Thread by @pinkomagazine

Our event is starting. Moderator Jasmine Gibson is introducing the panelists: Amber Hollibaugh, Barms Armstrong, and Michelle O’Brien (Che had to bow out) #pinkoNYPL

Jasmine: what brought you here?
Amber: I have been a Marxist since the 60s and 70. In that period, it was not unlikely to be queer and a commie. But once the movement professionalized or disappeared, it became more and more difficult to be a radical

Amber: The sex wars were also a difficult front. Ended up doing AIDS work, bc it wanted my experience. Ran the lesbian AIDS project, left to do queer aging work, took over Queers for Economic Justice until it had to close for lack of funding.

Barms: I’ve been in the left for about 10 years, since late 20s. Got involved in anti-police repression, then Occupy. Then read more and more. Only came out in the last few years and my politics crystallized around the same time.

Michelle: Want to introduce Jasmine, a great poet and theorist and an editor. Amber is one of the greats, I worked with her at QFEJ. She gave a galvanizing speech that set off the White Night riots, which is the cover of our zine.

Michelle: We made this zine especially for the event, has an editorial manifesto we wrote collectively, plus a found text that is co-signed by Marsha P Johnson, where it’s very clear that she’s talking about queer communism, and we’ll be taking about this more.

Jasmine: Many of you talked of moments that crystallized divisions of sexuality, gender, and race. Why do you think that now sexuality in one’s politics is separated? Where does the demarcation come from?

Michelle: the question of the relation bt sexuality and politics is a vexed one. There was once a position that eg anal sex was a transformative political experience, but the limits of that experience was revealed over time.

M: we experienced sexual liberation not social liberation. Some socialists took the wrong lesson: became sexually conservative. The wrongness of that position is also clear now to many radicals.

M: Amber’s work on pleasure is a really important source in this. My work is on poverty in working class trans women of color also finds this.

M: Many queer and trans people are coming of age in a very bleak world, and their experience of solidarity is around queer pleasure. It’s not that it gives a template for everything else but opens up a set of questions.

A: One is the things that I saw in my life experience was in the 60s, the idea that you had the right to pleasure, which was difficult for those of us who were gendered or queer but very impactful.

A: This idea jumped from the civil rights movement and the womens movement and catalyzed communities where pleasure was the guiding principle.

A: We were reading and talking about how we were invisible in the Marxist movements, and that continued until HIV.

A: HIV cut short the question of pleasure. People were terrified of promiscuity. That became a question of life and death

A: this had an enormous impact on the politics of pleasure, bc it had such a huge impact on political communities. Something that we’ve never really recovered from.

A: Safe sex has been organized as something to stop promiscuity. Make it unlikely for you to do anything dangerous, a question that was class and race driven.

A: These risks were driven by how class and race and gender combine. Having sex in a doorway is a very different question than sex in a dormitory.

A: the left never really dealt with this. The queer left tried to but we were never really big. This has allowed the right to mobilize a dangerous discourse about us. Has to be taken on

A: how can you talk about pleasure unless you talk about what it means to have a lover in a shelter

A: I feel very passionate about pleasure. You can’t build a movement without pleasure. But pleasure really isn’t simple.

Barms: Marxists or the left are still largely heteronormative, largely about the family, won’t touch family abolition which is weird considering how old the theme is

B: some segment of the left really clings to this heteronormative version of the family. That’s what we’re up against. I describe fascism as essentially focused on the family.

B: A lot of self-proclaimed marxists don’t stray too far from that unfortunately. Part of that goes back to the reaction in the 80s, and the loss of a lot of revolutionaries then. May be bringing it back but we’re still very small.

Jasmine: hard to talk about how to deal with people who are basically maimed by capitalism. A lot of things that queer communities have been taking about for a long time have been coopted by capitalism.

J: the family is an extension of the working, functional body, but which leans really heavily on the destruction of other communities. What does the corporeal reality of queer communism look like?

J: eg, walking people through death, dealing with insulin, etc. How does queer communism relate to this politically? Often not talked about in class terms

A: I’m a diabetic. Try to get a syringe into a shelter! Look at who’s diabetic. It’s poor and working class communities. It’s a class issue that is the way that people die.

A: Example of how capitalism is driven by profit without any mediating factors. When we talk about queer communism, we don’t frame it as if those are the driving issues. I need my insulin and I need my orgasm.

Michelle: Barms comrade @kategrif wrote a lot about the teacher strikes. One of the things that motivates a lot of the teachers were a new health plan requiring them to wear a Fitbit.

