Karma Chávez in NYC.   (photo credit: Santhosh Chandrashekhar)

AE was also recently informed that the book coming out of the After Homosexual conference in Melbourne, Australia, at which Ryan Conrad presented for AE over a year ago, finally got the green light.  A co-authored piece between Ryan Conrad, Yasmin Nair, and Karma Chávez, “Against Equality, Against Capitalism: Towards an Economic Critique of Gay Marriage,” will appear in the conference publication.  The trio also co-authored the introduction of another forthcoming Australia-based book project called To The Exclusion of All Others where our foreword titled, “Against Equality: From the Belly of the Beast to the Land Down Under,” will appear.  We are also currently working on a self-reflective piece for a queer archives special issue of the journal Radical History Review, tentatively titled “Against Equality: Radical Queer Memory and Action.”

Imagining Queer Justice

In addition to our writing and archiving, collective members have made a few in-person appearances.  On April 10, Karma Chávez spoke at Bluestocking Books in New York City to talk about Prisons Will Not Protect You, and on April 26, Ryan Conrad will appear on a panel at Wesleyan University titled Imagining Queer Justice: Prison Abolition and LGBT Hate Crimes Legislation along with author and AE contributor Eric A. Stanley and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s very own Reina Gossett (all thanks to the wonderful organizing of Margot Weiss). We continue to post about these events and others on our Facebook and Twitter pages, so make sure to join us there if you can.

More from us soon!

Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You,

LGBT organizations have rallied around hate crime legislation (HCL) in an effort to address the violence faced by queers and trans people, but the writers in Prisons Will Not Protect You  point out that HCL only extends the reach of the prison industrial complex.  Hate crime legislation ostensibly provides added protections to minority groups and serves as a deterrent against future crimes by extending and enhancing penalties.

However, as the writers in this anthology show, hate crime penalty enhancement has no proven record of preventing anti-queer and trans violence.  Furthermore, HCL disproportionately targets the poorest populations, particularly people of color, who cannot afford the legal resources necessary to fight back against charges of having committed “hate crimes.”  Ironically, they are from the very same marginalized communities that HCL is supposed to protect.

Prisons Will Not Protect You, edited by Against Equality co-founder Ryan Conrad, analyzes the inequality and violence perpetuated by hate crime legislation and its role in perpetuating the prison industrial complex. This archival anthology features an original introduction by Dean Spade, the prominent trans legal scholar and author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (2011).  

These essays also examine cases of violence towards queer and trans people, including the New Jersey Four and the Texas Four, demonstrating the vulnerability of gendered, raced, and classed queer bodies within law enforcement.  Prisons Will Not Protect You exposes deadly links between state-sponsored violence, homophobia, transphobia, and the criminal punishment system while articulating the need to build better solutions to end all forms of violence.  Arguing that hate crime legislation only helps funnel massive numbers of people into the profit-driven prison system, this book details abolitionist alternatives to harsh sentencing and rethinks our responses to crime and violence.

Eric A. Stanley, filmmaker and co-editor of Captive Genders (2011), writes that the essays “detonate the LGBT mainstream’s argument that justice hinges on imprisoning the “correct” bodies and reaffirm that imprisonment itself is the antagonism of our collective liberation.”

Proceeds from all book sales underwrite Against Equality’s policy of sending all AE titles to LGBTQI prisoners at no cost.  The book is available from AK Press and Amazon.com, and will be available from our own website shortly.

Cover design by Chris E. Vargas

We are happy to update yall about our newest anthology due out this fall.  We have been working hard all summer to bring you the third and final installation of our archival trilogy. With this book Against Equality once again demonstrates that another queer and radical world is possible.  The essays in this volume take a critical stance against the prison industrial complex and the system of inequality and violence perpetuated by hate crimes legislation, formally passed in the United States in 2009 as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

Prisons Will Not Protect You, a compilation of archived work, is located at the difficult and traumatic point where the violence of the state against queer and LGBT people colludes with the violence we are always trying to escape. The pieces here question the gay community’s fealty to the prison industrial complex, arguing that hate crimes legislation, which enhances penalties and can even be used to bring in the death penalty, only serves to funnel massive numbers of people into prisons with increasing lengths of time served and the use of tortuous methods like solitary confinement. This has significant racial and economic implications in a country that houses five percent of the world’s population but nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners and where prisons have become, for many impoverished area and people, the only source of livelihood.

Click for more details…

We hope you are having a terrific summer.  The Against Equality Collective has been busy, as usual, as we gear up for some exciting events, most notably the upcoming release this fall of our third pocket-sized book, Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You.  As you may know, since launching in 2009, we have been dedicated to searching for creative ways and a plethora of venues to critique the mainstream gay and lesbian movement.

In the last three years, we have ruffled feathers and become a recognized voice in national LGBTQ debates. Here’s a snapshot of our accomplishments:

• Built a free online archive of radical queer and trans critiques containing nearly 100 entries.

• Self-published 2 widely reviewed and acclaimed books that we continue to provide at no cost to queer and trans people who are incarcerated.

• Created 2 sets of original postcards, 1 set of buttons, and distributed over 5,000 of our satirical “greater than” stickers.

• Participated in 28 community events, lectures, and panels.

• Presented at several academic and activist conferences, including the 2011 annual College Art Association Conference in New York, the 2012 After Homosexual Conference in Melbourne, and the upcoming Harry Hay Conference in New York.

