“Thank you for Coming to Work Today”: Book Talk On Activism, Friendship and Fighting at Village Works, March 9th
(Not to reader:
I posted this last week, but the post got flagged last week for violating some vague set of community guidelines.)
Thank you for coming today.
Thank you to Village Works, the best bookstore in New York city. Buy a book or a zine everyone.
Thank you Malav and the crew from common notions.
Thank you to Caroline and Andrew and Virginia who are here, who sat for interviews, unpacking bits and pieces of our messy history.
Let me introduce the co panelists, my friends:
James Richard Tracy is an American author, poet and activist living in Oakland, California. He is the co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times. I’m honored to have him here.
Lynn Lewis is an oral historian, educator, community organizer and author or Women Who Change the World: Stories from the Fight for Social Justice, (City Lights, 2023).
And Rachel Herzing, the author of How to Abolish Prisons.
For me, it's always been about the friends, the friends in the streets we see, that make going to the demo fun, the comrades that become family.
This was the hardest book I ever wrote. It's about the friends and our messy contradictions, and conflicts. But also our glories and greetings and salutations.
“Thank you for coming to work today,” Elizabeth Owens, of vocal used to say it all the time. “Thank you for coming to work and don't forget to make the donuts"
I attended her funeral in September 2020, sad she was gone, recalling the hugs she gave everyone who attended marches, even my kids. “You did the most important thing, you shared your family with us all,” she told me. I was also relieved I had gotten the opportunity to interview her for this project, before she shuffled off. Her telling me her life story about drug use and sex work and harm reduction, fighting the landlords and insurers and drug companies restricting acesess to the housing and drugs she needed to survive.
I interviewed a lot of my friends.
Another who stands out is Doris Diether, my friend from Judson Memorial Church, who helped beat back Robert Moses’ plan to put a freeway through Washington Square Park. She died exactly a year after Elizabeth. The NY Times reported: “Doris Diether, a full-time public citizen who by sheer gumption became a self-taught guardian of Washington Square Park and a Greenwich Village preservationist, died on Sept. 16 in the Waverly Place apartment she had occupied since 1958. She was 92.”
Another was Elizabeth Meixell, aka Sister Mary Cunnilingus, of the Church Ladies for Choice, who brought me into ACT UP affinity groups and fun, before she shuffled off in 2022. She was there in the fall of 2015, at one of the readings for Rebel Friendships, my book about the affinity groups, which had become my everything in New York. Her opponents, “the Nazi nutzo psycho right wing bullshit” that we still see today.
I instinctively favored affinity affinity groups over organizations, which seemed to perpetuate the sorts of “iron cages of despair” that Weber lamented.
When I told Stanley Aronowitz about my research on friendships, Stanley reminded me that these affinity groups come and go. Organizations are what endure.
There was something to the falling apart that bore consideration.
“If you are interested in a fight, think about Stalin and Trotsky. That was a fight,” Stanley told me.
“That’s not exactly a resolution I’m looking for; one man stabbed the other,” I replied.
Talks about friendships and fighting were some of my last conversations with Stanley, who shuffled off after that conversation, August 16, 2021.
The friends have been many, even if friendships as a model for social change might be limited.
Still I aspired to live in a city of friends, the sort that Whitman prophesied about.
Thank you to James Tracy for pointing me to this poem.
I still imagine what that city could look like.
(More poems next week at Lucky Bar. We have a full line up).
But Stanley had a point, you could not talk about social movements without acknowledging that movements are often afflicted with conflicts, which undermine our efforts.
And, of course, the larger point was that our efforts are limited when our tent gets too small, too restricted, when we get too critical of others?
Steve Duncombe, my old Lower East Side Collective buddy, and mentor, suggested I take seriously, some of the conflicts and struggles of activists, both internal and external, that my next project be about this. So I started interviewing activists about their friendships and conflicts.
Looking around, I saw the problem everywhere, not just with my own friendships, but also in well-documented historic friendships and conflicts: Karl Marx and his writing partner Friedrich Engels bickering about incessant requests for money while drafting their critique of capital; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau wondering who did or did not share thoughts during hikes; Simone de Beauvoir and her childhood friend Zaza and relational asymmetry; Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton publicly airing their grievances over leadership of the Black Panthers; Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich debating intersectional analysis; the Treatment Action Group (TAG) and ACT UP members landing ad hominem attacks in ACT UP meetings and newsletters; Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud writing each other long letters about their relationship splitting; Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno debating the relative merit of poetry, or whose writing was or was not sufficiently dialectical. Old Left vs. New Left, introverts and extroverts, clashes are everywhere.
“Two souls live in me, alas, irreconcilable with one another” Goethe wrote in Faust.
Sometimes we all feel that way.
