Between the giant teddybear in the corner and all the tits bouncing around in the dark, I knew I was in the right place.
Four hundred miles and a city full of state worshipers behind me, I walked up to the registration table at the Arizona Libertarian Party’s 2017 Anti-Inaugural Ball with a huge smile on my face. Phoenix was a breath of fresh air to clear my head of all of Los Angeles’s sickening, endearing, tortuous bullshit. This party, put on by the Radical Libertarian Caucus, was a welcome reprieve from the starving-artist life I’ve been leading in relative solitude.
It’s been a while since I associated with any group in large volume, let alone my fellow libertarians. What’s more, this weekend’s was no ordinary assortment. Nowhere did I find the straight-laced conservatarians I once came to regard as the norm in this movement. (Among the many delusions from which I suffered while living in Washington, D.C. a few years ago was the fear that I might be the only queer, ethnically ambiguous, artistically-inclined libertarian in existence.) In their place were weirdos in tall hats, neon women with their tits out and, yes, a 93-inch plush bear in the corner of the bar.
I now know there is no norm, and I don’t need to pretend to be something I’m not. Some people I met were curious about me, and they wanted to know how I fit into the libertarian scene. By the third time someone asked me how I identified, I told them this: “Small-l libertarian, big-L LESSSSBOOOWE.” My interlocutor nodded in quiet approval and maybe even a little amusement. It occurred to me that this level of cheeky forthrightness never would’ve gone over as well with anyone I met, libertarian or not, during my D.C. days.
The best part about this weekend was that I could be myself; neither flamboyant nor repressed, but decidedly sapphic and somewhere in-between. It’s a very cool thing that the radical caucus did, to put this event together in queer, unapologetic opposition to the inauguration of this dying empire’s next soulless overlord. If it did nothing else, it inspired this young anarchist to be a little more queer — and a little less apologetic.
