With one week left of Pride Month, with heavy hearts looking at the world and the regularly-scheduled petty conflicts within, we share some words on what we hope pride is to become understood as, going against the narratives imposed on us by liberals.
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The First Pride was indeed a riot. It was a riot ignited in the late 1960s by trans women of color and stoked into flames by the trauma of lifetimes of oppression. It was a riot aimed at the cops, who ceaselessly brutalized gay bars and other welcoming spaces for queers in Turtle Island in the mid 20th century. It was a riot aimed at the abusive and fundamentalist parents. It was a riot aimed at childhood expectations. It was a riot aimed at heartache coming from all directions. It was a riot aimed at the tricks who never payed their sex workers. It was a riot aimed at the average everyday bullshit that stomps on us and twists.
Pride was not just a riot. It was a total rupture.
Now what is called “Pride” is a family event. Now pride is a free speech free-for-all where hate preachers invariably show up to harass festival-goers, blabbering bullshit about Jesus and hellfire and sadly never being shot in the head, due to all the Lovely Rainbow Law Enforcement showing up to beat your skull in . . . with a rainbow asp. How progressive and Good. A sickening departure from one’s roots, this contemporary “pride.”
Needless to say, we don’t go to these events. (Unless one is able to show up armed and effectively oust the fascists and the bigots from hurting anyone.) They aren’t worth it unless you want to waste money or just generally be frazzled and annoyed. There was an attempt to do a Queer Liberation march in NYC and other American cities a year or so ago, met with much heckling and harassment by police and liberals, still following the same orderly, embarrassing Demand and Chant model of typical American “civil disobedience.”
Nobody who has really studied the origins and nature of real freedom can have any truck with these orderly events, these progressive ideals, these simple feel good slogans and gestures. Real freedom comes from a stoic doing backed up by a stoic understanding that slices through all of the obstacles and goes straight for the target. Do you want to celebrate being a rainbow-clad subject to a society that actually hates you no matter what? Or do you want to pursue your genuine interests against all demands for a silent, sad life?
The word “Pride”, in the context of the christianity that still objectively dominates the world, should conjure images of a sinful disobedience against the norm, with intent to collapse the society and dogma that name “sin.” We don’t want a queerness that is simply attractive and exploitable for capital and carefully surveilled by the state, while the christian nationalists are in competition with feeble progressives for power. We want a queerness that is the enemy to every person with a knack for reducing everything down to its surface-level simple “truths.” We want a queerness that demonstrates the deep, unnameable complexity of organic existence as a mode toward complete self-realization against all sacred authority.
This Negative Pride has to become unshackled from liberal “visibility” and “community” politics and become something far, FAR more dreaded by the homophobes, the transphobes, the essentialist simpletons, the progressives seeking to reduce and abuse us.
WE are those who inherit this burning, boiling Earth. WE are those who crush the skulls of our enemies. WE are those who negate the commandments of a drooling, demented “God,” pulling the plug on his life support. WE are those who End submission to religious stupidity. WE are those who live unapologetically, and with bite.
Co-Authored by the Effrenatum Collective