IMIID OG@-dvg 3g
Elements of this introduction were presented at the North American Anarchist Studies
Network conference in Montréal in the spring of 2018, on the occasion of the tn year
anniversary ofthe initial publication of "Toward the Queerest Insurrection.” Others

were presented ata small gathering hosted by Aleatory Books in Seattle later in the year
Some appear here forthe frst time. The full bok that tbis text introduces ean be found at
<contagionpress.com/ pocketbooks/be-gay-do-erime.

‘Tarot design by amrie
rmusterni-illustrates.tumbl.com

‘Typeset in Adobe Jensen Pro and ©10 London
Designed by Post.Chicans:

PDF available on haters.ife
BE GAY
DO CRIME

Mary Nardini Gang
For Quincy Brier, a, hy dsrapting te ele of et
‘nother wasked-ap academe trying t@ write Mara
‘nd Sia ou of Stonewall, reminded ws that not even
the dead wil be ofeifour enemys victorious.

or Fea nels sce by romeo er rn tro
sing racs a plc by thers nan asc ploing
hc warfare guna the ois, and by others dancing
and do dein some asc insignia i the moments
lore ber death

 

For Chis Chit, abo would surely we his opportunity
te nnd the intersting sme bien
insight about where we have been and where we oe
sing

 

or Ravin Myking, whose betty case the ptr of
Iomophobic megahurch ofthat the mouth ond de
are te aeivalof wees to bunt is sep and conse
the sheep tlt the ground. speaking in tongues and
praying for the abent god

or Scant and the i of memory.
or Vad fri cots:

Forallour friends on the other side we present these
reflecrons.
fn years ago, we were seized by a
frenzied spirit and, in a trancelike
state, received a set of ten weapons for a
‘war we were only jst finding the words to
describe. We were a cabal of teenage run-
aways, neer-do-wells, what Genet called
<eiminal children, coming ex niilo, from
and with nothing but each other. We ex-
perienced the whole social order as inim-
ical to freedom, desire, and our preferred
relations, but suspected we were not alone
in our visceral hatred for this world. So
‘we encoded these tools - visions of excess
and otherness ~ into a slim zine and sent
ic to the ends of the earth. For a decade
‘we've followed it, across borders linguistic
and militarized, to find the comrades (in
a sense inalienable from, as Chris Chitty
argued, the words originary homoerot-
ic implications) who received this same
transmission: queer insurrection.

Daring chat ime, we stole away on trains
with forged documents, on fraudulent
flights, and in the cars of strangers who
picked us up en route to one encounter
after another. We found each other in for-
fest encampments, communes at the cen-
ter of cities, ar blockades against the storm
called progress, and in revelry within the
hollowed out shells of deindustrializacion,
We fought enemies minute and gargancu-
an on streets and in alleyways. We were
there when cities were burned, buildings
‘occupied, boutiques looted, ports block-
aded, wanna-be bashers humiliated, nazis
punched. We delivered an empty coffin
to the doorsteps of a killer cop, threw fire
into che home of a john who killed a trans
‘woman, and more through bank windows
in the name of those imprisoned for re-
fusing a similar fate, We instigated the
wildest queer riots in a generation outside
the gates of summits of the global elite
and again when an apologist for fascism

‘emerged as “dangerous faggot” in the hal-
lowed halls ofthe intelligentsia.

We found our way into reading groups
and meetings, waited for the men to stop
speaking, and spoke only to be misun-
derstood. Misunderstood except by our
friends, for whom we stockpiled pepper-
spray and stunguns because we wanted
them alive, turned tricks co pay bail be-
‘cause we wanted them free, walked out of
grocery stores because we wanted them
fed, scammed universities to bring them
to our cities, sold our time at strategic
instiations so we could give them every-
thing, got really good at showing specific
forms of care (s0 good we found better
hhustles), waited with cigarettes and blan-
kets outside the jails because we hated
the idea of them in there alone, prepared
for attacks like we would fora night with
lovers, dedicated books to each other and
‘our beloved dead because these words
‘mean nothing outside of the relationships
which give them traction. We swore oaths
to keep each others secrets and keep each
‘other alive. To hold fiercely to that bril-
lianc intimacy we shared in moments of
which we can never speak, to never speak
‘our names either, to always speak side-
ways in handwritten leccers on the sides
of buildings, delivered by hand between
traveling friends, or mailed innocuously
under the eyes of guards and censors.

