E112: [FREE EPISODE] Radical Reads - Be Gay Do Crime - Working Class History

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
As we come marchin marchin in the Beauty of the Day,
A million darkened kitchens, one thousand mil last graye are
breden by the beauty is Sun, Sun discloses, and the
people Heresy and Bredden, Roses, Bredden and Roses.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode in our Radical
Read series, where we talk about historical and political texts
that we think are important for workers and organizers to read, discuss,
and inform our activity. Just a reminder that our podcast
is brought to you our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund
our work and in return get exclusive early access to

(00:49):
podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise,
and other content. Supporters also get access to two exclusive
podcast series, Radical Reads, as well as fireside chats. Join
us and find out more at patreon dot com slash
Working Class History. Usually this series is actually available exclusively

(01:10):
for our supporters on Patreon, but in this case we're
releasing this entire episode for free for everyone. Today's book
is Bgay Do Crime, Everyday Acts of Queer Resistance and Rebellion,
edited by Zaine McNeil, Riley, Clare Valentine and Blue Buchanan.
It's the second book in our Everyday Acts series published
by US Working Class History alongside our friends at pmpress.

(01:33):
The books full of hundreds of stories of LGBTQ people's
history for every day of the year, and so giving
the widespread assault against queer and trans riotes going on
around the world, we wanted to get together with Zain,
Riley and Blue to discuss the book learn more about
queer history and its relevance to our current moment. The
book is out now available with global shipping in our

(01:54):
online store, so do make sure you get hold of
a copy today at shop dot work Classhistory dot com
link in the show notes you can also get ten
percent off using the discount code wh Podcast. Before we
get into the discussion, I just wanted to take a
moment to explain some of the terms and concepts that
come up in the episode. So, for instance, pink washing

(02:17):
refers to the use of gay and trans rites as
a smokescreen for various nefarious practices, for example, the current
genocide in Gaza. Compat is short for compulsory heterosexuality and
refers to heterosexuality being generally assumed as the default and
contemporary patriarchal societies. P COSE or PCOS stands for polycystic

(02:39):
ovary syndrome, a common hormonal disorder in people with ovaries,
which has symptoms including things like the growth of facial hair.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
Roe v.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Wade was the US Supreme Court legal case which resulted
in the establishment of a constitutional right to abortion, which
has since been reversed with the Dobbs decision of twenty
twenty two. Anyway, with that out the way, I hope
you enjoy the episode.

Speaker 4 (03:02):
It's really cool to meet you all. Thanks for doing
this and for like doing the book. You know, I
really love it. Excited to have it soon to be
going out into the world. Would you be able to
kind of go around and introduce yourselves in a bit
about your personal activist work backgrounds. How have you want
to do it?

Speaker 5 (03:20):
My name is Nay McNeil. You see him and they've
done pronouns. I have really specialized in Queer Appalacha. I'm
from West Virginia and also have done different advocacy work
around anti carcial work and being an advocacy and animal rights.
I've just graduated law school and I am super excited.

(03:43):
I'm currently working on a book around ANERCR coomitism right
now as well.

Speaker 6 (03:48):
Hi, y'all, my name is Blue Buchanan. I'm an assistant
professor at unc Asheville. So speaking of Appalachia, I'm over
here in the web eastern part of North Carolina in
the Blue Ridge Mountains, originally from the Midwest. I sort

(04:08):
of came to this project through two main ways. One
because of my research sort of what I look at,
the kinds of historical work that sort of rejuvenate me.
And the other part is really through direct action stuff.
I've been taking part in labor trans black organizing, primarily

(04:30):
in the Midwest and West Coast since about twenty twelve,
so I'm sort of coming at this from both a
scholarly and organizing perspective.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
So I guess that leaves me Riley Valentine, Hey Thom,
I'm from the Deep South. I'm from Georgia and my
family's all from Louisiana, and I grew up in a
household that was very dedicated to Catholic social teaching. So
I remember, you know, talking with my parents about anti

(05:03):
war activism and how it fit into theology. We did
a lot of work around poverty, immigration, and my mama
did a lot of work in pushing for abortion rates,
and she was born in the nineteen fifties, so this
was like in the sixties and seventies in Louisiana, and
I guess I became really involved in direct action more

(05:24):
so during occupy when during Occupy Atlanta, I was on
a group of organizers who helped start like I revived
the Atlanta medic Collective, which was really which was really exciting.
And as life has gone, it's also kind of dovetailed
with my academic interests, which are largely focused in care
ethics and how we can rethink and reorient society from

(05:46):
a more neoliberal focus to something that's more based upon
like we toy careful one of them.

Speaker 4 (05:52):
All Right, well, thanks for the introductions all. Really nice
to meet you, because up until now it's just been
the odd email going back and forth. And yeah, it's
very different to meet people in person. But could you
maybe tell us, like how did you come to collaborate
on be Gay Do Crime?

Speaker 3 (06:13):
So there's a network actually of like trans academics at
all like help each other and collaborate and I know,
like through like my PhD journey, like it was invaluable
having other trans academics to talk with, and that's how
I got to know both Zain and Blue.

Speaker 6 (06:35):
Yeah, just to dovetail off of that, it's because I
know Zaan. Zain was the one who reached out, was like, hey,
there's this opportunity. And in part it's because Zain and
I had already worked around topics around activist history. So

(06:55):
we had worked together on stuff for the Activist History
Review and so Yeah, Zain had reached out was like,
you know about some additional communities this project, Really we
want to be as intersectional as possible, and so they
asked if I could participate and really bring some of

(07:17):
the again stuff around black history, some of the postcolonial
stuff that I had learned about in grad school into
the project. So really Zain was out here organizing the people.

Speaker 5 (07:33):
Yeah, and I had worked with pm Press previously on
a collection around Queer Appalacha Callediolomys All the Emerging Voices
Queering Appalachia. And I'd worked with Steven from Pmpress and
he had reached out to me right before I started
law school actually like three years ago now, and I
was like, hey, we want to work on this project.
We want to do a kind of collection where we're

(07:55):
able to put all of these really rich and diverse
moments and queer history together. And even though the project
itself has been through multiple iterations and really shifted, that
kind of rooted in movement is something that I wanted
to bring to this And because I knew Blues work,
like Blue said, and A knew Riley's work later on,

(08:18):
it is really, like I've said before, like a monolithic project,
I think, broader and richer and more than any of
one of us could have done. And so all of
us as well as other queer entrance people in the community,
helped us to try to make this collection as authentic
reflection of where we come from as possible.

Speaker 4 (08:43):
Yeah, because I wasn't really sure how it came about,
because I think that Stephen at PM Press and we
I'm not even sure who mentioned it first to the other,
but we both kind of had the same idea that
following our kind of first book, Working Class History, every
day Act of Resistance and Rebellion wanting because that was

(09:06):
a broad book about a little bit of everything, and
we couldn't do justice to any of these kind of
particular different types of intersecting struggles in kind of single volumes,
and I guess they had the same thought that it
would be great to produce more volumes, you know, even
with any other topics like quite history or black history
or anything like that. On their own, one book can't

(09:28):
do anything but provide the tiniest snapshots. But I think
the book does a great job of providing these snapshots,
and then people can look in the references and learn
more sort of from there. And so in terms of
the book, how is it kind of put together and
how do you hope that readers are going to use

(09:48):
it and relate to it.

Speaker 6 (09:50):
Well, The way that we structured the book was chronologically, right.
We start off with our readers on January first and
only basically work our way through the calendar year. And
we thought about this with a lot of intention, because
the goal was to make the book a part of
people's everyday lives, right, a sort of everyday meditation and

(10:14):
everyday activity where folks could gather with friends, family to
think about how sort of radical queer history impacts them
and what lessons they can take into the present moment.
I know that one of the things I imagine we'll
talk about is our current political environment. The idea was

(10:39):
structuring this in a way that made it easy to
feed folks, feed their spirits and get them to really
engage in taking what they learned about history and making
it their own.

Speaker 5 (10:53):
I think for me, something that was really important for
me is especially when I started, both of my siblings
were in like middle school and elementary school, and both
of them were also queer, just a different kind of
flavor of queer than I was. And I always want
to be the person in their life that I wish
I had that was able to give them the space

(11:18):
to grow into who they were, to experiment, and to
feel safe in doing so. And I think this is
the book that I wish I had had in middle
school and high school, and I throughout college too, and
now to be able to know that not only am
I not alone, but I come from a long lineage,

(11:40):
a global lineage of resistance and community and joy that
made me feel safe, and I want to make sure
that they also have that experience.

Speaker 3 (11:52):
So I'm actually I'm a high school teacher and I
get a lot of kids come into my classroom to
talk about a lot of thoughts and feelings, and I
teach history. And so for me, like I have you know,
kind of alternative like alternative history books in my classroom

(12:13):
so that students who are curious can pick them up.
And a lot of students have asked about having you know,
LGBTQ pluss history, where's queer history? And in my curriculum.
We tried to make it as intersectional as possible, but
there's not a lot necessarily there that's written in a
way that's really accessible, especially for young people. So this

(12:37):
book is something that I'm excited about because I could
see my students being really excited to read it. And
I think that's really meaningful because a lot of our
history books are written for you know, academic audiences and
are in textbooks, so there's not as much as accessible
for younger people.

Speaker 4 (12:57):
Yeah, and I you know, I think that is how
a lot of people are going to use it. I
know we've heard from our first book quite a few
people that used it, and I'm sure we'll do the
same with this one. Are people like parents of young
kids to kind of go over at the breakfast table
or the dinner table, and teachers and things like that.

