Modern political theories balance between equalizing society and liberating society. The discourse of using the state to equalize wealth and opportunity pleads for a stronger and more centralized state. I argue that an effective movement of queer emancipation is a libertine movement. Emancipation lies with the rollback of the state’s biopower and overturning the identity categories of the state rather than fighting for them. I propose an alliance of anti-statist movements in America, including the libertarians and successionists. The left right distinction. Genderqueer is a libertarian social position. It is the concepts of liberty and freedom applied to gender. We are the new libertines.
Burning Man is a libertarian/libertine experiment. It is a radical unleashing of human creativity that comes with a relative liberation from default cultural rules and norms. This is the model for emancipation not the old left model of legal intervention to protect identity category rights. Embrace your freedoms not your rights.
For gender activism this means turning from fighting for juridical recognition, protection, and regulation and instead take over the streets and the parks. Expand our liberty of gender expression rather than limiting the freedom of action of others deploying the essentialist discourses of privilege, transphobia, transmisogyny and cissexism.

My Lovefest photos document young women expressing their sexuality. My pictures trouble some older feminists. Anti-Sex feminism governs their ethics. Sex-positive feminism may never reach this older generation.
Anti-porn feminism joined hands with the christian right in America in the 80’s in an effort to roll back civil liberties and impose regulation on the representation of sexuality. The radical lesbian feminist figure of “Man the Rapist” joined with the christian figure of “Man the Pervert”, to define the “Threatening Other”.
This fear of (one’s own) perversion, is the force behind the American male’s Homophobia and Transphobia.

Nietzsche wrote A Genealogy Of Morality (GOM) in 1880, a very interesting time. The stranglehold that Calvinist identity politics had on German public morality was beginning to slip. Bismarck had unified Germany under Prussian rule only ten years earlier. The “imaginary community” of the German Nation was being created. Nationalist and Populist politics were destabilizing all of the regimes of Europe that could not harness the New Nationalism to their cause.

Nietzsche witnessed an earlier era of identity politics when the newly minted secular identities of class and nation were gaining ground on the Calvinist and Lutheran identities. He despises the protestant morality which he grew up with. He calls it a slave morality which he traces back to the persecution of the early Christians within the Roman Empire. A slave morality is a sort of intense passive aggressive identity. As marginalized people the early christian theology identified with a victim status. It tried to make powerlessness into a virtue and dreamed of vengeance on the Sinful Roman empire. Nietzsche sees the Calvinist Identity as identifying with being victimized by the sinful, the powerful and the secular and dreaming of the ultimate vengeance fire and brimstone. In Contemporary California we might say that they “gave their power away” and embraced the role of the victim. Nietzsche finds this Victim Theology in most (all?) of the identity politics of his contemporaries, including christian moralism, anti-semitism, working-class populism, nationalism, socialism, anarchism and feminism. He felt that each of these movements had internalized the original Judeo-Christian victim cult.

At the time Nationalism was considered a progressive movement of liberation and modernism. Identifying with one’s nation was a new and modern identity which has started spreading across Europe with Napoleon earlier that century. Those new identities of German, Hungarian, Serbian and Croatian were very fresh and all based on cults of imagined victimization by another group. Hatred towards another group which is perceived to have power over your own “imagined community”, that was and is the basis of Identity Politics.

Folsom street fair is tomorrow. San Francisco is crawling with horny gay men in leather.

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