This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first 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). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! 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.
“Make it Gay,” part four: the Finale; or “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll!” (Ludo-Gothic BDSM in practice, feat. Blxxd Bunny and The Scorpions)
You can always trust your inner feelings
‘Cause they always tell the truth
Where did it get you, then your analyzing
Just do what feels right for you
If you take life as a crazy gamble
Throw your dice take your chance
You will see it from the different angle
And you too can join the dance (source)
—Klaus Meine; “Make It Real,” on The Scorpion’s Animal Magnetism (1980)
Picking up where “Book Sample: Shining a Light on Things, or How to Make Monsters” left off…
At long last, we arrive at the finale to our “camp map.” We’ve had to travel through Tolkien’s treasure maps and Cameron’s space colonies to get here, but also Radcliffe’s spectral, operatic castles and various psychosexual, “demon-castle” monstrosities (re: the Metroidvania) evoking the potential “to put the pussy on the chainwax”: to camp the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM in practice and among friends who embody the virgin/whore as monstrous-feminine. Canon is propaganda that normally “grows out of the base and the ruling class’ interests [to justify] how the base operates and defends the power of the elite” (exhibit 0b); camp is propaganda through roleplay as Gothicized, wherein our “camp map” camps canon by replacing its harmful castles, knights, and monstrous, operatic throwbacks with harmless counterfeits during ludo-Gothic BDSM. This bait-and-switch extends to emergent thoughts, guilty pleasures and wish fulfillment as maps to explore upon our own sticky surfaces (above): regarding nature as monstrous-feminine (female or not) to subvert through itself according to what we control and leave behind. Our “treasure map” is drawn over older historical maps of conquest, effacing the linguo-material structure brick-by-brick with brick by brick. Gay bricks. Like language, their meaning is largely arbitrary and dictated by dialectical-material context, including that of class, culture and race war as informed by its own phenomenological (and pendulous) back-and-forth: between people and things made by people (about either of those things).
We’ll look at two seemingly at random and framed concentrically inside/outside of themselves (next page)—the Scorpions, followed by Blxxd Bunny and I pioneering ludo-Gothic BDSM out of whatever’s on hand; i.e., as it would continue to be used for this entire book series’ illustrating solidarity with (which we’ll conclude on before closing the volume out and heading into its aftercare)! Language isn’t harmful or healing on its own; how it’s used is, which requires rediscovering things again through prior returns to past attempts: to camp what has already been camped, been camped, been camped… The echo is “bad,” but that’s also kind of the point? Nothing lives forever but things can survive cryptomimetically between pieces of language adjacent to trauma. It’s silly-serious and “almost holy” (re: “A Song Written in Decay“); i.e., while writing and otherwise interacting with the dead as once-alive and yet miraculously alive-again through us subjected to the same humiliating forces we escape from inside of themselves. Let that be your optimism, however ouroborotic. Now carpe diem! The night is young!
(source)
As such, the “camp map” finale is both a destination and invitation to continue through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a profound means of rebellious fun; i.e., as an informed exercise of past reflections built and building on older forms thereof to have fun by inheriting the plastic past (and its danger discos, above). Through the Gothic’s playing with the taboo (usually through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, above) to achieve controlled and uncontrolled opposition, alike, the latter are assembled from, and according to, our Gothic-Marxist tenets (and other pieces of the manifesto tree); re: making Communism just a little sexier and gayer through the Gothic’s cryptomimetic chain; i.e., of actively and intelligently (through informed[1] play) camping the canon but also the ghost of Marx to recultivate the Superstructure and reseize the Base through oppositional praxis: the proverbial twin trees we’ve sought to corrupt like Morgoth did, in Valinor (or Satan unto Paradise). This is not a singular event, but one that occurs through many collaborative acts; i.e., of worker solidarity developing Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism in opposition to state power over years, decades, and centuries of a collective ludo-Gothic BDSM! It goes on and on, and that’s a good thing—is a place of play to build whatever we need inside Plato’s cave, thus “Make It Real” through all the usual forces of nature and attraction waiting behind the camera lens.
This book’s finale, then, is merely a demonstration of one link inside that grand chain of events; i.e., as made by me with one of my muses (re: Blxxd Bunny). It’s not my making of monsters but our making of monsters; i.e., where we pull a Spinal Tap and “crank it up to eleven,” having the whore’s monstrous-feminine revenge against profit: through the very labor the state tries to control and antagonize workers with! Ours is not mere force of will (the fascist argument, when capital decays) but the force of our Aegis when brought to bare (so to speak), mid-performance; i.e., of power as something to see being performed: Medusa and hers looking back at you!
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Note: Bunny is a good friend and cover model who kindly has supported my work over the years (re: despite them being ace and me very much not being ace). While a few illustrated exhibits feature sex workers collaborating as models for me in 2022 and early 2023 in Volume Zero (re: Itzel, from the dedication illustration), Bunny is a special case; i.e., because the finale of the “camp map” features them exclusively as the prototype—meaning for what became common practice in my later volumes, but especially Volume Two (the largest of my volumes by far)!
To that, while Volume Zero has the “camp map” with Bunny in it—illustrating mutual consent with me through ludo-Gothic BDSM—and Volume One has a handful of exhibits with different models doing the same basic action, Volume Two has dozens upon dozens of collabs. Camping canon, then, is an incredibly important idea vis-à-vis portraying ludo-Gothic BDSM as actionable; i.e., beyond simple rape play “for funsies” and more by healing from state abuse through intersectional labor exchanges that make monsters for illustrating mutual consent ipso facto. To it, Bunny broke the proverbial mold—said idea (and its execution) specifically pioneered here with them as my first cover model. They’re a very special bun (the best bun), and while I feature them extensively in my book series, I have pointedly updated this finale in 2025 to exhibit more of their work. Go support them!
That being said, this specialness includes our aforementioned process, which is still going on as I write this addendum; e.g., with Vera Dominus and I:
(artist: Vera Dominus)
In short, Bunny and I started the beginning of something in 2023 that is still going on with exciting new cuties. Just as Bunny is ace but partakes in public nudism to celebrate such things, sexuality and asexuality are a gradient; i.e., workers react differently separately-and-together about the same things, including sex and gender as things to identity around and perform with in a poetic state of death, change and rebirth: constant evolution from dead things turning radically back into living things. C’est la vie.
In keeping with activism and exhibitionism/voyeurism, some people love to share and show off; others love to do it for a larger cause. Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is a holistic enterprise, in this respect; i.e., it deals in, with and through informed inclusion, acceptance and love to address duality through Gothic aesthetics: with bad actors, players and faith challenged in duality during oppositional praxis. Both we and our enemies commit stochastic terrorism; the only difference between us is our goals (and outcomes to said goals)—with them to keep us (and sex work, at large) illegal, and us to free ourselves from those state proponents pimping us! We become a rift in time-space, a dark church to turn the world completely upside-down, and whose shake down shakes out labor and land to give back to those it was stolen from by the elite!
Furthermore, through cryptonymy’s restless enormity and alien, febrile darkness, it becomes a thread we pull back on during ludo-Gothic BDSM. To reverse such abuse on a systemic level (which is all that capital really is; re: raping nature for profit), the liminal hauntology of war (and its morphological extensions’ dark side of the moon laid bare) cuts both ways. Plunging into the Medusa’s mighty bottom and its bottomless void to reverse the only thing capital cares about, we humanize the harvest to expose the state as inhumane (a concept which “Nature Is Food” from Volume One will inspect)!
