MAY 29, 2026 PRIDE MONTH JAY COOPER Groundcover contributor Trigger warning: suicide, sexual abuse of children, slavery, war and all that entails, and the other T-slur. Pride can be a petard for hoisting ourselves upon, simultaneously, sin and virtue. Pride contains confidence, power and health. It also contains arrogance, self-mythologizing and delusions of supremacy. Pride is often at the heart of evil men. Men who are bombing children, who are raping children, who are draining every resource from every person in the world, often do it with pride. They do it to puff out their chest and say, "I have the biggest spaceship.” The soldiers they send overseas to slaughter and be slaughtered need to believe they're "bringing stability to the region" — despite all evidence they're doing the opposite — so they can kill with pride. Some of my queered siblings are surely already annoyed at me using the term sin because organized religion has weaponized pride against us. Behind and beyond the hateful legislation, the medical abuse, the street and economic violence against queer people is so often religious rhetoric about how our love, our identity, our existence is a sin. Gay-bashers take pride in being in the in-group. They must believe they are "God's chosen people" to justify their utter inhumanity, to carry out genocide with pride. Pride in being born within the empire, being "an American," drives the arrogance, exceptionalism and negligence that allow people to not only sit idly by while our government slaughters the world, but to actually convince themselves it is just. Jarheads (Marines) take pride in being abused, brainwashed cannon fodder. Nazis take pride in imagined histories of supremacy to justify the unearned privilege they enjoy within this crumbling empire. The empire encourages and rewards queered people who take pride in being "one of the good ones.” Transmedicalists take pride in having been diagnosed by the hateful machine that queers us and in getting the appropriate surgery to fit cleanly into the white supremacist binary. How many times have you heard a queered person say that their own category of queered people ought to act better in line with the expectations of white supremacists? So why do we strive for pride every year? To be queered and embarrassed is to be crushed, suffocated. To be queered and confident is to be a star. If pride breathes the breath of confidence into you, it keeps you alive. Many opt to be isolated, because maintaining confidence is exhausting. If the only benefits of celebrating the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion every year were to recharge and bolster each other's energy, it would still be worth it. Last year at Ypsi Pride I cried in the street. I don't remember doing much else, just taking in the scene and crying in the street. I was about to be homeless and I thought it would be the last time I'd ever see a Pride celebration, and the scenes of people living their lives with happiness moved me. I was crying, looking at how far we'd come, standing in the streets being our queer selves, never forgetting the war machine was coming for us. The empire is sick, regardless of how far we've come. I did not grow up with Pride celebrations. I grew up fighting. Still today my safety is at risk when an intoxicated homophobe or a predator gets a whiff of my queerness. I've learned to navigate it through blood and tears. Growing up the fight was hopping in the car with a baseball bat because across town a hate mob had surrounded a boy I barely knew, who would later move to Alaska and lose his head to a shotgun blast. The fight was getting pulled out of class by security for dressing femme. The fight was surviving the predators that saw me as easy prey. Suicides, overdoses, carrying a knife in case you got jumped in the parking lot, losing friends to the nazi hate machine. Queer liberation is an inter-generational struggle. Lessons learned, abuses suffered. The qualities that make us queered change, but the fight remains. So long as folk are queered, so long as folk are made an out-group, the fight remains. There's little difference whether someone is queered for their sexual preferences, the way their mind processes information, the abilities of their bodies, or the colors of their skin, except in the angles of attack. It's deliberate that queer folk are pushed to the unprotected fringes where violence happens. The white supremacist machine queers us so its in-group can have pride in being not us. Police protect the machine; queer folk, folk who have been made outgroup, are treated as property of the police. Civilized folk, folk who take pride in being "law-abiding citizens," sit idly by and watch the police beat, kidnap, and kill us. They will soon realize the definition of good citizen is shifting under their feet. They called people who look HisGROUNDCOVER NEWS How do I find pride within the most sick, bloodthirsty empire on earth? panic "illegal," and people let them be treated as property of ICE. They said people who look Chinese are spies, and people let them be treated as property of the feds. They say Trans people are pedophile groomers, so nazis can take pride in killing us. In reality we know the empire protects pedophile groomers, and via the weaponized shame of queering, via marginalization into an out-group, because of the closeting and secrecy that creates, Trans kids are often their victims. If there’s one reason to have pride, it’s to combat the shame, to live without embarrassment around who you are, to remember that we are all equal. I didn't have Pride celebrations growing up, Pride was a thing in far-off cities that maybe weren't so backward. I had Anonymous. Technological anticensorship and technological secrecy, used not only by the oppressed, but also by the grotesque. The parts of the internet made "clean" for mass audiences are censored heavily by moderators. Those people, who censor the internet for you, who have to look at the things that get flagged as gross, evil, traumatizing, and criminal, are suffering. The uncensored dark web encompasses the sites and protocols where anyone can say anything, where nothing can be censored, the places where every effort is made to anonymize everyone. Those places where no one suffers to shield you from the truth show how evil humanity can be. I know that whenever there's conflict that sends refugees running from their homes, there's sex slavery because I've seen the pictures of mothers and daughters chained to basement walls in the auction threads. It's not abstract to me. It's clear as day, burned into my memory. I learned steganography technology watching pedophiles teach each other how to place zip files of child-pornography inside meme images right in front of my face. Encryption, anonymity, unrestricted speech; these tools are as useful to predators as they are to the oppressed, same as pride. Anonymous was no one and anyone. Anonymous was anybody with the technical know-how to become anonymous. If you could find the thread, get on the thread, participate in the thread, and not have it trace back to you, you were anon. People would ask "How do I join Anonymous?" They misunderstood. Anonymous was not a group, 7 anonymity was a tool, was a power. Paranoia and anonymity go hand in hand. You don't get one without the other, that's why Anonymous isn't a group, it's an idea. When things happened in the world, anons shared it. I was fourteen when I watched them hang Saddam Hussein. I had already seen Daniel Pearl’s beheading, and I would see more over the years. War is hell, and if you think because it’s happening overseas it won’t scar your children you are lying to yourself. Anons could coordinate in public without anyone knowing who they were, without having to know who their collaborators were. I saw coordinated doxings and hacks, tracing internet pedophiles back to their home addresses, online struggles between anon pedophiles trying to get children to satisfy their perverse desires and anon hackers trying to alert the child's parents to the dangers of the internet. Within Anonymous threads it seemed most anons just wanted to make someone cry. Anonymous had no direction, no cohesive ideology, they were just as likely to abuse a child as they were to fight for justice. There was no quality control on the technologically empowered. Spend enough time and determination to learn how to hide and you were in. Some people were hiding from the feds, some were hiding from each other, many from their parents. Some were criminals, some were political dissidents, some were feds, all were closeted. The language in that place, if you took it offline you'd appear as a freak, a lunatic. If you were to meet another anon in person, if they accidentally referenced an anon in-joke and the cat was out of the bag, they would have completely different views of what Anonymous was, because Anonymous had no cohesive meaning. Everyone shared the closet, and nobody knew who anybody else was unless they fucked up and revealed themselves. To me Anonymous was hope that we could defeat the machine, that we could through sheer force of nerddom break the bloodthirsty monster. To others it was another tool of the machine. To many it was a dark corner where they could procure the utterly illicit. We trained ourselves not to divulge any personal information whatsoever. We had been trialed by the fires of hell to protect our identities from everyone because the anonymous pits were full of psychos and creeps. I met an anon creep on a train. He see EMPIRE page 11
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