall and that's the gift that just keeps on giving all year round.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople

* Who by David Byrne & St. Vincent

* You Can Have It Back by Wild Pink

* Fight the Power by Public Enemy

* Say Yes to Heaven by Lana Del Rey

* November Spawned a Monster by Morrissey

* Sepsis by Blondeshell

* Satellite of Love by Lou Reed 

* American Society by L7

* Everybody Wants to Love You by Japanese Breakfast

Eleven Dangerous Queers They Don't Want You to Know About

 The worst thing that can happen to any minority in this twisted empire in decline is to be integrated into the official zeitgeist of mainstream history because that inevitably means being neutered post-mortem and turned into some taxidermy fairytale designed to prove the supremacy of our exceptional national order. We've all seen this grotesque fate delivered upon the revolutionary progeny of the slaves forced to build Babylon with that revisionist obscenity that we dare call Black History Month and we have much more recently seen this post-colonial minstrel make-over performed on my own tribe with the Disneyfication of Pride Month.

Centuries of struggle against puritanical conformity have been condensed down to a vapid parade of limp-wristed corporate divas. An empty celebration of the inclusive spirit of the American nightmare set to the ballads of Celine Dion and ending at police gunpoint on the wedding alter. This isn't us, is it?  Where have all the wild faggots gone? Where are all the pissed-off dykes and fearless freaks and perverted provocateurs who died emaciated and diseased but defiantly unbowed with one boney finger extended to the stars and stripes that continue to imprison and violate our bodies? Where are all the dangerous Queers?

Well, they're all right here of course, for I may be but a petty genderfuck malcontent eking out a meager existence in the shadows of this empire's colossal rustbelt ruins, but I have devoted myself entirely to performing the role of a gonzo historian, a wild-eyed amateur sleuth compiling the names and stories of my lupen outlaw class and regurgitating them back directly into your eye sockets with my acidic prose. What I perform may not fulfill the high-minded qualifications of a collegiate historiographer but that isn't my aim. My aim is to construct a counter-mythology to inspire my people to revolt against the elitist mythos designed to sedate us. That is why I still celebrate Pride. To hijack the parade and steer it back to the flaming cop cars of Stonewall. To teach my children the sacred legends of their profane elders. This is my thankless jihad, and these are eleven dangerous Queers that they don't want you to know about. Tattoo their names on your soul and rage in the glow of their flaming spirits.

Leslie Feinberg- Leslie taught me how to do this. He was the original keeper of our tribe's hidden history. After living a brutally punishing life as a blue collar transmasculine butch lesbian, Leslie told the world his story in heart wrenching detail with his semi-autobiographical debut novel, Stone Butch Blues. But that influential diary was nothing more than a beautiful brick hurled through the plate glass window of this nation's gnat-like attention span. Like me, Leslie was a committed revolutionary populist on a mission to take back Queer history from the bourgeoise intellectual elites and tell it in our native tongue. Leslie spent sleepless nights after twelve-hour factory shifts pouring over newspaper stories, books and historical documents at public libraries so he could shed a scolding light on the bones of our forgotten heroes, whether it be in the pages of books like Transgender Warriors, which completely rearranged the way I see the world, or in his tireless tirades in the Workers World newspaper. He is why I write this list, in a quixotic attempt to carry on his massive legacy into another generation of sexual mavericks and gender outlaws and tell them our stories. 

Storme DeLarverie- Storme smashed her fist through the snout of history when she threw the first punch of the Stonewall Uprising, but her legacy extends well before and well beyond that glorious weeklong orgy of faggot rage. A biracial child of the Jim Crow South born in the Queer chocolate Gomorrah of New Orleans; Storme first made a name for herself as the lone drag king in the Jewel Box Revue, the nation's first integrated drag troupe. She also sparked a butch lesbian revolution by bringing her performance to the streets, boldly wearing her three-piece zoot suits and fedoras off-stage and turning female masculinity into a way of life. After Stonewall, Storme added a loaded pistol to her wardrobe and spent nearly fifty years stocking the streets of the Village like a bleach blonde panther, serving as the unofficial bodyguard of her tribe and becoming a breathing symbol of Queer Power and butch strength that lives on to this day. Storme DeLarverie is our John Henry only she was real, and she swung a much bigger dick.

