A Bash Back! reportback from a group of janky & rowdy queers

A Bash Back! reportback from a group of janky & rowdy queers who had a gay ol time

From Scenes from the Atlanta Forest

“Queers are marked as victims while violence is understood to be only the tool of the masters. The queer anarchist project embodied by Bash Back! Is first and foremost a refusal of victimhood and a reclamation of the violence taken from us by progressive ideology and used against us by queerbashers and the State. It was a crucial shift for Bash Back! to break with those who refused to recognize the importance of this reclamation. It served to cohere and solidify the insurrectional queer tendency around the question of violence…” ~ back cover of Queer Ultraviolence, 2012, Fray Baroque & Tegan Enelli.

Bash Back! was nothing short of the joyfully militant & orgiastically unhinged gathering it advertised itself to be– queer AF, silly, sexy & sketchy antics ensued almost every day/nite. A lot of us felt held in an urban space where there was room to be all kinds of things & ways, & not much was taboo.

We loved the topless beach party where a group of raucous queers ran off some bro fux filming & subsequently got froggy with the cops, and the “gay bloc” nite time caper that targeted Cop City supporters such as AT&T & chase bank showing solidarity with the DTF struggle by attacking these facilities which resulted in a plethora of smashed windows, graffitied walls, and smoke bombs flung into these buildings! That shit was a real gas!

Let us not forget the epic rave in a rad ramshackle squatted warehouse, where as the night dragged on, the drugs kicked in, people got wilder and looked for more things to smash & bash within and around the rave building itself; a naked homie clad only in a balaclava smashed a nearby street camera, cause fuck surveillance in general!

These are all raw & inspiring tidbits from Bash Back! that help elucidate their queer ultraviolence stance; it’s comforting to know that Bash Back! folks are not the type to leave you standing there all alone when it’s time to throw bricks through that Starbucks window.

The workshops were also on fucking point, everything from knife fighting, to french and local femmes & queers giving advice about squatting & eviction defense, a DTF panel with militant forest folks who were tight with Tort, queer action planning, conflict resolution, how to “break-up” (relationship oriented) in the movement, etc. One of our favorite workshops was the one right before the DTF panel, which examined the intertwining of queerness, occultism, and anarchy over the past thousands of years and ended with a discussion of the Edelweiss Pirates, a group that split from the Wandervogel youth movevment when they were subsumed by the Hitler Youth. Instead, they dressed up like pirates, squatted forests on the outskirts of cities, and engaged in guerrilla war against the Nazis, attacking supply lines, bombing trains, and carrying out raids and assasssinations, while also doing weird sex rites in the forest. As they handed over the space to the DTF panel, the speaker said, “If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s important.”

We are very grateful for our hosts who are rad AF “nihilist enemies”, as the tiqqunist milieu described them. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that Bash Back! is an entirely separate tendency and that the vast majority of these “irrelevant theory bros” did not dare to show up in Chicago. “When did we lose the queers to the nihilists?”, they wondered. They never had us!

It’s hard to believe it’s been 13 years since the last Bash Back! convergence. The following passage from 2009 reads like something that could have happened yesterday, although thankfully no longer at Bash Back!

“On Saturday night of the convergence, a now infamous queer dance party on the El train turned into a spontaneous illegal march in the streets. Hundreds of people paraded through Chicago’s assimilationist gay neighborhood, Boystown. The atmosphere was joyous, with people dancing wildly and wearing lingerie as masks. Some were completely naked except for their face coverings. The police subsequently attacked the peaceful yet illegal march. People near the back of the march began to place newspaper boxes into the street to stop the police from running queers down. At this point, shameful people in the crowd removed the boxes and screamed, “This is not polite!” With the boxes back on the sidewalk, the police were able to injure participants with their cars. The march ended with four people in jail, and one person hospitalized after a police cruiser intentionally drove over their foot.

