I have a post I have been writing (and rewriting) for over a week about the text message exchange between Tyler Robinson (the person accused of murdering Charlie Kirk) and his partner, about love and the politics of love, that I may try to finish in the next week or two, but the weirdness around whether the language in those texts is the language of 20 somethings texting each other gives me pause. That pause has been expanded even more by the shooting at ICE facility in Dallas Texas, where there are claims that the shooter is a leftist because there was a bullet found where someone wrote “Anti-ICE” in blue sharpie on the bullet.
I absolutely hate holding on to the notion that either of these could be examples of false evidence produced to fan right-wing flames and fears about “Leftist Violence!!!!” because I want to believe that it is actually pretty hard to manufacture evidence that will hold up to intense public scrutiny. I want to believe this because, even as an anarchist, I don’t really want to be living in a world where people have to be THAT suspicious of everything every person ever says. Like that is pretty much a world where society ceases to exist.
And I know that this administration is full of lies and trying to take short cuts with presenting opinion as fact and manipulating data, but there is still a difference in my mind between the terrible and misleading AI written HHS reports being prepared for Robert Kennedy Jr. and tampering with crime scene evidence…Although I do acknowledge that crime scene evidence does get tampered with by the police and people in positions of authority, and that much of it goes under the radar and without being exposed…It just feels like if that shit is happening with cases that the whole world is watching closely, and no one is calling BS, we are in even more trouble than I think we are.
So, definitely possible, and if true, its a very big deal, but I just don’t want to jump into either trying to navigate both possibilities at once, or risk just picking one and potentially misleading my readers before more information becomes available. In other words, I am going to sit on the politics of love for now, at least as it relates to the idea of “political violence” and Leftist or Right-wing ideologies. Instead, tonight, I want to write a little bit about a topic that someone has been asking me a lot of questions about, and that is about whether anarchist/anti-authoritarian/anti-capitalist organizing spaces need to drug and alcohol free, and whether such a goal is inherently authoritarian.
I promised to try to be more experientially focused with these blog posts instead of theoretical, so I am going talk about the Aquadome, how and why we chose to make a Indie/Punk community center and show space drug and alcohol free, and the kind of responses that we got for making that choice/how we did and did not enforce it.
But before I do that, I have 4 points I want to present about drug use (including alcohol) that I think shape my perspective on these questions.
1. Most people, over the course of their lives, will need or strongly desire to find ways to chemically change the behaviors of their body/minds. This is what drugs do, chemically change the way our bodies, minds or whole bodyminds behave in certain circumstances. It includes prescription drugs and it includes social stimulants (like recreational drugs and alcohol). People may not initially think of a social or cultural practice like drinking alcohol in this light, but that is very much what makes drinking alcohol different from drinking something else at a party or social event. Now, it is absolutely true that things like sugars and proteins and vitamins are changing our internal chemistry as well, and could be included in this conversation about drugs, so it might not be the case that drinking a moderate amount of alcohol is really much different from overdosing on sugar as far as “engaging in a behavior to modify the behaviors of our bodyminds, so we can include general diet in this conversation at some point, but nutrients are required for daily life, so that is a conversation that can get pretty messy. For the sake of this argument, we don’t need to include all nutrition in the category of drugs to establish that people use many different kinds of drugs for very many different purposes, and that for most people, social and cultural practices tend to determine which drugs are the ones “bad” people use and abuse and which drugs are the ones that help the “good” people live good, normal lives. Determining what any community means by being “drug or alcohol free” is a social and cultural practice that varies from place to place and community to community. Often times that complexity gets ignored or boiled down to “recreational or social drugs” but even those categories get complicated with prescription medications that change or target social behaviors. Maybe, for the sake of destigmatizing the whole “drug user” idea, I should just call this medication instead of drugs, because even when we are talking about recreational drug use, we are talking about people trying to self-medicate themselves into a mental and physical state that helps them enjoy the upcoming experience. Which leads to:
2. People have a lot more anxieties and fears about social interactions and the expectations on those interactions than they like to admit, and turn to a whole spectrum of to help them navigate these social interactions. This includes all of the social interactions related to sex, physical and emotional intimacy, and interpersonal vulnerability. It is very common for people to turn to self-medicating specifically to help them overcome inhibitions, overactive imaginations, and physical behaviors that lead to awkwardness and discomfort in various kinds of these social situations. So, yes, this is people going to the bar to have drinks and find a hook up, but it is also people wanting to go to a sporting event and consume alcohol with other supporters of the team in order to create a moment of shared hope and exhilaration that might or might not be possible without that alcohol. Wanting to chemically change your physical and mental state in order to have a specific kind of social or interpersonal experience is medicating for social health, even if that tends to be self-medicating and in situations where everything from dosages and safety networks are less certain or difficult to assess. In much of the USA that I have experienced, people often associate substance usage as a necessary step in pursuing social and physical relationships (I.e sex, but also more) that deviate from normalized and often enforced political and social values. I.e. for many people who have experienced much of their lives being told certain sexual behaviors or desires are immoral, it can be very difficult to overcome those moralizing voices in ones head without some kind of chemical assistance, at least at vulnerable moments of challenging those social values.
