There were so many sweet, tender, and moving moments at this past weekend’s @ACABookfaire—not to mention silly, inspiring, and connective ones (like the best and most wholesome kind of anarchist family reunions), among so many other dreamy descriptors—that it’s hard to narrow down examples, much less narrow down my gratitude to the organizers, tablers, presenters, and really everyone who converged at this bookfair.

But a highlight for me was the beautiful space made for not only honoring but also remembering and being vulnerably real about our grief—that is, sharing the whole of ourselves and life, with its abundance of joys and sorrows, wins and losses. There were three workshops related to mourning, ritual, dying, and death. There was an altar specifically built for the bookfair by an anarchist gravedigger and casket maker, and people added flowers, notes, art, photos, and herbal grief potions to it over the three days (see pictures 3 and 4).

And there was the friend from Durham, NC, who brought the banner pictured here, which they entrusted to me on the sixth anniversary of Charlottesville on August 12, and which @firestormcoop then let me hang in a prominent place of visibility and honor—over the area in the bookstore used for speakers during the bookfair. Six years ago, the banner was painted soon after Heather Heyer was murdered, and so many others were deeply injured and forever scarred, by fascists during the Unite the Right rally in Cville. It then was originally hung from the stone base of the first Confederate monument that folks tore down in NC, and later, on the one-year anniversary of that monument falling, it was hung up again—this time as part of an altar with names and flowers and candies around it, and folks read the names of people killed by the police in Durham.

The banner now has a home at Firestorm, as daily reminder that “we struggle in memory of all we’ve lost to white supremacy and fascism.” To my mind, all anarchist spaces should routinely make such room for the #ArtOfRemembrance, #RebelliousMourning, and #MendingTheWorld—which is about mending our own rebel hearts too.

Mourning our dead—who herself did so much to mourn via her music against the often-murderous violence of the Catholic Church, colonialism, anti-Blackness, patriarchy, fascism, and more—as seen wheatpasted in a bunch of public places around so-called Asheville, NC.

There’s such strength in this image, with eyes so intent on seeing and confronting hard truths, underscoring her own lyric, “I’m proud to be a troublemaker.” And yet there’s a sorrow to this image, to those eyes, that almost unwittingly makes one start replaying other lyrics of hers, tape-loop style, in one’s head: “To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.”

Others have already said this, but it hits me every time I see this outdoor “altar” to Sinéad O’Connor / Shuhada’ Sadaqat: she, like other brave feminist truth tellers and healers, should have been honored in life, not relegated to a social death during life, nor had life made so hard and repeatedly abusive that death came too early.

May her memory spark a blessed revolution.

(photo: black-and-white headshot of Sinéad facing directly at the camera, with eyes wide open and no smile on her face, pasted on a buffed-gray wall)

#ArtOfResistance
#ArtOfRemembrance
#MourningOurDead
#MendingTheWorld

When I was gifted this sticker during the hectic yet beautiful Montreal Anarchist Bookfair back in May, I had little time to think about it, much less look at it. Along with other sweet anarcha-gifts, it was tossed into pile to take home, and later, tossed into a small ziplock bag of other stickers that then, unfortunately, got lost under a pile of papers, which in turn got tossed into a box that recently traveled to the US Midwest. It was only rediscovered a couple days ago when I wanted to take an alleged #ArtOfResistance stroll and rummaged around for companions.

Audrey Hepburn? I stared back at her confident (defiant?) gaze and couldn’t understand why someone had paired her with “antifa.” Maybe, I thought, it’s a meme I missed. Or some sort of irony? Or simply that whomever crafted this design just likes Hepburn as an actress? Or maybe some antifa dude wanted a pretty female face to draw attention to the message? (Yuck!) Perhaps, to be less skeptical, they wanted to show that folks other than cis-males can be antifascist?!

It’s then that I thought to do that most modern of things: an online search (versus the old-fashioned act of going to an actual library). Keywords: “Audrey Hepburn antifascism.” And I learned something, or was reminded of something: stickers can and sometimes should make us think! They can and sometimes should serve as the #ArtOfRemembrance, honoring our chosen rebellious ancestors. They can and sometimes do both, while also putting out a much-needed stances: #ResistFascism!

What I learned, moreover, was that as a teen in the Netherlands, Audrey did her part to resist Nazism: “I [gave] underground concerts to raise money for the Dutch Resistance movement. I danced at recitals, designing the dances myself. I had a friend who played the piano and my mother made the costumes. The recitals were given in houses with windows and doors closed, and no one knew they were going on. Afterwards, money was collected and given to the Dutch Underground.”

Be like Audrey—and stick firm to solidarity (and now, some public walls and street signs).

Pausing for a moment of queer joy.

This world is stone-cold hard. It’s too easy to sink into that grayness. To see nothing but what paves over all we love, all we desire and yearn for.

To always feel, as the hauntingly beautiful new album from @blackoxorkestar phrases it in a song that could make a rock cry, that “there’s something missing that could make us whole.”

Queer joy makes whole. Not always, and for many, not often. Or not often enough.

Yet it never abandons the desire for that nonbinary messy beautiful wholeness, complete with cracks still visible and honored.

And when those moments come, queer joy knows how to revel in them, dance with them, share them; squeeze out every ounce of delicious, self-generated, spontaneous, otherworldly time-spaces; dream forward about more euphoric moments.

So one has to pause each time, and leave a “note to self” etched across the barren landscape. As remembrance, as fuel and fire. As shared wink to others of what’s possible. As concrete evidence that those moments aren’t mere moments. They are the connective tissue of lives worth living.

#QueerAsFuck
#BeGayDoCrime
#BeGayDoJoy
#ArtOfRemembrance
#ArtOfResistance
#TryQueerAnarchismForLife

(photo: purple circle A spray painted across a sidewalk leading into @defendatlantaforest, because #QueerNotCops, paused by in mid-October, and woven—through friendships new and older—into the queer-joy pause of the few days in Oberlin and Cleveland, thanks to too many fabulous anarchists to name here)