We find no allies in the state or the capitalist class. The cops and corporations are our enemies, not our allies. Indeed, Pride finds its roots in riots against the police. We have only ourselves to rely upon for our own liberation, not the institutions of violence that already exist. We must destroy gender on our own terms, not on theirs.
In the classic, liberal, telling, queers are told as a struggling group but only in the past. The story of course ignores the mass deaths to AIDS that continue to this day among the most marginalized queers, and instead centers as holy and righteous the preservation of marriage for gays and inclusion into the American war machine. These “rights” are the so-called triumph of the liberal gays, won heroically in the courts of a just and free country.
Even on the left this narrative of rights is nigh unavoidable, cishets and queers alike failing to grasp the abysmal failure that the push for rights in the courts has been for radicals and queers. These rights campaigns have entrenched deeply conservative causes into the narrative of queer liberation, seeking to capitalize on the misery and suffering of a deeply radical sector of the population. They have co-opted our words and gentrified away our spaces, all in the name of their so-called “equal rights”, but the only rights the queers have gained are the rights to be assimilated into patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, capitalism, and the state.
The banner of equal rights is again and again used to blunt queer radicalism among those of us who lack money, white privilege, and cis comfort, removing from us the money, company and organizing power of our fellow queers in favor of gross class warfare against the proletarian queer and cisheteronormativity for the wealthy whites, safe and happy in their unthreatening lives. This ugly liberal co-opting of queer resistance is constant and continual, exhibited most plainly in the corporate takeover of pride in almost every sector, a disgusting perversion of the anti-cop riots that started it and in service of every two-bit company looking to make a quick buck in June. Our ambitions are stunted and worn down, our community organizations drained of money and resources, our proudly aberrant communities driven even further into the margins, our history erased, all in service of capitalism. We will suffer it no more!
In the fight for queer liberation our goal must be, in no uncertain terms, destruction of gender, patriarchy, the military, the state, and capitalism, or we will have failed in our push for liberation. Equal rights are a momentary respite from the harsh reality that capitalism, the patriarchy, gender, are all oppressive systems that must be shattered to build a truly equitable society. In short; fuck your equal rights, we want everything!
Our demands will be constrained no longer by vulgar “practicality” and electoral processes, but we must join with fellow queers and proles and beat back the evils of capitalism in the streets. We must throw down the false idol of respectability, and build our own power, respectable politicians be damned.
Everything under the sun will be ours, with no state to gun us down, no bourgeois pigs to shackle us in wage slavery, no military girlbosses leading a charge against the poor and downtrodden of another country, no cisheteronormative social formations, all of them gone, leaving us free to live life as ourselves.
