The Undead, and Bad Dreams (openings)

Posted on by Persephone van der Waard

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

The Undead: Zombies, Vampires and Ghosts

“We are Legion. Our numbers will darken the sky of every world. You cannot escape your doom.”

—Sovereign, Mass Effect (2007)

(artist: Untalented Inc)

Picking up from where “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis” left off…

“We are legion” was uttered by the Gerasene demon, which Jesus “miraculously” transferred into a herd of pigs before force-marching the poor animals into the ocean. Yet, the idea often connects to a legion of undead, whose hungry, upset polity threatens the living with a chorus of repressed, xenophilic voices speaking out against xenophobic oppression as middle-class: violent, very much non-peaceful protest mirroring Gil-Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1971) but also softer whispers; e.g., Trace Chapman’s “Talkin’ About a Revolution” (1988): “Poor people gonna rise up / And get their share.” Indeed, the undead are a radical response to trauma—of radicalization when treated like trash, period—and there exist entire struggles for which America is always the mother country siphoning resources into itself; i.e., in ways that reduce people to mere sex objects and recipients/givers of state force. This extends to workers facing proponents of state rhetoric that must be refuted, connecting this to that; i.e., texts ranging from Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein to Ahmed Saadawi’s 2014 Frankenstein in Baghdad, but connected as well to historical analysis; e.g., Bad Empanada’s “The Iraq War Was About Oil” (2024) highlighting that Zionism and oil monopolies are not mutually exclusive. To that, we’ll be exploring the monstrous history of such exploitation left behind as undead reminders of itself—from zombies, to vampires and ghosts.

Bear in mind, the number of ways the state oppresses, divides and conquers is without limit, affecting colonial territories like the Middle East, Africa and the Global South, from Rwanda to Vietnam to Cuba to Palestine and so many others. From snipers to bombs to death squads to eugenics programs, etc, nothing the colonizer does is fair and they fear everything around them enough to kill without question; they have to or profit cannot happen. Our guerilla-style resistance (asymmetrical warfare reclaiming the Aegis) needs to be cumulative as a means of developing something post-scarcity mid-resistance and decay. In short, we need to raise our voices—however loud and however soft—to speak out against the daily abuses of the colonized by the settler-colonial project as a fundamental element of Capitalism that will try and disguise itself. This includes lies and controlled opposition; e.g., Pride as something to recuperate by Rainbow Capitalism and something to reclaim by us.

(source tweet, anthnyxyz: June 1st, 2024)

Pride isn’t a holiday. It’s not something we do one month out of the year to serve profit; liberation is fought for year-round in spite of profit. Pride isn’t positive thinking divorced from socio-material concerns (thus reducing to controlled opposition), then; it’s a fight for socio-material liberation, challenging the white moderate’s argument for “peace” as an absence of perceived tension challenging capital, hence the status quo. For the sake of ourselves and our comrades all around the world, we cannot be silent because Imperialism (as we shall see) does not stay put; it consumes everything, making the world undead. Any intersectional, solidarized statement against oppression matters because it’s one more individual as part of a larger group that won’t divide to serve profit, thus gentrify and decay on loop. We’re all, in some shape or form, victims of Capitalism doing what Capitalism always does by design: profit while concealing the nature of said profit (exploitation, police violence and genocide) through dogmatic regulations of sex and force, preying on nature-as-monstrous-feminine. Like Omelas, to victimize one group and turn a blind eye is to doom all groups to such a fate, because the state will always incentivize class betrayal to avoid state predation as a matter of fact. This isn’t controversial so much as state proponents serving profit (thus genocide) merely discourage its open discussion. We must do better by setting aside our Judas silver to help those in need not just when it rears its ugly head, but for all time regardless if the membrane is weakened or not, whether Dracula’s castle appears nakedly on the horizon or not. The state is always eating behind illusions that—per Capitalist Realism—romanticize the harvest as grim, which we shall now explore the histories of in different undead forms.

Before we proceed, I do have some pieces on Palestine[1] as one genocide among several primary ones taking place right this very second to enrich the Imperial Core (the other being the Congo, but there are others, too). I likewise have future projects planned with Indigenous groups, people of color and other colonized groups if they wish to be included (re: “Looking for Models, Sex Positivity 5/13/2024“); for now, the history of settler-colonialism oscillating across imperial territories is something of a survey to a much wider problem: the bloody business of Capitalism harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine, extending to a broad cycle of gentrified lies that reliably decay into different forms.

As such, the oppressed become an army of undead, their counter history standing against state forces (the latter making hay as a matter of denying genocide, not simply during it); i.e., in acts of solidarity through our art as reclamatory and iconoclastic: as part of a pedagogy of the oppressed as undead (“those who suffer have no voice”). These apocrypha can be zombies, vampires, and ghosts, whose combined, nightmarish abuse (and voracious eroticism) shall be explored in the following two chapters (and their subchapters):

  • Bad Dreams; or, Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse parts one, two and three explore the giving and receiving of state trauma through undead bodies; i.e., various expects of military urbanism/state decay at home and settler colonialism abroad, as well as how to reclaim these devices and use them to freeze our enemies in place inside the state of exception (re: Athena’s Aegis).
  • They Hunger; or, Reintroducing Liminal Expression through Undead Feeding Vectors goes beyond zombies, using parts one and two to consider the feeding mechanisms of vampires, ghosts and their human counterparts to confront and express state trauma/decay with.

