The Gathering Storm of Queer Activism

The first chapter of my next book Be Gay, Do Crime: The Story of the Mary Nardini Gang

This is a cross post from the Red Menace Collective. This is where you can read draft chapters of my books before they are published, and fund my ability to independently produce them.

Queer Marxism drops June 1, 2025, tracing the radical evolution of queer activism. The Story of the Mary Nardini Gang is a key piece—informing the larger book but also standing alone as critical history.

Join the Red Menace Collective today to read this project's outline and future chapters before they are released publicly.

---

I'm excited to share this first chapter as a free preview of "Be Gay, Do Crime: The Story of the Mary Nardini Gang" – an investigative exposé that pulls back the curtain on one of the most radical queer Marxist collectives of the late 2000s.

This narrative delves deep into how revolutionary queer politics evolved beyond mainstream LGBTQ+ activism into something far more dangerous – a militant ideology seeking not equality, but the complete dismantling of Western institutions. By chronicling the Mary Nardini Gang's activities in Milwaukee against the backdrop of economic change, this book reveals how legitimate urban development was reframed as "oppression" to justify increasingly radical tactics.

Every detail is historically accurate, yet presented with the pacing of a political thriller. My aim is to document how well-meaning identity politics can be weaponized by radical leftist ideologues seeking to destabilize the very foundations of our society. As readers follow this story, they'll witness the deliberate strategy of using queerness not as an identity, but as a revolutionary weapon against the family, private property, and traditional values.

This isn't just another academic critique of leftist excess—it's an urgent warning told through gripping narrative. By understanding how these ideologies operate and spread, we're better equipped to recognize and counter their influence in today's increasingly divided cultural landscape.

---

This is the first draft chapter. Future chapters will be available exclusively to members of the Red Menace Collective until the book is published.

---

Chapter 1 The Gathering Storm

Milwaukee in the late 2000s was a city at war with itself. It was a place where industrial ghosts lingered in abandoned warehouses, where developers were steadily devouring working-class neighborhoods, and where police sirens howled nightly over a cityscape divided by race, class, and a growing economic gulf that felt impossible to cross.

At its core, Milwaukee was a city caught between its industrial past and its uncertain future. The jobs that had once sustained its working-class communities had vanished, shipped overseas or rendered obsolete by automation. By 2008, the manufacturing sector had shed over 80,000 jobs since its peak—more than half its workforce. The unemployment rate in neighborhoods like North Division and Sherman Park had soared to 25%, nearly triple the national average. The factories that had once fueled the city's economy were now rusting skeletons, monuments to an era that no longer existed. The sprawling A.O. Smith factory complex that once employed 7,000 workers stood vacant, its 76-acre campus a haunting reminder of what had been lost. Entire neighborhoods, once full of factory workers, were hollowed out. Houses stood abandoned, their windows smashed, their walls tagged with messages of frustration, defiance, and decay.

And in their place? Luxury apartments, overpriced coffee shops, and the slow creep of gentrification—a familiar story playing out across the country, but here, it had a particularly sharp edge. The Harbor District project transformed former industrial docklands into high-end waterfront condos selling for $400,000+, while the median household income in adjacent neighborhoods hovered around $30,000. Developers weren't just changing the skyline; they were erasing entire communities. The city was being remade for someone else.

For those who had lived through Milwaukee's industrial collapse, the shift was more than economic—it was personal. It wasn't just that jobs were disappearing. It was that entire ways of life were being erased. Families who had lived in the same neighborhoods for generations were forced out, either by rising rents or the slow suffocation of economic despair. Corner bars that had once served factory workers became artisanal cafes. Grocery stores closed, replaced by boutique markets with price tags foreign to the people who had lived there for decades.

The shift was particularly devastating in places like the Menomonee Valley, once the backbone of Milwaukee's industry. The factories that had provided jobs for thousands were left abandoned, towering monoliths of rust and shattered glass. Entire blocks of working-class homes were bought up, bulldozed, and rebuilt as condominiums that none of the former residents could afford.

For those who remained, the changes weren't subtle. People watched their neighborhoods shrink—not physically, but culturally, their histories erased, their communities displaced by new residents who saw them as relics of a city best forgotten.

It wasn't just the buildings and businesses that changed; it was the people. The city that had once belonged to the working class was now being remodeled, brick by brick, to serve a different demographic—a wealthier, bougie, more complacent one.

The transformation was not peaceful. As longtime residents were forced out, the police moved in. Evictions became routine, with tenants finding themselves pushed onto the streets for the sake of redevelopment projects that promised "revitalization" but delivered only displacement. No-knock raids and aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics became everyday occurrences in neighborhoods on the verge of gentrification. In 2008 alone, the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Department executed over 3,000 evictions, a 43% increase from just five years earlier.

