"The Necessity of Gay Crime" Transcript

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(This transcript was created from the original script uploaded as closed captioning. Differences where James skipped overdiverged from the script are highlighted.)

I grew up poor, though I didn’t know it. My parents worked very hard to shield me from the fact that certain bills would be paid on alternating months, since there was never enough money to pay everything, that we lived in low-income housing, and that even then a portion of our rent each month was covered by my father mowing the lawns and shovelling the drive ways of other houses in the housing group.

I never knew that my mother would borrow money from relatives to make sure that I had Christmas, and then pay it back over the next few months. I never knew these things when I was a kid. I didn’t find out until I was a teenager and my parents separated. When suddenly very little money became a whole lot less.

When my mother and I had to move into a house so poorly insulated that the first floor was never, ever warm. It got so frigid that you had to run up the stairs when you made food in the winter or else it’d be cold by the time you got to your room.

But almost everyone I knew was in the same situation. I was lucky enough to be an only child, so I had it a lot easier than my friends, who had to share what little they got with multiple siblings. And so in order to get by, crime was just a fact of life.

But nobody looked at it as really breaking the law, because people weren’t stealing from each other. They were stealing from Walmart or other big stores. Things would just fall off the back of a truck. For most of the people I grew up with you were getting a game console for Christmas or your birthday, it meant that Best Buy’s inventory was missing a few Xbox’s or PlayStations.

Almost every adult I knew worked under the table, their employer paying them without claiming them as an employee, and that way neither of them had to pay taxes. The whole area I grew up in was peppered with bartenders, fishermen, mechanics, repairmen, maids, cleaners, you name it. All of them working under the table.

Because the island I grew up on had its economy completely collapse in the 1980s when the coal mines and steel mills, which had been the economic lifeblood of the place for over a hundred years, were sold off to a German energy conglomerate and then closed down. Everyone lost their jobs, their benefits, and their hope.

And since so many people had been injured on the job throughout the years, taking pain killers to keep working, they were suddenly without the ability to pay for the meds too. So they had to start buying pain meds from family who had pensioned out, and therefore had drug plans, in order to do the backbreaking jobs that they could manage to find.

Which, sadly, led to my hometown getting the nickname of CottonTown, because OxyContin was its main import. This video isn’t my autobiography though, or about the town I grew up. There’s been enough news coverage about that little island going to hell in a hand basket for a hundred video essays.

But I just wanted to set the scene so you understand where I’m coming when I talk about the necessity of crime in certain situations. How not all criminals are bad people, and how a lot of people are shunted into the category of criminal because of where society has placed them, and how successful society will allow them to become.

All of this so that I can talk about Banana Fish.

If you’re not into relatively obscure violent, crime anime based on 30 year old manga, you probably have no idea what Banana Fish is. I sure as hell didn’t. I thought it was either a disgusting sushi dish, or a really smelly banana.

And then I sat down to watch it, which was a blessedly easy process thanks to Amazon Prime Video, [...]

[On screen]:

*Not Sponsered.
...But hey, Amazon, call me.

[...] and binged the 24 episodes in two days. And see, I get headaches if I look at screens for too long, so watching subtitled media is kind of hard for me. And since Banana Fish doesn’t have an English dub, I had to grin and bear a pounding headache to get through it. But I had to. I had to find out what happens.

Banana Fish is a 2018 anime, based on the 1985 manga by Akimi Yoshida, that deals with organised crime in New York City, all the way from street gangs, where our main character Ash exists, to mafia-like organisations, all the way up to political power players like US senators of New York.

But really, REALLY, it's about the relationship between the tough American street kid, Ash, and an innocent young Japanese photographer, Eiji. Ash isn’t your typical gang banger though. He spends more time in the New York Public library than in drug dens, is well read, has a dark past he prefers to keep secret from most people, and has a hard time seeing a life that doesn’t involve violence and pain. He’s shrouded in a cloud of pessimism, while Eiji is eternally optimistic.

The series cold opens during the Iraq war, an American soldier named Griffin fires on his own squad in an apparent mental breakdown. He is subdued when Max, a friend and fellow soldier, shoots him in the legs. As Griffin collapses, he mutters… "banana fish".

Twelve years later, and Griffin, now essentially catatonic, is cared for by his younger brother Ash, the leader of a street gang in New York. One night, Ash encounters a dying man who gives him a vial of an unknown substance and an address in California; the man says the words "banana fish" before dying.

Ash begins to investigate the meaning of "banana fish", though he is impeded by Dino Golzine, a Corsican mob boss who has groomed Ash as a child to be his sex slave and heir to his criminal empire. He’s not very happy that Ash has managed to gain some independence, and wants his trophy boy back.

In the course of Ash’s investigation, Ash meets Eiji Okumura, a photographer’s assistant, who travelled from Japan to report on street gangs. He’s immediately intrigued by the older boys innocence and his… pole vaulting prowess. I’m sure there’s a double entendre there.

When Ash ends up in prison after being, more or less, framed for murder, he’s visited by Eiji and slips him a note by, well, sticking his tongue down his throat. Which Eiji really doesn’t seem to mind one bit. The note gives Eiji directions on how to help Ash via getting word to an associate in ChinaTown.

Things go awry though. One thing leads to another and Ash’s brother, Griffin is killed in the crossfire between two gangs. Ash soon makes bail, finds out about his brother's death, and swears revenge on the people who killed him. Eiji, being a wee bit too pig-headed for his own good, demands to come too, along with a few other people who more or less want to help Ash revenge his way across New York’s underworld.

