Queer Window

Stop Turning People In Crisis Into Spectacles

Author’s Note: For those who don’t know, I have been in a similar situation as the owners of Last Ditch Bar in relation to the COVID Conscious Community. The details aren’t really connected to what I’m about to write about so I’m not going to go into them. A brief summary is that in 2024 I co-wrote a post at ACT UP NY that was heavily criticized by the COVID Cautious Community. The first ACT UP meeting after this post was a “struggle session” that sounds very similar to what was described in the Boston Globe Article about Last Ditch Bar. I was the only author of this post in attendance at the meeting and I stepped down from my role as meeting facilitator at ACT UP NY and left the organization. I don’t know exactly how the owners of the bar feel as my personal finances were not tied up to ACT UP and I had stable housing at the time. But I think I can relate to the owners in this situation more than most.

Numerous police departments used the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor Uprisings as an excuse to purchase buckets of body cameras in the name of accountability. The massive increase in bodycams did not disincentivize police from committing heinous, violent acts. Derek Chauvin was more than willing to murder George Floyd on camera, having one that he could turn off at will would not have made much of a difference. These cameras have caused more harm than good to criminalized people.The images created by these cameras are seldom flattering and are used by the state to build a case against their targets. They are also all over YouTube. As many police departments make bodycam recordings public, there are thousands of Youtube compilations with millions of views creating a spectacle out of the worst moments in people’s lives.

More widely viewed are “freakout videos,” creating spectacles of people in crisis. Our social media is filled with these sorts of videos. Homeless people are routinely depicted in these videos as are mentally ill people and people having an acute mental health crisis. There is typically some justification for why the subject must be publicly humiliated. People’s fear of homeless people behaving erratically is framed as said people “making others feel unsafe” as if they decided to be homeless and in crisis in public specifically to mess with others. Often the person in crisis is yelling at a service worker who is trying to help, a situation that I have been in frequently when employed in those jobs. This is used as a justification for public humiliation. Public humiliation is a punishment that will allegedly deter people from behaving this way, despite the fact that the number of people in these crises only seems to be increasing. This public humiliation pushes the victims further into crisis that result in the behaviors continuing or escalating.

So what does this have to do with Last Ditch Bar? Well the same public humiliation as punishment is happening here. The Mainstream Left is calling this a day of reckoning for the COVID Cautious Community. This round of public humiliation will cast the One N95 into the Fires of Mount Doom, destroying the Air Purifier of Barad-Dur and end the COVID Cautious Community forever.

Hyperbole aside, the logic behind the public humiliation of our COVID Cautious Comrades is the same as the logic I laid out in the opening paragraphs. This is punishment for behaviors that are characterized as anti-social, pathologized as narcissistic, and mischaracterized as insufficiently radical by people who are more bothered by masking comrades than they are by Zohran Mamdani’s immediate capitulation to the NYPD. Somebody commenting about firebombing the bar is seen as more important than addressing the dire need for collective precautions against COVID and all other airborne pathogens for that matter, I would argue that the destruction of health infrastructure under Health Fascism is enough of an emergency to warrant significant precautions even if COVID-19 miraculously disappeared from the planet tonight.

That is not to say that the firebombing comment was okay or that I approve of it, but it’s incredibly disingenuous to scold someone for such comments when the most prominent Mainstream Leftist Commentator said “America Deserved 9/11” live on camera. There is zero difference between the media using that comment by Hasan Piker to condemn any candidate who campaigned with Piker and using the firebombing comment to condemn the entire COVID Cautious Community. Both are extremely condemnable things to say, that does not mean that everyone associated with the people who said them, their communities, and their movements need to be subject to public humiliation.

The mockery of this conflict within the community surrounding Last Ditch Bar obfuscates what the situation illuminates. The interpersonal conflict within this community is downstream of two things. 1. State abandonment of disabled people for the sake of Capital and 2. The contradiction inherent to the Last Ditch Bar as a privately owned business with thousands of dollars of debt and as a “third space” for the queer disabled community. If you want to hear more about the first point, listen to the yearly COVID recap episodes of the Death Panel Podcast. As for the second thing, there’s been so much discussion over the “destruction of third spaces” this decade as everyone’s financial situations become more dire. The disappearance of these spaces is a product of the root issue: the fact that most nonreligious third spaces are privately owned for profit businesses. The spaces themselves are a form of Capital that is almost certainly leveraged against the loans taken out to purchase and operate the bar. The financial incentives created by this fact puts the owners at odds with the patrons, who it seems like have financially contributed to the bar in more ways than just buying drinks.

This contradiction created the conflict that has been so widely mocked. Every privately owned for profit business that seeks to be a Community place has some version of this conflict where the owners make business decisions that harms the community of workers and patrons that fill the space. Conflicts like this are inevitable and solving them is how we make these spaces better. The demands of Capital and the needs of Life on Planet Earth are currently engulfed in a large-scale version of this same conflict. We have turned the Planet, our home, into a financial asset that we divide up, buy, sell, and extract resources from. Our entire global society is oriented around this. It is hostile to the needs of all the ecosystems that make up the Planet. We have been giving into the financial incentives of Capital and paying no mind to the needs of life, which requires community. That is what we should be talking about in response to this story.

That, and what we can do to care for each other.