Our first title for Anarchist Summer Reading Program is "Queers Read This".
"There is nothing on this planet that validates, protects or encourages your existence. It is a miracle you are standing here reading these words. You should by all rights be dead." - Queers Read This, 1990
Anonymous
Queers Read This was written at the height of the AIDS crisis as a call to arms in the culture war. The essential vibe here is queer rage, and I enjoy this deeply. Y'all know as I've aged I've mellowed, but I once nearly destroyed myself because I'm such a "good boy" that I couldn't turn my rage outward, I turned it inward, and the result was a toxic mess of addiction and self-destruction.
What I Mean By "Healing"
When I bring themes of healing and personal growth into my work, that's not just about positivity or whatever. It's about knowing how deep and destructive that internalized rage can be - and yet, how sacred and righteous and good it is to choose one's own conscience over the pressures of the world to conform, assimilate, obey. The concept of "queer" is constructed around this fundamental tension.
In a world full of normative demands so destructive to those who don't fit into it that our very lives are at stake, choosing to go "against" the grain by choosing your own truth over the lies that are told about you by those who want to destroy you is a profoundly brave and defiant act, and when we cultivate it for our own and each other's well-being - justice - we discover that to resolve that paradox we must embrace it.
Queerness Smashes the Internalized Closet
In this way, queerness defies identity constructs which attempt to box our behavior in and explain it neatly with reference to what's normative. "Gay" is understood as "not straight", "trans" is understood as "not cis", poly forms of relationship are "included" by adding a letter to an acronym while the organizations which claim to fight in our name demand access to state-sanctioned monogamy.
Proclaiming oneself queer is as liberating as it is powerful, and it terrifies our enemies. Queerness transcends sexuality and gender. A queer posture in the world defies the demands of conformity and non-conformity. Queerness is exhilarating, and exhausting, and exciting in equal parts, requiring constant vigilance over who makes my decisions, and who gets to. Gay culture has no more authority over me than heteronormative whiteness.
"I hate having to convince straight people that lesbians and gays live in a war zone, that we're surrounded by bomb blasts only we seem to hear, that our bodies and souls are heaped high, dead from fright or bashed or raped, dying of grief or disease, stripped of our personhood."
Queer Action Is Life
The text is far more militant than my spiritual take - I'm leaning on my own taproot of empowerment to frame the text in my own words, and for me there's something incredibly sacred about queerness. "Sacred" literally means "set apart", signifying that it takes intentional effort to preserve what makes something special. In this way radical self-love is a revolutionary tactic which shines the light of divine power into the darkness of homophobia, capitalism, and empire.
Queers Read This is essentially a manifesto for fully embracing what's so hard about this, not because we love how enraging and overwhelming it can be, but because we love ourselves and we love the people around us enough to keep telling them the truth about ourselves, the world, and each other.
When we choose this kind of radical self-love, we become beacons of resistance that give others the courage to separate themselves from the normative demands that are slowly killing all of us and join the radically queer embodiment of a new world. I'll leave you with these words, written as a call for coming out when that in itself was radical.
"I wear my pink triangle everywhere. I do not lower my voice in public when talking about lesbian love or sex. I always tell people I'm a lesbian. I don't wait to be asked about my 'boyfriend.' I don't say it's 'no one's business.' Be proud. Do whatever you need to do to tear yourself away from your customary state of acceptance. Be free. Shout."
