Making Things Together: Zines, Strategy, and Survival
“We're going to need a lot more in-person opportunities for us to expand our humanity,” says organizer Mariame Kaba.
"We can only be brave together,” says Mariame Kaba. In this episode of Movement Memos, host Kelly Hayes talks with Kaba and writer and organizer Red Schulte about political education, collective courage, and the mistakes we’ll make along the way.
Music: Son Monarcas & Sarah, the Illstrumentalist
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This transcript was originally published in Truthout. It is reprinted here with permission.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we will be hearing from two of my favorite people, author and organizer Mariame Kaba, and writer, organizer, and zinester Red Schulte. We’ll be talking about political education that actually builds power: zines as analog infrastructure, reviving our base-building skills, and creating spaces where people learn, practice, and belong. We’ll also talk about censorship, link rot, organizing outside the law, and why tenderness, discernment, and making mistakes together are survival skills under fascism.
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KH: Red and Mariame, welcome to “Movement Memos.”
Mariame Kaba: Thank you for having us.
Red Schulte: Thank you so much, Kelly.
KH: How are you both doing today?
RS: I’m hanging in there. I’ve been holding some really big complicated feelings recently while helping a project sunset, and to be honest, I’m quite tired, but I am real thrilled to be here talking with y’all right now. You both always really sooth my spirit.
MK: This is Mariame and I unfortunately actually today am feeling a little bit under the weather, but I really wanted to have this conversation with the two of you who are some of my closest comrades and friends, and so I am here and hopefully coherent.
KH: Well, I’m so grateful to be in conversation with you both. I learn something new every time we talk, and I really value the opportunity to think alongside you. To begin, could you each share a bit about yourselves and the work you do?
RS: Sure. This is Red. Hey y’all. I’m from rural Texas originally, but have worked and organized in Chicago, Illinois, and New York City for many years. I’m a sex worker community organizer, zinester, oral historian. I’m also a PhD student in art history. I politically exist somewhere on the anarchism-to-full-communism spectrum. I’m also extremely invested in print culture, analog film, and other media to the nerdy n-th degree as you both can confirm. I’ve also been heavily involved with prison abolition, abortion, harm reduction, and education justice struggles since my early youth.
MK: Yes, I currently am the co-director or co-principal of Interrupting Criminalization, which I started with my friend Andrea Ritchie back in 2018. Interrupting Criminalization is a movement hub, a resource, a space for convening people, and all with an eye towards how we interrupt criminalization, which we see as basically fuel for fascism and so could not be more important in this moment. But I’m also part of a whole bunch of other formations that I’ve been part of co-creating with other people for many years, including Survived & Punished national, including a couple of library-related projects that I recently started in the last couple of years with other people.
One is called For The People: A Leftist Library Project and the other is the New York City Public Library Action Network, so NYCPLAN. I also run a small press, a micro-press called Sojourners for Justice Press with my friend Neta Bomani, and I launched that in 2020. Neta came on board to co-direct in 2022, and we started along with our regular publishing and printing something called the Black Zine Fair last year, so this year was our second year of doing that work, so I’m able to use all of my loves around fighting against criminalization, trying to figure out a library for the 21st century, and making stuff with others through print and publications, through all of that. I’ll stop there, but the list is long of all the things I’m doing on a regular basis, so I’ll just lift up those for now.
KH: I appreciate those highlights. I know that if we tried to name all of the projects that Mariame’s involved with, we would run out of time, and the episode would be over.
MK: [Laughs]
RS: It’s true.
KH: So many plates spinning. As your friends, it’s really something to behold.
MK: It’s really true. I can’t help it. It’s not…
RS: No, you can’t.
MK: I know. I know y’all, I know. I’m trying.
KH: Well, we love this about you.
RS: It’s true, very much.
KH: You’ve both been involved with political and popular education efforts for many years. I want to talk about the importance of that work in this moment and what it can and should look like. Let’s start with zines. I know many of our listeners probably love reading and making zines, but I’ve learned the hard way that not everyone knows what a zine is or why they’re important. Red, could you start us off with an explanation of what zines are and why they are such an important medium for activists and marginalized people?
RS: Absolutely, Kelly. I know a lot of people have their own conceptions of zines, but I think it’s helpful to have a more general working definition, and for me, that working definition is that zines are small, independently published and distributed print objects that are typically free or cheap to both produce and acquire and are often circulated creatively. And so to wax a little bit on that, zines can also feature original artwork. They can have comic strips in them; they can have collage, photographs, stamp art, typed or handwritten text; and these can be made by an individual or a small group of people collaboratively. Zines can be informative or incendiary. They can also be mundane or deeply personal. I think zines really — what keeps drawing me back to them over and over and over again — is that zines create these opportunities for us to play, to feel, imagine, and prepare our hearts and minds.
KH: Can you share a bit about your own relationship to zines and zine-making, and why you think low-cost DIY publications matter right now?
RS: Sure. I’ve been making zines pretty consistently since I was 14 years old, so over 23 years now. Zines were where I first found my voice as a young person, through chain letters and zine swaps. Zines are also where I was first introduced to anti-war rhetoric and movement and also DIY or do-it-yourself ideas when I was in high school going to punk shows. And then again in feminist and more radical communities later in college, zines were always in the mix and I was just so hungry for them and sought them out. Seeing the amateur and the approachable aesthetics immediately made zines feel accessible and like I could make them too. That was that first initial thought, I could do this and I probably should be doing this. Zines looked and felt like they were for everyone. There’s also something I think so cool to me at least about having that cheat code to make Xerox copies more affordable, which — RIP — a lot of that went to the wayside with the rise of the bigger chains, but having that cheat code for free copies just made me feel really, really powerful.
