Excerpt from "Toward the Queerest Insurrection"
by the Mary Nardini gang
VII
The perspective of Queers within the heteronormative world is a lens through which we can critique and attack the apparatus of capitalism. We can analyze the ways in which medicine, the prison system, the church, the state, marriage, the media, borders, the military, and the police are used to control and destroy us. More importnatly, we can use these cases to articulate a cohesive criticism of every way that we are alienated and dominated. Queer is a position from which to attack the normative - more, a position from which to understand and attack the ways in which normal is reproduced and reiterated. In destabilizing and problematizing normalcy, we can destabilize and become a problem for the totality. The history of organized queers was borne out of this position. The most marginalized-- trans* folk, people of color, sex workers-- have always been the catalysts for riotous explosions of queer resistance. These explosions have been coupled with a radical analysis wholeheartedly asserting that the liberation for queer people is intrinsically tied to the annihilation of capitalism and the state. It is no wonder, then, that the first people to publicly speak of sexual liberation in this country were anarchists, or, that those in the last century who struggled for queer liberation also simultaneously struggled against capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, and empire. This is our history.
VIII
If history proves anything, it is that capitalism has a treacherous recuperative tendency to pacify radical social movements. It works rather simply, actually. A group gains privilege and power within a movement, and shortly thereafter sell their comrades out. Within a couple years of Stonewall, affluent-gay-white-males had thoroughly marginalized everyone that had made their movement possible and abandoned their revolution with them.
It was once that to be Queer was to be in direct conflict with the forces of control and domination. Now, we are faced with a condition of utter stagnation and sterility. As always, capital recuperated brick-throwing street queens into suited politicians and activists. There are log-cabin-republicans and "Stonewall" refers to gay democrats. There are gay energy drinks and a "queer" queer television show that wages war on the minds, bodies, and esteem of impressionable youth. The "LGBT" political establishment has become a force of assimilation, gentrification, capital, and state-power. Gay identity has become both a marketable commodity and a device of withdrawal