The punching of Bob Black & the fallout

Index:

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An Open Letter to Bay Area Anarchists (April 4, 2014)

An ugly precedent has been set by the episode of crude authoritarian behavior at the 2014 SF Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. The screaming, the threats of harm, the physical intimidation directed at us personally, as well as the vandalizing of the books and magazines on the CAL Press/Anarchy magazine table by a dozen or so people associated with the Quilombo social center was out of line. Such bullying, harassment, and intimidation should not be tolerated at anarchist events or in anarchist spaces merely because other anarchists might have unpopular ideas and use words that may not align with a particular perspective on identity politics.

So far, this bullying has not just been tolerated, in fact it has been rewarded; by choosing the safest path and walking away, we have helped to encourage it. The biggest vindication for those who instigated these antics is that, despite their threats of inflicting physical harm on other anarchists, and despite their refusal to talk about what they found so upsetting about our presence — even with those who, despite their best efforts, were unsuccessful in de-escalating the conflict — they were not asked to leave the bookfair.

Those from Quilombo who menaced us no doubt feel justified in targeting us, but the three of us individually, our project, and our six year old son are not actually their enemies. We have spoken to several people who are their comrades, and have expressed our willingness to engage in a mediated resolution to this conflict. We urge anyone who was frightened, appalled, or annoyed by the disruption at the bookfair to stand in favor of verbal mediation and against physical intimidation.

John, Lisa, and Lawrence
CAL Press/Anarchy magazine; editor@anarchymag.org

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NO MORE WATER, THE FIRE NEXT TIME! By Bob Black (April 28, 2014)

The latest – I dare to hope, the last — Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair (Marxist-Opportunist) took place on March 22, 2014, in Oakland, at “The Crucible.” This long-running event was previously the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair, until high rents forced it to relocate to the East Bay. Its ostensible sponsor is the Bound Together, nominally-anarchist bookstore in Haight-Ashbury. Traditionally, Bound Together fronted for AK Press, supposedly a collective, which was founded, funded, and dominated by a foreign businessman named Ramsey Kanaan whose immigration status remains mysterious. When, after a few years, the AK Press collective came to be not in complete agreement with Kanaan about policy, he left and founded, funded, and dominated, PM Press, which, to the outside observer, is, in its publishing decisions, indistinguishable from AK Press. I don’t know which publisher now controls this Bookfair. This is one of many things which the victims of the recent outrage at the Bookfair probably know, but which they do not disclose. But it is unmistakably under the control of anarcho-leftists who are far more leftist than anarchist, and who only grudgingly allow post-left anarchists to table.

Several post-left anarchist projects are active in the East Bay: C.A.L. Press; Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed [AJODA]; and LBC Books/Distribution. They were at the Bookfair. Their publications and distribution have challenged AK Press and PM Press both politically and commercially. The Bookfair management (which does not identify itself) would really rather that these anarchists weren’t there, but, it can’t think of any reason to refuse their being there. It can, however, quietly encourage terrorist actions to get rid of the real anarchists.

At the end of this Bookfair (close to 6:00 PM), a mob of Politically Correct vandals – according to the tablers (John, Lisa and Lawrence), a dozen goons – launched a surprise attack on the table shared by C.A.L. Press and Anarchy Magazine. The thugs, as they screamed threats, poured water all over the table, destroying many books and magazines – including copies of at least one of my books! there will be retaliation for this! And I will send them a bill! The people at the table, surprised and heavily outnumbered, cannot be blamed for not fighting back. But the bystanders can be blamed. But, they can be blamed – as I shall go on to do – for covering up for the thugs, and for not telling what they know about the background to this story, and for not publicly identifying those involved.

I strongly protest the complete cover-up of who did this, and why. Even I, from afar, with scant help from the victims, can relate more about this incident than its victims have made public – and even more than they have privately related. I strongly object to the failure of the victims’ “Open Letter to Bay Area Anarchists” to explain the back story to this attentat. It can’t be justified, but it can be explained.

Once upon a time, in some anarchist context which (once again) I don’t know about, Lawrence Jarach got into an argument with some black anarchist about the Anarchist Persons of Colors’ practice of collaboration with reactionary black churches. He reportedly said something like, “we should burn the black churches, and the white churches too.” I hardly need to say – or do I? – that Christian churches have historically been the allies of the state and the enemies of anarchists. That is why the great classical anarchists, such as Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tucker, Malatesta, Goldman, etc. have been, not only anti-clerical, but anti-religious too. That is why, in the early period of the Spanish Revolution, the anarchists burned hundreds of churches, and put the others to better uses. The APOCs’ know nothing of this, as they know nothing about anarchist history, and as they know nothing about anarchism, and as they are not anarchists. A pox on APOCs!

