Book Sample: Volume One, opening and preface

Posted on by Persephone van der Waard

This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “Make It Real” shall do the same, but with Volume One/the manifesto (versus “The Total Codex” promoting Volume Zero/the thesis volume). 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 “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume One is already written/was released on Valentine’s 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.

Volume One: Manifesto and Instruction

Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.

—Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do (1975)

Picking up where “A 2025 Foreword” left off…

(exhibit 6b1: Artist: Autumn Anarchy and Persephone van der Waard. Gothic Communism is a group effort. Glenn the Goblin and Revana Mireille are two mascots for Gothic Communism; I commissioned Autumn to draw them specifically for this volume, then applied a background and painted additional details.)

Up until now, the thesis volume and paratextual documents have discussed sex positivity and Gothic Communism on a mostly theoretical level; Volume One is concerned with manifesto—or the simplifying of theory—and its subsequent instruction through application and poiesis: praxis and synthesis. The preface serves as the bridge between Volumes Zero and One; it will extrapolate further on the anarcho-Communist devices present within Gothic-Communist application during ludo-Gothic BDSM, then articulate on the synthesis of said application; i.e., the cultivation of the daily social-sexual habits needed to achieve praxis through Gothic poetics. From there, the manifesto gradually segues into the synthesis roadmap, focusing more and more on trauma writing and artwork (and eventually targeting Cartesian abuses of workers and nature); i.e., as forms of synthesis that rely on simplified theory as intuitively understood between worker collectives achieving praxis through shared poetic activities.

Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later (give or take) after Five Books; or, Cuwu’s Hand in Forming Ludo-Gothic BDSM

“You just keep getting better and better!”

—Cuwu, to me, upon first meeting each other (January 2022)

 

As someone I met in January 2022—until and after our parting as friends in June 2023—Cuwu remains someone tremendously important regarding what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM. I wanted to address that, here; i.e., with a small addendum kicking Volume One’s second edition off; re: one similar to Volume Zero’s “Two Years Later (give or take): Returning to My Thesis Argument after Five Books.”

(artist: Cuwu)

First, Cuwu was my friend and abuser—specifically an abusive sub demanding I care for them. Furthermore, they have borderline personality disorder and are in therapy/on medication for that (e.g., weed and Klonopin). Any mention of these things isn’t to fetishize them for its own sake, nor to shame them, but to talk about Cuwu’s relationship to me, part-in-parcel. Their education, mental illness, sexuality and gender-non-conformity all went hand-in-hand, so I will discuss them hand-in-hand; i.e., according to the development of Gothic Communism as it formed into itself through Cuwu’s help (regarding ludo-Gothic BDSM) onto other people I met after them who they accidently helped prepare me for. So whereas Zeuhl led me to Jadis (my rapist) and Cuwu helped me escape Jadis, Cuwu went on to prepare me for what came next: to meet Blxxd Bunny, Nyx, Bay and countless others while leaving Zeuhl behind; i.e., Cuwu set a far better example than Zeuhl or Jadis did, yet displayed similar paradoxes in their own actions that hindered me, too:

(exhibit 6b2a1: My exes and I: Zeuhl [top] and Jadis [bottom]. I’ve written about both extensively in this book series, but each has their own respective exposé: “Non-Magical Detectives” and “Showing Jadis’ Face.” As explained in those pieces, Zeuhl’s face continues to be mildly censored because they’re more neurotic, vindictive and marginalized than Jadis. Both harmed me greatly but through said harm inspired me; i.e., to write and illustrate Sex Positivity to heal from said harm, thus ultimately meet Cuwu [and those who came after Cuwu]. For every useful idiot, you have accidental allies!)

Second—and to be absolutely clear about this—any mention of Cuwu in the pages ahead, but also the entire series, is informed by an agreement between us; i.e., I have written permission to share the porn we made separately and together provided I leave their real name out of it. In regards to the exact nature of the details, consider this conversation between myself and a curious reader… who I suspect may have been a bot. Even so, the question—however nosy it comes across—is a valid one, and I will cite our conversation here; i.e., to be as thorough and transparent as I feel comfortable:

Hippymccrankface: You state that Cuwu abused you and that you have separated yourself from them, but also there are numerous images of them nude and having sex with you. Are they aware of the use of their images in this book which has been published since separating?

Me: I have Cuwu’s express written permission to use these images for different purposes, including on OnlyFans and for different creative purposes (their NSFW sex work is still available online, as is our material together, though I generally don’t advertise it). The only thing Cuwu ever asked of me was to leave their actual, real-life name out of things, which I’ve done in accordance to their wishes.

As for my writings about the abuse I experienced from them, they are not involved with that/supervising it, no. The material is part of a portfolio we generated together as sex workers, which I am using independently to write about my experiences with them, good and bad (source Tumblr post, vanderWaardart: December 18, 2024).

That’s the gist of things between us. Cuwu’s still online and, while on hiatus (the last time I checked, anyways), so is their sex work. Said work is arbitrated as much post hoc as not—meaning that like eating a Reese’s, saying “Splunge!” or putting the pussy on the chainwax, there’s endless ways to develop Gothic Communism through monstrous-feminine language in duality; re: by having the whore’s revenge through ludo-Gothic BDSM camping past attempts; i.e., the whore as a poetic device to camp and camp with. This is how Cuwu and I did it, back then.

Third, the 2025 second edition to Volume Zero took the term, “ludo-Gothic BDSM”—which the 2023 first edition introduced with my coining of it—and expanded the involvement of it in that manuscript retrospectively. By comparison, I would actually write the manuscript for my manifesto back in early 2023, whereupon I would write Volume Zero in late 2023 and introduce ludo-Gothic BDSM as a term—only to return to, and finalize, Volume One on Valentine’s 2024 after injecting ludo-Gothic BDSM into its pages (~40, versus Volume Zero’s original 30). Now after releasing Volume Zero‘s second edition, I find myself returning to Volume One to do the same, and inevitably mention ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Cuwu’s involvement) more in its manuscript than I did previously. For the historically curious, all of these changes are cataloged in my full series changelog, which you can find on my website’s one-page promo.

(artist: Cuwu—one of the first images they sent me, before I left Florida)

The fact remains, the idea was roughly conceived in 2021 (re: “Our Ludic Masters“); i.e., before I met Cuwu in early 2022 (re: the epigram). From there, our meeting and separation led to me eventually writing “Healing from Rape” (which Cuwu—a person with borderline personality disorder who relied on DBT to survive—helped me do, regarding Jadis abusing me; re: “Leaving Jadis; or, Running Up that Hill“); i.e., in mid-2023. By late 2023, I was crystalizing ludo-Gothic BDSM vis-à-vis Metroidvania for future use; re: “The Quest for Power” in theory, and the “camp map” finale with Blxxd Bunny in practice. Two years later, in 2025, I would release a corpus for Metroidvania and another for ludo-Gothic BDSM, then commemorate Blxxd Bunny’s hand in things; re: with the second edition of Volume Zero.

Regardless, Cuwu still remains the precursor to Bunny and someone who, while we weren’t dating in title, had agreed to be friends with benefits from the offset—in function having tons of sex, making plenty of porn, and caring for each other in numerous ways that went beyond the initially-agreed-upon FWBs status we supposed shared (many of which this volume and Volume Two will explore). In short, we were comrades (what Cuwu called “cumrag comrades” or “cummy Commies”): a cum dumpster to my cum dumper yet trading in both directions!

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Some of those ways informed what, in my opinion, is some of my best work in this series, including what ludo-Gothic BDSM became in widespread practice after Volume Zero had essentially coined it—ostensibly with Bunny’s help, but also Cuwu’s before Bunny and I had actually met! Now that Volume Zero’s second edition has credited Bunny for their hand in things, I shall be revisiting Cuwu’s; i.e., I couldn’t have written Sex Positivity as it exists without their help! Showing how here isn’t revenge; it’s an act of continual love from me towards Cuwu—a sign of respect from one sex worker towards another! You changed my life, kid, and only for the better!

