lb_lee | Bash Back, the Mary Nardini Gang, and "Be Gay Do Crime"

Mori: Okay, I disappeared down a rabbit hole the past few days, so now I'm going to tell y'all about this radical queer anarchist group I learned about and the zine that got me here. It gets long, guys! (Content warnings for death, suicide, religion, anarchism, jail, and violence talk. Also mention of anti-Chinese racism and lynching from the 1800s.)

At a flea market over the weekend, we picked up a zine called "Be Gay Do Crime" by the Mary Nardini Gang. We went, "oh, hey, gayness, anarchism, skellies, possibly about spirituality/religion, this might be our thing." Little did we know that it would send me on days of research, reading, and INTENSE FEELINGS. But before I can tell you about that, let me tell you about the group that made it.

Bash Back! and the Mary Nardini Gang

The Mary Nardini Gang got their start in the Bash Back! movement in Milwaukee in 2008, making the articles "towards the queerest insurrection" (their most famous, I think), plus "Whore Theory," "Criminal Intimacy," and "What Is It To Become Beautiful?" which along with an interview were all contributed to the Queer Ultra Violence: Bash Back! Anthology in 2011. "Towards the queerest insurrection" became its own zine under the same name, possibly in 2014, while the others became the zine Writings from the Mary Nardini Gang.

One of the things Bash Back! (including at least two members of the Mary Nardini Gang) did in 2008 was gatecrash a homophobic church and disrupt the service. The church sued, Bash Back! lost, and they settled out of court in July 2011... by which point the group had already dissolved due to "internal politics" at least five months before (Balaskovitz, Bash Back! News). The Mary Nardini Gang, AKA "a gang of criminal queers" continued trucking on independently. In March 2016 they wrote a letter to the editors of Hostis magazine about the politics of vengeance and the limits of call-outs, justice, and conflict mediation.

Over the years, members died: Quincy Brinker (no info), Feral Pines (1987-2016, 29 years old, killed in the Ghost Ship warehouse fire), Chris Chitty (1983-2015, 32 years old, suicide), and Ravin Myking (1989-2012, 23 years old, unknown but it was at home and someone on instagram wrote "I'm sorry you felt alone," so I suspect suicide), Scout Schultz (suicide by cop, 9/16/2017) and Vlad (no info) (Hotchkiss; Fox and Lane-McKinley; Green; DePaul WGS; Selk, Shapiro, and Lowery).

By 2018, the surviving members of the Mary Nardini Gang had been seasoned by time and grief. They made "Be Gay Do Crime."

But before I can tell you about the zine, let's talk about the meme.

Be Gay, Do Crime (the meme)

For centuries, the art of Europe and its colonies has used the skeletal figure of Death as a revolutionary figure for the sake of social commentary. Hans Holbein's danse macabre in 1523-1525 had scathing things to say about nobles and especially the clergy, reflecting religious tensions at the time, while Alfred Rethel in 1849 made a popular short comic starring Death as a revolutionary "friend of the people," associated with Jews, communists, Freemasons, and monstrous women--and all this is a bad thing, because Rethel was making this comic as monarchist propaganda (Ponemone).

Rethel's revolutionary Death has a lot in common with this political cartoon (looking like so) by Thomas Nast from April 10, 1880, which adorned the cover of Harper's Weekly. This Death wields the torch of Anarchy, a Free Love badge, and a Mob Rule scroll. His bandolier reads "Communist," his hatband reads "Deadheadism" (a rough synonym for freeloading), and the scroll reads, "The New Constitution of California: Kearneyism, other people's homes, savings, land, property, lives, capital, and honest labor, all common stock in the universal co-operative brotherhood," with every A transformed into a Freemason symbol. (Because yes, like Rethel's, Nast's Death apparently likes hanging around with Freemasons.) Both Rethel's and Nast's depictions involved the spectre of workers' rights being truly about communism and anarchism. There's also racism thrown in; the "Kearneyism" is a reference to Denis Kearney, a super-racist Irish guy who started the Workingmen's Party which is now most well-known for passing anti-Chinese legislation... because in the end, that's what they most achieved (George, Bryce). In fact, Nast's depiction might be armed with a sword and pistol to label him as one of the extralegal "vigilance committees" roaming California at the time, or to associate him with violence and disorder like that which was responsible for the 1871 Chinese Massacre (Wallace).

