This event is part of the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair 2019!

If you’re interested in history, radical politics, sexual liberation, LGBTQ communities, or underground and outlaw culture, this talk will appeal to you. Regardless of your current political beliefs or sexual orientation – YOU WILL BECOME A QUEER ANARCHIST BY THE END OF THIS PRESENTATION! Come out – we dare you.

In today’s United States, where LGBTQ people legally marry, serve in the army, and take part openly in the upper ranks of corporate and political power, the days when queerness seemed a disruptive threat to established authority seem to be vanishing. Yet examining the history of homosexuality in the United States reveals a little-known story: the central significance of anarchist ideas and activists within the struggle for sexual liberation.

Anarchist sex radicals offered the first public, political defenses of same-sex love in the United States, decades before the emergence of the gay liberation movement. Likewise, anti-authoritarian currents have long swirled through lesbian and gay culture, with insistence on individual freedom and autonomy alongside a fierce critique of the state common not just among activists but throughout the fabric of everyday queer life. Even after the classical anarchist movement declined in the 1920s United States, queer anarchists exercised a significant influence – not just among other political or sexual radicals, but in the cultural avant-garde of literature, poetry, and music, among public intellectuals, and within gay liberation, feminist, bisexual, and direct action movements.

Exploring the hidden history of queer resistance to all forms of authority opens a window into the capacity of dissident sexuality and politics to provoke profound cultural and political change – a capacity that radical queers today, in an age of triumphant assimilation, can and should reclaim.

More ACAB 2019

August 23-25, Asheville, NC will host its third annual Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair in conjunction with the third annual Pansy Fest, a queer and trans DIY music fest showcasing LGBTQ musicians from the South. The weekend will feature free workshops, panels, talks, as well as a vendors, concerts, and meals.