I point this out because I think it really helps avoid a lot of the moral arguments that arise around drug use and allows for conversations about actual practical experiences instead of theoretical ideals. People engage in acts of altering their existing bodymind chemistry in collective groups in very many different ways, with different levels of risk based upon many different factors.
3. Capitalism creates so much pressure around time and how it is used that people often feel pressured into looking for short cuts that can be reckless and dangerous. Especially people with limited economic surplus beyond immediate survival, it can be very difficult not to burden oneself with expectations for what to accomplish with one’s free time that don’t rely on tools like drugs, alcohol, medications, etc., that help maximize one’s efficient use of time. As a direct result of this:
4. Most people, especially people working for a living and lacking economic surplus, tend to rely on “support networks” to meet their physical, mental, emotional, and social needs that might be under-cultivated or under-resourced to handle deviation from a handful of very prescribed and regulated behaviors. There are people and institutions that have a very heavily vested interest in keeping people reliant on under-resourced networks of support for meeting these needs. For example, my stepfather worked at the Anheuser Busch Brewery in STL for many years as a Teamster, cleaning empty tanks. Alcohol is often talked about as a recession proof industry because people drink when they are happy, but they drink even more when they are sad. “Working people don’t go to therapy, they go to a bar.”
Ok, that took a lot longer to write up than I intended. The point of solidifying these four ides out in writing is to avoid making oversimplifications like “alcohol and drugs contribute to rape culture and are thus bad,” without denying that unsafe drug and alcohol practices are something that very many people use to facilitate all kinds of personal, interpersonal and social situations, including sexual relationships and moments of shared intimacy and vulnerability. People do this because, culturally, those unsafe practices involving drugs and alcohol have been critical in allowing people to be who they think they want to be or do the things they think they need or want to do, even when they come with known risks and dangers.
The Aquadome. If you don’t know what that is, there is a very long story I’d have to tell to explain it, and I will share a zine (that is not currently digitized in a sharable format) that dives into that story on the Black Unicorn Press website at some point (and hopefully return to this blog post to link to it), but the short, crunchy telling of that story is that I helped organize a community center that was a gathering spot and venue for artists, musicians, thinkers, radical malcontents and other outcasts that felt excluded from more mainstream cultural and social environments and activities. We knew this was a space where weird things were going to be happening in a small midwestern town. Weird things that would be loud, risqué, dangerous, transgressive, and vibrantly disquieting to many of the town’s residents. In many environments, weird, disquieting experiences that borderline on dangerous and illegal go hand in hand with other rebellious, dangerous and morally questionable activities. The saying is “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” for reasons. But, punk, anarchist, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist spaces have a long history of being raided by law enforcement agencies that have used illegal substances and underage drinking as weapons to shut those spaces down in many places where those spaces were not going to be subject to as much surveillance. Thus, I guess one simple explanation, that has nothing to do with the bigger picture I lay out above, is to say that the choice to make a space like the Aquadome a sober space was for simple survival of the space. A bunch of kids (including many under the age of 21), drunk, and dancing in their underpants in the street can be broken up for public intoxication and underage drinking, with people getting arrested and ticketed. That same group of kids just dancing in the street, in their underpants, confuse the hell out of cops that pull up expecting to deal with drunk people…at least, that was our experience.
Building on that positive reason to keep a anarchist-run community space sober, confusing the expectation that weird, fun, adventurous and liberating events and experiences required the use of social lubricants/medications like drugs and alcohol had a pretty amazing and community building affect on the people involved in the project that didn’t want to be drunk or high or otherwise intoxicated. High school students could come to shows and events and the Aquadome, and even tell their parents honestly that it was a space with no drugs or alcohol (kind of a big deal in rural midwest America), and a local community as whole that started off pretty suspicious of the project started giving it a pass as a weird sober artsy place. There were definitely some people (both local townsfolk and college students) who probably would have come to a concert or two at the Dome because they would have liked the band, that didn’t because they couldn’t drink while they moshed or thrashed or gazed at their shoes…but it also wasn’t that uncommon for people to circumvent the “no booze or drugs” policy by drinking in cars or vans or the alleyway behind the building and then come in for a band’s set, then go back out and drink again between bands. We never really had any situations where it took more than one person saying “hey, there is no drinking in here” for anyone who brought booze inside to go back outside and either leave or stash their drinks. For most of the people who really valued having a community center that would let the loud weird bands play, and the artists have nude models to draw, and the anarchists to make vegan diners and host “secret banner making parties,” whether they themselves would have liked to drink or not, I think preserving the safety and long-term viability of the space outweighed the possibility that drinking during a band’s set was going to be some measure of more fun than drinking before hand.