The following morning, leftist-seeming elements at the convergence flung wild conspiracy theories to disrupt the original radical predisposition of BASH BACK! Although there was no black bloc and not a single window smashed, spineless “outside agitators” claimed they were tricked into participating in a black bloc, and put into harm’s way. Some thought the march was oppressive because there was no consensus to have a riot. First of all, if those people thought that march was a riot, they clearly have no idea what a riot is. Had there been a spontaneous riot, what are the rioters supposed to do? Are they supposed to sit in the middle of the street, in front of the police and vote on whether or not to fight the police?

Many white attendees who had flocked to Chicago from the coasts claimed the spontaneous Bash Back! action was racist. When queer people of color from the Midwest countered otherwise, they were met with a brief silence followed by white people proclaiming that the black bloc was indeed racist. These “anti-racist” whites added that the partiers on the train exposed black people to queerness, which was also racist. By the logic of these white “anti-racists,” there must be no queer people of color. The whites and cisgendered people insisted the action was also transphobic, despite trans people telling them not to speak for trans people. Some men even went on to call the actions of some women “manarchist”. In a tone implying his guilt, Eric Stanley, of the defunct Gay Shame San Francisco, and now a lecturer at the University of California Santa Cruz, cattily said to a Bash Back! organizer, “Just so you know, people are descending upon Bash Back to destroy it.”

Lez-be-real here. Propaganda for the convergence says things like, “You bring the balaclavas, orgies, and riot.” There were posters with images of rifles, riots, and people brandishing assorted weapons. Had any one of the people who injected to the street march in the basis that it was oppressive or unsafe read a flier, poster, communique’, or for that matter, as anything Bash Back! produced? It was absolutely clear what kind of people would be attending the convergence and the tactics Bash Back! advocated were even more clear.

Liberal provocateurs used any sort of identity politics to shade their own cowardice. When the very people these leftists claimed to represent (people of color, transfolks) countered the liberal narrative, they were silenced in the name of anti-racism and trans-solidarity. Rather than admitting their fear and guilt, “anarcho-liberals” fall back on racist tactics of refusal. They ignore, isolate, and alienate people of color (minus a few tokens) to create their own Twilight Zone anti-racist narrative. The Bash Back! tendency was always the antithesis of leftist identity politics. The 2009 Convergence was when these two tendencies finally came to a head.”

-“The 2009 Bash Back! Convergence And Subsequent Drama”, editor’s note, Queer Ultraviolence pg 161-163

We came to Chicago expecting that we might need to intervene in similar conflicts, but thankfully this was unnecessary as the anarcho-liberal tenderqueers stayed quiet or didn’t show up. It was truly a breath of fresh air to go to an event where the antithesis of rad “left”/radlib politics and practice reigned supreme, including how conflict was held, supported & transpired; the much needed departure from bullshit wyt privileged radlib spaces where NVC (non-violent communication) is God, cancellation is common & liberal fuckshit like lockdowns is king, was mad inspiring & beautiful! BASH BACK! made other supposedly rowdy/militant scenes like Earth First! seem irrelevant, lib af, & unnecessary. Both oogle & nihilist energies were running high & making shit happen. It was amazing to see a whole rad milieu of anarchists & nihilists who see the value in overt militancy, & will no longer leave space for liberal bullshit.

It’s ok to be tender, & hell we love being queer, but fucking every other “rad” space is a tender wyt queer dominated space that’s hyper peace-policed, and we’re tired of it. Bash Back! means BASH BACK! & solidarity still means attack to us, not some watered-down NVDA that gets us all arrested leaving us with more charges & un-won struggles. The only language the oppressor understands is violence, & we stand by that.

Please tenderly be queer in a way that doesn’t stifle our energy or quell our flames, or tenderly take your privileged ultra-pc manipulative ineffective shit elsewhere.