The "be gay, do crime" meme was started accidentally by a gender nihilist named Io of Bum Lung and the Degenderettes (Woodstock; the Degenderettes). It started as a text-only graffiti tag they did with a group in France around 2016, looking like this. In June 2018, Io made this tag and merged it with Thomas Nast's image of the rioting Death, changing the Communism bandolier to "Communes," the "Deadheadism" hat band to one reading "round bombs", and the Mob Rule scroll to read, "BE GAY DO CRIME!" To this day, they use this image to fundraise for bail bond funds and prison abolition and have raised thousands of dollars for these causes (Io, 2018 and 2021). (Io's Etsy shop is here, if you're curious.)

Io's adaptation of this meme had a quote in tiny text at the bottom: "many blame queers for the decline of this society--we take pride in this. Some believe that we intend to shred-to-bits [sic] this civilization and it's [sic] moral fabric--they couldn't be more accurate. We're often described as depraved, decadent and revolting--but oh, they ain't seen nothing yet."

This quote is from the Mary Nardini Gang's "Criminal Intimacy." Io doesn't seem to have been a member of the Mary Nardini Gang, but Io sure did know their work!

And so the Mary Nardini Gang referenced Io's work in turn, resulting in Be Gay Do Crime from Contagion Press in 2018. (Contagion Press is also responsible for our copy of The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. Clearly this is a press we should pay more attention to.) The big book was a compilation of all the Mary Nardini Gang's previous writings, plus an introductory chapter, the latter of which, in true anarchist fashion, was yoinked and made its way into the saddle-stitched zine that we bought.

Be Gay Do Crime (the zine) (yes, we finally got here)

Most of the Mary Nardini Gang's earlier zines didn't have much effect on me, with the exception of "towards the queerest insurrection," and even it wasn't quite my thing. They are very hard on the "shoot all the cops, burn all the rapists" sort of deal. I don't regret reading them, but trying to put myself in that mindframe feels like trying to squeeze through a tube too skinny for me; my ass keeps getting stuck as I go, "wait, but in reality, this would just work out to survival of the biggest bullies and manipulators!" I still am full of rage and fervor, but I also know myself well enough to know that it doesn't bring out my best self. Being a berserker only seems powerful and badass until you hurt someone you love.

So I'm glad I read "Be Gay Do Crime" first. It's the Mary Nardini Gang ten years after that stage. After they've seen their friends die too young in horrible pointless ways, after they've seen the collapse of Bash Back! and probably a slew of other movements, after they've seen Trump get elected. After some of the shine has been kicked off their ideals.

This zine was the first time I had really seen so many of my feelings and philosophy about death, community, and the world in the same work. Everything else, we were kinda picking through scraps--Eiesland talks about disability and religion, but it's Christianity which is about as mainstream a religion in the USA as you can get. "Borderland Devotions" and Spirit Marriage talk about religion that's more like what we actually practice, but "Borderland Devotions" has cis academics trying to explain transsexual sex workers to me (yes, buddy, we know who they are, please stop mentioning your subjects' genitals), and Spirit Marriage feels more abled eco hippie, while I'm a die-mad-live-madder punk at heart. We still got a lot out of them, but it always involved monkeywrenching.

But then there's "Be Gay Do Crime," which opens up with loving dedications to the members who died, like, "For Feral Pines, last seen by some of her friends throwing rocks at police, by others in an assembly plotting psychic warfare against the fascists, and by others dancing and then defacing some fascist insignia in the moments before her death" (4) and then, the following page, say, "[we] dedicated books to each other and our beloved dead because these words mean nothing outside of the relationships which give them traction" (5).