Something else they know nothing about is what they scream about there not being: racial equality. To advocate the burning of all churches, black and white, as Lawrence did, for them means that Lawrence is a “white supremacist.” Racial equality is racist. Only whites can be racist. All you have to do is, if you are white, ride public buses in the lower-income areas of American cities, as I have done thousands of times, to find out otherwise.

But all that the “Open Letter to Bay Area Anarchists” (signed by Lawrence, John [Henri Nolette], and Lisa [L.D. Hobson] – the members of the Anarchy Magazine editorial/production group) says about this is, basically that in ostensibly anarchist “spaces,” such intimidation, bullying, etc., should not be tolerated. Let’s be warm and fuzzy! Let’s be very California! Let’s make nice! But some people are not nice. These thugs are not nice. And, for the record, neither am I. I am very not nice to people who are not nice. And my not-niceness is not limited to verbal unpleasantries. Nor am I forgiving. Water on my books isn’t water under the bridge: not now, not ever. Certain faces will also be watered – with tears.

I’m not saying that – although I’ve sat at that table twice – I would have responded more violently. At my age (63), I probably shouldn’t have. But I think I would have got into it anyway. And if two or three other people had joined me, I’m sure that I would have, and we would have, kicked some ass. All bullies are cowards. If it that got messy, that would probably have been the end of this Bookfair, and that would be a good thing. But I appreciate that the people at the table, outnumbered and caught by surprise, understandably didn’t fight back. But why is the back story a privately circulated secret? Especially since it has been so much gossiped about?

However, the anarcho-racists’ antagonism to Lawrence, even aside from its being irrational and anti-anarchist, does have a back story. The victims have concealed this, except for saying that this was done to them by “people associated with” Qilombo. They do not publicly identify the individuals involved. But privately, one of them has identified, as the ringleader, somebody calling himself “Hannibal Shakur.” I am sure that this is not the name under which he collects his welfare checks. However, he was one of the speakers on the anarcho-racist panel at the end of the Bookfair. I had to find this out by Googling. It’s obvious that at the end of the racist panel, Hannibal and his entourage just went over and trashed the CAL Press/AJODA table, although, no CAL Press publication, and no issue of AJODA has ever said anything against black racist pseudo-anarchism – an oversight, perhaps. It’s not just a cause for complaint that the thugs “were not asked to leave the bookfair” – they were its invited guests. This was an inside job. Imagine what would have happened to me if I watered the tables of AK Press, PM Press and See Sharp Press!

The “Open Letter to Bay Area Anarchists” should be circulated more widely than to Bay Area anarchists (who are mostly feckless). It should go to every group which tabled at the Bookfair. But it needs revision. The hmuliating offer to “mediate,” which was anyway predictably ignored, should be deleted. There should be a call to boycott the Bookfair until it publicly repudiates the “Qilombo” mob (which can’t even spell correctly!), and bans their future presence and participation, and financially compensates CAL Press and AJODA for their losses. Why should they pay? Because they are liable, at least for negligence, more likely for recklessness (consciously ignoring what they should have expected to happen), or even for authorizing the attentat. They are guilty until proven innocent.

In the “Open Letter,” the victims say about the thugs that they are “not actually their enemies.” Why not? You may not be their enemies – although you should be – but they are your enemies. It’s okay to be the enemies of anybody, even Persons of Color, if they are Negro Nazis. And it’s stupid not to be. I am literally, physically nauseated by the way the victims are covering up for their oppressors. I want to know names, and addresses, and phone numbers. I want to know where they work, in the unlikely event that they do, and where they go to school. Their employers (or their professors) should be identified and informed. It might be useful to obtain, and circulate, their criminal records. And I want to know (as I have heard conflicting versions) the race of these racists because they played the race card. Why not send a demand to the “black churches” on whose behalf this all supposedly happened to repudiate the action? If they don’t, they indeed deserve to be burned. You could send the demand to the white churches too. That’s racial equality. Burn, baby, burn!

In the words of that eloquent Negro slave song (alluding to the Flood and to the Last Judgment): “No more water, the fire next time!” First water; then fire.