Bear in mind, we’ll only be able to scratch the surface of what American Liberalism, Capitalism, and establishment politics do on a daily basis: deny the ongoing execution of genocide, which they help enact the world over! We want to challenge that in ways that sing against state forces and their aims; re: our Song of Infinity as part of an older historical-material tradition: to sing against the storm of state operations killing people and nature by design (from Volume Two, part one):

As Bay shared with me, “Kiwis are bird rats”; i.e., Nature’s idea of Jewish revenge hunted by the likes of smug men like Karl Jobst or Christoph Waltz (the former sucks in real life, the latter sucks onstage): Their steady song of the Earth is our Song of Infinity to take up ironically with Gothic poetics against the colonizer posturing as “benevolent” (which includes Jewish ethnostates and their proponents simultaneously denying the Holocaust and reenacting it; i.e., the establishment “Good Jew” instead of those like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi as the mythical Jewish unicorn the state doesn’t want you to know about but cannot stop [because their power is a lie, an illusion]: a Socialist anti- Zionist Jew and journalist). Moderates, including token moderates (e.g., Obama) and their elitist, bought-and-paid-for yes men (The Humanist Reports’ “Politicians, Pundits, & Celebs Get a Brutal Reality Check at Elitist Circle Jerk,” 2024) try so hard to control the coverage and paint themselves as good, but they’re the biggest cunts of them all (re: MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 1963). Luckily there’s one thing that moderates (Jewish or otherwise) can never hide: which side they stood for—no, sung for—when the going got tough. We can’t afford to keep quiet or toe the line, because that’s what genocide is: dying in darkness alone, or ignoring those who do while kissing up to capital, to the elite. We’re together when we’re heard, warning predators off and organizing against them through intersectional solidarity (diversity is strength); i.e., kettling the cops, turning a kettling attempt on its heel (encirclement, but also a kayfabe pun); e.g., the American-Israeli ambilocal complex/academic establishment to sever ourselves from: “University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne protesters have encircled police using reinforced banners & signs” (source tweet: Escalate Network, 2024) is one, but also the students of Harvard (an establishment school if ever there was one):

(source tweet: Harvxrd Palestine Solidarity Committee)

Protests are always violent because the state always treats liberation with violence. To that, we must become a pandemic to the elite—united on every continent, a collective thorn in the side of empire-in-disguise. As such, I provide not just my book or this chapter, but my song as unbroken and unbowed, raising my fist with my friends all around the world (source).

As we inspect these histories, remember Weber’s maxim on the monopoly of violence (and in connection to it, Asprey’s paradox of terror and Crawford’s invention of terrorism vis-à-vis the Neo-Gothic mode): Any undead representation of worker interests automatically becomes seditious; the state legitimizes its own violence against the oppressed, delegitimizing any violence performed by those defending themselves from state control, the latter dressed up as “love[2] language” that treats the former as inhuman, alien, and fetishized; i.e., during us-versus-them Amazonomachia using the ghost of the counterfeit (the lie of state sovereignty) to further the process of abjection inside the state of exception.

Just as Capitalism sexualizes everything, its reversal (using Athena’s Aegis) sexualizes whilst looking beyond short-cited blindness. Or as my PhD writes,

Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios); a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other and vice versa. As such, my own contributions to the Gothic are very much about making it sexual again, but also sex-positive in ways that Radcliffe (and her own venerated castle’s praxial inertia) were not (source).

Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, this playfulness involves the confronting of trauma in different monstrous forms, including the undead as the traumatized eaters of sex in ways that express power and move it in different directions; i.e., through knowledge and the basis of oppositional synthesis: girl talk (anger/gossip), monsters and camp. So whereas demons are made, summoned or found insofar as power and knowledge are forbidden and exchanged, undead embody trauma while freezing and feeding as a means of uniting together against state trauma.

To that, the eyes are a common means of the undead doing so; i.e., a doorway to the soul as something less fixed and more open to performative debates that invite the potential for horror as serious and silly to varying degrees; e.g., Shelley’s Frankenstein summing it up well: “his teeth [were] of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set” (source); but as usual, they also go both ways, becoming a potent means of camp: laser-beam bedroom eyes—headlights to freeze one’s deer-like prey in!

In turn, this can be lampooned to death, but this paradoxically—like the vampire as suitably animate and inanimate—yields an odd kind of life unique to human communication and conditions. To quote Willem Dafoe (above):

The actor said of the Speed 2: Cruise Control performance:

A lot of people give me a hard time about that. They tease me about the size of my performance, that it was over the top. But I swear to God, I stand by that performance because there was no other way to do it. I’ve got a pretty flexible face, an expressive face.

And I don’t censor it, I let it do its thing. I don’t put on faces, but I know for a fact that my face can do some really extreme things. And so when you freeze it into a meme, yeah, you can get a lot of laughs out. That’s for sure (source: Bronwen Winter Phoenix’ “Willem Dafoe Stands by Performance in Speed 2,” 2024).

In short, the Gothic lives and dies by such campy potential unfettered, but there’s a lot of wacky devices at play to remember and not all of them work into a given performance!

Specifically keep the module thesis argument in mind, as I won’t have time to set it up and stress it neatly per monster type as undead (re: our modular thesis):

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it (and its trifectas, monopolies, etc) using the same threatening aesthetics of power and death, decay and rape.

(artist: Fritz Willis)

As such, bearing pain and feeding is anisotropic; trauma makes us decay/corrupt as monstrous-feminine or fascist (token or not), albeit in ways that cause us to develop undead feeding habits that are to some degree sex-positive or sex-coercive. It’s seldom clean, too, lurking in the odd grey area of the theatre stage and monster costume. Nor are these forces unique to neoliberal Capitalism, with past poets closer to death, rape and raw sexuality and taboo bodily functions (re: shit, cum, barf, birth, whatever) in ways we’re alienated from now (save in fetishized forms that serve profit): relegated to household spaces that close us off and expose us to patriarchal, Man-Box-style predation. Hauntology lets us brush up with the past as nostalgic in ways that never existed and push towards Communism as aborted by capital/the project of abjection (and other Gothic theories). Such fictional outrages postulate uneasy hypotheticals about what you would have done during a genocide “back then”: what you’re doing right now (doubly so given the flow of information in the past was more controlled than the Internet currently is)!

So far in the book, we’ve discussed Fischer’s maxim regarding Capitalist Realism at various points: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism.” Now I want to apply it to the historical-material expression of the zombie as a kind of myopic, “unimaginable bad dream”: the (eco)fascist nightmare of the zombie apocalypse (we’ll briefly touch on eco-fascism here, but return to it in Volume Three, Chapter Five). Faced with this nightmare, our goal is to humanize it in xenophilic language that enjoys the fantasy as something to critique (re: Sarkeesian)—i.e., to empathize with the wretched without ignoring their state-supplied undead brands (the spectral nature of the neither-living-nor dead as spreading like a virus, in linguo-material terms). Our emphasis (for the upcoming chapter) is bad dreams, so camping canon will focus on unironic state harm as something to overcome inside of itself; i.e., the liminal hauntology of war as a place to seek out trauma in theatrical forms that we must, ourselves, subvert within the home as broken, haunted, occupied by undead trauma as nostalgic. This can certainly be comedic in nature, but I find overtly comedic forms of zombie narratives to be somewhat empty in terms of their parody (re: Shaun of the Dead, 2004). In short, their eyes are blind, and we need something that not only can see the truth of things, but whose teeth have bite!

