by Troy Williams

(originally published in the Q Salt Lake)

Where are the radical queers of Utah?  Yes, we have some radical individuals – but where is the rogue band of offensive gender terrorists who want to rip the city apart in an excessive display of cyber-sex orgies and haute couture runway abortions?

I crave gender anarchy.   Not the fringe one-off — but a movement — an ensemble of deviance and destruction.  I envision a neo genderqueer anime technopop future for everyone.  I want the mayor of Salt Lake to be a raging tranny dyke in spiked metal platforms with a hermaphrodite parrot named Felatio.  I want Sherry Dew, the unmarried celibate queen of Deseret Books to receive a revelation that commands gay polygamy for all worthy queers. And I want heterosexuals to tremble at the thought of losing political power.

I want fantasy.  I want to attend a carbon neutral Pride parade led by Grand Marshall Thomas S. Monson in solid gold stilettos and a barbwire hemp whip. CRACK! I want to tell my little genetically cloned mutant children about the infamous Homo Provo Insurgency of 2014. You remember?  The year when a team of punk technopathic anarchists posing as nurse midwives injected every Utah Legislator with homeopathic nanobots so they would spontaneously masturbate themselves into everlasting orgasmic bliss. It was the year when everything changed.

The Queer Revolutionary must dare to envision the unimaginable.  I want entropy with relevance and freak fashion with my Apocalypse.  Make it work.

There are few radical queers in Utah.  And I don’t count extremist visionaries who sit in their house all night tweaked on meth. Nihilism as a social movement never went anywhere. Deconstruction is at best a design aesthetic.  Utah is the land of pioneers! These deserts were colonized by a people who rejected the old social order! There is radicalism embedded deep in our DNA.  Sleeper junk punk cells just waiting to be activated.  Let us all gather and sip an ahayuasca sacrament for the souls of all those who partake of it!  In my future world the Tabernacle Choir can release a Buzzcocks tribute cd and win a fucking Grammy.   In my world I can go on Craigslist and find a complete porcelain Precious Moments fetish gear figurine collection for under $100. In my world, Hayden Christiansen has stopped acting and finally realized his true potential as a gay bareback goth pornstar.  Some may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

Ah, but I know what you fundamentalist fascists are thinking.  “See!  We knew it!  Those disgusting faggots are deviant perverts who want to destroy our way of life!”  Yes.  We are deviants.  And I do want to destroy your way of life.  I want to destroy your cluster bombs and your semi-automatic handguns and your nuclear weapons of mass destruction.  I want to destroy your earth-raping, sky-murking, river polluting toxic waste factories. I want to see the humbling of a Mighty Empire that invades and conquers foreign lands and pillages the precious natural resources of developing nations.   I want to see every hypocritical homo-hating fear mongering child-molesting patriarchal sociopathic priest completely mocked, defrocked and relegated to cultural irrelevance.

Who are the true perverts in America now really?

There are few radical queers in Utah.  I missed my calling.  I try to be radical but I’m outnumbered.  And I don’t have any tattoos.  Oh, and let’s be honest, I’m getting older. Consequently I stopped experimenting with psychedelics after I was violently attacked by an intra-dimensional alien being on Venice Beach (long story).   But I still have fantasies.  I do have an appreciation for the perverse and the offensive.  And I also value the beautiful and serene.  I’m learning how to stand in both.  I’m a Zen pornographer.

I wonder if I could ever possibly be content with a gay marriage, two adopted orphaned refugee babies and a board position with Equality Utah.  I know, boring right?  Sure.  Is that the future for aging radicals? No Gender Terrorism?  No Interracial Cyborg Cross-breeding?  Maybe just a little? I used to think I had to either be a radical queer or an assimilationist. But I live and work in Utah where even the most normal prudish homo is considered dangerous.   Now I’m integrating both.  It’s not an either/or scenario anymore.  It’s a both/and.

At heart I’m an iconoclast rabble-rouser.  But I also am beginning to value the subtle power of social transformation.  It takes both.  The radical queer takes the post-modern approach that all identity is a construct and nothing is essential.

We can choose our orientation and our gender as easily as we construct our Facebook profiles.  And I believe that is true. But then I’ve always felt queer as a child, so I believe I was born this way too.  And the debate rages – nature or nurture?  A or B?

I say both. We can stand in paradox, include our contradictions and transcend the binaries of the mind and culture.  That’s where revolution begins.  That’s where radical social transformation starts to gestate.  It’s an inside to outside metamorphic hyper convergence.  It’s simultaneously a profound sutra of evolutionary wisdom and also nothing more than a load of pseudo-intellectual bullshit.  The queer mind includes both male and female.  The transgender body includes both yin and yang.  We are both/and.  The poet Rumi understood: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I will meet you there.”

Revolution and submission.  Perversion and innocence.  The post Post-Modern.  An integration of Everything.  Viva.