We all have our internal conflicts, our wounds, and Oedipal struggles. And all too often we play them out publicly. This phenomenon happens often in movement friendships: we idealize our comrades, and this leads to disappointment. What do you do when a friend has blind spots or biases?
“The pursuit of full humanity,” said Paulo Freire, “cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore, it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he (or she) prevents others from being so.”
I spent a decade interviewing my friends about their conflicts.
The Sex Wars that gave Mark Milano gray hairs in ACT UP.
The purity contests, the old Cotton Mather finger wagging, the scolding we see.
Debates over reform vs revolution.
Andrew Boyd and I talked about the Billionaires for Bush or Gore vs the Gore voters, who like Al Gore.
Several lamented the cool kids club, that radical chic stylish, oh so hip, self-appointed vanguard, calling the shots, in movement after movement.
The Swim Team in ACT UP, the oh so brilliant Treatment and Data Committee with their McArthur genius grants.
The summit hoppers in Reclaim the Streets and the Global Justice Movement.
The Occupy insiders who seemed to dominate the spokescouncils.
Claire recalled feeling like she was back in high school again, not getting picked to play.
Emily recalled groups actually trying to take out each other’s affinity groups in the movement.
Others simply scolded, pushing sympathizers out of our movements, over mask use or failure to use the right lefty speak.
So what are we to do?
Don’t call people out, call people in, says Loretta Ross.
Listen to them.
When we call them out, Naomi Klein contends, they find a welcome mat with Steve Bannon, etc.
Still the petty jealousies.
Everytime a friend succeeds, I die a little, said Gore Vidal. I felt the same way.
“In the years since I published Rebel Friendships in 2016, many of my friendships and affinity groups ran their course or splintered. We faced a war on immigrants and outsiders, threats to democracy, and climate chaos. The stakes were high; there were fights over tactics and strategy; arguments over ideologies; Hillary vs. Bernie. Friends turned, solidarities crumbled, friendships became strained, and social ties were severed… social media confirming points of view, emphasizing differences.
“There is nothing more alienating,” says Lauren Berlant, “than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.”
Some friends disappeared, but others talked, shared, and worked it through. According to friends in the Icarus Project, “Friendships are the best medicine.”
Conversely, “Self-righteousness was a glaring weakness,” say Moore and Tracy in No Fascist USA!. It’s a refrain we hear a lot in stories about rebel friendships. Another common refrain: “We tended to out-left each other,” said Laura Whitehorn.
The hardest book I ever wrote. We had several enactments, as therapists call moments when external conflicts find their way into the dynamics of the sessions, acting out unresolved conflicts, emotions, or patterns of behavior in the interviews themselves. Eternal debates about antifa vs rise and resist, affordable housing vs gardens took shape as we conducted interviews, And several interviewees stopped talking with me as we were completing the interviews. We repeat the same arguments over and over again, in an eternal return, much like the conversations between Hans and Settembrini in The Magic Mountain.
Still the process continued and I fell in and out and back in love with the movements in which we navigated struggles over status, strategies, and tactics.
We fight with our friends and we find meaning in our friendships. This was Angela Davis’ point, standing in Oranienplatz, Berlin, in October 2022, speaking about refugees and social movements, the connections forged between strangers who become comrades. Our friend Allesssandra had told us about the talk earlier in the day.
“The refugee crisis is a consequence of capitalism,” says Davis. “Freedom is a constant struggle.” She recalled the Million Roses for Angela campaign to get her out of jail, supported by friends across Germany. “You saved my life. Movements saved my life. So I see myself as standing in for movements. . . . Racism is not an individual defect. . . . It’s a structural problem. . . . We are here in Oranienplatz where ten years ago people said: ‘No, we will not capitulate’. . . . Give hope to a collective future.” Davis went on to remind us that our conflicts may be “structural problems.” The question is, how can we fumble toward repair of these problems?
Interviewees shared stories about how they address such problems, demonstrating an intergenerational approach to skill sharing, movement stories dovetailing into each other, over and over again, one after another.
Each interview began with conversations about the problems they encountered that brought them into collective organizing.
Caroline - poverty,
Bertha, - racism
Boyd - nukes
Duncombe - racism
Michelle O'Brien - transophobia
Bertha Lewis, the founder and president of the Black Institute, an “action tank” aiming “to shape intellectual discourse and public policy from a Black perspective” told me, “I was born in 1951 . . . I’m dead smack in the middle of the civil rights movement, dogs and fire hoses, then 1963, the March on Washington.” “We were very poor,” shared Lewis. “I was born in a little fork in the river, St. Johns County, Florida. My parents were migrant workers. My birth certificate says I was born colored. Grew up Negro. Was called an Afro-American. And then chose to be Black. You have to understand first of all my race, my ethnicity, my gender, and my age. I couldn’t do anything else; [it was] destiny, inevitable. Given that, I became an English and theater major. I was going to fight the revolution . . . by doing musicals.”
