Queerness, in the anarchist frame, is not an identity category. It is a political position — the refusal of the compulsory, the normal, the assigned. The refusal to accept that the state should be in the business of certifying which love is real.
This episode traces what happened when that refusal became a legal campaign. Stonewall 1969 was a riot led by trans women of colour and homeless queer youth. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera built STAR House from a truck in 1970 — a shelter for homeless trans kids, funded by their own sex work, governed horizontally. Rivera was booed at the 1973 gay liberation rally for being too radical.
But the American story is only part of it. In India, the hijra community held court authority under the Mughal Empire for centuries — until the British Raj criminalised them with Section 377 in 1860, a colonial law imposed on 42 countries that had no equivalent at home. In Uganda, the laws used to persecute queer people today were introduced by British colonial administrators, not by African tradition. In Brazil, the travesti communities built mutual aid networks and political organisations against state violence decades before the mainstream movement noticed they existed.
The laws criminalising queer life across the Global South are not ancient local traditions. They are colonial exports. And the communities that resisted them did so through exactly the practices this show keeps returning to: mutual aid, horizontal organising, building the world you need without asking permission.
ACT UP's direct action cut the price of AZT. Bash Back kept asking the question the mainstream movement had stopped asking. The argument has never stopped being made — everywhere, in different forms, for a very long time.
Topics: queer anarchism, Stonewall, Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, STAR House, ACT UP, marriage equality, Bash Back, Section 377, hijra, colonial law, Brazil, travestis, ASTRAL, food sovereignty, queer liberation, trans rights, decolonisation.
Further reading:
— Susan Stryker, Transgender History (2008)
— Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007)
— Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? (2003)
— Enze Han & Joseph O'Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalisation of Homosexuality (2018)
— José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (2009)
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