That being said, I won’t be expounding on Cuwu too much, here, as one, this volume is already cited heavily in my later books but especially its manifesto postscript, “Healing from Rape” (which, I think, is one of my book series’ finest accomplishments).

Furthermore, Cuwu likewise already makes numerous cameos in my later volumes, being cited dozens of times; e.g., in the Poetry Module’s “Castles in the Flesh,” “Red Scare,” and “My Experiences,” as well as “Healing through ‘Rape’” in the Undead Module and “Making Demons” in the Demon Module (the latter which I would dedicated to Cuwu). Frankly there’s plenty more specific examples I can’t easily list, here; e.g., exhibit 37b1a[1] from “Healing“; i.e., I don’t always announce Cuwu’s presence before a (sub)chapter starts, and have lost count regarding the exact number of exhibits featuring them—be that solo or with me alongside them. Even Volume One flirted with showing Cuwu off, exhibiting their photobashed body in exhibit 16 (wearing a mask—one the Poetry Module would remove, followed by having Cuwu’s face being entirely uncensored[2]).

Regarding Cuwu and ludo-Gothic BDSM, I will merely try to keep things short and let this volume segue into ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Cuwu); i.e., as a liminal space, transitioning from Volume Zero into Volume Two. I’ll signpost “ludo-Gothic BDSM” a little, here; i.e., which I would inject into the manuscript, back in 2024, with “Predators and Prey” and “Concerning Rings,” as well reformatting the volume to divide in two; re: Manifesto and Instruction. The former is effectively taking the manifesto tree from Volume Zero and further synthesizing and simplifying it (along with producing several essays), while the latter leans into “application”; i.e., regarding the universal liberation of workers and nature as monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of the alien, hence, ludo-Gothic BDSM, and being for all intents and purposes synonymous with ludo-Gothic BDSM. Synthesis is development, which requires ludo-Gothic BDSM through the cultivation of good daily social-sexual habits that, once synthesized, apply theory between people making content.

In short, we embody Gothic Communism during ludo-Gothic BDSM, which we also represent (with our cakes, below); re: labor back is land back, and “From labor to land back, that is our whore’s revenge; i.e., by reclaiming violence, terror and monsters where they are normally used to harm us, subverting them with ludo-Gothic BDSM ‘when in Rome’ to make empire stateless, classless, moneyless and raceless!” (source: “A 2025 Foreword: On Volume Zero’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM”).

We’ll get to that. When we do, though, I won’t always stress the interchangeability between application, camp and ludo-Gothic BDSM having the whore’s revenge against profit (re: humanizing the harvest, therefore nature as monstrous-feminine). Even so, I still want you to keep it in mind, increasing the word’s usage from the original ~40 to roughly 200 (similar to Volume Zero’s second edition); i.e., Volume One is simpler in part because I wrote much of it before my PhD. And while I would return to it afterwards to inject ludo-Gothic BDSM into it (doing so to clarify the subject matter that was already present), these injections were originally somewhat “doughy” and few-and-far-between. I have since tried to rectify that with the second edition, here; i.e., by consciously acknowledging ludo-Gothic BDSM as a vital means of camp whose process started closer to Cuwu than not, and still had a ways to go “in the oven” after Cuwu exited my life; re: before I would really start to take advantage of it in Volume Two.

Note: The increase for “ludo-Gothic BDSM” in the manifesto is largely for comparative purposes—i.e., the count in the manifesto is technically “more” than the Poetry Module and similar to the Undead Module’s first editions (180 and 293), but also isn’t steelmanned, this time around; it’s more tacked-on/annotative. The feel, then, is more checkered, and not synthesized more thoroughly. Instead, it’s to remind you of a point of comparison; i.e., one to make between granular terms like “oppositional praxis,” “playful Gothic” and “demon BDSM” versus me simply synthesizing them with “ludo-Gothic BDSM”; re: from Volume Zero’s prototype after Volume One’s first draft back into Volume One’s final draft leading into Volume Two synthesizing everything post hoc, during holistic study. My not doing so here, with Volume One’s second edition, is to preserve the manifesto’s historical and simplified nature, and to allow you a unique chance to see ludo-Gothic BDSM “unspooled” and discussed in a manner you might actually encounter outside these books. 

Think of it, then, as a de-evolution viewed backwards, one used to morphologically expressed—in circuitous, non-linear and ergodic terms—the path I took to get here; i.e., a castle inside a castle, or as I write in “Meeting Rebels” (from the Poetry Module):

An echoing dislocation—nay, an echolocation of dislocated castles, of ruins (the narrative of the crypt)—their string of ghost towns write with/written in disintegration (death, vis-à-vis cryptomimesis) as roads only ostensibly to nowhere; i.e., building sand castles standing in for Communism as the elusive “princess in another castle” but also Capitalism as the intimidating dragon holding her prisoner (or the white woman collaring the dragon, but I digress) as a synthetic (thesis-to-antithesis) plurality of conflict that yields different forms and functions in the same sand: a “collective something-something” that, no matter how far we run, walks (shambles) faster than we do: the return of the living dead as speaking for itself regarding the colossal wreck before, during and after its decay (source).

Exploitation and liberation share the same space, on and offstage; the way out of the labyrinth is inside it, regardless of when and where you find yourself: camping the canon in duality during ludo-Gothic BDSM through a reclaimed language of the underworld to reverse abjection, thus profit, during the whore’s revenge; i.e., through the human body (and its monomorphic gender expression) as alien to capital vindictively pimping it (re: “Concerning Rape Play“). So can we, through theatre of such things, externalize what is normally unseen, or draw attention to what is outside ourselves according to our internal trauma externalized (e.g., “Escaping Jadis“).

—Perse, 4/3/2025

Nevertheless, ludo-Gothic BDSM will come into play much more often, here (and in less doughy forms), and especially later in the book series—from Volume Two into Volume Three (which is even older than the manifesto, hence doesn’t have the term in it at all). People communicate through sex (and gender) to heal from trauma; i.e., doing so ways that build cumulatively towards what—for Gothic Communism—is a holistic enterprise. It’s what Cuwu and I did, working on a system of camp that neither of us realized would go on to become Sex Positivity‘s praxial bedrock: of my work’s applied theory and into our pedagogy of the oppressed (and subsequent gender trouble and parody—terms to explore in Volume Three). In the interim, here’s a face to go with the name; i.e., whose ur-camp (and bangin’ PAWG-level bod) fueled what ludo-Gothic BDSM became in my and Bunny’s later prototype—Cuwu’s vital clay (and dark hungry energies) that helped give Galatea shape, thus a voice to liberate Medusa with! Not once, but over and over and over again, passion is a refrain to repeatedly embark on when pursuing universal liberation;  i.e., the Communist Numinous trapped inside a little four-eyed, snow-white baddie with a tight hairy pussy and fat succulent ass (the Medusa takes many forms)!

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Miss ya, kid; stay safe out there!

Love,

—Persephone

(exhibit 6b2a2: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard—with Cuwu blowing Persephone in her sleep without express permission [to be fair I absolutely didn’t mind, in hindsight, and Cuwu confessed it seemed like a safe bet, at the time; it was].

