Dear Queer People: A Message to My Battered Tribe

There are few things more heartbreaking in this world than watching someone you love in an abusive relationship. Sadly, I’ve seen it firsthand, up close and personal, and it’s harder to sit through than a train crash. To see a selfless and loving spirit sacrifice their safety and self-esteem on the altar of some conniving predator with a bouquet in one hand and a hammer in the other… Trying to convince that selfless and loving spirit that that bouquet and that hammer are a package deal, and they deserve better than to be trapped in an endless loop of empty apologies and sadistic degradation… It’s infuriatingly sickening and downright soul shattering, especially when you are a survivor of abuse yourself.

Sadly, this is a pretty common story for Queer people on the margins like me and I’ve seen it play out in more ways than one. Too many people across virtually every conceivable demographic can probably relate to the scenario that I’ve presented above. However, I invite all of you to try and imagine what it’s like to have to watch everyone you love, your entire community, trapped in that kind of scenario on a national scale and you might begin to comprehend what it feels like for me to be a Queer anarchist post-November 2024. Everyone I know is terrified and they have good reason to be. Donald Trump was elected in a landslide victory on a campaign that promised to the cure the country of “transgenderism” by using the full weight of the federal government to shove trans kids back in the closet and nail the door shut.

But Donald Trump and his MAGA Mensheviks aren’t the only ones abusing my people intimately. Fascist gangsters like the goons of the GOP have been chasing us around with torches and pitchforks since Rome declared our heathen existence to be an affront to their new sky god’s authority. I don’t like it but it’s nothing new, it’s almost expected at this point. What hurts me far worse is seeing my people run to the arms of the Democratic Party for sanctuary only to have those milquetoast breeders’ shame and berate them.

Over the last four years Republicans across the country have been on a hate crime spree, using the government to violate our rights in nearly every way conceivable; passing thousands of laws that declare the supposedly constitutionally protected speech of our gender expression to be a misdemeanor, that bar us from making sound and informed medical decisions for ourselves and our children, that have gagged our kids from even speaking of their existence in our nation’s compulsory school system… And the Democrats have done absolutely nothing to protect us.

Now, with Queer people feeling more exposed than ever before, that same party that many of the people I love are currently looking to for protection is throwing us under the fucking bus and blaming us for their failure to run a candidate in the latest election that anyone could stomach voting for without a goddamn gasmask.

Despite the fact that trans rights didn’t even rank in the top 50 concerns for voters in most polls and that Kamala Harris could barely make eye contact with us while the Republicans poured hundreds of millions of dollars into our wholesale defamation, every left-of-center rag from the Guardian to the New York Times has been running nonstop opinion pieces by pithy little neoliberal shits calling for a more Clintonian approach to their already cellophane support. Meanwhile, Joe Scarborough and the spawn of Zbig have been running these stories daily like headlines on MSDNC, that is when they’re not busy visiting the Orange Duce to kiss his ring, and Democratic representatives like Seth Moulton and Tom Suozzi have gotten in on the act as well.

Unbeknown to most, this too is nothing new. The Democrats have always been manipulative fair-weather friends at best to pretty much every minority in the book but the Zionists and Queer people are no exception. Bill Clinton won his first Democratic primary in 1991 on a campaign to treat a community still reeling from the AIDS epidemic with compassion and tolerance only to restrain us with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act.

Mind you, military service and state marriage have always been pretty empty symbols of assimilation but even these tokens were too much for the DNC hierarchy until very recently. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton all ran repeatedly on keeping fags from sullying the sanctimony of nuptial slavery until a Supreme Court victory for Marriage Equality became an inevitability. Only then did these self-proclaimed allies start crashing Pride parades and painting the White House pink, all while continuing to savage our people by growing a police state which disproportionately violates the rights of Queer people, especially trans women of color, to Frankensteinian proportions.

Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris actually built their long and illustrious careers on this stealth wave of Queer bashing fascism, from the Clinton Crime Bill to FOSTA-SESTA, but that didn’t stop MAGA inc. from accusing them of the mortal sin of granting trans prisoners’ basic human rights. The biggest Republican slight against the Biden-Harris White House in 2024 was a well-publicized lie that Joe and Kamala had provided prisoners with sex change operations.