Or having that one friend who could liberate office supplies or sneak you into their parents or their jobs so that you can make all these clandestine copies. The anonymity available, the little power in your hands to share ideas and feelings and art, I think it was and still is, that feeling of doing, of action. That’s what really spoke to me early on and what keeps speaking to me. I’ve been a part of several zine collectives over the years and currently help run the Support Ho(s)e Collective zine distro and that distro circulates sex worker-made propaganda and print resources at protests, zine fests and fairs and other events. We also use our zines to really think through what we’ve politically organized and taken on over the course of a year together in struggle. This formation has been around for about 10 years now, and so we make a yearbook zine together every year to really document that year in struggle and also think through some of the major, really the losses, the grief, and also some of our personal victories and movement-based wins.
It’s where we share our art and our rage and I’m really proud of the work that that collective is doing, especially toward its zinemaking and its political education and resource-based materials that we circulate. And I think with the rampant censorship and criminalization of online spaces and also, let’s be honest, the sheer toxicity of social media, I think that zines can be a balm and an armor for us. They can slow us down in really helpful ways. We can read zines to ourselves and others, taking time to process their content, and I think when we feel them in our hands or in our laps, their unique art or budget stylings become a counter to the glossy AI garbage that is seen all too often on our phone or computer or our TV screens. Zines then can offer us something physical, concrete to discuss and share with friends and comrades. And zines invite dialogue and create a literal container for discourse, and that takes longer than a few seconds to tweet or comment on something out into the void. Zines linger.
KH: Mariame, could you say a bit about your relationship to zines?
MK: Yes, absolutely. It’s funny because Red talked about when they started making zines and they started at 14 and that’s about when I also started, earlier than Red did. I’m older than Red. But I basically discovered zines as a young person probably when I was around maybe 13. I didn’t start making them until a year after that, but I was… There used to be a record store here in New York City called Tower Records, and that’s where I found my first copy of a zine called Bad Seed from Miriam Linna. And Miriam Linna was a drummer in a band called The Cramps, and she made Bad Seed as this kind of like a celebration she called it of juvenile delinquency. And in it, she’s basically just making fun of the moral panic that’s swept through the U.S. in the 1950s. And so she looks at the way that that panic manifested in books and music, movies, fashions of the time. And so this was like a eight and a half by five and a half stapled zine and I still have maybe four copies of that original set of zines that I bought over time.
I didn’t used to collect them. I would just get a zine and then I would give it away to somebody else. I would share it with other people, but this one is one of the few ones that I kept copies of over time. And I think it was about a year after that that I made my first zine and that was about a young man named Michael Stewart who was killed by the NYPD in 1983, and it really marked me as a very young person growing up in New York City at the time. Maybe I was like 12 or so years old when he was killed, but he felt so just… I saw him on the news and in the paper and his face, he seemed very relatable to me and like he could be my brother. I felt very connected. And so a couple of years after he was killed, I made that zine, but mostly I was making zines about music because I was a music obsessive. I made some zines about dance because I was a fledgling dancer.
And I just loved zines because it allowed me to really combine my love of journaling with other inspirations to create unique publications. I made them in small batch editions, maybe four or five. I barely shared them with anyone that I knew because I was a little bit embarrassed really honestly, as a young person making zines. Even though I grew up in New York City, most of the zinesters that I knew of were white and men, male, and I don’t think I met another person of color who liked or made zines until the mid-90s when I was well into my twenties. And it doesn’t mean that those people didn’t actually exist. Obviously they did, but they were not visible to me or to the circles that I was growing up in. I’ve been a zine maker since I was a teenager, and now that I’m in my late middle age, that practice has continued but with modifications.
I used to make zines like using photocopiers, glue, scissors at my dad’s office and using his copy machine. And over time I’ve moved on to collaborating artists and designers to create, I think, what I think are beautiful and engaging publications that are self-published, but maybe more people would consider those now art books than zines. But I still hold on very much to a zinester spirit in my work. And I’ve always been a pamphleteer, so I’m also interested in continuing that tradition in multiple ways. That’s how I came to start making them myself and really appreciating them as a technology for disseminating information and making yourself known to yourself and others in some very specific ways.
KH: Thank you for that.
Red, your practice of teaching people how to make zines has been important to a number of people in my life, including some young trans folks for whom that form of expression has become really important in recent years. And Mariame, your zines have been such a great learning resource for me. I’ve been fortunate enough to contribute to a couple of them over the years. And I did want to uplift one, in particular, that I think is especially relevant right now. Your zine about tear gas, A [short] History of U.S. Police & Tear Gas is an important and timely read, given the federal use of so-called “less lethal” munitions in recent weeks. Federal agents in Chicago have gassed protesters and residents going about their lives, in their own neighborhoods. In one case, the agents dropped a canister of tear gas in the street while they were being heckled by community members. In another, they gassed a crowd that formed after the agents had shot a woman in her car. Now, I am no stranger to tear gas, unfortunately, but when I read your zine, I did learn something I did not know about the history of tear gas in the United States — which was that General Amos Fries, who was one of the major advocates for commercializing tear gas for domestic use, in the U.S., after it was banned as a weapon of war, actually did a demonstration of the product in 1921 where he gassed a Girl Scout troop to prove how safe and harmless teargas was. So about 60 Girl Scouts were sobbing, weeping and vomiting, during this ill-conceived commercial demonstration, and because this is the United States, this still somehow became a fully normalized, prevalent product that is in use today.