But first they need to take a trip to California, to the address Ash was given by the dying man. On their way there they make a little stop over in the small hamlet Ash spent most of his early childhood in. This is where we see the hardened criminal open up to Eiji, using the process of teaching him how to handle a pistol to get close to him. After Gozine’s men find them though, a shootout ensues, but our main team make it out alive and get back on the road to California.

Once there they find a mansion occupied by a man revealed to be Lee Yut-Lung, the youngest son of China's largest crime family. They later encounter the home's true occupant, a doctor who informs them that Banana Fish is an untraceable drug that brainwashes its users — turning them into near thoughtless murder machines. Golzine intends to sell the drug to the United States government, which seeks to use it to overthrow communist and leftist regimes in South America.

This sounds absurd, but look up some of the stuff Regan^{[sic: Reagan]} did in South America in the 1980s. It’s not that far-fetched.

The group is almost immediately captured by Golzine's men and taken back to New York. Once there, Shorter Wong, Ash’s best friend, is injected with the Banana Fish serum to show off what it can do. He’s instructed to kill Eiji. Shorter attacks Eiji in a frenzy, though in a moment of lucidity, he is able to beg Ash to kill him. Ash is given a gun with one bullet… Kill Shorter, or kill himself. He shoots and kills his best friend to prevent him from killing Eiji.

This sends Ash into a violent spiral, and he ends up cutting a bloody swath through Golzine’s mansion in order to save Eiji once again, after he’d been locked away by the mob boss’s men. Ash rescues him and the mansion is set ablaze.

Once in hiding, Ash and Eiji are able to have another calm moment. Their first since before leaving for California. Where we learn that Ash has… a very bad temper and no patience when it comes to his goons, especially when it involves his sleep. He can violently react to being woken up… but not when Eiji does it.

As the story moves forward, becoming more and more complex, involving intergang rivalries, financial espionage, and ghosts from Ash’s past… Ash and Eiji become more and more the focus of the story, with even the opening titles changing to make it even clearer that these two are more than just friends.

But in the end, as the series comes to a close, we’re given a chance to hope that this story may just have a happy ending. Though Eiji is safely heading back to Japan while Ash remains in New York, his enemies seemingly vanquished, Eiji does leave the door open for Ash to join him by giving him a prepaid ticket to join him in Japan.

An ongoing thread throughout the series is how much more dangerous America is than The Land of the Rising Sun, and that Ash is too kind a person to not have a peaceful life. It seems like Ash is going to take Eiji up on his offer, but while reading the letter Edji left behind for him, he’s stabbed by, seemingly, the last person in New York who might want him dead.

Ash kills the assailant, but may be mortally wounded himself. He manages to bring himself back to the New York Public library. The place he’s always had the most peace. While Eiji waits for him at the airport, hope wafting away, Ash lays his head down on a table and dies.

[RECORD SCRATCH!]

No he doesn’t die, goddammit. And this isn’t me saying, no he doesn’t die because he and Eiji are too cute together, and he doesn’t deserve to die. I have proof! As the show was airing, the Banana Fish website kept an up to date tracker of which major characters were dead, and which were alive. More and more characters having their image and names greyed out as the show went along. When the series finale first aired, Ash’s photo and name became greyed out but very soon after, went back to color. Which means… he’s not dead. Like I said.

He DOES die in the manga, but plenty changed from the Manga to the Anime, And since we see Ash take a hell of a lot more punishment than a knife wound throughout the series, I’m not willing to believe that he’s dead. And there’s too many plot threads left open for a sequel. So you’re not going to change my mind on this. Our blond Mary Sue with the dead eye aim, master hacker capabilities, and sky high IQ is alive. Anyway.

The relationship between Ash and Eiji in BananaFfish is a lot like that of Victor and Yuri in Yuri on Ice. It’s subtle, but not queer coding. And I think it works best that way. Many older men in the show who are portrayed as “gay” could easily be read as straight by anyone who understands the psychology of sexual predators. They don’t fall in love with men, they abuse them. Especially men below the legal age. For them, it’s a power fantasy, just like with sexual predators in real life.

Ash himself was forced into the life of a sex slave through his early teen years at the hands of Golzine, but escapes that life of abuse and organized, white color crime by turning to a life of petty, and not so petty, crime. The sexual pradators in and around Golzine’s orbit are just that, predators. Not necessarily gay men.

But Ash and Eiji… we never see them have sex. There’s a kiss, almost as soon as they meet, but that’s shown as passing on information that Ash needs to smuggle out of prison. Ash using Eiji as a means to an end, just like he’s been used throughout his life. But over time he doesn’t just come to like and respect Eiji, but he falls in love with him. Sharing with him parts of himself that he thoroughly kept hidden from everyone else in his life.

Eiji, on the other hand, begins the story as an innocent, almost damsel in distress type. Who, over the course of the series, becomes willing to break more and more laws, but only to save Ash’s life. In a series filled with criminals of all ranks and sorts, Eiji is only willing to become one to save the life of the person he loves. Showing the audience that desperate times can make a criminal out of anyone. Even the most innocent, sweet hearted boy in the world.

Ash even gets angry with him when he does break the law, even to rescue Ash, because he wants Eiji to keep being the good guy, and not get drawn into this world. Crime, for Ash, is a way of life. It’s how he survived as long as he has.