The back story on Qilombo itself should be told, not just hinted at in private E-mails. This was apparently originally a punk anarchist type infoshop which, once it got going, was taken over by black militants, as recently as January. Its website states: “In January of 2014, the Holdout temporarily closed its doors to do some serious cleaning.” Yes: ethnic cleansing, It is not as if what happened at the Bookfair came out of nowhere. It came out of this vipers’ nest, at 2313 San Pablo Avenue. Who’s the landlord? Are these desirable tenants? It sounds like a soft target, much easier to trash than a table at a bookfair with hundreds of people around, even though those people were sheep. Two or three people with a car could do the trick. The Black Bloc could deal with these black blockheads. Out of town activists could do the job (I can think of some people who might be interested – one guy in particular), to whom blame could be assigned (“outside agitators”). I offer to my Bay Area friends, plausible deniability. And nobody will be extradited for the crime of trashing a Negro anarchist pesthole, although the police will regret the loss of their agent provocateurs. (Isn’t this an obvious possibility?) I wonder if Qilombo is also a weapons arsenal and a crackhouse.

From hints and scraps, I suspect that what happened at the Bookfair goes back to what happened at Occupy Oakland. This was one of the largest, and clearly the most radical of the Occupy actions. I have no doubt that every effort was made to involve all activists and all communities in Oakland. The later interlopers had every opportunity to get in at the beginning and shape the development of the project. But they didn’t. They put in no effort. They took no risks. But when Occupy Oakland got going, and got a lot of publicity, then these lazy POC opportunists butted in with their irrelevant, absurd “Decolonize” demands – as if Occupy was colonizing anything. That takeover attempt failed. But the pattern of parasitism continues. Were the Qilombo louts the Decolonize Occupy louts? I’m going to assume that they were, unless I see evidence to the contrary. Heah come de judge – Judge Dredd!

And what solidarity have Bay Area anarchists provided, since the “Open Letter” was circulated? None, unless the victims are turning this into yet another secret. On Facebook, a prominent East Bay post-left anarchist chieftain has dismissed the outrage as “drama.” Instead of taking action, he plays Kriegspiel. Several years ago, I discussed, with this same notable, my having been run out of the Bay Area in 1985 by leftist thugs. He assured me that such a thing could never happen again (if I returned), because then I had no defenders, but now I had allies to defend my back. Ever since I was driven away, I wanted to return. I liked living there better than anywhere I’ve lived before or since. The first time I visited, publicly, I tabled, at the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair, with CAL Press/Anarchy Magazine. Because there had been threats, it was made clear to the Bookfair managers that any violence offered to me would have serious consequences. I was even provided with a bodyguard! And so my enemies (white leftists of the Processed World stripe) didn’t attempt anything. They too are, like the Qilombo bullies, like all bullies, cowards.

I no longer want to live in the Bay Area. I was moving toward this decision already, but this Bookfair outrage was decisive. I’ve observed the astounding rise in rents and in the cost of living, which has already forced all of my friends out of San Francisco (where I lived for four years) to the East Bay (where I lived for three years). Now the East Bay is becoming economically impossible, except for those of my friends who are so fortunate as to own houses. I see no way I could live there without sacrificing too much of my small income to housing. I was thinking about doing that anyway. Not now. If I have some friends in the Bay Area, I still have enemies too. The friends are not as reliable as the enemies. If I am assailed, my friends will dismiss my difficulties as “drama.” Since they don’t even defend themselves, or each other, they won’t defend me. And I am less than ever able to defend myself all by myself.

This announcement will delight my enemies, and it will probably also come as a relief to most of my “friends.” I am equally indifferent to both reactions. The enemies, however, might want to consider that, if I’m not local, I can strike at them and they can’t strike back. As for the friends, my respect for them has greatly declined.

I expect that, as a result of circulating this statement as widely as possible, the result will be absolutely nothing.

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In Defense of Bob Black by Aragorn (Sept 19, 2015)

For those of you that haven’t heard I threw an event with Bob Black at our local infoshop on August 7th 2015. At this event local activist “Morgan Le Fay” came to protest Bob for the 1995 Hogshire affair and ended up punching him a few times (3) in the face. A month later Bob announced on Facebook that I was both a traitor and enemy. He proceeded to blow my pseudonym (incorrectly) as an act of vengeance.

Rather than speaking about my own anger at Morgan or Bob at their behavior I am going to give the eulogy–one I’ve been contemplating for some time–of Bob.