 

In che long tradition of queer criminal-
ig, weve expropriated literally every-
thing we could, We wrote anthems and
journals of exegesis, ended archives and
prison distros, scammed pages by the
thousands. We filled parcels with stolen
fineries and sent them with love notes to
distant friends. We determined each oth-
cer deserving of the ten thousand things.
We've fumbled through learning a thou-

Do rime -5
sand techniques of healing our broken
bodies and spirits. We mastered che art
of the dérive, wandering by instince alone
through the darkened streets of the var-
ied metropoles seeking some ineffability
we still cant name. Weve experimented
with every permutation of drugs and hor-
rmones to find the alchemy that opens us
up to the world. We developed addictions
chasing highs between one uprising and
the next, and later helped one another
find other ways. We experimented badly
with dozens of models for new relations,
but continued even at our worst, because
wwe learned the hard way that disposabili-
ty isnt an option. Eventually, aching flesh
and the planc kingdoms revealed their se~
«ret languages. We learned love languages
too: the inimitable joy of gifts and quiet
declarations and evernities of now-time
spent in affinity and in affection.

Now-time: a hard-won concept we only
learned by way of a sequence of loss
We've hurt each other and had co learn
to pick up the pieces of shattered rela-
tions. Weve been betrayed too, but are
disinclined co spill much ink on sellouts
and curncoats. Weve run away and we've
returned humbled. Our friends and lovers
hhave been taken from us, locked in cag~
«es, sicided by cops, burned up in dance
parties a the margins of gentrifying cities
‘We know that our time with each ocher is
fleeting, so we fight for every moment of
interdependence and complicity

 

“This spring, along with the flowers, an im-
age bloomed within some small nodes of
the world wide web. A skeleton, dressed
asa pirate bearing a torch named anarchy’
with ‘communes’ emblazoned upon her
chest ound bombs’ around her hat and
‘free love on a pin. A sword hangs from
her bele and she bears a scroll proclaiming

6- Be Ow

“be gay! do crime!" The skeleton is fren
tied.

Ac the bottom of the page run che lines:
“Many blame queers for the decline of this
society — we take pride in this. Some be~
lieve that we intend to shred-o-bits this
civilization and its moral fabric - they
couldrit be more accurate, Were often de-
scribed as depraved, decadent and revolt-
ing — buc oh they att seen nothing yet”

Here at the foundation of the image, we
found words which rang familiar. After a
slight slippage in time, we remembered the
feeling of those words and having written
them. ‘They were initially published as a
communique issued by a criminal queer
association in an underground periodical
published by anarchists in Milwaukee
called Total Destroy

Both che gang.form known as Bash Back!
and this publication were expressions of a
milieu based in Riverwest, discreet (and
at times not so discreet) anarchist neigh-
bothood since the end of World War IL
After the war, che nascent bohemian an-
archist subculture that had been devel-
‘oping in the war resister camps among
writers and art freaks, and some chris-
tians, splintered in a diaspora that bore
the newly freed mystics to New York and
San Francisco. A small enclave ended up
in Riverwest and stayed, joining the Gal-
leanist anarchist lineage rooted in the city
“The neighborhood remained a constant
site of struggle, sometimes armed, with
the forces of aw and order. Inthe neigh-
bothood one can find a certain crossroads
at which a variety of struggles have inter-
sected: queer struggles, struggles against
racism and fascism, against the police, for
the liberation of foodvays, along with a
dense layering of underground culcares
Distinct anarchist currents consistently
cohabitated that neighborhood, debar-
ing positions and ways. Around the time
of the Nardini Gang communiques, in-
surrectionaries, queers, race traitors, and
eco-extremists came together under the
roof of an anarchist space. ‘This particu-
lar infoshop (the Cream City Colletives)
‘was one of the many anarchist spaces that
hhad stood ac that exact intersection going
back decades.