M: that is such a queer issue. Trans people are subject to all kinds of violent body discipline. Capitalism has increasing practices for disciplining the body, and this is a big site for rebellion

M: also Marx and Engels wrote about the toll that factories took on workers bodies. Any blue collar work inflicts such misery on our bodies. The question of healthcare is a question of the harm of work: see the opioid crisis

M: thinking about how we can be with our bodies in a sane way, which is what queers have been talking about forever, is a question about control over work.

Amber: harm reduction and needle exchanges here are also relevant. The right to have safe needles was a brutal fight, opened question of “what queer? What community are we talking about?”

A: this is in the framework of how drug addiction is a classed and raced politics. Without this politics it’s only in the question of stigma.

A: there were a number of safe injection sites in NYC, but the orgs kind of disappeared. Need a way to make sure the cops aren’t going to come down on people the minute they leave

Barms: queer people are largely expendable in the work force, and the mental health crises and body toll work takes is massive q

Jasmine: what does the project of queer communism mean at this point?
Amber: I think it’s everything. I can’t say how critical I think it is. The situation we’re facing is terrifying.

A: the permission of violence is terrifying. What that needs is a radical movement that can build a strategy to attack the structures that kill us

A: if you don’t have a vision of what it is that’s wrong, and what it is you want to change, so you can say to people here’s how the world can be different if we do it together

A: that means we need to talk about things like Marxism. Not just that trump is bad. I wish it were that simple. Even the Bernie mobilization in ‘16 was an achievement. Makes me think of what is possible

A: people see in a much more naked way that things are brutal, but we don’t have a movement yet. Need to be able to say we can make a difference not just that we need a difference

Barms: every time I’ve been in anything insurrectionary, queer people have been at the forefront. I think that’s our role, we push everything forward. But that part of what being queer means

Michelle: been thinking a lot about the stonewall riots. One of the things is how much the world has changed. Some obvious ways, not terribly interesting — could be undone very quickly

M: but some things underlying have changed. Eg: how is it that every major national liberation struggle since the 70s have closed? Some conspiracy explanations, but I believe it is a global capitalist crisis over the past decades

M: capitalists realized less wealth was coming in, organized to keep opposition at bay. Where we saw welfare expansion only depended on commodities boom
Jasmine: restricted to citizens

M: points to the severity of the crisis. The nation state and capitalist profitability are in a moment of serious crisis, and we need political solutions that move beyond the boundaries of the nation state, taxation and normative family

M: we need answers and those questions are being posed in a really serious way.
Amber: No shit.

Jasmine: how does invocation of a radical past impedes or assists movements in the present?

Amber: what is the framework of a visible queer politics at the moment? One of the things that always made me insane in the movement was that the things it was fighting for were the last things I wanted.

A: was it discriminatory that gays weren’t in the military? Or course? Did I want that? No! Marriage as well

A: we issued Beyond Marriage at QFEJ. There has been remarkable changed and it matters. But the things that are imbedded in gay pride are the things that make me rip my hair out. I don’t want to sit at that table

A: the movement has made certain issues appear to be the pinnacle of queer politics. In my poor white trash family, they love gay marriage, don’t understand why I haven’t married my partner.

A: there has been remarkable change but they are not what the end is about. We need to talk about what it means to take on a global crisis. What about Tijuana, where so many of the migrants are queer?

A: we are only a component of a struggle that is much bigger than ourselves. But I am very excited that so many people are here to be a part of the discussion.

M: I think there are lots of ways that nostalgia can be a problem but I actually like taking about stonewall. Lots of very present issue can be brought up, anti-police movement etc

M: deep links between Black and Puerto Rican movements and gay movements. In the 70s there were hundreds of riots. Black teenagers forced the movement people to think a lot harder

M: stonewall was one of these riots. In tactics and form, multiracial riot. The gay liberation fronts principle of unity was solidarity with the Panthers

M: leading to Huey’s “most revolutionary” letter about gay liberation, inviting GLF to participate in the people’s constitutional convention in Philadelphia

M: Silvia Rivera wrote on the Young Lords, who did lots of health activism work. STAR joined the anti-war rally organized by the YL. Joined the the org. “They gave me a lot of respect. It was a fabulous feeling to be myself, part of the young lords as a drag queen”

M: the most significant pro-trans groups today are not the queer rights orgs but the orgs that spun off of black lives matter

Barms: every time I was in a protest there were queer people, trans women or color at the front line. That’s a trend that goes back

A: QFEJ wanted to be a part of occupy, the twoc organizers we sent to work with them were not welcomed — tolerated

A: bc we had been working in the shelters for so long, we could deal with homeless people that occupy people didn’t know how to deal with. Nor did they know/want to deal with queerness

A: some cities were different. Oakland was more queer and more visibly talking about capitalism. Even on the left there’s a politics of toleration re: queers

A: when you get into the straight left and you force the liberalism to peel away, we need to do that to make queerness a part of the politics of change. Our voices do the change work.

