Boulder, Colorado is a city of massive class divides, and its problems reverberate and are duplicated across Boulder County and its other municipalities. The median home price is $1.5 million. More than half of city residents rent, and of those, over 60% are classified as cost-burdened, paying more than 30% of their monthly income in rent. The median income is over $80,000, but 20% of the population lives below the poverty line. Boulder occupies land stolen from the Ute, Arapahoe and Cheyenne people in violation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie, and has blocked off huge swathes of this land to create a “green belt” largely reserved for the recreation of the wealthy. It has worked for decades to restrict housing growth to virtually zero, leaving many residents unhoused.
Out Boulder County is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that maintains a monopoly on the public perception of queer people in Boulder County, and most funding and resources intended to support queer people are funneled through OBC. Executive director Mardi Moore and her immediate staff are frequently the only people consulted by jounalists for queer perspectives, and the county & municipal governments cite OBC’s support to deflect criticism of their homophobic and transphobic policies. Corporations such as Google and Comcast oppress trans employees, donate millions to anti-LGBTQ organizations, and globally exploit people and the environment – then turn to OBC to buy pinkwashing and distract from their violence.
At approximately 12:30 pm the afternoon of June 13th, queer organizers met and obstructed the Out Boulder County-organized Pride motorcade, by using banners to block its planned route at the intersection of 15th Street & Pearl Street. One banner read “No Cops at Pride / No Cops at All”. The other read “Liberation, Not Assimilation”. Chants were heard, including “Bottoms and tops, we all hate cops!” and “Pride was a riot! We can make it one again! / Pride was a riot! It still is!” Meanwhile, other comrades distributed a zine that elaborated on these messages, titled “Whose Pride Is It Anyway?” (printable version included below).
looks like the #Boulder Pride march is stopped by people protesting Out Boulder County’s cooperation with police pic.twitter.com/uxiVQS3YgR
— sean collins (@seancllns) June 13, 2021
While the rear of the motorcade was soon diverted down 16th Street, the front, led by a fire truck, remained stuck, and motorcycle cops confronted the banner holders and ordered them to move out of the street. A designated police liaison intercepted police officers and carried their threats as an intermediary, delaying them and making it easier for comrades to Shut the Fuck Up and not talk to the cops.
15th and Pearl marks the start of the pedestrian-only heart of bourgeois Boulder, Pearl Street Mall, so the action was observed both by those who had gathered on the route to spectate the motorcade & by many other passersby. As the blockade began, many spectators cheered & shouted supportive messages. Others were confused, asking what “No Cops At All” could mean. Others were openly hostile, with at least one self-identified “supportive mom” thanking the police and jeeringly asking a trans woman “is your mother proud of you?”
The cheers for the police and abuse of protestors by a segment of the Pride observers rips away the mask of performative wokeness from liberal Boulderites who stick BLM signs in their yard and then call the cops on Black people, from petty-bourgeois “progressives” who hang rainbow flags in their businesses while stealing wages from queer workers. A Pride event that prioritizes these people’s comfort over the liberation of the most marginalized is nothing but rainbow fascism.
While they may still be PFLAG darlings, OBC’s harm to QTPOC and the community as a whole has been so egregious that they have even sparked opposition among less-radical LGBTQ+ Boulderites, resulting in a simultaneous unaffiliated protest led by former board members of the organization, sharing their own flyers and stories of being treated with hostility & pushed out of the racist organization after asking for financial transparency & trying to lead diversity & inclusion efforts. While they pushed a reformist agenda, some showed solidarity with the blockade, using their signs to obstruct cameras from recording faces.
Despite being an organization that brings in over half a million dollars a year in funding. OBC does not provide substantially more services than they did when they were half the size. Instead, the excess is spent on increasingly lavish parties for monied gays. #OBCTEA
— OBCTEA (@obctea) June 13, 2021
Out Boulder had set up a tent at the edge of the mall where professional drag queen Jessica L’Whor was hosting their livestream of the event; L’Whor has been criticized by many in the Denver/Front Range drag scene, including her former collaborator Kai Lee Mykels, for attempting to dominate the community and exclude styles of drag associated with BIPOC. At around 13:00 into the livestream recording, behind L’Whor’s gushing thank-yous to OBC’s long list of corporate sponsors, chanting & motorcycles can be heard in the background; the livestream then cuts out until after the protestors are dispersed.
Due to the vulnerabilities of some queer participants, the blockade dispersed after receiving two warnings of imminent citation from the police.
We consider this to be a largely successful action. Thanks to a small group of on-the-ground actors and the support of remote comrades, OBC’s corporatized, performative parade was forced to avoid one of the most visible and populated intersections along its planned route. The immediate police response and threat of prosecution towards a fairly innocuous and entirely “non-violent” action demonstrated that the state is opposed to any true expression of Pride that does not require its approval or support its violence, and will wield cops against non-conforming queer folks to silence dissent. Spectators who came expecting a sanitized party were instead challenged with exposure to the often-silenced messages of queer resistance, and educational materials were distributed that we hope will raise consciousness among queers who may now realize that radical queer resistance is still a possibility – that we can be free and build our communities outside of the stranglehold of assimilationist non-profits like Out Boulder County.
