sheer spite press

Description

A 35-page typewritten zine comprised of letters about queer politics, including black and white scaled-down photocopies of the “Queers Demand” poster series.

From the intro:

“I’ve spent the past year and a half living in a small town in Maine, the only time in my adult life I’ve lived for any significant time outside of cities. Even though I have far-flung queer community that I feel close to, I’ve felt isolated here at times: as a queer, but more significantly as a queer with radical/left politics. Last November, gay marriage was won on the ballot in Maine as well as in several other states, and without my usual buffer of queer left community, the explosion of enthusiasm about marriage made me feel particularly frustrated, alienated, and sad.

At the time gay marriage was legalized, I was finishing a B.A. through a low-residency program at Goddard College, and I used my correspondence with my advisor, Otto, as a space to process some of my feelings about what I saw happening to queer politics and why it was troubling to me. Because the vast majority of the conversations I have about marriage are either with other anti-assimilationist queers who feel the same way I do or with other gay people who feel personally invested in marriage, I found it really useful to write to Otto, an open-minded and intellectually engaged straight ally who was willing to dig into the conversation without holding on to a strong personal agenda.

The writing in this zine is taken from those letters. It?s not a treatise or even a full representation of my thoughts: just pieces of a
conversation, and, hopefully, an invitation to more conversation. The personal, epistolary, mostly unedited nature of this writing means it is casual and free-form and less focused on proving and demonstrating every point than on exploring/questioning thoughts and political
frameworks. There are so many writers who have done and are doing groundbreaking thinking on queer politics, and there is a bibliography in the back of this zine of writing that I think is necessary to this conversation.

My goal in these letters was not to replicate the work of those writers, who articulate all of the political points I make here in much more thorough and rigorous ways than I do, but just to articulate some of my own thinking so that I can have better conversations with the people around me. Politics are so cultural that it’s easy to absorb political views and positions without really interrogating or building a relationship with them. I definitely haven’t escaped that, but these letters are one attempt to back up my beliefs with critical thought.”