Serendipitously, my comp copies of #BeGayDoCrime (@pmpress) reached me a few days ago just when I happened to be cat sitting in the Midwest town where the trans anarchist teen I quoted (anonymized yet with consent) in my foreword to this new book lives. Meaning that I could walk to this amazing youth’s pop-up multigenerational trans social space and gift a copy in person.
After presenting the book, I asked this teen, “Do you still feel the same about the quote? Do you still hold the same view?”—a year later, a teenage year older, and transphobic christofascism being all that much more entrenched and powerful. “YES!,” came the instant reply, affirming the quote in the first paragraph to my “Foreword: An Amulet, a Rose, and a Dagger”:
“These days, one often sees the slogan ‘Protect Trans Kids’ emblazoned on T-shirts, painted across banners, or chanted on the streets during a demonstration. Radicals have added a twist, interspersing illustrations of a rose and a dagger between those three simple words, giving them a more edgy feel. Yet a fifteen-year-old queer anarchist friend of mine recently shared their critique of this popular phrase, adamantly declaring, ‘We can defend ourselves!’”
I take heart from a now-sixteen-year-old and their generation, many of whom have a strength that comes, perhaps, from seeing and now losing—in the span of their young lives—so much possibility to fully be who they want to be. They know what they are fighting for, because they’ve had a sweet taste of it. And maybe, as a still-enthusiastic anarchist, this teen hasn’t yet lost faith in the egalitarian ethos of anarchism, which sees us all as worthy of caring for and defending each other.
And I take heart from this book, which I’m honored to have contributed to, because as I wrote, “Be Gay, Do Crimes, with its abundance of calendrical offerings, acts like a bolt cutter. Each entry snaps open another padlock, allowing us to steal back what is ours. To reappropriate the many scraps of our bottom-up legacies of good troublemaking that otherwise would be ‘lost’ to top-down histories, and use those glorious remnants … to figuratively craft our own amulets of mutualistic protection.”
https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1822