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Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars

Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars

Exhibitions
Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars
June 21 2012
New York launch of Against Equality’s second anthology, Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars, and Disastrous Inclusion: Critical Reflections on the Legacy of DADT, the Spring 2012 issue of We Who Feel Differently Journal, featured a reception and discussion with editor and Against Equality co-founder Ryan Conrad.

Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars collected pieces by contemporary radical voices critical of the mainstream gay community’s uncritical approach to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT). It featured an introduction by the inimitable Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and essays by writers—Bill Andriette, Kenyon Farrow, Larry Goldsmith, Jamal Rashad Jones, Cecilia Cissell Lucas, Erica R. Meiners, Mr. Fish, Yasmin Nair, Tamara K. Nopper, and Therese Quinn—from Against Equality’s digital archives on LGBT investments in militarism. This archival anthology asks why the historically left/radical anti-war critique of war does not extend to DADT and the issue of queers in the military.

“Against Equality: Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars” provide a hitherto unavailable set of critiques on a subject that has rarely been approached with as much candor and nuance. Defying the prescriptive logic of “gay is good” that permeates mainstream gay politics, it seeks to interrogate the place of the military in a queer imagining of the world and simultaneously challenges the mainstream left to question its signing on to the damaging militarism of contemporary gay politics.

Copies of the new anthology, as well as the collective’s first anthology Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage, were available for purchase at the event. Proceeds from the book sales subsidized Against Equality’s books-into-prisons policy, providing Against Equality books at no cost to LGBTQ prisoners.
June 21 2012