The Bloodline of Militant Queer Resistance

The second chapter of Be Gay, Do Crime: The Story of the Mary Nardini Gang

Queer Marxism drops June 1, 2025, tracing the radical evolution of queer activism. The Story of the Mary Nardini Gang is a key piece—informing the larger book but also standing alone as critical history.

Join the Red Menace Collective today to read this project's outline and future chapters before they are released publicly.

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ICYMI, read the first chapter here.

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Milwaukee, 2008.

While mainstream gay organizations chase marriage rights and military acceptance, something more dangerous is brewing in the Midwest. This chapter traces the radical lineage that connects the queer insurrectionists of Milwaukee back through decades of confrontational resistance.

From concentration camp badges to revolutionary manifestos, discover how the pink triangle—once a death mark—was transformed into a weapon of defiance. Follow the thread through ACT UP's militant response to government inaction during the AIDS crisis, where activists weren't asking for compassion but demanding survival by any means necessary.

As respectable gay politics embrace corporate sponsorships and black-tie fundraisers in the 1990s, the chapter reveals how a different path was being forged in the abandoned factories and cheap apartments of deindustrialized cities. Through underground zines, collective houses, and networks of trust, a new form of queer militancy takes shape—one that rejects assimilation entirely.

By 2008, they've given themselves a name: Bash Back! Not an organization but a tendency, a modality, a stance that targets systems rather than just individual bigots. Their confrontational actions escalate until a federal lawsuit threatens to expose them all.

But legal pressure only pushes the most radical elements further underground, where they're developing something more potent than street demonstrations—a theoretical framework that will send tremors through radical spaces across the country.

The pink triangle. ACT UP. Bash Back! What’s next?

The queer insurrection is coming.

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