I have known Bob, not in his daring years when I could have been a co-conspirator to his minor offenses against local legends Processed World, not when he was at the peak of his power and railed against work at the Gorilla Grotto, but perhaps in his decline, as publisher of his last two books. But the relationship between a publisher and an author is a close one. We could safely discuss his entire oeuvre at length and depth. We could discuss our shared ideological enemies. I could share with him my goal of returning his name back to being on the cynosure of anarchist thinkers where he belonged, returning him from his exile (for his naughty behavior against Jim Hogshire, etc.). As the preening narcissist he has always been, Bob basked in my appreciation, of someone he delusionally believed to be a fawning acolyte.

I still believe that Bob deserves defending, and my defense of him follows in three parts: he survived, he did something (even if it was the wrong thing), and he did it alone (for better and worse).

Survival

I imagine become an anarchist in the twilight period between the end of the Vietnam War era (not exactly a banner time for anarchists anyway) and the rise of (albiet low-profile) anarchist punks must have been quite lonely. I can’t imagine having these ideas without the benefit of seeing what impact they had on relationships as they were tested out. One of my clearest experiments of this sort was when I moved out of a group house (the very next day as I recall) when they wrote my name to an objectionable task on the chore wheel because I was at work. I had Debordian fantasies and put my body on the line in their pursuit. But I did not do it in a vacuum. The day I left the house I drove across the state to a warm, waiting room with friends who were happy to see me. The situation would have been miserable if I didn’t have those friends, that shared understanding about Debord, or the money to have a car to make that drive.

While Bob isn’t the only survivor of his generation I have a giant soft spot for all of them. Their clarity about then is one of the reasons that we can be fighting different fights now. Specifically I am referring to the context of anarchism, workerism, the left, and ATR. I have so much respect for this generation because I caught the tail end of the Red anarchist menace and its mediocrity was asphyxiating. As an ex-post-left anarchist I’ve had enough talk of what the left should be (if only…) to last three lifetimes. Dodging the bullet of having to endure Great-Men-Talking-about-Revolution-as-if-it-were-about-to-happen (or already did) I still consider quite the achievement, which would not have been possible if it were not for the ones who survived and particularly for Bob Black.

But they paid a price. In Bob’s case an ass-kicking or two, for others it was different kinds of social exclusions, ones that reflected their personalities and survival skills. On another level they paid the price of loss of faith. Obviously we are talking about a secular kind of faith–a belief that when exposed to a correct analysis or critique people will change their minds–but a faith nonetheless. A faith that other people, strangers, are like you: reasonable, argumentative, and more interested in something-like-truth than in popularity contests or petty games. This loss of faith has created grumpy, lonely men but it has also created a neon colored sign post for us, the next generation, and for those who are arriving after us.

Doing something

I realize that most of the anarchists of the post-left generation have exposed their own influences as being egoist but that wasn’t my perception of them or their position(s) during my first decade of exposure to them (prior to meeting them). It seemed to me that Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed was the American wing of a post-situationist perspective, full stop. In hindsight, I realize how little I knew but it was the SI that excited me when I was just an anarcho-tot. It was their practice of critique-as-action that made sense to me, and it was how I saw action that I wanted to participate in. The SI critique of what we would now call activism felt complete to me and, as a result, held no interest, it was complete. The attacks against groups and people of the same fighting weight did, and still does, hold me captivated.

This is where my defense of Bob is strongest. Whether in the name of revenge or his own sense of rightousness Bob devoted his life to fighting people and institutions outside of his weight class. We once had a conversation where I was expressing how not-in-a-hurry I was with regard to dealing with a slight because I held that the long view, the strategic view, would win out against hurried action. Bob made it clear that while he might have agreed with me about the likelihood of winning, my attitude was bullshit. The only time to deal with opponents is now. He meant it. He would rather lose the fight, and do it now, than wait and win.

This charming personality trait explains nearly every scandal and misstep Bob ever took. As he aged, his rush to fight took on the long form essay rather than the flaming poop bag, but the will to fight never waned.

This point, by the way, is why the activist insult against theory/critique people has always aggravated me. I try to give the activist crowd the benefit of the doubt that they do truly believe in the political practice they are part of “in the streets” and are not just using regular people as cover for their desire to see the glittering rain of a window pane. (The least they can do is realize that a vigorous internal conversation is a verb and not “doing nothing” but whatever.)