Death is everywhere in "Be Gay Do Crime." This is a zine about trauma and loss, about dancing at the end of the world, about embracing the pain and the joy and going on anyway. When the gang writes, "Our friends and lovers have been taken from us, locked in cages, suicided by cops, burned up in dance parties at the margins of gentrifying cities," ("Be Gay Do Crime," pg. 6) it's not figures of speech. Feral Pines was the one who died at that dance party, and gentrification was a big factor in why she was at a place with massive fire hazards: those were what she and her fellow queer performers could afford (Hotchkiss).

The Mary Nardini Gang writes, "We know that our time with each other is fleeting, so we fight for every moment of interdependence and complicity." (6)

"The world would not end in one simple gesture of revolution or collapse, but would die as a patchwork, and from that humus would rise new worlds, plural. [....] These are not methods to bring about the new world, these are ways of living that assume its immanent being" (8).

"We proceeded, despite the end of the world, seeking joy everywhere we could. Our communiques took the ruins for granted and we insisted upon dancing amid them. Sex parties, dance parties, street parties, reading parties--partying emerged as a central form in that frenzied moment. Our later inquiries into the sacred nature of the revel--into the bacchanals and nighttime sabbats--revealed an intrinsic relationship between partying and the world-making arts. In our parties, we opened onto connection with each other, onto other realms and other gestures" (9).

Then they go and describe sort of how we've been feeling about plurality online these days: "Where we came to understand the party as spiritual, they desired a political party. Where we sought forms of connection, they submitted to an apparatus based first and foremost upon separation. [...] We remained unconvinced. We had already experienced the death of the party, and had already dealt with the authoritarian cult tendencies that followed from it. When the formal dimension of the Bash Back! network had run its course, we quickly analyzed the moment so as to move beyond it." (9)

"BB! [Bash Back] was never about queer issues or queer politics. Instead, the project took as its issue the lives of its participants. Rather than the motifs of victimization and charity regurgitated ad nauseam in activist circles, the BB! tendency took as its starting point queer life itself. Those within the tendency organized a space within which they could genuinely live, and a network by which to defend that space" (9).

"We took life itself as our project. [...] No Party can say the same. The very function of the Party is to expand its own operation by vampirizing the life energy of all subsumed within it. [...] We have a responsibility to clarify: These initial words are not political; they are magical.

"[...]Between the inquiries of the chaos magicians and the shared reflections of insurrection oriented anarchists, a whole host of techniques emerge in common: the means to choose a story and make it real [...], the invocation of the dead, queer ancestral working, [...] the necessity of abundant sacrifice, [...] the interpretation of dreams and omens, the secret names of our beloveds and their encrypted sigils scrawled across city walls, the visionary states of jouissance and spirit-contact by way of dance, the decentering of the self and the openness to the other, the pacts made at the crossroads--these are the keys to an otherworldly litany, a grammar of worldmaking by way of ritual action.

"[...] You see, the world really did end for us in December of 2012 when we lost Ravin." (10)

"We live in a world haunted by all the ghosts of a genocidal leviathan, where the land is full of bones screaming out for vengeance and the very architecture of these cities filled by all the dead who built it" (10).

"The skeleton has been here, frenzied, before. [...] The skeleton has never left. She remains present among the diasporic threads which have always undermined the southern border. She is the Holy Death. The patron of criminals and queers, of exiles from worlds. [...] Our dead are among us, the ancestors have returned and they are insisting that we have a chance to make it all whole again. The task remains to put our ways in common" (14).

Sources Cited:

Balaskovitz, Andy. "Bash Back! resolved" (2011). Lansing City Pulse, Wayback Machine. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20131102211934/http://www.lansingcitypulse.com/lansing/article-6100-bash-back_-resolved.html

Baroque, Fray and Eanelli, Tegan (editors). Queer Ultra Violence: Bash Back! Anthology (2011). Ardent Press. Retrieved from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-queer-ultra-violence

Bash Back! News. (2011 January 21). Bash Back! News. Wayback Machine. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20110121021848/http://bashbacknews.wordpress.com/