At the same time as I say all this, I have to admit that I was straight edge for all but a tiny fraction of time that the Aquadome was operating, and that I am well aware that some folks that organized events at the aqua dome got around the community standard of “no drugs or alcohol” in ways that were not nearly as sneaky as they thought they were. Sometimes out of town bands would just bring their intoxicants of choice into one of the upstairs studio spaces where they would be spending the night, or even just take over one of the bathrooms for the night. People brought water bottles and “water” bottles to events at the Dome all the time and no one was searching people’s bags or actively trying to enforce anything but the most flagrant disregard for community standards. For people whom had stronger needs for a sober space than just “don’t do that stuff out in the open here,” the Aquadome probably would not have been a particularly safe space, and very well wasn’t a safe space for any number of folks that might have left abruptly without anyone noticing.
Additionally, I think there was a veneer of elitism that I was willfully ignoring as far as organizers feeling like people who were going to turn away from the Dome at the door when they saw “no drugs or alcohol” were not people who the Aquadome was created to serve. That is probably way too kind of way of framing the reality for myself. I know there were people who made fun of us for being a drug and alcohol free space that I was first angry at, for refusing to come in and support bands and events that they otherwise wanted to support, and then thankful that they stayed away, as they were also people who came to infuriate me in other political and social spaces. People who would write and publish non-ironic poems about wanting to be a super hero that went around and beat up and killed rapists in a local paper, like that was going to somehow solve the problem of sexual violence or make survivors feel safer. So in other words, people who engaged in their politics and social interactions (and posturing around those politics) that I didn’t like, the epitome of political gatekeeping and “holier than thou” elitism that people often complain about with anarchist organizing and organizers. As less and less of the folks involved with the Aquadome cared about sober environments for events and concerts, the enforcement of community standards got more and more lax, and I am sure that folks that felt excluded from the Dome earlier saw the hypocrisy and judged us for it harshly.
So what does this Aquadome story have to do with the relationship between Intoxication Culture and Patriarchal Misogyny?
One of the things that originally drew a lot of young folks to a straight edge lifestyle (at least in my experience through the late 90s and early 00s), was the fact that the social spaces available to young people to develop interpersonal relationships (romantic, friendships, even collective political critiques) were policed by groups with very intense ideologies. If you wanted to be cool at a lot of high school parties, for example, you probably had to be drinking alcohol or smoking something, probably until you did something embarrassing, hopefully in a fun and light-hearted way and not in a scaring or harmful way. The only alternative to this was pretty much religious spaces that piled on a lot of toxic and terrible baggage for inclusion. You (I) could be a total nerd and pretty much just give up on being cool, but (in the late 90s) that very much meant having a very small to non-existent social circle and actively giving up on experimenting and developing consciousness about yourself as a sexual being, except maybe through pretty terrible mass media targeted at lonely, isolated people. It feels like the internet changed that in some meaningful ways, but I would want to hear about it from young folks, not from my own speculations.
The thing about both 90s youth party cultures and 90s religious youth cultures is that they internalized and reinforced a lot of harmful ideas about gender, sex, and sexuality, that folks reading feminist literature and wanting to counter those harmful ideas found revolting and it really sucked to be expected to participate in them or else be branded a social pariah forever (or at least feel like that was the case). In both cases (the party folks and the religious folks) there was intense structures of Patriarchal Misogyny that was forming around controlling access to environments that were either built on access to social drug use, or rejecting it. If you listen to interviews from some of the earliest cultivators of the straight-edge movement, they are pretty explicit in their connecting intoxication culture with exploitative capitalism and patriarchal misogyny, and I think the fact that the straight-edge movement ended up fairly coopted by both capitalism and the patriarchy has been frustrating and disappointing to many folks who came to it because they were looking to build community not dependent on tools for social interaction that were intricately linked to sexist and classist exploitation. When people succeed in making vibrant community spaces that are not dependent upon easily controllable resources, those communities become targets for both subversion and attack by industries and institutions that have collected a lot of political, economic and social power by dominating how people interact with each other. It is a very difficult space to navigate without falling into numerous traps designed to destroy and alienate community spaces from the people that might benefit from them and is something that people need to talk about more when they are trying to do community building work that challenges or disrupts existing social and political orders.