Even so, each case remains memorable and idiosyncratic. Vera, for example, loves to share and I love to receive (each concept being highly reversible, of course); i.e., while making content together (above), as of me writing this addendum. Subsequently playing with taboo things as the Gothic does, we do so in liberating ways conducive to Gothic-Communist development; re: by pushing towards universal liberation vis-à-vis emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness during intersectional solidarity’s holistic pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., healing from rape as a matter of systemic, thus widespread generational trauma (wherein we tip on its cusp of oppressive darkness merged with our own visible sort, below)—with, in our case, the gentle mommy domme’s own fabulous revolutionary cryptonymy reversing abjection (thus profit) during the whore’s dialectical-material revenge! Not everyone enjoys the way that I operate, but Vera does, and working together with her as Bunny I once pioneered has been tremendously rewarding! Sooner or later, education trumps making money but the two commonly go hand-in-hand until Communism actualizes; re: Socialism, which Gothic Communism is until society becomes stateless, classless and moneyless (we’ll talk about the anarchist, horizontal elements to Gothic Communism in the preface to Volume One). In other words, Socialism is fun; i.e., it doesn’t preclude sex (and power through sexuality’s asexual elements; re: public nudism as “porn art”)!
To that, find what fits together comfortably (though some friction paradoxically doesn’t hurt) and—once lubricated—make revolution happen, yourselves! Among ace and non-ace folk alike, united labor action (and tolerance for allies) are what ludo-Gothic BDSM is all about (thus its calculated risk developing Gothic Communism). Mommy dommes or otherwise, show them your Aegis; use its pearly surface (and assorted thresholds) to reflect a larger battle cry upon! Forget chainwax, slap that ass like a bass guitar! Mosh-pit that pussy till it begs for mercy! The Metroidvania are a perfect dom, but they aren’t people; castle to Gothic castle, the love shack is a Numinous torture dungeon of people and place alike—one for its students to experience dark-and-forbidden desires on the edge of the civilized world (re: “Exploring the Derelict Past“)! So edge your little hearts out! Howl at the moon! —Perse, 3/29/2025
(artist: Vera Dominus)
Before we get to Bunny and I doing that ourselves on their Aegis, let’s go over a few odds and ends that concern camping canon, thus ludo-Gothic BDSM (about eight pages)—how to do it, but also some examples that inspired my work you can learn from…
We’ll get to the Scorpions in a second (exhibit 1a1a1i1). First, let’s canvas the process that camping canon entails; i.e., the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll that Gothic works with, thus Bunny and myself. Doing so is not just a sexy wiggling and silly-serious act of one-upping others; there’s a—you guessed it—Gothic function to such excessive numeration. Manuel Aguirre writes on excessive numbers, “Wherever four is the number of completeness […] a fifth element will suggest transcendence, or else disruption, of the human order […] the third of two, the fifth of four, the eighth of seven.” Silly or serious, a number beyond an intended amount denotes a hidden space or monstrous function; or as I write in “Survival-Horror in Blood (1997): the Weaponized Affect of the Gothic FPS” (2019): “Super secrets do more than numerically exceed the player’s understanding of the space; they go beyond Blood’s ability to quantify its own content, its own past.”
Furthermore, while that paper argued for campiness in videogames—specifically with the phrase “However, Blood affects through an FPS framework; furthermore, its response from the player is not driven by fear for fear’s sake. It is nostalgic and fun in ways that go beyond fear-and-nothing-else” (source)—the same idea of the “super secret” as something to “find” (to make and call it “archaeology”) applies to any source of hidden power in any Gothic space and its ludo-Gothic BDSM becoming ours. As such, it includes our own campy creations camping older “castles” and their monstrous denizens in and out of canonical media; i.e., by using whatever is left behind, generally presented as Gothic fantasy in some shape or form and often concerned with the selling (or interrogation) of power and sex; re: “to interrogate power, you must go where it is.”
As Key and Peele demonstrate, this interrogation can be directed at all manner of things in a playful sense to remake; i.e., to laugh at our would-be colonizers and all they hold dear by enjoying their tantrums as rope to hang themselves with. The proper way to disarm a Nazi (thus capitalist), then, is to fuck with, thus expose them as false (versus the perfidious bloodthirst of centrist neoliberal illusions); e.g., this absolute chudwad having a complete shit-fit over pronoun inclusion in Starfield (The Kavernacle’s “INSANE Anti-SJW MELTDOWN Over Starfield,” 2023). He’s precisely the kind of entitled, grifting bad actor/reactionary (with white moderate orbiters/defenders) that people like Bunny and I are challenging through our own collabs:
Ergo, laughing at dumbasses like him is perfectly fine and good, but there’s also the cathartic joy of playing with what makes them so dumb to begin with, during ludo-Gothic BDSM: canonical symbols of stigma, discipline and punishment (codified beliefs, behaviors and sets of rules/instructions) that we can reclaim from their carceral-punitive function via performative irony inside amatonormativity (e.g., “Reader, I married him.”) and various other heteronormative trails. Said irony unfolds by pushing back against/making fun of traditional sex operating as compelled labor for AFAB people, genderqueer persons, and other minorities. This happens through camp (thus class/culture war) personified in Gothic art; i.e., challenging heteronormativity during gender trouble and gender parody as liminal, monstrous expression: the monstrous-feminine and “corrupt,” correct-incorrect as existing between different media types and genres simultaneously: a Paganized hauntological made clown-ish/gay through the act of making as one simultaneously of finding through re-creation! The past comes alive, born again in ways not exactly the same (the invader is always alien and ally in Gothic scenarios)!
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
For example, my drawing of Amanda Ripley camps Rip’ far beyond the developer’s original, intended vision, making her sex-positive inside the same operatic space, wherein our crafty heroine survives colonial trauma using stolen guns and improvised weapons; i.e., against an invincible ghost of the counterfeit (the alien, lovingly called “Stompy” by the fans) as interwoven with corporate subterfuge exposing the so-called “Russian spy[2]” that Dan O’Bannon disliked so much: a deliberately uncanny class of mindless working robots called “Working Joes” that Amanda must also fend off, lest they choke her to death like Frankenstein’s monster does Victor’s bride.
It should be obvious at this stage that I am predominantly a pin-up artist; as a rule of thumb, pin-up art focuses primarily on a subject, not a space. This means that while I draw spaces to contain my subjects within (and generally spend a fair amount of time inside Metroidvania and other castles for inspiration), I actually spend most of my time drawing monsters while listening to music. And yet, as I am a creature of chaos, I’m also drawn to past “castles” that contain my monsters, making my own through bricks that are, themselves, full of castles (and deep, dark desires written all over their surfaces and subjects); as such, my chaotic personality is drawn to the power of sex in Gothic forms, to which compelled binaries are generally a hindrance.
Simply put, I do what feels good to me according to how I think and according to the modes I haunt; i.e., the campy art/porn that I make with various other persons who inspire me. It’s where I feel most at home; it’s what feels right when making my own castle to roost from and populate with, assisted by monstrous code, music, humanoid representations and actual, living friends who put these devices and theories to praxis in their own lives.
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
To that, I find the Gothic—like sex—to work best when at least somewhat silly and transgressive[3]. The finale, then, is a collaboration between myself and one of my muses; re: Blxxd Bunny—the two of us demonstrating just how Gothic and silly camping the canon can be using a variety of styles, including rock ‘n roll as part of Gothic counterculture: something to fabricate as a sex-positive, quasi-operatic force; i.e., a “creative success” of proletarian praxis (and all that entails). In short, Bunny and I will effectively be doing ludo-Gothic BDSM across a variety of media forms, but also our bodies and the labor attached to them.