RS: What a hellscape.
MK: When I read about that, I was like, oh my God, this is so typical of this fucking country.
KH: It really is, and people should know these things. I think sometimes we think the current political moment is uniquely absurd, and while we are definitely in circus territory, this country has a rich history of what-the-fuck moments that slowed absolutely nothing down. It’s important to remember that. I think this is also a good moment to revisit Mariame’s zine, White People Hate Protest, because I think it’s important to examine the historical reality of what popular support for protest has and hasn’t looked like. Sometimes, we can get really distracted or discouraged by the naysayers and the social media protest critics, but many historical moments of protest that are widely celebrated now were not received that way at the time — at all. And, in fact, white support for protest, particularly Black or brown-led protest has, historically, been very fickle. So, we have to remember that protest isn’t a mirror of popular opinion, as we understand it, or something that’s meant to placate every amateur pundit. It’s about calling people forward and together, toward and around an agenda for change. That’s always going to be criticized and nitpicked, especially by people who live comfortably within the status quo, and I appreciate the ways that your work reminds us of that.
And speaking of online commentary, nowadays, a lot of political expression happens in the digital world. And while it makes sense that organizers have leveraged tools like social media, we have seen a trend, in recent years, where these tools have been increasingly weaponized against us. Algorithms that reward conflict and fuel pile-ons have also chipped away at our social skills, making it harder for people to connect and relate to each other on and offline. All of this conflict and fragmentation have generated a lot of harmful patterns in our movements. Additionally, the impermanence of digital content also poses a threat to knowledge sharing and the preservation of our movement history. As we confront these challenges, what do you think we need to revive or reclaim?
RS: Thank you for that question and that framing, Kelly. I think it would behoove us, maybe I’ll start here, to revive patience and grace and discerning critical thought and to just make those more popular, just like let’s make all those things more popular. Honestly, I do not see those traits that I just named on social media very often on the Left. I also think that our collective attention spans are shot and that only serves this digital impermanence you’re talking about and the 24-hour entertainment news cycle trends, of course don’t make anything easy to digest or otherwise. I don’t know y’all. Of course, I think we should use all the tools at our disposal, but I don’t think that we often fully consider the consequences of the latest and newest tools or fully the ramifications that might abound from them. And personally, the work that I’m involved with benefits from small, intimate trust built relationships where political education and strategic and tactical conversations happen in person, I do not think that there’s currently an adequate replacement for that.
I think especially when we’re talking about the fallout, whether from actual right prosecution, the cultural and the impact, the social impact of things like SESTA-FOSTA rights and the amendments to the Communications Act, as well as other similar types of acts like the EARN IT Act, et cetera. Those impacts are so, so deeply violent and especially on sex working and queer and trans healthcare and harm reduction spaces online, so spaces where people might be communicating about how to access hormones or safe injection sites or other kinds of harm reduction-based practices or trans healthcare needs, sex workers trying to form safer bonds of working with one another, advertise and more affordable or safer means that they self-determine. All of these things are actively under threat, being criminalized, persecuted, et cetera. And so we were finding each other online. In sex working community we often joke that sex workers built the internet, at least the interesting internet, and we were finding each other there.
We were finding work, we were finding community, queer and trans people finding each other, finding and sharing stories and keeping especially queer and trans youth safer by being able to share history and experience. And all of those spaces are fraught now with the fear of persecution and criminalization. And so I think I started my comment with asking us to be kinder in terms of how we move in online spaces, but I also want us to work smarter. Work smarter when you’re in online spaces. Yes, abandon our love for drama and rumor, but also abandon our need to identify every single thing that we’re doing to everyone all the time. Please, we need to rein that in. I’m rambling now, so I digress.
MK: I think you both know how I feel about social [media]. I always have felt that it’s a really useful tool that can be employed towards increasing our reach in terms of helping more people access information and resources. It can be a useful organizing platform to help people find each other. I think all those things are real. I think now under fascism, we should be even more concerned about the bad actors that are on these platforms that are spending their time looking to pile on people, looking to dox people, looking to harm people in various kinds of ways. We need more discernment than ever, and I think that we lack the ability to have discernment like the stranger that’s in your mentions like, who is this person? We just have no idea. And people really respond and react and in ways that… The level of infiltration that used to have to happen in person is now so easy to do online. I think discernment is really, really called for.
I also think in terms of the question of digital as it relates to what we were talking about zines, people are also making digital zines and also making zines available through digital means. And I just want to give a short example of the difficulty of that in some ways. For the many years I’ve had a lot of my zines, not most of them, but a lot of them that I’ve made through various organizations, specifically Project NIA and other organizations that since sunsetted. I put them online, I put them on Issuu, which is this private platform where you can pay and you can put your documents. I know a lot of people who are listening probably have read a document on Issuu. And when I was working at Project NIA we could pay the $200 a month or whatever hosting cost for having our publications on there and allowing people to be able to read them either online or download them directly for use.
