new book and more stickers!

Our munch anticipated second anthology is almost complete!  We just received a test print in the mail and after a bit of editorial reworking and format tweaking we will send this project off to the printers for a full print run.  This means the book should be available around the end of the month from our wonderfully supportive distributor AK Press.  It will also be available through amazon.com, but let’s be real, purchasing the book directly from AK Press supports a much better company!

In addition to the test print of Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars, a large box of 3000 “>” stickers arrived in the mail as well.  We will get the online store up and running again soon so yall can place sticker orders.  Running around slapping our “>” stickers over the HRC’s “=”  stickers can make for quite an eventful evening!

Image by Mr. Fish (clowncrack.com)

As the policy of DADT, which bars gays and lesbians from participating openly in the US Military, expires today we don’t find ourselves celebrating.  Instead we are trying to imagine what a renewed, multifaceted anti-war movement could look like while busily plugging away on our latest archival anthology of writing and visual culture that critiques the prioritization of overturning DADT as well as  gay and lesbian investments in militarism more broadly.  We hope that this anthology will serve as a historical reminder proving that not all us queer and trans folk were banging on the doors of the war machine begging to be rainbow colored cannon fodder.  We also hope it will serve as yet another starting point for imaging other futures without war (including the material conditions that make wars “justifiable”) and conjuring actions that will bring us closer to that reality.

The anthology, Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars features writers like Yasmin Nair, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Kenyon Farrow, Tamara K. Nopper, Erica Meiners, Therese Quinn, Bill Andriette, Larry Goldsmith, Jamal Jones and more!  The book will be available in late October from our distributor, AK Press.

cover design by Chris Vargas

We are excited to announce that our next archival anthology, Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars, is in the works and is due out this fall!  This is the second anthology by the folks who previously brought you Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage. This book gathers together contemporary radical voices opposing the mainstream gay community’s uncritical approach to repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, featuring an introduction and essay by the inimitable Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, in addition to writing from other contributors to our digital archives on LGBT investments in militarism. This archival anthology asks why the historically left/radical anti-war critique of war does not extend to DADT and the issue of queers in the military.

We’ve launched a KickStarter fundraising campaign to support this book project.  This necessary funding will make the book accessible to people of all incomes by keeping it inexpensive to purchase and even free for prisoners.  We like to think of it as a community-supported publishing campaign that will help keep us from going into any further debt to produce and share our work.  Plus, if you make a donation we will send you fun stuff, just like a farm share!

- Yasmin and Conrad contributed an article on gay marriage, neo-colonialism and re-imagining what global queer solidarity could look like to the inaugural issue of the online journal accompanying Carlos Motta‘s We Who Feel Differently project.  Conrad was also interviewed as part of the project and the video and transcript is available here.

- Yasmin and Conrad also did a few radio interviews over the last month.  Yasmin’s podcast from WBEZ’s (Chicago’s NPR) Eight Forty-Eight program can be found here and Conrad’s podcast with KUCI’s Justice or Just Us program with Jarret Lovell can be found here.

- Our next archival anthology, Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars, will focus on critiquing gay and lesbian investments in overturning Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  It is due out Fall, 2011.  We will be launching a KickStarter campaign on the 1st of July to help fund this project as we’ve already maxed out as many credit cards as we could scam for the first book…

- We will be reorganizing the digital archives over the next few months to make it easier to find articles and images.  When we started we only had a few here and there.  Now we the good problem of having a lot more to organize!  So be on the look out for an archival reorganization at some point this summer.

- We will be spearheading an A.E. into libraries project soon too!  We are doing our best to make our work as accessible as possible to folks, so we are making sure that at least one library in every state in the country has our book.  Below is a map showing which states already have a copy in at least one library.  Don’t see your state listed?  Then go to your public or university library and request the book.  Just bring the title, author and ISBN number and they should be able to handle it!

each pink state has at least on library with our book!