• Wrote for 6 popular press and academic outlets.

• Appeared as guests on 12 television and radio programs and gave interviews for numerous of print and online publications.

And there’s more to come. But it’s getting expensive.

A.E. is entirely run by five volunteers in an anti-capitalist collective committed to staying outside of the 501c3 non-profit structure.  This decision means that we have no access to the grants and funding sources available to non-profit organizations, but we are able to maintain our autonomy from grant cycles and funders’ whims.  This allows us to focus our energy on our work instead of cumbersome organizational and financial management as well as the time-consuming task of writing grants we are not likely to receive because of the politics of our work.

This model of anti-capitalist organizing also means that we give most of our cultural products away for free or donations, we sell our books nearly at cost, and we work with the meager funds contributed by collective members.  We’ve received small honorariums from giving talks at universities, and we’ve collected some income from book sales, but most of the cost sits on our personal credit cards, collecting interest while we struggle to pay it down. Activism isn’t cheap, and we hope that if you think our work is important, you’ll be willing to help us out with a financial contribution.  We currently have just over $5,000 in debt primarily due to the printing costs associated with our publications, and we expect that this amount will significantly increase when we print our next book later this year.  We are looking at nearly doubling our debt.

If financial contributions are not possible for you at this time, or you would like to contribute in additional ways, there are numerous possibilities:

• Request that your home university’s library purchase copies of our books
• Consider incorporating one of our books into the course(s) you teach
• Review our project or one of our books in popular or academic publications
• Share our work with your colleagues and students
• Invite one of us to speak about our work at your university with an honorarium
• Cite our work in your upcoming publications if relevant
• Send us articles and link to art and cultural projects that we can add to our archives

Thank you for considering to support the work of the Against Equality Collective. If you are considering a financial contribution, you can use the PayPal donation button on the bottom right corner of our website. If you’d like to know more about contributing in other ways, you can contact us at againstequality@gmail.com. We appreciate your time and consideration, and look forward to continuing to reinvigorate the queer political imagination with fantastic possibilities!

Together In the Struggle,

The Against Equality Collective
Yasmin, Ryan, Deena, Alex, and Karma

This back to school tote bag, based on the logo design for Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No to Drugs campaign, playfully reminds us that heterosexuality (and all its attendant traditions) is indeed the opiate of the masses.  This reusable tote is sure to impress all your recently gay-married friends in the state of New York who are already searching for divorce lawyers.  It will likely raise a few unfriendly gay eyebrows in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington where gay marriage will be put before voters this fall. It will also surely impress everyone at your local food co-op, farmer’s market, library, or anywhere else where you need a bag for carrying your items.

We did a limited run of fifty hand-printed totes that we sourced from a local American company.  These bags are made from natural cotton canvas and measure 11″ x 13″ x 4″.  Each three-panel tote bag is uniquely stitched and printed by hand, so the exact size and print will vary from tote to tote.  But they all look the pretty much the same as seen here.  To get your hands on one of these limited edition tote bags, get on over to our online store and check out our complete line of conversation starters.

>>>Upcoming Events>>>
In just a few weeks we will do a book launch for Against Equality: Don’t Ask To Fight Their Wars at the New Museum in New York City as part of Carlos Motta‘s We Who Feel Differently project.  The event takes place on June 21st, 2012 at 7:30pm on the 5th floor of the New Museum: 235 Bowery in Manhattan.

We also just got some great news that A.E. will be doing a panel this fall at Radically Gay: The Life & Visionary Legacy of Harry Hay, a conference hosted by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY from September 27th – 30th, 2012.  Our panel is titled “Eat Your Fetish!: Against Equality and the Politics of Queer Cultural Production and Appropriation” and features presentations from Karma Chavez, Yasmin Nair, and Ryan Conrad.  We are sure to ruffle at least a few tail feathers.

>>>Upcoming Publications>>>
Against Equality has written work appearing in upcoming publications including 5th Estate magazine, AREA Chicago, and After Homosexual, an anthology inspired by the Australian conference by the same name at which A.E. presented back in February 2012.

>>>Project Updates>>>
Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You, the third book in our pocket-book series, is coming together in time for publication this fall.  This book critiques the demands by gay and lesbian organizations seeking LGBT inclusion in hate crimes laws and looks more broadly at the prison industrial complex as a site of harm and violence that disproportionately affects queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people.  Chris E. Vargas will be designing a fabulous cover for us once again and Dean Spade will lend his voice to do the book’s introduction.

A.E. is also still working on a new anthology of erotic fiction called Fuck Equality and we’ve extended the deadline through the end of the year! We’re looking for submissions of original, unpublished stories between 1500 – 2000 words that incorporate our political agenda of challenging mainstream gay and lesbian politics (ie. marriage, military service, and hate crimes legislation) into the storyline. We’re always trying to find new ways to animate our politics; what more fun and sexy way to share our political project than with naughty tales of queer debauchery and gender terrorism!?  Details here.

Without further delay, the designs:

Cristine Drach, (New York)

Ryan Conrad, (Maine)

Sam Wallman, (Melbourne)

This new series of postcards will be available to order from us next month when we relaunch our online store on May 1st.  Thanks again to all who participated and special thanks to Cristine, Conrad, and Sam for sharing such great work with us!