By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Sometimes I can’t help but feeling like the Ebenezer Scrooge of Pride Month, pissing on everybody’s parade from my high horse of moral superiority. It’s not that I’m not proud of my people. Quite the contrary. We survived a fucking plague while the government hoarded our meds and we launched a cultural revolution that shattered the antiquated gender binary once and for all. As a Queer Anarchist, my people are quite literally everything to me. But as an anti-assimilationist, I can’t just sit by and watch as every aspect of my culture gets appropriated into some massive corporate machine just so we can enjoy the shallow victory of a handful of petty privileges peddled as rights- The right to be married in their courthouses. The right to indulge in their prison industrial complex with hate crimes legislation. The right to get blown to bits in their fucking army. No thank you.

But this does pose the interesting question of what do I actually want for my people and it’s not an easy question to answer. In short, I want a lot. A lot more than any state system could ever possibly provide. On the 52nd anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, I want nothing less than a Queer revolution in the following ways.

I want Queer to be recognized as a race in the tribal sense of the word. A stateless nation of many colors defined by our shared resistance to White Anglo Saxon Protestant Puritanicalism. An anti-colonialist tribe, inspired by other movements of multiethnic resistance like the Black Power Movement, the Chicano Movement, and the American Indian Movement. I want my people to recognize that the Queer Movement only exists because we were purged from our former tribes and banished to the shadows by the same Conquistadors and priests who raped and pillaged the darker continents in the name of Manifest Destiny. Therefor the struggle of all colonized people must become our struggle as well.

With that being said, I also want this Queer Nation to become a tribe of many ethnicities. For far too long Queer has been synonymous with White and Queer people of color have been made to feel like they must choose between their ethnicity and their Queerness. Well I am a Celtic Queer person and my tribe is made of dual citizens. We must embrace Black Queer culture and Latinx Queer culture as part of our tradition just as we must embrace the European heathen cultures stripped from Queer people by Christianity, Whiteness, and globalization. Let our clan be the link in the chain that unites many sovereign peoples.

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