There is also a Wisconsin event in there, just to keep all yall on your toes!

>          >          >

April 1 – Seattle, WA @ Cornish College, Notions Building Lecture Hall, 2pm
April 2 – Seattle, WA @ Hollow Earth Radio, workshop w/ Queer Youth Space, 2pm
April 8 – Portland, OR @ Red and Black Cafe, 7pm
April 12 – Rohnert Park, CA @ Sanoma State University, Stevenson 1002, Noon
April 14 – Santa Cruz, CA @ UCSC, Crown Merrill Community Room,  7pm
April 16 – San Francisco, CA @ Modern Times Bookstore, 7pm
April 18 – Los Angeles, CA @ University of S. California, Taper Hall room 201, 5:30pm

April 20 – Madison, WI @ U of W, The Union, 7pm

there will likely be a few more events added to the tour schedule in the coming weeks, so check back again before the end of the month!

>          >          >

Mar 2, 2011 – Asheville, NC @ Firestorm Cafe & Books, informal conversations, 7pm, w/ Conrad
Mar 3, 2011 – Asheville, NC @ UNCA, Humanities Lecture Hall, lecture, 8pm w/ Conrad

>          >          >

The sassy designers at Against Equality have created a new set of 1″ buttons bringing together the retro 80′s design from Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign and Gran Fury‘s iconic “silence = death” logo that was later adopted by ACT UP.  A third button of our own “greater than”  logo rounds out the collection of newly available trinkets to adorn your most flagrant pair of hot pants.  We hope these little buttons act as just one more way to spark much needed dialog about other kinds of queer and trans futures we might find most inhabitable.  To order buttons click here!

In the midst of the affective and emotional cacophony about the “right” of gays to marry as a simple expression of love, gay marriage was portrayed as part of a progressive/left agenda, and few people seemed to notice that the national gay marriage campaigns are in fact deeply conservative . For instance, the argument that committed gays ought to be able to marry in order that their spouses might receive health care reinforced the spread of privatization by affirming that the state has little to no responsibility for people’s well-being.

Even fewer seemed to notice that several queer voices were dissenting from the newly strident emphasis on gay marriage as the only way to gain “full equality.”  Many of these voices were questioning the very notion of “equality” and making critical and nuanced critiques of the complicated and problematic ways in which issues of economic inequality and race were erased in the drive to make gay marriage the only worthwhile cause of the “community.”

As Against Equality transformed into a collective project and more critical perspectives were added to the archive, the responses we received from readers made it clear that we were filling a giant vacuum in the public discourse on gay marriage. Over and over, we heard from people who were deeply grateful to have access to the constellation of essays we gathered. It became evident that not only were large numbers of queer and trans folks angry at where the gay marriage campaigns were heading, they were interested in finding concrete ways to resist it. To make these conversations more accessible to folks offline, we compiled a sampling of archived essays into an anthology. We issued a call for art, and the result is the fantastic postcard series we make available with every book order.

A year later, our first book Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage is a reality, we have nearly sold out of our first press of five hundred, and we have just concluded our first book tour and are planning the next one. Our discussions and the work of collective members and contributors are clearly making a deep impact. We have begun the process of filing an amicus brief with a few other like-minded queer and trans social justice organizations in the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger case, and will be submitting a piece to the inaugural edition of the new international journal, We Who Feel Differently. Plans for the second book in the series critiquing militarism and the fight to overturn “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are underway, and our digital archive, which is as important to us as our book projects, continues to grow.

Our book tour was especially gratifying for us because we not only learned that the work is making an impact, but that queers and straights everywhere are taking the critiques we offer back into their organizing and daily lives. In our own work, as activists who work on issues like queer youth homelessness, the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, immigration reform, school violence, and the prison industrial complex, to name a few, we feel more emboldened and assured that the possibility for a queer, and truly radical and just world, still exists. We thank you for making this possible!

xo – the Against Equality Collective