(artist: Bill Sienkiewicz; source: Jason Faulkner’s “What’s the Deal with the Original Resident Evil Cover Art?” 2019)

“When it comes to living, no one seems to care! When it comes to wanting out, those with power will be there!” The rise of the living dead is a call to violence in both directions (re: Matteson). Civil conflicts erase neat distinctions of inside/outside or correct/incorrect, hyphenating them mid-turmoil to constitute a dangerous, aggravated confusion: a residence unfriendly to those who feel foreign, thus unwelcome inside it. And yet, the productive idea of crisis is that, on an anisotropic viral level, undeath comments on the dogmatic sickness/decay of society as embodied with irony or without; i.e., the unheimlich (sick home) raised in defense of workers or the state plaguing them through various comorbidities leading to collective, compound, generational harm inside the liminal hauntology of war’s state of exception: the state is eating people closer to the nucleus more indiscriminately! And all the while various undead appear for or against the state; i.e., inside the castle grounds as a confusing site of psychosexual violence both canonical and campy using the same general aesthetic: trauma and feeding.

This includes zombies, vampires and ghost’s feeding mechanisms and vessels for psychosexual trauma. As we shall in the very next chapter, zombies often double ourselves or those we love inside a home that—per the Gothic tradition—is also doubled to say something troubling about itself that is normally buried; i.e., a bad dream that rises up out of Hell.

To this, we must become at home with trauma, exposing its walking corpse in places that are less devoid of undead things walking about than we care to admit; i.e., those scheduled to either give or receive violence in an undead sense, including ourselves! We can feel dead[3] for these reasons; or we can feel lobotomized during Capitalist Realism, conditioned only to consume in a world that does its best through the dead malls and brainless franchises of Zombie Capitalism to keep us asleep and hungry for food that keeps us braindead; i.e., infected with the virus of pro-state sentiment (which comes with an inability to imagine anything outside of the fever-like crisis): defending the nuclear family by abjecting its built-in decay. Our own psychosexual appetites (and penetrative-penetrated feeding methods, giving and receiving sexual force) must challenge those, but they often overlap like a bad dream.

(artist: Silk Angelo)

Bad Dreams, or Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

“Fuck the fucker. I told him not to go downstairs.”

—C.J., Dawn of the Dead (2004)

This chapter concerns the bad-dream function of zombie apocalypses revealing and concealing state oppression. Per the Gothic, there is a class-cultural psychosexual element; i.e., the body as something to rape and rape with in relation to the home as sick. Live burial, Eve Sedgwick further contends in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, concerns libido as necrotic and tied to the ancestral home as voracious; i.e., the idea of live burial, wherein victims of state collapse become digested by the decaying home or some extension of it: castle-like bodies, knights and Amazons working as cops to supply the state with its necessary entropy and us-versus-them victims (of which it treats as “terrorists,” which it negotiates with using automatic violence). It’s all rather poetic and something for Communism to reclaim from capitalistic forms abusing the same poetics borrowed from the imaginary medieval past. So while the apocalypse is an uncovering of trauma through the things that are normally exploited, Gothic Communism is a psychosexual transfer of power towards workers, mid-revelation; i.e., standing against the state amongst those more oppressed through liberation with bodily pride (often as a literal billboard, below) as an act of genderqueer defiance! All peoples must be free, no exceptions! Genocide is wrong!

This famously contains the outlaw as masked, of course, but also anonymous in ways that remain after the face and body are exposed. It becomes a means of flashing those in/with power through our agency as something to see, show and conceal different things while, at times, literally putting out as a means of putting our code out there: show skin; watch Nazis (which white moderates functionally are) shit themselves; repeat. Simply put, we expose state defenders by pissing them off, and nothing pisses reactionaries and moderates off more than outspoken sex workers standing up for themselves and other oppressed groups. If you’re not pissing Nazis or Joe Biden off, then you’re not doing it right!

(exhibit 34c1a2a: Artist: Crow. Zombies and other undead concern messages of revenge for or against the state; e.g., Nazis cowardly[4] seeking revenge for capital by appearing logical, strong and merciless against its enemies, and workers bravely rising up to achieve a proletarian revenge by dismantling the state [and its Cartesian dogma]. All undead embody language as a kind of anisotropic virus, then, insofar as it can be used to infect people with different ideas—in duality to become as any monster does under such circumstances: doubled during oppositional praxis, mid-argument/confrontation.

[artist: Crow]

To that, Crow’s cryptonymy—the semi-degrading writing on his skin; e.g., “milk bag #1/#2” and “bimbo” as a self-appointed form of appreciate irony through the agency of calculated risk [where I lovingly “ravish” my good, sweet boy during consent-non-consent exactly the way he likes]—is like any zombie’s, capably showing and revealing his own apocalypse per the double operation of cryptonymy as speaking with others less fortunate making up the same collective voice; i.e., the showing of one’s skin and vulnerability mid-solidarity with other oppressed groups as a pedagogy that challenges state powers. This is an act of impeccable bravery against whose who are not brave, distracting and overwhelming the abuser as someone whose power can be divided by different groups all at once: “I’m here! Fuck with me!”)

(artist: Crow)

To that, Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything through Gothic poetics, the larger mode concerning the burial ground as the violently erotic home: the fearsome place of unchecked rape, of unironic predation in ways that have only worsened uniquely following the end of the French Revolution (re: Foucault). For the middle class, then, this becomes a dogmatic argument of shelter to defend from alien sex and force with abjecting degrees of extreme prejudice; for the alien/monstrous-feminine, such devices are turning inside-out, facing correct/incorrect as hyphenated to varying degrees of hyphenation during an apocalypse, a revelation, an uncovering of traumas that have developed through capital as growing into an increasingly alienizing and fetishizing force against nature coming home to roost.

