Please please tell me where I can learn about creative and chaotic activism. I feel like I found my calling through that post and I really want to learn more. Mostly about what people did and what effects it had. Like how they went about doing things that made authorities nervous. Because that sounds fantastic, but I need to understand more about toeing the line legally so I’m disruptive enough to cause a scene, without authorities actually being able to *do* much about it.

oscarorozcoorejel:

queeranarchism:

Well, the movement that most inspires me in this regard are the Dutch Provos but there have been many other protest groups in the 60s to 80s in Europe that have used humor, chaos, spectacle and experiment to call for social change. Many of them combined bizarre theatre performances in public with a simple but radical political message and many lived according to their own ideals in anarchist communes that focused on sexual freedom, communal child raising, etc.

What made the Provos effective was that they could not be pinned down as
anything: they had no fixed agenda, no membership, no clear structure
and very few things were organised through large meetings or general
consensus. Instead, they were a lot of small groups who just did stuff
because they felt like it and they shared a few common ideals that were
experienced emotionally more than they were articulated. With hindsight they can be characterized as situationist anarchists but they rarely explained themselves like that.

Some Provos broke the law, some did not. That too made them unpredictable and effective. A lot of movements have split over legal vs. illegal techniques but the Provos used their diversity as part of their unpredictability. For example, when the Provos spread a rumour that they would poison the city water supplies with LSD, the police fell for it and paniced because they knew that some Provos were actually willing to do such radical illegal things.

Sources on the provos:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provo_(movement)
• https://libcom.org/files/provos.pdf
• http://www.provo-images.info/WhitePlans.html

This reminds me of that one time an aids awareness and advocacy group in the late 80s ( I wanna say speak out) put a gaint condom on top of a whole govt building to get them to take safe sex and practices to prevent std more seriously and actually support em

There have been quite a few actions where activists put condoms over tall public structures but since you mentioned a building you’re probably thinking of 1991 when
Treatment Action Group, a sub-group of Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) put a giant condom over the house of Senator Jesse Helms. Senator Helms was a far-right conservative and one of the loudest voices to stigmatize HIV/Aids. Helms saw Aids as a punishment against LGBT people and
opposed HIV research, treatment and prevention.

There’s a report of the event here: https://www.poz.com/blog/in-memory-of-je