Valerie Solonas- Valerie was a creature of conflict and contradiction. Her legacy is defined by two events that remain as combatively contested as her own spirit: the creation of the infamously incendiary SCUM Manifesto and the near fatal shooting of Andy Warhol. What we know is that Valerie survived an abusive childhood to come out as an aggressively butch lesbian during the gray flannel purgatory of the Eisenhower Era. She graduated with a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland before relocating to the radical hotbed of Berkley where she wrote and self-published the SCUM Manifesto. Here is where things get a bit murky. SCUM stands to this day as the most seething and vitriolic critique of the patriarchy ever written, a call for women to abandon the boredom of domesticity to overthrow the government and destroy the male sex. This screed only entered infamy after Valery shot a Queer celebrity for allegedly trying to steal the publishing rights to her work. The questions that still define her legacy are, was this an act of a vengeful artist pushed too far or the manifestation of the delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic? And was the SCUM Manifesto meant to be a misandric sermon or a dark satire of Freudian chauvinism in reverse? 

We may never know the answers to these questions for sure but to both, I say why not all of the above? Solonas was a feminist provocateur in an age when women were rendered completely mute by society. I believe her goal was to make enough noise with both her writing and her actions to end the silence, to obliterate the sexist myth of a weaker sex by any means necessary. It's a shame that she felt that she needed to obliterate another brilliant Queer artist to achieve this goal but it's hard to deny that she succeeded. Perhaps she was just trying to speak to America in the only language it seems to understand. Either way, I feel that she has more than earned our undivided attention. 

Michel Foucault- Traditionally, the intellectual class has done very little for Queer folk other than to label and categorize us away into easily tokenized objects, but Michel Foucault was the consummate anti-intellectual, raging virulently against all absolutes and systems of intellectual power. And this, more than any sexual preference, is what made him our intellectual. Foucault's work as an activist professor and groundbreaking philosophical provocateur laid the foundation for generations of radical Queers to liberate themselves from the rigid sexual identities and gender essentialism that the good professor boldly rejected as tools of coercive power structures. Foucault set us free by erasing the barriers of his peers and telling his students to make up their own damn rules. The AIDS virus stole him from us too soon and cretins within the intellectual elite continue to sully his name with baseless slander but Michel's true legacy lives on in every teenage rebel who builds a new gender identity on Dischord over the weekend just to dismantle it on Monday for the lulz. 

Sylvia Rivera & Marsha P. Johnson- Without these two fearless genderqueer sex workers of color there would likely be no Pride to pinkwash. After breaking their heels off in the ass of the fascist pig state at Stonewall, these two transgender warriors took the raw rage of that spontaneous uprising and used it to sculpt a movement. Sylvia and Marsha founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries to provide Queer street kids with the same kind of solidarity and protection that the Black Panthers brought to the projects and they often sold their own bodies to do it. STAR also collaborated closely with other outlaw organizations like the Panthers and the Young Lords because Sylvia and Marsha were true fucking soul sisters of the greater revolution that defined Queer Liberation, turning tricks and raising fists not just for Christopher Street and the Peirs but for Algiers, Harlem and Saigon. They were the original power bottoms of bottom unity and we still have so much to learn from their legacy.

William S. Burroughs- With his fluid, non-linear sagas about drug-addled perverts confronting the tyrannical menace of bureaucratic conspiracies with chaos magick and a lifetime of libertine exploits to match, Billy was far more than just a groundbreaking novelist. He was a post-modern priest with a shotgun for a scepter, reminding the collective Queer mind repeatedly and mercilessly of the necessity for eternal rebellion. Burroughs didn't just give us Junky and Naked Lunch. He gave us Bowie and Genet and CBGBs and glam rock. He gave drug-addled perverts everywhere the shovels we needed to dig our own underground and then dig another one and then another once the mainstream managed to colonize it. Thanks to the narcotic seeds planted by that mild-mannered lunatic in gray flannel scales, the pesticides of civilized monotony will never sink deep enough to kill the roots of Queer liberation. Praise him.