(13:18):
And I think dates and anniversaries are funny because they're
so arbitrary and they don't kind of mean that much.
But like a lot of people, when you relate to
things that happened in the past, it seems kind of
very distant, and perhaps a link with the present isn't
always that obvious, but just something being the same date
as today, if something happened on it's the eleventh of July. Today,

(13:42):
just something that happened on the eleventh of July, it
does kind of pull it into them and it's like, oh, today,
isn't you know something just like that could be today
or whatever. But if it's an everyday book going by
the year, I mean just having a look at the
very first day, I mean, and from the title of
the book as well, Be Gay Do Crime, you can

(14:02):
immediately see that state repression is a feature here because well,
I mean, the title is it's fun and its provocative,
but I guess also it's not even so much about
being going queer just has been a crime and indeed
is criminal in so many ways. And from the first

(14:24):
of January it's very clear, with multiple stories about police
and state repression of queer people. And you've got examples
in the book going back literally hundreds of years. Could
you maybe say a bit about how LGBTQ plus people
have been criminalized sort of historically, and how does this
criminalization also relate to other concepts like class and race

(14:51):
and disability and things like that.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
Well, particularly when it comes to disability, because I do
a lot of work in disability. I have epilepsy, chronic pain,
and various things, so a lot of my work is
in disability studies. And the crossover between the control of
bodies that we see with disability also is there with queerness.

(15:16):
And typically you see people who their bodies are being
surveiled are always have other intersectional identities. It's very rarely
people who are wealthy, who are white, who are fully
able bodied, who are the ones who are being examined
and are being persecuted. And oftentimes these histories dovetail with
histories of colonialism, with the theories of racism, and with

(15:38):
the stories of disability enableism. So all of these things
coal is together so that it's impossible to examine queer history,
kind of as you said, with working class history without
looking at other histories and other systems of oppression and structures.

Speaker 5 (15:54):
Riley and I are working on a book right now,
that's really on this idea of how laws will change.
But the idea is to control bodies and control relationships
and sexualities, whether that looks like surveillance in different ways
or the actual incarceration of certain kinds of bodies, and
how these laws might change. But whether it's you know,

(16:16):
the gender affirming care bands that we see right now
or the different kinds of dress laws from fifty sixty
seventy years ago, the idea is over surveilling populations, controlling
the way people gather and love and fuck, you know,
in different spaces, and then really making it so that

(16:39):
they're able to coercively either incarcerate or control or create
this idea of what family values are for the state.
And I think we see that a lot through this
collection of moments right that these are people whose identities
are being criminalized, like you said, whose way of engaging

(17:02):
in community, of just having a body of performing gender
is criminalized. And so what does that mean when existing
is a criminal behavior but also a way to create
spaces of joy and community and resistance and liberation. And
I think something really difficult, it's mean we really wanted

(17:24):
to do in this book is show not only the
harm that happens from these systems, but also how people
chose to exist, how they wanted to exist and able
to thrive and love despite that.

Speaker 6 (17:41):
Yeah, so often queer in trans life is only recorded
or only talked about in those moments of like death
and violence. Right, people are only remembered when they are
sort of recipients of harm. Part of what we wanted
to do with this book was to both note that

(18:03):
harm and that people are living through alongside what's happening.
June Jordan has a great collection of essays called Some
of Us Did Not Die, and it's sort of in
a similar vein in which we're trying to emphasize that, yes,
we aren't unmarked by these histories of violence, but we're

(18:28):
also not contained by and only limited to those experiences.
I think to answer sort of the broader question about
queer and trans people being criminalized historically, it's important to
recognize that queer and trans folks really experience a new

(18:49):
moment within society with the emergence of the nation state. Right.
There's lots of different formations of statehood before then, but
the idea of the nation state is relatively new, and
it really put queer and trans people in a new
position to be criminalized, right, or in a new position

(19:12):
to be visible, right, because the nation state has always
been interested in creating populations of people, people who are
biologically a particular way, who need to be controlled and
managed or excised, right. And so when we think about

(19:32):
it that way, we get into the fact that homosexuality
is really coined in the mid eighteen hundreds, and so
this concern about populations becomes really important. And this connects
deeply to class, race and disability, right, because the nation
state is increasingly interested in trying to figure out how
to homogenize its populations to better control them, and in

(19:57):
order to do that, it has to identify people. And
so the fact that queer and trans people have been
part of this identification process and also resisted that identification
is important. So yeah, class race disabilities, certainly, I think

(20:18):
we also need to connect the fact that queer and
trans people, when we're thinking about who's vulnerable are sort
of multiply compounded along the lines of class, race, and disability.
And I also just want to point out, in addition
to sort of thinking about disability from some of these
other lenses, really talking about how disability can be created

(20:44):
by structures of violence, right, that sort of social model
of disability. Thinking about the fact that, for instance, if
you have an anxiety disorder, as I do as a
black person in the United States, that makes sense. There
is a lot of reasons to be anxious, right, And

(21:05):
so realizing that not only is it that our struggles
are interconnected, but that the forms of control and violence
that produce quote unquote different populations are also interconnected.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
Right.

Speaker 6 (21:24):
The things that create disability also create these other categories.
The last thing, just as an example that I wanted
to share, right in Germany, you had the creation of
sort of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and this led folks like
Magnus Hirschfeld to say, look, we need to decriminalize both

(21:46):
sexuality and gender identity. The danger that came along with
this was in participating in that nation state project of
creating populations, because folks like the Nazis turned around and said, well,
if we can't re educate them out of this, and
if they're just a part of the biological population, then

(22:09):
we need to get rid of them from that population.

Speaker 5 (22:14):
Right.

Speaker 6 (22:15):
So, again, just speaking to our current moment to where
we're at It is also important to recognize that we
have strategies to address the violence that comes with visibility.

Speaker 4 (22:29):
For listeners wanting to know more. There's more about the
specifics about Hirschfeld and the Institute of Sex Research and
what happened with the Nazism in the book. So it's
also very timely given them many aspects of the current situation.
And yeah, I mean just an anecdote about the aspects
of criminalization and class referring to some of the things

(22:51):
you mentioned about kind of stories about bad things happening.
Is also a bit of a problem with historical records
because often when you're looking back, especially looking for specific dates,
you know, like this project, there are dates for when
people were executed or for when people are arrested and

(23:12):
things like that. Whereas you know, so many, especially because
of the criminalization of queer life for so long, many
these moments of joy they weren't written down, they weren't
recorded because they were you know, illegal. But you know,
it's a testament to the work you've done that you
know that the sense of community and joy really comes through.

(23:33):
In the book. You highlight a lot of kind of
I guess you could call it like political acts of
resistance or you know, quite deliberately political, like specific demonstrations
or things like that. But could you maybe say a
bit how some of the less obviously political acts of resistance,
like forming communities and survival strategies, how that's played a

(23:54):
role in queer resistance through time.

Speaker 6 (23:57):
Yeah. So there's actually a really great quote by a
black trans artist called Juliana Huxtable who had been asked
by an interviewer, what's the nastiest shade that you've ever thrown?
And she responds by saying existing in this world?

Speaker 5 (24:17):
Right?

Speaker 6 (24:18):
And So I say that in part because I also
want to give a shout out and recognition to folks
who didn't survive.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
Right.

Speaker 6 (24:29):
Some of the framework that even the book sort of
wrestles with is talking about surviving as an act of resistance.
But in some ways that can also sort of negatively shade, right,
those folks who haven't managed to survive the various forms
of violence that they've experienced. So I just also want

(24:50):
to give a shout out that it is about the
living that is the act of resistance rather than the survival.
And I think that's part of what Huxtable is pointing
out is that it is the act of existing, It
is the act of relationship that is the political act itself.

(25:12):
And I think that that drives a lot with my
own perspectives as a black trans organizer. And I think,
as you had pointed out, it's difficult to put that
in a book with dates because it's something that is
every day but community formation and survival. I mean, I
think that's as deeply political as you can get. Right.

(25:35):
The moments that we try to highlight are just that
there are moments that highlight a lot of work that
has happened way before that moment. And I think that
this is especially highlighted when we see folks like Miss Major,
who's a black transfigure who talks a lot about the

(25:57):
care work that is required in spaces, pushing back against
the disposability that is often imposed on queer and trans
folks to say that you don't have to like everyone.
The point of doing the political work is not that
we are best use. It is to recognize that when

(26:19):
we change our conditions for the better, when we make
sure that we all have our basic needs met, it
becomes possible to do something new or to do something otherwise.
And I think that a lot of the insights of
these black trans organizers come not just from the experiences
of violence, but from leaning on one another. So yeah,

(26:43):
I would say that survival is what makes those more
overt acts of political resistance possible.

Speaker 4 (26:51):
That's a really great answer. Something that we sayh have
focused on in terms of our research is the role
played by the Empire in propagating homophobic values and laws
around the world. In most countries today where homosexuality is illegal,
were part of the British Empire, and in most of

(27:12):
those places it's British colonial era laws still on the books.
You've mentioned already about the creation of the nation state
and the need to create and manage populations. So in
terms of that project, you know, what do you think
is about queerness that you think authorities government states finds

(27:32):
so threatening in terms of creating these manageable populations.

Speaker 3 (27:37):
I would say, don't forget the Labor Party has just
signed on to throwing trains people under the bus, much
like the Democrats in the United States. Words of a
flother do flock together. Martha Nusbahan has this amazing tact.
She writes about how discussed, particularly when it comes to
queer people revolves around the idea that we exist in aminality.