That being said, the sleep sex Cuwu and I would have later on was fully negotiated; i.e., without any assumptions; re:

[model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: “Dark Shadows”] 

Ideally, illustrating mutual consent during ludo-Gothic BDSM should always be fully and clearly negotiated; i.e., because that’s what goes into any dialectical-material context that people can glean from our artwork [and its lessons]! To it, nothing is discrete in Gothic; learn from our mistakes, but also our creative successes putting the pussy on the chainwax! Love is a battlefield and revolution is a place for love to bloom. Learn from us while making love to help revolution take root in peoples’ hearts and minds, but also their bodies’ various holes [a hyphenation of technology and tissue]! As such, take risks that calculate more safely afterward, but be as safe as you can while doing so at the time! Fortune favors the bold, but consent above all else [a balancing act between caution and courage].

[artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

Whatever happens, make something that lasts. Even if that’s only in your memories—and be those in the flesh or passed on through media into flesh, there and back again—we will be waiting for you future rebels; i.e., when you go looking through castles, onstage and off, for spectres to dance with! You wanna camp something? Make it gay! In turn, time is a circle, and “what we do in life echoes in eternity!” Come be gay with us!)

Manifesto/Instruction Volume Outline

“DEMON, ATHETOS SAY, KILL.”

—Athetos’ variants, Axiom Verge (2014)

Volume One is functionally divided in two: our manifesto, and the exploration of trauma as a powerful means of instruction during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the application of power through the campy aesthetics of inequality and death during calculated risk: camping bread and circus inside the circus through our baked goods (cake or otherwise). To that, it contains my original preface, manifesto, sample essay and synthesis roadmap, which we shall now outline in this brief section.

Before we do, I quickly (over the next one-and-a-half pages) want to consider the nature of the exhibit style of this volume compared to my thesis. More so than Volume Zero, Volume One invites the reader to consider investigating power and trauma through theory and praxis as things to synthesize and express; i.e., through active, informed, collective participation; e.g., through shared exhibits like the one below. Said exhibit was created between Roxie Rusalka and myself, with Roxie being informed of my project ahead of time and agreeing to take part. It was deliberate/planned, and took time, money and work to pull off, but also mutual/informed consent:

Note: This exhibit is cited in “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Metroidvania” in the Undead Module; go there to see me expand on its ideas. —Perse, 4/2/2025

(exhibit 6b2b: Model and artist: Roxie Rusalka and Persephone van der Waard. Instruction occurs through the interrogation of trauma, wherein power is perceived and performed; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM/general Gothic poetics and simplified theories that incorporate a fair amount of former worker history pushing towards liberation. Said history is typically “lost” under state operations and must be repeatedly reclaimed through a liminal pedagogy—the act of reimagining systemic abuse received by workers from state forces. This reclamation very much includes monsters that are historically regarded as treacherous to status-quo agents, but especially regarding men under the Cartesian model; e.g., the nymph or siren as a regular emasculator of traditional stations of male agency and authority. To that, Roxie’s handle, “Rusalka,” refers to a type of Slavic water siren, which Roxie suggested I use as inspiration for depicting her in my book. Seeing as I already recognized the mythology from Thomas Happ’s 2014 Metroidvania, I drew Roxie as a Rusalki from Axiom Verge to instruct viewers with.

My and Roxie’s pedagogy of the oppressed, then, constitutes something that you might recognize from elsewhere; i.e., as having threatened male figures and institutions from earlier hauntologies: the Rusalki from Axiom Verge serving as titanic war machines who—in the style of a framed narrative ripped from Frankenstein—instruct and dominate Trace as an avatar/unwitting extension of the game’s chief male antagonist, Athetos. None of this is strictly “new” insofar as it has already appeared in fiction in some shape or form, but its present resurrection constitutes unique elements amid ongoing struggles.

The game’s narrative installs a psychomachic, psychosexual dialog between all parties, established through play and felt through various positions of ignorance, knowledge and power imbalance. The women of the game are its primary instructors, and teach Trace from a place of darkness: the hellish wellspring of oblivion imparting fatal wisdom and traumatic rememory as much through pain, unequal power exchange and outright lies/subterfuge as they do through open communication. The takeaway isn’t that Amazonian women are inherently treacherous, but survivors of immense trauma working with potential allies who, at times, have no idea who they’re serving: Trace embodies Athetos, whose desire to conquer space/the universe through the colonial gaze of planet Earth [astronoetics] is initiated, embodied and explored through a position of ignorance; i.e., one that thrives through ergodic, monomythic motion and the shadow of Pygmalion/the Cycle of Kings as something to routinely bring about at the cost of all things.

[artist: Wildragon]

Within this overarching structure, canon classically challenges the ancient female as an Archaic Mother to behead; to reverse this is to foster a counterfeit of Athena’s Aegis that freezes state potential in its tracks: female power as something to behold and learn from through the death of an internalized bigotry and desire to conquer that is often, at first blush, framed as “self-defense,” “progress,” and “empowerment.”)

The entirety of the volume contains dozens of exhibits like the one above, arranged inside the preface, sample essay and two volume halves:

  • The preface explains how Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism differs from older Gothic and Marxist academia/praxis that I wish to modify and borrow from (Marxist-Leninism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis) in order to proceed beyond the myopia of Capitalist Realism using a unique synthesis of Gothic theories, Marxist concepts, and various other factors presented with commonplace language as freighted, liminal and already-colonized, but also potentially freeing when used by workers to open up their minds in dated, pulpy ways: the proletarian Gothic imagination.
  • “Manifesto” simplifies the complex theory of our thesis volume by providing our manifesto in full; the manifesto gives our mission statement, as well as a variety of signposts and core ideas I’ve coined/retooled from older thinkers: the six Gothic-Marxist tenets of Gothic Communism (the Six Rs), four main Gothic academic theories (the Four Gs); its essays/essay groups (“The Nation State,” “An Uphill Battle,” and “Monster Modes“) also explore the topics of the Gothic mode we’ll continue to cover through the rest of the book—its monsters, lairs/parallel space, Hermeneutic Gothic-Communist Quadfecta, and phobias—as well as the Six Doubles of Creative/Oppositional Praxis and their synthetic oppositional groupings through which to synthesize, thus interrogate state abuses using trauma writing and artwork.
  • “Instruction“ focuses on instructing theory once simplified by using trauma writing and artwork as a synthetic, educational means of Gothic poetic expression (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM). The manifesto postscript tackles generational trauma and police abuse by seeing it in others through their pedagogy of the oppressed; the sample essay uses every key idea in my book to analyze a primary text at full speed; “Paid Labor“ stresses the value of paying workers when synthesizing praxis; and the synthesis symposium covers how to use the synthetic oppositional groupings to synthesize our general terms and academic ideas, processing them (and our trauma) into idiosyncratic, emotionally and Gothically intelligent social-sexual habits within our own lives; it covers more at length what we illustrated during the camp map finale in Volume Zero, focusing on Cartesian trauma and how its profit motive unironically treats nature as food: (rape and war that harvest nature through monstrous-feminine dialogs).

(artist: Roxie Rusalka)

Preface: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; or, Synthesizing Emotional/Gothic Intelligence through a Sex-Positive Gothic Mode

“You know nothing, Jon Snow.” 

—Ygritte, A Storm of Swords (2000)

Synthesis is vital to good praxis. For our purposes, synthesis can be adequately summarized as “the cultivation of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural/racial awareness; i.e., the deliberate utilization of Gothic poetics during the practical application of simplified theory had between activist workers: formulating healthy social-sexual habits to deal with state trauma.” But there’s still plenty of theory that goes into these habits and their collective instruction/de facto education during ludo-Gothic BDSM. To that, Gothic Communism is “picky” in terms of what it incorporates. I want to run these habits down during the preface, then conclude said preface by touching on praxial synthesis (and catharsis) before moving into the manifesto proper!

First, a few things Gothic Communism tends to avoid, theory-wise. Gothic Communism strongly dislikes pure poststructuralist/psychoanalytical (e.g., Freud, Jung and Lacan) and Marxist-Leninist models (though it employs many of their ideas in an-Com ways); i.e., not only do these models tend to be dated, vaguely abstracting and sexist/queerphobic (as Stalin and Freud both were, above), but they are far more common in Gothic academia than I would like (especially Freud in remnants of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, when second wave feminism and post-Freudian analysis were all the rage, and which I would critique in my own work; re: “A Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love“).