Digital zine: https://cryptpad.fr/file/#/2/file/nEuT-Y-+0NxMWJZKIG1vVYPg/
Printable zine: https://cryptpad.fr/file/#/2/file/2A5Rl10vUkHulSwi09kVEcLw/
Want to contribute to COLA? Send us your action, reportback, artwork (found or original), essay, zine, or whatever to [email protected]
]]>On the night of May Day, we attacked the office of BI Incorporated in Gunbarrel, Colorado. Phrases such as “¡Chinga La Migra!” “Abolish ICE” and “Fuck Your Shackles” were written with spray paint at the entrance of the building. “Profiteers of white supremacist violence” was painted on one wall. “Fuck ICE” was written on the BI sign facing the roadway, and rocks were thrown through the glass panels on the main entrance doors.
BI Inc. is a company owned by the private prison company The GEO Group, which runs the migrant concentration camp in Aurora. The company manufacturers the GPS ankle monitors that GEO and ICE use to surveil the movements of migrants who live outside of their camps, and to subsequently incarcerate them if they move too freely.
BI’s ankle monitors are nothing more than high-tech shackles. BI originally manufactured cattle monitors, and now applies that technology to dehumanize people, earning hundreds of millions of dollars from ICE contracts in the process. BI also runs ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP), which requires participants to check-in regularly at BI offices, where many have reported discrimination, harassment, humiliation, and assault by BI employees.
This is all unnecessary and deliberate cruelty. Borders are arbitrary creations used by the powerful to prevent international solidarity among the working class. They should not exist, and no one should be punished for crossing them, whether by incarceration in a physical building, or by being forced to wear a spying device.
Through our small act of defiance, we hope to demonstrate to our comrades that they too can take immediate action against the oppressive forces of capital and the state. We also hope to inspire the workers at BI to end their support for La Migra in solidarity with the global working class. Together we can work to erode the power of our country’s white supremacist policing apparatus. As long as it festers in our communities, we must fight it.
No more borders. No more shackles. No more “USA.” Freedom for all.
Jock Waldo, the President of BI Inc, is registered to vote as a Republican at 11192 Twin Spruce Rd. in Golden, CO.
Solidarity.
]]>Regarding the march on the evening of April 17th for Adam Toledo and others murdered by police in recent days, we have heard criticisms– a lack of clear targets, long distance, and accessibility issues. We are trying to learn from this, and, among other things, have reconsidered Cheesman Park as a gathering area, and are thinking about ways to communicate approximate marching distances to potential targets.
Most importantly, we are not trying to be protest leaders. We wish to, foremost, help build a culture of autonomous demonstrations and direct action that “Colorado” is in desperate need of. Going forward, this means that any actions publicized by us will prioritize community planning and consensus building. Disagreement and satisfactory compromise are vital to autonomous movements, alongside a culture of respect for diversity of tactics and honesty about acceptable risk for individuals and collectives.
Accessibility – No space or action can be accessible for everyone, so we recognize it is important to give people enough information to know if it will be accessible for them. We aren’t going to demand “more bodies in the streets” and shame people for not doing things that are damaging or impossible for them. Potential solutions include having multiple contemporaneous actions with different tactics and purpose.
Action – Autonomous movements rely upon individual decision making, and we recognize the importance of those choices on the attitude of any collective engaged in direct action. We encourage the use of any direct action or march as an opportunity for any sort of antistate or anticapitalist actions — collective energy is important to the impact of direct action, and is built up from small acts of defiance to the oppressive system.
Every direct action, especially new protest routes and strategies, creates flak for DPD – every new scenario they have to plan for and respond to dilutes their overall repressive capacity. What are we accomplishing if we keep rattling the fences at the Capitol and the District 6 Precinct, getting gassed & arrested again and again? We aren’t saying nobody should ever mobilize at these places. But there is a difference between risking arrest and seeking arrest. As such, we are going to encourage creative and smart plans and actions that minimize harm to our community while most disrupting the system as it stands.
Arrests (& lack thereof) – We believe that posing a material threat to power can be worth risking arrest. However, mass arrests are (in most cases) no longer a beneficial end in themselves. In the words of Kwame Ture, “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience.” Tear gas is a weapon that police use against us and that we prepare to defend against; it is not a necessary badge of a successful action. State violence is spectacular and has been touted as an effective means through which to affect change, but relying wholly upon direct and dramatic confrontation with state forces often plays into their hands. As with electoralism, autonomous movements cannot be sucked into a belief that pitched battles with state forces are a meaningful route through which to abolish the police; we must embrace our strengths while denying the enemy theirs.
On a related note – there were too many cameras last night. This is in part our fault for not specifying that cameras are not welcome on the flyer. Let us all do a better job of stopping surveillance of direct actions. (see: “In Defense of Smashing Cameras”)
We think some things last night were very good – we appreciate the protective cars at the rear, and the art people created, and are very happy no one was arrested. Thoughtful critique helps us all grow and we look forward to seeing the community learn, iterate, and experiment with future actions.
– some anarchists
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