And while a queer protagnost being a violent criminal may have some suburban gays clutching their pearls, Watching the show, I didn’t bat an eye. Because a relationship between queer people and criminal behaviour isn’t at all new.

Though it may be a rallying cry and a meme now, ‘Be Gay Do Crime’ was once a matter of propaganda against queer communities. Established powers throughout the better part of the last two hundred years at least, meant to warn people about the degeneracy of queer people and illicit lifestyles. Drugs, crime, sex, death, and worse — unchristianly thoughts. The public image of gay people, then referred to as ‘sexual inversion’ or ‘sexual deviants’ was generally expected to be poor and dirty, or predatory.

Granted, though, this was at the same time of European history when England had to launch a multimedia effort that included posters, pamphlets, Anglican church missives, fiction, and even spreading via word of mouth — NOT to send your boys to Italy.

Rich families noticed that after their sons toured Europe, something about them would change after they spent a few months in Italy. The combination of a prevalent casual approach towards sex, a culture focused around pursuing artistic romance, and simply being one of the most scenic landmasses on the damn planet, usually culminated in cold, English boys’ sexual hang-ups being eroded by the hordes of beautiful Italians with a ‘when in Rome’ attitude when it came to 69ing with other guys.

And that’s to say nothing of queer hotspots in Europe throughout history. The Netherlands, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Munich, Vienna – even pre-world-war Turkey. That isn’t to say that you could live a queer life without consequences in these places, though Italy stood out to conservative Europe as there was a degree of tolerance even within rural sections of the country.

It’s hard to be proud of a national history that washas been established by a bunch of bisexual senators and emperors and still cling to casual homophobia. The real threat were the scandalous solicitors in Hyde Park! Or… something, something, hide your children.

In a way… even in modern media, we… somewhat… continue to propagate that line of thinking. Though the clean, suburban-friendly gay dad may be the consencus media portrayal of gay men now — to the point where depicting gay men in anany area of criminality is now something that will get you blacklisted by the HRC - we are wrought with depictions of trans and bisexual people who are either poor, dependant on criminal income, or the overused trope of the bisexual villain. Whose ubiquitous sex drive OBVIOUSLY means they’re hypersexual and promiscuous. And therefore evil.

As gay men and women begin to push their newfound influence into the business of media production, the gay criminal has shifted to the bisexual criminal, or the trans criminal. And media which still depicts gay people as criminals has become exceedingly uncommon.

And yet, within the queer community remains a solidarity with crime, and with resistance to the law. Why is that? Well… unfortunately, this is one of those instances in which state-produced propaganda was… not really wrong.

Propaganda about queer links to crime was only really dishonest for omitting queer elites. But it was not dishonest about the fact that London’s West End was once a very colourful neighbourhood. Hyde park after dark, famously became a venue for sexual exhibitionism and sex work solicitation. Drugs, stolen goods, and unsavoury types all drove property values in the district down. This allowed the torrents of disowned queer people to have a place to live in a city that saw them as scum.

And as the queer class was considered undesirable, upstanding businesses usually refused to take them on payroll. Many who wished to be open or at least who were unable to be closeted, needed to take work where they could get it. And sometimes, that wasn’t always by taking jobs your mama would approve of.

For younger ones, that meant prostitution. Leading to the rise of the famous London Rent-Boy culture. By omitting the fact that fancy boys travelling to and from Italy would return with homosexual liberation, media and political messaging perpetuated the idea that homosexuality automatically brought delinquency. And then used that as justification, in part, for the systemic persecution of gay men and the attempted persecution of gay women.

Beyond England, presenting the link between homosexuality and crime as a simple fact is part of virtually every national effort to persecute gay people. (And trans people as they became more visible.)

So what? Am I agreeing with the link that queer people and crime is inherrant? No… I’m saying that a link between crime and any kind of ‘second class citizen’ is inevitable.

I’ve touched on this before and it’s worth mentioning again. Oscar Wilde, renowned author, editor, playwright, poet, businessman, and darling of the English theatre at hisits hayday, was also infamously one of those high-profile buggery cases that the English government wishes people would really just forget about. His very public prosecution, once used to fighten little gay children, is now a source of national embarrassment for the British parliament. (As if they don’t have enough to be embarrassed about, already.)

Oscar Wilde, leading up to thehis trial, was heavily engaged in the English queer underground, and factored in a number of his observations into his writing. Across several of his works, he explored the idea of an ‘illicit identity.’ If there is an identity which the state considers ‘illegal’ — what does that do to someone’s psychology?

If, for instance, the penalty for having red hair is the same criminal punishment as smoking opium (and the English do like to pretend red-heads ought to be illegal) — if you have red hair… why not smoke a heap of opium? If the consequences for simply existing are the same as criminal behaviour, then it’s not like actively deciding to be a criminal is gonna make it all that much worse for you, is it? Why not do all those fast-living, young-dying, acts of delinquency that your parents warned you are things ‘propper’ folk would never do? Vandalise property, pick some pockets, lift some goods off the back of that waggon, break into that house, smoke all these drugs, go with a band of dwarves to steal some gold from a dragon.

If living a criminal life and holding the wrong person’s hand are going to get you the same sentencing — or worse — why not live an exciting life before you get caught? And then because some in the minority group can be found guilty of a certain crime, it must mean that that’s something any of them could be capable of.

This is something used against more than just queer people — also immigrant populations and… people who generally aren’t white. Politicians, even liberals, are prone to using language that influences voters to believe that criminality is inherent in minority communities. That if, say, the nation lets in refugees from South America they will, quote: “bring their crimes with them.”

