The End of an Era

Beyond the Plus is dead, long live Beyond the Plus.

In case you haven't heard, members voted to disband Beyond the Plus last month. My feelings on the matter are complicated. I feel like I failed, yet I feel like it's not necessarily my fault. In my eyes, Bt+ was my life's work. It began conception years ago, and it finally formed into something real last year. It hurt to watch what I built slowly turn to rubble, but it was destined to happen eventually.

I thought the community was ready for something public like Beyond the Plus, and now I think I was wrong. Which is strange, because everyone seemed so excited. Everyone in the world was rooting for public community to be a thing that worked out, and all of our members did too, after all they found out about us because of said publicity. I thought that excitement meant it would work out, but I think a lot of people didn't actually think out what publicity really meant.

People wanted us to be out and proud, but when the news articles started coming out people got scared, and for good reason. But you can't have your radcake and eat it too, and I feel like a lot of the community wants everything good that publicity will bring and to filter out all the bad, which just isn't possible. I thought this was something all of our members would've thought of already, but it seems they didn't. I told them we could make things as safe as possible for them, but they didn't realize that there would be an inherent risk, and once that veil was tattered they saw things for how they really were and decided that a public org like this isn't how they wanted things to be run.

Which is fair, but the whole point of Bt+ was to reach out to people who didn't already have community, that's why we were public in the first place. Not to campaign for our rights, like all the news articles said, but to reach out to people who may be closeted and not have community. I thought a public organization was the way to give that to people, but now the people who found community through us have decided it was not, and I don't know how to feel about that. But, regardless, the org is for the members, and if they don't like how it's being run then they I should listen to them. We could have continued and just let everyone who didn't want to be public leave, but the trend shows that most everyone who found us through publicity would likely be against that publicity later, so I think that would just be delaying the inevitable.

And it wasn't just our members who wanted us to disband, but virtually everyone in Seattle, even other radqueers. The only people who wanted us to stay loud, proud, and public, were me, vi, and one of our members. Back in December we started gaining attention from Soyjak Party, and the aftermath of death threats and doxxing caused half of our staff to leave. From there, the local queers started hating us more and more, and soon the threat of "disappear or we'll make you go away" started coming from people in our own community who didn't want the heat that we were bringing. They saw us not as a sanctuary, but as a threat. In retrospect I should've known people weren't ready for Bt+. 

I'm left wondering where to go from here. I want to help the community, I really do, but I don't know how. We have a loneliness epidemic, our people need to form real, in-person connections. Maybe not necessarily through something public, but they need to go beyond the internet and find out what real community looks like. If Bt+ isn't how to do that, then I think we just need to become braver. We need to face what we fear in order to form community, whether it's private or public. We will never be accepted if we don't.

But things are scary right now. The fascist regime is growing stronger, ICE is rounding people up, the surveillance increases everyday. Nazis have become mainstream again, we are living in a 21st century Nazi regime. I thought that people could be brave and all stand to fight together, but instead what I found was infighting, witchhunting, and paranoia. We either have the option to stand up to fascism and not let it impact our way of life, or let the fascists win, going back to how things were 100 years ago. It seems like the latter is what's going to happen.

I need to take a break from activism to think more about what activism truly is. I've said before that the idea of activism is a trap, and I think that's true now more than ever. I thought Bt+ was the best form of activism our community had, and everyone who wasn't a part of it thought so too, but it seems like our members disagreed, and that's okay, that's just how things are. The world isn't ready for activism like this. We will only be ready once we have those private in-person communities, once we stop using the internet as a substitute for a real life, and once we learn to be a little braver and face the risks necessary for networking and pushing our people forward. 

I thought Bt+ could bring our Stonewall, and maybe that was selfish of me. I hoped that never would've happened, I did everything I could to protect our members, but I always knew that their safety wasn't 100% guaranteed. I thought they knew that too, but I was wrong. I never wanted anything bad to happen, but I thought that if it did then our people would stand together proudly and fight whoever told us we weren't allowed to exist, and that that would bring actual progress to our movement. But that was never going to happen, and I suppose I never should've wanted it to happen.

This is the end of an era. A new one will begin soon, I just don't know when. I know this isn't the end of the radqueer cause, but I'm back to the drawing board. I'm going to continue writing to my blog, live streaming, and existing. Honestly I've always thought of myself as a content creator and only started doing activism out of necessity. I don't intend on disappearing, I just need to think more about what this community really needs, what I want, and where the overlap is. I thought I knew better and could push everyone towards my vision, but now I see that I should've been working with people where they were at, and not trying to push them into deep waters they weren't ready for. 

Activism is going to be a community effort, and seeing the state of the community makes it hard for me to think that's possible. How are we supposed to earn ground when our entire movement is based off of Tumblr blogs, fedi instances, and Discord servers? How are we supposed to fight together when our community is so split up? How are we supposed to fight for our rights when the slightest attention from antis makes us want to run and hide? I wanted to set an example for the community about what a real life could look like out of the closet, but everyone more influential than me is pushing people to do the opposite. 

I don't consider Bt+ a failure, it taught me a lot, especially where the community was at. I had assumed more people were where I was at, brave and ready to die for the cause. I know that's not true now. 

If you take anything away from this blog post, then let it be what I have said so many times already. If you want to see change in this community, then make it happen. Not through activism, but through living life as who you really are. Community is a support net to catch you when you fall, so when you decide to take off the mask you have people to protect you of things get rough. The internet has helped our cause but it's also hurt it in so many ways. We've let anonymity and "safety" push us into comfortable loneliness, and now we don't know how to get out of that. We must all get out of this hole we have dug for ourselves before it becomes 6 feet deep.

- Ally K <3

(P.S. Please take my survey! I want to learn more about where our community is really at and what we want to see happen.)