(28:03):
And so when you take that within the nation state
and in more of a political science perspective, just like
Blue is saying, if your body can change genders or
exist between genders, if your family doesn't necessarily have to
follow the way a heteronormative family looks like it's necessarily
have to involve children, thinking of Lee Edelman here, like

(28:24):
the death drive right, So queer people in a lot
of ways challenge the ability of the nation state to
exist and to function, and so our existence is in
a lot of ways, like the quote you know that
Blue gave right, existence is a huge way of just

(28:46):
addressing and refuting the ability of the nation state to
control bodies, to control identities, and queerness is I like
to think of it as like a positive force of destruction.

Speaker 4 (29:02):
And I suppose this is something which affects the you know,
states which call themselves socialist or communists as much as
kind of capitalist ones, because once they find themselves in
the position of actually managing an economy, especially if we
look a bit further in the past through the twentieth century,
the kind of economic cornerstone of capitalist society including in

(29:24):
countries that didn't call themselves capitalist with the nuclear family
and the reliance on unpaid labor of women workers in
the home and in terms of childcare, and so I
suppose so even that's obviously the case in places like
the UK and US, but even in places like the

(29:45):
Soviet Union, where whereas like Carl Marx wrote about the
need to abolish the family, the government that called itself
Marxist was like, no, the family is the center of everything,
and you've got to get rid of abortion and ban
homosexuality and you know, create this little new clear family
where the woman does the work of reproducing the labor
power of the male worker and also the future generations

(30:07):
in the home. I suppose that's why in recent years
there's been an attempt to I guess you could call
it co opt LGBTQ people into the status quo, allowing
gay marriage and even encouraging it, and you know, spreading
that idea of the core nuclear family.

Speaker 5 (30:25):
I wanted to just say that one of the most
surprising parts of this project was how queer labor history
is for me, especially when we think of FDR in
the US. Right, Really, the success of the labor in
his government was because of Eleanor's lesbian community who she

(30:47):
brought into be part of the Department of Labor. And
so a lot of the success of what we think
of the Golden Age of labor comes from queer lesbian
feminists and so that I think has really changed the
way I think through labor organizing, both in the community
micro labor work as well as in federal organizing in

(31:12):
the US, because a lot of that came from her friends,
which is something that I didn't know before I started
this project.

Speaker 6 (31:21):
Yeah, I just wanted to add alongside that a few things.
One is just to give a shout out. A book
recommendation in addition to ours, is called Transgender Marxism and
Transgender Marxism Fabulous right also talks about how trans folks

(31:41):
are situated within exactly that kind of like material reproduction process,
and I definitely think that part of what queerness does
is it challenges the basic bio essentialism that rests at
the heart of the Name State project as well. So

(32:01):
just wanting to sort of draw that out. I sort
of also want to point out for folks who may
not be as familiar with some of the controversies within
the community, the difference between talking about queer community as
like Riley was pointing out, and like LGBT as like

(32:22):
a sexual or gender community, and really trying to differentiate
between the two of those, particularly because I look at
right wing gay men, I see folks who identify themselves
as part of a minority sexual community, but that sees

(32:42):
the state and its violences as something that they have
to participate in in order to get recognition or protection.
And I think that whether we're talking about those right
wing identity groups or whatever state government authorities system those
systems are inimical to queerness because at their root, part

(33:07):
of what queerness does is say you don't need to
take the terms of that sort of Faustian deal right,
you don't have to participate in nationalism, patriarchy, domination in
order to live fulfilled and again relational lives. So, just

(33:28):
as Riley was pointing out that you can have a
family and it doesn't have to look exactly the way
that the nation state wants that family to look, I
think that what causes concern for the nation state is
that queerness disrupts important structures of socialization, the kind of

(33:48):
socialization that makes violence natural or normal or just a
biological requirement. We have so much social Darwinism into the
nation state as well, and queerness says we don't have
to fuck with all of that in order to be human,

(34:10):
right in all of the complex and messy ways that
being human manifests.

Speaker 4 (34:16):
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. Going back
to the book and the very first page of it,
we've spoken about the themes of state repression, but another
thing which is immediate on the first page is the
connection between queer liberation and other types of liberation, specifically

(34:36):
black liberation. I wonder if this is something that you
were kind of deliberately trying to communicate or is this
something that just emerged naturally through the history and what happened.

Speaker 5 (34:50):
I think it's both. I think that there obviously is
a really rich history of black queer and trends organized
at the same time really sort of historically tense between
black organizers who are queer in like a Black Panther
Party and other things in this rights movement who also

(35:12):
ended up being sort of marginalized in that space, and
so very like messy but really rich history there. And
so I think partially it's because we wanted so much
of the Archive. You know, we've been talking about the Archive.
I always have a huge issue with the Archive because
so much of our history is race, and those stories

(35:32):
that are told are either these really heinous stories written
by the state or really reflect the wealthiest, whitest property
owning histories, right, And I think that's what Worker History
in People's history really tries to challenge about what this
idea of history really even is and who is profiting

(35:55):
off of the way our histories are told as truth.
And so we really wanted to challenge a lot of
the Archive that really reflects that those kind of marginalizations
and erasures while uplifting other parts of queer history. At
the same time, we're limited. So even though we tried

(36:17):
really hard to bring in these stories as some way,
it was still difficult because of the limited archive we
are working with to really do as much justice as
I think we wanted to.

Speaker 6 (36:29):
Yeah, just to go back to something that you had
pointed out earlier, sort of about Britain's involvement in sort
of global homophobia and transphobia for that matter, I think
just going along with what Zain said, there there were
two sort of separate aspects. One was a subject position question, right,

(36:53):
So part of this volume emerged from our own subject positions.
We sit at a number of different intersections, and so
we were bringing our own knowledge of our own communities,
histories and events that we wanted to see, right And
certainly again as a black trans person, that was important

(37:14):
for me to share out. And I do think that
that lends the book a through line that is focused
around sort of black liberation efforts, because that is an
important intersection for myself. So part of that is there.
I think that we also can see that the construction

(37:35):
of what it means to be all of these categories
is about who is entitled and who isn't right, who's
entitled to the freedom of private property, who's entitled to
the freedom to express themselves in particular ways? And while
that has caused some problems, it also means that, for instance,

(38:00):
black people, as c Riley Snorton says, right, that maybe
being black is a trans experience, right, and vice versa.
So I think that part of what also emerges from
this in some ways is a breakdown of those categories,
right to say that, actually, if you want to know

(38:20):
about black history, you're gonna have to know about queer
and trans history, right and vice versa. So I think
that part of it is that because we are trying
to read against the grain with these archives, that means
that we're going to come up with stories that are

(38:41):
centering folks who are multiply marginalized, I will say, and
Zaan pointed it out as well, though, that we ran
into a lot of limitations. So we were familiar with
certain archives, right. I have been to archives in Germany,
the UK, Canada, and the US, but like that is

(39:04):
by no means the breadth of the archives around queer
and trance history that exist around the world. And despite
purchasing as many books on queer history from as many
people as possible, I mean, there's also language barriers right.

Speaker 5 (39:22):
There.

Speaker 6 (39:22):
I was struggling to learn German so that I could
read some of the primary materials, right, So there absolutely
are difficulties when trying to engage with I mean counter
history right in many ways. One of the ways that

(39:46):
I think Riley, Zaane and I sort of dealt with
that ambiguity or that tension was to say, this is
an invitation, right, like this is a starting place. It's
a it is a starting place, show knowing how we
took our intersections and turn that into a series of stories.
But it isn't an end.

Speaker 3 (40:08):
Yeah. I think Blue's comment, especially about language is really
important can't be understated as well, because also like whose
stories get written down, like the practice of a story innography.
You know, there's languages that die out every single year,
and a lot of them are indigenous languages, and so
then we end up lacking those histories. So, like Blue said,

(40:31):
this is an invitation and hopefully we're going to see
more intersectional queer history.

Speaker 4 (40:38):
Yeah, definitely, And you know that is an appeal to
listeners and readers of the book as well, to make
more history and write it down somewhere in the book.
It doesn't look like a coincidence that quite a lot
of the stories are from the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies.

(40:59):
We did podcast recently about a wave of workers' strikes
in the US during the Vietnam War, and kind of
that wave of worker militancy basically in the US emerged
as a direct result of the civil rights movement and
struggles against colonialism, for example in Vietnam. You know that

(41:22):
kind of fed into this just general atmosphere of workers rebellion.
Would you think that the same is also true for
the queer liberation movement around the same era.

Speaker 3 (41:34):
I would say absolutely. And within this moment, you know,
you have mainstream organizations like the Gay Liberation Front, but
you also have breakoff organizations like the co He River
Collected right, made up of black queer women who were Marxists,
who are like, we don't feel represented in the mainstream
Black civil rights movement. We also not feel connected to

(41:57):
the women's rights movement. So you see queer people well
really taking advantage of this massive energy happening and creating
these movements that have long lasting legacies.