A: we need to take it on and understand the that is part of the work we’re facing

Michelle: there’s a long history. There are a lot of social democrats are attacking “identity politics”

M: hard to say what they mean, but it basically means queer, black, disabled. This kind of anti black queer phobia is part of their political logic

M: this is also part of the logic of the alt-right, of building policies for white people

M: eg is TERFS. Logic is identical to alt right. Taking advantage of this confusion about trans issues to recruit socialists to the far right. This is a revanchist move. Asserting queer politics now is crucial to keep people on the left

M: struggles around blackness, transness and refugees is going to be the crucial test for the left going forward

M: Nina power is this British feminist, got upset with feminist identitarians, all of a sudden showed up on a far right podcast, but becoming a TERF was her pathway

Barms: When the nation state left cites the past, they don’t cite the panthers. You can tell a lot about what they exclude and what they are keen on. They like the family wage, FDR benefit package

B: you’ll see this more more, so watch out for this.

Jasmine: what was your exposure to the gay press? Radical theory, race theory? Etc

Michelle: I’m a big pro-theory person. When masses of people are in motion by the thousands or millions, they can make major theoretical breakthroughs

M: very hard for a handful of theorists to figure out why we’re failing in the absence of that. Bc of the capitalist crisis were in, a lot of people are learning from theory and opening up into a much bitter politics than has previously been available

M: I’ve been on the left for a long time. I think we’re absolutely at a moment where queer communism could have a real effects and im very excited about Pinko

Amber: in the past 15 years, the overlap between queer activism and queer academics has gotten smaller

A: theory has less relationship to activism now. No place to go, so you go to an academic conference. That’s an important thing to note.

A: often the overlap appears to be the academics, rather than revolutionaries. People getting radicalized outside the academy is a very different process.

A: important to have projects that aren’t dependent on the academy.

A: QEJ used to go to an activist conference, there was no connection with working class and poor queer people. That wasn’t who was invited, so you couldn’t learn there in a way that would help inform radical perspective

A: Where are queer ideas centered? Are they in the academy? Or is it on the anti-intellectual queer left? We need to take this on

A: I know, coming from poverty, how hard it is to be a part of the left. But I tried. I used to fuck people to find out what books they had. When I told the truth about my sex work history in the women’s liberation movement,

A: you could only talk about it as a victim. I wasn’t a victim. That means your own history makes you marginal to the movement that says it’s acting against marginalization

A: we need to take it on, because the people need a movement that lets them take part in, that you’re not too poor, too queer, whatever, to read Capital.

Barms: I can relate to those points. We need theory, it informs action. A lot of the anti theory left has a lot of gendered assumptions. Social questions are “soft” not rigorous somehow

B: this doesn’t take revolution seriously enough. It’s complex but not beyond most people. Worth taking seriously

Question: what are your thoughts on organizing at a time when the primary way we publish and connect is on social media? Platforms are fascistic but also central to our social lives, could be used to surveil movements

Barms: printed matter matters, seeing how FB cracks down on political orgs, we do need to have viable non-social media options. Need tangible goods that aren’t subject to same surveillance

Amber: new forms of control we have t take very seriously, the data surveillance is very dangerous. That doesn’t mean we don’t use those formats though we need to be thoughtful about what we do or say

A: we also need to look at older forms of organizing. The BPP had a newspaper that was sold in every black community that spread the word about news, food etc.

A: need to develop tiers of work so we understand the different levels of danger. Social media has also had a remarkable impact on revolutionary action around the world. Learning about each other, where to go. Not adverse to using those forms

A: make sure that if something gets shut down, that’s not all we’ve got. Needs to be a regeneration of radical newspapers that aren’t controlled by the state and aren’t surveilled.

A: surveillance shouldn’t be taken lightly. Doesn’t mean we stop using social media but can’t be the only way.

Question: what networks are there for queer aging outside of the family?

Amber: I think it’s terrifying, there aren’t many answers. SAGE is building housing. But it’s like 60 units; not going to make the difference.

Amber: in the AIDS world, there a lot of awareness of aging and HIV, because a lot of the radicals that are still there are fighting. But having done aging work, it’s terrifying to think about boomers, bc Social security is going to be then only thing most people have

Amber: have to start taking about what it means to take networks around aging. No mobility in the same way as you used to have. Cant go on a search for an apartment

A: will have to look at earlier models around HIV/AIDS so that people will have communities. We have the knowledge but we have to share awareness that aging is a queer issue

A: have to build that as part of queer politics, bc the framework for aging is isolation

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