Given its size, this chapter has been further divided into four main subchapters:

From the gun-laden annals of the zombie apocalypse inspired by the killing fields of Cambodia (and similar foreign displays of American brutality and exploitation) to Freddy Kreuger’s knives-and-nightmare torture of women to the war-torn battlefields of Bungie’s Myth series, we’ll examine some of these dreamlike scenarios, undead victims and zombie sex toys—including how iconoclasts have struggled to reclaim their widespread use from the state of exception; i.e., by examining personal, sexual trauma and incorporating proletarian “necrophilia”/xenophilia into the poetic equation during oppositional praxis challenging the middle class’ regular canonical function.

This function remains constant—feed and deliver trauma to regulate sex and force; i.e., defend the state during the liminal hauntology of war/apocalypse (the appearance of monsters), decaying with said state as its violence serves its usual purpose, but growing more visible due to weakening illusions: to execute unto labor-as-intersectionally-solidarized, said polity wrongfully framed as a hoard trying to decay and regenerate away from capital and its nuclear family model (and consequent trifectas, monopolies, capitalistic values). The state will harvest such things that appear in the friendly, functionally white middle-class neighborhood before pulling them once more out of sight again. In the interim, sex and force will crystalize in the usual heteronormative, settler-colonial ways, per the grim harvest; re (from Volume One):

When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn’t spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics’ endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains with counterterror (source).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

During an apocalypse, the nuclear family becomes brittle, threatened, hostile—replete with the usual dimorphic double standards during state-sanctioned rape and murder fantasies defending the elite through fascist-style moral panics, but also white-moderate exceptionalism (“boundaries for me, not for thee”) whose fear and dogma that reliably leads to witch hunts, to genocide when decay sets in at home regarding its endless raping overseas; e.g., the appearance of the monstrous-feminine as many things, but especially the damsel to rescue and the whore to exorcise through penetrative violence on the same often female bodies (re: Robert Neville); i.e., husbands or potential suitors slaying women, people of color and other formerly vulnerable spectres of Imperialism come fearsomely home to empire! Canonically the ghost of the counterfeit becomes something to abject—to capitalize on; re: necrophagy—the eating of old dead stories cryptonymically and cryptomimetically echoing spectres of decay per state abuse, its subterfuge breaking long enough to let said monsters appear and walk around for middle-class (usually white/token) American kids to banish again, Scooby-Doo-style (re: Radcliffe, The Monster Squad, etc): the pre-teen regulation of sex and force on various stages populated with various actors; i.e., “disempowerment” as a form of white suburban privilege to police marginalized groups with; e.g., mummies in pyramids ready to choke a bitch, and other threats of pimps from beyond the grave scaring whitey… white.

Joseph Crawford notes how the Victorians were afraid of everything vis-à-vis rebellion as something to abject (whitey scared of Hell as seeking revenge for colonial abuse—state shift), punching the ghost of the counterfeit. There’s really no end to the toxic sediment, the American graveyard built on transplanted British graveyards (a bit like Dracula’s transplanted grave sod from “Transylvania”). Is it fun? Sure! But nostalgia becomes yet-another-thing to police by white kids (and token elements, not shown below) who grow into functionally white cops that decay into fascist ones: an invasion of the body snatchers in costumes worn in good and bad faith (witches vs witch hunters, a concept we’ll explore at length, next volume)! They regress towards a fascist “former time,” a bad dream to project onto their deeper darker selves as giver and receive of force, which they profess in bad faith to conquer and overcome in service to profit at all moments: through revenge.

(artist: Art by Bones)

Survival (and by extension, “survival horror”) is a common theme of the Imperium invaded by its own atrocities as poetically humanized during mirror syndrome; i.e., the human condition (and by extension social-material conditions) a complicated process of rememory and reclamation as a lucid-dreaming maneuver that cannot be fully monopolized by state forces! This is a good thing! The bad dreams of an apocalypse, then, are generally a time to dance and play with monsters, but the quotes around “rape” and “murder” are generally optional insofar as the irony of psychosexual violence per ludo-Gothic BDSM is optional; i.e., as the violence and flow of power can travel towards or away from the state, mid-cryptonymy and decay!

Moreover, such doomsdays are classically evoked in the language of night-and-day—something to put down when the night falls and Hell’s dead routinely rise from the overcrowded grave (re: the manufacture trifecta) as a matter of postcolonial revenge, the whole lot of them thrown in together as searching for their lost humanity as a consequence of Capitalism. Some seek revenge in pursuit of power as fascist (e.g., Skeletor literally chasing the moon in the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie, seeking self-actualization as a deifying act); others look for retribution/comeuppance as a Communist exchange that often associates with nature-as-undead being yet another manner of preferential code—i.e., with its own unique history belonging to a shared struggle between workers and the state (Crow loves werewolves, exhibit 50a2) vis-à-vis the monstrous-feminine.

For instance, there’s the lunar cycles, whose undead nocturnal feeding becomes animalistically “feral”—a kind of lycanthropic madness tied to the moon-as-female (“lunacy”), pagan rites (the March hares, above), and a hunter’s symbol that often stresses size difference as a predator/prey dynamic tied to vulnerability at odd hours: in bed, sleeping or frozen in fear as lustful, wanting to be topped and bred, Snu-Snu-style:

(artist: Sandreiio)

As we’ve already explained, though, zombies often feed and receive/give trauma during the day when the world turns upside-down. Other undead generally do not—are attached to spaces of darkness (more on this in the feeding chapter) thrown wide; i.e., the eye of confusion, opened and staring state defenders down. There’s also the natural disaster side of things; i.e., an earthquake happens, or a toxic waste spill, or a pandemic otherwise serving as similar metaphors of denial and release: monsters (zombies or otherwise) conveniently appearing as scapegoats during capital’s usual instabilities swinging back and forth.