Bash Back! News. (2011 February 22). bashbacknews.wordpress.com is no longer available. The authors have deleted this blog. Wayback Machine. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20110222055009/http://bashbacknews.wordpress.com:80/

Bryce, Viscount James. "Remarks by Denis Kearney on Kearneyism in California." (1889). The Museum of the History of San Francisco. Retrieved from https://www.sfmuseum.org/hist9/brycenotes.html

the Degenderettes. "Degenderette Merit Badge Order Form." Wayback Machine. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20220314143532/https://degenderettes.com/order#meritbadges

DePaul WGS. "Remembering Ravin Myking" (Winter 2013). DePaul University Women's and Gender Studies Newsletter. Retrieved from https://las.depaul.edu/academics/womens-and-gender-studies/about/Documents/WGS_winter_13_newsletter_finalII.PDF

Fox, Max and Lane-McKinley, Madeleine. "Mourning and Marginalia: Editing the Work of Christopher Chitty" (2020). Retrieved from https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/mourning-and-marginalia-editing-the-work-of-christopher-chitty#!

George, Henry. "Kearney Agitation in California" (1880). The Museum of the History of San Francisco. Retrieved from http://www.sfmuseum.net/hist9/hgeorge3.html

Green, Jenn. "I am so sorry you felt alone." (2012). Instagram. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/S1zlJqIRFz/

Hans Holbein the Younger and Rublack, Urlinka. (2016). The Dance of Death. London: Penguin Classics.

Hotchkiss, Sarah. "Honoring Those Lost to the Oakland Warehouse Fire: Feral Pines, Artist and Electronic Musician 'So Full of Life and Love'" (2016). KQED. Retrieved from https://www.kqed.org/arts/12483968/feral-pines

Io [bum_lung]. "Happy Wrath Month" (2018) Retrieved from https://twitter.com/bum_lung/status/1002934418854633473

Io. "To date be gay do crime stuff has raised over $12,000 for prisoners!" (2021). Retrieved from https://twitter.com/bum_lung/status/1403016661913964552

Mary Nardini Gang. "Towards the queerest insurrection" (2008). Retrieved from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mary-nardini-gang-toward-the-queerest-insurrection

Mary Nardini Gang. "Criminal Intimacy" (2008-2010). Retrieved from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mary-nardini-gang-criminal-intimacy

Mary Nardini Gang. "Interview with the Mary Nardini Gang." (2008-2010). Retrieved from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mary-nardini-gang-interview-with-the-mary-nardini-gang

Mary Nardini Gang. "What Is It To Become Beautiful?" (2008-2010). Retrieved from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mary-nardini-gang-what-is-it-to-become-beautiful

Mary Nardini Gang. "Whore Theory" (2008-2010). Retrieved from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mary-nardini-gang-whore-theory

Mary Nardini Gang. "Letter to the Editors." (2016). Retrieved from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mary-nardini-gang-letter-to-the-editors

Mary Nardini Gang. Be Gay Do Crime (2018). Contagion Press.

Mary Nardini Gang. "Be Gay, Do Crime" (2018). Self-published.

Ponemone, Scott. (2019). "Rethel's Death as Counterrevolutionary Meme." Retrieved from https://www.scottponemone.com/rethels-death-as-counterrevolutionary-meme/

queergraffiti. "be gay. do crimes. Marseille" (2016). Retrieved from https://queergraffiti.tumblr.com/post/150643905220/be-gay-do-crimes-marseille-france

Selk, Avi, Shapiro, T. Rees, and Lowery Wesley. (2017). "Call about suspicious man was made by Georgia Tech student killed by police, investigators say." Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/09/17/knife-wielding-campus-pride-leader-killed-by-police-at-georgia-tech/

Wallace, Kelly. "Forgotten Los Angeles History: The Chinese Massacre of 1871" (2017). Los Angeles Public Library. Retrieved from https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/chinese-massacre-1871

Woodstock, Tuck. "Episode 112: Io (from Bum Lung)" Gender Reveal Podcast. Retrieved from https://www.genderpodcast.com/s/Gender-Reveal-Transcript-Episode-112-Io.docx