[Flashing in the bottom corner during the next paragraph]: "*SARCASM"

Because the crimes were always with these people – these crimes are an element of their culture that they arethey're bringing into America where they will spread it among the good, heterosexual, cisgender, god-fearing white folk.

And because politics is all about ignoring nuance for the sake of cashing in on cheap thrills, there are some factors of the human element that are deliberately being exempt from the discussion.

First: human beings, on a fundamental, physiological, instinctual level are driven to survive. More than that, we are driven to assure the survival of those in our selected family. Chosen or not. We will do almost anything it takes to facilitate this survival.

It’s… literally our biology. There is no point in debating this. There’s no point in arguing with this. Survival, either of the self or the group, is our number one objective. And trying to deny this, or say that there should be ‘limits’ to what we do to survive, while might be justified as ‘logical’, is simply not taking into account the human reality. In order to survive, humans will break social conventions (some of which being laws).

Second: …we exist in a network of social structures that we call ‘society.’ Many of these social structures (and you can debate this all you want but it won’t make it less true) serve to hold some people up at the expense of others. We’re naturally competitive. Many of us find a reward in being better than others somehow, and some of us prefer more quantifiable ways: those who have more and those who have less. There cannot be the strong without the weak, and some people have a dysfunctional obsession with strength.

And factor in a dark ages hard social reset followed by imperialism, eurocentrism, colonialism, post-colonialism, orientalism, a network of slavery over three continents, and two world wars… and you’ve got a socially permissable means to visually profile people and sort them into social classes. These principles are so deeply internalised in our social, economic, political, and legal framework that we can’t even be completely aware of where the separation is between all of that and what is truly human.

As a result, there are some groups of people who are locked into such an old-standing system of prejudices that they literally cannot escape poverty. Being in these situations of poverty lead to a heightened sense of the need to survive. Which leads to a much looser attitude around — not necessarily moral codes — but removing the community’s moral code from the stringent guidelines of laws that are designed to protect the fundamental hierarchy of privilege.

You can’t really say that areas with high crime rates have ‘loose morals’ when there are often strict no-snitching social rules in that same neighbourhood, and families helping each other out when times are tough. This is a very clear indication, to me, that human beings inherently want morality. We want cooperation, we want society.

However, some groups of people simply have been oppressed to the point where the morals needed for their own survival are not compatible with the morals a given society would like to foster among thea populace.

Which should be seen as a problem with society at large, and not a problem that exists within scattered impoverished communities. Society has a way of disincentivizing conventional morality among those who cannot afford it. And then in turn, society has a way of over-policing those same neighbourhoods. And then in turn, society has a way of branding these people as social outsiders whenever they try to make people aware of their economic condition.

So a huge portion of our social structures are built around a human need for survival, and then making survival inherently more difficult for certain groups of people. When you realise this, it becomes very easy to predict which groups of people are more likely to act outside of social convention in order to survive.

And even if, in a consequentialist frame of mind, they aren’t really to blame for their economic situation, establishment power will use this to create fear-based propaganda in order to spur privileged voters to support the existing hegemonistic hierarchy. And then use this same line of thinking to encourage voters to endorse voter-suppression tactics against these marginalised communities.

The less these communities can contribute to the political process, the less control they have over legal processes, the greater jurisdiction law enforcement has in oppressing these groupsthem, the greater the existing hierarchy can perpetuate it’s<sup class"add">[sic: its] agenda. And, in turn, the less incentivized law enforcement is to protect and serve the marginalised groups.

It also doesn’t help that law enforcement — to this day — continues to under-investigate crimes against queer people and communities of color, especially including, but not limited to, sexual assault, murder, and disappearances. The ‘red dress’ movement wasn’t justonly to raise awareness about missing and murdered first nations women — it was calling to attention the fact that these crimes are almost never investigated in the first place.

Queer communities in particular have a… unique relationship with this. Though Banana Fish did depict the oppression of multiple minority communities, it did little to depict the social oppression of the queer community as a whole and their relationship with the law. In fact, the explicitly referenced queer characters, if anything, function as class oppressors which… This is based on a manga from the 80s, by all means read into that.

But queer communities function a little differently from communities of color. In part, because queer communities are not homogenous in themselves. Within a queer underground of a given city there is a melting pot of many different cultures and cultural experiences. But for the most part Queer communities stand out because while we may have been born queer, very few of us were born into Queer culture.

In fact, there are many different ways one could be queer, and even more ways to express that. And if we’re talking about Queer Communities and their relationship with the law… what is a queer community?

As queerness, in whatever form it takes, has been taboo in most of the Colonial world for the better part of the last thousand years, there tends to be a lot of homeless queer kids. Go figure. I don’t understand how the straights are still shooketh by this.

Why do you think people are homeless to begin with? Queerness is never really a threat to anything but your family’s upstanding reputation or, insofar as the Catholic church preferred keeping the undesirable classes as uneducated and god-fearing as possible, a threat to your family’s ticket to heaven.

And suddenly you have a religious institution built around forgiveness and compassion where it is more ethically favourable to disown and abandon your children than to put up with a quirk like who they like kissing.

Within this context, the ‘Queer’ Community, or the Gay Community as it was called through the 1900s, was a collection of people who had either been abandoned by their family, pushed out by the communities they grew up in, or who had been from accepting families and simply rallied together to be among like-minded people.