Whether it’s with an axe to the skull or a silver bullet to the heart, the state summons its own heroes of the middle-class. The latter then kill such beings to return things “to normal…” transforming them back into tame, harmless humans, subjects, slaves to their own psychosexual lust; i.e., as foisted onto them by a hostile middle-class branding them as criminals to consume during the process of abjection, namely making them criminals per criminogenic, dogmatic conditions that frame GNC behavior as “sodomy” (synonymized with disease, including the AIDS pandemic attached exclusively to homosexual men, at the time): “the love that dare not speak its name,” anal sex, tied to drug use and self-harm as a matter of coping with being relegated to homeless positions—to cruise, as it were. The closet’s a bitch, even after it’s become a tokenized privilege to escape from! As we’ll see, homosexual men historically have sold out to push that anguish onto others—to assimilate until they are put down/forced to convert (the euthanasia effect applies to anything monstrous-feminine, not just AFAB parties):

(exhibit 34c1a2a2a: During The Monster Squad‘s final battle, a gauntlet of movie monsters [and cops] are killed one-by-one. Society is ostensibly falling apart. Rudy, being the Monster Squad’s muscle and oldest of the boys, has already penetrated the Brides of Dracula with wooden stakes he made in shop class [a gross metaphor for losing one’s virginity to “scarlet women”]. With the werewolf, though, he remembers what the movies have taught him to do: shoot to kill, defend society [and police] from degenerate forces.

Wasting no time, Rudy pointedly borrows a fallen officer’s service revolver to load a single silver bullet into [the round made by stealing from one of their mother’s silverware collections, a sign of middle-class status]. As Rudy prepares his weapon, the wolf man is framed to the left during cross cuts; Rudy is his leather-clad executioner [aping an older “greaser” culture] standing to the right, a kind of mirror syndrome comparing and contrasting our man in white [straitjacket colors] and boy in black [the colors of the clergy and of death]. “Bang!” Rudy says, and fires. It works like a charm, dropping his enemy in one dramatic shot. Make no mistake, this is a violent, homophobic exchange, one mirroring police brutality in boys like Rudy conditioned to see gay men as monsters [a position not helped by closeted homosexuals being angry at the world, but also themselves]. The film was made in the 1980s and is never shy about its homophobic language, though it doesn’t explicitly connect the two [it doesn’t take Judith Butler to connect the dots, however].

Regardless, the wolf man’s killing remains a brutal, cryptonymic act of vigilante street justice, whereupon the guilty man—having transformed back into a human—outrageously thanks Rudy before dying. It’s internalized bigotry by the self-hating queer as laid low by conversion therapy, “ending the curse” in a very phallic, homosocial manner: a gunfight. Said fight simulates an ordering of force as giver and receiver per a heteronormative perverting of queerness by projecting straight insecurities onto something to scapegoat, to rape; i.e., the ostensibly straight man proves his outward “straightness” by raping an openly queer-coded man with an artificial penis: bullet dick. Per Foucault, it’s just another form of sodomy out-of-bedroom dressed up as justice in defense of the home as straight; sexuality becomes confused, psychosexually violent, hungry like the wolf [all that grunting and grimacing] and synonymous with unironic death; i.e., as a dogmatic means of carrying out capital punishment against GNC elements the state needs to keep its future cops in check and flush in war brides.

So often our killers are scared little boys motivated by sex attached to the nuclear model. Though brief, the scene is visibly traumatic for both characters, the fag denying his queer self-as-animal during suicide-by-cop and Rudy forced to execute such a person as a regressive, neocon rite of passage: becoming a straight man by killing a degenerate one as a means of fatal nostalgia, then and now. After he’s forced to look upon his work, Rudy realizes he’s just killed a human being [and a penitent one at that]. Still being a teenager, though, he responds to the ritual’s classic reward: owed sex. So Rudy hops to it, quickly distracting himself from what he’s done by assimilating at long last; i.e., returning his horny gaze onto the “loose” girl next door… who he’s been creeping on the whole movie. Such Hawthorne-grade hypocrisies are merely heteronormativity in action, folks!

To that, the straight perspective is normally the hero’s; i.e., as threatened by queer forces as trying to “turn” them. Per the pedagogy of the oppressed, obliterating these harmful myths becomes something to heal from police violence together. It’s tremendously important, then, to allow for positive queer inclusivity [versus burying your gays] that likewise speaks to the inverted complexity of queer life under state power and canonical Gothic poetics. In short, it’s very different to be queer and threatened by straight violence than the other way around; the latter is bad faith and murderous, whereas queer existence is generally made to question itself in ways that lead to calculated-risk-taking as a matter of discourse: being treated like animals as a rejection from normal society by virtue of being different from the way said society is structured around profit.

Shylock, for instance, is called a dog in Merchant of Venice precisely because he is alien in the eyes of the Christians who moralize their own behaviors as moral and generous. The reality is they use their own language to assign exceptions to themselves, mistreating the alien as foreign through double standards that not only punch down against him, but the stigma animals associated with him; i.e., bad dogs and wolves that refuse to behave. It’s a means of propping themselves up while alienating themselves from nature/the monstrous-feminine as something to capitalize on/exploit. Ultimately Shakespeare’s critique of an imaginary Venice speaks to English problems: abusing the language of nature and animals in order to maintain society as it presently exists under Capitalism when he wrote The Merchant of Venice. Development under Capitalism towards Communism invariably requires reversing the process of abjection to embrace our animal side as something normally alienated from us and fetishized by capital. We can recognize said side as alien and fetishized—indeed, can even play with that using ludo-Gothic BDSM—but we must humanize it as part of nature, not separate from it and “superior” to it as Cartesian thought does by design:

[source Tumblr post, Eldritch Bauble: June 3rd, 2024]

By extension, all of this has a genderqueer flavor insofar as the dialectic of the alien extends to anything “black” within the settler-colonial model that presently exists [which Shakespeare would have been on the cusp of when writing stories like The Merchant of Venice in 1598]—not just Jews, people of color or unruly women, but queer people at large surviving under capital as animalistic reclaimers of their wild sides; i.e., cruising amid stigma while returning to something forgotten as a means of survival amid enrichment, not exploitation when putting on the wolf mask: hunting for love and connection, not division and profit.