Instead, I wrote Sex Positivity to marry Gothic/queer theory with Marxist, dialectical-material analysis/oppositional praxis, a process I have decided to call Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism. While both sides of it (and ludo-Gothic BDSM, to a lesser extent) will be thoroughly explained in the Manifesto and Instruction portions of this volume, let’s quickly run down this book’s Communist and Gothic aims to summarize what Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is according to me and why.

Note: I wrote the manifesto before my PhD, and this preface attempts to—among other things—explain why Gothic Communism is anarcho-Communist is scope versus Marxist-Leninist (which Cuwu was, oddly enough; i.e., Gothic Communism was the accidental byproduct of a copulating an-Com and self-described “Marxist-Leninist”—the latter inspired by Castro, if memory serves).

To be as thorough as I can, then, here is my definition for “Marxist-Leninism” alongside the abridged definition of “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism)” and “anarcho-Communism”:

Marxist-Leninism/”tankies”

An embryonic form of Socialism that, past and present, favors state models and nostalgia; i.e., one that hybridizes Marx and Engels with 20th century thinkers and leaders—most notably Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, but also Mao, Castro and other state leaders/schools going into the 21st: through “tankie” apologia whitewashing the crimes of said leaders and their states as beings to worship and compromise with (Bad Mouse’s “On Hakim’s Nuance,” 2025).

anarcho-Communism

The gradual disillusion and transmutation of Capitalism into Socialism and finally Communism through direct worker solidarity and collective action versus through state mechanism and argument; i.e., whereupon power is horizontally restructured away from state models and Marxism Leninism (and state power/state-regulated Capitalism).

Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism (abridged, full definition in “The Terms I Coined”)

the titular term of my book series, so I’ll quote the whole thing, here—expanded and updated substantially since 2023, in 2025, to account for my writing of four books after Volume Zero): Coined by me, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is the deliberate, pointed critique of capital/Capitalism and the state using a unique marriage of Gothic/queer/game theory and semi-Marxist (an-Com) ideas synthesized campily by sex-positive workers during proletarian praxis: developing systemic catharsis, mid-liminal expression during praxial opposition, using ludo-Gothic BDSM and palliative-Numinous dialogs (e.g., Metroidvania).

(source)

Beyond my understanding of the term, “Marxist-Leninist” was actually coined by Stalin around or after Lenin died, in the 1920s (from Wikipedia): “Marxism–Leninism was developed from Bolshevism by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s based on his understanding and synthesis of classical Marxism and Leninism. Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism” (source). And Stalin, let’s not forget, was a total-and-massive cunt who—among many other things, besides—enabled pedophilia in his own inner circle (re: Behind the Bastards’ “Beria: Stalin’s Pedophile Cop & the Soviet Oppenheimer”), made homosexuality illegal[3] in 1933 (the same year Hilter burned down Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institution of Sexology) and, all in all, killed/displaced a shitload of people (millions) to reinforce his own cult of personality (e.g., Stalingrad—arguably the biggest battle in modern or medieval history—was strategically worthless to the Russians or the Germans; i.e., Stalin wanted the city defended and Hilter to conquer it [costing over a million soldiers on both sides] because it had “Stalin” in the name. If that’s not vanity then I don’t know what is). These men were not gods, nor should we treat them as such; they were the ruling class, and one whose state Capitalism [on Stalin’s side] was largely nominal in its historical execution of Communism (and yes, the West undercut it, but Stalin and the Politburo that survived him still held the stickle during the harvest).

This being said, Stalinist Bolshevism isn’t identical to Hilter’s National Socialism, but both men were dictators, nonetheless (as was Mao, and by extension, American presidents, British Monarchs, and so on). In doing ludo-Gothic BDSM to develop Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, we’re not here to worship these darlings, but kill their legacies by camping their ghosts (and that of their offshoots; e.g., Creed, Kristeva, Butler, Foucault, Bad Empanada, etc); re: “the state is straight” and ASAB (from the Undead Module’s “Understanding Vampires”):

To it, Bad Empanada is a Marxist-Leninist, valuing the material element to Marxist analysis, but also state mechanisms; i.e., he doesn’t condone or support anarcho-Communism, treating its practitioners like hopeless hedonists and (as I shall explain) sex pests to lump in with genuine predators. Except, the state is straight, historically the ultimate and constant enemy selling out and wearing down to abuse its own people; i.e., as expressed by Bad Empanada himself towards me and others like me, the state—whether it calls itself Socialist or capitalist—always prioritizes us fags and sex workers when the state of exception narrows (consider this sentence the Gothic, queer and thoroughly anarchistic thesis argument for “Understanding Vampires”). We can’t afford to be strictly material in our investigations of capital, because much of praxis (and its synthesis in our daily lives) comes from the social component of media; i.e., that is produced as much by workers as corporations (ibid.).

Furthermore, when camping Marx‘ ghost (and his followers’ compelled stupidity/willful ignorance), we can still borrow from Marx (the “broken clock” mantra/Sarkeesian’s adage); i.e., blood in, blood out:

The whole point of abjection is to popularize and normalize open violence in society (foreign and domestic) and popular media against target groups, and that’s exactly what happened to queer people in the 1980s. They came out of the closet in force and the state invented a shadow army to attach to them and blame for/capitalize on imperial decline through militarized violence. Any nation-state could recognize and attack them, thus shame, rape, mutilate and kill them; society became sick in ways never before seen. Nowhere was safe for either side, Cartesian thought radicalized in service to profit under the neoliberal hegemon; i.e., through tokenized police violence against queerness during us-versus them copaganda. Already reprobate, we became grist for the mill—a new destiny to manifest by enterprising (and paranoid, avenging) young boys and girls of all colors and creeds (white Indians), lest they catch and transmit what we were carrying: Black-Death vermin to trap, cage and exterminate, but also sexual and yeast/fungal/viral (code-like, secretive) infections to cure told in retro-future revivals neither here nor there (a Foucauldian moral panic policing sex by treating us as an alien health crisis; i.e., as Communism, but especially gay Communism, as AIDS incarnate).

Out of nowhere, the future was abruptly and utterly canceled, and it was suddenly all us fags’ fault, what with our gay anarchist’s “Commie,” alien, abject biology and gender suddenly being everywhere; i.e., waiting insidiously and perilously to hatch and make the Earth queer and gay from outer space—all despite older proponents of Communism historically wanting little if anything to do with us; re: the state is straight and our survival is both antithetical to its own and something it needs to prey upon and extirpate to carry on—like a vampire, in other words. To quote Marx (who loved monstrous language; re: Castricano), specifically from Kapital, “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor.” Our vampirism must camp canonical iterations, the state most of all, including all its heteronormative, cryptomimetic bid for power’s rape and death fantasies: our death and rape at their hands. This can be theft of power to cause harm, but also labor and wages, even bodies and blood itself (e.g., John Dooley and Emily Gallagher’s “Blood Money: Selling Plasma to Avoid High-Interest Loans,” 2024); and all existent in a half-real sense between history as alive and dead, material and social, imaginary and substantial, etc (ibid.).

In short, where knowledge gaps exist, fill them with whatever proves dialectically-materially and socially-sexually useful towards universal liberation; i.e., one that routinely has the whore’s revenge against profit during ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the canon. Leave the rest; its garbage. —Perse, 4/2/2025

(exhibit 6b2c: Model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard—from “My Logo for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism!” I designed the logo on August 26th, 2025; i.e., right around when I began writing my PhD in earnest [which released on October 8th]. After Cuwu, Bunny was central in helping me prototype ludo-Gothic BDSM as the vector for develop Gothic Communism; re: “The Quest for Power” in theory, and the “camp map” finale in application.)