Note: I’ve consciously determined, with this 2025 edition of Volume Zero, to mention “ludo-Gothic BDSM” more (~200 times versus the original 30); i.e., by introducing it more into the manuscript. That being said, I won’t be calling anything inside or after this point in the finale, “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” save for a few examples; i.e., I won’t go crazy with it because my later books already do that. Even so, “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” as a poetic means of negotiating and expressing labor as monstrous, is essentially what Gothic Communism is founded on, albeit somewhat retroactively. It’s what Bunny and I were doing here and, by extension, elsewhere in my book series; i.e., after I had crystallized the term but before I had started using it to a wider degree. From the Poetry Module onwards, I would focus more on “ludo-Gothic BDSM” as rape play and catharsis versus the labor negotiation and expression side of things. Yet, the latter are just as fundamental and, furthermore, things that will continue to come up between this finale, Volume One and Volume Two.
To it, unless stated otherwise, consider this end of the addendums for this volume. —Perse, 3/29/2025
In Gothic stories’ poiesis/cryptomimesis, the heroine is classically a prisoner inside a procession of illusions that promote guilty pleasure, often set to music within theatre as sinful: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll commodified as displaced and enchanting within the ghost of the counterfeit as a continual process of fakery canonically bound up with the process of abjection. Inside this parading galaxy of damaging nostalgia, her trapped ghost echoes across space and time as felt through, and gliding across, the surface of the image, but also inside the threshold of Gothic poetics’ liminal expression. She is sexualized even before the clothes come off (re: Sedgewick), but Americanized in ways that yield these fantasies through neoliberal forms that have, themselves, become nostalgia that we can reclaim through our own figurative (or literal) “rock ‘n roll” (originally an African American euphemism for sex): as learning from the past by transforming it using the same fractal recursion—i.e., its theatrical devices as deprivatized within the same mechanisms of capital. Capitalism will sell back to us what it alienates us from through Gothic theatre, which we can take, turn right back around, and transform right then and there: a reversal of the abjection process, humanizing monsters and sex work as interrelated affairs inside the ghost of the counterfeit.
Before we get to Blxxd Bunny and deprivatization, let me give you a quick, fun example of what I mean by “privatization.” I could pick any rock ‘n roll to camp, thus deprivatize, but I’m going with actual music, specifically the music video. I choose the Scorpions because—despite their breakout success and flirting with disaster using questionable (read: clearly ephebophilic; see: Bobbie Johnson’s “Wikipedia Falls Foul of British Censors,” 2008) album art with Virgin Killer (1976), much of their music is decidedly camp-adjacent with a Gothic aesthetic updated for the neoliberalizing of the rock ‘n roll craze of the ’80s. This helps explain the unquestionably German band’s popularity in far-off places like Japan; it was carted back and forth as a product: sin, sex, and rock as packaged, sold and performed in the Elvis school of “porn” through music hinting at the skin trade going on elsewhere in the same larger market; i.e., by a bunch of white dudes for a bunch of white dudes (the middle class):
(exhibit 1a1a1i1: There was nothing strictly “new” about the mise-en-abyme of the 1980s mimesis of a commodified desire sold as “terrorist literature.” Its own controlled opposition was packaged and presented through age-old art techniques that creators then-and-now use for the profit motive, but also to make art that is profoundly anti-capitalist/sex-positive but still “of its time and place.” Indeed, “artistic statements,” “medieval expression,” and “capitalist action” are far from mutually exclusive—a delightful fact illustrated wonderfully by Andrew Blake’s superbly dreamlike Night Trips [1989]. “Vaporwave before Vaporwave existed,” Blake’s marriage of the medieval image was “joined at the hip” [so to speak] with the neoliberal variation of the “Sale of Indulgences” expertly presenting the woman as trapped inside and outside of herself. We see her bare body clinging to electrodes that monitor her vitals, with persons standing next to her looking in, as she looks down at herself, looking in at other people fucking her and each other while she fucks them. Its concentric phantasm is profoundly decayed and euphoric, but also unquestionably ’80s. You’ll know it when you see it.
Regardless of its chief aim, Blake’s film won a silver medal at the 1989 WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival, specifically in the “Non-Theatrical Release” category. This makes it the first porn movie to win a medal at a major international film festival [source: Violet Blue’s “The Helmut Newton of Porn,” 2008]. It was porn and art-as-porn that made a statement that was clearly predicated on material conditions, but also love for the raw materials themselves as “dark,” forbidden fruit tied to music, drugs and disintegration.
The Scorpion’s “Rhythm of Love” [1988] relays a similar savage amusement through the commodification of said fruit, first and foremost. It relays the woman and eponymous scorpion as fused like a chimera. Onscreen, its main product is music, but that music is relayed through Gothic retro-future pastiche. Amid the canceled future, our Teutonic knights fly in from outer space on their spaceship, hauling special “cargo”: the Star Trek starlet in a leather catsuit! They appear like shadowy ghosts, taking to the stage while ghostly women dance and writhe all around them—behind the screen, “inside” the drumkit, upon and within the mirror. Like a Gothic castle, these sexy gargoyles squirm like animated stone. Of course, the band’s bill of sale conflates sex with music as a silly-yet-serious promise: rock ‘n roll as “sex music” deliberately fused inside a drug-like medieval portrait. Its recursion has been recuperated to serve the profit motive within a campy pastiche that undoubtedly moved monomythic merchandise in a great many forms—e.g., guitars, porn, videogames, movies, Scorpions paraphernalia. It’s all connected, but debatably far more concerned with selling out by “rocking us” with counterfeit cargo [containing ghostly stowaways] than making any kind of statement directly and openly themselves. And yet that’s the beauty of media; we can take what they did for a profit and weaponize it for class war while also having fun!
The whole meta-conversation occurs between not just the Scorpions and Blake from their respective doubled “castles”; it occurs between us on the shared wavelength, deciding what kind of art [thus monsters] we want to make while vibing within the same nostalgic, Gothic headspace and aesthetics [think Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” (1796) but less lame]. To camp or not to camp? That is the question; but also: to what degree? Allegory or apocalypse? Missionary or doggy? Vaginal or anal? Maybe a bit of both while we listen to Emerald Web’s The Stargate Tapes [1978-1982] [4]? Maybe just a bit of teasing while we sit around eating questionably-shaped food objects? The sky’s the limit, really.)
Despite all their demonstrable flaws, I love the Scorpions because their nostalgia lends itself well to camp as living in the same shadow space as a particular kind of Gothic: the love zone. I wanna rock, baby, and fuck demon mommies to metal in my castle (effectively campy recreations of Castle Anthrax [below] and its train of “wicked, bad naughty things,” all hailed by naughty nuns and false grail beacons; like, it’s made up, but I didn’t make that up). In their music video for “The Rhythm of Love” (1988), the Scorpions offer Cold-War comfort food (which would culminate with “Wind of Change,” in 1990) adjacent to, thus crossing over (if by accident) into the art-camp erotica of Andrew Blake’s porn world they were clearly peddling themselves. And if they were of the (revolutionary) devil’s party and didn’t know it, we can take their sleeping potential and wake it the fuck up with our own monstrous creations. So let’s do that now, shall we?
(exhibit 1a1a1i2: There’s nothing “gentle” about canonical knights; their courtly “love” is rotten to the core [the greatest danger is a serious “knight” (cop) who feels “in fear for his life” and is protected by the system in ways that allow him to kill and rape with impunity]. Also, we don’t see it, but Castle Anthrax is presumably the “evil” double of wherever Sir Galahad came from. Its “wicked” residents represent “almost certain temptation,” which real-life bigot and massive chudwad, John Cleese, must “save” Michael Palin from; it’s very “bros before hoes,” the kind of toxic homosociality that Monty Python was making fun of in-text about older legends manifesting in their own culture, but also their own cast; and later on, “TERF Island” would play out through the rise of “Radcliffe’s ghost” [mirroring her xenophobia while also not being her] in total fucking psychos like J.K. Rowling’s male and female, straight and queer fans baying for our blood.)
