Anarchist gay rights
So to Speak Podcast Transcript - An anarchist's perspective, with Michael Malice
Note: This is an unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.
Michael Malice: I think the word free speech, people always attack me like “Oh, you say you’re for free speech but you’re blah, blah, blah.” I never say I’m for free speech. I loathe that term. I deliberate it is used interchangeably for several different concepts some of which I am 100% for, some of which I am completely against. If you and I were going to have a conversation about Apple and you were talking about something that grows on trees and I’m talking about laptops, we’re using the same word but we’re going to be talking past each other.
Nico Perrino: Hello and welcome endorse to So to Say the free speech podcast where every other week we take an uncensored look at the earth of free expression. I am as always your host Nico Perrino. Today’s episode looks at free speech from the perspective of one anarchist. I say one anarchist because our guest today Michael Malice, who describes himself as an anarchist without adjectives freely admits that many anarchists would differ with some o
Living My Life: A Tale of Blood, Sweat, and Anarchy
Interview with Robin Isaacs
Dale Altrows / Issue 4 / 10/26/2009
Robin Isaacs is a long-time queer anarchist who has lived in Toronto for the past 30 years. Over the course of a lifetime of political activity, Isaacs has been involved in a variety of activist projects including the anarchist publication Kick It Over, the 1988 “Survival Gathering” in Toronto, Anti-Racist Move, Queer Nation, AIDS Activity NOW!, Limp Fist, and the Northeastern Federation of Anarchist Communists. This interview was conducted by Dale Altrows in February of 2007 in Montreal, Québec. The complete text of this interview was over 20,000 words, and, due to space restrictions, we have excerpted sections to run in this issue of the journal. We have made the accomplish interview available on the Autonomy & Solidarity website at http://auto_sol.tao.ca.
How did you become politically active?
I was born in 1955 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to a working class family consisting of an assimilated, Lithuanian-Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. My father worked on the line for Bristol Aerospace and my mother worked in
“OH BABY it’s another night at Louis’ place” in Hannah Levene’s debut novel Greasepaint, where the Butch on Piano (BOP) faction has important matters to discuss. Louis Brooks calls the gathering to order, reminding everyone of “shake,” “RATTLE,” and “ROLL”—the BOP’s three main characteristics of revolutionary worldbuilding. Harry, the butch who “made the girls melt like tears into a pillow,” strolls in late. But to Sammy Silver, editor of the anarchist newspaper they have gathered to discuss, Harry is right on occasion. They have to go over her interview in the upcoming newsletter about a Porgy and Bess production touring in Leningrad that includes a discussion of what it means to collaborate on art as a Black American. After that, they’ll play music and smoke and cover from their exes—a typical Friday evening for butch dykes and Jewish anarchists in 1950s Modern York.
Levene uses an ensemble cast of characters, including the Anarchists, the All-Americans, and the BOP, to immerse the reader in the butch-femme bar scene, one similar to that of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. Rather than a linear plot to move the story forward, the narrative is more impulsive, less conventional, w
It’s impossible to imagine gays—our cultures, habits, presence—without cities, without urban spaces. The sparse freedoms of urbanisation, starting in Europe in the early up-to-date period, created a crack in culture, large and dim enough for men who prefer men to meet, socialise, mix, and flourish something in. What we grew was an identity; not just a sexual identity, but a collective identity, and a cultural one.
Likewise, it’s almost as tough to imagine cities without gays, although many people hold tried. I recollect as a juvenile teen visiting London from a calm and pretty rural county, and realising that something was different here, something anxiety-inducing and thrilling, in the presence of bars which hung flags from their windows. A few years later I came to realise that these bars were a key part of a social and sexual infrastructure for gay men. Later still, I visited them, and then I took them for granted. I’m only just realising that there’s nothing about gay bars that isn’t entirely contingent, transitory, vulnerable. Perhaps the last few decades of the 20th Century will be looked upon as a brief social tranquility, when such places could operate openly, profitably, and provide
While I have been thinking about wanting to do this piece and workshop for a while,
I had a hell of a day to find the right place to start
because having to initiate and to end is linear within time
so my first words to you, dear participants would be: let’s terminate linearity.
Understanding anarchy as queer will kickoff again
after it has started alredy
from 3 different places:
definitions
history
praxis
I could not have reached any of these places without my network of trust and love
and texts and thoughts by thousands of other people that have said and done
sharp ass, beautiful, hot, irrational , amazing things
despite
or because
of the heteronormative, cis centric, patriarchal, white supremacis, ableist, capitalist, statist
civilization that not only surrounds us
but is inscribed into every single one of our movements.
I wanna start again
over and over
a revolt against a revolt against a revolt
continuity is not workable
yet: seeing myself positioned in history
is necessary.
So let’s start again
with binaries.
gentleman — woman
heterosexual — homosexual
cis — trans
inter — dya / endo
binary — nonbinary
genderfluid — ag