The Communist aims of this Gothic book series (and its ludo-Gothic BDSM) are anarcho-Communist in scope—a combination of Communism and anarchism (there are other combinations, but these are either excluded [anarcho-Capitalism] or fall under anarcho-Communism in my opinion; e.g., queer/feminist Communism). So, not only does Sex Positivity seek to abolish private property in pursuit of post-scarcity beyond Capitalism; its chief desire is to end the worker exploitations that reliably happen through privatization—occurring through the nation-state as the chief monopolizer of violence and terror in ways that neoliberal corporations spearhead as their partners-in-crime (neoliberalism being a return to the “freeing” of the market, consolidating wealth in the pockets of the bourgeoisie through state-corporate abuses of power and personal responsibility rhetoric disseminated by centrist media; neoliberals also disguise, aid and abet fascism, a concept we will explore much more thoroughly in Volume Three).

Everything I propose operates in service of deprivatization and dismantling the nation-state, corporations included. The vertical consolidation of materials and power in state-corporate echelons is horribly alienating and destructive. Both must be gradually replaced by anarcho-syndicalist communes as horizontal arrangements thereof. Doing so amounts to Gothic Communism’s chief aim: a Gothic (monstrous) mode of expression that is productive, constructive and creatively sex-positive, liberating workers by utilizing the democratization of sexualized labor as something found and fostered among class- and culture-conscious workers, not the state (which historically privatizes labor [and Gothic poetics] for the elite in fundamentally undemocratic ways, including Marxist-Leninism’s various missteps; i.e., a “kettling” of state powers by capitalist forces into headspaces of paranoia and ultimately the settling of old scores).

(source: Julia Kenny’s “Stalin’s Cult of Personality: Its Origin and Progression,” 2015)

In other words, there’s to be no cults of personality nominally declaring themselves “Communists” or “National Socialists” in Gothic Communism, nor genocidal great leaders nor pyramid schemes; no Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, nor Stalin as Marxist-Leninist heads of state; no neoliberal, corporate-born billionaires like Bill Gates or their establishment-politician/corporate-Americanized executives quietly assisting the billionaire class as the great destroyers of the planet (these various heads to the state of affairs are synonymous with “the state/the elite” insofar as I use those terms); no popes nor cult leaders; no venerate, accommodated copycats of various “fathers of [insert academic field, here]” like Jacques Derrida and his god-awful prose (ditch said dreck, but keep his genuinely productive and useful Deconstructionist ideas; e.g., “There is no transcendental signified” [obviously paraphrased, because Derrida couldn’t write a straightforward sentence to save his life] from his 1966 essay, “Structure, Sign and Play“) nor the post-Freudians who followed in Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s footsteps only to have their psychoanalytical models updated by the likes of Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson alike, either man presented as annoyingly sacred and lame (to be fair, Zizek can be a lot fun when picking low-hanging fruit, but he’s still not Marxist, anarcho-Communist or queer enough for my taste; e.g., his defending of a two-state solution[4] vis-à-vis the Palestinian genocide).

The idea of Gothic Communism is to avoid the Foucauldian “torture loop” of a hauntologized, abject disgust mill; i.e., the expectation of medieval, rapey violence post-deconstruction, but also the chickenshit, exploitative power imbalances in academic circles; e.g., Simone Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre working as a team to routinely “deflower” a (much) younger third. As Andy Martin writes in “The Persistence of the ‘Lolita Syndrome'” (2013):

It has to be said that Beauvoir’s interest in these matters was not purely theoretical (in fact, it is hard to conceive of any philosopher’s thoughts being purely theoretical). As a diligent investigator, I am obliged to say that she was dismissed from her teaching job in 1943 for “behavior leading to the corruption of a minor.” The minor in question was one of her pupils at a Paris lycée. It is well established that she and Jean-Paul Sartre developed a pattern, which they called the “trio,” in which Beauvoir would seduce her students and then pass them on to Sartre. (See, for example, “A Disgraceful Affair,” by Bianca Lamblin, in which she recalls being infatuated with Beauvoir, but romanced systematically by Sartre, who cheerfully remarks, on the way to a consummation, that “the hotel chambermaid will be really surprised, because she caught me taking another girl’s virginity only yesterday.”)

Beauvoir’s “Lolita Syndrome” (her personal favorite, she said, among her essays) offers an evangelical defence of the sexual emancipation of the young (source).

Double standards aside, both intellectuals shamelessly exploited the unequal power structures of academia, but enjoyed a constant postmortem, reverential emblematizing as the intellectuals with the final say on feminist matters. Equally gross, in hindsight, is Michel Foucault’s 1993 interview with Edmund White, whereupon he delivers a self-confessed and seemingly innocent admission to the chasing of cute boys his entire academic career (echoing Dennis Cooper’s twink-in-peril schtick, but in real life minus the ironic/liberatory meta):

I wasn’t always smart; I was actually very stupid in school [T]here was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And in order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him – and that’s how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I’ve been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys (source).

Zeuhl said they “ride and die” with Foucault (not having much to say in reply when I mentioned he was a pedophile, learning that about him several years after Zeuhl and I broke up). More to the point, the above quote is something Zeuhl would use to seduce me with (re: “Leaving the Closet“). —Perse, 4/2/2025

All seemingly innocent until you learn about his predatory sex tourism (Bad Empanada 2, 2022), desire to abolish age of consent laws in France (The Living Philosophy’s “Why French Postmodernists were Pro-Paedophilia in the 1970s,” 2021), and what James Miller in The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993) called an addiction to self-destruction and sadomasochist sex (the coercive sort). Likewise, Elliot Swain in 2021 remarks in utter frustration how Foucault tended to avoid Marxist language altogether. Foucault wasn’t just accommodated, you see; he was enabled and desired intellectual fame similar to what Sartre had achieved before him. It’s gross, queer-normative, TERF levels of nasty and needs to be abolished. Good play and sex-positive BDSM are all entirely possible (and something we’ll explore more in Volume Three, Chapters Two and Three). However, creepy Gay Uncle Fester ain’t it.

Rather, in a reconstructed, post-scarcity world, there is no systemic war and rape. To this, Gothic Communism is also not a regression back into the freed market like Gorbachev did to the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, but instead a collective push towards universal degrowth (that means no “as good as it gets” moderates, too). Instead, this is to be an entirely different mode of undertaking development under Capitalism towards anarcho-Communism away from Capitalist Realism, but the basic ideas are still the same—re: Socialism’s “From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] work” to Communism’s “to each according to [their] need.” Anarcho-Communism simply means class solidarity and collective action performed directly by informed, intelligent workers of various sorts, aided by bourgeois and petit-bourgeois (middle) class allies—not by establishment politicians, academics and state-corporate agents, whose politics/praxis are bourgeois in nature; they serve the state, not workers.