ThatThe last group was an unfortunately small one, and though we’re getting better, queer homelessness is still the largest subsection of youth homelessness in North America and Europe. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t an undertone of sexism and racism in queer circles, and which there still is.

So… as much as I don’t want to frame this with rose-tinted glasses… in theory the Queer community was a place for a bunch of misfit people who didn’t belong anywhere else, because almost everywhere else rejected queerness in all forms.

However, persecution against queer people was especially harsh because there was a widespread public belief that queer people actively chose to be the way they were. And many within the queer community came from communities that were already impoverished and persecuted. So when outlining a queer relationship with the law, we have to understand that these were people who stared down the barrel of survival nearly every day.

Some of us… even vogued for the gunmen and commanded respect. Dorian Corey began her career as a dancer in the 1960s. She had risen to become the house mother of the House of Corey by the late 1970s, walking the catwalk in underground drag balls and appearing in shows all throughoutaround Harlem. Aside from her famed performances, Corey was known for her elaborate ball gowns, which included a 30-byto-40-foot feather cape that took multiple assistants to carry behind her.

It was that reputation as a seamstress that led Corey’s friend and caretaker Lois Taylor to enter her apartment on West 140th Street in October 1993. Corey had died two months before of AIDS-related complications and had directed Taylor to take the costumes she wanted and sell the rest. Once inside, Taylor discovered a drycleaning bag containing the partially mummified body of a man eventually identified as Robert Worley, who had been missing since 1968. Worley's body was wrapped in plastic wrap and Naugahyde and doused in baking soda.

The case remains a mystery to this day, despite the fact that many people believe Corey killed Worley in self-defence. Both Corey, a drag queen, and Worley, an addict, both of which built a distrust of authority, especially police. With their deaths, the chance to know their complete storieshistory vanished, leaving true-crime websites and podcasts of varying quality to reassemble the pieces of their lives.

Fans of the show Pose will recognize this story as the inspiration for Elektra Evangelista, played by Dominique Jackson, in a two-season plot arc. Elektra is working as a BDSM mistress when one of her clients dies in her room from a drug overdose. Elektra, like Dorian, understands that the police will not assist a Black transgender sex worker.

However, unlike in Dorian's story, audiences know that Elektra has friends to call. They use skills learned in making ball gowns to assist her in sewing the man into a garment bag and packing him in a trunk. When Elektra is arrested in season three, she uses her one phone call to inform her house family that the trunk in which the body is hidden must be moved before the cops search her house.

Elektra's one-time daughter and now a house mother herself, Blanca (played by MJ Rodriguez), offers Elektra unconditional love and support. In this storyline, viewers get to see the pain in Elektra’s past, as well as the camaraderie and joy on which she is able to draw in the present.

Crime is rampant in Pose. Whether its hiding a dead body, using drugs, sex work, petty theft, or lifting a regal display of opulent fashion from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to win a ball’s top prize. The series does not shy away from the fact that it’s cast of characters are, in the law's eyes at least, criminals. But it also makes the point that, in many of these cases, what other choice todo they have?

Multiple characters on the show, both male and female, are sex workers in one way or another. Whether out and out prostitution or, in one interesting case, performing strip shows behind glass for men willing to pay for the fantasy. Certainly a safer way of going about things than waiting on the corner and hoping to pick a John who isn’t psychotic, and a 1980’s precursor to the cam stars of the new millennium.

In most cases the show portrays these crimes as victimless (lets note that Elektra’s dead john overdosed all on his own), except when the women being hired become the victims. The show is clear that, when everyone is being safe and everyone is concenting, the crime of sex work is a victimless one. The biggest stress of the job really stems from the fact that if things do go south, the girls have no recourse. They can’t go to the police because they’ll likely be locked up long before any man who hurt them is.

Is it their first choice of career? Not likely. One character, Angel, played by Indya Moore, starts out the series as a sex worker but eventually transitions into modelingbeing a model. But they’reseh's the only sex worker on the show to find herself climing into the upper echelons. Showing just how rare it is to fight your way out of a life of crime into legitimate success.

Indya Moore themself was once a sex worker. They told ES magazine:

[Quote scrolling on screen:]

“It has really destigmatised sex work, not only for people watching the show but for me, too – I had internalised so much shame. I felt really ashamed of having been a sex worker and, coming into this industry, it was something that I feared I would be outed for and that it would harm me.”

They started in the field because, as a trans non-binary youth who’d grown up in the foster system, with no money and no real social safety net in America, let alone health coverage, they needed to find a way to pay for the hormones required to be comfortable in their own body. And since decent paying jobs aren't exactly plentiful when you’re a queer, person of Haitian, Puerto Rican, and Dominican descent, they did what they had to do.

That’s how pretty much every character on Pose who breaks the law ends up doing so. Nobody is doing it… Mostly nobody is doing it for shits and giggles, and nobody is doing it specifically to hurt other people. They’re doing it out of necessity. They’re doing it to survive.

Pose also highlights other people who break the law in similarly desperate circumstances. The people fighting back against the Regan^{[sic: Reagan]}’s Administration’s ignoring of the AIDS crisis. The men and women of ACT UP who got arrested and charged over and over again while protesting the unfairness of the situation. ThatThe thousands of people across the country were being left to die by their own government.

Desperation is a seed that, once planted, can bloom into crime, and eventually, if the system isn’t careful, grow into violence. But the system would rather arrest these people, slapping the label of criminal on them forever instead of trying to help them. “Go through the proper channels” they’re told.

