queer as in "rocket launchertttt"

yo gay ass needs to read this

every june, pride month arrives drenched in corporate money and state endorsement. it gets stripped of its radical history and political teeth. what gets erased is the fact that pride began with an uprising against police violence, not no damn parade for assimilation. we need to bring them damn bricks back. pride month isn't some culmination of queer resistance, but it should be pointed out that the queer community has been going hard as fuck. political engagement has intensified, marked by collective action and structural critique.

but pride 2025 is also marked by a sharp contradiction: celebration and resistance side by side. on one hand, u got all the mainstream stuff and art/historical rememberance. on the other, over 500 anti-lgbtq+ bills across amerikkka are reminding anyone who forgot- that "be gay, do crime" is actually a statement and not just a suggestion.

when we say queerness is criminalized, we gotta be precise. the demonization of queerness is not some natural human reaction. before europe imposed its colonial, capitalist, christian framework on the world, queer and gender-expansive ways of living were integrated into countless cultures. queerness was not “against” anything. it simply was.

settler colonialism didn't just steal land. it stole definition. it tore apart entire systems of meaning and replaced them with hierarchy, domination, and rigid control. gender, once flexible and ceremonial in many indigenous societies, became a legal status. sex became about reproduction, about population control, about discipline. intimacy got conscripted into the service of the state. queer practices, which had once been woven into communal life, were rebranded as deviant. being queer was no longer a role or a relationship. it became a problem to be solved.

across the globe, indigenous people held and still hold gender systems that defy european binaries. on turtle island, two-spirit people existed in many nations with sacred roles. in south asia, hijra people were part of the social and spiritual fabric. in hawai‘i, māhū people were respected for their unique balance. the colonizers saw this and reacted with disgust. their response was not confusion. it was strategic violence. gender fluidity disrupted property inheritance. queer kinship complicated control. so the colonizers outlawed it, institutionalized children, and enforced heterosexuality as the default.

heres a few more examples of gender multiplicity, specifically in africa:

*Buganda (Uganda): mukodo dako were assigned male at birth but lived as women and could even marry men. pre-colonial ugandan society accepted them until british colonialism + christianity criminalized queerness.

*The Dagaaba (Ghana): recognize people who embody both masculine and feminine spirits. they aren’t boxed in. it’s fluid, spiritual, communal.

*The Chewa (Malawi): makhosikazi were male-bodied dancers who performed women’s roles in rituals. sacred, not spectacle.

*Sango priests (Yoruba, Nigeria): often included gender-nonconforming or feminine men, seen as vessels of divine power.

this is why we can’t separate queerness from decolonization. to queer everything is to unmake the settler project at its core. its to recognize that queerness is not a modern identity but an ancient relationship to the land, the body, and the spirit. queerness is not new.

i wanna clarify some political terrain tho, especially since empire, liberalism, and corporate agendas flatten all forms of deviance into marketable identities. specifically, a distinction between "gay" as an imperfect umbrella term and "queer", as a term that alot of people still draw a false equivalence with. gay usually refers narrowly to sexual orientation, while queer functions more as a political orientation: a refusal of normativity in all its forms: gender, family, citizenship, economy, whiteness, nation-state, even time itself.

the difference matters because we live in a world where u can be gay and uphold carceral logic, imperial war, and racial capitalism. queer, signals something deeper than who u fuck or love. it signals how u resist. it pushes us to interrogate what we’re aligning with and what we’re opposing. without making that distinction, we risk reducing queerness to aesthetics, visibility, or lifestyle, and stripped of its insurrectionary potential.

the empire has learned to neutralize queerness by flattening it into mere identity. being gay is not a choice. it's a biologically-influenced orientation shaped by complex interactions of genetics, hormones, and development. but queerness is not the same tho. queerness is a political decision, a social posture, a structural antagonism. it names a refusal to comply with the systems that manage and discipline sexuality and gender. to be queer, as in radical as fuck.

