Ryan Conrad

This book chapter is based on a co-authored multi-media talk by Against Equality to support the release of the collective's 2014 anthology Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. It appears in the anthology Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions (2016). This chapter provides an overview of the collective's politics and archival practices from 2009 to 2015.

The work required of politicized subjects to act together, across difference towards transformative justice, is inexhaustible, complex, and difficult. Sometimes it is a battle to speak to one's peers, let alone act in concert with them. This article addresses destructive tendencies of intracommunal queer relationality in particular. Recent events within queer networks have helped us to understand particular impasses in queer organizing as acerbic and self-destructive-what we term here as "acrid." In such instances, although some useful spaces for critique, criticism, praise, questions, wonderings, rants, reflections, and connections opened up, battlefields on which allied community members viciously attacked one another also manifested. Although generative at times, the debates and dialogues contained a great deal of vitriol, judgment, complacency, demands for apologies and annihilation, and in some instances, threatening and violent language, all which inhibit the momentum of our movements. This article is neither a content analysis of these myriad breakdowns in queer collaboration, nor are we interested in proving that such examples of destructive paradoxical relationality indeed happen. They happen. Instead, we assess the damage of devastated intracommunal relations, consider their queer propensities, and creatively theorize alternative possibilities for better collaborations throughout our queer spaces, communities, and futures.

Margot Weiss talked with Ryan Conrad, Yasmin Nair, and Karma Chávez, three members of Against Equality, a queer online archive, publishing, and arts collective that challenges the political vision of mainstream gay and lesbian politics—especially inclusion in marriage, the U.S. military, and the prison industrial complex via hate crimes legislation. They have three anthologies: Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage, Against Equality: Don't Ask to Fight Their Wars, and Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You.

Since 2006 Eric Stanley and Chris Vargas have been creating some of the most challenging work in contemporary queer film and video as both makers and performers. With the debut of their featurette Homotopia (2006) and the follow up feature length sequel, Criminal Queers (2012), they have staked claim to a new, radically queer aesthetic. With a critical vision of a queer utopic futurity that is neither possible nor hopeless, they use video and performance to confound our visual expectations of the now predictable “experimental” film genre and push the possibilities of the medium itself to gatecrash much-needed dialog on queer and trans subjectivity.

In June 1969, amidst the rhetoric of the “Just Society,” the White Paper on the extinguishing of Indigenous sovereignty, and the early years of state-sanctioned multiculturalism, the Canadian government passed an omnibus Criminal Code reform bill. The Omnibus Bill is often cited as the moment homosexuality was decriminalized in Canada, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau was benevolently trying to bring about equality for lesbians and gays, or when reforms established the right of women to access abortion and reproductive rights. None of these claims are accurate. Ryan Conrad spoke with Gary Kinsman in late March 2019, to reflect on the mythologies of the 1969 Criminal Code reform in light of recent state actions and how these acts of recuperation and co-optation impact left queer organizing strategies in the present.

Thomas Waugh is a professor at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University in Montréal where he founded the Concordia HIV/AIDS Project in 1993 and currently co-chairs the interdisciplinary sexuality studies programme. He is also a long-time mentor to Ryan Conrad, shepherding yet another lefty activist artfag through the savage and hostile territory known as academia. The conversation that follows takes the 19-book Queer Film Classics series from Arsenal Pulp Press, of which Tom is a co-editor, as a jumping-off point for an intergnerational conversation about queer film, friendship, and faggotry.

Margot Weiss talked with Ryan Conrad, Yasmin Nair, and Karma Chávez, three members of Against Equality, a queer online archive, publishing, and arts collective that challenges the political vision of mainstream gay and lesbian politics—espe-cially inclusion in marriage, the U.S. military, and the prison industrial complex via hate crimes legislation. They have three anthologies: Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage, Against Equality: Don't Ask to Fight Their Wars, and Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You. Margot: I'd love for you to begin by talking about the reception of Against Equality's work. So much of what you do straddles the seeming " divide " between academic or intellectual labor, and activist or political work. Ryan: I've toured extensively with the Against Equality anthologies and have been lucky to engage all sorts of folks in conversation about our project. While on tour I found that many folks from all sorts of backgrounds (urban/rural, formally educated/self taught, etc.) were hungry for our critique and eager to relate it to their local activist work. The separation between intellectual labor and political organizing seems dubious at best—most folks I met on tour were critically engaged with both. The reception to our work is unique because of how we have positioned ourselves. Our three anthologies are entirely self-published and are distributed through our self-managed website along with the help of the activist publisher/ distributor AK Press. In this publishing process we seized the means of production of knowledge, which is an explicitly activist gesture for an intellectual project. This has allowed us to exist inside and outside academia in interesting ways. For example, our books are taught in university classrooms in the United States and Canada, but they are also used as tools by activists to challenge the