Speaker 5 (42:10):
And I had brought this up a little bit before,
but like you mentioned, a lot of these movements were
training grounds right where queer folks also face marginalization. Right
the Black civil rights movement, a lot of queer black
activists face similar marginalization from their comrades in that space
and then moved into other spaces. The same thing with

(42:30):
vin m war activists. A lot of the people learn
the tools and tactics from these movements and then use
those later because they felt alienated. A lot of the
same thing and the communist movement there are a lot
of queer activists and the communist movement who then faced
a lot of homophobia and were sort of forced out,
but use those tactics to fight for other movements, fight

(42:53):
for themselves, and so like for me personally, I come
from a sort of orientation and consistent anti oppression where
if you're fighting for queer liberation, you also have to
fight for every other kind of liberation because the state, right,
like Blue had mentioned, uses the same tactics and tools
to control all of us, And so you can't really

(43:14):
fight for one liberation without the liberation of another or
group of people, or the environment or animals. And I
think that because of we usually sit at a multiplicity
of marginalizations right that are sometimes forced onto us. Right
you were talking about class. Some people won't understand why
queer and trans people have a lot of issues with housing,

(43:37):
right with access to food, why so many of us
are living in poverty, right that are pressured or move
into sex work that therefore leads to criminalization and realvize right.
But a lot of that is a state putting onto
us these not having access to other kinds of different

(43:58):
kinds of work or capital, our property right so and then,
like we mentioned disabling, and so a lot of us
sit in a space where we're finding for a lot
of different groups, and we have a lot of identities
that we want to fight for. And so after being
trained in these movement work and then being alienated disillusioned,
a lot of those tools, I think we're used for

(44:18):
the queer liberation movement.

Speaker 6 (44:21):
Yeah, just to build off of that and maybe be
a sociology nerd for like just a second. But like
in social movements research, they talk about isomorphism, which is
basically that coming up with strategies that work for a
social movement, right, that like effectively manage to maybe persuade

(44:41):
your audience or win concessions. That takes work, right, And
oftentimes it's easier to look to see what has worked
for other people and adapt that to your own particular
issue or concern, right. And so there is a lot
of social movement isomorphism, a lot of transfer between different

(45:06):
social movements because when you find tactics that work, you
make use of them. I also just wanted to pick
up on something that Zaane talked about, which is like
we are all often connected to multiple movements, right, but
we can't do everything. So like, maybe I'm out here
being like I'm going to focus on trans housing. That's

(45:27):
gonna be my thing, and sure, absolutely these other problems
equally important. But I can't do everything or be everywhere.
But I do know the trans girl down the way
who is working on a different issue we talk, right,
And that's also where maybe a strategy or tactic that

(45:49):
we learned about in our organizing space can be adapted
by somebody who is working on the same issue, but
just from a different sort of entry way. So again,
almost like a dandelion model, right, we don't have to

(46:10):
be everywhere and do everything, but when we strengthen our
relationships with others across those lines, we transfer forms of
knowledge and organizing in faster and more flexible ways.

Speaker 4 (46:28):
So while a majority of the stories that you feature
in the book are about the Western world, they are
a good number from the global South and from countries
which have been formally colonized. What sort of like similarities
and differences did you notice in terms of the repression
and the resistance of queer people in those different places.

Speaker 5 (46:51):
I feel like, again that's something we're really conscious of
within our limitations, is there is this sort of majority
narrative discourse where oh, the quote unquote global West is
so great with queer people. Of course they'd be a
little less so now, but that was like the main narrative, right,
and then like, oh, the global South, this is a

(47:12):
horriblace for queer people. And again we've talked a little
bit about what empire means with that, right. But at
the same time, we really were conscious of this idea that,
even though it's sort of sorts snippets into different kinds
of history, that we might accidentally reify this discourse if

(47:35):
we just sort of reflected you know, Canada and the
US and the UK. And even though I think we
did that a little bit, because like Riley and Blue
set our limitations and our archive and then language, were
really really wanted to focus on broadening what queer history
looks like, and in the moments I think we brought in,

(47:55):
I would say a lot of it that I've noticed
were similarly trying to get some kind of legal recognition,
whether that looks like being safe, or being able to
change your name or access gender firming care, or if
there is some kind of harm, having the state try

(48:16):
to rectify that harm instead of criminalize you. And so
I think a lot of the same struggles are ones
we see that were previously done in the US and
being able to just have you know, like your your
gender marker or your name or be safe. Right, It's
like what people need ends up being very similar, and

(48:37):
the tactics I think are similar, right, whether that looks
like trying to go to the parliament or lobby different officials,
or march right or create community spaces. Like a lot
of the same tactics that we saw in the US
are things that we also saw in other countries.

Speaker 6 (48:58):
Yeah, just to add to that, well, maybe it bears
mentioning that like the US and Canada are also part
of the colonized world, right. I know that certainly. It
is difficult when we're talking about like the global South
versus the global North, and that there are for example, say,

(49:21):
there's a lot of discourse happening among black Americans right
now about are we American? But when we're talking about
sort of colonized folks, particularly indigenous and black folks in
say the United States, we are also colonized, right. And
I say that because I do think that again, at

(49:42):
least something that I've tried to bring forward in consistently
in our discussions is the impact of the black radical
tradition on thinking through some of these questions, not just
taking colonization seriously as something that happens out there, but
something that is sort of part and parcel of that
nation state building process, part of empire. As Zay had

(50:08):
mentioned before, and I would say that when we're looking
at the differences and similarities across these contexts in terms
of proximity to the benefits of colonization or proximity to
repression and violence caused by colonization, what I noticed in

(50:32):
terms of responses is less that it's a whole different toolkit,
but in many ways that the tools are being adapted
for the particular set of harms. Right, we can see
harm reduction strategies. Folks who are like, yeah, we know that, say,

(50:53):
looking for this legal representation is buying into all that
British colonial nonsense. But we also need access to our healthcare. Right,
So if the differences are really about answering the particular
structures of violence, the similarities is as Zay was pointing out,

(51:13):
that fundamentally these are about meeting basic human needs, and
if we're not getting them through some places, How do
we get them through others?

Speaker 4 (51:21):
Right?

Speaker 6 (51:23):
Some of what we're seeing is differences in the public
visibility of those resources. Is it more of a whisper
network right in which folks are sharing resources or is
there more public visibility or institutional investment and so Yeah,
I would say that the biggest difference is in like

(51:49):
where folks are at in terms of their visibility, And
I would say the biggest similarity is that across the board,
what folks are organizing for is the meeting of their
basic human needs.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
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(52:27):
Class history link in the show.

Speaker 4 (52:29):
Notes, How did you work together? How did you find
that process? And deciding on what stories you were going
to include?

Speaker 3 (52:39):
Isn't that Internet a beautiful thing?

Speaker 7 (52:44):
I believe we had at one point three Excel sheets
with like changing entries as a way to also keep track,
because it was helpful for us to make sure we
could go through we had like a short summer to
be like, okay, what's this about. That way it helped
not get too redundant as well, and to make sure

(53:07):
that we could, oh, like this is a huge gap
geographically or this community we haven't necessarily talked about, So
that was really helpful for tracking. I've never used Excel
sheets more in my entire life, but I found it
to be a really easy way because we're all incredibly busy,

(53:29):
you know, Blue and Eye.

Speaker 3 (53:30):
We teach, and we're researching Zane doing law school. Like
having like consistent meetings is that's almost impossible with all
of our schedules, so we were I think we were
able to coordinate really well, especially given how busy we were.

Speaker 5 (53:48):
I was gonna say this project, since I mentioned, has
gone through so many re iterations and has shifted a
lot and expanded and brought in a lot of ways.
I think it was very queer and the way we
went and a very messy in that too. Like I
had my backgrounds mostly working on ended collections, and I
wanted to facilitate as many voices as possible, but then
that didn't work in this kind of collection because it

(54:11):
got way too big and it was I wanted to
bring in more voices and more experiences, but at the
same time we had to limit it. I wanted to
bring in different scholars and activists who could look over
and review what we were doing, and I did some
calls at different scholars, like, hey, did you look at this?
How are you to this book? Like Blue said, And
We've I read probably like fifty different queer history books

(54:35):
and was able to talk to or email a lot
of those different scholars and would share, you know, the
s Excel sheet with them, like where are the gaps?
Where are the problems?

Speaker 7 (54:45):
Right?

Speaker 5 (54:46):
And then those reiterations would change what the project look like.
And like, I think we've really gone over as we
were all very conscious about what we didn't want to
reify to cause harm. We had challenges around whether we
were bringing in someone who was harmful in one way

(55:07):
but still important to queer history and another way. You know,
I think all three of us a lot of our
work is challenging assimilationist LGBT rights movement, but at the
same time, one legal history is much easier to find
than a lot of other kind of history, and some
of those if you need something for every date, you know,
is just having a certain law in place? Is that problematic?

(55:30):
Is there other things we could bring in? Is it's
still the work that people put in for that, you know,
really important to queer history, even though it's not what
we consider protest work. And so the book itself has
just so much labor in it from the three of us,
like a wild amount of work has been put into it,

(55:52):
from the editors, from PM Press, from working class history,
and all of that is very conscious conversations going into
every single moment about why is it important? How does
it reflect working class or people's history, or what is
protests or what is queer right? How could someone who

(56:15):
wouldn't identify as queer because, like Blue said, gay and
lesbian and queer were more sexual activities, not identities until
later on. What does it look like if as three
Americans we are focusing more on America, Canada and the UK,
how do we really challenge this idea that queer history

(56:35):
isn't white and rich at the same time, like that's
what the archive reflects, and so the whole process was
very queer itself, I think, and just us trying to
navigate a very large project and at the same time
stay true to the moments we wanted to have it reflect.