Milwaukee's new economy didn't just force people out—it criminalized those who stayed. The police cracked down on street vendors, on squatters, on anyone whose existence didn't fit into the city's rebranded image. Graffiti artists were arrested at higher rates, even as luxury lofts embraced gritty urban aesthetics. Homeless encampments were routinely destroyed by law enforcement, while the city built more high-end condos than affordable housing. The Common Council's 2007 "Quality of Life" initiative expanded penalties for loitering, public gathering, and "suspicious behavior"—all viewed as thinly veiled attempts to criminalize poverty and resistance.

One particularly infamous case involved a group of activists occupying an abandoned warehouse slated for demolition in the Riverwest neighborhood in February 2008. The police responded with a full SWAT team, battering rams, and riot gear—an absurd display of force for what was, at most, an act of survival. Twenty-three people were arrested on criminal trespass charges, with organizers facing additional counts of "conspiracy to disturb the peace." The arrests made headlines, but the real message was clear: Milwaukee was no longer a city for those who resisted its transformation.

Wherever the new economy expanded, so did the reach of the police. And for Milwaukee's radicals, it became evident that this wasn't just about urban development.

This was a war.

The Enforcers of Capital

The relationship between the far left and the police has always been one of open hostility, but in Milwaukee, this dynamic took on a particularly brutal form. The police were not merely enforcers of the law; they were the foot soldiers of gentrification, the blunt instrument used to remake the city in the image of wealth and bourgeois expansion. To the activists, every eviction, every mass arrest, every crackdown on protests served a singular purpose: to eliminate resistance and ensure that those who had been left behind by capitalism had no means to fight back.

For Milwaukee's radicals, it became clear that the police were not just an occupying force—they were the armed wing of the city's economic transformation. The police didn't just maintain order; they ensured that the city's new order, one defined by displacement and criminalization, was enforced at every level. And as they escalated their tactics, a new kind of resistance began to take shape. One that rejected negotiations, rejected legality, and rejected the very foundations of the system itself.

As the economy collapsed, the surveillance state expanded. New policing strategies were introduced—more patrols, more cameras, more undercover officers embedded in activist circles. In 2007, the Milwaukee Police Department received a $1.7 million federal grant for expanded surveillance technology, installing over 100 new security cameras in "high-risk areas"—conveniently located in neighborhoods facing gentrification pressure. The MPD, long known for its heavy-handed tactics, had amped up its presence in gentrifying neighborhoods, cracking down on any signs of resistance to the city's transformation.

Protests against police brutality had begun to rise in frequency, especially in the wake of high-profile killings of Black Milwaukeeans that underscored the department's long history of violence. The 2007 death of Derek Williams, who suffocated in the back of a police car while officers ignored his pleas that he couldn't breathe, sparked months of demonstrations. The fatal shooting of James Perry in 2009 during a routine traffic stop only intensified community outrage. Activists clashed with law enforcement at demonstrations, and in response, the city poured millions into expanding police budgets and surveillance infrastructure. Between 2006 and 2009, the MPD's budget increased by 18%, even as social services faced devastating cuts.

The message was clear: Milwaukee's future would be built on the backs of those who had no place in it.

Neighborhoods that had once been havens for radicals, artists, and working-class communities were being heavily policed and surveilled. Community spaces were shut down. Even minor offenses, like vandalism or public gatherings, were met with disproportionate police presence. The Autonomous Zone (or A-Zone), a longtime anarchist infoshop on the east side, faced constant harassment, with officers frequently stopping and searching patrons as they entered or left.

Infoshop: A radical community space that functions as a combination of library, meeting place, and distribution center for anarchist literature and resources. Unlike commercial bookstores, infoshops operate on principles of mutual aid rather than profit, serving as hubs for organizing and skill-sharing outside capitalist relations.

Living outside the sanctioned economy was no longer just frowned upon—it was criminalized.

For the radicals watching this unfold, the lesson was obvious—the capitalist state would not be reformed. It had to be fought.

A City with an Anarchist History

Milwaukee had always been a city of contradictions. It was home to some of the most brutal law enforcement crackdowns in the country, yet it had also harbored a resilient and defiant anarchist presence for decades.

Long before the Mary Nardini Gang emerged, insurrectionary anarchism had already taken root in the Midwest. Unlike mainstream political activism that sought gradual change through established channels, insurrectionary anarchism rejected waiting for permission to act. It advocated immediate, direct confrontation with systems of power—believing that freedom could only be achieved by actively dismantling the state rather than reforming it. This approach stood in stark contrast to both liberal reformism, which sought changes within the system, and traditional leftist organizing, which often focused on building mass movements over long periods.