queerness is a mode of war against the social, political, and hegemonic order. it's the art of becoming ungovernable while keeping love intact. fucking shit up and taking care of each other. it's not rainbow capitalism, not tolerance, not progressive policy reform. it's the collapse of borders, binaries, and all institutions built to manage, measure, and contain deviance. queerness interrupts like pro palestine activists at a tim scott fundraiser. It cuts across the timeline of empire, refusing the demand to move in straight lines or reproduce the very structures that kill us.

family structures imposed by the state are carceral. queer kinship rewrites lineage outside property and patriarchy. kinship is chosen, not assigned. its based on survival, not inheritance. queer kin decentralizes bloodlines, surnames, and legal contracts. we build families as ecosystems of resistance. queer kinship dismantles the myth that family is synonymous with the nuclear, heteronormative unit. instead, we anchor ourselves in relational webs of support that refuse capitalist logic. we claim belonging not because of inheritance but because of solidarity. ive always felt that it's much more redeeming to intentionally cultivate the spaces we exist in by refusing to let empire define what belonging looks like. like, it’s not enough to just survive the margins. we gotta shape them. we gotta loudly reject the idea that liberation is something given or granted. we say nah, "we gon’ build our own shit". we redefine beauty, kinship, even time itself. it’s redeeming because it’s generative.

queer does not mean soft assimilation into cishet liberalism. its a feral logic that rejects the nation as a project of death. we kinda dont need more visibility within genocidal structures; we actuallyneed those structures to collapse. and die forever. so queerness must remain unintelligible to the empire. because if they can brand it, they will bury it. they picture us waving flags on tanks, cheering for politicians who legislate our extinction. but remember that pride began as a riot. pride as in a rocket launcher must keep it there.

queer people, especially black, brown, and trans folks, have always been targeted by the carceral state. from anti-cross-dressing laws to sodomy laws to the ongoing criminalization of sex work, homelessness, and substance use, the state has policed queerness long before there were parades. even today, queer youth make up a disproportionate percentage of the incarcerated and houseless population. therefore pride without prison abolition is performance without integrity.

queerness in prison is a mode of being that interrupts the carceral order at its most intimate level. prison isn't just a way for the empire to erase people, it's also a regime of gender regulation. it encodes hypermasculinity, racialized discipline, and heteronormativity into the bones of daily life: how one walks, talks, sits, survives. under these conditions, queerness doesn't just deviate; it exposes. it reveals the cracks in the cis-hetero-patriarchal logic that governs incarceration and it refuses to perform the masculinity that sustains the prison hierarchy.

the prison system is built on a plantation model where racialized gender is weaponized to produce docility or destruction. masculinity behind bars isn't just expected, it's enforced. tenderness is punished. vulnerability is marked as weakness, and that weakness becomes a threat to the power structures that organize prison life. in this context, queerness really spins the empire's top. disco. it can neither be domesticated nor fully annihilated. so it must be brutalized, hidden, or made spectacular.

to talk about queerness in prison during pride is to remind the world that not all of us are free. that some are still behind bars for being too femme, too loud, too defiant. we are insisting that our movement isn’t complete until all cages are dismantled.

audre lorde tells us that the erotic isnt just pleasure. its a source of knowing and power. queer eroticism disrupts the state’s moral logic by revealing value in desire itself. the erotic decouples intimacy from utility, exposing relationships as sites of resistance. to claim erotic freedom is to destroy the state’s claim on our bodies and desires. we wield erotic knowledge as a tool to dismantle hierarchies. pleasure becomes praxis, a way to know ourselves outside of capitalist extraction. in the erotic, we glimpse the possibility of collective joy beyond domination. erotic as in destruction.

queer as in radical as fuck turns every particle of existence into a site of struggle. when we say queer is treason against the settler definition of the human, we mean it. the settler state insists on coherent gender, coherent family, coherent productivity. coherence is compliance. but queer sovereignty is dissociative sovereignty. we reclaim our lives through liberatory fragmentation. we reject the pathologized frames that depict dissociation as illness. instead, dissociation becomes refusal. we fragment on purpose to resist capture. to be queer is to be a sovereignty that can't be mapped or owned by the empire.

progress, productivity, deadlines, retirement, death. heteronormativity mirrors that: birth, school, marriage, kids, legacy. it's very linear. queerness disrupts that flow. we create kin outside of blood, joy outside of utility, intimacy outside of possession. queer temporality honors pauses, loops, disappearances, detours. it privileges connection over completion. it teaches that survival cannot be measured by deadlines.

