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The idea that queer pleasure must be banished from the public is at the center of the moral order which allows private wealth to risk the lives of every earthly being. Undoing this is part of the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.
Let’s go back: As the European bourgeoisie began exerting political control over the world it was transforming and enclosing, one of the key weapons in its hand was the concept of a moral geography it extended over its territories through the public/private distinction.
The practice of accumulation by dispossession not only violently disrupted Indigenous people’s relationships to land but also each other. This happened in Europe, in Africa, and in the “new world” colonies. Private property is also a way to enforce white-coded “propriety.”
Black and Indigenous social life was either banished from the public or condemned to eternal publicness. The domestic family was imposed as a way eradicate kinship structures that upheld alternative forms of living.
In Europe, the uprooted peasants lived in what their exploiters saw as sexual anarchy. They were crowded in tenements, three or four to a bed, unsegregated by gender, age, or family relation. Public spaces were often the only place to find privacy.
Proletarian sexuality was always politically threatening and somehow queer. See this 1790 French pamphlet which satirizes the revolution by conflating it with the political demands of “the children of sodom” archive.org/details/lescon…
Bourgeois women began “civilizing” projects, imposing the social conventions they expected from their private rooms on the city at large, in particular regarding what (sex) they did not consent to see. The newly established police forces and public hygiene projects joined in.
Soon, sex workers and proles seeking pleasure alike were subject to state violence for the crime of not having a room of their own. As the capitalist state became more elaborate, it invented new types of crimes and new types of people who commit them.
These people were queers, comrades. Our desires were outlawed and the state attempted to eradicate us. In the Third Reich we were sent to the camps. In the US after the war, some of us fought back and reclaimed our right to pleasure in public.
The forces of reaction mobilized the innocent child as a foil to maintain this moral geography. And our legal freedom relied on affirming it — Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case striking down sodomy restrictions, was decided on the right to privacy.
What would it mean instead to make a claim to the public? To affirm social relations repressed in the name of the safety or innocence of the family? We could instead cultivate other ways of making collectivity and pleasure banned and policed under colonial capitalism.
Anyways, happy pride :)