Well, earlier this year Issu decided to increase significantly the cost of hosting your items and your reading materials on their platform, just like really, I think almost like a 25 percent or 30 percent increase in the cost. And so now if you want to not just have your digital zines uploaded there for people to use and read, you have to pay so much more extra if you also want that feature of being able to allow people to download that. A lot of people, myself included, now are trapped with a bunch of stuff that’s on Issuu, but now can no longer be downloaded because I refuse to pay $350 a year or $400 a year to allow that feature for downloading. And people will say, well, there are all these other means whereby you can upload your materials and have other people read it. Yeah, okay. Maybe websites are a way to go in some cases, but often you have to pay to host for a website, and at a certain point in time, if you don’t pay the cost of upkeeping your website, well then your website, it disappears.
We’re living in a world right now where link rot is literally having massive impacts on people’s ability to retain knowledge and to preserve knowledge because you go to a site and you’re reading a piece and you click on the link and the link no longer exists online, it’s no longer there. It’s somebody who, I cannot remember their name right now, said something that’s posted a lot on social media, which is that websites and the web is the most ephemeral of products available. It is so ephemeral that it’s so fragile, it’s the complete opposite of what people initially thought the internets were going to be, which was going to be forever, and you were never going to be able to lose the materials and it would just be more sturdy, perhaps even than paper. Well, it turns out that the technology that’s the sturdiest is paper in our current structure.
And so the importance of a zine being a handmade, handheld physical item that will outlast in many ways the digital should really have us thinking strongly about how to continue to expand on making analog hard copy, paper-based work in our current moment. Things that are going to be less traceable, frankly. Surveillance on the internet is mass and will get more massive, easily identifiable as to who put what where when. If you’re doing hand-to-hand delivery it’s just going to be different. And so I think we have to think about all of these things relating to costs, relating to surveillance, relating to how impossible it feels right now to preserve anything on the internet. All of that stuff really has a direct impact on our ability to organize, our ability to document and our ability to make connections with each other.
KH: Absolutely. As does the ability of billionaires, like Elon Musk, to rewrite platform policies, amplify their own messaging, or invisiblize ours, or for people to just be suspended for challenging the status quo or whatever arbitrary reasons that the people who actually own this infrastructure — which we do not own — ultimately decide.
RS: I was just thinking about the beginnings of the collective that I’m a part of Support Ho(s)e that I was mentioning earlier. Our first web presence was on Tumblr because that platform was initially the one that you could talk about… We could share images that were nude images, we could share much more openly information about sex work and queer and transness and bodies and abortion and a lot of these other things. We could talk about experiences of incarceration, and a lot of us found lots of community on Tumblr.
Well, no online platform is sacred, and I think I really want to underscore this, and all of Mariame’s comments really do highlight how deeply ephemeral in not a fun way, not a scrapbooking way, not a cute little cocktail napkin with your lipstick on it way, but ephemeral and fleeting our online platforms and spaces can be when overnight TOS, terms of service, can change because of, like you said, Kelly, some wealthy figure’s influence on public policy can shift and determine a company’s, can guide their hand, as it were, to censor, to surveil, to increase their already egregious overstepping of privacy concerns for folks using platforms. And this is not to say like, oh, I long for the early days of the internet; there’ve always been issues. But I do think it’s important to note the escalation toward extreme surveillance and censorship that we’re seeing and that all of us have talked about now and have screamed about full-throatedly for a number of years.
And there are obviously pros and cons of all the things, but I really think this is a moment to lean into print more than ever.
MK: I agree so much with that and I also think we have to be really mindful of the fact that they’re criminalizing everything and they’re criminalizing speech, they’re criminalizing just every possible angle, criminalizing people in a broader way than has already existed in the country. And so we have to be mindful of that. I also think something that I… Our mutual friend, Stevie Wilson, was currently incarcerated in Pennsylvania. A few years ago, I really appreciated on Twitter, Stevie did a whole thread where he talked about how he found zines to be the perfect political education for people who were incarcerated. And I just want to read a few of the suggestions of what he suggested because I think they’re speaking to what we have been talking about but from somebody who’s currently inside and has been for a long time, mentions costs, whether producing, distribution, copying or mailing them, they’re much cheaper than books.
It says, “Many corrections departments, both county and state place limits on the number of books a prisoner may retain in their property. Zines circumvent these rules and they take up less space. Disseminating zines is easier and less likely to draw the attention of prison administrators. We can hide them on our persons or within other materials, not so for books. They’re less intimidating than books. Many prisoners have had negative scholastic experiences. They shy away from books, especially big ones. Zines are a way to create interest on topics or maybe create interest on a book. Asking a person to read a ten-page zine will be met with more eagerness and interest than asking them to read a 200-page book with 40 pages of notes.” It just goes on. “Number five, they allow for a gradualism that books often don’t. We study chapter by chapter with no rush. Sometimes we use excerpts turned into zines, and this gradually familiarizes a person with a topic often sparking interest in the complete work. Our groups can be anywhere from six people to 30 people. Zines are much easier to supply than books.
“Often there are rules in place like the one in Pennsylvania that doesn’t allow multiple copies of a text to be mailed to one person. Zines give us a chance to rework a text so it becomes accessible to prisoners. Zines are democratic, anyone can make one.” Those are just a few of the comments that were in that thread and I just think perfectly encapsulates the broad possibilities of what hard copy zines can do. And also speaking directly to the people who have already been living under fascistic conditions that now more people in the federal-level fascistic takeover that we are experiencing, that more people now will live under those conditions that a lot of people, not exactly the same obviously, but we are getting a dose, a tiny dose in various ways of the ways in which incarcerated people are subject to the whims and the complete and utter control of people who do not have their best interests at heart. And we should think about that as we’re producing information that we want to share with each other outside of the eyes of the people who are paying attention to everything.
