Be gay do crime book

For Quincy Brinker, who, by disrupting the talk of yet another washed-up academic trying to write Marsha and Sylvia out of Stonewall, reminded us that not even the expired will be safe if our enemy is victorious.

For Feral Pines, last seen by some of her friends throwing rocks at police, by others in an assembly plotting psychic warfare against the fascists, and by others dancing and then defacing some fascist insignia in the moments before her death.

For Chris Chitty, who would surely use this opportunity to insult the insulters while transmitting some brilliant insight about where we have been and where we are going.

For Ravin Myking, whose beauty caused the pastor of a homophobic megachurch to froth at the mouth and declare the arrival of wolves to hunt his sheep, and caused the sheep to fall to the ground, speaking in tongues and praying for their absent god.

For Scout and the fires of memory.

For Vlad, ai ferri corti!

For all our friends on the other side, we submit these reflections.

Ten years ago, we were seized by a frenzied spirit and, in a trancelike state, received a set of ten weapons for a war we were only just discovery the words to portray.

Be Gay Do Crime

Among the discordant chorus of anons who penned the defining texts of the queer anarchist network Bash Back!, none was more fervent in its glorification of criminal crave, decadent hedonism, and social undoing than the Milwaulkee-based Mary Nardini Gang. Their fiery “Towards the Queerest Insurrection” still circulates as an integral manifesto of riotous queerness, while the “Criminal Intimacy” and “Whore Theory” have made their more subterranean way into innumerable conversations and correspondences.

Ten years later, the secretive group supplements these collected writings with a subtle retrospective. Carefully unlocking the hidden layers of their theses on insurrection, they tackle up to what they got erroneous, concede that the world ended somewhere between the Greek insurrection of 2008 and now, and insist upon the vital task of ushering new worlds into being as we live amid the decomposition and cataclysmic death throes of the antique one. To their theses on insurrection, they prepend a new arcana tooled for opening onto the queerest of outsides.

Dedicated to their friends among the dead, this pocket edition is a necromantic mirror, an encrypted message to old love

Be Gay, Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos

Event date:

Tuesday, June 3, 2025 - 7:30pm to 9:00pm

This event takes place on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. Register here.

Charis welcomes anthology contributors: Sam Cohen, Venita Blackburn, Temim Fruchter, Alissa Nutting, and Emily Austin for a panel discussion moderated by Charis bookseller Abeo Chimeka-Tisdale about Be Same-sex attracted, Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Homosexual Chaos.

A trans miss makes increasingly frequent hoax calls to a business where she's had a negative experience, watching the consequences with perverse joy. A group of aging queers turns to bank robbery to stop the sale of their bungalow complex to a development company. As the president prepares to give a speech, two women lurk among the journalists, ready to shoot him. And an aspiring composer takes to stealing items from strangers' homes in a kind of cosmic redistribution each period one of her relationships fail.

In sixteen brilliant, wild-eyed stories, Be Gay, Do Crime delivers a celebratio

Be Gay, Do Crime: Everyday Acts of Queer Resistance and Rebellion

Available for preorder

Sometimes it pays to be gay and do crime.

As communities are boldly rising to challenge capitalism, white supremacy, and authoritarianism, Be Gay, Do Crime: Everyday Acts of Queer Resistance and Rebellion is your ultimate guide to LGBTQ+ resilience and rebellion. Packed with daily snapshots of radical queer history, this book celebrates the bold, the brave, and the beautifully defiant moments that have shaped the fight for justice.

Ever wonder why the Stonewall protests became an uprising or what the earliest acts of queer resistance looked like? How about the ways queer communities have organized against oppression across the globe? Be Gay, Do Crime dives into these stories and so many more—from fierce acts of resistance to joyful victories—bringing to being the rich, diverse history of LGBTQ+ liberation.

By situating readers within a larger pattern of fight, these everyday acts counter the erasure of queer people from history and serve as a reminder that our struggles are part of a broader defend against systemic violence and dehumanization.

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