My Queerness will not be Policed, my Queerness will Riot.
It took me a lot of time to come up with the right ideas for this. And I mean right ideas not as an objective truth but as the words I think fit my telling and saying about this. As the time pass, as it inclemently does, I dive into my own hate and rage. This is a rage about my young adolescent and my current adulthood, my queerness and police. I even tried to do it in the past, but then I got angry at my own words and I deleted it as the garbage I considered it was.
I have had always certain disdain for authority, you can ask my parents if you have any doubt about it, so, you obviously would conclude that I’m a not a fan of any kind of police: I hate police, yes even the individuals that walk and talk.
When I was a teenager I liked to go out to skate out of the bank of my town and in the end of that age of mine I was used to see police officers. You might be a skinny, a squalid teenager, but you surely need to be checked out by the State itself: you skate and the next second you might be doing is robbing the bank, or worse: making some political statement. And back then the statements that I made were formulated in their all silliness on my math tests, it’s almost funny because the most anarchist that I dared to say back then was on a piece of paper and I thought of it as too bold to say it out loud: maybe you don’t need the State to be moral or doing some good. That isn’t what a good catholic “boy” does, right? Something was off, nonetheless:
[…]cops refer to the citizens they police as “the enemy,” mocking community accountability efforts as “sideshows” that “exist only for chiefs and sheriffs to provide an illusion of citizen accountability.” Burning the Bridges They Are Building: Anarchist Strategies Against the Police in the Puget Sound, Winter 2011
I know that now and I think I sorta did back then, but I was the only one that came out as trans and pansexual, and who is anarchist, the others who skated with me? The others are good citizens and good parishioners, so who knows. I was suddenly the enemy, a kid whom you have to check periodically. I guess they don’t believe on any type of induction and 5 times checking for whatever they were searching wasn’t enough.
But let me contextualize anarchism and why — as anarchist — I’m personally not fond of them, the police. The anarchist sees this — the system we live in — as repressive, it is a system which doesn’t allow self determination to the individual or any freely formed collective. The State is above any objection or assertion of the free one or the unique, it’s god among women and men:
[…]the media and the police work for the same power structure: a power structure that demands we all remain obedient while they rob us, exploit us, bully us, and lie to us, and then punish us with the utmost cruelty when we break one of their rules, or fight back. This is a system built on our misery. It is no coincidence that sometimes people snap, and do whatever they can to fight back against the agents of this system. To win just a moment of justice, a moment of vengeance. They are the bravest of us, the most honest.[…]
[…]“All people seeking to be free find themselves in direct opposition to a system that is inherently violent and oppressive. The police deliberately use violence to control or kill off anyone who seeks to dismantle this power structure — or anyone already marginalized within it. We don’t want a friendlier police force. […] We want to get out of control. We want a world without cops.” -from the anarchist leaflet John T. Williams Was Murdered by Seattle Cop Ian Birk. — as quoted on Burning the Bridges They Are Building: Anarchist Strategies Against the Police in the Puget Sound, Winter 2011
The State doesn’t care about you, the State is just a bunch of bureaucratic asses ensuring the status quo, its fixity and its hunger for eternity, and that fixity and that eternity is all about allowing that the ones whose enrich themselves, without any regard of sympathy, empathy or care for the planet in which they supposed to enjoy such wrong doing, keep getting richer and richer. The state isn’t an altruistic entity that works for the people that it claims to represent. It is obvious since, as Emma Goldman would say of the kind performance that subjects the individual to the legitimacy that such deed, that is voting, generates: if voting changed anything, it would be made illegal (Emma Goldman, 1906). And this is really self evident! How much time have humanity live under capitalism or some sort of democracy and anything have ever changed?! I’d say never, since democracy was thought as a legitimated way to govern the women and men. It’s imperative to understand this: the State will not serve you if you don’t have already a real power over it, the State won’t save you. Democratic people, or some sort of statist, would say that the State is the only organization that have legitimated right of using violence: the State’s behavior is violence, and it calls its violence “law”; that of the individual, “crime.” (Max Stirner, 1845).
That’s maybe the last argument against a pacific resistance against the State, since the State presents itself as hegemonic entity, and what would happen when it runs out of non violent arguments? The outcast, once asserted their will and the hegemony of the State is openly challenged, will be forced — literally — to behave accordingly, it doesn’t matter if it is a pacific assertion. Anything or anyone that asserts themself or itself as outside of the system, or not accordingly to the will of the system and — ultimately to the discourse that promote the ones who control the system, will be repressed, physically and violently if it is necessarily. They (the ones that the system serves) will use those who are eager being violent without being judged by the system itself, they’re fools on their whole:
The way the System treats police conduct is incredible. Most behavior that would land an ordinary person in jail is considered part of a police officer’s job! When you read about the level of brutality that police exercise on the job, it is apparent that the job of a cop must attract a lot of closet sociopaths and personalities with a need to reassure their ego that they’re a worthwhile person by exercising dominant behavior over others (sort of like a dominatrix except with less leather). Most obsession with authority, control and machismo (the person who is out to prove how tough they are by bullying others) are characteristic of deep-seated inferiority complexes and incomplete emotional development created by a highly regimented family, religious, peer group, school and “career path” which left little room for the development of individualized personality, creativity or ambition. Killer Cops: Licensed to Kill
It’s almost unavoidable the existence of police brutality because any amount of violence that could come from the State is violence that has never been really legitimated. And it’s a bad favor we do to ourselves to think that a cop is a friend of our causes, he has the gun and they work for those who protect the rich and the normalcy, or the order, while they take from us the wealth to protect such pigs.