For us and Gothic Communism, worker safety is sacred and supersedes any icon who came before and iconoclasts absolutely shouldn’t hesitate to tear down/camp their harmful reputations. To give some further examples:

  • Milton was patriarchal (Lapham’s Quarterly’s “Misspent Youth”)
  • Tolkien was racist (Anderson Rearick’s “Why Is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc,” 2004).
  • Marx wasn’t overtly a Gothicist (certainly not by current, iconoclastic standards, anyways; he loved ghosts, but these had to be “unpacked” by people like Derrida, Castricano and other Gothic theorists whose work emerged nearly [and after] a century after Marx’ death); also, he was anti-Semitic (“Karl Marx in the Ludwig Rosenberger Library of Judaica,” 2006) and homophobic (see “Making Marx Gay“).
  • Oscar Wilde was anti-Semitic (Christopher Nassar’s “The Problem of the Jewish Manager in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” 2005).
  • Simone Beauvoir was not only a rapist, but cis-centric (“woman is other”).
  • Pablo Picasso was a rapist and misogynist (Marta’s “The Women of Picasso,” 2023), as was Roman Polanski (Dreading’s “The Case of Roman Polanski,” 2022).
  • Lovecraft was mega-racist: “China Miéville says, ‘There is nothing epiphenomenal about racism in Lovecraft.’ Put differently, Lovecraft’s race thinking cannot be separated from his body of work” (Brown University’s “The Racial Imaginaries of H.  Lovecraft”).
  • Coleridge was an apologist for the state, scapegoating Matthew Lewis as “terrorist[5]” from a white, straight man’s cis-supremacist, classist and racist position; i.e., “equality of convenience” dressed up as a conspicuous boner for the West using the flowery (and sober, at this point) language of a Poet Laureate:

The Romans slowly conquered the more southerly portion of their tribes, and succeeded only by their superior arts, their policy, and better discipline. After a time, when the Goths, ­to use the name of the noblest and most historical of the Teutonic tribes, ­had acquired some knowledge of these arts from mixing with their conquerors, they invaded the Roman territories. The hardy habits, the steady perseverance, the better faith of the enduring Goth rendered him too formidable an enemy for the corrupt Roman, who was more inclined to purchase the subjection of his enemy, than to go through the suffering necessary to secure it. The conquest of the Romans gave to the Goths the Christian religion as it was then existing in Italy; and the light and graceful building of Grecian, or Roman-Greek order, became singularly combined with the massy architecture of the Goths, as wild and varied as the forest vegetation which it resembled. The Greek art is beautiful (source: “General Character in the Gothic Literature and Art”).

We not only have to be better than the West; we have to be better than all these persons and avoid what my friend Sandy Norton lovingly calls the “Imperialism of Theory” (coined when she was sparring with a fellow academic about William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 novel, Vanity Fair):

At its best, theory offers us models that encourage speculative thinking. Many critics assume, however, that the application of theoretical discourses to literature necessarily entails a particular, and limited, set of interpretive practices: reference to a theorist’s ideas, for instance, may too easily be taken to mean that a critic subscribes to all the tenets of that theorist’s position as well as to those of the better-known practitioners of the theory. This constraining movement unnecessarily forecloses speculative thought and seeks, in a way that mirrors imperialist discourses, to conserve the authority and power of those who have accumulated intellectual and academic capital through association with a theory.

This sort of theoretical imperialism is also methodological: the repeated application of a theory in a particular way quickly comes to constitute an authority which dictates that it should only be applied in that way. Although he may not do so intentionally, Perkin employs theory as a constraining force when he takes me to task for using Foucault’s work but failing to adopt a strictly New Historicist methodology: “Foucault leads one to New Historicism, which requires that one read a text as part of a world of discourses, whereas Norton’s article is really a close reading of some strands of a single text” (165; my emphasis). The semantic slippage in this sentence is telling, I think. It is, on an overt level, “New Historicism” or presumably its practitioners that “require” the use of this method. But because “Foucault leads one to New Historicism,” the implication of the sentence is that Foucauldian theory itself “require[s]” this method. This I would deny. Although his work provides a model for some of the methods of New Historicism, neither Foucault nor any New Historicist would claim that his work which is used across a broad range of disciplines may only be appropriately applied using those methods.

I do not believe that I am required to demonstrate “a need to invoke Foucault” (and the diction here is interesting precisely why does Perkin use the word “invoke”?). Like Marx or Freud, Foucault is himself an example of what he calls in the essay, “What Is an Author?,” “founders of discursivity,” figures who have “established an endless possibility of discourse” (154). “To expand a type of discursivity,” he proposes, is precisely “to open it up to a certain number of possible applications” (156). Rather than “needing to invoke” Foucault, I choose to apply Foucault because of the speculative richness such application offers (source: “The Imperialism of Theory: A Response to J. Russell Perkin,” 1994).

Simply put, singular and enforced interpretations are dangerous, and we need to be choosy in ways that prolifically and flexibly enrich our arguments, not simply dot them with the fancy patriarchal ornaments of accommodated intellectuals. Meanwhile, our ruffling of their collective feathers needs to hit a collective nerve: their sell-out, privileged status; i.e., sitting in their ivory towers and basically talking amongst themselves in a highly privatized sense. This requires a certain sense of detachment from positions of comfort that historically are used to divide and conquer workers. As Said writes in “Reflections on Exile” (1984):

Because exile, unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. They generally do not have armies or states, although they are often in search of them. Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people. […] Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one’s native place; what is true of all exile is not that home and love of home are lost, but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both.

Regard experiences as if they were about to disappear. What is it that anchors them in reality? What would you save of them? What would you give up? Only someone who has achieved independence and detachment, someone whose homeland is “sweet” but whose circumstances makes it impossible to recapture that sweetness, can answer those questions. (Such a person would also find it impossible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma.)

This may seem like a prescription for an unrelieved grimness of outlook and, with it, a permanently sullen disapproval of all enthusiasm or buoyancy of spirit. Not necessarily. While it perhaps seems peculiar to speak of the pleasures of exile, there are some positive things to be said for a few of its conditions. Seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal.

For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally. There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish orthodox judgement and elevate appreciative sympathy. There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be (source).

Exiting Plato’s cave can feel brutal, insofar as its new-felt unheimlich is irreversible. From our own “pleasures of exile,” though, home is something to cultivate through alienation as a forced consequence under Capitalism. It, like trauma in general, becomes something to live with, often through rituals of theatrical distress:

(artist: Coey Kuhn)

Liberation from the illusions of capital means our prescribed homeland becomes foreign in ways that allow for startling new appreciations; i.e., in terms of how we identify using Gothic language during fresh struggles under old, systemic problems: as monsters. Doing so helps us better voice the chaos inherent to our daily lives under capital, once the game is up. Yes, we can be “ostracized” by people who frankly care little for our well-being at an institutional level (accommodated intellectuals); but as their cool dismissal of us exposes the apathy and bigotry behind their “soft” arguments, their hard, inflexible stances can be denuded by Gothic Communism’s chief weapon: poetics. Canon’s combined, “sacred” memories—of powerful men, women and token minorities—need to be expunged[7] and criticized, preserving the exhibits of what was while utilizing what is as useful towards development towards a better world than has ever existed; i.e., to be indebted, but not enslaved, towards an imaginary past: the Wisdom of the Ancients as a living document to learn from, but also rewrite as needed.

Said document—and by extension the public imagination/understanding associated with it—is something that workers can actively contribute towards for their own betterment. As such, these borrowed concepts’ flexible application works well beyond their original, intended prescription while we make our own monsters (thus historical materialism). Time is of the essence, though; we need to critique power dialectically-materially yesterday and now in the kinds of language that the vast majority of workers actively recognize and consume voraciously—monsters, but also sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll as “Gothic.” Capitalism commodifies worker struggles through Gothic language as popular but policed, something that we must reclaim from state forces styling themselves (and canon) as genuine and exclusive, but also “safe.” Intended readers for the ghost of the counterfeit are habitually its greatest abusers through the process of abjection; i.e., inside a heteronormative, setter-colonial system that has, since its very inception, been designed to exploit, demonize and control others for profit—to rape them through an elaborate series of mind games and lies that have them fearful of, and fascinated with, the imaginary past as a dependable tool of menticide. To this, rape is more than physical/sexual violence; it’s the flagrant abuse of power that leads to worker exploitation on physical, mental, sexual and/or emotional levels over time: the mind as something to rape according to stations and stances within Capitalism that reflect harmful positions of unfair status, privilege and authority.

Our Gothic-Communist emphasis, then, is the class and cultural solidarity of Gothicized sex work in worker hearts and minds—its monstrous artistic output constituting collective labor action as a liberatory teaching device; i.e., proletarian praxis operating through internalized class/culture consciousness, emotional/Gothic intelligence, and trauma awareness and expression; and whose subsequent appreciative irony—of xenophilic camp through praxial catharsis—opposes bourgeois praxis and state propaganda’s heteronormative canon. “Monsters are real” becomes a labor dispute, insofar as they express through theatrical means how all workers, but especially gender-non-conforming workers, have the right to exist and not be exploited by capital; i.e., the same right deserving to all humans, animals, and the Earth: the satisfaction of our basic material needs and the ability to pursue our own happiness within these material systems under post-scarcity.

(artist: La Patte)

Said praxis, when synthesized, aims to “rewire” a fundamentally bourgeois Superstructure: by transforming said canon, affecting the Base through daily habits that, when cultivated, express a rebellious class and cultural character (re: camping the twin trees of Capitalism). While the Base and Superstructure originate from Marx’s own work, the Superstructure interests us because—as stated during the thesis volume—it normally “grows out of the Base and reflects the ruling class’ interests” (re: Rana Indrajit Singh). As sex-positive workers, we want to denormalize worker abuse and alienation by shifting away from generational trauma as a systemic effect; i.e., by transforming the state’s capacity to deliver such things, attacking worker minds with sex-coercive canon and unironic, harmful xenophobia and xenophilia. We must directly challenge said education and synthesis according to our own sex-positive, hence iconoclastic, Gothic poetics: recultivating the twin trees by supplying our own in their place. Our liberation is meant to be gradual, occurring through a proletarian Gothic imagination that is grown over time, and whose careful cultivation stems from a collective intelligence/awareness that is explicitly developed to function as anarcho-Communist, not Marxist-Leninist (or other socio-political and -economic arrangements that remain prone to the historical abuses of state power as a vertical, thus harmful, configuration).

Though proletarian, Sex Positivity comes out of an abject past fraught with compromise, the “state Socialism” of Marxist-Leninism becoming increasingly nominal (and abusive) under Capitalism; obviously we want to avoid that as much as we can while developing Communism outside of establishment politics; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM according to our central tenets; e.g., through ironic Amazonomachia, emancipatory castle-narrative and the palliative Numinous, etc.

(original artist: William Kurelek)

The state and oppositional praxis have many moving parts that complicate the latter’s execution, especially since its working often generates friction amid praxial inertia. We’ll consider performing proletarian praxis under live, total conditions in Volume Three (first adumbrating its complicated Gothic histories in Volume Two). For Volume One, just understand that that my manifesto tenets, Gothic academic theories, mode of expression, oppositional-praxial model and synthesis roadmap (explained in that order) are all designed to function through Gothic-Communist iconoclasts re-cultivating a bourgeois Superstructure, which is what praxial synthesis ultimately is: thesis vs antithesis, canon vs iconoclasm; i.e., iconoclastic poiesis as a dark poetics/pedagogy of the oppressed intended to make workers more emotionally/Gothically intelligent, sex-positive and capable in terms of recognizing but also interrogating/negotiating power and trauma while instructing good play vs bad play during their own lives. This liminal, ongoing procedure occurs through their own creative output, which helps prevent future abuses by changing the socio-material conditions that lead to systemic harm; i.e., by telling beautiful lies that speak truth to power in “Satanic” ways, but also formulate and embody an active and unified front against state powers (and their monstrous, fetishized media, often with pornographic qualities) abusing all workers: sex-positive monsters that express worker identities attached to ongoing struggles, unresolved under capital and pinned by the boot of state enforcers. In short, we learn from the voiced oppression and lived trauma of others.

This abuse happens to varying degrees, but our monstrous empowerment demands intersectional, solidarized resistance; i.e., praxial synthesis amounts to the cultivated intuition that executes practical theory out of daily habits. Through what we make ourselves between ourselves, we achieve praxial catharsis through monstrous theatre as second-nature. Guided by sound theory as an instructional path leading away from systemic oppression, it’s something discussed less in Volume Zero because Volume Zero was primarily theory (though the camp map finale gave a brief example of camping canon between Blxxd Bunny and myself regarding systemic trauma; re: the ludo-Gothic BDSM prototype). Volume One aims to reduce said theories to a practical degree, upon which the synthesis roadmap will thoroughly consider trauma writing and artwork as things to synthesize through our bodies as monstrous-feminine (flesh is semantically loaded with fearful-dogmatic qualities that we can instruct workers away from using said bodies in a sex-positive manner). We’ll work towards praxial synthesis as we thread the manifesto, after which the volume’s second half considers its instruction towards catharsis); i.e., how praxial synthesis executes practical theory by cultivating good social-sexual habits that simplify and execute theory during oppositional praxis.

This extracurricular instruction/de facto education generally requires a “dance partner” to move with in harmonized theory before systemic catharsis can be realistically attained: while wearing costumes that express what we have in mind. The goblin is one such example, with sex-positive versions reclaiming anti-Semitic tropes and stigmatic language through complex social-sexual labor exchanges: between my partner Bay and I during our own attempts at praxial synthesis/catharsis with ludo-Gothic BDSM.

(exhibit 6b3: Model and artist: Bay and Persephone van der Waard. Bay is my partner and we make art together to express and interrogate trauma, rendering it visible during ludo-Gothic BDSM according to how we identify and self-determine. The goblin, then, is both my mascot monster for Gothic Communism, and the way that Bay identifies with as a monstrous entity that serves their pedagogy of the oppressed: the means to voice their trauma and their power with. Everything occupies the same space, including resistance and power but also class/cultural character in the presence of state abuse’s generational trauma; i.e., as something to overcome through mutual, informed consent and instructional love.)

Oppositional praxis during development reliably leads to liminal conflict and transition—especially in Gothic stories when oscillation and ludo-Gothic BDSM are expected. Part of the cliché is how a monster or parallel space’s praxial role in Gothic fiction becomes ontologically ambiguous during oppositional praxis; e.g., class allies/traitors and bourgeois/proletarian monsters, witches, zombies, etc. As Gothic Communists, we’ll have to learn to tell ’em all apart, but also relate to them from moment to living moment. While historical materialism remains a common introduction for separating traitors and co-conspirators—i.e., the dialectical-material study of monsters across the Gothic mode over space and time—these warring factors cannot and should not be separate from their social-sexual elements. To that, monstrous language remains utterly essential as we synthesize praxis within our own friendships.

This often has a Satanic function. As the “Notes on Power” essay from Volume Zero argues, the Satanic rebel speaks truth to power by telling beautiful, paradoxical and doubled lies that resist state control; re: to be “of the devil’s party” like Milton was (according to William Blake) but consciously so; i.e., conducting what the elite would consider thought crimes through dark poetics that are often more interesting (and fun/gender parodic) than blindly submitting to pre-existing authorities: facing one’s undead sensations and animalistic hunger while demonically shifting one’s shape, effectively offering up forbidden knowledge (of pleasure and trauma) when confronting one’s true self as anathema to the status quo under Capitalism. Utilized in this sense, Gothic poetics teach workers how to self-fashion and self-determine through subversive/dissident identities that, far from being controlled opposition, furtively educate audiences on how to question authority whilst forming out of oppressive, gender-troubled struggles against them; i.e., through trauma writing and artwork as a mode of survival and reclamation of one’s power through darkness visible reminding prudes that “Medusa lives!”