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
The rest of the finale is a collaboration between Blxxd Bunny and myself. We’ll start with camping the pussy but especially the birth canal, the vagina and its biological-reproductive function, as demonized by “both sides” (in the traditional, binary sense) for different, often pareidolic reasons: for men, “vagina = woman and woman is other”; for (many) women, “vagina = rape and unwanted baby (which under the best of circumstances, can still kill the mother or drive her mad; i.e., the Madwoman in the Attic).” They see less what they want to see and more what they have been conditioned to see. The ensuing rhetoric becomes weak/strong and correct-incorrect at the same time; i.e., “as it should be” in relation to the classic Gothic “push-pull” (oscillation) as conducive to the same-old historical materialism being structurally preserved through play as practice; re: as a military detail/exercise that, as usual, is largely forged out of spare parts taken from all over empire as inherited!
For our revolutionary purposes, “the devil is in the details.” As a fixture of rebellion, “Satan” is out there waiting for us, calling for workers to rise up and take back what’s rightfully ours: our bodies, our labor, our dignity in our own devilish deals. “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven,” but also: “the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” We can do so consciously—to be of the devil’s party and know it (unlike Milton) while “rockin’ out” at the same time: to “ring hell’s bells” and call others to do the same; e.g., to ring “Satan’s (door)bell” as a metaphor/mayhap-happy-accidental pun for anal sex. Regardless, it’s “the call of the void,” baby—not of actual self-destruction, but of a canonical prescription’s harmful “self” (the ghost of the counterfeit) threatened by its paradoxical relationship to codified objects of abjection: canonical sin, strength and gender roles, etc, encompassing the paradox of terror sex-positive workers run wild with. In short, the world may be a shitty place, but we can do our part to make it a better one than has ever existed according to what we create as camping what came before. Pokémon evolve, right? I choose you, Blxxd Bunny!
(exhibit 1a1a1i3: Artist: Blxxd Bunny. Bunny’s bum/pussy, a book, and ACDC [all walk into a bar…]
When dealing with canonical vaginas, the asshole is always nearby [the actual body part but also its colonizer/colonized regarding said part]. The asshole, pussy and owner’s body constitute the wandering womb as ancient hysteria, which canonizes into “pussy,” “demon,” and “Nazi” as combined into some such silliness as part of the elite’s bad-faith “joke”: a “pussy demon nazi,” “vagina-dentata necrobiome, “womb cave” or whatever else is monstrous-feminine enough to correctly-incorrectly convey and execute canonical praxis by closeting the representee and killing the representative [and vice versa]. The way to reclaim the joke, thus the process, is to camp the pussy, demon, asshole, and Nazi separately and together [and with the asshole—the “devil’s doorbell”—being so close to the pussy as to be conflated with it during the process of abjection, the vagina becoming a conveyer of shit and the asshole of afterbirth, blood, yeast infections, etc; but also terrifying truths: girls shit—or as an admirer of my ass playfully asked me once, “Damn, girl, you shit with that ass?” “Coprophilia” in quotes]. Generally this is done in ways that people normally communicate as a social-sexual species: through sex, but also parties, operatic theatre [drama and comedy] and music—e.g., rock ‘n roll as countercultural, but also oral and folklore-driven, thus something the elite never fully have a grip on [a potential for uncontrolled opposition]:
“Moonlight is thought to transform some people
Into strange creatures to drive others mad […]
Does the moon [ass] actually possess such strange powers?
Or is it all just lunacy?” [“Moon Baby,” 1997].
Regardless of how they come about, the adjectives and their nouns, when combined, will go from being seen as unironic, stigmatized sites of trauma, sin, darkness and torture, to having these things put into quotes; i.e., to be camped. Through our synthetic oppositional devices they become a joyous playground of constructive anger, stabilizing gossip, perceptive pastiche, ironic quoting and gender trouble/parody, and good-faith egregores—a revolutionary Grendel/Grendel’s mom and their figurative and literal cave/home as poetically elided while remaining aware of its own previous, fatal historical materialism: as already colonized, thus something to subvert and reclaim through “perceptive” camp. In a dialectical-material sense, the mother is no longer a site of unironic, incestuous rape, castration and infantile vengeance, but neither is her “child.” Instead, the mother becomes her own subject, and the relationship between mother and “child” improves well beyond any literal, familial terms: it becomes a pornographic jest with happy/non-harmful variants of “correct-incorrect” and “weak/strong” results [this treatment of “happy” again being lifted from Catherine Spooner’s Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic]: as played with by the performers who pass their lessons along to consumer students through iconoclastic art as entertainment and education [an American paradox]. In short, it’s a “stepson/stepbrother, what are you doing?” scenario minus the exploitation; as with all ironic, sex-positive BDSM, the “rape” is placed in quotes during subversive rape play. It becomes informed, invited—a means of combating its harmful, manufactured forms [manufactured consent, rape culture, Max Box/”prison sex,” etc; in fact, all of the bourgeois trifectas] during a “creative success” towards proletarian praxis.
Canonical synthetic stratagems [destructive anger, destabilizing gossip, “blind” pastiche/parody and its endorsement, unironic gender trouble/parody and bad-faith egregores] must be checked in ways that cultivate emotional/Gothic intelligence at a social-sexual level, thus recultivate the Superstructure to incentivize degrowth [away from canonical war in all its forms and disguises] through the Gothic mode as employed by our own costumes, uniforms, masks and weapons as disguise-like but also functional: the de facto proletarian teacher, lover, dominatrix, soldier and spy all rolled into one. In doing so, the operative regains control/the ability to negotiate boundaries and experience catharsis; i.e., through submission within boundaries of mutual consent, drawn up by teaching others control/negotiation [discipline] and by playing with herself and inviting them to watch in ways that respect [thus illustrate] mutual consent through campy demon BDSM, kink and appreciative “peril”/psychosexuality as an invited voyeurism/exhibitionist nudism: “Come and see” [or see and come].
[artist: Blxxd Bunny]
Under such liminal conditions, the exposed body isn’t exclusively vulnerable; it’s a descriptively sexual, culturally appreciative place for [a]sexual artistry and gender-non-conforming appreciation, play and catharsis of many different kinds—e.g., Bunny is ace and should be appreciated, worshipped and loved[5] as a being to empathize with/relate to: as a fellow worker under the same proletarian struggle; i.e., to revive our combined pedagogy of the oppressed through what makes it delicious and fun, thus relatable, to begin with; and something whose comforting, nurturing qualities make trauma—be it outside or inside the body through rape, war and mass exploitation/genocide—easier to talk about and heal from.
