By Colleen Hamilton
them.us
August 16th, 2024
The visual artist behind an illustrated three-part examination of mass incarceration discusses the invisibilization of injustice that allows for our mass incarceration crisis to continue.
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For the writer and illustrator Vic Liu,“be gay, do crime” is not simply a slogan for Instagram or a colorful backpack pin. The phrase reflects a central theme of their work.
“The difference between crime and harm is something that’s often discussed in abolitionist spaces,” says Liu, the co-author and illustrator of The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration, a three-part examination of the economic and political conditions that created mass incarceration. “Crime is the breaking of a rule that the government has decided — parking in the wrong place, for example. Harm is when you deeply hurt someone.”
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For most of U.S. history — and arguably into the present day — being gay was doing crime. Until the 1970s, the punishment for sodomy across the United States could be life in prison. In the 1950s and 1960s, “three piece clothing laws” required women to wear a dress, bra, and underwear, or risk arrest during raids of queer bars. Today, the criminalization of queerness and transness takes the form of bans on gender-affirming care and drag performance. And so for Liu, “crimes” are often constructs governments use to limit our possibilities for pleasure, discovery, and bodily autonomy. Be gay, defy unjust laws. Be gay, resist the norm. Be gay, become yourself.
Out now from PM Press, The Warehouse contains hundreds of illustrations from Liu and incarcerated artists, each designed to help people on the outside understand a system predicated on disappearance. Co-authored with abolitionist James Kilgore, the text also offers strategies to imagine new forms of justice and care, detailing how accessible housing, free education, and improved health care could reduce harm in our societies. Liu notes that these interventions would be especially critical for LGBTQ+ people, who are incarcerated at three times the rate of the general population. According to The Vera Institute of Justice, more than 85% of incarcerated trans people have spent time in solitary confinement, and over half of those people spent more than a year there. Additionally, 20% of youth in the juvenile legal system are queer, and 85% of those are queer youth of color.
In addition to The Warehouse, Vic Liu is the creator of Bang! Masturbation for People of All Genders, an inclusive and revelatory visual guide to masturbation that has sold almost 50,000 copies. The 28-year-old is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, where they focus on projects that convey complicated topics with a focus on empathy and accessibility. Below, we discuss how mass incarceration exists as a function of mass invisibilization, portraying the ongoing debates between abolition and reform, and how we can each participate in the work to reverse the inhumanities of our criminal justice system.
Where did the idea for this book come from?
I’ll start by saying that I firmly believe that text is elitist. Twenty percent of Americans are illiterate. We exclude so many people when we exclusively encase information in text. Some of this is grounded in my own lineage. My grandmother did not learn how to read until much later in life, and she’s one of the smartest people I know. I think it is completely unjust for us to take all the information about how the world works and hide it from people, so I pivoted towards making information visible through things like color, design, and art.
That led to BANG, my first book about masturbation for all genders and abilities, which is race, ability, and trans-inclusive. It was crucial to me that the anatomy diagrams were race-diverse, which is something that is not always available. It was also a visual primer, so it’s very much designed to make it accessible without words. At that time, I was reading about mass incarceration and read James’s book Understanding Mass Incarceration, but the graphic design was horrible. I cold emailed him and said, “I want to make a visual book with you.” This man — a 76-year-old white man who uses he/him pronouns in his signature — answered, “I have no idea what that means. But let’s talk.” And then we had a book four years later.
What is the relationship between BANG and The Warehouse?
From the outside, books about mass incarceration and masturbation are not very related. But the intersection is bodily autonomy, and the fact that the state wants to make us afraid of our own bodies. “Uses of the Erotic,” an essay by Audre Lorde, is incredibly important to me. She talks about how the oppressor derives power by separating you from the inherent power you possess in your body. She says that it is crucial politically to access that power because it teaches you that you can survive without the state. It teaches you that you deserve to have joy. It teaches you to not allow yourself to settle for powerlessness or despair.
