Queer Revolt

As I turned into an alley with a friend this evening—two queer anarchists on a meandering, never straight, walk—this tag greeted us. Without a moment’s hesitation, we both smiled.

There is a pleasure in seeing oneself reflected in the landscape, especially when the terrain too often is shaped (or should I say distorted) by heteronormativity. Indeed, much of our conversation touched on the revolting (as in “disgusting”) damage that cisheteropatriarchy and plain-old patriarchy does within our own anarchistic circles—from breaking apart everything from collective houses and autonomous spaces, to projects and social movements, to friendships and our bodies/hearts.

Yet this friend, who is much younger and wiser than me, and so many others (or at least enough of them) in their anarchist generation have not only embraced being queer—in a sort of rebellious #BeGayDoCrime and prefigurative #CollectiveCare way—but also understood that #QueerRevolt is a verb, a practice, a social relation in revolt, as in “to turn away with disgust” from and “renounce allegiance” to heteropatriarchy. Their queer revolt, it seems to me, isn’t something that proclaims itself atop a barricade—though that too is beautiful. It’s that slowly yet in palpable and promising ways, this new generation of gender outlaws within anarchism is modeling another culture that threatens, thankfully, to trouble and overturn the cis/bro/bully/abusive powers-that-be within our milieu and beyond it.

They (along with some of us older-gen queer anarchists) do this by embodying new ways of being and doing, thinking and feeling, organizing and transforming—grounded in militant communal care, militant mutual aid and solidarity, and militant joy, peppered with rebellious mourning and rebellious ritual, and general fabulousness. It’s as if they are the re-“volt” of electrical charge that’s needed within anarchism and outside it to move us humans into the fullness of our potential, smashing boxes that none of us really fit in, but doing it with love as a verb.

Someday, perhaps there will be a full queer revolt. For now, it’s enough to smile over what we can see; what has changed right in front of us.