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Entering scenes as a young anarchist in the mid-2010s, the legacy of Bash Back! and its influence on queer insurrectionary & criminal activity deeply influenced my anarchism and my queerness. As such, I was excited about the re-emergence of the convergence and the chance to tap into a tendency and a network that has profoundly influenced me.

I left Bash Back! 23 feeling ecstatic, connected, inspired, and energized; I also left feeling frustrated, annoyed, & exhausted.

 

 

Some of the powerful things that happened at Bash Back:

  • Workshops on practical skills such as self-defense & the formation of fighting groups; mutual aid self/social therapy; emergency care & critical first aid; threat modeling & operation security; action planning; conflict resolution.
  • Talks and reflection on anti-fascism, fat liberation, youth liberation, indigenous abolitionist feminism, individualist anarchism, Jewish anarchism & ritual, struggles against anti-trans legislation, and queerness in Weelaunee.
  • Scheming, dreaming, & connecting around regional networks and convergences, autonomous production & supply lines for medicine, safe houses and transportation, lessons for living and fighting amid precarity.
  • A wide range of joyous extracurriculars—a punk show in a park, a warehouse rave, a naked beach party featuring some real live bashing back, some night action, a golf course orgy, a game night.

Cutting past all the posturing, ideology, beefs, and unhinged takes, this convergence will likely prove incredibly generative and influential in shaping the networks and practices of queer autonomy to come. Many of us who came have already been throwing down, forming a cutting edge in the struggles of our epoch; the defense of land & water against pipelines, mines, & cop cities; the undermining of borders from all sides & below through conspiratorial aid and attack; growing food, healing the earth, coming into right relationship with the land and indigenous sovereignty; demolishing the prisons, police, & the property they protect; and loosening the pressure of the economy with strikes, sabotage, squats, & scams. Queerness is a kinetic force that brings us into conflict with this world, propelling us and the struggles we intervene in; in turn, those struggles expand and develop our own queerness, transforming us in ways that can only be imagined when pushing at the edges of this world. We have long known that the world cannot continue as it is—and we are entering a moment where more people are coming to this position alongside us as the world tilts & fragments.

BB23 marks a new stage in the renewed organization of queer criminality, autonomous self-defense, riots & orgies; organization as a process of directly taking sides in the fight against our extermination, in the fight against this world. It is a refusal to remain bystanders in our own lives, to take into our own hands the question of our survival—our food, housing, hormones, health, and pleasure. This is the potential in the connections, skills, & knowledge shared at the convergence. As people connect, they grapple with the limits we have hit in developing ethics and practices of queer autonomy, unleashing new possibilities.

The crowd at Bash Back! was a beautiful mix—teenagers, students, radical queer activists, OG BBers, queer nihilists, feral oogles, individualist anarchists, land defenders, care workers, squatters, artists, sex workers, trans girl coders (these categories all overlap, often within the same person or crew). The power of the convergence was its ability to draw in people who may think of themselves and what they do very differently, a seductive strategy to help generalize queer criminality & self-defense, to generalize Bash Back as an open set of ethics and practices rather than a closed subculture.

All that said, we are also so fucking annoying. That in itself isn’t something we need to change. We’re queers, and we’re anarchists; of course, we’ll annoy each other, have conflict, learn who we fuck with and who we don’t, and proceed accordingly. However, post-convergence, I can sense a few tensions and dynamics that, beyond being annoying, feel like obstacles that could dissolve the potential opened up at this moment.

On Ideological Identity & Promiscuity

I have a dirty secret: I’m an ideologically promiscuous theory-slut, and I’ve been fucking around with other tendencies for a while now. Cruising around, having risky discourse with queer insurrection, nihilism, cummunization, autonomous marxisms, social ecology, democratic confederalism, Zapatismo, abolitionism, dickunnism, decoloniality, foco, landless worker movements, solidarity economy traditions, and so many more that I’ve forgotten. I love doing it—the thrill of playing with the body of practice, experimenting to find what feels good, taking what’s vital in each, and mixing them all together. Some of the ideas I fuck with don’t get along with each other, but I still love what I get from playing with each of them. The big (counter)public secret is that many of us do the same but are afraid to admit it.

Bash Back! has been described by both detractors and celebrators as nihilist, anarchist, insurrectional, militant, and feral. The pejorative description of “nihilist enemies,” from what appears to be a carelessly dismissive comment arising from very specific personal/scene beefs, was gleefully reclaimed. BB 23 was all these things, as opposed to tiqqunist, anarcho-liberal, tenderqueer, etc.

