Toward A New Praxis
Finding Queer Communion On The Precipice
This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.
First, welcome to all my new subscribers. I’m glad you’re here.
I decided to begin reading Surviving The Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies the day that President Joe Biden announced he would not seek a second term.
The atmosphere around the U.S. presidential election mere months away was becoming more and more dire. Data showed that many folk, especially younger voters, don’t like Biden or Donald Trump. And yet, despite the 45th President having one of the most divisive, destructive and dehumanizing records of any past executive, he continued to have an edge in head-on polls over the incumbent.
Biden’s withdrawal from the race—seen simultaneously as a long shot, necessary and a disaster—sent my mood from brooding pessimism to abject anxiety. I live in an overwhelmingly arch-conservative area in an otherwise deep blue state. I was forced out of a job I’m good at it in part because of my work around progressive issues that were opposed by elected officials.1 A school district here just this summer passed a resolution endorsing a ban on trans students participating in girls sports, despite the fact that state law prevents such a ban. A second Trump presidency will only empower and ingratiate the worst of the local kakistocracy, and it was appearing increasingly likely that such an outcome was imminent.
In reading Surviving The Future I hoped to find inspiration or new ways in how I could help support the local queer community I have become a member of, as well as other communities that have long faced disenfranchisement, discrimination and worse here. Because, let’s be honest, a second Trump term will be miserable for me on many levels, but I am still a college-educated, cisgender, heteronormative-presenting, married man. To say that I am privileged is an understatement. For other queer folk, for people of color, for the differently-abled, for the infirm, things would be much, much worse. Learning novel (to me) approaches and thinking around supporting all disadvantaged folk seemed a pragmatic response to that looming scenario.
One may find it strange that I would turn to a clearly anarchist-inspired book of essays to find something motivating under these circumstances. I have never described myself as an anarchist or as being anarchist-adjacent. In fact, I take issue with many of the tenets of anarchism, if not the practices of its adherents.
I consider myself fully a progressive—I support universal/single payer health care; progressive income taxation; a truly livable wage (or, even better, a universal base income); redirection of resources from military and police budgets to mental health, social supports and education efforts; pro-reproductive rights; mandated employer provision of sick, vacation and parental leave; necessity of providing tangible reparations to the descendants of enslaved people brought to the U.S. and redressing the grievous pain inflicted upon Indigenous people in the U.S. I could go on.
I have undergone some amount of education when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) thinking, strategies and practices, independently and with people who, at least in my conservative community, are considered excellent at mediating discussions and challenging people’s ingrained perspectives.
I seek to support disenfranchised folk via their businesses, events and collective actions.
Regardless of all of the above:
My born status, faith and upbringing, despite knowing now how erasing it was of me and others, still informs my world view and impulses.
I am deeply ill-informed/equipped on how best to address the overwhelming systemic abuses in the United States against anyone who doesn’t look like me.
While I believe that government, specifically representative government, is beholden to its citizens and, at best, is a force for good and change—via education, public works, economic intervention and so on, I acknowledge our nation’s government has repeatedly failed at this even in the rare moments it had the best of intentions and actions.
It’s with that background and self-awareness that I dived into Surviving the Future.
Some of what the essayists discussed was familiar to me, at least in concept, and I even agree are serious failures and challenges. The insidiousness of white supremacy and patriarchy in all aspects of our society. The perpetuation of the prison-industrial complex. The suffocating grip of capitalism. The revisionism employed by nearly all government entities in service to a mythological “Manifest Destiny.”
But it also didn’t take long for me to become uncomfortable and/or shocked.
They contended the fight for marriage equality and other queer rights deliberately pulled attention away from addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis while also creating new pools of people to be exploited for military service. In fact, several writers noted that such offers of any rights should be refused outright.
They asserted that DEI efforts, by and large, are just another form of control that prop up the very institutions that will continue to conduct violence against the disenfranchised, or even create opportunities for that violence.
They argued that it wasn’t enough to reform prisons or overhaul sentencing guidelines; no one, one essay argued, should be incarcerated and that includes those serving sentences for sex-based offenses.
Their particular willingness to attack anyone, queer or otherwise, for being part of or supporting a business venture.
I had to take breaks, sometimes days at a time, after reading just one essay before going on to the next. My difficulty to absorb all of that and more is, admittedly, based on ingrained reflex.
How could I agree that gay marriage was a mere distraction? My one queer relative (who lost a lover to AIDS) and his now-husband were so wanting to be married that they were among those in the city of San Francisco who managed to be wed by then-mayor and now California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2004 before being stopped by the state supreme court, which voided them all later that year.
How could I view DEI efforts as dangerous forms of assimilation when I had worked with youth and adults in my latest role who viewed them as their path to broader acceptance, if not protection, at school?