[…]Are they afraid of criminals? No! They are afraid of us; the ordinary people. They are afraid of accountability. They are afraid of loosing control. Like any army of occupation, they are afraid of the freedom of the people whose communities they have occupied and the justice of those they have wronged. The fact that they fear us means that they know that our action is all that is necessary to begin to change the direction of society and dismantle the Police State. It means that only our reluctance to act keeps the present system in place.
And I, as a queer person I must add. They must be afraid of all we faggots, lesbians, gays, bi’s and transgender people, since we proved firstly on Stonewall that we’re not afraid of being the outcasts. We, queers, live in constant tension with the system and to this light we should act, consequently and accordingly to our struggle, not for being able of taking a place on a system we don’t have a place, but to create a place out of our own struggle to live in. We’ll meet with a difficulty: the State is all there is above the individual and it’s not giving any amount of space that we demand or we take for ourselves and our enjoyment, we’ll meet the police and the State in the streets, regardless of how white, capitalistic and gentrified you present your queerness (No, I’m not interested on RuPaul, neither on Queer Eye).
See, we’ve always been the other, the alien, the criminal. The story of queers in this civilization has always been the narrative of the sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic inferior, the traitor, the freak, the moral imbecile. We’ve been excluded at the border, from labor, from familial ties. We’ve been forced into concentration camps, into sex slavery, into prisons. The normal, the straight, the american family has always constructed itself in opposition to the queer. Toward the queerest insurrection (Mary Nardini Gang, 2014)
We’re by de facto out of all normalcy, and because of that, all intentions of not confronting the state of things, to think that there could be a progress without steps or jumps in our material and discursive conditions, without actually disengaging, and fighting against what is the normalcy, are— as I mentioned before — just another formed of gentrifying and colonialism of the queer bodies, individuals-us and our struggles. It is a silly thinking that you — as queer individual — can be part of the ones that are on the top with conditions and will not outcast violence upon those who you call friends and fellows queers. You can be, sure, but you’ll surely have to gentrify, to alienate yourself to be the kind of queer that capitalism, the state and all the most powerful hegemonic discourses can appropriate for themselves; it’s never about you, nor your queerness, it’s about how much money can offer your queerness to the pigs, how much can they squeeze from your queerness and from you, it’s about how much you don’t pollute the landscape of the normalcy. And the police will be there to put you in line, to assure you’re not so queer or to be the queer that can’t be exploited, not your queerness, but what is demanded from you to make you look potable.
The perspective of queers within the heteronormative world is a lens through which we can critique and attack the apparatus of capitalism. We can analyze the ways in which Medicine, the Prison System, the Church, the State, Marriage, the Media, Borders, the Military and Police are used to control and destroy us. More importantly, we can use these cases to articulate a cohesive criticism of every way that we are alienated and dominated.
The gentrifying of queernes from the capitalist, the normalcy and the patriarchy system is so evident when, sadly for several reasons, the trans folks, the black queer people and sex workers have been the first on putting the face, they have been the one on first starting the riots that later the system tried to absorb, because the system is all and nothing can be out of it. It’s not hard then to explain why there are companies on Pride, Pride and the queer people struggle is starting to be gentrified, if it is not totally gentrified already.
It was once that to be queer was to be in direct conflict with the forces of control and domination. Now, we are faced with a condition of utter stagnation and sterility. As always, Capital recuperated brick-throwing street queens into suited politicians and activists.
Is it really that we forgot what Pride is all about? Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, no one? Really? Pride isn’t about fighting over who’s going to be the marshal of this year, Pride isn’t about giving space to capitalism or the State, Pride started as a riot, with a brick being thrown at the police by a black sex worker trans woman, Pride is about asserting ourselves as dissidents of the order, the totality and the normalcy. It is full bullshit to gentrify us into a white capitalistic, straightened up “queerness”.
And when I was sixteen a would be bully pushed me and called me a faggot. I hit him in the mouth. The intercourse of my fist and his face was far sexier and more liberating than anything MTV ever offered our generation. With the pre cum of desire on my lips I knew from then on that I was an anarchist. In short, this world has never been enough for us. We say to it, “we want everything, motherfucker, try to stop us!”
It’s necessary to remember this rage inside us, this rage that the State and the Capital will make the police ultimately to fight against, because the only way we won’t be met with violence is by being assimilated into the narratives of always, a white narrative, a sexist narrative, a traditional narrative. We can’t allow us the luxury of give up to the stupid narrative from liberals and progressists: we ain’t getting anything by being assimilated, if only, we will absorbed and turned into a commodity, and we’re suffering from commidification.
So next time you see a cop, a brutal part of the State and the most explicitly violent, I hope you remember how this all started, how and why people march at this month and not other one, or why we even do it anyway. When you see a cop, I hope you remember how historically we have been beaten up by them or ignored by them, or laughed at when we asked them for help because we were in danger, I hope you remember all the trans women who are sex workers and have been murdered, and no one cared — the police didn’t care, nor the State. I hope you don’t see as gatekeepers to those who still remember and consequently to that memory act on Pride, because you are the gatekeeper, you are the one who don’t remember and for you we’ll have to yell, kick, punch or throw bricks if it is necessary when the time comes.
