2012 – Against Equality

Against Equality’s New Book Is Now Available for Order!

Posted by A.E. on October 23, 2012

Oct 232012

Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You, the third and final book in the Against Equality Collective’s pocket-sized book series, takes a critical look at the celebrated passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 in the United States.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our newest anthology on critiques of hate crime laws will go to print soon!

Posted by A.E. on September 1, 2012

Sep 012012

Cover design by Chris E. Vargas

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

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

Click for more details…

Marriage and Love – Emma Goldman (1911)

Jul 312012

Marriage and Love - Emma Goldman (1911)

An Appeal to Friends & Supporters

Posted by A.E. on July 30, 2012

Jul 302012

Dear Friends & Supporters,

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

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

Built a free online archive of radical queer and trans critiques containing nearly 100 entries.
Self-published 2 widely reviewed and acclaimed books that we continue to provide at no cost to queer and trans people who are incarcerated.
Created 2 sets of original postcards, 1 set of buttons, and distributed over 5,000 of our satirical “greater than” stickers.
Participated in 28 community events, lectures, and panels.
Presented at several academic and activist conferences, including the 2011 annual College Art Association Conference in New York, the 2012 After Homosexual Conference in Melbourne, and the upcoming Harry Hay Conference in New York.
Wrote for 6 popular press and academic outlets.
Appeared as guests on 12 television and radio programs and gave interviews for numerous of print and online publications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Together In the Struggle,

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

Check Out Our New Back to School Anti-Marriage Tote Bag!

Posted by A.E. on July 24, 2012

Jul 242012

We’ve been busy working on our third anthology and a few other essays and interviews, but now seemed like a good time to take a short summer vacation from writing/ editing to churn out some hilarious new things for our online store. Late one night/ early one morning in a humid fourth floor studio that remains a balmy 85 °F after dark, we hatched this idea…

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

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

They Who Marry do Ill – Voltairine de Cleyre (1907)

Jul 072012

They Who Marry do Ill – Voltairine de Cleyre (1907)

Spring / Summer Updates from A.E.

Posted by A.E. on June 13, 2012

Jun 132012

It has been a while since there was any news from us. We were all so busy working on projects, we didn’t have much time for updates. We’ve had a lot going on this Spring: touring in the Midwest, re-opening our online store, starting a Twitter, and we have even more exciting things coming up this Summer! Check out the details below (or follow us on Twitter!) to stay in the loop about all the things we are up to with A.E.

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

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

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

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

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

New Postcard Prints for Against Equality Coming Soon!

Posted by A.E. on April 23, 2012

Apr 232012

After mulling over more than twenty submissions from our most recent call for art for postcard designs we finally chose the three will will print this year. Many thanks to all who submitted designs to our call for submissions. We are really happy to have so many to chose from, but unfortunately we can’t print everything we receive. Like we said last time we printed postcards, we would love to print all the lovely submission we received, but we don’t have a stash of gold coins and rubies in a safe out back like the Human Rights Campaign.

Without further delay, the designs:

Cristine Drach, (New York)

Ryan Conrad, (Maine)

Sam Wallman, (Melbourne)

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

Reminder: Postcard Call for Art Due March 31st 2012

Posted by A.E. on March 24, 2012

Mar 242012

Just a reminder that Against Equality is still looking for your sassiest, snarkiest, silliest and most sarcastic designs for our second postcard project. On our website, we have continued to archive critical writing that encourages others to rethink the rhetoric of equality and inclusion as deployed by the mainstream gay and lesbian organizations and campaigns around gay marriage, hate crimes legislation and military inclusion. Sadly, we have had a bit more difficulty finding critiques that employ visual culture (photography, video, print, performance, painting, film, etc), so we thought we would encourage more creative work around these through this postcard project.

A few selected designs will be printed on 4” x 6” postcards and the images will be added to the AE digital archives. These postcards will be distributed internationally through our low-cost online store. Designers whose images are selected will be compensated with a stack of fifty of their own postcards as well as a handful from the rest of the designers! Submissions should directly address one or more of the themes from our digital archive (italicized above). All entries must be received by email on March 31, 2012 as 300dpi .pdf files with all colors converted to CMYK. And don’t forget to leave an 1/8” bleed on all sides!

Send questions, comments and submissions to: againstequality@gmail.com
or visit us on facebook!

Fuck Equality: Erotica for Rowdy Queers

Posted by A.E. on February 14, 2012

Feb 142012

Against Equality is putting together a new anthology of erotic fiction, so we need your help! We’re looking for submissions of original, unpublished stories between 1500 – 2000 words that incorporate our political agenda of challenging mainstream gay and lesbian politics (ie. marriage, military service, and hate crimes legislation) into the storyline. We’re always trying to find new ways to animate our politics; what more fun and sexy way to share our political project than with naughty tales of queer debauchery and gender terrorism!?

from “Born in Flames” publication by Kaisa Lassinaro

We want to hear about your wildest fantasies of raucous anti-war organizing, lesbian wolf packs fighting to end anti-queer violence (Born in Flames tribute anyone?), trans prison librarians organizing erotic poetry writing groups, seducing marriage equality interns to the dark side, and lots more! These are just a few examples to get all your juices flowing. And remember: political erotica (when is erotica not political?) doesn’t have to be dull and didactic – let your imaginations run wild! Facebook event page for the Call for Submissions available here!

Submissions are due May 15th by email to againstequality<at>gmail<dot>com; we hope to complete the editing process early in the summer. Each contributor selected for publication will receive two copies of the book as compensation. Submissions should be formatted as either .doc, .docx, .pdf, or .txt files. Please include a short 50 – 100 word bio.

Older Entries