“Oh you want a treatment for AIDS? Well, funding Contras in Nicaragua is far more important than funding AIDS research.”

“You want an education that doesn’t leave you a hundred thousand dollars in debt? Sorry, we have tax breaks we need to pass.”

“You want to not die because you can’t afford cancer treatment? Sorry, but we’d much prefer to fund fighter jets even though no countries we’ve gone to war with in the last 30 years have a f*cking fighter jet!”

And so, when you ask politely, and get slapped in the face, what recourse do you have? Breaking the law, of course. This is universal, but particularly prescient for queer people, especially trans people, when the entire system is set up to keep you from existing. Gender confirmation treatment and surgeries don’t come cheap. And even if you’re in a country that subsidises them, then they don't come fast.

Decade long wait lists for gender confirmation surgery consultations, NOT the surgery. A decade just to talk to a doctor about it. Or if you’re in the US, you can make it happen a lot faster, but it can cost upwards of a hundred thousand dollars.

And it’s very easy to say, well that’s a problem for the queers. I’m fine.

Oh, are you? The Supreme Court is set to rule on abortion in 2022, and things aren’t looking good for a woman’s right to choose. If abortions are made illegal, even in the case of sexual assault, you, a victim, may become a criminal as you try to take control of your own body again.

Or how about if the housing market goes bust and by no fault of your own, thanks to the convoluted ways mortgages can change hands in America, you’re told by the bank that you underpaid your mortgage last month by a few cents, a payment increase they neglected to inform you of. And so you need to get the hell out of that house. But you refuse. Now you’re a criminal. Now the cops are going to comecoming to your door and force you out of your home. They’re not going to arrest the finance experts who screwed you, but they might just arrest you if you resist.

But, yet, a lot of people don’t see this. They still see the trans sex worker, or the desperate gay man pushed to desperate measures, or the abused teenager running away from home and doing what they need to do to survive… they don’t see them like they see themselves. And so a lot of people, an awful lot of people are a-okay with there being laws against sex work or selling drugs, even weed, or working under the table at a bar. An awful lot of people think, yeah, put them in jail.

Or fine them, that’s more humane. But then when they can’t pay the fine, where do they go? Prison. What happens? They’re trapped in the system. When they get out they have a big red CRIMINAL stamped on their forehead when they try to get ayour typical job and then… they’re forced back into the same situation that got them put in prison in the first place.

Unless they have community to help them, to hold them up, to protect them. But the gay community isn’t exactly a great place to turn to for help these days. Not anymore. So many queer people with the means to help other queer people really don’t care.

Look at Kristin^{[sic: Kyrsten]} Sinema, the bisexual democratic senator from Arizona who has basically made a career lately of saying “screw the poor”. She may be queer, but she doesnt fight for the queer community. It’s a very… “I got mine” attitude.

Running in tandem with establishment gay men and women pressuring eccentricities out of queer people, there is an ongoing push to recognize the razor’s edge that Queer rights hang on. A large component of what is referred to as Queer Anarchy strives to understand the ways in which Queer communities, as they were more or less ignored by the political and legal powers, developed their own systems of self-governance.

These communal structures were what led to the mass-mobilization of queer and queer-supporting groups in urban centres leading to a relatively quick turnaround in terms of rights being won.

Now,² you may hear the word ‘anarchy’ and be frightened in a Satanic Panic kind of way. And… this is in no small part due to the way that privileged white people either use Anarchy as an aesthetic, or assume that Anarchy is a matter of founding a libertarian Mad Max, governmentless, wild west.

However, Anarchy has many different branches and sub-schools of thought. Generally speaking… Anarchists reject prevailing political ideologies and processes as being inherent or true. This may mean they want governmental reform, or that they want to replace existing governments with new ones. It may also mean that they want to be able to live separately from federal or municipal oversight. It’s where cryptocurrency comes from.

Like I said, this is a complicated movement, and the media really does latch on to those white kids from middle-income suburbs who decide that rules are for fools in school… yo… Subsequently, the same group that drops out of college and then become zombie apocalypse survivalists. ³

Queer Anarchism, actually, has a long history predating many American queer communities as we know them. Anarchist movements within these circles analyse the ways in which the law itself is designed for selective oppression. How can a government which systematically rejects certain citizens for a reason that is entirely benign, call itself a civil society?

Evidently, they argue, there must be an underlying institution which benefits from certain people being oppressed, exploiting a government system which is designed to protect the interests of upper classes and… Yeah the answer… is… usually capitalism.

If people are poor. People are desperate. And if people are desperate, then they are pliable. And if people are pliable, and preferably under-educated, then they completely believe that you can’t raise the minimum wage or else Elon Musk, speaking of crypto, who worked hard for every one of his billions of dollars, will personally… go homeless. There it is folks. The multi-billionaires are the real persecuted class of society.

Now, once again, I’m generalizing, but there is a recognition that Queer acceptance comes with a cost — or essencially assimilate into hetero-hegimonistic social structures, or to express one’s queerness in a way that the hetero-hegimony is comfortable with. We are badgered out of our queerness because cis-hetero power structures hold our rights hostage. And then when we exist in poverty and homelessness, they remind us that we only have ourselves to blame. Somehow, in this situation, we are the ones who are illegal.

In the process of critically examining our society’s laws and legal protections, Queer Anarchy conforms to the idea of ‘be gay, do crime’ as a rallying call. This being, that our worth and value is not linked to our ability to adhere to a legal system that is in no way meant to benefit us. And that this same system, being ‘the law’ in a philosophical context, exists to use force if necessary to convince us that we should conform to social conventions in order to benefit those who exploit us.

