“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
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