"Release Your Inner-Weirdo"

I don't identify as a gay man and I'm not always particularly bold in living this article's advice in the ways that it might be applied to my own politics, identity, and broader life. I also think the food metaphor to be found somewhere in the middle tends to turn it in a bit of a power-blind multi-culti direction, when similar arguments under a more thorough anti-authoritarian and anti-oppression frame are actually stronger. Nonetheless, I think that "Release your inner-weirdo: Progress does not often come through subtlety, but through confrontation" has the right idea about the power and political importance of being assertively, politically "abnormal." The point isn't transgression for its own sake, but refusal to passively submit to the grafting of difference onto structures of power and the homogenizing, invisibilizing, silencing normativities (whiteness, masculinity/feminity, straightness, others) the society that surrounds us tries to push down our throats.

(Found via Direland.)