Vanguard of the Sexual Revolution
CrimethInc. Task Force #69

An ad hoc committee consisting of all the people at any given time who are having sex that either is broadening to their personal horizons, is socially prohibited, or takes place in a barely concealed public space. It often includes fresh young lovers, reckless life — artist types, and men and women of all ages entering into unexpected affairs; masturbating adolescents who live with their parents are always considered honorary members. Conquest-seeking “libertines” are excluded on principle, of course. Here is the V.S.R. manifesto, composed by Nadia C. in a library one night when she hadn’t made love for an agitating three days… or perhaps on a still Christmas morning after a night of passionate sex with a woman she had wanted for years.

A Call (in)to Arms!

Because we get to have so little honest, intimate, beautifully dangerous sex that they can sell us flat images of it instead. Because we spend so much more time contemplating these representations than having sex that when we do sleep together, it is more a meeting of roles than of individuals — and not supportive or satisfying roles, at that. Because the most radical of us would still rather speak fancifully of total revolution than dare a moment of actual experimentation in a field that really matters, like our beds. Because as long as our own sexualities are constructed by the media of silence and the culture of violence, each of us is a Trojan horse bearing our own enemies (the values of domination and submission, the paralysis of fear and shame) everywhere we go.

It’s time to stop being spectators and start being actors (or agents, if you prefer, the double meaning being very much intended), to take our desires back by converting our sex lives from passive recreation into active re-creation. And to do this, we must first replace the representations of sex in our lives and all around us with real sex.

Our numbers are greater than you think. You are one of us each time you transform “public” space — not by “privatizing” it [it’s already deprived of anything personal at all, thus the irony that the “public” is actually the least public of spaces], but by making it into real people space, by doing something in it that truly feels liberating… for example, fucking (on the roof of the police station, at the shore on the rocks just below the art museum window, etc.). Not that public sex is always itself revolutionary sex, but such sex is always revolutionary in that it takes lovemaking out of the narrow confines in which it is permitted — that is, in which it is permitted to languish, caged and stripped of the spontaneity that is its life’s blood, just as we languish with the rest of the world stripped of it.

They shall know us by the innocence of our guilty smiles, holding hands as we walk out of the fog in parks at night: transformed and transcendent, unbowed and uninhibited in this dry and dreamless world — by used birth control devices(1 and 2) left in university classrooms and office bathrooms — by growing numbers of women who know exactly what they want and men who aren’t afraid to touch one another. We will be the spark that ignites the new sexual revolution: armies of lovers laying down their responsibilities and picking up each other, as weapons, to fight against the smothering joylessness of this world. To quote the skinheads’ anthem of homophobia and intolerance back at them, we refuse to “stay in the closet because it’s safe in there” — precisely for that reason! As we’ve learned time and again in this struggle, our only safety is in danger.

Lovers of the world, unite — you have nothing to lose but your shame, and a world of pleasure to win!

— Reprinted from the ninth annual Bulletin of Saboteurs.