The policy they were referring to was actually enacted in 2019, during the Trump Administration, and as Attorney General of California, Kamala Harris actually opposed similar measures while she busied herself throwing transwomen into men’s prisons and denying them access to basic medical services. This might explain why Team Kamala didn’t even bother to respond to these adds. In fact, it actually took an organization of ex-Republicans called the Lincoln Project to do that but not before the lie was spread across the zeitgeist during half-time of every NFL game in October.

You would think that this would be enough, that Queer people, my people, would finally get the message loud and clear that these sycophantic frauds don’t fucking love us, they are just using us like human shields to keep straight, suburban, cat ladies distracted from the fact that the party of hope and joy is just another pawn of the prison industrial complex. But no, my friends, my sisters, my beautiful people just keep crawling back to those pitiless scoundrels, begging for shelter from the same state being used to crush them. They do it because they don’t believe that they have any place left to go. They do it because the other guy, their ex in the GOP that they were raised in, is worse. And perhaps worst of all, they do it because they don’t believe that they deserve any better.

Well, I am here to tell my people once more, in no uncertain terms, bullshit! Everything that we have, everything that we are, everything that Queer people have ever achieved in this land of rape and honey, we have won alone without the aid of either one of these abusive parties. Who sent the pigs screaming for their lives from the wailing flames of Stonewall? Who drug those Freudian incels at the DSM by their gray hair into removing homosexuality from their dirty list of mental illnesses? Who survived a plague to throw our sickly bodies into the guts of the medical machine until they would so much as even address the existence of the AIDS holocaust. Us! Us, goddammit, and no one else. In fact, the only reason that DNC rapists like Bill Clinton even came slinking to our back door was because we made revolution look so goddamn sexy that even the straight kids wanted in.

We don’t need the fucking Democrats, they need us, but they need us passive and battered so they can show us off between war crimes like cheap whores and then cram us back in the closet whenever it suits them. This isn’t our fault. This is just what the state does to minorities that they fail to annihilate the old-fashioned way. But we need to end this toxic relationship once and for all and take back our power while it’s still a live hand grenade.

We need to go back to the basics of the Gay Liberation Front and build our own goddamn party, our own goddamn everything… Our own schools where our children won’t have to rely on straight bureaucrats and corporate textbooks to tell them who they are. Our own mutual aid societies that can provide us with the level of healthcare we deserve even if they have to do so illegally. And yes, our own fucking militias, so we will never have to rely on another crooked bigot with a badge to protect our streets ever again.

But more than anything, Queer people must reject the state. Pride is nice but it’s a pretty petty substitute for power and much like Black Power, Queer Power is about a communal devotion to self-reliance which can only ever truly be achieved through anarchism. Like all survivors of abusive relationships, Queer people need to separate ourselves entirely from our current corrosive environment of learned helplessness and build a support network among fellow survivors so we can heal and avoid getting trapped in the same cycle over and over again.

The good news here is that we have plenty of other tribes to choose from because the Democrats have plenty of victims getting thrashed for refusing to vote for their latest human billboard. The undocumented and the Muslims both find themselves in similarly dire straits, with one party gnashing their teeth at them and the other scolding them for their lack of obedience. Both of these communities know a thing or two about self-reliance and living outside the law and I’m sure we can probably teach them a thing or two about shouting theater in a crowded fire.

Revolution makes for some pretty strange bedfellows, especially when that bed is on fire, but revolution is also the only salvation left amidst a system comprised of dueling wife-beaters reliant on the same liquor of prison state privilege and at the end of the day, what is strange but another word for Queer? I say let’s get strange and make some more goddamn history and I say let’s do it with our hands unbound by petty partisan chains. Together, the battered tribes of America can bring the Ike Turner state to its knees where it belongs.

The post Dear Queer People: A Message to My Battered Tribe appeared first on CounterPunch.org.