The paradox of catharsis and trauma lies in how these lucid dreams and beautiful, psychosexual nightmares are always good for a laugh, a cry and/or an orgasm as added benefits that can help us relate to ourselves, society and our comrades in vivid, cathartically medieval, and yes, [self-]indulgent/masturbatory ways. You don’t have to marry a comrade; someone can help you masturbate as a friend, and in a variety of friendly ways: with their hand, their words, or their photos supplied as sexual participation, or as artistic extensions of themselves they know other people enjoy with in those ways [even if they do not]. And unlike the Gothic heroine—who literally has to go to hell and back just to get some implied dick at the end—our “happy endings” can happen from moment to moment; i.e., in the same aesthetics of power, weakness and death divorced entirely from harm and enjoyed “to the hilt.” Under these felicitous circumstances, what was advertised as “mere fantasy yet better than real life” becomes half-real: A “Oh, God, is this really happening?” fairytale, storybook, dream-come-true [and not a boring one, either—it has whips and chains whose “death by Snu-Snu” follows the BDSM motto: “hurt, not harm”] that helps comrades heal through shared struggle as cathartic; i.e., trauma bonding. That’s another aspect to ludo-Gothic BDSM—one that Bunny plays out solo as much as with me invigilating their work, afterward:
[artist: Blxxd Bunny, who plays around with their body as historically-materially fetishized in fun, campy ways, including the bathroom (a classic site of rape/power abuse in horror films) as an image of ironic, appreciative peril/cathartic rape play. In the larger “bathroom” scenario, they film their body and its parts from a variety of angles and positions, all while covered in [self-installed] tattoos and “on fleek” (source: Max Kutner, 2015) makeup. Like that curious and enigmatic phrase, they’re “starting a thing”; re: Key and Peele’s timeless and immortal (according to me) “putting the pussy on the chainwax!“]
In turn, this sex-positive trauma-bonding struggle and identity during ludo-Gothic BDSM can be dressed up as needed; i.e., viewed from any angle or context one requires to synthesize, thus relay, the counterterror message as part of the larger action plan—of worker solidarity reified through the connections we establish and produce.
For workers like Bunny and I, this concerns normalized social-[a]sexual transactions of exchanged sex-as-labor in artistic forms that we take back from the paradox of elite omnipotence and their menticided thugs’ double standards [e.g., “God’s Loophole[6]” for white, Christian girls having anal sex to avoiding sinning before marriage—the idea of sin largely an arbitrary one arbitrated by the arbiters]. Though our Six Rs, or Gothic-Marxist tenets of Gothic Communism, oppositional praxis becomes “creatively successful”: sex-positive instead of sex-coercive. In turn, Marxism becomes more fun and funnier/sexier than Marx; it becomes “succulent” by “living deliciously” to regain what is lost, repressed, or denied to us by Capitalism’s myopic, future-cancelling amnesia, including our humanity, dignity and power—to organize, reassemble and fight back with: as workers aggregating in solidarity [through riots and strikes, but also camp] against tyrants mobilizing their aggregate power against us. “‘This is our mall,’ motherfuckers! Our Black Mesa, companion cube, and ‘cake!'” We start things/put the pussy on the chainwax, not you!” Power is stored on the Aegis as something to camp canon with during ludo-Gothic BDSM:
[artist: Blxxd Bunny]
In short, the state’s monopoly on violence, terror and monsters is not total; we have room to conduct counterterrorism as a vital, necessary process to our own survival through ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the canon by any and all means at our disposal! Power is in things the state wants to pimp; re: like Bunny’s fat succulent ass!
The same collective and complicated pragmatics[7] applies to any monstrous-feminine symbol presented as abject, “terrorist,” corrupt and/or stigma-animal. The individual parts must be reclaimed, but also how they interrelate back and forth with/within themselves, their owner and their would-be colonizers as reconditioned by the revolutionary [thus transformative] cryptonymy of the worker-as-instructor’s powerful, “torturous” code: “come here and get fucked, but in a non-harmful and, at-times-surreal, sense that contributes to sex worker rights/the rights of all workers sexualized under Capitalism”; i.e., “wake up/exit Plato’s cave by paradoxically addressing bodies, genders and labor more broadly inside the cave as having been harmfully sexualized, dimorphized and fetishized under Capitalism.” The fear and fascination with an imagined emancipatory hauntology can drive the reverse process of abjection through a Galatea whose dark poetics—through their body and artistic expression/pedagogy of the oppressed—combats Capitalist Realism’s verisimilitude/myopia; i.e., Capitalism’s harmful narrative of the crypt stemming from the unironic monomyth, Cycle of Kings, and infernal concentric pattern as unironically consumed, thus endorsed and reproduced without irony through future, unironic forgeries. Our combatting of said forgeries occurs by dancing with the figurative dead, but also fucking them [a sex-positive camping of “necrophilia” placed in quotes as a kind of “rape,” or sex-positive rape play with “undead” flavors]. Against bad[-faith] dance partners, our “danse macabre” can sweep ’em off their feet!
[artist: Maurice Sendak]
The “wild rumpus” of the liberated Galatea’s sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll engenders the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis: mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and informed, ironic and culturally appreciative consumption during Gothic counterculture—kink, fetishization and demonic BDSM—as iconoclastically poetic. As such, they recultivate the Superstructure and the demonized image: of workers and of Communism, but also of the elite not being in charge and genocide not happening as a profoundly sex-positive thing. “Making it gay” becomes not “the end of the world” as a terrible event, but a ridding of the awful double standards surrounding “the end of history” as exclusively enjoyed by the elite [and their proponents; e.g., Coleridge tut-tutting Matthew Lewis while writing “Christabel” (1797-1800)[8]] but not by us; re: “boundaries for me, not for thee.”
In turn, this seminal and tremendous subversion becomes a thoroughly enjoyable thing told through the Gothic mode of creative expression in highly playful language that people actually speak, exchange and consume from an early age: through monsters, music and myths—the oral traditional carried over into written form [and those “in-between things”; e.g., drawings and performance art] as Gothically apocryphal. Good [sex-positive, healthy] sex-and-gender education and good play are things taught to children through said apocrypha, as are their bad [sex-coercive, harmful] forms. Historically-materially the parent dichotomy [and its sub-categories and orbiting factors] all exist in dialectical-material conflict—i.e., in material renditions of the Gothic psychomachy’s psychosexual psychopraxis, wherein punching up and down theatrically express through subversive and subordinate forms: the Amazonomachia as class/culture war during art and porn as thoroughly monstrous [undead/demonic] forms of liminal expression warring with one another in paradoxical, doubled performances of power but also interrogations. Don’t be afraid to scrutinize, thus learn from it, in a dialectical-material sense.)
To conclude this finale and the “camp map,” canon isn’t hard to camp; it just takes subtext and a drive to be oneself as part of a larger tradition of questioning canon. You have to be willing to realize that nothing is sacred (except human rights and the health of ecosystems and the humane treatment of animals), then be unafraid to be loud, campy and silly with your own ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: similar to what Bunny and I have gleefully demonstrated here. Power is wherever you find it:
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Before we segue into the “camp map” conclusion, let’s reflect on what Bunny and I have done; i.e., the big picture that ludo-Gothic BDSM attaches to, in small (nine pages), and some closing points about solidarity as a juggling act: being “up in the air” with many moving parts, all of these falling into place insofar as Gothic Communism ultimately does—messily and with some degree of risk whose calculations can only go so far!
As the “camp map” shows us—and what Bunny and activism is taught through participation as playful: by having fun at canon’s expense, “making it gay” wherever we can, from positions of relative privilege and oppression; i.e., by drawing graffiti-style rainbows all over it with glitter and crayons, but also embodying it through what makes us beautiful: the sum of ourselves reclaiming stolen culture, but also weaponizing stolen stigmas twisted out from the robber’s vault of abused folklore.
The vampire, for example, is as much a Jewish voice (through Mel Brooks) as it is an anti-Semitic trope and pre-fascist marker/Catholic “kick me” sign (more on this in Volume Two’s “They Hunger” chapter [on vampires], and in the Demon Module; re: “‘Anti-Semitism’ vs ‘antisemitism’“). The pedagogy of the oppressed, then, rises up out of comedy as much as drama insofar as satire is concerned—but often occurs through Gothic reminders that comedy is as much happiness and joy on- and offstage as it is a straight-up joke told for laughs. As Hannah Gadsby might put it, a “joke is tension and release” (and humor is utterly vital to camping canon; i.e., through its art history, which Gadsby specializes in through staged comedy shows). I think comedy abides by that in relation to sex and gender told through the joke of sacred things that, given to us straight (that was a pun), lead to great harm.
