I was so excited when @ekhobson and @dnbrgr asked me to write about Out of Control: Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners for the book #RemakingRadicalism. It’s a beautiful collection of works, a documentary collection of 30 years of social movement history

On this, my very first Twitter thread, I’m gonna share why I was so stoked to write about Out of Control, and why I continue to study and write about their work. Ready? OK: Thread. #RemakingRadicalism

The name “Out of Control” was the invention of rita bo brown, mostly called just Bo—a formerly incarcerated revolutionary who was a well known activist around the Bay Area, a white working-class radical butch dyke who had been in the George Jackson Brigade.

You can see why, when Bo was on the run for the robberies she did on behalf of the Black Liberation Army, they thought she was a man--called her the "Gentleman Bank Robber." Bo created the name Out of Control humorously, with a double-meaning that I’ll write about a little here.

First, “Out of Control” referred to the fight to free women prisoners from the Lexington Control Unit, a sensory deprivation and isolation facility that was constructed in the basement of Lexington Prison, in Kentucky, in 1987. #RemakingRadicalism

The unit was specifically designed to punish several women political prisoners, dissidents and fighters against the US state: Alejandrina Torres, Silvia Baraldini, and Susan Rosenberg were all taken there, where prison officials told them they’d never get out--

unless they renounced their militant leftist political commitments—which they valiantly refused. #RemakingRadicalism

A national campaign for the closure of the unit was organized and led by the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, a Puerto Rican organization in Chicago, and Out of Control joined it, working on the campaign until a successful lawsuit won closure of the unit in 1988.

So on the one hand, the name “Out of Control,” when we think about political prisoners, draws attention not only to the Lexington Control Unit, but also the era it comes from #RemakingRadicalism

...toward the beginning of decades of the buildup of control units and supermax prisons—which many people would say began with the lockdown unit at Marion prison in 1983, and from there, an era of construction of control units and supermax prisons began. #RemakingRadicalism

They’re everywhere now, but they started then, and were enacted partly to control political prisoners and people who organized during incarceration, effectively blurring lines of who is considered a “political prisoner.” #RemakingRadicalism

All incarceration is political, and so many ways of being are targeted by the punishment system; techniques like solitary confinement—a feature of control units—work to threaten, to discipline, and potentially to punish all incarcerated people. #RemakingRadicalism

Control units extend the punishment system in a brutal, torturous manner. So the name of the group makes us think about that. #RemakingRadicalism

But the other meaning of the name “Out of Control,” that is so brilliant, is that this was actually a group of self identified “dykes out of control”. They made t-shirts proclaiming themselves “dykes from hell.” #RemakingRadicalism

And they raised a lot of good hell, a lot of beautiful, rebellious hell, from banner drops and street protests to garage sales in the Castro and women’s cultural performance nights called “Sparks Fly”—events that raised money for legal support and a commissary fund.

Out of Control brought a culture of wild women’s queer desire into the public sphere, never without the message and reminder that a structuring feature of social inequity is the sexist control of women perpetrated in both everyday social life and also in state systems.

And they went to the site of the prison constantly, visiting and advocating and agitating on behalf of friends and comrades, providing legal aid, sustenance, and also emotional support--

promoting the voices of women political prisoners to social movement publics—especially to feminists—really, never resting while their comrades were locked up. #RemakingRadicalism

They focused on the site of the prison as a place where “uruly” women, who rebelled against normative concepts of feminine gender and sexuality, had long been confined and sometimes brutally controlled. #RemakingRadicalism

In effect, they extended a queer-feminist critique of the patriarchy of the family and similar social institutions to the patriarchy of the state, through which women political prisoners, who had refused complicity with norms of US citizenship, were used as examples--

meant to frighten and demobilize a potentially much larger, mass movement of resistance against US imperialism, racism, militarism, and capitalist exploitation—a movement that we still need, and that actually, we are still in now. #RemakingRadicalism

And that movement needs to be a feminist movement, and it needs to be radically queer—to reject the imposition of heterosexual, heteropatriarchal norms and controls. So, "Out of Control" signals all of that. #RemakingRadicalism

I wanted to write about Out of Control because of the massive history of resistance we can learn about when we pay attention to what they did. #RemakingRadicalism

Members of Out of Control were also members of SDS and the Weather Underground, Prairie Fire, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, and many many more groups. #RemakingRadicalism

They supported women like their friends, Laura Whitehorn and Linda Evans when they were hit by the Resistance Conspiracy case; Marilyn Buck, who was incarcerated for decades, because she had participated in the liberation of Assata Shakur. #RemakingRadicalism

They supported members of the FALN, like Alejandrina Torres and Dylcia Pagan; they sent money to the incarcerated MOVE women. They testified at the 1992 tribunal that put the United States on trial for crimes against humanity. #RemakingRadicalism

They brought lesbian resistance and visibility to the left, and with their presence at Pride and the Dyke March, they brought leftist radicalism to queer and feminist publics. #RemakingRadicalism

Bo Brown was one of the organizers of the first Critical Resistance conference in 1999, and Out of Control’s workshop there was one of numerous spaces through which they influenced the contemporary prison abolitionist movement. #RemakingRadicalism

They wanted women, lesbians, working-class dykes, and current and former prisoners to be valued and influential participants in the emergent coalitions for revolutionary justice. #RemakingRadicalism

Finally, I wanted to write about Out of Control, because I love them. I want to be influenced by them, and I want to share their influence with the world. #RemakingRadicalism

I love to listen to former members of this group, and to learn from their long lives of constant political activism. I love their multiple commitments to lesbian sociality, to visibility, to camaraderie—to each other. #RemakingRadicalism

I love to hear how they made community and how they made noise, in pre-gentrification SF, when they’d get together for brunch and hours-long meetings, hanging out with each other in the sunny Mission, before it was targeted by forces of capital that would squeeze us all out.

They didn’t do what they did for recognition, but I want to give them recognition—even more, because of that. #RemakingRadicalism

They remind me of the world-changing and world-making that can be wrought from realms of love and rebel friendship, and I want to share their stories with everyone. #RemakingRadicalism --thanks Emily and Dan! @ekhobson and @dnbrgr