KH: I’m really grateful to you for bringing Stevie’s wisdom into the conversation. And Stevie, of course, is also a contributing author to Read This When Things Fall Apart, which we’ll talk about more in just a little bit.
I also want to emphasize to folks who may be very online, and who are not ready to break with that world, that I am also very online and not ready to break with that world. We’re not saying you have to divorce yourself from digital tools and platforms, but I think we are suggesting that we should be less bound by some of the digital norms and habits that have really shaped our lives in recent years. Our political lives, our expression, so many things are bound up in these hyper-surveilled spaces, with toxic norms, that we can be ejected from at any time, and where all of our expression and documentation of history, all of our shared and ideas and networks can disappear in a blink — and we do not have to keep all of our eggs in that basket.
Another concern I have talked a lot about is that, over the last 20 years or so, a strong reliance on digital mobilization has led to far fewer people in our movements developing base-building skills. If your political journey didn’t involve an organization that wanted base-building specific labor from you, there’s a good chance you haven’t gotten that training. And that really needs to change, if we’re going to have the skills we need to talk to strangers, make connections, and convince people to pool their collective capacities toward our shared goals. If we want to do more than stage big events, if we want to have active political projects that flourish, we need those skills. That’s why we hosted a base-building workshop in Chicago recently that wasn’t specific to any particular campaign — it was just about imparting these skills, and encouraging people to practice them in the realm of whatever they’re doing, or whatever they care about. And I think we need a lot more of that. It’s a kind of reclamation, in these times, to get out there and practice these skills, because we’ve really been driven away from each other, in so many ways.
And I see people recognizing that need. In Chicago, right now, we are a city under siege, and on the day of our base-building training, there were so many important events going on, I thought our turnout was going to be really modest — and I was okay with that, but I was also completely off the mark. We had a packed room, and we had to keep bringing in more chairs, because so many people from across the city, and from a couple of other states, had come out for this conversation. It was so heartening. So, this really is the time, because people are reaching for tools, knowledge, and opportunities. They know we need each other, and we need to continue to issue meaningful invitations, and welcome people into generative spaces.
And speaking of welcoming people into generative spaces, Mariame, I want to talk about the communiversity project. Can you tell us about this initiative, how it came to be and how it’s going? I’ve been so excited about this project.
MK: Yes. I’m also excited about communiversity. I think all three of us have done a lot of work around political education for many years now, and this is an ongoing thing that I’ve been part of doing for a long time now. I did many communiversities in Chicago, and back home in New York this is the first time that I’m offering and co-organizing a communiversity here. Essentially communiversities are non-hierarchical inclusive public centers of education for the enrichment and advancement of community life. It’s a space that is intended to encourage us to relate issues back to our personal lives. It is intended to allow us to ask questions, to have political conversations, to try to make new friends and comrades, and importantly also to try to connect to local organizing. I was lucky enough to partner with Women Building Up, which is an organization here in New York City that is led and that has leadership from formerly criminalized and incarcerated women and gender expansive people.
They’re based in Brooklyn. And I think you all have heard me ranting for years about the fact that there are no spaces to meet in New York City that aren’t costing a million dollars for people to be able to meet up there that don’t have all sorts of accessibility issues, et cetera. Women Building Up has a brand new, basically the last couple of years space that they’re inhabiting that’s beautiful and that allows for a lot of things to happen there. And so once I started partnering with them, we started planning together with a couple of other folks who were volunteers. This offering set of sessions, courses, workshops that community members can join. It’s all sliding scale zero to whatever you want to offer if you can offer it. We had a call for proposals that we put out for courses and workshops, and then we selected from those proposals and workshops that we received.
And we’ve been having sessions that have anywhere from four people who attend, to sessions that have had 35 people attending. And all of it has just been wonderful in the sense that it just reminds everybody again how important it is to meet people in person. We have spent so many of these COVID years being online, and I have to say I was so grateful for Zoom and Skype and all the different ways that we were able to keep in touch with our loved ones and with each other at the height of the COVID pandemic and how that has also really allowed people who are homebound, who have other issues, who can’t leave because they’ve got small children to be able to participate in more things as that has expanded. I want to say that up front, very important for accessibility, very important for engaging people in things that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to access otherwise. People living in rural towns where there are very few people like them around them can log into a session about transformative justice from a very tiny town.
Those are all so, so critically important, but I’m going to say this again, like I said, for the analog piece around zines, we are at a time where infiltration is easier than ever from bad actors. And you have a very hard time handling digital security for online kinds of things these days. Now Zoom has that stupid feature that if you don’t know how to turn it off, somebody will join and then it’ll say this meeting is being transcribed, you never can tell who has actually triggered it. These are things that are making online virtual stuff much more fraught and difficult. Also, when you’re face to face with somebody in person, you are just more able to really lean into their humanity and also be much more willing to share your own. It’s just true. And I have found every single Saturday, we are now six Saturdays in, and I’ve just found every session that I’ve been lucky enough to either facilitate or where I’ve been able to talk to people as they’re leaving, people are smiling, people are outside after it’s over exchanging contact information.