While the concept isn’t foolproof, the delicious irony of camp is that it can fail and still work. If memory serves, Dracula, Dead and Loving It (1995) fell flat—felt like the Count going through the motions after a very long career (which, for Leslie Nielsen and Mel Books, was the case). Maybe it just doesn’t “work” compared to Young Frankenstein (1974) according to some people:
Did you happen to read the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly? Mel Brooks said: “There’s a great quote: ‘Critics are like eunuchs at an orgy—they just don’t get it.’ I ran into Roger Ebert. He didn’t like Dracula. He made no bones about it—thumbs, pinkies, every digit that he had. And I said to him: ‘Listen, you, I made 21 movies. I’m very talented. I’ll live in history. I have a body of work. You only have a body'” (source: Roger Ebert, “Movie Answer Man (07/21/1996)”).
And yet, it does work because it’s making fun of canon! That’s the point! Bella Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula might be queer-coded, but it’s pretty damn straight-laced in terms of executing said code; i.e., its unironic treatment of queerness (the gay man threatening to make the ladies all lesbians: the “Carmilla-esque” bride of Dracula). The key to transformation is the attempt at camp, not the ability to cash in and “succeed” in the capitalist sense. Even if the joke doesn’t land because the comedic timing is off, I’d still rather someone fail to tell a funny joke with good intent than land a wickedly funny one with bad.
I don’t want to apologize for an unfunny vamp camp, but the myth of camp is that it’s always funny. It’s not; you can be completely off your game and still camp canon. For example, “true camp” is seriousness that fails, but as I point out in “My Least Favorite Horror Movies?” (2020), even this is a spectrum:
For me, the most egregious movies are the ones not worth rating at all. Alas, these fall into the bin—a giant midden of forgotten trash, with little distinguishing one from the next. I find it far more productive to seek out movies others might slap a number on to qualify. Myself, on the other hand, will simply be content in saying something about them, whatever that may be. If a movie cannot get me to write about it save to say how woefully boring it is—or lacking to some other degree, instead of supplying me with any sort of positive reaction—then I might relegate it to the pile and simply move on (source).
Sometimes you get duds. More to the point, class war demands gender trouble and gender parody with an active eye for empathy first and foremost, not a stellar punchline. Even if the story is good, it’s no guarantee of critical acclaim. To this, The Monk was not well received by (white, cis-het male) critics like Coleridge, who petulantly whined: “Nor must it be forgotten that the author is a man of rank and fortune. Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble!” (source). Like, fuck that guy. Yes, fuck you, Coleridge; the unwelcome appearance of campy monsters meant that you—as the most privileged group (white, cis-het men)—finally had to say something of your ruined ideal of the world. Awfully telling that you took the conservative stance by bashing the fag instead of “the Great Enchantress” by recognizing her as serving the profit motive through controlled, thus commodified opposition (the ensuing chaos being blamed on gay terrorism, of course—story of our life). You’re not a god and neither was she; I can prove that right now by barbequing both of your sacred cows (and dancing with your ghosts—as Tom Cruise’s Lestat puts it, “There’s still life in the old lady yet!”).
In short, empathy constitutes making fun of legit assholes, even if the joke sucks (e.g., Brick Tamland when sticking up for his pals with this gem: “Where did you get your clothes, the toilet store?”) or the person you’re telling it to doesn’t appreciate it (the stuttering Irish bartender from Boondock Saints [1999]: “Why don’t you make like a tree and get the fuck outta here?”). Moreover, camp can be whatever canon you wish to fuck with. Our danger disco can be an obvious example (re: the rock ‘n roll vampire castle); or it can be scrawled over Tolkien’s refrain (the hopelessly fake-but-popular treasure map bastardized from a bunch of self-aggrandizing Spear Danes by a British Oxford nerd/war veteran who, while racist and far from perfect in his own privileged voice, at least gave people the option to be gay through the medieval romance).
So many things can enact ludo-Gothic BDSM to camp canon with. What matters is that it’s camp and that’s a pretty broad canvas to paint your “masterpiece” on; better a sex-positive stick figure or a cute, unscary monster (whatever floats your boat) speaking in a valley girl/surfer dude accent than a sexist, rapey Picasso, academic or frat boy who thinks “green light” should be interpreted as “no means yes, yes means anal”; i.e., “green means automatic anal whether the receiving party consents or not.” If their eyes are souless and dead behind the mask, blame Capitalism because it does that to men (and tokens) inside the Man Box’ dark fortress/siege mentality fearing the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., during the abjection process’ dialect of the alien: nature invades home and makes it alien, requiring state crackdowns from the middle class (more on Hogle’s seminal idea throughout the entire series). In terms of capital pimping nature, it’s the hand that turns the handle of the meat grinder!
Before we conclude the “camp map” and move on to our thesis conclusion, I have some closing notes to address; i.e., about language, including its usage and policing of swearing and sex positivity as something to raise like a fist (often as a raised fist) against our perceived, “untouchable” betters. First, in relation to the traffic light system and Man Box culture: these things are all connected to larger socio-material issues informing these behaviors as instructed either way. So, while the universally ethical usage of the traffic light system might seem intuitive, the frat boys and chudwads of dude-bro culture[9] would abuse and dogmatize its canonical misuse.
Second, the same effects in language can be seen in things like vocal fry and upspeak; i.e., the lack of direct assertive aggression being seen as feminine/weak in a traditional, thus conservative and heteronormative sense. “Perceptive” camp, then, becomes an ironic lack of traditional male/masculine assertiveness; it’s automatically camp by virtue of not being these things through function. The same goes for swearing and aggressive displays that can have competing communication goals, including but not limited to, videogames:
There are many attitudes surrounding swearing and why people do it and who is supposed to and who is not. For instance, Timothy Jay writes “swearing and aggressive behaviors are a substitute for physical aggression.” Building on that idea, I would like to additionally posit that, with people who play videogames—who henceforth, I shall refer to as gamers—such aggression can manifest itself in [any gender … Because common] options for aggressive behavior online are [verbal, but] performed anonymously due to “[e-community solidarity being] facilitated by [an] anonymity [that also] guarantees online equality” (Dynel 38). Yet such aggressive behavior can be radically motivated by [competing sexual and gender] dynamics once said anonymity is removed and equality disturbed (modified from the original source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Swearing Communication Goals: Social Aggression in Homo-Social Bonding vs Sexual Aggression,” 2016).
Beyond videogames, the same idea of competing communication goals applies to other forms of violent (usually Gothic) theatre and gender performance that videogames are built upon (and vice versa); i.e., in relation to parallel media forms and consumption.
By extension, these performances (and their goals) happen in-text, as well as during the meta of the text as something to perform on various registers in ways that can be reclaimed—i.e., not just by cis-het people (which the above paper primarily focused on because I was still in the closet when I wrote it) but by any minority/underclass group who doesn’t want to be colonized/tone-policed according to intersecting degrees of privilege and oppression. Ludo-Gothic BDSM can camp canon solo; it can also do it with friends/toys helping us make art: a mystery to reunite with through a process that’s difficult to standardize.
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Unto that, our third point is solidarity. My relative privilege as a trans white woman stands in solidarity with other oppressed groups against capital; even if it’s from my modern-day version of Merlin’s tower (as my foreword mentions), my friends still cheer “Get ’em!” as I take Radcliffe, Tolkien or Natalie Wynn to task. It’s simply not worth it to venerate such people like they’re beyond rebuke, thus compromising with the state and halting any attempt at being politically active.