“This is the place where we found our-
selves when, a few months after the ini-
tial publication of “Toward che Queerest
Insurrection,” emissaries from the Fucure
spoke through fies set across the seas. In~
surrection broke out. Not in Milwaukee,
bur in Greece. Civilization died within
the bounds of che nation-state mythol-
ogized as the epicenter of its birth. The
police executed a teenage anarchist named
Alexis Grigoropoulos in another long-
term anarchist neighborhood, Exarcheia
(ex- out of; -archea, rulership). Exarcheia
is a place where anarchy, the Beautiful
Idea, had never gone quiet, and so when
cop murdered a youth — an encounter
so devastatingly routine in the US ~ there
at the crossroads which is now Alexis)
hhero-shrine, che whole world caught fire.
“The insurrection had come.

“The fires that burned there for seventeen
nights sent embers to the far corners of
the world, and these found places where
the flame could catch. That flame caught
in our obscure neighborhood wrapped in
rivers, and it changed everything for us.
“Those seventeen days opened up a narrow
gate such as Walter Benjamin proposed
‘existed in each moment. That gate opened
up in che bizarre, internationalist, mycelial
‘web woven by anarchists across the globe.
All throughout the anarchist galaxy, the
messiah came. We bore witness. We saw

the river flow backwards. We saw the
Event, the Open. The fires lit in Greece
spread across the globe as metropoles
and suburbs and unceded territories all
throughout the world in a non-linear,
‘expanding and evolving polyvalent front,
a border between an old world decaying
and a new one emerging.

For many, the realization was brought
by disaster o insurgency in response to
the hidden daly disaster of policing. In
the US, che idea spread through the in-
frascructure of the various nodes created
by che insurrectionary anarchists of the
preceding decade. The ist ral encounter
‘with the fire itself, on chis continent, oc-
curred in the opening days of 2009 when
the city of Oakland burned in response
to the police murder of Oscar Grant. By
‘way of solidarity actions and the stories of
travelers, anarchists who were present for
that opening of the door on the west coast
of this accursed nation, spread word that
the insurrection had come and everyone
should act accordingly.

Bash Back! was one of many currents
which took that message co heart. In the
context of the networks emergent prax-
is, a proposal surfaced which insisted on
anew form of life: criminal, queer, anar-
hist. In short, devotion to the new world
‘emerging, indifference co the social order
lying, and war with those who would de-
fend its memory or attempt to reanimate
its corpse, We realized that time and iden-
tity are fictions, bur thac we are bound
to our ancestors and can only heal feom
the violences by addressing generations
of trauma, We realized that the moment
‘was always immanent, and that we simply
needed to shift perspectives to access i.
Anarchy had always been there beneath
the paving stones. And we saw itzand were

Do Crime -7
forever changed, and now had to live ac-
cording, not in he time thac remains, but
in che time after The distribution of the
anonymous cext “Desert” through green
anarchist nodes put forwaed the proposal
that the world would not end in one sin-
ale gesture of revolution or collapse, but
‘would die as a patchwork, and from that
‘humus would rise new worlds, plural.

In the clash with the alt-right we are en-
countering another of those worlds. Di
ane di Prima said ic best in her revolucion-
ary leters:

And it seems to me the strugle has to be
waged on a number of different levels:

they have computers to cast the I Ching
Sor them

bout we bave yarrow stalks
and the stars

it is a battle of energies of force-field,
what rhe newspapers

call a battle of ideas

Since the moment when the Bash Back!
network encountered the clash of the
new world breaking into existence, we've
‘experimented in ways to live in this new
‘world with which we're bound up in some
divine act of co-creation. We, and these
words, have gone to the comers of the
world, announcing, asthe frenzied skele-
ton above, our magic: Be Gay! Do Crime!