Milwaukee's underground was connected to a broader network of anarchist resistance stretching through Chicago, Bloomington, Minneapolis, and beyond. The city's radical legacy ran deep, from militant labor struggles of the early 20th century to anti-police riots in the late 1990s. The anarchist networks operating in the region were fluid, decentralized, and often invisible to outsiders, but their actions left unmistakable marks.

Milwaukee's radical spaces—punk houses like the Dustbin on Center Street, infoshops like the A-Zone, and squatted warehouses in Bay View—were not just gathering places; they were training grounds for street tactics, DIY survival, and autonomous organizing. The Cream City Collectives, founded in 2005, became a hub for anarchist organizing, hosting skill-shares on everything from dumpster diving to digital security, counterbalancing the technological surveillance advances of the period. Activists in these circles forged alliances with radical labor unions, antifascist groups, and Indigenous land defenders, creating a resistance ecosystem that thrived beneath the surface of the city's gentrification.

Unlike traditional leftist groups that relied on centralized leadership and rigid ideologies, Milwaukee's anarchists rejected the dogmatic approach of communist organizing with its party structures and vanguardism. Where Marxist-Leninists sought to seize state power through a disciplined revolutionary party that would lead the working class—what Lenin called the 'vanguard'—these insurrectionaries aimed to make governance itself impossible. They had witnessed how communist movements throughout history had replicated the very hierarchies they claimed to oppose, creating new ruling classes and bureaucracies. Milwaukee's radicals wanted nothing to do with these models.

In the wake of increased police repression, groups from different cities began sharing resources, tactics, and even personnel. Anarchists from Minneapolis came to Milwaukee to support protests against police violence. The Midwest Anarchist Bookfair, held in Milwaukee in 2008, became a crossroads for radical education, where insurgent ideas spread faster than authorities could suppress them. This event brought together over 500 radicals from across the region to exchange texts, tactics, and theories—including influential works by insurrectionary anarchist writers like Alfredo Bonanno (he/him) and the Invisible Committee, whose text The Coming Insurrection had just begun circulating in English translation. Bonanno's essays argued that waiting for revolutionary conditions was a trap; the time to attack was now. The Invisible Committee similarly rejected the patient organizing of traditional leftists, instead advocating for creating zones of opacity where life could flourish outside state control.

The Midwest's anarchist scene wasn't just resisting local oppression—it was creating a new model of decentralized insurrection that would later define the Mary Nardini Gang's approach to resistance.

Unlike traditional anarchists, who focused on mass organizing, insurrectionary anarchists rejected the long-game approach in favor of immediate, disruptive action. They didn't believe in waiting for the right historical moment. They didn't believe in incremental victories. They believed in acting now, in the moment, in ways that made the system ungovernable.

As one widely circulated zine in Milwaukee's anarchist circles, Queer Ultraviolence, declared:

"We are the people who will destroy what you cherish. We want to abolish marriage, not expand it. We want to end capitalism, not find our place within it. We are not interested in a world where the cops stop beating us because we've become respectable—we want a world without cops at all."

Milwaukee's radicals had seen what happened when resistance played by the rules. They had watched as progressive movements were co-opted, watered down, and ultimately neutralized. They had no faith in electoral politics, NGOs, or bureaucratic "solutions." The only way forward was direct action.

It was in these circles that the foundations of the Mary Nardini Gang were laid.

Queer Is Not Gay, Gay Is Not Queer

By the late 2000s, the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement was fully committed to assimilationist goals—marriage equality, military service, representation in corporate advertising. National organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) framed gay liberation as a matter of legal rights and respectability, focusing their efforts on lobbying politicians and winning over corporate sponsors.

For radical queers, this was a betrayal of queer liberation's revolutionary origins. The Stonewall riots of 1969—led by transgender women of color like Marsha P. Johnson (she/her) and Sylvia Rivera (she/her)—weren't polite requests for inclusion but fierce rejections of state violence. While early queer liberation movements of the 1970s had called for dismantling capitalism and the nuclear family, by the 2000s, mainstream organizations had abandoned this radical vision in favor of narrow rights-based reforms.

This ideological rift played out in real time in Milwaukee's queer spaces. In 2008, when the HRC held a fundraising gala at the Pfister Hotel downtown, a group of radical queers disrupted the event, unfurling banners reading "Marriage is the New Closet" and "Stonewall Was a Riot, Not a Brand." Security removed them within minutes, but the moment crystallized the growing divide between mainstream LGBTQ+ politics and the radical fringe.