And to our potential allies, I say this: If you’re really on our side, you’ll join us or at least support our—like Monty Python’s Frenchman viciously taunting Arthur and his knights—collective swearing or violation of boundaries inside our safe-space exhibits as allowed to exist in the same public market (vis-à-vis Milton’s 1644 “Areopagitica”[10]); i.e., regardless of how badly it upsets or bores fancy-pants critics like Coleridge or Jameson (the former much happier with those he “allowed” to write; e.g., Radcliffe, because her romances upheld the status quo, hence its material conditions) or bothers official police defending private property before people, including sex workers as privatized by the elite:
(source: Fired Up Stilettos)
So don’t be meek[11] about it, comrades! Swear! Be bold in your art! Raise your fist! The idea isn’t even to fight back as the state does; instead of apathy regarding police brutality (military urbanism) and settler-colonial violence, sex-positive artists promote Gothic Communism as universal basic human/worker rights (and the rights and health of animals and the environment) while discouraging sexism and other bigotries with their own playful disguises. They raise their fists to “punch” Nazis and neoliberals—not literally in the face (not always, anyways), but up into their dogmatic, canonical propaganda.
In turn, this raising-of-the-fist (and other body parts) occurs by retooling war as an act of rebellion against bourgeois tyranny. The difference between us and fraidy-cats like Radcliffe is that iconoclasts own the act of punching (up, in our case) as a conscious form of informed political action; i.e., directing worker solidarity (often through billboard/graffiti[12] approaches tied to their actual bodies, above) against normalized violence and those who encourage or perpetuate said abuse—to show the world what fascists and neoliberals really are: complicit abusers who try to divide and discourage the love that holds rebellions together (across space and time, the ghosts of Marx [including Marx] channeled through us).
Fourth, as to the provocation of the raised fist itself, Nicola Green demonstrates how there are many, many variants of the raised fist in art (“Struggle, Solidarity, Power: The History of the Iconic Raised Fist,” 2021). Its historical purpose is antifascist—pitting true rebellion against “fake rebellion” by reifying an emancipatory cause as something to sloganize: “punching up” through body language:
The fist was used by the United Workers of the World labor union in 1917 and by anti-fascists in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War. Students raised the fist in Paris in 1968 in mass protests against French President Charles de Gaulle. If you’ve seen an image of the fist on a sign or a shirt, it’s almost certainly an uncredited version of a design by Frank Cieciorka, whose woodcut print of a disembodied black fist on a white background adorned posters for Stop the Draft Week in 1967. Cieciorka had seen the fist while participating in a socialist rally in San Francisco (source: Christopher Spata’s “What does a raised fist mean in 2020?”).
Nonviolent resistance articulates that which the elite historically frame as violent: worker solidarity, but also countercultural displays of active, prolonged resistance. Art prolongs resistance by holding up better than fleshy bodies do. More to the point, when treated as acts of rebellious strength, they lift people out of violent ways of thinking while still living inside oppressive systems that encourage mental imprisonment. This includes neglect and class betrayal at large as violent through the support of the system in sacrifice of worker rights; e.g., Radcliffe’s own political moderacy and longevity through her novels/School of Terror.
(exhibit 1a1a1i4: Source: ibid.. Picket iconography is something that can emblazon protest and counterprotest for or against the state; those who use these symbols need to reclaim them from state proponents by committing their usage to movements that ultimately do not become recuperated, thus ineffective at inducing genuine socio-material change; e.g., Che Guevara on a t-shirt [exhibit 8b] doesn’t automatically equal rebellion; it has to leverage collective worker action/solidarity against the state in ways that do not automatically preclude violence: striking and rioting. They’re not safe, but they historically work, which is why the elite use neoliberalism indirectly and military urbanism directly to quell rebellious sentiment; i.e., Thatcher’s proud, shameless declaration: “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.”)
Using de facto reeducation to punch up, sex-positive artists bridge gaps to achieve universal liberation with ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., seeking to change indoctrinated people’s hearts and minds: by bringing them over towards a more humane and egalitarian way of thinking about sex, including its Gothic, infamously campy forms.
And of course, all of this is rather easy for me to say, right? I’m just a white middle-class American woman and have relative privilege. Obviously, I expect workers to do activism to whatever degree they feel safe and comfortable, but also want to remind them: it doesn’t take much effort to raise a fist (white people should do it, arm-in-arm with their fellow workers, and use their positions of privilege to speak out in ways many people in the world can’t). And to all workers of the world: Remember that we’re doing this for all workers, not purely for our own comfort; re: post-scarcity vs “equality of convenience.” Everything dies and the state and its proponents are going to police you no matter what—to take more and more for themselves while alienating you from everything around you.
So provided it’s genuine and aware of its effects, any endorsement—no matter how small—helps counteract Capitalism carrying on as it always does. Your assistance needn’t amount to “going native”/fully assimilating and joining us on the Satanic front lines (there is a price to that, a bell you can’t unring… but also, we have snacks so come hang out); in fact, it can simply be getting out of our way (many class traitors undercut the legs of rebellion by actively recuperating[13] or betraying its slogans and symbols in service of cheap, escapist fantasies). Whatever you choose to do, just know that a hellish chorus of whispers and speaking and/or raised voices appearing in conscious, organized solidarity with those symbols will hit far harder together against the state and the establishment than one person shouting the truth of Capitalism as loudly as they can from the top of their lungs. Labor action is a group effort, including camp! It’s what Bunny and I did, and you can do, too! Go wild, loves)! Don’t just raise your fist; show ’em your Aegis, and once more with feeling! Become the mountain for others to travel to!
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Like Satan, camp at large is very much tone-policed; i.e., treated by proponents of capital as, “This old, not new, not something that’s sold as ‘fresh,'” all while ignoring old theatrical devices like medieval puppet shows and bad voices, swearing and colorful metaphors, asides/speaking to the audience, Greek Choruses and Jojo’s “tension” katakana, offshoots of Blue Beard/Medusa, etc. Capital is always trying to commodify, thus colonize the antiquated oral traditions of theatre, but through the drive of capital these invariably become outmoded, and we can reclaim them from canon as it crumbles, possessing the body when the spirit has fled (“the flesh is weak”). Ideally the message should convey even when inebriated (a kind of xenoglossia, if you will, to summon through ritualized instances of teaching exercises about sexuality, bodily autonomy and worker rights doubling as art).
From the Scorpions to Blxxd Bunny to Vera and myself, canon can always be camped, and furthermore, relies on controlled chaos to account for the systemic mayhem capital foists on workers; i.e., old theatrical stratagems and Gothic hauntologies, but also “talking funny” or incorrectly to achieve its campy Jester’s affect: combining this with that, as ludo-Gothic BDSM demonstrably does. Use its dark gravity to pull your own baddies!
In short, daily synthesis and catharsis means using whatever works; fuck to Tangerine Dream if it makes you happy/cultivates good daily habits (as Zeuhl and I once tried, though it’s not good sex music. Stick to metal [or anything with a steady beat; e.g., Susumu Yokota’s “Tambarin“] for that). Likewise, kill any darlings you need to; re: as much shit as I’ve given Radcliffe (whose “cow” hasn’t just been cooked well done, but beaten, stabbed, shot, set on fire, ripped open, farted on, and doodled over with crayons, glitter and clown makeup; forget tearing her a new grave-sized asshole, she’s nothing but asshole now—or, if you want to be less Matthew-Lewis about it, I’ve camped her ghost), I’ve also looted her castle bare, pinching everything I can to make my point. Thanks for the leg up, Annie (we’ll get back to you, in Volume Two; re: “Summoning Demons“)!