I’ve seen some people take selfies of each other when it’s over. We have a built-in women… Kim, who’s one of the people who works at WBU, had this idea to say, let’s have a lunch break no matter how… It goes often from 11:00 to 4:00 or depending on the times when different sessions are being offered, let’s have a lunch break from 12:30 to 1:00 that everybody can join, so if people are already in a session, they’d stop at 12:30. If people are starting a session at 1:00, they can be invited to come earlier to grab lunch. The weather’s been beautiful too, so it’s been lovely for people to grab lunch, go downstairs in the garden area and eat outside. Breaking bread with other people is so, so important around community building and building trust, and I don’t know how… We’re going to need this if we’re going to be able to really organize under fascism. We’re going to need a lot more in-person opportunities for us to meet with each other, meet together, talk, share, expand our humanity with each other, so I’ve just been so happy about it.
It’s our first time, so we’re working out a lot of kinks. It’s hard to know what kinds of sessions people are going to really want to sign up for. We’ve had to cancel a couple of sessions. We’re learning because asking people to show up for four Saturdays in a row for a course looks like it may not be the best way to go. Maybe the maximum way people can do is devote two Saturdays. We are also inviting… We’ve invited the WBU community to submit proposals, so we’ve got a lot of formerly criminalized and incarcerated people who are running their own sessions and workshops and the topics they care about and really want to be engaged in are sometimes maybe not the exact same topics that other people want to engage with, so we are really just working out the kinks and figuring out what is the best way to build real community with each other in this city, which is such a hard city to live in and such a hard city to organize in and where people sometimes feel extremely isolated from one another.
That’s a little bit about communiversity and it’s taking a lot of my time right now. As per usual I had big visions and then I’m up at X number of hours sending emails to everybody. The Thursday before the Saturday sessions to remind them about the values of the space and we’re going to do masking and we’re… It’s been a learning experience and if we do it again, we’ll I think get better at it.
KH: It’s such a heartening project, and I look forward to hearing more as you all learn from this experiment.
Red, you do political education work with highly marginalized communities in a red state. Can you talk about what that work looks like right now as trans folks, sex workers, and other criminalized and stigmatized people build community and learn together under increasingly authoritarian conditions?
RS: Yeah, absolutely. In order to talk about what it looks like down here in Texas, I need to start us, though, in Chicago. And I bring this up to remind folks that for the communities that I work with directly who are queer and trans sex working people with incarceration experiences, so doing political education amongst my peers who are in all of these intersecting categories, starting Support Ho(s)e we really formed our political home and hub in Chicago initially. And that’s because we were experiencing so much both political and social, like sociocultural stigma, whorephobia and extreme criminalization in Chicago, in the city of Chicago, which has a democratic sheriff, Tom Dart, who’s been in that position since 2006. And under his regime of rampant criminalization, he’s made it his… How do we say this? His goal is to “save” all women and girls from what he deems as the evils of Johns and the evils of prostitution.
And so what that has looked like over the 10 years that we’ve just been organizing, as a collective in Chicago, dealing with arrests, dealing with extremely repressive and abusive conditions from policing for folks that work outside, dealing ranging in harassment, doxing and physical violence from so-called neighbors, for folks that do outdoor-based, street-based work, et cetera. Again, the range of violence from people in your own neighborhoods to the police, to the violence one incurs in Cook County jail or by extension, any of the IDOC, Illinois Department of Corrections prisons, ranging from that to the everyday stigma and discrimination that you might face from other forms of employment. Friends, quote unquote “friends,” family, and even people in movement spaces. I unfortunately have to remind us that whorephobia, it is unfortunately alive and well in many, many leftist movement spaces. And so why I take us back there is because we’re dealing with all of these conditions, we’re dealing with the City of Chicago and the county wanting to re-institute unconstitutional, prostitution-free zones, which are based on their gang-free zones.
And there’s lots of stuff out there that you could link folks to, so I won’t go into the details there, but dealing with that, dealing with police, sexual violence, and harassment and arrest, dealing with the doxing and entrapment. Police will often pose as clients to entrap workers and vice versa, police will pose as workers to then entrap our clients. There’s all of these things. We’re dealing with all of this in Chicago and the spaces that we’re going into as sex workers, we’re only talking about, at the time before our formation, we’re really only talking about how we can do self-care and how we can vote. And I’m not trying to disparage against those methods of care, but we wanted something else. And so we started reading together and radicals find each other, and this coalesced into sharing meals, rotating who’s going to host a space, rotating what we’re reading together, what we’re watching together.
Often these are zines and articles. We eventually graduated to full books. We started making zines together. We started watching sex worker film and discussing it, all while creating a space to vent, to discuss, to learn together. And in doing so, these are the things that Mariame was also talking about, and that Kelly, you’ve also spoken about and participated in, you build trust. You get to actually know who you are in a room with and you see each other’s… And I loved the way you put this, Mariame, you expand your capacity for humanity and you expand how you can embrace somebody else’s humanity when you’re doing this. And you’re less afraid to make mistakes, you’re less afraid to ask questions in a situation like that, I think it’s a perfect just experiment-based thought-working way to figure your shit out together and then to do something about the struggles, the strife that you face. Fast-forward, so we learned all of that and we’ve been able to export versions of that to different places that our comrades have moved to, started working in, organizing in et cetera.
And down here in Texas with the extremely overt fascistic regime that’s in place, these things are playing out in very specific ways, so we’ve leaned into heavily working with our local anarchist spaces like Monkeywrench Books. We formed beautiful coalitional relationships with organizations like Gender Unbound and Texas Trans Futures so that we can help take care of each other. In thinking about print materials and political education things down here in Texas, I’m thinking about the Austin Trans Pink Pages, a beautiful project which is a totally print-only directory of all things trans in and around Austin that Gender Unbound put together. I’m thinking of our International Sex Workers Rights Day zine-making nights at Monkeywrench.
