FAG RAG REALNESS

On writing as resistance and resilience.

Hi! I’m Jacob, and this is Fslur.

Today, writing as resistance and resilience in the face of regressing cultural and political status for queer people. Right up top, recognize that I write from a place of privilege as a white, mostly cisgender (ugh, labels) middle-class fslur. Trans people, queer people of color and queer people with less economic security face distinctly intensified threats to safe self-determination. More on this to come.

I recently attended a historical retrospective on Fag Rag, a magazine of commentary, creative writing and art published in Boston from 1971 to about 1987. I hadn’t previously encountered Fag Rag, but the name hooked me for obvious reasons. The event, a panel discussion among some of the original contributors as well as historians of queer literature, was a gold mine of insight into the queer experience of the era, the progress of recent decades and the role of art as connective tissue preserving identity and community across space and time.

I confess that I was a little envious, wishing I’d been part of the team putting out Fag Rag. Even by today’s standards, the magazine pushed boundaries. And I don’t mean the erotic art. As drawn up in this fabulous 2020 report from Columbia Journalism Review, the magazine “presented queerness as a repudiation of everything wrong with America” and argued in an editorial that “because the order of the world starts and ends in the family with Daddy, fascism comes not only from the nuclear family but from compulsive heterosexuality.” What would you expect from Charles Shively, a writer behind Fag Rag whose least provocative essay may be Cocksucking as an Act of Revolution. You understand my envy.

Another gem from now-Harvard Professor Michael Bronski, another Fag Rag contributor and one of the retrospective participants — the magazine was anarchist with a lowercase ‘a.’ I like this framework. I’m shy of labels, especially political labels associated with distinct movements or ideologies. Don’t cancel me, but I’m not ready to identify as an Anarchist, Communist or Socialist. But I’m invested in working against hetero-patriarchy, capitalism and settler-colonialism, and not in abstract, academic terms. I have skin in the game. My identity, and the identities of those with whom I share community, is under threat.

This is complicated. Is spending money not participating in capitalism? Is enjoying the stability afforded by the world’s dominant military power not upholding American settler-colonialism? And is cocksucking not an act of submission? I’ll need to write a full response to Shively’s essay. To this point, I don’t think there’s an easy answer. We really do live in a society. We’re all complicit. And I value my freedoms — the ability to go where I want, dress how I want, buy what I want and — most importantly — read and write what I want.

Here’s the rub — I want everyone to be able to live how they want to live. This includes Palestinians, Sudanese, Ukrainians, political dissidents and queer people around the world. But I’m a white American writing in America. This is my lane. And you may have noticed that, despite a long, generally positive trend toward progress, we’ve seen a significant backslide in the last decade or so. Safety for queer folks, people of color and even women in this country has never been under more significant threat in my lifetime.

This sentiment charged the atmosphere at the Fag Rag retrospective, which took place just days after the election. There was apprehension in the air, and pain and anger and fear. But I found the discussion of Fag Rag inspiring. Now is not the time to accept defeat. Now is the time to learn from our history, carry the torch forward and organize into resistance. I don’t mean virtue signaling with pink hats. I mean muscularly and unashamedly exercising our rights. Our rights to publish, gather and speak. Our rights to marry. Our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Importantly, now is the time to step up our allyship. Immigrants are the scapegoat now. What about when the police confiscate your passport? Abortion is the scapegoat now. What about when schools mandate bible study? Trans people are the scapegoat now. What about when sodomy is illegal again? We can’t wait until we’re personally impacted. Anyone who values living in a free and open society needs to start living those values.

Fslur is the start of something. I’ve worried about sanitizing myself and my work, about facing blowback for being too queer, for not assimilating enough. But I’m done with that. In the spirit of Fag Rag, I want to get more comfortable challenging the fascism of compulsive heterosexuality and other systems of oppression. If my professional opportunities suffer, I will take the hit. If I face retribution in the years to come, I will fight. And if I have to suck more cock, so be it.

Thanks for reading! Do you have thoughts? Do you know someone else who might? Please pass me around, and don’t hesitate to hit me up with comments, questions and fresh ideas. Catch you next time!

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