As something to learn and perform through others (not just myself and Blxxd Bunny but any sex-positive worker), activist statements/uncontrolled opposition’s “punching up” are often demonstrated by simply existing through identity politics as subversive/cathartic roleplay. A monster, after all, is a form of identity mid-struggle under oppressive, prescriptive conditions. Gothic Communism, then, seeks to alter our current material conditions (and their “stuck” pastiche) by recoding the Superstructure during canon vs iconoclasm as “sexier than Marx” (who, again, was always a bit dry) “but also funnier” (re: “chainwax”); i.e., sexy meaning funny if it respects consent by challenging things that don’t respect consent. This means working in praxial opposition to the status-quo factors whose comorbidities under Capitalism lead to genocide and us being undead/demonized and—unlike Leslie Nielsen—are not loving our roles in heroic canon; e.g., Scott Marks’ “Day of the Animals: Leslie Nielsen Meets the Preston Sturges of ’70s Schlock” (2022).
(artist, left: Henry Fuseli; right: source)
All this being said, let’s wrap things up with a short thesis conclusion (for my argument and its argumentation, written back in 2023), then move onto the symposium! Onto “Thesis Conclusion, Symposium and Segue“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] Again, some camp is blind; we have to make sure ours isn’t, lest the ludo-Gothic BDSM that results become Sontag’s ignominious “true camp”: “seriousness that fails” in ways that harm us. We must be aware of what we’re doing. The exact destination is less important than the historical materialism of things falling into place as society grows more and more sex-positive over time.
[2] O’Bannon’s fussy term for Ash the Android, in Alien; i.e., Red Scare (a concept we’ll explore more at length in the Poetry Module; re: “Red Scare; or, Out in the World“).
[3] I’ve always been drawn to tattoos and piercings on other people. When Zeuhl and I first had sex, we were initially watching Forbidden Planet. They insisted their legs “were hot” and asked if they could take off their pants. I complied, but kept glancing over at their crotch because I couldn’t tell if they were wearing see-through panties, had a really hairy pussy or both. Turns out, it was both—a fact I learned shortly thereafter when I looked over at Zeuhl to discover them watching me, waiting to see how I would respond. Intrigued by their septum piercing, I thought of a way in: I asked them if they had any other piercings. They said they had pierced nipples, to which I asked if I could see them; they obliged, whereupon I asked if I could suck on them. Zeuhl smiled enthusiastically and said, “If you want!” (for a deeper chronicling of all my sexcapades with Zeuhl, refer to “The Eyeball Zone“).
While a little bittersweet now, the scene is still a happy memory for me—not least of all because it was a silly inside joke between us for years: Before starting the movie, I had propositioned Zeuhl, to which they said, “I’m not for closing any doors”; to which their joking addendum to the original answer would be followed up with “…fucks three hours later!” Even if they were only playing around to abide by the college fantasy of temporary rebellion and experimentation (whose principles they largely abandoned after graduation), Zeuhl—or at least my rememory of them—is a ghostly half-muse of sorts. Despite me wanting to, we never made any art together—just sex tapes and naughty photos. None of that is contained in this book, of course; but I did use the memories of them absolutely rocking my world to create the artwork and passages you see in this book. In short, what I loved about them lives on in my cloaked, campy reenactments.
[4] Something Zeuhl and I tried once; frankly fucking to metal/videogame music (e.g., Metaltool’s “Mega Man X3 – Opening Stage,” 2012) is a lot more effective: it at least carries the necessary energy and beat, even if it often sounds rather goofy in its own right (Zeuhl and I both smiled like total dumbasses while we fucked to Turrican II’s “Traps,” 1991. But much to my delight, they especially loved Amiga chiptunes regardless of what we were up to, and for good or ill, I cannot listen to that music now without their beautiful, silly ghost haunting me and the music).
[5] Bunny is demi-pan and generally asexual when performing sex work. I have ace components when working with them and our mutual participation is ultimately asexual relative to our negotiated boundaries illustrating mutual consent. They have known from the start that my girl-cock gets hard at seeing their naked body (I told them as much) but we do not play together. Any orgasms I have while looking at them occur in private without their participation. Any information that I bring to their attention relates to how awesome they are as a friend, one I love to draw and appreciate in my writing as ludo-Gothic BDSM (re: Bunny loves rape play and monstrous themes in their work/on their Aegis, below).
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
This is not “a wasted opportunity.” I can get sexual participation from other friends during ludo-Gothic BDSM, and my friendship with Bunny is absolutely perfect as is. I love them very much and have nothing but the utmost respect for their work/play as an extension of who they are; it’s what makes them so awesome and fun to work with and precisely why I write about, draw and otherwise feature them in my book as much as I have. As with my other muses, Sex Positivity is an ode, an apologia, to Bunny and people like them doing ludo-Gothic BDSM: “Including your work, all of you have value and worth and deserve happiness, safety and love.”
[6] Deliciously camped by Garfunkel and Oates’ “God’s Loophole” (2013): “Fuck me in the ass if you love Jesus!” To it, anal is classically a state terror weapon whose sodomy accusations/morphologies we can camp (re: “Our Sweet Revenge“), and Bunny loves to exhibit anal without lube (what they call “painal,” often crying during it; i.e., as part of the exhibit blurring fiction and non-fiction, and enjoying that liminality as part of the performance, aka “method acting”).
[7] From linguistics: “meaning established through voice and subtext”; e.g., sarcasm and irony.
[8] Coleridge achingly bemoaned the presence of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk having been written by a MP (Member of Parliament). He looked down on the Gothic as “cheap” and base, like spitting off a bridge to try and communicate grand ideas (as Dale Townshend once told me in class; “his Gothic cathedrals were envisioned as holy and filled with light”—to which I replied that Coleridge was merely pissing in the wind [relative to the rise of impolite forms of counterculture]. Dale merely shook his head and grumbled at my contribution). Or as London Skoffler writes,
Coleridge may have used Gothic elements in his writing, but he would have been vehemently opposed to this suggestion. He criticized Gothic literature, specifically the sexually charged story The Monk by Gregory Matthew Lewis, as corrupting and perverse (Townshend). So why was Christabel so sexual? Perhaps, as Ann Radcliffe says of terror and horror, it is because Coleridge did not graphically depict his characters’ actions. Instead, he only hinted at what may have happened. Coleridge leaves a lot of interpretation up to his readers, forcing them to use his beloved imagination, to decide for themselves (source: “Coleridge’s Gothic Romanticism,” 2019).
In other words, Coleridge was a privileged nerd who—like Jameson’s latter-day dismissal of the Gothic, but also Austen’s parody of it or Radcliffe’s “armoring” in more delicate novels—was heavily predisposed to prescribing proper modes of sexual expression: veils. Not only does doing so cater to the status quo (which will sexualize the veil anyways, or titillate themselves with guilty desires they can later deny but privately enjoy); it remains inadequate from a holistic, dialectical-material point-of-view (which Gothic Communism demands. More on Coleridge in “The Future Is a Dead Mall“).
[9] Man Box has transformed into itself using an appropriation of surfer and hippie culture, the college Max Box of rapey (mostly white, cis-het male) students proliferating through the unaddressed rape culture in academic faculties; e.g., Foucault, Beauvoir and Sartre, etc.
[10] Originally written to the Parliament of England opposing licensing and censorship.
[11] I.e., like George McFly from Back to the Future: “Do you really think I ought to swear?” George asks his son. “Yes, definitely!” the other replies, “Goddammit, George, swear!”
[12] The same idea applies critiquing the seemingly peerless reputations of famous authors like Tolkien, Radcliffe or any of the others we’ve looked at in this volume; camping them will be seen as defacement, its own sort of “graffiti” applied to cultural monuments that, if ever they even did, have long ceased helping workers on their own (outside of camping them).
[13] As per Thatcher’s refrain. This includes putting one’s faith entirely in Capitalism actually solving our problems. It made our problems.