This, in turn, becomes a vital means of communicating through sex as something to spill tea with; i.e., among one’s friends as a process of surveying the territories through our social-sexual connections to gossip with; e.g., me—even when still inside the closet—gabbing with my girlfriends about who was dating who, and furthermore, our various techniques acting as a matter of pride but also learning through each other. Girls take pride in the head they give, but also the power said giving grants them over the cuties in their lives; this, in exchange, becomes instructional: suck dick, survive, but also thrive and have fun by cluing other people, AFAB or not, in on the means of doing so! Girls talk, and share as a means of survival and praxial enrichment through sex—to feel excited when one of our number meets someone cool [and starts to fuck]. This isn’t a trade secret, then, but a social-sexual means of Gothic-Communist development; i.e., by establishing shared trust in mutual action across communities that challenge heteronormative forces [versus tokenizing for them, as TERFs do].

For instance, when I starting experimenting more and sucking cock, my friend Lydia explained some handy tips for how to avoid the gag reflex with larger dicks. People who suck dick, when divorced from the necessity of having to make a “provider” cum, simply wind up enjoying it by virtue of it being something to partake in and have fun doing as skilled practitioners of as a matter of value, of skill; i.e., throat goats: “I wanna gag, I wanna choke, I want you to touch that dangly thing that’s swingin’ the back of my throat!” Get it, girl!

[artist: Othala M]

In other words, straight people—but especially men—don’t cruise the way that queer people historically would have done/do, and such examples of “sodomy” involve us fags seeking pleasure [including pain] as non-harmful, but often while adjacent to actual harm. ex changes us, as does death, and in the Gothic the two generally overlap [re: Zeuhl, Cuwu and Jadis radicalizing me with sex]. Faced with it, we find ourselves making curious sacrifices/absorbing new information that shows us what we’re made of—old pain, new daring. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, babes! Regardless of the monster type, but especially vampires and werewolves, the master/apprentice dynamic remains common in queer exchanges. Someone from an older generation is categorically attracted to someone from a new, younger generation across space and time—the latter drawn to the mastery and security of power the former offers, and the former seduced by the sweet essence and vitality that the other provides: the maiden and the whore, the lady and the tramp, the detective and the dark prince of love, etc.

Whatever the shape, such lords will value all cuties forced to fetishize/maximize their labor value’s monetary potential under a capitalistic scheme; i.e., valuing these survival mechanisms versus resenting them [as male Twitch streamers will do, for instance, but also SWERFs at large and even AFAB sex workers internalizing misogyny and using it to police themselves for the pimp]: for doing what capital forces the monstrous-feminine to endure by design. The trauma of settler-colonial domination is certainly there, mid-liminal-expression, but under sex-positive examples becomes something to subvert and ultimately avoid during calculated risk: a palliative Numinous, domming the sub safely regardless of gender or sexuality.

[artist: Super Phazed]

Of course, such things are hardly so black-and-white in reality, and “strength” as a matter of queer virtue shall reify as if-not-equal-then-certainly-idiosyncratic among both parties. However this happens, ’80s homophobia plagues queer culture more broadly as something to subvert using the same Gothic theatrics. As such, queerness is a community of misfit survivors drawn to each other as a mixing and matter of discourse melding desire/protection; i.e., we are all strong for each other as a social-activist means of monstrous-feminine expression in and out of the bedroom [and each other]: werewolves [and other lycans] serving as anthropocentric code thereof. These operate with all the usual animalistic preferences, carefully communicating trauma during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a complex means of merging privilege and oppression to synthesize catharsis.

[artists: Ms. Reefer and Ayla]

For example, Chryssi [aka Ms. Reefer] and Ayla have worked with me to give a shared voice to repressed struggles during calculated risk as a matter of exhibit. One is younger than the other but both are very femme and cute, but also feral and ravenous during sex in ways that feel adorable and hot insofar as size difference combine with an urgent desire to care and protect [to actually do so in ways the police historically do not] as each comes deliciously to the fore; e.g., by fucking like animals/to metal [werewolf or otherwise] while finding peace of mind during calculated risk expressing our collective outrage and struggle to find love and survive in ways straight folk generally do not—especially straight folk [and token fags] in decay defending the state: Nazi werewolves! In short, both cuties look out for each other and take care of their various needs during mutual exchange and consent as normally unspeakable, which I can assist in helping them speak by giving them a Gothic stage to speak their truth with: common ground to find with each other and our straight allies [wherever we find them]. The state haunts us? We haunt them back! It’s an honor to be able to fund, exhibit and illustrate my friends as such! Our similarities amid difference is a gift, our diversity a strength to survive state hunters as a matter of pride all year round [a war of attrition, as asymmetrical warfare always is].)

However one slices it, trauma, feeding and decay are both the result of settler colonialism and its history as an Aegis to show our enemies what for by rising up at all times, but especially when state illusions are weak. Any show of solidarity is a show of force in the eyes of the state, which they will do their damnedest to censor by having us cover up ourselves. We need to invoke the spirits of the dead—their awesome power through our own bodies and their labor value as reclaiming violence, terror and morphological expression from state forces. Simply put, it becomes a means of speaking out while confronting trauma, face-to-face, ass-to-ass on the mirror glass: where one’s power is stored, shown, wrestled with—where it negotiates with past histories making fresh ones on the surface of and within thresholds, through parody and pastiche, praxis and catharsis.

If you want to critique power, you must go where it is. Nothing is more powerful than workers in solidarity united in nude opposition (often literally) against the state: anti-Zionism, anti-fascism, and anti-Capitalism, etc, as written on the skin, but also simply the skin as something to share and flaunt while concealing ourselves through anti-predation measures; e.g., our identities behind invisible barriers, mid-cycle, struggling against hypermassive objects using our own massive elements abstracting said devices; i.e., our bodies and their labor value as GNC.

(exhibit 34c1a2a2: Artist: Crow. The dead become a matter of legend that always returns to a present that has deliberately forgotten them; i.e., the Imperial Core repressing state abuses at home and abroad in service to profit. These decay and return, over and over in ways that are hardly new. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” Marx announced, feeling doomed by the tragedy and farce of such gross repetitions. Similar to Marx, Nikolai Gogol writes in Dead Souls:

The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards (source). 

