Bash Bash Revolution: A Weekend of Queer Anti-Authoritarian Community Defense
From It's Going Down
Announcing Bash Bash Revolution, a week of music and combat sports to benefit various autonomous self-defense and mutual aid projects.
From It's Going Down
Announcing Bash Bash Revolution, a week of music and combat sports to benefit various autonomous self-defense and mutual aid projects.
Why don’t we declare our own war?
An orgy of violence, even slightly expanding the small window of allowed gestures into millions of precincts burning, writhing together in unlimited grief, unlimited pleasure.
There are so many people who feel safe calling for our deaths. They are the ones that should feel that their end is coming, because it is.
The following text is my reportback from Bash Back! 2023, simultaneously published here and submitted to Bash Back News, where I hope it will be published soon. There are more than a few references that might be obscure to folks who weren't there, who don't know some of the pertinent lore. I hope that that does not diminish the value of the piece to the wider readership.
Topic of the Week - guest contribution by MK
An middle schooler in my life asked me a question to this effect the other day, and for this tranarchist, it kickstarted the most beautiful kind of existential crisis. Of course this tweenage organizer, who didn't use the a-word for herself, was gay—but in her possibly-ungovernable gay (and maybe queer) self, was she still practicing anarchy to some extent?
source: bbnews.noblogs.org (https://bbnews.noblogs.org/post/2023/09/20/a-hundred-queer-anarchist-cr…)
Blue flashing lights pass by, oblivious to our collective trespass. A hole in the fence, hotties passing through, passing into each other. A new world cums into being, a rupture on the leisure pastures of the rich. Cruising utopia, at least for a night. Queers writhing over each other, defiling one another. Sweet melodies accompany soft caresses, the sound of piss gurgling beside a couple kissing. Determined fuckers splayed out on tarps. The line between criminality and sensuality? Sorry she's not in tonight.
From Medium by Elisha Moon Williams
“What is Bash Back!?”
“What does it mean to resist oppression?”
“What is our purpose?”
“Is our violence of substance or of image?”
These are questions that have ruptured throughout queer anarchist history since the late 2000s. Bash Back! has been called many different things over the years. If you ask 5 queer anarchists, you’re likely to get 6 different answers. Some have claimed that it is a decentralized network of autonomous queer anarchist cells. Others have considered it a gang, a tendency, or even just a symbol. According to certain folks, they’re all of these things and more.
From CrimethInc.
Reviving an Insurrectionary Queer Network: An Interview
In 2007, in the course of preparations for actions against the 2008 Republican National Convention, an insurrectionary network of queer anarchists formed under the umbrella Bash Back! Over the following three years, this network participated in a vibrant array of confrontations, organizing efforts, and publications, expanding and intensifying the struggle against sex and gender normativity. Today, as fascists and other bigots renew their assault on queer and trans people and anarchists fight back, there is an urgent need for renewed coordination and innovation. In this context, participants in the original Bash Back! network have called for a new Bash Back! convergence in September 2023.
From bashback.info
In 2008, queer anarchists gathered in Chicago to plot a disruption of the electoral spectacle and cohere a network out of emergent youth crews in multiple cities. Fifteen years later, the proposals put forward then — criminality, autonomous self-defense, riots, and orgies — are needed more than ever.
From It's Going Down
Counter Flow Collective on Starting a Distro
The Stonewall riots are easy to celebrate because they’re in the past. But the need for queer insurrection is hardly history.