we also queer value. under capitalism, bodies and labor are extracted and exchanged based on productivity and compliance. queerness challenges not only who is valued but how value is constructed. a queer politic sees rest as resistance, disability as knowledge, failure as method, pleasure as praxis. queering labor is not about hiring queer people but challenging wage labor itself. queering education is not about adding pronouns but abolishing the classroom as a carceral gatekeeper. queering love is not about loving the same gender but breaking from ownership, scarcity, and relational competition.

to queer everything is to decenter the state, the nuclear family, the binary, the border, the job, the clock, the god of capital. it is fundamentally abolitionist. normativity is a colonial imposition, never a neutral structure. queerness means resisting the pull to be respectable, recognizable, or redeemable by systems that erase us. it's a commitment to fluidity without aimlessness, subversion without nihilism. we don't queer everything to make it trendier. we do it because the status quo is killing us, and queerness is the architecture of another way to live.

as in every revolutionary endeavor, we don't need allies. we need accomplices. because this is about life and death. the violence queer people face is not random. i's disciplinary, strategic. it punishes what cannot be domesticated. so when we queer everything, we do more than break rules. we refuse to die for someone else’s order. we say, "if your world needs us to disappear in order to function, your world must end."

homophobia is not about who someone fucks. it is about which relationships, intimacies, and social alignments get to count as legitimate. queerness threatens compulsory heterosexuality and hierarchical roles. it disrupts not only desire but function. many interpret queerness as stepping out of assigned social utility. the moment someone deviates from the gendered or sexual script, they are seen as a public offense. this is why queerness is framed as a danger to the collective social story. people defend that story with mockery, discomfort, even violence. they treat queerness as liability. if empire is built on disconnection, then queerness is a reconnection. it reimagines the universe as intimacy. it forges a metaphysical mutual aid, it doesn't just distribute mutual aid but also a feeling of "i belong here". it constructs love as non-transactional, not asking for id, compliance, or productivity. queerness dreams the divine between us, and is defined by the choice to survive together.

so this pride month, ask yourself: are u safe, or are u free? are u visible, or are u uncontrollable? queer as in radical as fuck. this pride is not brought to u by corporate sponsors. pride this year is brought to u by glocks with switches, by trans communities who rise.

queerness in the tradition of abolitionist thought is inseparable from anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism. a queer politics that does not confront empire is not queer. to unlearn shame. to name beauty on our own terms. queerness is treason against the settler definition of the human. to be human in this world was always a white, cis, patriarchal, able-bodied category. queerness withdraws the self from empire’s jurisdiction.

ultimately, queering everything is a threat. it must be. if you want inclusion, go buy a rainbow flag and wave it behind a police cruiser. but if you want freedom, if you want the world to end so we can build another, then be queer as in radical as fuck.

assimilation is death disguised as success and it obscures the violence that underwrites so-called progress. we refuse to be co-opted by liberal narratives that claim inclusion while theaters of genocide persist.

palestine is not “an issue.” palestine is the frontline of empire. its where settler colonialism continues to refine its strategies of domination through surveillance, military occupation, and apartheid.

so when we say “queer liberation,” we are saying “abolish borders,” “fuck the police,” “dismantle zionism.” we are saying that queerness can't coexist with a genocidal settler project. we are saying that queer palestinians do not need to be “saved” by western ngos. they need the bombs to stop falling, the checkpoints dismantled, the occupation ended.

pride and palestine intersect because both challenge the foundational myths of liberal democracy. both expose the lie that the state can offer justice. both demand a world built not through inclusion into existing power, but through its destruction. queer resistance and palestinian resistance are aligned not out of sentiment, but out of shared antagonism to the empire.

in this frame, pride without palestine isn't just incomplete. its counterrevolutionary. every pinkwashed statement that ignores the bombs dropped on gaza is a betrayal. every liberal celebration of gay rights that partners with zionist lobbies is complicity.

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queer as in "let's paint our bricks nice and pretty"

the F is for fag