thank you. for still being here- alive, in the world, emotionally engaged instead of numbed out, here talking on the internet. I know it all takes tremendous courage. I don't know you but I know the world is better for having gem in it
Great read and I was always looking forward to your return. I watched the whole "cancel" from start to finish in a sort of "how is this happening" type way because it seemed so forced and incongruent and wrong. Any trust in leftist community justice I had withered away during those lives which felt super punitive and one sided and riddled with public shame. It didn't feel like you and the issue at hand were being explored, but more so that the "cult" was making you an example of the power they had and how easily they could snatch away yours, showing everyone they could be next. It also felt that you were being punished for your success? You made the best abolitionist content the internet had ever seen, lead with true belief and passion, and in seconds your contributions were forcibly removed... it was so odd. I never stopped following you in hopes I could see your work again and here we are. Hope u stick around I can read more of you. Cheers to your life and love
P.s. I always feel like the "oh but your life is fine after ur cancel" or "that celeb still had so much money after their cancel theyre FINE" is such a misperception. To be forced into a false truth is traumatizing and icky... and then to have to silence your need to share and express and connect to others is not as simple as "oh but your life is fine"... especially for those like you who clearly have some wonderful thought and guidance to share. Money and good vibes doesnt drown out your heart lol and I'm surprised people don't know that. People don't share their work for money or happiness they do it because they *have to* and their heart demands it. You take that away and you take a lot.
I don't agree that its impossible for someone to rape you and not know it. I was assaulted at 15, by a young man who was never taught consent. I know this because I went to catholic elementary school and the sexual education was...well it was fucking evil. This being said, I don't think this young man deserves to be punished. But he did something that hugely affected my ability to engage in sexual intimacy, and so did the other people who assaulted me. I blame the catholic church...but the assertion that I couldn't have been assaulted because it I had been he would have known it...makes no sense. I can be assaulted and not want the person who assaulted me to be "cancelled" or imprisoned. I can be raped, and want systemic change instead of revenge. I believe it's life saving to teach people about consent, I'm wondering if you agree, or if you believe that I am too, brainwashed.
I was one of the 106,000 and the cult thing clicked hard in that moment. I’m really glad to hear where you’re at. Really like the self definition exercise…as another lost leftist I think I’ll try that.
gem, it means so much to hear from you again. i LOVED your old content and in 2020 on a way more small small level i was canceled by some close friends because of my breakup w my x. i thought about u all the time but tbh i forgot your handle and just wondered why i never saw u. i missed the whole cancel u experienced. then scrolling through my saved photos, i saw the beautiful picture of u in the sunflowers just this spring. i was SO happy to be reacquainted with your page and then so upset to see what had transpired. i’ve been thinking so much about how carceral and punitive and bad cancel culture feels in the way it has been wielded lately. i know for myself i was really hating on myself, and thank the lord i had some real true friends who could freakin convince we i deserved dignity and was being manipulated. i think this piece is really powerful in your vulnerability. i love there’s no focus on appearing perfect - it feels like the left is all about being some perfect spewing of “right” ideas. things r hard. it’s hard to talk about rape. i do think people rape without knowing it, because everything is complicated! but i know what happened to u is super fucked up and i’m so so happy u are sharing yourself with us again. i am so grateful for u gem. so glad you have been healing and loved. you deserve all the love and i appreciate you very much.
this is massive. i’ve been cancelled, on a far smaller, more local scale than you were, but so much of what you say rings so painfully true. my accuser didn’t have to go through any official paths to ostracize me from my community, my greatest passion and my career (all one and the same, as is so often true under capitalism). i watched the live, your “trial”, watched how people were not only unwilling to search for the transformative justice they claimed to want, but were actively seeking ways to Get you, signs that you were truly the monster they wanted you to be. i feel that same scrutiny in every interaction. every new person i meet, no matter how unrelated or unknown they may seem, i feel the anxiety that they’ll eventually recognize my name from my accuser’s impossibly wide network and ghost me or worse. even in writing this comment, i find myself exploring parts of my own circumstances and, for lack of a better word, trauma, that i had never dared to. i’m realizing that i could write my own essay in response, but i’ll just leave it at this: i’m sorry you’ve gone through this. and thank you for somehow being strong enough to go Through it, and still be here. your words are a blessing. thank you for sharing. i’ll continue to follow your journey. Thank you.
I’m so happy to see you back. Seeing your situation unfold was really eye opening for me and was instrumental in steering me in a new direction. The way so many leftists handle stuff like this is not okay, and I began to learn that I don’t align with that way of handling conflict. Pushing people out of community and using shame as a weapon is not acceptable or helpful at all. I’m sorry that you had to deal with being cancelled and having lies spread about you.
I appreciate you and really value the thoughts you choose to share with us
inadvertently falling in line with cult-think is like waking up stuck in a junji ito human hole when you thought you were on a hike, and learning to speak for yourself again can feel like carving away rock with our bare hands. i can’t think too hard yet about the time i’ve lost to being scared of being deemed a bad person by people i do not admire in the slightest, people who are only waiting for me to sin. it makes me so fucking angry. my memories of my “community” are paralytic.
thank you for excavating some wiggle room. looking forward to more bad thoughts.