“This developmenc of means of living and
fighting in this new world has looked dif-
ferent for each of us. We have suffered un-
imaginable losses and learned a thousand
ways of healing. We studied to become
specialized practitioners of these varied
modalities. We built networks of care to
support each other through betrayal, re-
pression, and the death of our friends. We

8- Be Ow

learned to care for each others! wounds
and cover each others’ rents. Many of us
work with spirits and ancestors. Some
people gor into publishing, Some moved
to the wilds and are learning its myster-
ies. We have abolitionist fanatics. We have
antifascist researchers who've committed
their lives to documenting the movement
‘of our ancestral enemy: Weve learned to
fight, to attack, to hold space afterwards
We have been at every uprising in the last
decade and have shared understandings by
‘way of them. Those of us who continued
the path of sex work are now struggling
against the States deployment of new re~
pressive and cybernetic techniques. Some
people have gone entiely underground.
Some have leamed the sacred methods
of altering the body. As we speak, people
are studying the stars to find thei way
Some messengers are still wandering,
many have stayed put and are now deep-
‘ening their animistic relationship to place
(es, in the cities too). We have among us
practitioners of sado-masochism, queer
performance, afo-fucurism, chaos magic,
“public health,’ herbalism,diasporic eradi-
tions, long-form prisoner correspondence,
poetry.

“This panoply could be looked ac asa set of
tactical discussions, but this view must be
turned on its head. These are no methods
to bring about the new world, these are
‘ways of living chat assume its immanent
being. We have continued from the pro-
posal published cen years ago in "Criminal
Intimacy” that our relationships are our
strength and that those relationships were
forged in the moments we found each
‘other while the doors stood open. Strat-
egy does not precede the moment but
‘emerges in its aftermath. Insurrection is
the messiah and ic has already come. The
‘question since has been how to proceed.
Ie is no surprise that anarchists who turn
toward mysticism (Fredy Perlman, Ursu-
la Le Guin, or Diane di Prima) at some
point come to study the Tao ~ the way.

We proceeded, despite the end of the
world, seeking joy everywhere we could.
‘Our communiques took che ruins for
granted and we insisted upon dancing
amid them. Sex parties, dance parties,
street parties, reading parties ~ partying
‘emerged as a central form in that fren-
ied moment. Our later inquires into the
sacred nature of the revel ~ into the bac-
chanals and nighttime sabbats — revealed
an intvinsic relationship between partying
and the world-making arts. In our parties,
‘we opened onto connection with each
‘other, onto other realms and other ges-

“The realization of the insurrectionary di-
mension of the party proved dangerous
precisely for its potential to be reified as
the party of insurrection. By way of the
circulation of a small blue book', some
who reveled in flames alongside us became
fixated on the proposed re-emergence of
the party form, the very structure of syn-
thesis thar had dominated the revolu-
tionary imaginations of lost generations.
Where we came to understand the party
as spiritual, chey desired a political party
Where we sought forms of connection,
they submitted to an apparatus based frst
and foremose upon separation. The party
as proposed by those who penned the lit-
tle blue book was to be invisible and there-
by avoid the failure of the past century's
party form. We remain unconvinced. We
hhad already experienced the death of the
party, and had already deale with the au-
thoritarian cult tendencies that followed
from it When che formal dimension

1 The Coming Invern the Invite
(Conenite

of the Bash Back! network had run its
course, we quickly analyzed the moment
so.as to move beyond it. Following an ex-
cerpt from "Criminal Intimacy. a section
of the conclusion to Queer Ultravolence
titled"On the Party” put it this way:

In describing those participants in Bash
Back! as a form-of-ife, Ym making an
cffore to discard a whole range of con-
«cepts and ways of thinking that should
be entirely useless co us moving for-
ward. In particular I want to corally be
done with the notions of identity poli-
tics and identity activism. BB! shouldn't
be understood as a sequence of activist
endeavors, nor as an articulation of a
militant identity politic (co the extent
thac it can, i¢ was a failure). BB! was
never about queer issues or queer poli-
tics. Instead, the project took as its issue
the lives ofits participants. Rather than
the motifs of victimization and charity
regurgitated ad nauseam in activist cie-
cles, the BB! tendency cook as its start-
ing point queer life itself. Those within
the tendency organized a space within
which they could genuinely live, and a
network by which co defend that space.
1 experienced BB! as an amalgamation
of desites, dispositions, acts, process-
cs, gestures, and compliciies. BB! is as
much wrapped up in sexual practice
as in criminal act, as much in strategy
as in style. The process of BB! and the
‘emergence of ts corresponding form-af
life demands to be read less asa what or
a who but instead as a how. This how,
is the how of organization, but also as
much of survival, of violence, of love, of
life itself. And so, whatever the limita-
tions of what Bash Back! was, itis the
hhow (the way) that truly demonstrates
the insurrectionary potential that I cel-
ebrate,

Do Crime -9
We took life itself as our project. Whatev-
cer thetoricit may employ. no Party can say
the same. The very function of the Party is
to expand its own operation by vampiviz-
ing the life energy of al subsumed within
ite We took that organizationalist dead
end as a point of departure and had al-
ready begun other experiments. Sadly, by
this point the straight comrades already
stopped paying attention to that process
of clarification,

We've learned a great deal in the lase de-
«cade, most of which can be summarized
by simply saying char we did nor know
what we were doing, Finding ourselves
now in this position to speak across time,
having an opportunity to reissue these
‘words to some who might find them for
the firs, we have a responsibility to clari-
fy: These intial words are not political; they
are magical.

“The mose studied practitioners of mag-
ic will cell you something remarkably
similar to the lifelong insurrectionaries:
the secret is really co begin. Between the
inquiries of the chaos magicians and the
shared reflections of insurrection orient-
ced anarchists, a whole host of techniques
‘emerge in common: the means to choose
a story and make it real by applying en-
‘ergy. the invocation of che dead, queer
ancestral working, necromantic visits to
Emma Goldman’ grave, the reproduc-
tion of apocryphal texts, conjuration by
way of magical language, the necessity of
abundant sacrifice, fies set to purify, ren-
dezvous below the moon’ fullness and
attacks carried out beneath its dark, rites
‘of mourning & revenge, raising hell ac the
pulpits of the false priests, che interpre~
tation of dreams and omens, the secret
names of our beloveds and their enceypt-
ced sigils scrawled across city walls, che vi-

10 - Be Gav

sionary states of jouissance and spitit-con-
tact by way of dance, the decentering of
the selfand the openness to the other, the
ppacts made at che crossroads ~ these are
kkeys to an otherworldly licany, a grammar
‘of worldmaking by way of ritual ation,

Worldmaking, because we actualy effect
the web of power ~ experientially and re-
ciprocally — by way of our engagement.
You see, the word really did end for us in
December of 2012 when we lost Ravin
While the world waited out the clock to
see if the machines would selfsabotage,
‘we scrawled’No Fucure'as epitaph for tis
‘world we were leaving, not as an effort co
preemptively snuff out our light, bur rath~
10 light up another world which was
already in. germinating, there beneath
the skin. We needed skillets to engage
‘our friends among the dead, and they in
turn gestured coward an animist world-
view toward the enspivited world. We live
in a world haunted by all the ghosts of a
‘genocidal leviathan, where the land is full
‘of bones screaming out for vengeance and
the very architecture of these cites filed
by all che dead who buil it, where every
spectacle of inclusion is wracked by the
cvileye cast by the excluded. We've learned
to be in relation, that any space has only
been taken back for enchantment and rec~
iprocity in co-creation with these spits.