How could I agree that sex offendors shouldn’t be locked up, having covered plenty of police cases involving domestic abuse, sex abuse, and child abuse as a newspaper reporter?
I could see their points on some of these matters, especially through the lens of their ideology. Anyone who believes the highest goal is the absence of the state is going to argue that fighting for rights from a state is a worthless exercise, for example. And I could see how the acceptability of some forms of queerness—namely, that of people who look like me—has allowed the broader issues facing the disenfranchised to be set aside and diminished.
For white queers, the danger of searching for happiness in an institution is that we will seek it at the expense of the collective good.
-Raxtus Bracken, “Adding Insult To Injury: A Case Study of the Institutional Weaponization of White Queerness”
Really, though, my shock and discomfort with much of what they put forward was because, well, they’re right.
That DEI initiatives, which I helped to support in my most recent job, are used by authority figures as a control measure until participants either can’t or won’t go along with them.
That mainstream media has time and again fallen for the making queer folk into threatening spectres, something that I myself am guilty of on some level.2
That the blatant commercialization of some aspects of queer culture—which I have participated in—watered down intentionally radical queer culture and allowed for the fringe to be demonized, even by other queers.
“...we are tired of the neoliberal capitalist project of our contemporary moment and yearn for the days when gays and lesbians were saying, “let us show you something different,” rather than “look how we can be just like you.”
-Jonesy and Jaime Knight, “The Figa”
Yet, what really resonated with me was their praxis—the practices, the services, the organizing that they carried out in response.
Creating mutual aid networks, writing to those in prisons and sending them books, documenting and archiving their efforts and art as well as the attempts by authorities to thwart them.
As much as the essayists deride and reject the popular culture and current world order, none of them advocated for violence or the forced assimilation of individuals to their ideology. They are radical, yes, but little happens in our world without radical folk. They plant the seeds of a more fair, more just, more human world.
This is not to say those seeds need or should be allowed to grow wild. Good intentions can choke out others. But that’s where progressives come in; we see the potential and work to make the most of it while balancing it against the bigger picture.
And just as I chipped away at my resistance to their militancy, I saw them chip away at their disdain for the mainstream. One essayist, who initially railed against the sterilization of queer culture in the mainstream, eventually noted that mainstream children’s television programming such as Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time (a personal favorite of mine) and Disney’s The Owl House (a favorite of my oldest child) are nonetheless effectively powerful ways to begin instilling the values of radical queerness in the youngest generation.
That caring for each other, and for other communities that have similarly been devastated and ravished by the monstrosity that is popular culture and hierarchical entities, is paramount.
It is exactly in these times of increased fear that we must stay committed to our values…we will not sacrifice the safety of some of us for others of us…The answer is to look outside ourselves. Building radical kinship between our communities.
-Rabbi Ariana Katz, “We Will Not Abandon The Waters,” Yom Kippur drash cited by Beth Bruch and Sandra Y.L. Korn, “How To Survive without Assimilating: Resisting Pinkwashing and Antisemitism”
A lot has happened since I started reading Surviving The Future.
All the above has brought my thoughts of the future back to brooding pessimism—three months to undo the past year or so of abysmal campaigning is not ideal, after all. But I will begrudgingly note that I see a faint light on the horizon and I hope that it continues to grow brighter.
I fully expect that the essayists in Surviving The Future don’t feel the same. Harris is, after all, a former prosecutor. Walz is still white and straight. Rejecting efforts to further target trans folk doesn’t undo everything still in place to target them and many other disenfranchised groups.
But just as I recognize my need to shift my understanding and what more I should do to bring about a more fair and just world, I hope they see the opportunity with a potential Harris-Walz administration to build upon their vision of a radical future.
If we come to recognize the cracks in the system, encouraging one another to find diverse, interdependent enactments of agency, then perhaps we can more easily tap into our own decomposition, engaging deviance as a legitimate ontology. It encourages us to speak and write and eat in a new language, with uncontrolled tongues and leaking pens, refusing to translate our self into the predetermined, precoded “right” form.
-Cassius Kelly and emet ezell, “How To Queer the Grammar of the Body by Eating Bread”
This was despite those officials being recalled from office, a very rare occurrence, nearly a year before I was unceremoniously laid off.
One transgression that comes to mind is a piece I wrote about the local community college establishing gender neutral bathrooms when it became state law.
Excellent. Just excellent. I sincerely applaud your intellectual honesty and willingness to become a beacon to others like myself would otherwise sit still in the dark, unaware of my own complecence.
Ty, this review is so well written. I really appreciate that you called out your discomfort, took a breather, and walked back into that space to stay open to learning more. Radical notions are meant to shake us up, to wake us from our complacency, and to force us to question all of the constructs we rely on. That's tough work, but I see you making such a good start. Thanks for sharing that perspective with us.