Bob has taught anarchism a lesson that has yet to be meaningfully followed up. We need to establish something like a set of rules, or a kind of terrain, around how to fight with one another. When Bob accused Ramsey, in the letter section of AJODA, of being a state agent (on the flimsey grounds that they needed to evade the consequences of the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1901), there were two results. One, Bob broke an unspoken rule against snitch-jacketing and two, Ramsey took him (and the accusation) extremeley seriously. Ramsey placed a fatwa against that issue of the magazine (#65, which had quite of few strong articles) and did whatever he could do persuade us (including by threat of force) and whomever was in his sphere of influence (which mostly meant infoshops that inclined Red) to not carry it. By putting his (and by extension ours–as AJODA did the material suffering, since AK Press stopped distributing the magazine after this issue) body on the line, Bob proved an unintended point. He provided Ramsey an opportunity to show what Ramsey was all about and Ramsey’s response to that paragraph of text couldn’t have been clearer.

For those of us who are similarly inclined, this lesson should be instructive. When you throw your body, identity, and personhood into the fray you rarely get accolades or huzzahs. At best you get a clarifying moment on a tangential point related to but not necessarily central to why you were acting in the first place. What most people do with this information is hide themselves behind nicknames, anonymity, or silence, and we, as a politic and practice, suffer for it.

The power of one

Bob has never had an ally (or accomplice in the modern vernacular) as he made it structurally impossible for anybody to be (or become) one. There are many private examples of how this looked in practice but it’s an obvious point that if you are fighting for your interpretation of the singular right and correct position anyone who would join you has to convince you that they think the same way that you do and for the same reasons.

Bob’s life is a series of breaks from limited collaborations that is not disconnected from the Stirnerite postulation about organization only lasting as long as the participants in it gain satisfaction in that arrangement. Bob’s innovation, if it could be called that, was to (mostly) set fire to any possibility of future collaboration by way of personal insults and public declarations of acrimony. Let’s call this practice “angry egoism,” which can only be ameliorated by its target bending knee, thereby placing future collaboration on the unstable base of an explicit power-over relationship.

And these dysfunctions ultimately rise from the fact that every battle, every idea, and every break happened for Bob alone. He has had lovers and temporary friends but largely his life was one lived alone, with no voice cautioning consequences or suggesting a different pacing, no daily consultations in bed. The only voice in his head was his, amplified by a Debordesque diet of spirits.

By this cautionary tale I put Bob Black to rest. He was a clarifying influence in my life, largely as a negative example but also as a good writer, but one incapable of reaching the heights he reached for. He will be remembered as much for who he wasn’t as for who he wanted to be but this is the most anarchist of problems. Most of us will not be remembered at all as our shared Beautiful Idea is larger than each of us and continues on after we are gone. The best we can hope for is some contribution to that idea and as a person who lived and wrote in especially challenging times and circumstances Bob Black has done his part.

Farewell.

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In defense of punching Bob Black and exiling snitchy bigots. (October 21, 2015)

So as we all know Bob Black was punched at the Long Haul by MLF. We feel this is justified and that anti-oppressive anarchist ethics should be upheld in so called anarchist spaces. That means no bigots or snitches should be invited to speak or be published by “Anarchists”. Here are some racist/snitch/sexist quotes from Bob Black that led to him being punched:

“That is why, in the early period of the Spanish Revolution, the anarchists burned hundreds of churches, and put the others to better uses. The APOCs’ know nothing of this, as they know nothing about anarchist history, and as they know nothing about anarchism, and as they are not anarchists. A pox on APOCs!” – Bob Black

“It’s okay to be the enemies of anybody, even Persons of Color, if they are Negro Nazis. And it’s stupid not to be. I am literally, physically nauseated by the way the victims are covering up for their oppressors. I want to know names, and addresses, and phone numbers. I want to know where they work, in the unlikely event that they do, and where they go to school. Their employers (or their professors) should be identified and informed. It might be useful to obtain, and circulate, their criminal records. And I want to know (as I have heard conflicting versions) the race of these racists because they played the race card. Why not send a demand to the “black churches” on whose behalf this all supposedly happened to repudiate the action? If they don’t, they indeed deserve to be burned. You could send the demand to the white churches too. That’s racial equality. Burn, baby, burn! ” – Bob Black

 – NO MORE WATER, THE FIRE NEXT TIME!

Really? After all of these recent racist church burnings in the South do you wonder why Bob’s words might get him punched.