This framing oversimplifies the convergence and risks stifling its potency. There is a current running through report-backs and conversations that emphasizes militant posturing, an escalatory rhetoric around personal & niche ideological conflicts, and pushes a contrarian hyper-irreverence (whether towards organizers, other attendees, or people who didn’t attend the convergence). The prominence of this current can deceptively crowd out other things happening over the weekend. This is not about defining a group of “bad queers” or “nihilists” or whatever, but a current that moves through all of us—if through some of us more strongly than others.

While this current ultimately did not define the convergence, it poses an obstacle to the proliferation of Bash Back as a tendency. People who may deeply resonate with the underlying proposals for queer insurrection and criminality may be turned off by weird and chaotic anarchist scene politics. This current may foster hostility, suspicion, and closure toward learning from different contexts, experiences, and frameworks for those outside a particular militant subculture or moving between many. Stifling attitudes close off the room and stench the air with fetid ideology, an odor worse than any room of crust punks and more destructive than mace: interest in deeper practices of care & generative conflict are written off as tenderqueer strategies of pacification; lessons from interventions against eliminationist legislation are dismissed as liberal & reformist; teenagers discussing the complex necessity of engaging digital spaces are written off as representatives of our cybernetic enemies; experimenting with ideas from the wrong publications slots you into the other side of a “nihilist v tiqqunist” discourse.

Counter to this, the heterogeneity of Bash Back is its strength and transformative potential—letting in fresh air and perspective, allowing a circulation of ideas and tools. We can come together in a way that does not demand some false unity and erasure of our differences, but neither are we left unchanged and unchallenged. Ideas and practices transmit across social bodies, often mutating in the process, and are taken back to spread and evolve further in new contexts. A feral punk learns how to move through conflict beyond mere militant avoidance or escalation; radical queers are pulled towards a queerness that negates and overflows identity itself; anarchists are challenged to view the potentials in intervening in legislative struggles and develop strategies to do so on their own terms; those locked into struggles around laws and demands tap into criminal networks aimed at sidestepping legality and legitimacy entirely; a tender queer develops an appreciation for rowdy conflictuality and risky militancy. We simultaneously learn how to take ourselves less seriously, have fun, and remain attuned to our responsibilities to others, turning that interplay into a source of creative power.

Queerness spreads as the destabilization of ideological identities and the false binaries they reproduce. We break out of how we are shaped by our cybernetic and spectacular hellscape, where identity and belonging are defined by what you read and say, the positions you take, and how you compete and distinguish yourself in the attention economy. Instead, we take from tendencies while betraying lineage and inheritance, whether ideological or subcultural. We encounter each other at the workshop, the memorial, the beach, the riot, the rave, the orgy; as we cum together the separations between us begin to blur, and we leave touched and transformed by each other. We remember that we have always been only a few transsexuals away from each other and that we must have each others’ backs even when we can’t stand each other. For all the drama around “tiqqunism,” a process of cumposition is taking place, and it is beautiful.

This is not to ignore fundamental principled disagreements, divergent desires, and beefs. Determining friends and enemies, writing polemics, taking distance from others, walking our paths, and dispersing power are all essential for waging war. But the conclusions, strategies, decisions, and breaks we’ll need to make cannot be decided in advance based on pre-given political identities or analysis. They can only be decided in the mud and amidst the fog of war, in the living heart of each political situation and struggle. And they will need to be approached anew in every context—while not forgetting the past, not letting the particulars of one situation overdetermine the openness of the one we find ourselves present in. We must always hold this tension between promiscuity and breaking up close to heart, a weapon we have should we need to use it. The trick is to know both how and when to use the weapon—and to avoid drawing it too soon such that it escalates a situation beyond control, hurts a friend or bystanders, or leaves us as the only ones fighting an unwinnable battle.

On Critique and Demands

As anarchists, we are incredibly good at critique. We are trained in it both by our tradition and, again, by the world we live in. We are taught to experience our agency through the very fact of expressing correct ideas, the practice of critique itself as power in a world where we are separated from our collective agency. Critique is also easy—it distances us from the messiness of a situation, from having to experiment within a set of practical limits. It gives us easy tools to judge and categorize events and people.

Throughout the weekend, you could hear people’s critiques of the event—during workshops, at meals, at parties, and at the BIPOC & regional caucuses. The comments ranged in content, including food, housing, the schedule, the location, & more. You’d hear critics casually stating assumptions about the lack of care organizers had for whatever issue they were focused on. Most frustratingly, the final debrief at the convergence essentially became a struggle session against the convergence organizers. In this conversation, the organizers eventually began pushing back—naming all the care and work they did put into organizing food, mediation, childcare, housing, & accessible venues; the actual limits they ran up against in terms of resources, people, energy, spaces, money; the ways they asked for the support they did not receive.

It was incredibly disheartening to sit through that meeting and watch how we tear each other apart. We need to get better at not constantly assuming the worst of each other. We need to be real about how many of us treat event organizers like service providers and levy critiques like bad Yelp reviews, ignoring the amount of labor that goes into convergences like these. We need more curiosity and openness when approaching something we are critical of, to be willing to ask how we could improve it (and maybe how we can get involved in helping improve it) rather than lambasting or making demands of those stretched to their fracture point for not doing enough.

I hope we can make this shift because the way we critique each other will otherwise stifle future experimentation. Why would anyone want to risk organizing a regional convergence or getting involved in a project if their inability to overcome certain limitations and do everything will mean they have failed—failed anarchists, queers, BIPOC, friends, enemies, lovers? I hope we can extend to each other the generosity that we would desire in such circumstances. Instead of critique as a ripping apart of each other, critique as an exploration of how we might improve our experiments and learn for the future, emphasizing the development of new practices we will take up, not merely the obsession with being right.

We might also notice how critiques reflect and shore up particular political identities, providing a false sense of agency while reaffirming our powerlessness. This felt particularly true and disappointing in the BIPOC caucus, where most of our time was spent in a group venting session about white people generally, mainly white anarchists. This is common for caucuses and perhaps therapeutic for some, but I’m over it. I left that caucus without any real sense of deeper connection to other people and how to push a queer horizon of struggle against colonial civilization—my ultimate reason for attending the caucus. I did find some of those things with people outside the caucus itself.

The shared unhappy community of critique is a path to disappointment. Shared critique ultimately tells us little about what we want to do, how we want to do it, and how we will respond to specific strategic questions, tensions, and limitations. It can even hide the heterogeneity and dissents that lurk within each political identity—whether gender, sexual, racial, or ideological—that may later become fault lines and sources of further disappointment. I hope future encounters, especially for something like a BIPOC caucus, can emphasize our shared power and practice. Not critique as a reinforcement of our victimization or distance from a situation, but tapping into our agency to develop ways to fight together and connect across struggles, ways to materially address the problems we are facing, to make white people irrelevant to what we are doing.

My favorite leggings glow orange in ultraviolet rays; Autonomy shines anew bathed in the light of queer ultraviolence.

Queers are getting organized, taking sides in the fight against our extermination and the world that demands it. To get organized means to take our fighting, feral livelihoods as the object of our power. We will not become bystanders in our own lives, as all the things we rely on are either managed or destroyed by our two-faced enemy. The question of our survival, access to medicine, food, housing, and pleasure is ours to answer—it should never have been out of our hands to begin with.

Queer fight clubs pop up around the country, offering low-barrier entry points to reclaim the power of our bodies in the face of fear. We practice, training our bodies to respond to the situations we will face; the playful ecstasy of a game secretly deepens our knowledge of our bodies and their capacities. Suddenly, we can hold a line against fascists & cops, de-arrest each other, and maximize our payback against those who would attack us.

On other fronts, we are developing the networks and techniques to tend to our lives—defense on the social, emotional, spiritual, & ecological registers. Growing ranks of healers help tend to our wounds as medics, herbalists, body-workers, and more. Self-generated collective care network groups experiment with and riff on techniques like Mutual Aid Self/Social Therapy to build self-generating & sustaining care networks outside the clinic. Complementary rituals of grief, memory, & death work to help shape the ways we make new meaning. Rather than cast out madness for some false image of health, we are cultivating a strategic madness that enables us to live and fight, that sharpens the maddening distress of this world into a weapon forged in the fires of feral queer desire.

A growing network of queers nationwide shares practical tips on scams for surviving precarity, lessons learned from struggles and conflicts, and skills for both. Our scams and criminal acts take form and expand. Hot tranny sex takes over public spaces and brings down property values, autonomous supply lines move medicine and people across the country, and renewed queer gangs defend a proliferation of squats and occupations. More condos, offices, bulldozers, pipelines are mysteriously put out of commission. Construction materials mysteriously disappear from job sites; a workday in the country puts up a gathering hall made entirely from reclaimed building materials.

We have only just begun, again.

–a young girl-dickunnist & nihilist friend