Thank you for sharing parts of yourself with the world online again. I want to acknowledge how vulnerable that is and deep gratitude for that vulnerability. This essay makes me feel my own anxiety on this topiv. I have lived most of my time in online "leftist" space as a voyeur and have been both successfully persuaded into unnuanced and violent ideas about what justice looks like as well as repelled by what versions of that "justice" look like in practice. I am profoundly affected by the word "cult" and the descriptions you provided. It makes me feel like I can't tell where I stand. Do I successfully avoid toxic cultist behavior by never posting or commenting on Instagram boards or do I support it by following your cancelation, disagreeing, and yet not doing anything about it? What can I do in the face of online harassment campaigns of people whose work I admire but I don't know personally on either sides of the conflict? Where does the online left end and the offline left? How do we even define a cult of ideology that doesn't seem to have a centralized origin other than a way of talking and behaving online which then bleeds into other forms of organizing? Is the culture being identified a type of leftist ideology or is it the consequences of trying to organize leftist movements in a society dominated in all spheres by white supremacy? These are just some of the questions that your words and those of other survivors of cancelation bring to my mind. I hope they are helpful questions or that exploring them can change the cycles of harm.
definitely struggling with this as someone who has, over time, realized that past interactions i've had with people were uncomfortable, non-consensual, even assault. and as someone who has experienced this harm from people who might have been unconscious of what they were doing wrong. but i also believe that people should not be defined by the worst things they have done, and that this is not what i want to do to the people who have hurt me. the idea that these things can exist at the same time is difficult, but something i think we need to explore if we're serious about transformative justice and accountability and healing.
i assaulted my ex fiance and don't remember it. i was on a sleeping medication that made me highly intoxicated. i told both my therapist and psychiatrist about the side effects and they both told me to keep taking it. we didn't talk about what happened until months later when they proposed and then called it off after a few days, citing the assault as the reason. i wasn't drunk, i wasn't sober, i was just medication compliant. i can't seem to get them out of my head after two years, i think because things ended on such a strange, terrible note. i went through similar feelings- was i a monster? did i have bad consent practices? why would i do something so terrible to someone i love? did i subconsciously believe i had a right to their body and that's why i acted out while intoxicated? ultimately i have no answers. but i know i'm not a rapist.
i'm sorry you had to go through this experience, and grateful you're sharing your voice again. 2020 was portal, an outrageous time. People were desperately hungry for freedom and looking for guides to lead them to it, while simultaneously ripping these freshly-painted golden calves off of their altars with fury. Leaders were dropping like flies, statements were written and shared--so many statements. Were you really there if you hadn't drafted a statement? Accounts erased. Voices silenced. Were the accusations true? Was it counter-insurgency, like my movement elders warned? Or were we all damaged people looking to be freed by other damaged people? My money is mostly on the latter though it was likely a mix of all three but either way, i felt like the writing was written on the wall and that wall was 2014, when oppressed people with slightly more privilege cannabalized other oppressed people with less privilege with impunity during an era of movement that still hasn't received its due share of retrospection and scrutiny. Maybe one day i'll stop complaining and share my own analysis, and it's work like yours that inspires me to make one day a real day.
Earlier in 2020, I watched Kobe's funeral on-mute at a bar with a friend during an early birthday celebration. I shook my fist at a celebration for an abuser who, at the time, i was told should be scorned for the rest of eternity, and my friend, a black woman a few years older than me, shook her head, and offered him compassion, empathy and forgiveness. "Do you think that all those boys know what they're doing? Fo you think anyone ever taught them better, when all they ever hear about sex is how it's suppose to make them men? What are we suppose to do with all our brothers and cousins who fuck up? They all fuck up, that doesn't mean they stay fucked up." Things along these lines. Whether her questions should be applied to every case is a separate conversation, but I realized in that moment, despite the Henny slushies, that the woke mob/space was not giving me the tools I wanted as an abolitionist, tools that help me take care of my community and help us to create our own understandings of safety and accountability, reconciliation and repair. Tools that help us be free and also human, hurt, be hurt, yet still find and create care. And it was so uncomfortable to feel this gap between that moment and who I was before it; it was messy, dangerous even, to wade into the waters of time and wonder about processes and conversations and becomings that may or may not have occurred, that I/the public had no access to either way, and about whether anger and hatred and violence are like giant rocks that stand unmoved by that water, or floating objects, like glass, that eventually become transformed by the current. Booing a dead man didn't help me understand life. It didn't even make me feel good, it just promised that it would: it was an illusion. I appreciate you for poking holes in the illusion that keeps us more invested in its propagation than our own evolution.
I've been following your healing since you started posting again, it's so joyful to see you speaking your truth, re-finding your voice, and learning how to redeem yourself after an event where everyone told you that you were unredeemable. I was one of the ones who unfortunately didn't have much of a voice to be in defense of you during your canceling, but even if I did I'm sure they would've found some way to quell mine as well. These spaces become so alluring; spaces where black and queer voices are exalted; where black people can speak their truth; where we all feel a little bit closer to being free. But cases like this really show that we are simply a reflection of the things we hate in some ways. How do we scream abolition and hand out whatever punishment we have the power to? How can we ever advance from carceral thinking when breaking the social code will ever result in our heads on a stake? There is no real transformative justice here; we talk so highly of something that we don't even make a practice for ourselves and in our own communities.