“This was apparently originally a punk anarchist type infoshop which, once it got going, was taken over by black militants, as recently as January. Its website states: “In January of 2014, the Holdout temporarily closed its doors to do some serious cleaning.” Yes: ethnic cleansing, It is not as if what happened at the Bookfair came out of nowhere. It came out of this vipers’ nest, at 2313 San Pablo Avenue. Who’s the landlord? Are these desirable tenants? It sounds like a soft target, much easier to trash than a table at a bookfair with hundreds of people around, even though those people were sheep. Two or three people with a car could do the trick. The Black Bloc could deal with these black blockheads. Out of town activists could do the job (I can think of some people who might be interested – one guy in particular), to whom blame could be assigned (“outside agitators”). I offer to my Bay Area friends, plausible deniability. And nobody will be extradited for the crime of trashing a Negro anarchist pesthole, although the police will regret the loss of their agent provocateurs. (Isn’t this an obvious possibility?) I wonder if Qilombo is also a weapons arsenal and a crackhouse. ” – Bob Black

 – NO MORE WATER, THE FIRE NEXT TIME!

“Right from the start I’ve acknowledged that I was a police snitch” – Bob Black

“Besides, I stand by my decision; I’d do it again. I became, because of extreme provocation, a police snitch. So what? You got a problem with that? ” – Bob Black

 – Playing Ducks and Drakes

“Before I began my presentation, I did announce, that I wanted my assailant to be identified, and I asked for as much information as possible about him, his name, his address, his phone number, his mother, his probation officer, etc. All I ever heard was that he is named “******” and I didn’t get even that much from you. I want that information. If you and the anarchists cover up for this guy, I’ll hire a detective to find out. Why would I want to know these facts? Use your imagination. In the first place, to publicize them as widely as possible. I notice that nobody is even considering any retaliation. On behalf of your friends and yourself, you have dismissed the possibility.” – Bob Black

 – Bob Blacks’ FB Page

“How come these women won’t get in bed with any man except the DA?”

 – Feminism As Fascism

If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Stay In the Kitchen

Clarifications: MLF is a well known and networked anarchist and anti-fascist trans woman. She uses she/they pronouns.

So here Bob Black tries to justify insulting MLF’s makeup and the transphobic backlash by saying he is a “transphile” and a trans rights advocate claiming “I am well-informed on the topic of TG, having attended 5 or 6 TG conferences, mostly here in Albany, but also one in Philadelphia.” He continues to misgender MLF and is rallying for her to be jumped by a bunch of cisgendered men or snitching to get her in a violently transphobic prison system.

” ***** had made threats against me on Aragorn’s thread here — which he never told me about. Because I was unconscious for an unknown period, I didn’t hear the creep, while he was dragged out, screaming something about “transphobic.” As one of my friends who heard this said, “I never thought I’d see the day when Bob Black was called transphobic.” As is well known to many people, I am transphilic, and I have been, for many years. One of the people who knows this is ******.

Nonetheless, he reports the screamings of this lunatic as if they had something to do with the assault on me, which Aragorn anticipated — except he probably didn’t want it to go so far. ***** didn’t go there to punish my nonexistent transphobia, he went there to punish me as a “snitch.” (That’s the only word I recognized during the few seconds he gibbered in my face.) This is a problem with self-important people. They think they know the future and control the future.

I’ve been transphile for many, many years. I am well-informed on the topic of TG, having attended 5 or 6 TG conferences, mostly here in Albany, but also one in Philadelphia. Before ******* ******* was born, I was providing some free legal services to the Trangender Independence Club in Albany. In fact, I dated its President for a few months in the early 1990’s.

Some years later, I was a member of the Board of Directors of the Capitol Region Chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union. On my initiative, the first transsexual (an old friend of mine) was appointed to the Board.

*******/Aragorn knew that my visit to the Bay Area was not primarily to promote my book. He knew that the Bay Area was a rest stop for me, before I proceeded to a 17 day visit to the Philippines. He knew that my primary purpose was to meet someone there whom I hoped to marry. I did the Long Haul gig because he wanted me to.

In the Philippines, I made 3 public presentations, and met many people, and that was all great. But I was mainly there to meet the transwoman who is now my fiance:***************Go to her FB page and you will see photos of us together. I am now working on the complexities of bringing her here on a fiance visa (which is converted into a marriage visa upon marriage).

This is more important to me than dealing with the scumbag Aragorn. But, I’ve started on him, and there will be more from me about that, in due time. I ask that nobody buy my books — or any books — from his business, LBC Press/Distribution. “

We hope that once Bob Black sees the information we have compiled that he will humble himself and to be accountable for his oppressive behavior and leave the issue at getting punched. He has dug himself in a hole and most people will exile him just for his response. Anyone who defends him should be considered sketchy and a possible traitor to the cause. That being said Bob Black should call off any form of retaliation otherwise there will be consequences and an exiling from the Anarchist and anti-fascist community at large.

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