In 2006 I started a chapter of the Pink Pistols and soon after I met Libertarians for the first time. In 2007 Ron Paul happened and in 2008 I attended my first Libertarian Party convention in Denver, CO. They were just recovering from the Portland Massacre and most of it was way over my head. I don’t even think I knew about the NAP yet.
I cast my first ever delegate vote for Ron Paul and watched in horror as Bob Barr proceeded to win our nomination — I went home demoralized, and the train wreck of that election year continued. I was going through my Alex Jones phase, and we were using Ernie Hancock’s workshop to mass produce copies of “Endgame” and “The Obama Deception”. I truly feared the world was about to end. Then Obama won and I became sure.
In Spring of 2009 I relapsed on crystal meth, and the next three years of my life were probably the best and worst of my life. I lived out drug-driven sexual fantasies that most people dare not even speak of, and I lived through the hell of eviction and homelessness in a psychotic condition that led to my eventual near death in a small town in another state where I knew literally no one, hundreds of miles away.
Somehow by the grace of a power greater than myself, I found my way home and chose life. I accepted treatment and began my journey of recovery in 2012, as the Occupy protests were drawing to a close and Ron Paul delegates to the GOP were going through a convention disappointment of their own. I saw that the carefree days of my youth were over, and so was my youthful idealism — something I had guarded and cherished well into my late 30’s, far longer than most.
Being born into a mentally ill gay body and not discovering the first part until decades later brought a lot of unnecessary hardship into my life, but the luxury of a carefree adult life was a mixed blessing. I understand the abuses of the police state, the wage system, landlordism, healthcare industrialism, hetero-supremacy, private property and the drug war first hand.
I have been gay bashed with baseball bats, verbally and physically assaulted by cops, everything I own stolen and one of my cats murdered by a state-sanctioned eviction, held in a cage for weeks at a time for the crime of existing without property and psychologically tormented by guards and inmates alike, punished for uncontrollable body functions that happened because a business owner’s choice to classify me as “not a customer” is considered legally binding over my inability to control them.
Once a cop even held me bound in cuffs while he read my entire journal cover to cover — a journal filled with personal sexual fantasies that I wrote while high on meth, some of which involved men in uniforms like his. At the time I tried to tell myself it was a voluntary, self inflicted act of humiliation bondage but it wasn’t. It was a gross invasion of my privacy and a sick abuse of power over me by a man who took a perverse pleasure in the power he had to exploit my hopes and dreams (such as they were at that time in my life) for his own amusement. Because that’s how statism “protects” people like me after they’ve exploited everything else they can get.
When I did get back involved that fall, I didn’t just get involved with activism, or politics, or philosophy. I got involved with the dream of a world set free, because there was nothing else to hold on to after I decided not to let go. There is only one way out of this world for me, and that is through whatever path is between here and liberation, if not for me in my lifetime than for the people that come after me. I am in this not because I enjoy the drama, or the struggle, but so that no one ever has to make a choice like mine again. Nobody should ever have to choose between a life filled with trauma, suffering and abuse, or a death in pain and isolation as the price of being born to an unjust world.
Recovery has given me an incredible life. I can’t say I don’t struggle anymore, but I experience a great deal of joy. The struggle and the drama that comes with it do bring rewards that track closely with my talents and passion. I enjoy giving my life back to a movement that I believe can give a better life to so many others after my life was given back to me.
I don’t regret one bit of it and I’d do it all again. But something’s very different now that my carefree days are over. My adulting days are here. I don’t look at this as a hobby, or entertainment, or a therapeutic way to spend my time. I look at it as my life’s work, and I treat it as a profession.
I build entire campaigns around things like challenging respectability norms, and reclaiming the povertarian identity, and standing up to bigots hurling queerphobic slurs in my face not because I like scandalizing prags or drinking right-wing populist tears, but because somewhere out there somebody just like me is living through a nightmare just like mine who may not make it. Because this world is so full of oppression that it makes human lives actually end early, and it almost made mine end early too.
I am living on time that was given back to me as a gift, and I give it freely back so that more may have the same. I truly believe that one day, in a world set free every human will have the chance to be born into their full potential and live with peace and prosperity from cradle to grave. But even if we don’t get there in my lifetime, I know that each battle I win today makes tomorrow one tiny bit better for myself and others.
If the fruits of my labor, fueled by my passion and joy and the sense of urgency from my own experience can benefit even just one person, all the pain was worth it. And after all, what else do I really have left to lose?
