Queers Know the Power of Collective Action

Welcome back. Have you been doing your calisthenics?

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We have always been dangerous.

The simple act of being different from others has been considered a sinister act for as long as the word "sinister" has existed - a word that comes from the Latin for "left." We are the ill-omened creatures, the contrary children whose appearance was a sign of misfortune when the Roman Augurs, facing south, saw an omen on the left. Interestingly, however, the Romans inherited this practice from the Greeks, who, when seeking omens, faced north. That puts rather an interesting spin on things. Perhaps we should be seen as good luck, dexterous as we are.

LGBTQ+ people have always existed, and have almost always had to struggle for acceptance in a world full of malice against us. We have turned that struggle into strength for hundreds of years, and the Now we live in is just one more moment along that continuum. However, I must repeat myself - not all LGBTQ+ people are Queer. Queer is inherently a political stance that pushes for liberation. It is tied to Worker's rights, Women's Rights, and Civil Rights, and recognizes the singularity of that struggle against the group of people who benefit most from our subjugation - the rich, the politically powerful, those who are most often - but are not exclusively - patriarchal older white men.

This is not to say that all old white men are somehow sinister by their very nature any more than we are sinister by our nature. They are the inheritors of systems that are built to benefit them, and their greatest crime is most often that they have been taught the system is equal for all when in fact it is not, and it is more convenient for them to believe the lie. Whether that action damns them or not does not sit within the scope of this writing, and has already filled dozens of books of high quality. I suggest you read a few and come to your own conclusion.

The point is that we are all connected, and our struggle is the same, and we must learn our lessons from our history as much from popular Rights movements as we do Occupied France and Poland. We have been here before, and we did it then. We struggled, we suffered, we died, and we won. We can do it again. Their times were no easier, the people in them no more heroic or stalwart. Every person you read about - or that you didn't read about, for how many of us labour on in anonymity? - was an ordinary person who made a conscious choice to say "No more," for whatever it meant to them.

I do not wish to scare people - in fact my biggest worry is that that will be the result of all this. As I've repeated, this often feels like conspiratorial writing simply to list of the facts of the matters at hand. The purpose of this writing is to treat the current environment seriously and prepare for what might happen in the even that the current US government, and the Conservative movement broadly, mean what they say and decide to follow through.

This is meant, perhaps paradoxically, to hearten you, and to return power to your hands. You may consider yourself someone of no great strength or courage, you may worry that you will break before your oppressor does. You may worry that you do not have the energy, the patience, the fortitude, the care, to struggle for yourself and the people around you.

The good news is that you are not alone. You need not do all these things as a monolith, you need not carry the weight yourself. You are not heavy, you are my sibling and I can carry you just as you can carry me. Nor are the two of us alone. We are legion; a mass of ordinary people who are capable of supporting each other as we struggle against fascist oppression. That is what the queer community knows - from protests, to queers caring for dying gay men and women in the AIDS crisis, to collective meals to spread out the costs of food, to teaching others how to mend and sew their own clothing, to taking in those who have been abandoned by their blood family to build new chosen families, Queer resistance is based in collective and community.

Do you know someone who has a skill you'd like to learn? What could you do for them in exchange? This is another form of calisthenics that I think we need to begin to practice - Mutual Aid Calisthenics. Just like Anarchist calisthenics, this might end up being critical stretching and development. Let's call them, together with any others we discover, "The Calisthenics of Resistance."

I'm working on a post about how to stay as private as you can about important subjects. I am not necessarily an expert, but I can at least give people somewhere to start.

We must help save each other.

Share this with someone who would find comfort in it.