elilla&, tactical travestirecently I've had more young people asking me for advice on this and I'm like why do you want advice from me, I failed completely at it. I have a tech salary so I host a few queer people in need when I can, that's it, that's the bare minimum a socialist should do and it does not a commune make.
I guess I can talk about my experience with the times we worked towards that problem I could never solve, namely: how to get queers to do mutual aid when we don't know how to stay together.
1. You can't put a bunch of queer ppl in a space and say "it is forbidden to date, that's dangerous". That would be like telling cats not to jump. Bonding intimately to one another is kinda what we *do*.
2. When people are intimate they are liable to emotionally hurt one another.
Then you pair a subculture built from reified trauma, where any conflict is considered to be abuse, any hurt is violence, any disagreement is DARVO etc.; where the figure of the abuser is seen as a sort of duplicitous infiltrator to be rooted and cast out with prejudice; where the group is the first time the queer person ever felt accepted so they're liable to pedestalise others and thefore, when things go hurtful, to splitting and disposal; you pair this subculture of callouts, where the more you denounce the safer you are from your time on the wheel, against a material condition of wars and economic crises, against a world that deny us food and shelter and visas and medicine.
The result of this combination is that the first time there's a relationship conflict, both sides are incentivised to call the other an abuser as soon as they can, because whoever loses the narrative war in the abuser:victim binary also loses the support they need for shelter and medicine and collective self-defense etc. Moreover anyone not directly involved in the conflict is incentivised to get the fuck away, shut up and not get involved, lest they pick the losing side in the final narrative and be deemed an enabler. I.e. people are pushed to do the exact opposite of what we need, which is collective solutions to structural problems. Everything gets individualised, ascribed to failures of moral character of specific bad people, whose number somehow seems to multiply the more purges there are. So every relationship breakup splits the entire group into subgroups that never talk to one another again, even in the face of actual literal nazis stockpiling fucking guns, to literally fucking shoot at us. But no we can't have a gun range or an estrogen distro or a food forest, because Rebecca from Stuttgart punched a wall once when she was distressed and then she was deemed violent and problematic, and her bff Sarah who would have money to share now will never talk again to Marina who knows farming or her wife Dersima who could hook you up with immigrants.
> A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence. If its members move away every couple years because the next place seems cooler, it is not a community. If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying. Let's not kid ourselves: we don't have communities.
(The Broken Teapot)
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