As my thesis also argues, “Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode” (re: “The Quest for Power“). Bay embodies that as someone I love and want to depict the way that makes them feel most authentic, but also heard and seen relative to how they feel from day to day as an oppressed person who lives a highly Satanic life. A neurodivergent, non-binary and Indigenous cutie, they treat the term “shapeshifter” as something a paradox—less of something to turn into what never was, and more a revelation of their true self waiting to be shown to others who normally don’t have the eyes for it: a possible self tied to a possible world that loves and worships them as a god. “Playing god” includes playing with gods, and Bay is my god to worship, appreciate and love as equals in a highly plastic world. We constantly learn from each other while having fun together, our shared performance and play operating through Gothic poetics as an (a)sexual voice; delight and appreciation amid (for us) profound erotic euphoria. Doing so during ludo-Gothic BDSM constitutes an effective means of interrogating trauma mid-synthesis, but also negotiating with it; i.e., to teach workers confidence by using their bodies to learn with, but also demonize and play with inside immensely cathartic thresholds. They’re someone to dive into and enjoy while synthesizing praxis towards a better world one step (and delicious fuck) at a time.

(artist: Bay)

Onto “Mission Statement and Remediating Modern-day ‘Rome’“!

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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Originally Sex Positivity was a single volume, thus would cite its own exhibits in parenthesis. As the books grew, however, exhibits were dispersed into different separate volumes, thereby making said system moot. Now that most of my book series is online, though, I can effectively cite an exhibit and its accompanying post; e.g., “(exhibit 43e2c1 from ‘Always a Victim‘).” This is a brand-new trend, and not one that will happen in my later books until I get around to their second additions.

[2] The agreement between Cuwu and I, which we struck in mid-2022, was that I could exhibit our material on my OnlyFans*—and by extension, promote it online and make money off it—provided I kept their real name out of it. To this day, I have honored our agreement, choosing to call them by their alias, “Cuwu,” instead (a nickname I gave them).

*I only ever posted one video of Cuwu on my OnlyFans, and generally don’t advertise it, but here’s a screencap:

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

[3] A reactionary element haunting Marxism since Marx and Engels; re (from “Making Marx Gay”):

Fascists tend to say, “make something great again,” arguing as they do for a return to greatness that is inextricably tied to a conservative imaginary past. Conversely, Marx and his ilk tended to look to the future to escape the ghosts of the past, except their banishment under Capitalist Realism has led them—as Derrida pointed out—to haunt language through spectres of the man himself: his nebulous, shapeshifting reputation. It is this version of Marx that we must contend with, because it is the one that we can transform out of the actual man himself as a complicated fixture of history.

To that, this brief reminder stresses something that my thesis discusses repeatedly and should likewise be kept in mind throughout the entire book: Marx wasn’t gay in the functional sense; he was to some degree homophobic, and bigoted in ways his epistolary correspondence with Engels reveals. And while I think it’s entirely worth noting that homosexuality and its formative history merit valid criticism insofar as men with power have often sexually abused children (which Foucault dubiously called “everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality [and] inconsequential bucolic pleasures,” notably lamenting their ending of, following the rise of the bourgeoisie), we must also remember that until the late 1800s gender-non-conformity was entirely synonymous with criminal activity (for men, because women and slaves weren’t legally considered people at this point) (source).

To it, Marx’ signature homophobia and anti-queer tendencies haven’t gone anywhere; they continue to haunt liberatory discourse among Marxist-Leninists punching down queerphobically against people—i.e., those who know more about these matters than they do; re: Bad Empanada making Stalinist arguments against me and my kind because of Marxist-Leninist nostalgia:

Originally from a community post Bad Empanada made, saying “People who talk about sex constantly and openly like it’s their main interest must be dealt with. Make it taboo again,” followed by him responding to me, saying “BDSM doctors aren’t real” when I called myself one (which, I am); i.e., I—a BDSM doctor and trans woman—am not real (thus neither are sex therapists and paid/unpaid researchers, apparently).

It goes to show that people who are often right about a lot of things, just as often, are really fucking wrong when they are wrong. “Doctors,” for instance, didn’t originate from universities in the 20th-century style; for our purposes, they started off as clerics and scholars in monasteries during the Middle Ages—e.g., Leonardo da Vinci didn’t have a university degree and worked with media and materials, hand-in-hand (and was charged with sodomy* by a local town); i.e., his contributions aren’t something you can merely dismiss for him doing so (including the sodomy charge) (source: “Understanding Vampires) (source).

While pre-capitalist ideas do occupy Gothic-Communist pushes towards a post-scarcity world (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients recultivating the Superstructure), nostalgia towards said half-real past should never trump human rights, thus undercut development during ludo-Gothic BDSM; it should assist in development by undercutting the power of the state and its proponents—anisotropically reversing abjection during a revolutionary cryptonymy!

[4] When Zizek writes, “We can and should unconditionally support Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorist attacks” (source: “The Real Dividing Line in Israel-Palestine,” 2023), he’s essentially apologizing for the state model and its time-tested monopolies on terror and violence; specifically by endorsing Israel, he’s defending a fundamentally settler-colonial project, akin to supporting the Nazi regime’s right to exist while invading Poland but updated through modern-day proxy-war maneuvers (though the WW2-era US certainly expected Nazi Germany to abolish the elite’s enemies in Russia). The two-state solution is untenable because Israel is built on infinite military conquest; they decide who the “terrorists” are, then destroy them with extreme prejudice and impunity (thanks to American geopolitical support); e.g., GDF’s “It’s Official” (2023): “We are essentially seeing one of the worst bombing campaigns in human history. This is the crime of the century” and it’s being committed by the Israeli state and supported by privileged, puffed-up dickwads like Zizek (and politicians like Bernie Sanders or content creators like Natalie Wynn, aka Contrapoints [Bad Empanada’s “He Just Can’t Help Himself” and “Why Liberals Claim to Be Leftists“]).

[5] “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: Pressbooks’ “Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s review of The Monk“).

[6] The quote is ubiquitous, but consider the opening page for Alex Link’s “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots” (2009) for a summary of it:

In the midst, of its definitive arguments, Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) pauses to consider the Gothic just long enough to single it out as a hopelessly “boring and exhausted paradigm.” The Gothic, he declares, is a mere “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised” and it should not be mistaken for a “protofeminist denunciation of patriarchy” nor “a protopolitical protest against rape.” Although surprising at first, this condemnation is strategic in that it establishes the Gothic as Jameson’s critical other; the Gothic becomes an object of ritual sacrifice, imbued with those qualities in Jameson’s argument which are most discomfiting. […] If one regards Postmodernism as telling a story about postmodernity, its plot, taken as a whole, is curiously Radcliffean, in that it routinely presents the reader with postmodern objects meant to inspire anxiety before explaining them away. Jameson’s dismissal of the Gothic, in other words, resembles nothing so much as his own description of the Gothic, in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979), as a means of raising and exorcising an object of anxiety (source).

In other words, Jameson writes like Coleridge does—like a scared white boy but even more allergic to the Gothic mode, oddly emulating one of its most famous (and white) female authors (we’ll return to critiquing Jameson [and Coleridge] in the Demon Module’s “The Future Is a Dead Mall“).

[7] When I tried taking Lovecraft to task (“Method in His Madness: Lovecraft, the Rock and Roll Iconoclast and Buoyant Lead Balloon,” 2017), renowned Lovecraft scholar T.S. Joshi had a fit/refused to publish my work in his annual Lovecraft journal. Joshi seemed to dislike the mere suggestion that Lovecraft wasn’t somehow perfect as is—conveniently equipped to do what he did (according to Joshi) for his target audience, and that we pesky kids of today are just ignorant of his sublime genius. Puh-lease! If Lovecraft was “perfect,” you wouldn’t have New Weird/Next Weird authors like Thomas Ligotti, Jeff Vandermeer and China Miéville; producers like Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Lovecraft Country (2020); or developers like Red Hook Studios chewing Lovecraft up and routinely spitting out his racist, useless bones. Take what’s useful and leave the rest (without forgetting it).