Doing crime in this case is not necessarily murdering someone, but rejecting a socially held convention because a law says it. Instead, critically think about who benefits from this law? Who is this law meant to protect? Who is this law meant to target? And most importantly, even if a law does exist, such as laws against sexual assault, does the legal process consistantly acknowledge it? Is the process likely to side with the victim? Or the accused? And then critically deconstruct why that is.

Once again… the answer is usually capitalism. Not necessarily purist capitalism — as per an adapting marketplace of ideas that rewards merit — but crony capitalism… Which may just be a natural inevitability of capitalism.

In an economic system which prioritises wealth, the law simply becomes a method to protect those who have the means to afford it. Pride around Queerness in this context is that your inherent existence stands in opposition to these institutions of persecution. If identity itself is the crime, then we need to re-examine the definition of what a crime is. And to do that, we need to strip away the illusion that laws exist to protect everyone.

Within American continental policing, there is a bias among officers to favour wealthy districts — because as they are paid by the state tax dollars, they see these people as being more responsible for their salaries. Whereas poorer districts are not seen as if they are worth the time. Because property taxes are so much lower there.

So we have several groups of people who struggle to survive, who have no significant voice in legal processes, and who are not protected by law enforcement. What right do we as a society have to blame people for developing a set of guiding moral principles that do not align with prevailing laws, insofar as laws are designed to protect financial interests.

As I mentioned about police being aware of where their salaries come from, and thus feel a greater sense of obligation to higher-income districts, can we really say that public law enforcement is any different than a bunch of dark-age Lords hiring mercenaries to protect their castles? Understanding that people do want to exist cooperatively, what function does law enforcement have in a realistic way?

Many of the legal processes we have are inherited from ancient societies. The very laws we consider are ones to protect people are laws that were developed within feudalism. The wealthy protected themselves, and serfs, peasants, servants, and slaves were just collateral.

Dating back to ancient Persia, Egypt, Greece, India, and China, there was a much greater openness to admit that society was built on a structure of hierarchy. Oftentimes the rules that divided who was above who on a social ladder were clearly outlined and written in stone.

And there was pride in this. Pride in being social betters among the elites, and a sense of conforming oneself to one’s purpose among the lower classes. Though even with the divine right of kings and a religious population, the threat of rebellion was a very real, very constant threat. The wealthy of society danced a razors edge of amassing their wealth, while making public displays of generosity. Monuments, gardens, public libraries, schools, and even negotiated time off work, festivals, feasts — orgies! — all to give a little back to the public they were leaching wealth out of.

Those higher on the ladder had the finances to afford security to protect their assets. Their land, their possessions, their business interests. And just as much, they were protecting themselves from rivals, they also wanted to protect themselves from ‘social inferiors.’ The wealthy had the ear of politicians who could then pass into legislation a system of laws that would institutionally protect the wealthy from the poor.

For instance, laws prohibiting theft really accomplish nothing to protect the poor. For most of human history, the concept of ‘owning’ ‘property’ was something entirely foreign to MOST people. Everything a serf had was provided to them by a Lord. And owning land was something that only those with money could do. Anti-theft laws really only protected those who had something worth stealing in the first place.

And in many other ways, laws which essentially target poor people for being in desperate situations. A crime for which the punishment is a fine essentially means it’s legal as long as you have the money to sign a cheque. Because $500 is going to hit a $15,000/year household in a way so profoundly disruptive, but is almost entirely unnoticeable to someone whose net-worth is measured in stocks and bonds.

A legal system that is invested in pursuing the more peaceful means of coexistence among it’s people would aim to ensure a distribution of privilege. Rather than focusing on protecting those who have enough of a horde to protect. There’s that dragon again.

That there are no laws against withholding wealth from the poor is abundantly telling. In fact, something like wage theft is perfectly legal. All of this feeds into why under-privilaged communities would opt-out of typical legal structures in favour of their own communal systems of accountability. And in this kind of dynamic: survival, existence — let alone comfort — are functionally criminal actions. Because in order to survive, one must exist outside the law that is forcing them either to conform, or be silent in their suffering.

But make no mistake — our prevailing elite do not want the under-privilaged to simply not exist or go away. Without an underclass, the upper-class of society would have, primarily, no basis of wealth comparison, and secondarily, no means to exploit a scarcity of class mobility to extort cheap labour.

The mantra of hard work equating to financial success automatically feeds into this power dynamic. Without this mindset, there would be no way to continue to cast the illusion that within America, and much of the modern world, there exists a freedom of class mobility. When, in fact, fluid class mobility is the absolute last thing an oligarchic power structure wants.

Nobody’s saying that we should go out and be criminals. To live lawlessly, selfishly. As remarked by Oscar Wilde in the Portrait of Dorian Grey, vice is a slide. When you start with just a little, it’s easy to escalate into some complete debauchery. When we begin to discard social convention, there’s no clear guideline as to when to stop.

Like Walter White in Breaking Bad, cooking meth in order to pay for cancer treatment… To keep his family safe and out of danger. Until he, himself, became the danger. There’s a point where you can say that you survived. But… your survival came at the cost of breaking the law. Why not go all out and keep it rolling? The punishment’s not gonna get worse.

One crime begets another crime to justify it. Where do we draw the line? When does the need for survival become the need for comfort? When does the need for comfort become the need for excess? And unlike those who have money before they start committing crimes, we at the bottom don’t have the ability to buy a couple of Senators in order to make amendments to the law, making what was once a crime legal… for the right kind of people.