I’m thinking about, yes, these zine-making workshops with the youth of Texas Trans Futures and also our letter-writing nights where we practice writing long-form personal and political letters with loved ones who are incarcerated to develop pen pal relationships. And I think that all of those things were made possible by Support Ho(s)e’s Collective small, intimate group meetings to think, make and discuss amongst radical sex workers, so knowing your community members beyond a social media handle has to be essential. And that can look a lot of different ways. These are just some of the ways that I’ve moved and the collectives that I’m a part of have moved.
KH: Thank you so much for that, Red. You both contributed letters to our upcoming book, Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis.
Mariame, your letter to new organizers who are trying to find their footing feels incredibly relevant right now as so many people are entering the fray.
Red, your letter to activists who are organizing outside the law is a crucial intervention as the dragnet of criminalization expands even further under this authoritarian regime.
Both letters addressed concerns that are more widely felt by people who may be facing bigger fears and staring down more dire consequences for their actions than they would have only a year or two ago. So, I’m wondering, is there anything you would like to add to your letters today or any thoughts, sentiment or advice that you would really like to emphasize under present conditions?
MK: I would add many things. I wrote that letter right after the election, really it was a letter to my niblings who were very, very concerned and worried after the election. Many younger organizers I’m in community with were extremely worried. And I wrote that letter from a place of reminding everybody in some way that it’s okay that we’re living in uncertainty, that while it’s fear-inducing often to live in uncertainty, it’s also an opportunity. I think all that is still true. I think what I want to add is a point about not allowing yourself to become callous in this moment, the importance of staying tender with yourself and with those directly in your communities. I just think it’s so… I see the coarsening where it’s like a self-protective shell that many of us are donning our armor, because we are in a war right now. We really are. It’s a fight for our lives. It’s a fight for the lives of people we love, especially those of us who are in various marginalized categories and communities.
I want people to be able to stay tender. And I do want to just also say, maybe I would add something about, I think I talked about imagination, but I think I would triple down on that of the thinking about what we want to build in this moment. This is a moment of a need for people who are thinking about building different, building something else that is not a replication of these death-making institutions. The last thing I notice is that I think, or at least I feel like I have a sense that most people I know currently living in the U.S. are disappointed in themselves like, somehow if we imagine living under full-blown fascism at the federal level, I think a lot of us believed that we would be different and maybe we would be braver or more focused or take bigger risks or become world-defining actors of some sort. But it turns out that most of us just remain the same regular humans that we were before.
And I just would say particularly to the young folks, that if you’re not rising to the moment right now, that’s actually okay because it turns out that who you are and what you do isn’t necessarily immediately shaped by the times you live in, so you have to do more within yourself to be in a place where you are more comfortable taking bigger risks.
And that’s just going to be time and practice, time and practice, and a soft place to land, a community of people, which goes back to the point we made about the ways that zines can create community amongst each other and ourselves, the way a communiversity can create community, we all more than ever need soft places to land. And if you don’t have that, it’s just harder for you to take big risks because you don’t know who really has your back. And we can only be brave together, in my opinion. I think this notion of the singular, brave, courageous individual is a bunch of bullshit. There are those people, but most people feel like there’s strength in numbers. And when there’s people that you know have your back you’re much more willing to take risks, so I think I would say those things in a different letter.
KH: I really appreciate this call to think about courage as something that exists between us, in collectivity, as something we make together, rather than something that we either have or don’t have. Because most of us, sitting out here on our own, counting our worries, and being haunted by our fears, are not innately courageous — and I think it’s the norms of capitalism and individualism that lead people to think that they either are or aren’t good, and either are or aren’t brave, when goodness and bravery are actually things we make together. Good is something we do, in concert with other people. Courage is something we find and make together. As you say, there are people who are courageous, all on their own — and there are also people who can lift really heavy objects all on their own, but most of us need each other to accomplish certain tasks, and certain ways of being, and that’s not a bad thing. That’s not a weakness. That’s about us being social creatures, and really needing each other, in fundamental ways to survive and live up to our potential. Because our potential is collective as well. And it always has been.
Red, I would really love to hear you talk a bit about your letter, which is so timely and needed right now.
RS: So, Kelly knows this, the first version of the letter that I wrote came from a deeply hurt place. A place where I was grieving things that I had seen happen to beloved, beloved friends and comrades who are no longer on this earthly plane with us, comrades who I saw give their whole selves to the movement in really thankless ways, like ways that I think only now in their deaths are being fully, fully acknowledged. And I think that’s a goddamn shame. And that first letter was intense, and if you want to read it, you got to go find the zine I put it in. The letter that Kelly gently asked me to reframe is much more practical. It’s still emotive, and it’s still guided by thoughts, feelings, and experiences of seeing people put too much of themselves out [there] that’s identifiable.
So, it’s a letter that’s really about how do we navigate doing work that’s against the law, that’s outside of the law, and recognizing that these laws are deeply unjust and inhuman. And so it’s much more about how do we reflect on these things together? How do we learn from abortionists? How do we learn from harm reductionists? How do we learn from sex workers? How do we learn from incarcerated comrades who are doing clandestine work inside? And how do we translate those lessons into our current moment and take them into our hearts?