Speaker 6 (56:58):
Yeah, this was my first like time doing a book
editor position, so I was coming into it with fresh eyes.
I'm a first gen academics, so like, I do not
have a sort of lineage to draw on when it

(57:19):
comes to putting together something like this. And as part
of that, it was a learning process and sometimes a
rocky one. See those Excel sheets, Oh my gosh. And
also part of what both Zane and Riley sort of
pointed out, which was, turns out, not every month is

(57:41):
the time when queers are at their busiest, you know,
doing revolting things. So like June chock full, so many
all of the entries, but like, turns out, like February
is kind of a down month for the quick year
in trance folks. So like, it definitely became difficult when

(58:04):
you're like, hey, I need to find something for February
twenty eighth. That's not really the way that our social
memory works, right, And so that became became difficult. There
was also just uncertainty around dates. One source says that
it happened February sixteenth, and another source said that it

(58:27):
happened two days later. How to reconcile those dates? What
source do you privilege? And I also think just to
name you know, Zan was talking about this sort of
queer experience, it was also a labor experience, right, I

(58:48):
think for all of us thinking through division of labor,
how do we make sure that things are equitable? What
does it mean to do equitable work from different subject positions?

Speaker 3 (59:02):
Right?

Speaker 6 (59:04):
All of that was a much bigger part of the
process than I expected. But one of the things that
I appreciated was that it was out in the open,
like those conversations were happening, and they weren't always comfortable,
but they were being talked about, right, And so it

(59:25):
was particularly coming from academia where so much of this
stuff gets swept under the rug about differences in labor
and work. I appreciated that. With the co editors, a
lot of it was about being very upfront, being very
clear about what our limitations were and where we were

(59:46):
at with the project.

Speaker 4 (59:48):
Yeah, that's really interesting and it does reflect some of
the same kind of issues that we had doing the
first WH Every Day act book, and especially with all
of the spreadsheet and Google sheets, like wh kind of
runs off if ever, like Google sheets goes down where screwed?

(01:00:08):
And yeah, with the dates as well, and February twenty
ninth is a tricky one to fill as well, because
we do like to kind of fill every twenty ninth
as well, and thankfully we're able to with this one. Yeah,
in terms of there being busy months and not busy months, Yeah,
this totally happened with the general history as well, and

(01:00:31):
even some dates, Like we've got some individual dates with
like twenty five stories and then some dates with like two.
I think sometimes you can kind of like be a
bit flexible about Often stories include multiple dates, so maybe
if you've got one a little bit missing, you can
pick an aspect of the story for this date or
what have you. Yeah, But so, were any of the

(01:00:54):
stories that you put in here ones that you were
kind of personally involved because some of them are pretty recent.
So were any of them ones that you were kind
of personally involved in?

Speaker 5 (01:01:05):
I donot know if I was personally in any of them,
but I certainly was tangentially connected and a lot of it.
A lot of those moments that I brought in were
like ones for my high school right that, like other
people who aren't from Morgantown, West Virginia wouldn't know, we
have Firestorm in there in Asheville, a queer bookstore and

(01:01:28):
collective that I've been going to since I was like
fourteen or fifteen. After at LOSCA, I worked at Truth
Out as a breaking news writer, and so some of
those stories are ones that I was able to write
about when the news was breaking, and so like, I
feel like, I'm not sure if I was particularly in
any of the resistance movements that are are brought in,

(01:01:49):
but I certainly was in community or touched them in
some way.

Speaker 6 (01:01:54):
So the June ninth, twenty nineteen was actually an event
that I took part in. The entry is for the
Sacramento Pride shut down, So that was something that I
was directly a part of. It was an effort by
black and brown particularly folks, to say that we can't
have pride while participating in forms of violent oppression, and

(01:02:19):
in particular, the issue was around the inclusion of police
in pride. So that was one that I was excited
to get into the collection in part because again those
smaller cities not to call Sacramento a small city, but
like it's not the San Francisco's or Las of California.

Speaker 3 (01:02:38):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:02:39):
It shows that like again, those working class folks, those
folks of color that are in these other places are
also doing this work, and sometimes they are in fact
leading the way in doing that work. Only to have
those bigger places practice the same tools, tactics, techniques and
get more visibility. I'm not going to say I'm a

(01:03:01):
little shady about it, but like just it's it felt
very important to see that work amplify it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:09):
Yeah, honestly, there's so much in there it's really difficult
to remember. But there were things like all my families
from you know, Louisiana, like Lawtel, Small Bayou and getting
to write about the Upstairs Lounge bar, I was really excited.
And there were some things that we had that like
we were kind of talking about whether or not to include,

(01:03:33):
like the anti Kkak protests in Atlanta, which I was
a medic of, and there was like this joyous Hire
Radio dance party during it that was really amazing. That
was all largely organized by black queer organizers and I

(01:03:53):
can't remember we included that or not, but there were
moments like that where we were going through I was like, oh, yeah,
I think I've been there. But there are so many entries.
I can't remember how long the book ended up being.
It's like over three hundred pages. It was so many things.

Speaker 4 (01:04:10):
Yeah, you know, so it is good value for money
as a as a plot, you know, stories for your buck.
You are getting a lot. I mean, maybe you could
ask this question of each of you kind of individually.
Were there any that you put in that like particularly
kind of resonate with you or particularly important to you

(01:04:31):
on some level.

Speaker 6 (01:04:33):
Yeah. Two of the entries that I thought were really
important to me personally. The first is from June sixteenth,
eighteen thirty six, was about marrying Jones, and particularly as
a black trans person, seeing a story about Mary Jones,
black American sex worker in the eighteen hundreds, one of

(01:04:56):
the first trans folks ever recorded in an official capacity
in the United States, was really important. One we have
images of her. She is fabulous. But also because again
when we talk about these archives, especially archives that involved
black folks, slavery did a lot to sort of erase

(01:05:19):
the gender subjectivity of black folks, because, as so many
scholars talk about, black folks were reduced to their flesh
or reduced to their labor potential rather than having an
internal subjectivity. Seeing someone like Mary Jones, who is sort
of owning and crafting her own subjectivity in the pre

(01:05:42):
Civil War period was really important. The other entry is
from April twenty sixth, nineteen sixty eight. Kiyoshi Coromea basically
held a demonstration against the use of Nepal in Vietnam.
And what they did was they announced plans to burn
a dog alive with napalm in front of the university library.

(01:06:05):
It got thousands of people to gather together in a protest,
and instead of like engaging in this burning, they were
leafloted saying congratulations on your anti napalm protest. You save
the life of a dog. Now, what about the lives
of tens of thousands of people in Vietnam? Why does
it feel so important as an entry to me? So

(01:06:28):
much of where we're at in this current moment, and
particularly with the rise of fascism, has been the normalizing
of violence and this idea that as long as we
engage in acts of dehumanization, violence is fine and I
think part of this has grown in my analysis with

(01:06:50):
my connection with Zane, thinking about like those species boundaries, right,
and thinking about that contentious relationship. In particular, I think
black folks have with some of the anti speciism language
that's like, hey, yeah, we don't want to say that
people are better than animals, but also we're often treated

(01:07:13):
so much worse than animals, right, And so thinking about
those instead of as like tensions that keep us apart,
thinking about them as productive spaces to keep building forms
of like CROSSBC solidarity. So just something that's really sat
with me pretty heavily from the entries that we collected.

Speaker 5 (01:07:34):
For me, something that I really wanted to be able
to include this book was activism that we could learn
from and relatively recent activism, especially in other countries. Because
I lived in Budapest, Hungary for two years. I went
to Central European University for my masters, which is pushed
out of the country by urban and the fit does government,

(01:07:57):
and so I was there really at a point in
time where like my queer friends were, you know, getting
beat up that the secret police were knocking on your doors.
There weren't any gay clubs at the time, but if
you're going into queer spaces. They were like salons and sellers, right.
And I've always been very vocal that the US is

(01:08:21):
always just like five years behind Hungary, maybe six or
seven behind Turkey, and then you know, a handful more
behind Russia. And so a lot of the moments we
included were things from the twenty tens and early twenty
twenties from these countries, because these are activists that we
can talk to. You know, these are the same laws

(01:08:43):
that are being ripple effect by international afar right actors
that are being shipped to the US, shipped to the UK,
shipped to Canada like in the US. You know, Spack
literally has been in Budapest. You know, Victor Urban's talked
to Jatie Vance and Trump. Ronda Stantis was one of
the first governors bringing in the Fidesque laws that were

(01:09:04):
based on Russia's laws that we're now seeing go national
and so recently, you know, the Fidez government in Hungary
passed this law that was going to cancel pride survey
everyone and use that as a way to increase the
surveillance state and limit the rights to privacy that they
were going to use this huge surveillance apparatus that anyone

(01:09:28):
was going to march would be fined under. And it
was one of the biggest protests I think in the country,
and the biggest Pride protest, and a lot of my
tattoo artists, my friends were there, right, And so a
lot of people, maybe for like the first time, have
been really excited about Budapest and Hungary and activists there.
But I've been saying for years, like, let's talk to them, right,
Let's talk to people in these countries where the governments

(01:09:51):
are talking to each other. Let's learn from these tactics
that the queer activists are using. Because I've lived in
countries that are to my existence, and I know people
who continue to live, but I still have had some
of the most joyful moments of my life even in
these hostile countries. And I think that's what has led
me to be very rooted and steadfast in this moment

(01:10:15):
where the government, you know, has always sort of wanted
us not to exist, but is increasingly more hostile.

Speaker 3 (01:10:22):
Yeah, I love that. Uh, for me A big thing
was including moments where pride similar to what Blue is
saying with their direct involvement, but other moments Pride has
become a protest again. We talked about prides where it
became protests about the treatment of Palestinians, you know, and

(01:10:42):
protests against pink washing, which now I think is more
relevant than ever. So are these intreues now about recent protests,
recent things that have been going that people can trace
to what's going now, and people can make those connections
and hopefully find in spread and the fact that pride
as a protest is something that's never ended. There are

(01:11:05):
always opportunities to take these moments where queer people are
coming together and to channel that energy into a broader
liberation and into refuting any sort of pink washing and
any usage of our identities as a way to further
or allow genocide, colonialism, or any form of violence and dehumanization.

Speaker 4 (01:11:28):
Yeah, well, and all those concepts. I think you did
really get across with the selection of stories saying I
think that thing you just mentioned I hadn't really sort
of struck me before. But I think certainly myself a
decade ago, I wouldn't have thought, you know, if someone
had said, oh, in ten years time, when we're thinking

(01:11:50):
about what will be happening to people in the US
or UK will be looking at places like Russia, Turkey
and Hungary to see what sort of policies and change
are going to be being introduced. That's at least a
good thing about looking back and doing history. You don't
have to make predictions for the future and then look

(01:12:11):
like a ball. But I would not have seen that.
But that is very much kind of where we are.
And so I think this kind of maybe transitions into
the next step of questions, which is we are seeing
this populist far right backlash and the new wave of
repression against queer people in general, but trans people in particular.

(01:12:34):
What do you think of the primary reasons for this.

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
I think trans people similar to other minority groups in general.
I think it's an easy testing grown for further dehumanization.
Like if we can stop giving passports to trans people
with the correction de marker, then who else's bodies can
we start to regulate. We see this in various other

(01:13:02):
histories happening again, you know, I do a lot of disability.
Carrie Buck a white woman, She had a disability, and
they the Supreme Court legalized sterilizations, which they used for
Native people, they used for black people. They continue to
use that, and you know so, I think also because

(01:13:23):
we're such a small minority, I think we're a testing growl.
And I think we've seen that in the United States
as attacks against citizenships is, attacks against who can enter
and who can leave are increasing, and you see that
time and time again, particularly with the rise of authoritarianism.

Speaker 5 (01:13:44):
One of my favorite Hungarian scholars is named Andrea Pato,
and I was lucky enough to take a few of
her courses, and I've gone to quote her and a
lot of the pieces I've written, and she is like
a woman gender sexuality scholar who was really focused. Her
academic work is really focused on how Italian women and

(01:14:05):
Hungarian women really benefited from Nazism, actually, because I think
usually in these frames there's this idea that women were oppressed, right,
but at the same time of being a certain kind
of oppressed, was also able to gain a lot of power,
and a lot of her work currently because Hungary when
I was there in like twenty seventeen twenty eighteen, was

(01:14:28):
putting academics on lists right like they're doing now in
the US, and she was on those lists, and a
lot of her understanding of why Hungary if one of
the first things it did was changed its constitution right
packed its courts, changed the way the media works, continued

(01:14:48):
the project of harming and exploiting roma populations, and then
used this idea of gender and anti semitism really and
anti mimigrants because this is around the same time that
there was a lot of refugees coming through Hungary as
ways to mobilize its population. Right, like Riley was saying,

(01:15:11):
queer and trans people are an easy testing ground as
ways to then contain power over larger populations. And what
they saw a Hungary, So if they went out and
closed the gender studies departments and changed it into like
family studies, right when after queer scholars and women's studies

(01:15:33):
scholars pushed universities out of the country and then at
the same time did a lot of the laws that
harmed the trans and queer populations and pushed them out
as well. And then overseeing now with these laws to
expand the constitution, expand the surveillance state, using gender and

(01:15:55):
trans and queerness as a way to use that to
kind of close can veil the actual goal of fascism, right,
and so queer entrance people in this system are used
as a way to gain greater control, not over like
over every single person, over every citizen, and really erase

(01:16:18):
us from public life. I will say that even though
we see this as far right populism across the world,
at least in the spaces I know, like the US
and Hungary, it's very tactful, right. It's a move towards
autocracy and oligarchy, and by attacking the media and it
slidifying control in like parliament, you know, putting different judges

(01:16:42):
in places, you therefore control the information and control the people,
and really control the vote because voting doesn't mean as
much anymore. So I have more faith in the people
than our government structures.

Speaker 1 (01:16:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:16:55):
Same, Uh So I do want to say maybe to
start with that, I think naming that it is a
spread of fascism is important because we've had a really
hard time calling the spread of fascism over the past

(01:17:16):
decade or so what it is, and I think that
as a person who studies right wing social movements, it's
important to name it so that we can do exactly
what Riley and Zane have done, which is identify, Hey,
these are the common tactics of this particular political culture,
so that we can see the ways in which many

(01:17:39):
of these things are not new. And I think that
that's especially important for obviously all of us as sort
of historically minded thinkers, because you know, you pointed out
that you know, you don't have to predict, right when
you are a historian. I'm a historical sociologist. So my

(01:18:01):
sort of training is in some way slightly different.

Speaker 3 (01:18:04):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:18:04):
The goal is certainly to say, here are the past events,
but it's also to say those things don't disappear right
when tactics or strategies, as Zain was pointing out, when
they work, they don't go away, right, And in particular,
when we think about things like white supremacy, other forms

(01:18:25):
of sort of fascist organizing, there are moments in time
where they go into what social movement scholars call abeyance,
meaning like they're not a hot commodity at the moment, right,
Oh no, it looks bad to be called a racist.
But they don't go away, right. They sort of get
stored in our cultural memory. They get stored in underground

(01:18:49):
practices that folks engage in all those dog whistles, right,
that continue to persist. And so it does give us
the ability in some ways to think about the future
and to see, hey, you know what happens when certain
conditions are met. Just to play off of what Zain
was talking about, and we discussed Magnus Hirschfeld before. If

(01:19:13):
we want to understand where trans folks are situated in
our current moment, looking at the rise of the Nazi
Party in Germany is a helpful comparison. I think a
lot of folks don't know that that really popular picture
of the book burning that happened as part of a

(01:19:35):
stormtrooper rally was actually the burning of books from the
Institute of Sexual Research, which was Magnus Hirschfeld's work, which
again was documenting all these various ways that folks experienced
a variety of gender and sexual expression. So to go
along with what Riley was talking about with like we

(01:19:58):
are small, a small group, and that enables folks to
do violence, it is also about seeing how far knowledge
can be shaped through violence. And again this goes back
to fascism's obsession with the idea of violence as the

(01:20:20):
necessary sort of function of politics. It also says might
makes right right is such an essential part of this
authoritarian and fascist organizing. But to go back to an
earlier part of what we discussed. It goes back to
this idea of bio essentialism. If the foundations of fascism

(01:20:41):
make the argument that the reason why government should be
structured the way that it is is because there is
a natural or quote biological reason for its foundations, trans people,
queer people serve as an essential remind that it doesn't

(01:21:02):
have to be that way. That doesn't mean that queer
people or that trans people or at least LGBT people
as communities, can't participate in those forms of fascism, but
rather that the underlying logic is still about saying that
certain bodies should and have to act certain ways right,

(01:21:28):
And a lot of this comes up with this idea
of like women's rights versus trans rites. Instead of dealing
with the patriarchy, it's about reframing the question to say,
don't look over here at these structures of violence, but
instead take the scraps of what that system, the proximal

(01:21:51):
benefits that Zayin was talking about with women and fascism,
and make it so that the only way that you
get those proximal benefits is by turning on folks who
have less structural power. And like, this is something that
gram she talks about. Right, He's sitting there in prison
wondering why did like the communist revolution that happen? How

(01:22:14):
did Italy end up with fascists instead? And a big
part of this is about redirected attention, right and redirected focus.

Speaker 4 (01:22:25):
Yeah, and I think there's also something with trans people
being such a small minority. These populist and far right parties,
they often talk about economic concerns, from Trump talking about
the cost of eggs and groceries to wanting to bring
back manufacturing to the US and all that, which, of

(01:22:46):
course is never going to happen these far right people.
If anything, all their policies will lead to lower wages,
worsening conditions, and impoverishment of working people and poor people.
So they're never going to do anything to make any
of that better. But they can point to this very
small group of people that a lot of people won't

(01:23:07):
even know one individual, because you know, bigots often hold
ideas about groups in their heads, but when they know
members of that group, they kind of think, well, this
member I know is different or whatever. But you know,
a lot of people won't even know a single trans
person personally. But you know, these far right, people can
at least point to this group that they've harmed to

(01:23:30):
be like, well, at least I've had done something, you know,
like as you said with women's rights, that the Republicans
in the US, who are very open about their hatred
of women, you know, and have been for decades, can
now say about how they're protecting women and girls by
maybe they've banned one trans girl from a sport or

(01:23:53):
something in a sport of fifty or sixty thousand people.
And you know, in the UK this is happening as well,
with the support of a lot of the political left.
I mean, the Tory Party initially banned gender affirmation treatments
for miners and labor. Now they're in power have made
that van permanent and under labor well. A completely ridiculous

(01:24:15):
Supreme Court ruling has basically established that a lot of
protections which had been understood to be in law inequalities
law to trans people actually don't apply. And a bunch
of this is being supported by people that call themselves feminists, socialists,
communists and even some anarchists in the UK at least

(01:24:38):
arguing that trans rights are coming at the expense of
women's rights. How would you respond to that argument.

Speaker 3 (01:24:46):
I would respond that the improvement of life for one
group always includes the betterment of life for all people,
and that these fears and concerns that women have for safety,
those are very real concerns. You know, in the United States,
domestic violence is not taken seriously. You know, it's really

(01:25:07):
hard to prosecute someone for rape, even when it's videotaped
like we've seen. You know. I feel like when I
was in college, there were time and time again of
like violent campus rapes that just were not being prosecuted,
and it was and it was horrible. And those things
are happening and they're not they haven't ended. And the
rollback of Roe v. Wade and Dubs is forcing women,

(01:25:30):
particularly impoverished women, women of color, women in the South,
Native women. They're limiting their rights, they're limiting their access,
and so women are being harmed absolutely, But it's not
by trans people, but by making trans people kind of
like this phantom in in me, it allows people to

(01:25:51):
have something to concretely channel their anger towards. Even though
our lives together only make one another safer and better,
but it can feel so much more. I think overwhelming
to tackle a system of patriarchal violence when you've grown

(01:26:12):
up and have seen all of those attempts to address
those harms fail repeatedly, and so for sometimes this feeling
of almost like a win is a win even though
it's not, and it will in the end only serve
to harm women. We're seeing that women who are gender
non conforming are being harassed when in states that have

(01:26:34):
tried to pass bathroom bills, So these laws are actively
hurting women. And as Blue said, like the larger problem is,
it's patriarchy. It's not trans people, it's not us. But
tackling patriarchy is so much more daunting and requires it
would require an overhaul of the entirety of the United States,
not just the United States. It's not like the UK, Canada.

(01:26:56):
All of those things would have to be addressed, Like
I would say, a global politics would have to be
prodressed in a way that most people, people empowered, do
not want to do. So if they can shift shift
the target from themselves, then why not.

Speaker 4 (01:27:16):
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And the fact that some
people are buying it, I just find completely unfathomable. How
just completely I mean, how does completely stupid some people
are especially like these groups that are funding these so

(01:27:38):
called women's rights organizations in the UK fighting for single
sex spaces in quotes, and they're all these US based
evangelical anti abortion groups. That's who's providing the money, you know.
And if you look at their addresses, their office space
are being provided by these anti abortion groups.

Speaker 6 (01:27:57):
Well anyway, Well, I was just wondering you were pointing
out this idea of like even these folks who ostensibly
have like a good analysis in other places, seem really
drawn in right by this narrative around quote unquote protecting women.

(01:28:19):
And I just wanted to say, alongside what Riley had
added before, this idea of protecting women quote unquote, how
that can still be a sort of patriarchal call to action,
because especially if we look for example, at the history
of like anti black racism, right when we look at

(01:28:39):
these other histories that are so intimately bound up the
idea of in particular protecting white women has played an
important role in legitimizing violence against other groups of people,
while simultaneously laying the work to say that those other groups,

(01:29:02):
particularly racialized groups, don't have women, that those folks aren't
women in the first place. So I think one of
the reasons that even folks who ostensibly right like have
this well developed political analysis, are willing to buy into
it is because protecting women, as Biley said, doesn't require

(01:29:27):
addressing the patriarchal reasons why women quote unquote need protecting. Instead,
it says, yeah, you can feel like a strong man,
you can feel like all of those things that a
good Republican wants to feel, by basically advancing an argument

(01:29:48):
that as long as you're keeping other people that aren't
you say, as a powerful person, right, as long as
only you can harm women, then it's okay, right, you're
protecting women from the ability of others to harm them.

(01:30:09):
And so, in part I say this because black trans feminism,
one of the basic parts of this is recognizing that
black women, even if they were defined as cis, had
a very tenuous connection to the state of womanhood itself, right,

(01:30:32):
And that doesn't mean that some black women still haven't like,
participated in this right wing politic by doubling down and saying, well,
the reason why were women is because of all these
biological reasons. But part of what black feminism tells us
is that the state of womanhood is also a state

(01:30:53):
of exception, and it's a state of exception that can
be rescinded for all kinds of reasons, including being trans.
But I think Riley you pointed out that like all
you have to be is like look outside of a
norm in order to suddenly be kicked out of bathrooms, right,

(01:31:15):
what about folks who have like pecos right, oh my gosh,
a little chin hair, Suddenly like you're kicked out. Like,
part of what this does is it's trying to stake
out a claim about womanhood. But the only function of
womanhood that it's protecting is the function of womanhood that

(01:31:37):
is deemed valuable not to women but to men right
and to patriarchy more generally. And I just wanted to say, like,
this is also meant that we have Republicans, for instance,
calling for like genital checks on you, right, like things

(01:31:59):
that But I feel like many of those anarchists or
those leftists would say that's wild, right, like that, like
we that would absolutely be an infringement on anything a
feminist would claim is important. But the moment that it's
framed as protection, folks seem willing to overlook the fact

(01:32:23):
that what it does is it puts one's gender expression
within the realm of property rights and the state right
saying that the state has a vested interest to protect you,
it needs to have a say over altering shaping defining

(01:32:46):
who deserves to have protection and who doesn't.

Speaker 4 (01:32:49):
And I think you're referencing of both the kind of
racial connotations of protecting women dating back to the lynchings
of of black men. Point is very valid. And also
I don't think it's a coincidence that so many of
the controversies recently about quote women's sports have been around

(01:33:11):
questioning the womanhood of black women athletes. And I think that, yeah,
what I was trying to say earlier, you've kind of
explained my kind of blown my mind at how these
people can can buy into, as you say, thinking that
some people like Fox News commentators, as if they genuinely
care about women's sports, as if we haven't heard the

(01:33:34):
jokes that right wingers have made about women's sports for
the past fifteen twenty years, that you know, they've been
very clear that they do not care. And exactly as
you say, even if in your mind this principle lefty
thinks the idea of theoretical men in women's bathrooms or whatever.
All you have to do is think for two seconds

(01:33:57):
or even look at the reality because a bunch of
countries intro self id for gender, which was the thing
that caused the big controversy here initially was the UK
was going to introduce self identification for gender recognition certificates,
which the Conservative government was planning on doing, which is
just a sign of how rapidly sort of things have changed.

(01:34:18):
But that happened in a bunch of countries and you
can see the real reality of that, which is that
it was fine, and you look at the real consequences
of doing the opposite in the US where they have
brought in these bills, which is cis women being assaulted
in public spaces because they have short hair, you know,
or because they look wrong, and children, young sis girls

(01:34:42):
having adult men question their their genitalia at school events.
Like that's real, you know, and it's mind boggling. But
I think seeing the strength of the backlash, particularly against
trans rites in recent years, I don't know if any
of you saw this really awful opinion piece in the

(01:35:04):
New York Times the other day, which is basically written
by someone who posited themselves as an advocate of gay rights,
but now seeing the backlash is trying to kind of
avoid the backlash by saying that trans people have ruined
everything by kind of pushing too far. You know, all

(01:35:24):
we wanted was to get married and and that like,
this is a strategy which some people are trying to
make to separate lesbian, gay, bisexual people specifically from trans
queer people in gens. So they think that they can
protect their rights by throwing trans and queer people under
the bus. You've obviously looked at a huge expanse of

(01:35:48):
history here. Even if this were a desirable thing to do,
which obviously is not, is this strategically something which could
be successful?

Speaker 5 (01:35:57):
Do you think it's always been all losing strategy. And
that's the problem with assimilationist or accommodationist politics in general,
is that I think we have this faith that the
state will protect you, right. I liked what you said, Blue.
I think it was like the scrappings like that, you
can get some scrappings of protection, but it doesn't work

(01:36:18):
that way unfortunately, and liberation can't happen that way. If
you are in working with the state to oppress someone else,
you're engaging in your own oppression, and so this is
very topical. Actually because of a day or two legislative
research I'm friends with Alison Chapman found out that the
Stonewall National History Page, you know, which had taken away

(01:36:40):
every mention of transactivists beforehand, just also erased mention of
by people and bisexuality. And so that erosion of rights
reaches for all of us. And so even in the
binary trans community, like there was this idea that non
buying people or the problem, there's still a handful of

(01:37:02):
conservative you know, trans women that say, you know that
we were asking for too much and that's why there's
this backlash, and none of that is true. If anything,
the reason we're here is the same critique that like
Matilda Sycamore has had against equality, has had that we
we as in I guess white trans people have this

(01:37:25):
idea that we could claw up to some kind of
similar privilege and under white capitalism, right and just leave
the most marginalized people in the trans community somewhere else,
right and blue and I have worked before, like Riley
was saying, on these moments and now, like seven years ago,
where black trans people would protest majority of white cists

(01:37:48):
pride parades and say we aren't safe. What your pride
is is actually harming us. And there's this silence that
your eclipsing of the harm that my community is facing.
And then those pride tests we met with cops, right.
And so this has always been a failing strategy, whether
it's for the LGBT movement or for the feminist movement,
you know, going back to IDB Wells and the white suffragists.

(01:38:11):
And so it doesn't work, and it can't work, and
you're only harming yourself. And I think a lot of
these people know that. I think there's a lot of
desperation and fear that leads to this. But you're never
the good one, right. This is not the way that works,
and that's not the way fascism will do it. I
think someone we didn't include in the book because of

(01:38:32):
the problematic was this gay Nazi man, right. He was
just like, well, I'm a Nazi, right, and then he
got killed because he was gay. And so it doesn't
The state will still kill you no matter how close
you are to pushing forward their version of fascism.