The way to avoid such ignominious destruction and betrayal by the state as dying and regenerating into new versions of “Rome” (as haunting our dead German and Russian, above), is to listen to the dead as now including Marx and Gogol; i.e., in ways we can possess and camp [taking what’s useful and critiquing the rest] to upend state illusions using what we got—our Aegis! “A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe,” Gogol asserts, very much of his time when he adds [effectively commenting on the monstrous-feminine]: “There are occasions when a woman, no matter how weak and impotent in character she may be in comparison with a man, will yet suddenly become not only harder than any man, but even harder than anything and everything in the world.” Zombies, in turn, inhabit us as mediums to harbor them—oracles to pass forgotten knowledge and trauma, mid-apocalypse; i.e., as a matter of pride, projecting abjected things back onto the colonizer to paralyze them with, thus give us a chance to regenerate into something altogether more humane and away from state designs. It’s a mirror game, a danger disco working good faith against bad, one where we chose what to wear and what to take off from moment to moment.)

(artist: Crow)

“What a horrible night to have a curse”; the way out is inside of itself as something centrist yarns treat like an Americanized Halloween: dawn signaling the routine ending of the dead’s dreadful climb above ground. Post-apocalypse, the nightmare has seemingly appeared and ended, after which regeneration is anisotropic. Radcliffean agents will defend the state while fearfully endorsing its bread-and-circus, purge-style violence and unironic demon lovers; we can consciously subvert all of this through our work and relationships—by entering the bad dream as a state of awareness (of “being woke,” as the saying originally goes); i.e., towards the violent exceptions the state makes, which we transform the nightmare space inside of itself. This happens by using monstrous language to humanize, thus liberate, ourselves with: illustrating mutual consent in Gothic-Communist ways.

I would argue this process must be conscious, active. For instance, Harmony and I—exchanging knowledge and essence to heal from our trauma—work consciously together and contribute towards rebellion as a sex-positive force healing from rape; i.e., while roleplaying undead “rape” (necrophilia) in quotes. It gets poetically messy amid the “carnage” and fluids: deep up in that soft, warm “danger” as touched by unspeakable trauma, the crypt-like tunnel saturated with “death” exploding in the usual medieval theatrics (e.g., the miracle of bleeding inanimate objects), but also hyphenating death and love, pleasure and pain, castles and bodies, rapture and rape, etc. It’s not about wishy-washy romance, but getting down to business! Medusa’s not gonna hug herself!

(exhibit 34c1a2b: Artist, top-left and bottom-right: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-left and top-right: Harmony Corrupted. The ravishing fantasy just as often uses dirty talk that doesn’t translate well to ordinary clothing or photos in bed. Even so, sexting and long-distance play allows for some degree of sharing amid simulation-as-context; i.e., the doll or the lover fucking from afar on a fetish as doll-like in relation to the monstrous-feminine body [mine or hers] as like a graveyard-like body or body-like graveyard [a zombie] as much as a castle; or rather the open-secret function of the Gothic castle becomes a theatrical space for rape play and literal live burial during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s castle-narrative: the Gothic chronotope’s hereditary rites and dynastic exchange apprised of sex-positive poetics and Communist language in ways classic authors would have had to fumble towards. As such, this isn’t Oedipus Rex or The Mysterious Mother. It’s not a tragedy befitting the usual mayhem per canonical forms. Rather, we’re friends helping each other and, in turn, the world—by using our own Aegises to turn state power back in on itself. Any revelation that exposes Omelas becomes further openings, thus opportunities, to widen and execute on top of each other in repetition. Like sex, it has to repeat in order for us to survive: loudly and visibly as a call to arms, to participate in an orgy of revolution [free zombie love].

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

To that, Harmony and I can play with each other as dolls to ravish as giver and receiver of “rape” in quotes, exchanging money and wisdom and kindness and love back and forth: my edging blue balls choked with passion, mercifully releasing a fresh load of cum that waters their tomb-like mound. Before that happens, I can delightfully slide in and out of their likeness, feeding insofar as “food” is deathly poetic, thrusting and staking their ripe, melon-like “corpse.” The entire time, we feed rapturously on each other in ways that benefit us both during low-stakes calculated risk, but also the proletariat through the crude-but-nuanced paradoxical nature of the Gothic; i.e., to challenge state education as a psychosexual erotic exchange/exhibit, whose complicated nudism and genuine affection camps “trauma” as we make and share it together in ways Capitalism discourages: by mixing business and pleasure, art and sex, friendship[5] and comraderie, Marxism and that sweet, sweet pusssssay!)

Such iconoclastic theatrics, unlike canonical media, can synthesize praxis in a sex-positive direction, leading to fresh possibilities that push towards an older future that never quite was: through the interrogation of trauma as something to feed erotically on inside the graveyard (which includes nudism as an asexual display of “threats” placed in quotes, but also removed from them). There will be unironic trauma, pain and rot; but successfully facing these horrors, we can demask the state as raping us, along with those predators hiding amongst us abusing monstrous poetics to fortify a complicit cryptonymy via coercive sex and force, its disordered thinking and various syndromes (too many to list, each a monster to express in ways we reclaim from canonical sicknesses and cold, systemic assignments of state force, punishment, torture, rape and murder). It becomes something to escape through the middle class keeping the gate: “Those will with power will be there!”

Through revolution’s subversive, horny methods, the human is undead in ways that become not just strong but indomitable/unkillable as we feed, thus grow stronger through our trauma-induced appetites and feeding habits dismantling state power in favor of anarchist forms. The state is the ultimate foe; per ludo-Gothic BDSM, we want to reverse the abjection process through feeding and trauma as something to perform, synthesizing catharsis. In turn, the paradox of Gothic poiesis and cryptomimesis allows for a fun duality by us as performers and teachers: spoiling ourselves rotten inside a proliferate necrobiome; e.g., “Yeah, baby! I’m a little zombie slut! Fuck my undead pussy with that big Destroyer cock of yours! Rock my world!” Hooray for bad Gothic puns and smoking-hot cuties defying police brutality!