During the gathering, several different people were jumped. One individual with white dreads was jumped by a small crew of POC folks who held them down, punched them & cut off two dreads. Another person who was livestreaming in Portland in 2020, whose footage was used as key evidence to convict a comrade who is currently serving a four-year prison sentence, was jumped by that comrade’s friends on the final day of the gathering on the sidewalk in the midst of many people…. while no one said fighting was “bad”, some organizers thought it was a bitch move to jump the individual on the last day when all the parties had been there all week, so a “two-on-two” fight format was suggested instead which didn’t pick up… everyone was allowed to have conflict the way they saw fit more or less, & physical fighting was not immediately considered a cancellable offense by any stretch of the imagination…

It was interesting to hear a report back from a few folks that attended who wished there was more “bashing back” instead of “bashing sideways”; when Bash Back! propaganda explicitly encouraged people to SELF-ORGANIZE their own actions/orgies/riots, & even offered support from event organizers to help bring participants’ ideas to fruition.

It seems relevant to note that these are the same people who did not attend the night action, because either they weren’t prepared to bloc up & conceal their appearance, or didn’t bring tools to participate in rendering destruction on action targets… we also heard some people did not attend the smashy smashy event or share the details with their friends on the basis that “it’s a bad plan”… with that being said, we just wanna say that the night “orgy of violence” was very fun & successful resulting in no arrests. Meeting up in a dark place, walking a few blocks to a target, busting them tf up and dipping is not rocket science.

We hope more people take initiative, get prepared, & actually show up IRL to either participate or hear the plan/make suggestions to the plan next time before shitting on it. We understand that a lot of people are traumatized or paranoid right now and that’s ok, but it’s more helpful to be honest with yourself and your community and just say that rather than insinuating that something is a bad idea just because you are scared.

It’s time to maroon, not just talk about it in a theoretical workshop (the only really off-kilter workshop at Bash Back! this year), & not try to orchestrate others taking action in your place and reaping the social & economic benefits of that.

To those that are content living their mostly normal lives & keeping your barista jobs or whatever, a fuck ton of the rest of us want to maroon, squat, hop trains, get rowdy, fight the police, & gain territory, & a lot of us never wanna comply with the state…. we don’t know how many times we need to say it, we do not need radlibs yucking our yum or pumping the brakes on our insurrectionary goals & dreams. Libs always fuck us over in the end, are not gonna vote with a brick, & are just co-opting our rad spaces every time they show up & inevitably take up too much space.

Obvious bottom line, we need more people to do more radical shit & push back against the state, police, climate-destroying infrastructure, etc! We are in the 11th hour of the 11th hour! If there’s anything the tiqqunists should be able to compute, it’s that “The Time is Now!”, & that becomes more and more true as each day passes.

It is time to destroy any & all machines, anything’s a target! Machine = bad! Glass = smash! It’s time to Bash Back! against anything that destroys us or stands in the way of our collective liberation! The rise and resurgence of the radical right mustn’t go any further, and will only be halted if we Bash Back! at full force now!

Love & queer ultraviolence,

Some queers that wish to endanger the liberal influence on rad spaces

There are 31 Comments

"One individual with white dreads was jumped by a small crew of POC folks who held them down, punched them & cut off two dreads."

makes me wanna grow my dreads back and punching back on these authoritarians assholes.

Yeah I mean, these people should be pummeled for eternity. But fyi, there's way more to this story that will be coming out. It's way more fucked up than you think.

No, it's not. Some white person got their dreads cut and everyone went home. The earth kept spinning and here we are.

Right, no other relevant information regarding this at all. Keep telling yourself that bro! I am sure nobody will ever find out the specifics. So convenient!

Why don't you just reveal the specifics right now? What's gonna happen if you do?

I guess we gotta wait for snorezone distro to drop the zine and then we'll know all the details.

Nothing is going to happen, but the target of the attack should be given the opportunity to speak for themself. It's one of those common courtesy kinds of things.

