Be gay do crime skeleton

Be Gay Do Crime is a catchphrase and protest slogan used by activists, members and allies of the LGBTQIA+ community, promoting freedom from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or being non-cisgender. A skeleton, dressed as a pirate, bearing a torch named ‘anarchy,’ with ‘communes’ emblazoned upon her chest, ‘round bombs’ around her hat and ‘free love’ on a pin.

A sword hangs from her belt and she bears a scroll proclaiming “be gay! do crime!” The skeleton is frenzied. When trans artist @bum_lung posted the iconic skeleton design, it was a mere two days before @isislovecruft tweeted about the turnstyle incident. It was as if the entire culture was united: gay is good, and crime is part of that. I'd say the origin is that in some places it's illegal to be gay as well as the fact that villains have been queer coded for so incredibly long Also paired with the fact we have had to protest and fight to be seen.

The slogan was primarily popularized by an internet meme on Twitter of an s political cartoon originally created by Thomas Nast of a skeleton holding a torch and scroll, with the scroll edited to say "BE GAY DO CRIME!". For Quincy Brinker, who, by disrupting the talk of yet another washed-up academic trying to write Marsha and Sylvia out of Stonewall, reminded us that not even the dead will be safe if our enemy is victorious.

For Feral Pines, last seen by some of her friends throwing rocks at police, by others in an assembly plotting psychic warfare against the fascists, and by others dancing and then defacing some fascist insignia in the moments before her death. For Chris Chitty, who would surely use this opportunity to insult the insulters while transmitting some brilliant insight about where we have been and where we are going.

For Ravin Myking, whose beauty caused the pastor of a homophobic megachurch to froth at the mouth and declare the arrival of wolves to hunt his sheep, and caused the sheep to fall to the ground, speaking in tongues and praying for their absent god. Ten years ago, we were seized by a frenzied spirit and, in a trancelike state, received a set of ten weapons for a war we were only just finding the words to describe.

We experienced the whole social order as inimical to freedom, desire, and our preferred relations, but suspected we were not alone in our visceral hatred for this world. So we encoded these tools — visions of excess and otherness — into a slim zine and sent it to the ends of the earth. During that time, we stole away on trains with forged documents, on fraudulent flights, and in the cars of strangers who picked us up en route to one encounter after another.

We found each other in forest encampments, communes at the center of cities, at blockades against the storm called progress, and in revelry within the hollowed out shells of deindustrialization.

I'd say the origin is

We fought enemies minute and gargantuan on streets and in alleyways. We were there when cities were burned, buildings occupied, boutiques looted, ports blockaded, wanna-be bashers humiliated, nazis punched. We delivered an empty coffin to the doorsteps of a killer cop, threw fire into the home of a john who killed a trans woman, and more through bank windows in the name of those imprisoned for refusing a similar fate.

We found our way into reading groups and meetings, waited for the men to stop speaking, and spoke only to be misunderstood. Misunderstood except by our friends, for whom we stockpiled pepperspray and stunguns because we wanted them alive, turned tricks to pay bail because we wanted them free, walked out of grocery stores because we wanted them fed, scammed universities to bring them to our cities, sold our time at strategic institutions so we could give them everything, got really good at showing specific forms of care so good we found better hustles , waited with cigarettes and blankets outside the jails because we hated the idea of them in there alone, prepared for attacks like we would for a night with lovers, dedicated books to each other and our beloved dead because these words mean nothing outside of the relationships which give them traction.

To hold fiercely to that brilliant intimacy we shared in moments of which we can never speak, to never speak our names either, to always speak sideways in handwritten letters on the sides of buildings, delivered by hand between traveling friends, or mailed innocuously under the eyes of guards and censors. We wrote anthems and journals of exegesis, tended archives and prison distros, scammed pages by the thousands.

We filled parcels with stolen fineries and sent them with love notes to distant friends. We determined each other deserving of the ten thousand things. We developed addictions chasing highs between one uprising and the next, and later helped one another find other ways. Eventually, aching flesh and the plant kingdoms revealed their secret languages.

We learned love languages too: the inimitable joy of gifts and quiet declarations and eternities of now-time spent in affinity and in affection. Now-time: a hard-won concept we only learned by way of a sequence of loss.

Our friends and lovers have been taken from us, locked in cages, suicided by cops, burned up in dance parties at the margins of gentrifying cities. We know that our time with each other is fleeting, so we fight for every moment of interdependence and complicity. This spring, along with the flowers, an image bloomed within some small nodes of the world wide web. Here at the foundation of the image, we found words which rang familiar.

After a slight slippage in time, we remembered the feeling of those words and having written them. They were initially published as a communique issued by a criminal queer association in an underground periodical published by anarchists in Milwaukee called Total Destroy. Both the gang-form known as Bash Back! After the war, the nascent bohemian anarchist subculture that had been developing in the war resister camps among writers and art freaks, and some christians, splintered in a diaspora that bore the newly freed mystics to New York and San Francisco.

A small enclave ended up in Riverwest and stayed, joining the Galleanist anarchist lineage rooted in the city. The neighborhood remained a constant site of struggle, sometimes armed, with the forces of law and order. In the neighborhood one can find a certain crossroads at which a variety of struggles have intersected: queer struggles, struggles against racism and fascism, against the police, for the liberation of foodways, along with a dense layering of underground cultures.