The 1970s, the so-called anni di piombo (years of lead), saw the flowering of a multiplicity of practices, ideas and thoughts, which go to compose a multifaceted worldwide revolutionary movement that for about twenty years shook the whole earth.
We know the exploits of guerrilla groups such as the German RAF, the Italian BR, “insurgency” parties such as the Black Panther Party or Potere Operaio in Italy, widespread struggles such as Autonomia Operaia or Action Directe, and yet around this chaotic history we forget many movements that proposed to change the existing starting from the same structure of their struggles.
The George Jackson Brigade is an urban guerrilla group that between 1975 and 1978 carried out a series of armed actions capable of shaking up American society.
Ideologically diverse, with part anarchist militants and part communists, they had a non-hierarchical organization structured by affinity, a model similar to the Angry Brigades and Azione Rivoluzionaria, but not only: the BGJ is one of the first organized structures in which the queer struggle and the struggle against prisons become inseparable.
With an executive group formed largely by lesbian women and non cisgenerous individualities, the BGJ immediately brings as a practical criticism the segregation of non-binary people in the “largest democracy in the world”, the same one that a few years earlier found itself running away from the stones thrown by transgender people during the Stonewall uprisings.
The fact that such a path is now forgotten does not surprise us: on the one hand it is in the interest of pinkwashing people to create a peaceful, colorful and “gay” LGBTQ story, which only in Stonewall has its moment of anger to be placed in a specific time context, on the other hand we see the militants prefer to talk about stories that do not question their gender privileges or sexuality.
To us, who like to question everything, it is important to dig up from the sands of time a story of short but intense struggle, a hatchet of war that still damages jails and homophobes.