Zane McNeill, Riley Clare Valentine, and Blu Buchanan’s Be Gay, Do Crime reads like a daybook of LGBTQ. history. Organised as a calendar, the editors “fill every day of the year with factoids highlighting people and moments that have shaped the fight for queer liberation.”
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
We are grateful!
Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
There is something bracing about a title that shuns apology. Be Gay, Do Crime, the new almanac edited by the Working Class History collective and Liam McNeill, announces itself with the swagger of a slogan spray-painted on a police station wall. The phrase has long circulated in queer circles as both a sly provocation and as a philosophy. But what the editors have assembled here is less a conventional history than a kind of seditious calendar, offering 366 days of queer resistance—one entry for each day of the year, including leap day—drawn from forgotten uprisings, obscure court battles and the everyday heroics of people who refused to disappear.
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The book arrives at a moment when this energy feels urgent. Published in 2025 amid a fresh wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation sweeping through legislatures on both sides of the Atlantic, Be Gay, Do Crime positions itself explicitly as “a bit of historical sustenance… shared amongst friends.” This is not the sanitised queer history of pride parades sponsored by investment banks, nor the triumphalist narrative of legal victories won through patient lobbying. Instead, McNeill and his collaborators have curated what they describe as a corrective to “wealthy, white, gay assimilationist perspectives,” centring instead the radicals, the rioters, the Black lesbian union organisers and trans street fighters whose names rarely appear in mainstream accounts. The introduction makes the stakes plain: “This is not a struggle for rights and inclusion but a deeper struggle against systemic violence and dehumanisation.”
The almanac format proves both the book’s greatest strength and its occasional weakness. Readers can flip open to any date and encounter a self-contained fragment of resistance—a single sentence commemorating a forgotten protest, a paragraph detailing an obscure legal case, occasionally a full page devoted to a pivotal uprising. One day might introduce a nineteenth-century gender outlaw; the next recalls a piece of anti-trans legislation passed only weeks ago. This collage approach, borrowing from the radical pamphlet tradition, allows the book to encompass an astonishing geographic and temporal range. Stories arrive from six continents, spanning centuries, refusing any single narrative of progress. As Publishers Weekly noted, however, the calendar structure “loses any arc of progress or connection these queer narratives might otherwise create.” Page after page confronts state violence, criminalisation, and fear with little room for breath between traumas. The accumulation can feel overwhelming, even as it underscores the book’s central argument: that queer people have always lived under siege, and have always fought back.
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Yet this fragmentary quality is clearly intentional. The editors seem less interested in constructing a smooth historical arc than in creating what might be called an arsenal of memory. The foreword, written by diasporic queer anarchist Cindy Barukh Milstein, frames the anthology as a resource for contemporary struggle, a way to transform “despair into action, into a recommitment to live in caring and just ways in the face of unjust and uncaring systems.” The prose throughout oscillates between dense historical detail and impassioned manifesto, often within the same entry. When one contributor writes that “when conventional gender and sex behaviours become enshrined in law, queers must become lawbreakers,” the statement reads as both historical observation and rallying cry.
What distinguishes Be Gay, Do Crime from other queer histories is its unflinching commitment to abolitionist and anarchist politics. The editors explicitly reject the framework of rights-based reform, arguing instead for the wholesale dismantling of oppressive systems. “All systems are products of their time,” they write, “and thus… can be dismantled and new systems put in their place.” This revolutionary frame connects historical LGBTQ rebellions to broader anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-fascist movements, revealing queer people not as passive victims awaiting legal protection but as active participants in liberation struggles. The book draws deliberately from the tradition of anarchist historiography—one thinks of texts like Rattling the Cages or Surviving the Future—treating queer liberation as inseparable from the abolition of police, prisons, and colonial power. The editors contrast “fighting for scraps tossed from the opulent table of domination” with the power of communities building mutual care systems beyond state control.
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Whether this approach will find purchase beyond already-radicalised readers remains an open question. Conservative commentators—such as Stu Smith in City Journal—have already seized on the title as evidence of what an “openly revolutionary” and “radical and militant” perspective on queer politics, inadvertently confirming the book’s challenge to normativity. McNeill has noted that this is precisely the kind of book he wished existed when he was a closeted queer youth—not another paean to incremental progress, but an affirmation that radical queer history stretches back centuries and continues today. The editors hope readers will “flip to any page, soak up some inspiration, and join the legacy of resistance,” treating the almanac as a communal resource for study groups and organising meetings rather than solitary consumption.
In its eclectic mix of bite-sized history and defiant manifesto, Be Gay, Do Crime insists that queer liberation cannot be won through state reform alone. It is a reminder, uncomfortable for some, that the rainbow capitalism of corporate pride floats exists in profound tension with the revolutionary demands that sparked Stonewall and countless lesser-known uprisings. The book’s final provocation is perhaps its most subversive: that those who built queer worlds under persecution did so not by appealing to power but by refusing its terms entirely. Whether such refusal remains viable—or advisable—in 2025 is a question the almanac poses but does not pretend to answer. It simply hands readers the archive and invites them to make of it what they will.
★★★★
Be Gay, Do Crime: Everyday Acts of Queer Resistance and Rebellion by Zane McNeill, Riley Clare Valentine, and Blu Buchanan is published by PM Press, 2025, €23.
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