I’ll be the one in the almost-fitting suit and the impressive facial hair tweeting earnest stuff SO COME ON BY AND SAY HELLO.
This is my first open bar party in at least a year so I apologize in advance for the things I do and say. Except for that thing about Jonathan Safran Foer and weed delivery, which is absolutely true.
Leslie Feinberg stands at a podium giving a talk. Zie says:
In fact, we carried, before we had a pride flag, we carried the North Vietnamese flag as our pride flag. Now you could hear that and think “well that’s interesting”, but it wasn’t just an abstract thing.
(And by the way, I know there’s some people who have to leave at, uh, for a nursing class here; nobody’s gonna look at you funny when you go. I know people are starting to get nervous about—don’t worry, you go with our grace.)
So, the Gay Liberation Front and the Third World Liberation Front named themselves in solidarity with the North Vietnamese people at a time when that was considered treason. That’s like now, coming out and defending the resistance of the Iraqi people, the Palestinian people, the North Korean people, the Iranian people, the Cuban people. We face getting beaten up on the streets for marching with the Vietnamese flag but we knew that if we didn’t defend the Vietnamese people we were gonna weaken, first of all the people who deserved our support because we were the aircraft carrier in which the war was being launched in all our names. We would lose the solidarity with the Vietnamese people and we would lose our own political souls and movement as well if we didn’t take a position in support.
We were supporters on the front lines of the women’s liberation movement even when there were some who didn’t want us to be there—who said ooh, if you could just get out of the way, because you know, we’re strong women and they’re calling us lesbians [be]cause you’re around. We’re like, excuse me, we’re withstanding the lesbian invading—you better get used to that. As strong women you better get used to saying “and yes, many of us are!” Because otherwise, you’ll just back yourself right off a cliff. And I would ask you, do we have an equal rights amendment today? It was not a winning strategy.
We were involved in all these struggles, but not because we said it’s gonna be a tit-for-tat: “I’ll do this if you’ll do that. I’ll come to your demo Wednesday if you come to mine Thursday.” We did it because we knew it was a fight we had to join and be a part of. And it strengthened all—
[Image Description: text overlaying image of Sylvia Rivera. Text reads: “What is the bedrock on which all of our diverse trans populations can build solidarity? The commitment to be the best fighters against each other’s oppression.” ~ Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation]
Leslie Feinberg on trans exclusion in feminist spaces.
“We’re in danger of losing what the entire second wave of feminism, what the entire second wave of women’s liberation was built on, and that was ‘Biology is not destiny’. ‘One is not born a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘one becomes one’. Now there’s some place where transsexual women and other women intersect. Biological determinism has been used for centuries as a weapon against women, in order to justify a second-class and oppressed status. How on Earth, then, are you going to pick up the weapon of biological determinism and use it to liberate yourself? It’s a reactionary tool.”
From TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.
Happy (early) Nov 15th! Remember that Stone Butch Blues is free now and always to read here
Leslie was a communist, a butch lesbian, a nonbinary and transgender activist, and the person who made me who I am today. Consider checking out Stone Butch Blues if you haven’t already Do it for Leslie, and for hir surviving partner, Minnie Bruce Pratt
[ID: A screenshot of a tweet by Minnie Bruce Pratt (@MBpratt) reading: “Nov. 15 marks the 6th anniversary of my beloved Leslie Feinberg’s death. Hir last words were "Remember me as a revolutionary communist.” By hir wishes, hir iconic novel “Stone Butch Blues” is available FREE download & AT-COST ONLY print, at lesliefeinberg.net. Please share!“
This is followed by two images; the first is a photo of Leslie Feinberg from the chest up, and the second is a cropped image of what is presumably the cover of Stone Butch Blues showing the title with Leslie Feinberg’s name underneath. End ID]
Note: This tweet was originally posted on November 12, 2020.
““Caw, caw!” A huge black crow circled above me in the air and landed on a rock nearby. We looked at each other in silence. “Crow, are you a boy or a girl?” “Caw, caw!” I laughed and rolled over on my back. The sky was crayon blue. I pretended I was lying on the cotton white clouds. The earth was damp against my back. The sun was hot, the breeze was cool. I felt happy. Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.”
happy pride reccing some anti-assimilationist, anti-capitalist, and abolitionist books and texts
BOOKS
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? edited by Matilda Bernstein Sycamore (2012)
“Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into "straight-acting dudes hangin’ out,” what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?“
This pamphlet is an attempt to trace the historic rise of an oppression that, as yet, has no commonly agreed name. We are talking here about people who defy the ‘man’-made boundaries of gender.
Transgender Warriors: Making history from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman by Leslie Feinberg (1996)
[Leslie Feinberg’s] book celebrated the resistance to transphobia and a vision of trans liberation articulated from the perspective of class struggle. It understood that no liberation from transphobia or any of the divisive and violent oppressions in class society is possible without the transformation of capitalism into socialism.
Stories told of these times make the faggots and their friends weep. The second revolutions made many of the people less poor and a small group of men without color very rich. With craftiness and wit the faggots and their friends are able to live in this time, some in comfort and some in defiance.
Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation edited by Kate Bornstein, and S. Bear Bergman (2010)
Today’s transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being.
Made In India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/National Projects by Suparna Bhaskaran (2004)
Made In India explores the making of "queer” and “heterosexual” consciousness and identities in light of economic privatization, global condom enterprises, sexuality-focused NGOs, the Bollywood-ization of beauty contests, and trans/national activism.
That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies For Resisting Assimilation edited by Matilda Bernstein Sycamore (2008)
As the growing gay mainstream prioritises the attainment of straight privilege over all else, it drains queer identity of any meaning, relevance or cultural value.
How To Blow Up A Pipeline by Andreas Malm (2021)
Malm argues that sabotage is a logical form of climate activism, and criticizes both pacifism within the climate movement and “climate fatalism” outside it.
On Connection by Kae Tempest (2020)
On Connection is medicine for these wounded times.
Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Y. Davies (2003)
If you know anything about Angela Davis—anti-racist activist, Marxist-feminist scholar—you know that her answer to the question posed in the title is “Yes.” This is a short primer on the prison abolition movement
Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell
This profound, urgent, beautiful, and necessary book is an invitation to imagine and organize for a less violent and more liberatory world.
Black Marxism by Cedric Johnson (1983)
Influenced by many African American and Black economists and radical thinkers of the 19th century, Robinson creates a historical-critical analysis of Marxism and the Eurocentric tradition from which it evolved. The book does not build from nor reiterate Marxist thought, but rather introduces racial analysis to the Marxist tradition.
The Transgender Issue: An Argument For Justice by Shon Faye (2021)
[Shon Faye] provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.
Burn The Binary: selected writings on the politics of being trans, genderqueer, and non-binary by Riki Wilchins (2017)
This single volume offers a selection of Riki’s most penetrating and insightful pieces, as well as the best of two decades of Riki’s online columns for The Advocate never before collected, from “Where Have All the Butches Gone,” to “Attack of the 6-Foot Intersex People”
The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.
“This brings us to the third problem with eschatological framings of the climate crisis: they overlook the fact that for many, the end of the world has already happened. In October last year, Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani woman, mother and leader, wrote a desperate letter to the western world reminding us that for Indigenous peoples, “the fires are raging still”.”
MISC
Manifesto: An Aromantic Manifesto by yingchen and yingtong
There is a space for everyone. A space, a glass of water, and a plug socket.* Chairs and tables and cleaned toilets. So many chairs so that no one is without one.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.