When we look at the transmutations
which the anarchist galaxy has undergone
in the deeamtime of the past decade, ic is
undeniably other than the heteronorma-
tives Boring void into which we frst issued
these enchantments. Strong, varied and
dynamic queer currents course through
‘our space, tracing previously unimag-
inable constellations of thought and lives.
All the best and all he worst of what we
‘wrote all our illuminations and our omis-
sions, came true. The most dismissible
and petty conflicts in our little world have
been elevated ro a global and even cosmic
stage. The locks we picked opened doors
‘we could barely imagine in strong hearts
wherever they lay If only we had already
internalized Diane di Primas insistence
thac you can have whatever you ask for”
s0”ask for everything”

Because these are magical words, and be-
‘cause our accomplices hear chem and re-
spond even beyond the veil of death, we
cannot afford co miscommunicate. Let's
hold a mirror up to our ten weapons and
supply them with their necessary caveats
“These ten, taken together, form a sort of

1. Queemness in its negative sense

HL. Normaley

IIL Social war

TV. Queerness as conflict

V. The other, the excluded

VI. Repression, force relations

VI. Atcack!

VIIA subcerranean riotous inheritance

IX. Space, terrain, excess

X. Refusal, the self-described anarchist

In furtherance ofthis tarot, we present the
reversals:

x

Hold onto that moment when you first
called yourself an anarchist. Whatever
your story, surly it was a refusal, a pref-
ference not (0, saying “no” You may not
realize it, bt chs isthe firs rime in your
life you seca boundary with a world that
attempts to erode your capacity to do so.
Find that moment and thac affect and
hold firmly to it. Whatever else may be
taken from you, they cannot take this.
Let's dispense with the tired conversation
about the individual and the collective
We need each other and still each of us
needs recourse o that intimately personal
affect. Can we leave it at that? In the try-
ing times, when we feel alone against the
‘world, we will always have that iniiating
refusal. If we tend that litle candle, we can
always find our way, back to each other if
necessary: The anarchist tension adapts to
whatever comes next.

Ix

We received and will do our best to trans-
mie this mystery: queer criminality. This is
an ancestral current, a we, inherited from
a long and varied line of rioters, thieves,
writers, hustlers, mystics, ranters, freaks,
and artists. Like the descendants of any
ancestral line, we are the currently in-
camnated members of that spirit house.
Nothing began with us: we are simply
the present bearers of that weak messi-
nic potential to make i whole again, to
redeem all our dead, by way of heaven on
‘arth, In all that we do, we are in co-ere~
ation with these spirits. Lets learn to do
it well. When we tey to take space ~ oF
more realistically, to hold onto it against
the annihilating flows of progress ~ it is
for these reciprocal relationships between
cach other and all of our ghosts. We are

Bo rime - 11
fighting for the survival of a way of life
‘one criminal queer, anarchic, mystic, oth~
ex. Each of these predicates a source of
strength, a lineage, a collection of tech-
niques for the survival of people this
world has tried thoroughly to destroy
“This is why we strive for excellence and
‘excess in all that we do. Ichas always been
about queer forms of life. Beware those
who speak about other lives buc not of the
corpses in their mouth, or of the scream-
ing bones upon which they walk.