Speaker 3 (01:38:50):
I think fascism is the key here, which is what
Blue originally brought up and Zane just you know, reiterating
when you look at the history of fascism in any country,
no minority stays Okay, it never happens. You know, they
go after every marginalized group.

Speaker 4 (01:39:11):
But isn't it that famous quote though? First that came
for the communists, and I said nothing, and now I'm fine.

Speaker 6 (01:39:17):
I think that was how it ended. Yeah, and then
I was fine, yeah, yeah, I mean, I think, just
reiterating what Sane and Riley had added, that we have
this history of moved rather than removed stigma.

Speaker 7 (01:39:35):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:39:35):
So, for instance, when like homosexuality is taken out of
the American DSM, that's the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which
had previously defined homosexuality as a disease. As homosexuality got
removed as a disease, gender identity disorder was added as

(01:39:55):
a new category of mental illness, right, And so I
think that helps us to see this idea of moved
rather than remove stigma, right, instead of eliminating this source
of stigma as a form of control, we simply sort
of like push it down the proverbial ladder. Right. I

(01:40:17):
think that just building off of this idea that yes,
absolutely it is fascism, but we also can see just
as a critique of liberalism as well. A number of
scholars have talked about how liberalism rests on the idea
of the right of exclusion, right that like, in order

(01:40:38):
to have benefits of liberalism, you have to have like
the citizen who gets the benefits and the non citizen
who doesn't. And certainly this resonates in many ways with
our current political moment and the anti immigrant xenophobia that
has also become such a touchstone in police discussions. I

(01:41:01):
think that one of the difficulties, as Zain had pointed out,
is that liberalism says that as long as you can
identify yourself as fitting within a state of exception, you
will be included and protective, and it sort of leaves
the second part out, which is that in order to

(01:41:23):
get that protection, there has to be someone else that
is excluded, whether that's trans people, immigrants, folks of color.
This is also a problem of liberalism. And so there's
a bunch of scholars who have talked about this relationship
between liberalism and fascism, where like liberalism promises these states

(01:41:45):
of exception, and then when it fails, when it's shown
to not work up to the promise which it has
laid out, Fascism becomes a reasonable response to what's considered
the failure of modernity or the failure of liberalism. And
so I say this because this movement towards separating LGB

(01:42:10):
from T or LG away apparently from BT is a
part not just a fascism, but about the relationship between
liberalism and fascism and why we need to be relying
on other ways of moving through the world and thinking
about our lines of solidarity.

Speaker 3 (01:42:31):
I love that so much, because, yeah, with liberalism, as
we're saying, it delineates the political actors, the citizen versus
the citizen, and the person who could be the political
actor is already limited. They're autonomous, they're rational, they're a
self driven person, so they can't have any human vulnerability.

(01:42:53):
Human vulnerability isn't a part of it. So the minute
you start to add in disability, any type of situation
in which you may have limited you know, socioeconomic capacities
for example, any of that, then are you are no
longer a political actor? And so then like there's this
whole dialogue with John Rawls for example, of being like,

(01:43:15):
so then are you not a person, because if you
don't have those people, then you're not a political actor.
And if the political actor was what defines serbralism, then
you're not a human. And where do you go from there?
Which then leads of course into Zian's anti speciesism work
and it all comes together.

Speaker 4 (01:43:31):
And so maybe trying to sort of bring this kind
of to a conclusion and also maybe point to a
kind of way forwards. Can you think of any stories
from the book which are kind of inspiring or exciting
to you right now and you think point to a
kind of way forwards in the current situation.

Speaker 5 (01:43:51):
The stories, especially recent stories of the like high school
and middle school walkouts, has been really inspired for me
because there's this idea that this is this scores at
least that these laws are supposed to you know, quote
unquote protect children. As we've said, that's not the reason.

Speaker 3 (01:44:10):
Of the laws.

Speaker 5 (01:44:11):
And I don't really know if people believe it or
just like convenient I was a good pr but these kids,
when they speak for themselves through their everyday life or
actually like political protests where they've been disciplined, right, they're saying, no,
you know, this is kids who have the don't say
gay bills in their school, who get their things removed

(01:44:32):
from their libraries, who aren't able to use their pronouns
in school, who are on sports teams with trans people, right,
who are saying I want these people to feel safe,
I want them in my community, and I will stand
up for them because you don't have a lot of
legal rights, right. They don't have a lot of political

(01:44:52):
power in a lot of ways, and a lot of
autonomy in schools or other spaces. But they're using those
restricted ways a protest to stand up for other students
and say I love this person and I want them here,
and that means a lot to me.

Speaker 6 (01:45:09):
Yeah. So there's two instances that aren't in the book
that I wanted to speak to, and then one that
I think is in the book and is helpful. The
first is sort of the trans medical Support network. I
think I mentioned this before, right, but just people being like, yeah,

(01:45:30):
I'm gonna like gather up extra meds and I'm going
to distribute them secretly without like. This isn't about credit,
this isn't about visibility. This is about making sure that
folks needs are met in this moment. I think that
has been very powerful, and I think in part. The

(01:45:50):
reason why that stood out to me is because of
how prevalent trans healthcare bands are here in the South.
You know, North Carolina has banned care for minors. A
close member of my community is a trans kid who's
having like cross state lines in order to get the

(01:46:13):
care that they need. And so the fact that in
this moment of heightened repression, people are doing this work
and risking again that criminalization.

Speaker 3 (01:46:28):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:46:29):
A sort of popular transfigure, Eli Irlick, mentioned on Twitter
about like saving some of their meds so that they
can send them to trans kids in need, and immediately
people are like, I'm reporting this to the FBI. I'm
gonna make sure that you go to prison. But what
Eli's talking about isn't limited to like them making a

(01:46:53):
statement right on Twitter. It is it's a practice that
people are engaged in and is on or the radar.
It doesn't have a date to go with it. So
it's not something that really fits in the book easily,
but I think that it is it's important. Another of
the ones that isn't in the book, or at least

(01:47:14):
less in the book than perhaps some might expect. It
is around like deplatforming and disruptive resistance. And a big
part of the reason why I mentioned this is because
similar to what Riley had said about like going to
protests and doing stuff, and there's like a contingent of
quite queer and trans people who are there, but like
the event isn't an event or like an action necessarily

(01:47:39):
organized only by queer trans people, but like so many,
particularly the instances that I can think of, because I
was in California during Trump's first presidential run, was just
how many queer and trans people were out fighting fascists. Right,

(01:48:00):
it wasn't their event, but they were out there doing
the work to deplatform and disrupt these fascist organizers. And
I know that a lot of people have felt disheartened
that we've still ended up in the place that we've
ended up, even though people were putting their bodies on
the line. But I have a kind of a different

(01:48:23):
reading of that, which is that we would be potentially
in an even worse place without that right. In some ways,
the work that folks were doing was harm reduction, and
this is tied to an example in the book January tenth,
nineteen eighty two, we talked about Raymond Brochius, who helped

(01:48:43):
found the Lavender Panthers, and so really thinking about avoiding
the violence nonviolence dichotomy, being like, oh, this is the
good thing because it's non violent, and that's the bad
thing because that's violent, and instead really digging into what
we've consistently been touching on throughout today's discussion, which is

(01:49:06):
that it's about caring for one another, and caring for
one another may involve having to protect each other from harm, right,
and that kind of self defensive violence is really important.
We've seen the proliferation of the statement we keep us

(01:49:28):
safe along sort of our organizing routes in our social media,
but really digging into what that means. Yes, it means
making sure that we are drinking water at the protest,
and that we are making sure that if folks have
mobility issues, that they are thought about and protected and

(01:49:49):
cared for. And it's also about saying, sometimes we have
to engage in acts of violence in order to protect people, right,
not in the way that infantilizes them, but works to
enable and support their own agency and autonomy. So I

(01:50:13):
just felt like the Lavender Panthers entry really embodied that.

Speaker 4 (01:50:19):
Yeah, definitely, that's a great It's about a group of
LGBT people in California who formed a kind of armed
self defense gript modeled on the Black Panthers and this cup. Yeah,
definitely check out those entries.

Speaker 1 (01:50:32):
Love Grit, Love, bredden by the beauty his Sun Sun
Discloses and the people here housing and bread and roses,
Bread and roses.

Speaker 2 (01:50:47):
That brings us to the end of our discussion about
big A do crime, everyday acts of queer resistance and rebellion.
Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed it. You
can get hold of the book anywhere in the world
from our online store link in the sh You can
also listen to all our other Radical Reads episodes by
joining us on Patreon, which is how our work is funded. There,

(01:51:07):
you can also access loads of other great exclusive content
like regular podcast episodes of our ads, bonus episodes, and
our fireside Chats discussion series. It is only support from you,
our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts, So
if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining
us at patreon dot com slash Working Class History link

(01:51:29):
in the show notes. If joining us on Patreon isn't
an option for you at the moment, please don't worry.
About it, but please do tell your friends about this
podcast and give us a five star review on your
favorite podcast app. Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making
this podcast possible special thanks to jazz Hands. Our theme
tune is Montanne's version of the classic labor movement anthem

(01:51:50):
Bread and Roses, performed by Montanne and Nick Harriot and
mixed by Wave Racer. Download the song on the link
in the show notes, with all proceeds go into medical
aid for Palestinians. This episode was edited by Jesse French.
Thanks for listening and catch you next time.

Speaker 1 (01:52:08):
The rising of the Women is the rising of us all.
No more than drudge and idler than the toil where
one reposes, but as sharing of life stories bat and roses,
Breton roses, Breton roses

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