Mainstream LGBTQ+ organizations pushed a narrative of progress that depended on obedience, reinforcing what queer theorist Lisa Duggan (she/her) termed homonormativity—a vision of queerness that conformed to capitalist, state-sanctioned models of family, citizenship, and consumerism. This concept described how certain homosexual lifestyles were becoming accepted not because society was embracing true liberation, but because these lifestyles didn't threaten existing power structures and could be integrated into consumer capitalism. Get married. Serve your country. Buy the rainbow-colored merchandise. The radicals in Milwaukee saw through this façade—queerness was being commodified, disciplined, and turned into something safe, something sellable, something entirely disconnected from its insurgent roots.

While organizations like GLAAD celebrated increased LGBTQ+ representation in advertising, Milwaukee's queer anarchists drew inspiration from texts like Gay Shame and Against Equality, which rejected recognition from the state as a viable path to liberation. These critiques weren't simply about wanting more radical tactics—they represented a fundamentally different understanding of power. Where mainstream groups saw the state as a neutral entity that could grant rights, these radicals understood it as inherently violent, designed to protect property and wealth by controlling bodies and desires.

The underground circulation of zines with titles like Towards a Queer Nihilism and Against the Couple-Form provided theoretical frameworks that challenged not just heteronormativity, but the very structures of intimate relationships under capitalism. These texts argued that even the most basic social arrangements—like coupling, monogamy, and the family unit—were not natural or inevitable, but rather specific forms designed to reproduce capitalist social relations and state control over bodies and desires.

Milwaukee's queer anarchists weren't interested in symbolic victories. They weren't interested in rainbow capitalism, in Pride parades that welcomed cops, in the idea that progress could be achieved through legal means. When Milwaukee Pride invited the police department to march in the 2009 parade as a gesture of "inclusion," radical queers organized a separate anti-Pride event called "Shame," explicitly rejecting the mainstream celebration's corporate sponsorships and police presence.

They wanted something else entirely, a world where queer identity wasn't something to be sold back to them in the form of marriage licenses and corporate sponsorships.

They saw no liberation in military service, no justice in rainbow-striped police cars, no future in a system that demanded obedience in exchange for rights.

They wanted something ungovernable, something that couldn't be sanitized or controlled.

For them, queerness was not just an identity—it was a direct challenge to the state, to capitalism, to all forms of hierarchy. To be queer was to be a threat, an insurgent force against the institutions that had tried to erase them.

Milwaukee's radicals saw queerness as a weapon, not a brand, and they refused to let it be anything less.

The only question left was how to wield it.

And in that desire for something beyond assimilation, beyond reform, beyond governance altogether, the conditions for a new kind of queer insurrection were set.

The Moment Before the Spark

The final years of the 2000s were a time of simmering tension, of something waiting to erupt. Milwaukee's queer radicals were watching as their city transformed into something unrecognizable. The police were becoming more militarized, more aggressive. The state was proving itself, again and again, to be an enemy of anyone who refused to conform. And the so-called LGBTQ rights movement? It had abandoned them in favor of respectability.

It wasn't just that the mainstream LGBTQ+ organizations were failing them—it was that they had become part of the very system that queer anarchists were fighting against. Corporate-backed Pride. LGBTQ+ police liaisons. An emphasis on legislative change rather than direct action. The radicals in Milwaukee saw these as nothing more than the domestication of queerness, a neutering of its revolutionary potential.

The technological landscape was shifting too, creating new possibilities for organizing outside traditional structures. While social media platforms were still in their infancy—Facebook had only recently opened to non-college users, and Twitter was just finding its footing—they offered unprecedented tools for anonymous coordination. Encrypted email lists, primitive by today's standards, allowed radicals to communicate without meeting in person. The digital underground was becoming as important as physical spaces for spreading insurrectionary ideas.

By late 2009, the tension was palpable. A series of confrontations between police and activists had escalated throughout the year. In July, a community garden in Riverwest was bulldozed to make way for condos, leading to protests that ended with pepper spray and arrests. In September, a queer dance party in an abandoned theater was raided by police in riot gear. In October, three anarchists were arrested for allegedly planning to disrupt a real estate developers' conference, though the charges were later dropped for lack of evidence.

Something had to break.

A city in flux. A tightening police state. An underground network of anarchists who saw no future within the system.

The cracks were widening. The pressure was building. The moment was coming.

The only thing left was a name.

And soon, it would appear. Spray-painted on walls. Scrawled in zines. Whispered between radicals.

The Mary Nardini Gang was about to be born.