Even the legalisation of marijuana is really only legalising production for a certain few, and keeping production illegal for the people who have been cultivating it for decades.

More and more laws are added to our culture, prohibiting the actions of the poor. And at the same time we remove laws which prohibit the actions of those rich enough to pay for the right accountants, exploit the right loopholes, diversify their investments, shift their money between so many international bank accounts that it’s difficult for external investigators to tally up how much money they have. How much they owe.

Which leads to situations where companies like Apple are able to file their taxes in ways that make it seem like they lost money. Which then makes this company which, at times, has had more liquid assets than the American Federal Government, qualified for tax refunds. You, with your 30K salary… you can’t do that. You don’t have the money needed to pay the cost to hide it, to exploit it.

And while there are degrees of wealth that are, for whatever reason, impossible to tax… at the same time, there’s no amount too low that the government won’t want a cut. Sales tax exists to tax those who make too little to have to pay income or property taxes.

We live in a world where the Gateses, the Besoses, the Musks, the Bloomburgs all brag about how much money they have in interviews, and yet these same people turn around and cry to the government about how they don’t have enough money to be worth taxing. And nobody in the Government – at least very few people — seem to see any problem with that.

Both Pose and Bananna Fish bombard viewers with this messaging. Breaking Bad too. To have power is the ability to exercise authority over others. And authority is the ability to decide what the law is and, by extension, influence others’ understanding of right and wrong. And those in positions of authority use it.

Why do you think people want these positions in politics, want these massive hordes of wealth, want these authoritative roles in law enforcement — do you think they seek out this kind of power just to say they have it? Or are they going to use it? Those with authority make their criminal actions legal. And when they’re legal, they’re not wrong. And if it’s not wrong, it’s right. And if it’s right, you’re going to do it some more.

Banana Fish shows two kinds of criminals – those on the streets, and those in Mansions. Those in mansons can decide what the law is, they can decide what a criminal is. And they decide that those on the street hustling a couple thousand dollars to pay their way through the next few months are scum. They’re worse than scum, they’re a threat to the very fabric of society.

Meanwhile these same people syphon money out of the economy to add to their heap of gold. They amass amounts of wealth they never intend to spend. Money that will sit in a bank account, accruing interest, that will forever be removed from the economy. It will never pay an employee, it will never buy a product, will never pay for a service. It’s gone. Forever.

And so other people will get poorer. The upper-middle class will become the middle class. And the middle class will become the poor. And the poor will become the destitute. When it comes to trickle-down economics there is only one thing that moves downward. Desperation.

And the more people are desperate, the more the rich can continue to manipulate laws, can scapegoat poor people problems on other poor people, defund public services. The more they can buy, the more they control, the more angles they have to attack you and convince you that it’s your fault that you’re poor.

Because, they say, the rich worked hard for their money. For their wealth. For their horde. The dragon sits atop the heap of gold coins it did not mint, that it did not mine, jewels it did not cut and crowns it did not smelt. The dragon just had the power to take it, and the power to convince everyone else that it was invulnerable.

The great lie of mythology is that we were convinced that we had to fight the dragon one at a time. That, while the dragon flexes its power, there’s a code of honour — a law, if you will — that said we have to face it in a duel or else our victory wouldn’t count. We needed one brave knight to do the fighting for us all. Instead of we, all of us, crashing into the dragon’s den and wrecking the son of a bitch.

But at some point the laws of chivalry became the laws of the land. Passed down by the men who ruled the world. The kings and governors and presidents and, now, the guys who took advantage of a pandemic to become even richer than they already were. The ones who argued that patents on vaccines should remain intact. The ones that fooled people into believing that pretend, online monopoly money was the future.

That’s why I loved Banana Fish. Though the plot is messy and overly complicated, and Ash is a bit of a Mary Sue, and his relationship with Eiji isn’t quite as obvious as I’d like. I loved the show because of what it said about the world we live in. The evil, powerful men in the highest echelons of organised crime and government are, in the end, taken down because the low classes, the downtrodden, the abused, the traumatised, the minorities… they worked together to bring down the power players that were keeping them down. The street kids tore down an empire of abuse and took some power for themselves.

The series showed that it's possible to overcome the dragon if you work together. And so maybe, if Ash really did die, it’s fitting. It’s fitting that the perfect knight in shining armour, who led the charge to take down the dragon, didn’t survive to see the days to come. Because the world he’d grown up in, that empire of abuse, had fallen.

There was no place left for him in the new world that stood around him, and so he passed on from it. Maybe onto a new life. Maybe he got up from that table in the New York Public Library, got stitched up, and flew to Japan, where he could live a different life. One where he didn’t have to be a knight fighting dragons anymore.

There are real people like Ash in this world, fighting to change things, to take down the dragons controlling us all. Abusing us. Traumatising us. And it's usually is the ones who are most abused and traumatised, the most desperate, that will fight the hardest. People dying of AIDS, fighting a system set up to ignore them. People born into the wrong body fighting to be acknowledged for who they really are. The sick fighting for healthcare. The poor fighting for opportunities. And when the system decides these battles are too inconvenient, simply fighting them becomes illegal.

And then those knights become criminals. And So maybe becoming a criminal is necessary sometimes. And if the law does not reflect what we need, maybe it’s even essential.

So be gay. Do crime. And have a good time while you do it.