It Is Easier to Hate Gay Shame than to Hate a Murderous World

Abstract

Abstract Gay Shame is a direct-action collective that has been active in the San Francisco Bay Area for over twenty years. The group has never had any funding, and its members have met almost every week for decades and produced a wide range of interventions articulating an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, abolitionist queer politics. The author has been following the work of Gay Shame since its beginnings, engaging in related work in other cities and sometimes overlapping and collaborating with Gay Shame's members, since the early 2000s. Gay Shame's work has been prophetic. Compared to the other groups and people the author has worked with on this same intersecting set of concerns and interventions since the mid-2000s, Gay Shame has anticipated the conditions of reductive identity politics, the conditions of gentrification, and the methods of neoliberal co-optation with more accuracy and precision than anyone else. Again and again, Gay Shame has anticipated these conditions before others, making interventions that were often quite controversial because others were not yet ready to identify and name the contradictions and antagonisms that Gay Shame was naming. At this moment, when resistance is more necessary than ever, but groups and projects struggle under the weight of conflict, co-optation, and counterinsurgency, it is particularly useful to study how a group like Gay Shame has initiated and sustained this work.