Bertha smiled, recalling the era of tribes translating problems into dramas around town. She loved Jesus Christ Superstar; it was “big time but white,” said Lewis. “It is the struggle between good and evil. We have an antagonist and a protagonist. You have parts with many different characters. You have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You have a revolution to flip . . . . I think that’s why theater people are drawn to that.” It was a way to perform a different world.
Jennifer Flynn Walker felt a similar loyalty within Fed Up Queers, a late 1990s queer direct-action collective that began in New York City. “The people in Fed Up Queers are like my ride or die, my crew,” said Flynn Walker. “I would die for any of them still. I call it my gay high school. It’s people who really know me at my worst and still come around.” Walker gave an example of this kind of friendship: “Corn and I had this brief dating thing and then she started dating someone else and we were not talking. But then, we had this thing like ‘ride or die.’ We were supposed to set this effigy of Giuliani on fire. Corn got grabbed and we had this thing where if a girl gets arrested, we go into the system together. I was the girl who happened to be standing closest. I avoided Corn the whole day but I had to get arrested so she wouldn’t be alone.” “So, Corn gets arrested and handcuffed. And I have to make myself get arrested. They don’t want to arrest me––I had to throw myself around. I remember being horizontal and me kicking a fence. I get arrested; we get arrested together. We’re sitting next to each other and we start talking. We got a DAT [desk appearance ticket] instead of being put through the system together. And it was still hot. We went to the beach and had a magical beach day. You could make a bonfire on the beach in Rockaway in those days. Nobody was there. A great, magical moment.” Friends surprise each other; teach each other. And sometimes our comrades bring out the best in us.
“Remember, life is long,” said Bertha Lewis, reflecting on the lessons of history and activism. “Organizers have to learn organizer math,” Lewis insisted. “Power is about . . . either [you] can be famous and have power, of course you can be rich and have power, or else you can have power in numbers,” says Lewis, recognizing activism as a Sisyphean endeavor. “We lose nine times out of ten. Now can you deal with that or are you gonna become depressed? You have to knock on sixty doors to get in and talk to ten in order to sign up two. That’s the math.” Lewis reminds us, “The odds are overwhelming. The hours are long. The pay is low. You wonder, am I doing the right thing? And, goddamn it, you sit down with someone in the neighborhood. You left your house with this cloud, and I guarantee you, real people will lift you up.” Lewis paused. “I been at this now for thirty years. . . . My biggest mentors have been the people that I’ve organized, who have struggled for years and are still standing. I aspire to be a mentor, to have someone say, ‘Bertha taught me something.’ In the hood we call it ‘ride or die.’ These are people you can ride out any problem with.”
Inevitably, the interviewees dealing with problems came into conflict with each other, differences of opinion re enacted. Orwell reported Alex Comfort, movements tried to create safer spaces, struggling with mediation and the very idea of safety, people being called out, accountability exposing our limitations as movements.
Ryan Li Dahlstrom argues: “By making these public attacks on each other, we are engaging in the same disposability politics of capitalism . . . that we purport to be against . . . feeding into state surveillance tactics that are monitoring how we are tearing each other down.”
At a panel on immigrant organizing at the 2018 NYC Anarchist Book Fair, Jack Vimo reflected on the call-out culture of the current organizing moment, “Sylvia Rivera would never have found a place in this. She would have been called out.”
Sarah Schulman told stories of being hounded for being anti trans at her book tours.
What's going on?
Well, of course, there is a lot of trauma out there.
Whether we mean to or not, we tend to replicate the difficulties we had growing up, and there is a lot of harm families have handed down.
We come from fucked up families, bringing this into our movement work.
“There is a real power to have your story connected to others,” says Sascha Altman DuBrul. “It’s a challenge to hold onto the good parts and let go of other parts. It’s like we are all living in a hall of mirrors. Traumatized backgrounds lead to black-and-white thinking. You find it in movements, a lot of black-and-white thinking. One of the skills is stepping out of our point of view. How do you teach empathy? That really eats at movements. People compete over pain. I’ve had to do a lot of stepping into other shoes. I just don’t engage with people who are black-and-white thinking.”
Themes of resolution and dialogue, talking it out with each other, run through the story. Working through, as activists grapple with questions about targets. We rehash the injury, the same wound, same fight and flight over and over.
Grieving is also part of it, the same old errors that play out again and again. This was the case in 2024 after the death of Kathy Ottersten, a trans activist in ACT UP who’d recently ended her own life. Ottersten’s memorial was a gorgeous and heartbreaking night of stories, and working through. These raw accounts found their way into the final draft of the story.
In between frustrations, losses and wins, several interviewees talked about meaning making in activism and logotherapy, Victor Frankl, and finding coherence even in hard times.