Kuwasi Balagoon- Many brave radicals fought for Queer Liberation, but Kuwasi Balagoon literally picked up a fucking gun and went to war for it. After serving as a loyal foot soldier for the Black Power Movement with the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, Kuwasi came out of the closet as an openly bisexual anarchist behind bars and then literally broke out of prison to serve openly in the revolution against Babylon. He would die behind bars from that wicked virus that Reagan stoked but not before breaking out his sister-in-arms, Assata Shakur, who spits on the empire from her front stoop in Havana as a free woman as we speak. Kuwasi Balagoon was the Nat Turner of Queer Liberation, taking our struggle to its natural conclusion as an armed assault on the master's plantation. He didn't live to see that motherfucker burn, but a few of us wilder faggots still carry his fire through the fields.

Vaginal Davis- If you don't know that name, you're not alone but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be ashamed of yourself. Vaginal Davis is the Iggy Pop of drag. She did it first and she did it worst and basic bitches are still ripping off her swagger. Going back to her teens in late-seventies South Central Los Angeles, Vaginal Davis has been a tireless renaissance monster. A self-proclaimed sexual repulsive and proud social threat, this bitch basically single-handedly invented the Queercore scene with an endless avalanche of provocative club performances, raucous punk bands, subversive Queer zines and experimental pornography. And did I mention that RuPaul stole her wig?! As she would say, "Too gay for the punks and too punk for the gays", Vaginal Davis embodies Queer as a downright dangerous lifestyle that never rests and burns its laurels by turning race, gender and sexuality into a cabaret of gleefully shameless provocation. RuPaul can eat her fucking make-up. Bow down to the real Queen Bitch or feel the fury of a thousand unwashed fists.

 Max Stirner- "I love men, too, not merely individuals, but everyone. But I love them because love makes me happy. I love because loving is natural to me. It pleases me. I know no commandment of love." These are the frequently forgotten words of Johann Kaspar Schmidt aka Max Stirner, the 19th century German father of individualist anarchism who turned on everyone from Friedrich Nietzsche to Emma Goldman. So, was Max a fag? It's literally impossible to say considering that what little we know about the man comes second hand from pissed-off Hegelian breeders like Karl Marx and one openly Queer anarchist named John Henry Mackay. But we do know that regardless of his bedroom antics, Mr. Stirner was quite possibly the Queerest philosopher in the pantheon in that he settled for nothing short of the complete and total emancipation of the individual from everything but what drives their liberation, even if that requires a full-frontal assault on conventional biology itself. Stirner's distinctive brand of egalitarian egoism has inspired Queer anarchists like me for centuries and his concept of the "Union of Egoists" as a totally voluntary, non-systematic association of misfits in militant contradiction to the state is probably the best description of what it really means to be Queer ever conceived. I love Max Stirner. But I don't love him because he might be Queer. I love him because anarchy pleases me, and anarchy makes me Queer.

Malcolm X- A lot of people still don't want to hear this, but Malcolm X was probably one of us. Long before taking the helm as the outspoken spokesman for the notoriously puritanical Nation of Islam, Malcolm X was Malcolm Little and Malcolm Little was a rambunctiously effeminate kid who schoolmates remember openly engaging in sexual acts with other boys. He would go on to spend his early twenties as a gay hustler and even allegedly held an ongoing relationship with an openly gay transvestite named Willie Mae.

So, what exactly does all this contentious pillow talk have to do with Queer history? From his pulpit in the closet, Malcolm inspired most of the people on this list to bash back with his fiery sermons against internal American colonialism and he probably taught me personally more about being Queer than any other human being on the planet. Malcolm X taught me about the power of otherness weaponized and the ability of any tribe of outnumbered outsiders to take on the system and win through nothing but the sheer ferocity of our collective grit. Go ahead and call it wishful thinking if you like but the fact that Malcolm also appears to have been a fellow prisoner of the closet just feels too profound to be a coincidence. I have to believe that he would have at least followed Huey Newton's lead in recognizing the fire of his other tribe if J. Edna hadn't have had him wacked for empowering a whole generation of marginalized outlaws to get too wild to be governed. 

The least this generation can do is pay it forward with a Molotov cocktail to keep that fire burning. Here's hoping this list reads like a book of eleven matches.

You may say that I'm a dreamer, dearest motherfuckers, but I prefer to self-identify as a national security threat and thank Allah herself that I'm not the only one.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH