It’s time to steal back what is ours, to reappropriate the many scraps of our bottom-up legacies of good troublemaking.
By Cindy Barukh Milstein
LGBTQ Nation
August 21sts, 2025
The following is an adapted excerpt from “Be Gay, Do Crime: Everyday Acts of Queer Rebellion,” edited by Riley Clare Valentine, Blu Buchanan, and LGBTQ Nation contributor Zane McNeill.
These days, one often sees the slogan “Protect Trans Kids” emblazoned on T-shirts, painted across banners, or chanted on the streets during a demonstration. Radicals have added a twist, interspersing illustrations of a rose and a dagger between those three simple words, giving them a more edgy feel. Yet a fifteen-year-old queer anarchist friend of mine recently shared their critique of this popular phrase, adamantly declaring, “We can defend ourselves!”
Their assertion points to the superpowers of many young folks today, at least as witnessed from my vantage point as an older queer anarchist on Turtle Island. They already know, at an early age, that they don’t fit into heteronormative boxes. They already seem openly comfortable in who they are, in so many fabulous gender-nonconforming and even gender abolition ways. And as teenagers and even preteens, they are already both bashing back and striving to create their own queer utopias.
Yet these youths are frequently unaware that their fighting spirit isn’t so different from that of their ancestors, nor is their dedication to community self-defense. Take just one quote from this wide-ranging sampler of everyday acts of queer resistance and rebellion, proclaimed by gay antifascist Willem Arondeus as he faced execution for militant direct actions against Nazism… “Homosexuals are not cowards.” In fact, many of us adults don’t know our own histories-from-below either.
History, as the truism goes, is written by those in power, intentionally scheming to solidify their coercive and violent hold by erasing all that doesn’t conform to their narrative. The victorious hegemons—whether colonialism and capitalism; states, police, and prisons; or homophobes, transphobes, and fascists—in essence put our grassroots histories into a closet and lock the door.
Or so they think.
Be Gay, Do Crime, with its abundance of calendrical offerings, acts like a bolt cutter. Each entry snaps open another padlock, allowing us to steal back what is ours. To reappropriate the many scraps of our bottom-up legacies of good troublemaking that otherwise would be “lost” to top-down histories, and use those glorious remnants, those f*g ends, to figuratively craft our own amulets of mutualistic protection. And to share those talismans of remembrance freely with accomplices, coconspirators, and other visionary heretics as the material that sustains our unsanctioned, unabashedly magical world-building.
[T]his book is indeed a form of communal protection—a theme that threads its way throughout these pages. It’s the kind of protection that comes from learning about radical history and revolutionary predecessors, thereby drawing strength from knowing that we’ve done this before, and not just one or two times. For centuries, we’ve resisted and rioted, made strides, grieved beloveds, experimented and sometimes failed, carved out autonomous spaces, graffitied walls and blockaded buildings, chosen our own kinship, lent our hearts and solidarity, lived dangerously and danced illegally, acted up and come out, fought back, defied borders and smashed binaries, remained illegibly subversive, and so much more.
As piece after piece reminds us, when push comes to shove, we defend each other, and wisdom doesn’t disappear, even if the powers that be connive to bury our stories. “We’re here, we’re queer, we won’t disappear” (Norway, June 25, 2022). And whether we’re young, old, or anywhere in between, as this book underscores, we persist in everyday acts of reciprocity that reduce harm and alleviate suffering, within and outside our circles.
Or as poet Federico García Lorca put it… “I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.”
