Similar to the figure of the housewife in Wages for Housework writings, the criminal queer is devalued as a result of exclusion from formal wage economies. This figure also struggles from a position of exclusion from normative familial structures. If the figure of the proletarian, in Marx’s writings, only owns his capacity to labour, the criminal queer owns even less. Throughout this book, I have pointed to the conditions that underlie the white, male, heterosexual proletarian’s capacity to labour – conditions from which the criminal queer is excluded. This produces a lifeworld often marked by mental and physical illness, imprisonment, and death. But it also allows us to glimpse traces of a different form of sociality and solidarity, as communities are created to protect their members from various forms of violence. This particular form of lumpenproletariat, we might speculate, may be politically important, as it simultaneously fulfils and exceeds the demands of capital. Because these groups have little to lose, they often lead the way for revolutionary struggle. This does not mean that the criminal queer should be positioned as the revolutionary subject; it means that our political movements need to make space for the needs and experiences that stem from exclusion from both productive and normatively reproductive spheres.

One example of this practice was Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a group of trans, queer, and gender non-conforming people of colour founded in 1970 in New York by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Simultaneously an activist group and a collective based on reproductive labour, STAR provided housing, food, emotional support, prisoner solidarity, and advocacy for the black and brown trans community. For young trans people of colour who had been turned away by their families, Rivera and Johnson offered a place to sleep in the STAR house. The group also extended some forms of care to the local community, including free food and childcare. STAR relied on criminalised means of reproduction – paying the rent with money from sex work and feeding its members through shoplifting. There is a link between socially outlawed needs and emotions and acts which are actually criminalised. The desire for a different world is intimately tied to an economy of criminalised practices to satisfy needs.

Weeks suggests that these queer and racialised forms of reproduction constitute a form of self-valorisation, a selective practice of immanent resistance that allows us to constitute new collective subjectivities. STAR understood themselves as engaging in a revolutionary practice, explicitly politicising their needs and desires. They also supported and intervened in various political movements, such as gay, feminist, and antiracist movements. In their practice of reproduction, they used many of the tools advocated by Wages for Housework, including shoplifting, or ‘proletarian shopping’, and collective housing for those who had been harmed by nuclear families. In the Wages for Housework literature, such practices figure as a form of sabotage on the site of consumption, asserting the power of the proletariat to intervene in reproduction despite the threat of state violence. This project will only be successful if we create collective ways of protecting and caring for one another.”]

I cannot take my eyes off her face, off the world of work and experience she is radiating in the darkness. I see again, as I did as a child, my mother dressed for work and, at the same time, dressed for her lovers. My mother in that erotic blend of self-support and desire on the prowl, her costume, the black dress, the small hat with its veil of stars, the nylons with their seams down the back of her legs. I watched her dress, saw her arms raise before the mirror. I saw that mix of pain and pleasure that came to my mother, her beauty, her leaving. I cannot drop my eyes from my dream’s face. I do not want to. She sits in the chair we have placed right in front of me a few inches from the edge of the couch. Still smiling, she raises one leg and tucks her toes under the sofa’s pillow. Her skirt is now a band around her lap, and she sits, waiting for me to drop my eyes. She grows larger in the darkness, in her solid angular position, waiting for me to do what I must, what I have waited all these years to do. I am hardly breathing; I have lost all sense of what sex I am. The dark night has become illuminated by the power of myth, the power of legend. “Go ahead,” she encourages. My breath escapes me now, and I lower my head, taking my eyes from her large, strong face with its worldly, cool welcome, to what she is exposing to my view. It is only a small distance to travel, but I am terrified of the journey.

Right in front of me now, I see a second face, its red lips flaring in a nest of hair, drops of liquid caught in its strands, its own perfume opening up to me, right in front of me, the naked center of a woman. I raise my eyes once again to the public face, and I reel with the contrast. I cannot keep the two faces in the same place, on the same body. It is as if I am being allowed to see below the surface of all the days, all the mothers. I almost plead with her, don’t let me go under, again but she says nothing, just watches.”]

｡⋆｡˚ ʚïɞ ˚｡⋆｡

“Haas, where are you right now?”

“The club by the hotel.”

“And he’s not in the bathroom?”

“No.”

“Not on the roof?”

“No.”

“Not trying to access any of the dancers poles?”

“What? Why would- Oh, Troy says no.”

“Is he hanging out with drunk girls in the women’s bathroom?”

“Umm, one sec. Harris, can you ask her if Ilya is in there? … Harris says no.”

“Ok. What were you talking about before he disappeared?”

“We were trying to figure out where to eat.”

“Did anyone bring up sushi?”

“He didn’t say he wanted-“

“Just answer the question.”

“Uh yeah, someone suggested it, but he said he wanted-“

“He’s at the pier.”

“What?”

“He got bored, sushi put fish on his brain, which made him think about water, and he likes going to piers, and the hotel is walking distance from a boardwalk by the water. He’s there, most likely trying to look at fish going under the dock.”

“… How do you know that?”