So anyone who knows me knows that I’m writing a book about love

Just different variations of love and how it shows up in the life of a queer young person(I use to be one of those) I’m currently working on a chapter about community love and I wanted to share some thoughts.

I think the progressive Renaissance that we have been living through in the 2010s is on the decline. I really think it peaked in 2020 during the pandemic. Especially for trans people, we are really good at helping our community survive because we have had tons of practices. Genuine community care at the core of our strategy helps when we have to helping each other…. So of course, when a cutural awakening and global pandemic happens, we rise to the top…. The racial awakening that happens with Trayvon Martin, Alton Sterling, Sandra Bland, Orlando Castille, Layleen Palonco George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade(the list goes on and on) sadly sets the stage. We saw this rise in investment in Black people so anyone with a trans inclusive politics would then invest in black trans leadership.. We saw growth in visibility, programming, access. We saw growth in the nonprofit sectors. Hollywood….shit….even my own podcast and Youtube channel grew. Don’t forget some of us even got some reparations in Evanston, Illinois. Just a peak of a cultural shift. So of course, there’s gonna be a decline. There’s gonna be a response….I am seeing it, A backlash against trans visibility and particularly trans leadership. We saw in 2020, companies open up remote work just to survive which open up doors for disabled people to get more work that they have been qualified for for years. Those same companies who fight against the rise of minimum wage put on a veneer of communty care to smile and convince us to come back to work for that same bullshit wage. leadership.

  The love that we have for our community is the mechanism that moves us from being the needy to caretaker to movement organizer to rebel. BUT it is also that tool that the exploiters relies on to stabilize, and in some sense, reproduce itself.

Think about it , we are always in situations where we are not getting adequate help and resources from the state or traditional institutions. So we are forced to produce a network of informal economies and harm reducing strategies in order to survive….we build that strategy from scratch with very little help within the confines of a system( like the nonprofit industrial complex…or the ghetto..tomato tamato) These imperfect strategies we create do not produce a different world free of exploitation, where our community integrates through shared hope and care. Rather, the effect of these survival strategies is that it keep laboring activists infighting, distracted, and alive so that the real oppressor can avoid having an accountability to solve the real issue like pay us a living wage, making affordable housing accessible and abolished the carceral state.

This effect is illustrated by the endless individual mutual aid requests that plague our newletters, social media inboxes, and care circles. requests that are often for rent, shelter, food, medical care.This money is coming from our own community a lot of time cause we care and actually love each other… duh. The impulse to love each other by way of these individualized acts of care are ultimately mechanisms that keep us available for exploitation. It doesn’t mean that loving our community is wrong or bad. That’s actually the thing that deserves our efforts. Our community absolutely deserves our fight, our care & our energy. I’m just pointing out the cycle of exploitation.

Think about hoes on the hoe stroll …like in the amazing docu-series The Stroll and Last Call on HBO Max. They both do a brilliant job in describe how the street sex workers and community organizers create systems of protection for each other. In the Stroll, the sex workers, even while being in direct competition for resource, they still care enough to create a signal to protect the hoes from cops and warn each other about dangerous abusive cheap weirdo Johns. Then in the Last Call, the community organizers were making systems for bar patrons to literally stay alive and safe from a serial killer plaguing NYC because the cops were doing a piss poor nonchalant job at finding the kill and neglecting evidence and leads about the cases because they we Queer victims. The systems deserve out intent. The impact is undeniable but what happen after? We stay safe and alive just to get old from stress and naking ends meet….the grind slowly chipped away at our minds and bodies by the same circumstances of neglect that lead us to sex work or community organizing in the first place.

Then the snakes and wolves of community start to each us from the inside out with there back stabbing and tokenism chasing. We attack and gossip about each other out of need, insecurity, loneliness, and scarcity…giving fake hug & performative tears in public like we have a community based politic. We use calling each other out to boost our ego whether wrong or right….The clicks and views boost our image to get the next gig/platform/check…all to survive….to be exploited or exploit again. Social justice hamster wheel in a cage of capitalism we cant escape.

I nor anybody else has full proof solutions on how to stop this cycle of exploitation, but I’m just pointing it out in the hope that we can make better, harm reducing, less exploitative decisions. If that is at the forefront of our mind…maybe we can shift a lil more toward the world we want to be instead of the world we are.

Thanks to Dr Joy James for her theory of Captive Maternal