We were aware of the existence of tired leftist queers, but we didn’t realize that so many of them disguised their pacifism within confrontational aesthetics. Many of these sheep-in-wolves-clothes speak endlessly of histories of queer revolt and make films and texts glorifying violent resistance, and yet denounce those who sought to struggle with them in the here and now. They celebrate revolt that is separated from them by decades or oceans, all while actively sabotaging such efforts where they live. We were shocked that those who make films about bombings and jailbreaks or wear patches of guns would demonize those who engage in property destruction or violent self-defense. The reality: the hip queers who seek to make their careers as radical queer academics and filmmakers are in fact servants of abstraction. They seek to socially and monetarily capitalize on the image of queer revolt while contributing nothing to its possibility.

[..] We can expect many more films and photo shoots displaying a glamorous armed struggle (like the red army faction with glitter). We can expect more celebration of riots forty years ago and uprisings across the ocean (accompanied, of course, by condemnation of riot in the here and now — by crying over broken windows and over-tipped newspaper boxes). Violence will be acceptable as long as it takes the form of abstraction, an artform, a historical occurrence or a blip on the global news feed — when it is separate from us. It will always be refused on the level of our daily lives, when we become its agents.

[..] One after another queer academics line up, each appropriates the activity of insurgents toward the ends of strengthening their own careers. They take antisocial activity and use it to reproduce the Academy as a central engine of society itself. This is the ultimate treason.

Tegab Eanelli – Bash Back! Is Dead; Bash Back Forever!