Topic of the Week - guest contribution by MK Rain
"Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dangerous. Queer involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. It is our desire and fantasies and more still. Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world. Queer is a total rejection of the regime of the Normal."
- Toward The Queerest Insurrection
"If I'm not an anarchist, can I still be gay?"
- a twelve-year-old
An middle schooler in my life asked me a question to this effect the other day, and for this tranarchist, it kickstarted the most beautiful kind of existential crisis. Of course this tweenage organizer, who didn't use the a-word for herself, was gay—but in her possibly-ungovernable gay (and maybe queer) self, was she still practicing anarchy to some extent? Viewing the LGBTQ+ experience as anarchist praxis can imply a transcendence of Gay Rights (tm) in favor of ungoverned queerness. However, the idea that being born gay somehow makes one a queer anarchist could lead to the identity of gayness/transness being treated as synonymous with the intentional practice of queer anarchy. Meanwhile, viewing queerness and anarchy as distinct feels like a negation of the personal as political, of the ways that social hierarchies necessarily harm gay/trans communities, of lived queer ultraviolence.
Everyone and their mom knows that anarchy is inherently queer, but are gayness and transness inherently anarchic?
Is one simply gay or trans, and not queer, until they become ungovernable?
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