Vil

“The critique of assimilation is still only
understood halfway. ‘The dominant
line within the radical queer corners of
the professional activise world and the
school-to-publishing pipeline holds chat
it is enough to simply take the right po-
litical positions. So long as one speaks
the righe language, ethical (here meaning
happy) life exists within Leviathan. The
impulse to critique assimilation, in its
firse instance, refuses this acquiescence.
Be wary of any who remind too quickly
that we all make sacrifices under eapital-
ism, That is true, of course, but remem
ber that to sacrifice is to make something
sacred, to give it up for the spirits. This
world conditions us to lose things easily
because itis always taking chem away. We
choose to take back power over what we
give up, for whom, and why. You'll ree-
‘ognize your true friends by the way they
answer these three questions. There is a
subele difference between careerist and
conspirator-within-a-given-institution.
‘One way oF another, chose with nothing
to lose but each other, and by extension
a whole world co gain, remember one an-
other and act accordingly. Ies a matter of
priority: this dead world, or the ones we
are cultivating

12- Be Gw

VI

Arcack! Because itis always available, and
because it isthe real marker of the bound
aries of our little propulsive heterotopias
— worlds plural. World-making gives us
the ability to move our prefer-not-to into
a sideways gesture, a preferring different-
ly, otherworldly. The question of opacity
(he closet, passing) is an old one for us.
‘The queers who came before us navigat-
ced with several strategies, and it's up to
us to look critically ac all of them. Ie’ all
drag: a mask on our emergent world. The
mask conceals the real in order to make
attack possible. Realness is always a game
played with normalcy. Those who haven't
realized this are dangerous indeed. An at-
tack of whatever intensity is a small door
through which che real and its world en-
ters. Its world is animistic rake this into
account when choosing your target. All
the cosmos is alive and watching and ac-
tually matters. If you've followed us this
far into the labyrinth, you can always call
to presence the energy for even the small-
escattack. Let that possibility be Ariadne’s
thread as we go further, Let these rituals
signal to conspirators, embodied and not.

VI

Repression is the attempe on the part of
a decaying world to smother new ones
in their infancy. Weve withstood them
all, The Holocaust and the aids crisis re-
spectively destroyed two moments in the
preceding century when our world out-
grew cheir comfort for it. In both cases
the revolutionaries and the otherwise
marginalized died frst. Entire genera-
tions of our elders have been stolen from
us. Remember this when you forget who
you are, Remind yout friends, coo if they
forget. The state has sofe means at its dis-
posal. The criminalization of public parks
goes hand in hand with the proliferation
of cybernetic cruising apps. The benevo-
lent campaigns of “trafficking reformers’
keep sex workers on the streets or worse
“The wealthy will afford their prep while
people with aids continue to die on theit
doorsteps. ‘The circulation of the images
of particular bodies through social media
rnumbs us with blue light and distracts
from the systematic execution of those
same excluded bodies. Weve only made
ic this far by fighting repression in all
its forms. Pay attention co those worlds
thac are fighting it differency. Learn feom
those who fought it before. We'll need all
the various techniques against our shared
‘enemy. We need the healing techniques
too. We've inherited so much trauma from
these failed arcemprs. But we can choose
to heal in these lifetimes, to not pass the
shiton.

Vv

“The core of our world isan otherness, and
so each of us liminally navigates the other
worlds. We stand between, always a litle
‘extra, to0 much for any world but the one
were building between us. Pay attention
to where you feel other and whom you
feel at home with. This is affinity: knowl-
‘edge of another, and of their desires and
capacities. This isnt deterministic; ances-
tral traumas can be overcome, but only
by those committed to that overcoming.
This is a matter of hospitality, of the re-
sponse of a world to the other at its gates.
[Never separate any concept of reconcili-
ation ~ for example, tikkun olam ~ from
its spiritual grounding in the vision of a
living world, of an enchanted materialism.
Resise the impulse for homogeneity. Cie-
culate through whatever worlds will have
us. Jailbreak the others.

