Comments Elsewhere

That said, in my experience the groups he identifies (the homosexual lobby, inter alia) are seldom remotely interested in genuine liberty: they are interested in obtaining a seat at the table of power, not in dismantling the table altogether. … You never hear GLBT types demanding that government reduce funding for their pet projects: quite the opposite.

Look, dude, I’m an out bisexual man. I’m also an anarchist. I’m one of those “GLBT types” and I’ve spent the past seven years or so of my life not just calling for defunding this or that project, but in fact calling for, and working for, the immediate, complete and permanent abolition of the State as such. I happen to know a lot of other Gs and Ls and Bs and Ts who have been and are doing the same.

This conversation is not about “the homosexual lobby,” whatever the hell that is. It’s about me and my friends. The folks that Preston wants “purged” when he talks about holding “a revolution within anarchism itself.” This isn’t about attempts to reach out to statist outfits like Human Rights Campaign (who cares?); it’s about Keith’s explicit intention to run us — that is, people who are anarchists and are also vocal gay liberationists — out of the movement, apparently in the name of better recruiting among angry young white cis straight non-immigrant males. (Not to mention his similar suggestions for running out feminists, vocal anti-racists, trans folks, pissed-off, man-hating, dykes with an excess of body hair [sic! he says that like it’s supposed to be a bad thing…], people who oppose government immigration checkpoints and “papers-please” ID monitoring, etc.).

I read Mr Preston’s entire piece (or ’screed’ or ‘rant’ if you want to be pejorative) and there was one single sentence in a sea of reasoned argument (the whole ‘cock ring’ bit) upon which people have seized as evidence of some deeper ideological shortcoming.

Oh, well, we can discuss more than just that one pull-quote, if you want.

For instance, how about the several paragraphs that he devotes to arguing that anarchists, of all people, ought to be calling for the expansion of government checkpoints, documentation requirements, and prohibitions against immigrant workers? I don’t know about you, but I’d say that there’s some ideological shortcoming going on when a professed anti-statist goes around arguing for the escalation of police state tactics by government border thugs (because, hey, a majority of government-approved voters want it! well, hell, sign me up!).