If a bunch of segregationist identitarian leftists attacked you for failure to conform to their capitalist-prescribed worldview, you'd probably appreciate the chance to speak before allowing The Commenting Public to jerk off on their keyboards about the intimate details without your input being available.

You must be new here. The anews moderators do not let people speak unless it is to praise the anews moderators' narrow agenda.

Ruthless despots, the whole lot of them. I tried posting "fuk u fagit" 20 times in 5 minutes (as is my RIGHT) and these tyrants imprisoned my family. The only way I can see my meemaw now is if I issue a public statement swearing fealty to the lordship of Anarchy Comment Sections and also give them my GameCube with two controllers (I only have one but they won't listen).

the only thing that's being focused on right now is the organizers protecting the three who did it. After they got chased with knives they whined to the organizers that their lives were in danger. Hate on white people until you need their protection.

I'd be surprised if the organizers know the people who did it. Or at least much about them.

This was a small group of people led by someone who has been identified as an informant locally. They did not expect to get found and now are attempting to guilt the typical white college "anarchists" into supporting them.

still, this is what happens when "anarchists" cater to IP in any way and then confuse people with bogus versions of ultraviolence

Obviously, the people who are smarter than this stuff need to start acting. How can anyone be dumb enough to say oh yeah, three random people assaulted a white guy with dreads in 2023 and this is normal. It is not. Nobody gives a shit about white dreads or hoop earrings other than the dumbest fuckers on the planet and cops.

If you are the same as 09:40 I didn't mean any offense, I would just like to know more about "someone who has been identified as an informant locally" - specifically who this person is and where they're from. I wouldn't ask you to post that info in the comments section, but if you could point me in the right direction to find it myself I would be very appreciative.

If you are not the same person, no YOU fuck off.

<3, EmmaAintDead (not verified)
(it won't let me post as me)

To hide any infos online about snitches is just to be helping them. Especially on an anon forum as this one where this can be done, to an extent that won't compromise the website and its staff.

It's being handled. You're not a part of it. Quench your thirst for scene drama where you are after you're done fucking off

I'm with the person most directly involved here and it ain't you. So. Like I said, if you're for real, drop me a line. You can figure out how.

<3 EmmaAintDead (not verified)

to me almost nothing could be more emblematic of "liberal influence on rad spaces" than attacking an anarchist for their hairstyle. usa is a shithole country

It truly is sad as fuck. Imagine the sad example of humanity that can be manipulated by fucking hair police. It's embarrassing as shit. Not to mention from what I have heard, these people are likely Communists. Like straight up went to this looking to disrupt it and stop it. Who would be crazy enough to put their life on the line for such a dumb ass movement?

You can do whatever you want as long as you understand there are consequences to your choices whether you agree with those consequences or not, son.

but i mom, it's really a charlie chaplin stash....i was just tryin' to be edgy.

That's what I am saying. Bash Back needs to take a strong and firm line against Appropriation now!

Ban all rock music.
Ban all hair styles.
Ban all rings of any kind.
Ban piercings and tattoos.

Immediately convene the board and stakeholders including Maoists who got involved in things suspiciously after the George Floyd rebellion so that all appropriation categories can be outlined for anarchist events.

This is not manipulation. Don't worry we just want to *stop racism and war now* in the movement.

All those who go against the committee will go to prison in order to get a haircut.

Oh no! Bash Back has upset a white man it seems! We should rethink the whole thing.

that's a rather stupid thing to draw from this. i haven't seen anyone equate the "dreaded" situation to BB in general....overall sounds great!

From the comments above about informants etc and people who may have came specifically looking to disrupt the conference it might not have anything directly to do with BB but it's a pretty serious issue generally now with any event.

I would assume if they were cops/influenced by them than they would already be working with organizers to downplay/editorialize what happened. Likely manipulating the situation (and gullible people) for their own ends in order to cause a rift.

This has been repeated before. I just hope people actually know who these people are and their backgrounds cause this is all really suspicious in regards to as your said, "a great event."

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