IV

“To recognize queeeness in conflict means
to address the residue of a dead world
within us ~ trauma in our bodies, pos-
session by egregores, lies on our tongues.
Be humble; know that you are addressing
‘wounds inflicted upon countless gener-
ations. Be gentle with yourself and each
‘other in these matters, but remember that
healers often have the bloodiest hands.

sie

Social wat, understood as a movement to
‘expand upon this or that limited concep-
tion of struggle, gestures welcomingly to
the other, includes the stories of resilience
and subversion which disorder any ten-
dency toward a scientific (read: system-
atized) fetish on the pare of militants.

un

We do this because we remember that
[Normaley is itself our enemy: Avoid those
who read the backs of Foucaule books
hile glefully launting their normalizing
impulses. In any insurrectionary space, at-
tend to the freaks, The Norm arms itself
with terror, because some truly believe
in it. The devotees of Normaley ~ in its
psychic, libidinal, affective, disciplinary or
ideological forms ~ will be cops when the
insurrection dies.

I

°Q then, will never be a coherent letter
tacked a8 a bridge on some list of identi-
ties. The past decade shows the poverty oF
ruin of every attempe to do so, Weve said
already that these words are magic. We
might add that they are wyrd ~ the Old

Bo €rime - 13,
English for fate and all the ocher invisible
and nonlinear causalities we are woven
inco and which gives us the modern word
‘weird: The queerest insurrection de~
mands the weitdest, the most enmeshed
in the unseen, che most in relationship
‘with all hat teems just beyond the norma~
tive filter we are still ghting to unleaen.
Find chose who straddle char filter a foot
in each world. Share your methods, share
what you've learned, share the stories of
your dead, The dead we hold in common
make us family — some other form of kin-
ship than the Norm and its terror. We
need each other today more than ever. We
‘want co win this time, co win all the time,
and the dead want that too.

0

Here, Now. In this place and time. The
mirror of our current inquiry faces the
mirror chat this project always cartied
within itself: Mirrors upon mirrors: we
are not strangers here, Our enemies have
always mobilized che myth of Narcissus
against the criminal and queer. These
inguisitors and specialists in torture can
only do this by suberacting chis mych
from the enchanted worldview whence
it emerges, a view wherein other worlds
‘exist, there are windows beeween them,
and true communication is possible. In
the notes to his eranslation of The True
Grimoire, the faggot sorcerer Jake Strat-
ton-Kent suggests that this story is in
face an early encryption of serying ~ the
magical technique in which one uses a
mirror to communicate with other spie-
its and places. Narcissus gazed too long
at the underworld and was immortalized
as adelicate flower with such a fixed gaze.
“This isthe sign of the immortality of the
vegetable world, of the cycle between life
and death, of the infinite. Each is slighe-

14- Be Ow

ly other, each a different variation on the
story. We possess the freedom of discern
ment, choice. Theorists of games refer to
the magic circle ~ the boundary within
which the players agree upon the objec-
tives and che rales. Zero: the magic circle.
‘Zero: the space of all potential. Be careful
‘what you say in this space; have your wits
about you. What happens here extends to
all levels. Zero: from nothing and return-
ing to i. Zero: always the Fool, a scranger
centering seemingly from nowhere. Who
are you? Where are you from and where
are you going?

  

 

“The skeleton has been here, frenzied,
before. The meme described above de-
tourned a bit of propaganda from Califor-
nia dating back to the 1880s that vlifies
the queer and anarchist currents then
ppresent on these shores. ‘The skeleton
hhas never left. She remains present along
the diasporic threads which have always
undermined the southern border. She is
the Holy Death. ‘The patron of criminals
and queers, of exiles from worlds. She
wears other robes but she insists as the
constant reminder of our own mortali-
ty and of chose we've already lost. If the
messianic currents within western magi-
cal traditions are true ~ and that the final
judgment is che recuen of the dead ~ then
the passing of chat moment means our
dead are among us, the ancestors have re-
turned and they are insisting that we have
a chance to make i all whole again. The
task remains to put our ways in common.
If we desire a world without
restraint, we must tear this one to

the ground.

We must live beyond measure
and love and desire in ways most
devistating.

We must come to understand the
feeling of social war.

‘We can learn to be a threat,
we can become the queerest of
insurrectionists.