And so that’s the letter that we ended up with, and I’m so glad that we ended up with that letter, but I would like to add some words of encouragement and comfort for when people feel or are attacked by quote unquote “their own” or so-called former comrades or people who see themselves as part of the movement. And I just want to say to those folks who are feeling or fielding also those attacks, that I’m so sorry that you’re having to navigate the hate of the far right, the oppression of capitalism and right all of its evils, and on top of that, the ire of some usually misplaced rage. Remember that your actions and your principles will speak volumes for you and of you.
Try to keep your head and heart grounded as best you can and just find your people, find your people, and feel your big feelings. The goal is not to be some perfect savior, it’s quite the opposite. It’s just to be a person looking to be in right relationship with other people, the land and your own heart. All of this shit will pass. And until it does, be gentle with yourself and maybe put it all in a zine.
KH: Thank you for those words of comfort and encouragement for folks who may be feeling attacked or kicked around, amid some of the conflicts that occur in our movements, or the campaigns that are sometimes waged by people who are really nothing more than movement spectators, who don’t really contribute anything but rancor to our spaces. I think we need to be real about the fact that while disruptors can play an essential role in our movements, some people want to dismantle every group that they find, and want to tear down anyone who’s been praised, and are really just discourse snipers, at the end of the day. And we can’t be ruled by that energy. Especially now, when, as Mariame said, there is more bad faith and manufactured bullshit on social media than ever before.
I also want to circle back to what Mariame was saying about the importance of imagination, because what we absolutely cannot do is romanticize the road to fascism. It’s so easy for people to get nostalgic about things that aren’t worthy of nostalgia, when things get as ugly as they are right now. We need to remember, that’s what the right does. They fetishize a mythical past—a time that never really existed, where everything was great for them, and they are willing to scapegoat, subjugate and annihilate people as needed to chase that fantasy. We don’t want some progressive or liberal version of that bullshit, where we are romanticizing some prior point on the trajectory that brought us here, and trying to recapture that, like those were idyllic days for us all. And we certainly cannot play into the politics of sacrifice that centrists and others are endorsing right now, and throw immigrants, or trans people, or anyone else under the bus, in the name of restoring the neoliberal status quo, which was shitty, and ultimately delivered us to this moment — and would deliver us here again. There were already authoritarian policies unfolding in this country. There were already people living in bondage in this country — and we would still be looking at accelerations of those conditions, if we managed to restore the status quo. But I don’t think that restoration should even be viewed as an option here. The way out is not behind us. The way out is through, and we have to forge something new, ahead of us.
We need a transformative, liberatory vision for all of us, and I am grateful to think alongside people who are struggling to make that kind of future possible. As we wrap up today, is there anything else that either of you would like to share with or ask of the audience?
MK: I will just say, don’t stop trying things. Don’t stop trying things. This is a moment when you should just be leaning into trying out a lot of different stuff. We don’t know for sure what is going to work.
There’s this anecdote from Mr. Rogers that I’ve shared with many people over the years, and I just want to share it as my closing testament for the moment, which he talks about a young guy, a young person, who’s an apprentice, who applies to a master carpenter for a job. And so the carpenter asks him, “Do you know your trade?” And the young apprentice is like, “Yes, sir.” He’s real proud about saying this. And the master carpenter says, “Well, have you ever made a mistake?” And the young apprentice says, “No, sir,” feeling certain that he was going to get this job like, “No. No, I haven’t made any mistakes.” And the carpenter says, “Well, there’s no way I’m going to hire you because when you make one, you won’t know how to fix it.” And I think what has happened in our communities and in our specifically organizing and activist culture is a deathly fear of failure and of making mistakes, acknowledging that we make mistakes.
And again, I’m not saying here… I’m not talking about social media. I’m not talking about getting to social media and posting a long I’m so sorry for these 10 million things. Those aren’t your people. I’m talking about when these things happen and we’re in relationship with each other, or they are people we know and care about and we’re trying to be in community with each other and we mess up, which we will, that we continue to try things because we will definitely mess up. And if we mess up, it’s okay that we’ve done that. It is not going to be the permanent scarlet letter on our thing saying, I fucked up forever and that’s all I ever am. No, it’s not that. And you come to this knowledge, I do believe as you get older and you’ve been doing stuff for a longer period of time, you know you become discerning about who the people are that you owe something to. And you ask yourself, who am I to these people and who are they to me?
And based on that, you will react. You will react in the way that is the best way for you at that moment and at that time, so I just want us to really sit with that. You don’t owe yourself to everybody, but you do owe yourself to the people who you choose to be in community with.
RS: All of that a thousand times. A thousand times, all of that. I was just like sitting here just punching the air and air clapping. And if I had to share one final thing besides a thousand times everything Mariame said just now, please be nice to sex workers y’all. And if you haven’t yet, try making a zine about your thoughts, feelings, politics, and passions, and don’t respond to the hateful comments online. Maybe talk to someone that you trust to gut check you instead.
KH: Well, I really appreciate both of your insights so much and your work, and of course your friendship. I’m so grateful to be in relationship with both of you and I look forward to the next time we can all be in space together again.
RS: Ditto.
MK: Same here. Same here. We have got to hold onto each other y’all. We have got to do that. These are rough times, and we will endure them in community with each other and others. And we have to keep that high up in our minds and in our hearts. We need each other more than ever. And I think the people who don’t know that are missing out because this is rough stuff.
RS: Too right. Too right, Mariame.
KH: I appreciate you both so much. Thank you for joining me today.
MK: Thank you.
RS: Thank you, Kelly. Thanks Mariame. Bye y’all.
KH: I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes
