Past Tense

It feels crazy to talk about Fed Up Queers so completely in the past tense, like those were the glory days, and they're so over. But the facts are that I now live in the burbs and am surrounded by mostly heterosexual people, rarely get to do any street activism, and don't have a go-to group of people to make noise with.

I get riled up when people talk about how all of FUQ's drama was because all of us dykes were sleeping together. Sure, there was some of that, but a lot of the drama was an entirely different kind of passion. We cared about our message. We cared about what was right. We cared about making a difference, rattling people's comfort with the horrible things happening in NYC. And it felt fantastic. Exhausting too, but exhilarating to be part of a group that spent every week fighting for what mattered. Not all of our decisions were on target, and we spent a lot of time just spraypainting messages, which also meant a lot of time running from the police. But we also were in the thick of it. We got 10,000 people to show up for a demo in just four days, we got the Diallo protests rolling, we drew attention to every tranny murdered in NYC, Giuliani and his people knew who we were and knew they could expect us to cause him trouble wherever he went. I remember how it felt hearing "Fed Up Queers" on the radio, and on the tv news. The group drove me insane, and I loved them dearly. I remember how it felt when the whole thing fell apart because one person wanted to promote "inter-generational sex" as some radical cause, and all the dykes who'd suffered sexual abuse couldn't stop crying, and we couldn't get him to leave, and so we folded. I remember how angry I felt, and powerless. FUQ had been my power, and it was being taken away by a sexual predator. The whole thing made me mute. How typical.

I wasn't vegan then. I mean, I had been vegan for years and years, but then, when I moved East, it eventually fell away because I didn't know anyone who did animal rights. I was broke and depressed and dealing with massive police brutality in my little town. My head was elsewhere. When I moved to Brooklyn and met other queer activists and eventually became this powerful little gang called Fed Up Queers, I felt like my brain finally un-numbed, and I started to remember things that mattered to me. I remembered them in detail.

When FUQ was infiltrated and our actions started to fail, when we would get arrested before our actions had gone down, we decided to go to a skillshare in the swamp to learn some new tactics. We sold a bunch of "Brooklyn Out of Palestine" t-shirts to fund the trip, and it was there I went vegan again. The whole gathering was vegetarian, and really mostly vegan. My girlfriend and I had decided to spend the three weeks there eating vegan, dabbling with making the commitment while someone else was preparing the food.

Learning to climb was hard for me. Some of our gang took to it like monkeys, understood the physics, learned the knots easily, just excelled. It was slower for me: I had more weight to haul up that rope, was insanely scared of heights, terrible at math. I made it to the top of the scaffolding, but had a breakdown up there before I could come down. I was grateful to meditate with a group at the camp, felt it helped even though it felt funny, self-indulgent.

Then the fights started. Two guys who were too good to camp with us and were staying in hotels decided that the camp being vegetarian was racist. The whole production shut down, hundreds of people in multiple workshops, everyone stopped everything to discuss meat eating and race. No matter that indigenous Brazilians talked about cattle production destroying their land, no matter that indigenous Canadians talked about how, although they weren't vegetarian, that factory farms were against everything they believed in. No matter that people of every color, veg and not, talked about how the camp's basis in environmental activism required that it be vegetarian. Everything stopped to let two guys (whose favorite word was maricon) talk about how they'd lose their culture if they didn't eat meat. And they did eat meat, brought in styrofoam containers from a deli every day.

For fear of being called racist, the camp ceased being vegetarian, the (Iranian) director quit, the kitchen staff quit, and everyone went home having learned half of what they intended to learn. But my girlfriend and I were vehemently vegan from then on, having so many people to make up for.

The camp fell apart, and, despite our best efforts, FUQ fell apart too. I stayed friends with those queers, and sometimes did activism with some of them. All but the sexual predator, and the one woman who supported him and who I ceased to trust. None of them ever trusted our care for animals, either, always thinking "there are more important things" and forgetting that there are many things all at once.

I read a friend's writing about FUQ and about seeing Le Tigre in the 90's in a tiny space in Brooklyn and how we were all freezing and about an action in Central Park in the Ramble when gay men where getting arrested there. And I can tell that she hasn't felt that exhilaration since, that momentum, that belief that anything can happen. And that makes me sad. We've given power over to that child molester, to that infiltrator, to those silly men who think they'd lose themselves by not eating meat. We've gone silent.

sean bell, in retrospect

I'm a little late to party: I'm just learning to use video. This unthrilling footage was taken on May 7, 2008 when there were coordinated acts of civil disobedience throughout NYC in response to a "not guilty" verdict for the cops who murdered Sean Bell. This symbolic blockade took the street and blocked the Queens-Midtown tunnel for about half hour during rush hour traffic. The idea was to shut the city down, but that didn't quite happen.
- Pictures from One Police Plaza
- Pictures from Harlem
- Report from the Brooklyn Bridge
- Report from the Triborough Bridge

It didn't happen because when black people are routinely murdered by the NYPD, the only people who become enraged enough in any numbers are black people. At the one big march that happened right after Sean Bell died, there were very, very few faces that were not black. People like to believe the dirt throwing stories that are drummed up: that the victim had been arrested once on drug charges, that he'd been rumored by another drug user to have an illegal weapon. But neither of things, if true, justify what happened.

killed by NYPD, originally uploaded by abovegroundpool.

The fact is that Sean Bell wasn't high when he was killed, and had no weapon. Undercover officers followed he and his friends out of a bar, drew guns on them without identifying themselves as police offers, and shot three unarmed men fifty times.

There's no doubt that the amount of force endorsed by the NYPD is outrageous, and that an enormous number of people are murdered by them every year; for being black, for being mentally ill, for being homeless or sex workers.
I've blogged some of these images before, but feel today, like it's worth posting them again. When Amadou Diallo was killed, and a group of mostly white queers kicked off the demonstrations, Al Sharpton was moved to say "I am a Fed Up Queer." Though honored by that statement, I think it means there aren't enough allies for the black community. We're way more comfortable assuming victims are some kind of troublemaker, that there must have been good reason.

verdict

The Sean Bell verdict came back this week: cops can use whatever amount of force they like against unarmed people. Murder, when committed by a police officer, is not murder. The police department is considering action, which generally, in these cases, means that these officers will get an extended paid leave.

killed by NYPD, originally uploaded by abovegroundpool.

bang bang

Closing arguments were given yesterday in the Sean Bell case: "The three police officers on trial for killing a 23-year-old man on his wedding day behaved appropriately." It is looking like police officers who poured 50 bullets into Sean Bell and his friends, all unarmed black men, are going to be found not guilty, just like the officers in the murders of unarmed black men Patrick Dorismond and Amadou Diallo.

The NYPD and the NYC "justice" system should continue to be challenged. Consider listening to Le Tigre's Bang Bang during your action planning meeting....

Or support:

• October 22nd Coalition
  
• Human Rights Watch
  
• Cop Watch