Looking out for each other.
The reflections on rebel friendships were many.
Andrew Velez attended more act up meetings than anyone, over literally three decades. He spoke on a panel on my last reading on Rebel Friendships in 2015.
I interviewed him countless times, the last for this book, shortly before he died on the 14th of May, 2019 at the age of 80.
“Until there’s a cure, I won’t be able to cross the street to avoid someone I don’t like working with,” Vélez said back in the ’80s and ’90s. I asked Vélez about this comment. “I have an invisible list of names and when the epidemic is over, I will never have to speak to any of them again,” said Vélez.
“That’s from then. I don’t feel that way now.”
I asked him, “How come?”
“I think I’ve become kinder and gentler. And I’m much more forgiving. There’s still people I think are jerks and I don’t want to waste any time talking with them. But, in activism, you don’t have to like everyone. . . . You just have to be willing to do the work. I always thought, what is it we need to do? And very often when I’m at a meeting and it’s going off the rails because people are getting caught up with stuff, what I’m good at is stepping in and saying, ‘Could we get back to what the point is here?’”
I think about Andy, in his pearls, chatting with friends we've been with for years and years, doing this over and over again, finding a way to move forward, with each other, one joke, one demo, one bust at a time.
So, what are the lessons?
Love each other or die, as Auden said during WWII, before he renouced the poem, “September 1, 1939” after it was published.
Still, friendship has changed and so have we.
Yet, how do we allow difference?
All too often the old Protestant scold, the wagging finger re-emerges.
All too often, we are not inclusive. Give people grace. There are gonna be different times for different people and friendships.
Thank you.
“This is a time when we can get back to basics, back to human relationships,” said James, commenting after the talk.
“Do we all see the same things?” wondered Lynn. “Finding alignment, it takes time outside of the meeting.” Love or fighting, “let's not debate the word. What do you mean? Maybe we build from there? Let's figure out how to take the time, take the risks…”
“Thank you to Lynn” James followed. “It's ok to say comrade.” The crowd clapped. “Avoid sectarianism and its excessive attachment to a particular sect or party… When a small group of people have exclusive access to the truth, they can lie to get you to the rally or meeting because the ends justify the means. Friends help people survive repression. It helps people feel a sense of revolution. We’ve never had a time when we’ve been free of repression. As long as there’s been a movement, there’s been repression. There’s so much we can’t control. What we can control is how we react. Forgiveness is a foundation to do the work, to negotiate conflict. Stick out the losses and the wins.”
Following his talk, James thanked Lynn and introduced Rachel Herzing, who talked about critical resistance and her work, How to Abolish Prisons, riffing on the idea of the good fight vs the bad, the ways movements overlap and differ, yet still move us forward.
Friends from the PSC and my dissertation committee, Irwin Epstein and Times Up and Public Space Party, ACT UP, on and on were there.
I signed a few books, greeted friends from around the world. And we strolled over to McSorley’s McSorley's Old Ale on 15 E 7th Street, continuing the conversation over a few pints, recalling adventures, journeys back to New Orleans, next steps forward for friends, through the years, wondering what it is we’re doing.
As CS Lewis put it, “The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question "Do you see the same truth?" would be "I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend," no Friendship can arise - though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.”
Hopefully we’re going somewhere.
Two more readings to go in March.
All weekend, people were out in the streets,
March for Science Friday,
Tesla Takedown March 8th
Women's March,
People in the streets, a conversation about frienships and movements.
Arrests as we arrive.
"Tax the rich... " chants the crowd in front of thr Tesla store on 860 Washington Street in the West Village. "We need clear air, not another billionaire."
Direct action fill the street.
No one is pleased with the South African oligarch, who’se first move in power was to gut the program that programs to provide AIDS relief in Africa, with dreams of privatizing our governemnt.
@Says Pop4Planet says
“Billionaire losers are destroying our country.
With the stroke of a pen, they sacrifice our planet and the lives of our loved ones for a couple more percentage points of profit.
The problem isn’t the “woke mind virus” or immigrants—it’s these losers.
From destroying forests, to polluting our neighborhood with toxic air, nothing is safe under their rule— not funding for Medicaid and Head Start or housing and disaster relief.
These fuckers read our dystopian novels and turned them into business plans. Why don’t they go to therapy instead of using us as guinea pigs for their weird inter-planetary fantasies?
We’ve reached a Fork in the Road. They’ve declared war on us— so we’re declaring war on them.
Sustained non-violent protests are happening across the country against the delusional elites and corporations that are polluting our planet and exploiting our people.
For our love of humanity and for the planet we call home.
Fuck these losers. This is an uprising.”
Strange times in the USA.
If ever there was a time to say it loud and say it proud, its time to speak up, even if glasses are breaking.
Look out for each other.
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