(artist: Petra Juliet)

Please beware! There will be constant discussions of unironic genocide and rape in the pages ahead, as linked to monster poetics, which we must learn to subvert through the same performative spaces; i.e., with the descriptive sexuality of mutual consent during appreciative irony’s Gothic counterculture: our de facto (extracurricular) education as meant to challenge the state through how it feeds—through us as undead! All this is merely something to keep in mind as we enter the scary (and delightful) world of bad dreams!

Your Commy Mommy,

—Persephone

Onto “Bad Dreams, part zero: Return of the Living Dead“!

Footnotes

[1] One parallel example is my piece, “Judas Priest: Invincible Shield and Zionism” (2024). A more direct example, though, is my response to the Israeli crackdown after the October 7th Hamas attacks (committed bravely and desperately against their oppressors), “Justice for Palestine” (2023):

What’s going on in Palestine is wrong, but so is the larger geo-political argument trying to justify it—what is, quite simply, genocide for the same old reasons: bourgeois hegemony. The Imperial Core of the Global North sanctions, funds and incites genocide to enrich the elite, including the one occurring right now in Palestine at the hands of the state of Israel and its war criminals (Bad Empanada, “Israeli ETHNIC CLEANSING of Gaza Begins – 1 MILLION Expelled in Another Nakba,” 2023). This is entirely wrong on every conceivable register (and demonstrates how nation-states exist purely to serve the profit motive). Palestine is in the right, Israel is not; even when Hamas becomes indiscriminate in their killings of Israeli citizens, you must remember that said citizens are occupiers of stolen land taken through lies and by force—i.e., the ethnostate using its own women and children as human shields during an unlawful occupation that has been ongoing for over seventy years (with the United States’ financial backing and geopolitical support). […]

I, for one, will not stand idly by while the same old proponents of Imperialism make the same old tired arguments to serve the elite. These are people’s lives, ground into dust by the great machine of capital as having become an ever larger and more fearsome monster as time goes on. Even if those in the present fall into the state of exception, targeted for termination inside state-manufactured prisons by old ghouls like the American establishment (the mother territory) and her allies, we should not be silent as they siphon all life from the land and its peoples, places and ecosystems; the elite and their supporters need to be exposed for what they are: the Great Destroyers of our age, the ultimate threat to all life on the planet purely to enrich the smallest number of persons they can. In line with today being Friday the 13th, think of the elite (and nation-states) as the undying slasher that both never seems to die but is always in decay. Israel is fascist, and fascism is Capitalism in decay. American Liberalism and the neoliberal market demand eternal crisis that leads to decay that must be aided and supported. To that, the Israeli state is the 21st century version of the Nazi war machine (echoing Hilter’s beerhall putsch [and later his war into Poland and Russia appeased by Britain and America] as they shove into Gaza). War pimps and jailors speaking pretty words, the enablers of Israel are little more than murderers who come to you with smiles. They will destroy the Global South and then set their sights (and mercenaries) on the Global North (which is already a police state rife with fascism) as the Imperial Boomerang sails home. Fuck them (source).

Also consider “Bushnell’s Requiem: An Ode to a Martyr” (2024) and “Remember the Fallen: An Ode to Nex Benedict” (2024) as encapsulated in “Psychosexual Martyrdom” and “A Note About Canonical Essentialism.” Geography is not destiny or moral; we are not expendable in light of state aims. Furthermore, as my partner Bay says, “We should not live in a world that requires human sacrifice to make an important political statement on the value of human life.” Never let them forget that—that we are human and they, the state and its defenders, are the worst sort of ghouls draining nature to try and cheat death/consolidate power in vertical, pyramid-style arrangements!

[2] A note about necrophilia and sodomy as highly contentious terms: Whereas this volume explores xenophobia and xenophilia at length, it does so within the parent dichotomy of canon vs iconoclasm. Class struggle, then,  treats xenophilia as ironic in terms of meting out love and affection to stigmatized groups; i.e., those treated as undead by the state. However, “necrophilia” is historically a confusing term, more of a misnomer when used by the elite than any kind of accurate depiction of actual sex-positive behaviors. Technically fucking a “zombie” is necrophilia, but if the person isn’t actually braindead and has the ability to consent then it’s not historically what we be called necrophilia (outside of Gothic circles).

Figurative, tricky usage aside, my application of the word will either be to highlight its misnomic usage by state proponents, or to stress the simple fact that beings perceived as “dead” are being fucked in some shape or form: either by the state in a coercive sense or by the proletariat trying to recover their lost humanity while identifying as undead in xenophilic creations: “Fuck this zombie cunt,” being—true to form—an ontological paradox that must use a word that doesn’t quite fit; i.e., “technically, sort of, not really but the word stuck, so…” “Sodomy” falls under the same bailiwick, referring both to the xenophobic legends about queer people in Neo-Gothic discourse as criminals/outsiders, as well as the xenophilic reclamation of these same monster stories; i.e., the gay “feeder” of essence for or against state interests; e.g., the vampire or werewolf as a queer metaphor for homosexual men.

[3] The first thing Kain says in Alien is “I feel dead,” commenting on the Job-like stresses the company puts on its workers.

[4] State puppets aren’t brave, they’re complicit—are so horrible that no one in their right mind would want to support them or stay by their side; i.e., real divorced-dad energy as part of a grift, a hill to die on; e.g., Bad Empanada Live’s “Destiny & Loner Box’s Deadbeat Dad Journey to Israel” (2024). Let them, reminding those who look on our nude bodies that they aren’t for sale, nor destined to serve as zombie-like slaves to such men; they serve to rebel against them time and time again—as a circle that, coming round and round, pushes said abusers to the dustbin of history. Only cowards kill, enslave and/or rape women and children; only sad, pathetic hypocrites defend such butchery (killer virgins falling victim to the state promise of sex, essentially). Let them pay for it with our company among others reminding them what they have given up—their humanity and our trust!

[5] Harmony took the above photo for my birthday on June 1st. To that, I wasn’t able to have a cake on my birthday because my mother had to go out of state a couple days early. So Harmony (and some other cuties) gave me slices of their ample cake and pie, instead! So thick, tasty and moist, and needing to be glazed with lots of yummy frosting (rainbow jizz, taste the rainbow)!