This comment is bigger than this platform, but you crossed my mind the other day and I saw that you are back on TT and Insta. I hope that you and your partner have been well. I am appreciating reading your thoughts and reflections in this space that feel more real, more raw and more reflective. If you need to chat or catch up, I hope that you still have my contact info.
thank you. for still being here- alive, in the world, emotionally engaged instead of numbed out, here talking on the internet. I know it all takes tremendous courage. I don't know you but I know the world is better for having gem in it
Great read and I was always looking forward to your return. I watched the whole "cancel" from start to finish in a sort of "how is this happening" type way because it seemed so forced and incongruent and wrong. Any trust in leftist community justice I had withered away during those lives which felt super punitive and one sided and riddled with public shame. It didn't feel like you and the issue at hand were being explored, but more so that the "cult" was making you an example of the power they had and how easily they could snatch away yours, showing everyone they could be next. It also felt that you were being punished for your success? You made the best abolitionist content the internet had ever seen, lead with true belief and passion, and in seconds your contributions were forcibly removed... it was so odd. I never stopped following you in hopes I could see your work again and here we are. Hope u stick around I can read more of you. Cheers to your life and love
P.s. I always feel like the "oh but your life is fine after ur cancel" or "that celeb still had so much money after their cancel theyre FINE" is such a misperception. To be forced into a false truth is traumatizing and icky... and then to have to silence your need to share and express and connect to others is not as simple as "oh but your life is fine"... especially for those like you who clearly have some wonderful thought and guidance to share. Money and good vibes doesnt drown out your heart lol and I'm surprised people don't know that. People don't share their work for money or happiness they do it because they *have to* and their heart demands it. You take that away and you take a lot.
I don't agree that its impossible for someone to rape you and not know it. I was assaulted at 15, by a young man who was never taught consent. I know this because I went to catholic elementary school and the sexual education was...well it was fucking evil. This being said, I don't think this young man deserves to be punished. But he did something that hugely affected my ability to engage in sexual intimacy, and so did the other people who assaulted me. I blame the catholic church...but the assertion that I couldn't have been assaulted because it I had been he would have known it...makes no sense. I can be assaulted and not want the person who assaulted me to be "cancelled" or imprisoned. I can be raped, and want systemic change instead of revenge. I believe it's life saving to teach people about consent, I'm wondering if you agree, or if you believe that I am too, brainwashed.
I was one of the 106,000 and the cult thing clicked hard in that moment. I’m really glad to hear where you’re at. Really like the self definition exercise…as another lost leftist I think I’ll try that.
this is beautiful! thanks and blessings.
gem, it means so much to hear from you again. i LOVED your old content and in 2020 on a way more small small level i was canceled by some close friends because of my breakup w my x. i thought about u all the time but tbh i forgot your handle and just wondered why i never saw u. i missed the whole cancel u experienced. then scrolling through my saved photos, i saw the beautiful picture of u in the sunflowers just this spring. i was SO happy to be reacquainted with your page and then so upset to see what had transpired. i’ve been thinking so much about how carceral and punitive and bad cancel culture feels in the way it has been wielded lately. i know for myself i was really hating on myself, and thank the lord i had some real true friends who could freakin convince we i deserved dignity and was being manipulated. i think this piece is really powerful in your vulnerability. i love there’s no focus on appearing perfect - it feels like the left is all about being some perfect spewing of “right” ideas. things r hard. it’s hard to talk about rape. i do think people rape without knowing it, because everything is complicated! but i know what happened to u is super fucked up and i’m so so happy u are sharing yourself with us again. i am so grateful for u gem. so glad you have been healing and loved. you deserve all the love and i appreciate you very much.
this is massive. i’ve been cancelled, on a far smaller, more local scale than you were, but so much of what you say rings so painfully true. my accuser didn’t have to go through any official paths to ostracize me from my community, my greatest passion and my career (all one and the same, as is so often true under capitalism). i watched the live, your “trial”, watched how people were not only unwilling to search for the transformative justice they claimed to want, but were actively seeking ways to Get you, signs that you were truly the monster they wanted you to be. i feel that same scrutiny in every interaction. every new person i meet, no matter how unrelated or unknown they may seem, i feel the anxiety that they’ll eventually recognize my name from my accuser’s impossibly wide network and ghost me or worse. even in writing this comment, i find myself exploring parts of my own circumstances and, for lack of a better word, trauma, that i had never dared to. i’m realizing that i could write my own essay in response, but i’ll just leave it at this: i’m sorry you’ve gone through this. and thank you for somehow being strong enough to go Through it, and still be here. your words are a blessing. thank you for sharing. i’ll continue to follow your journey. Thank you.
I’m so happy to see you back. Seeing your situation unfold was really eye opening for me and was instrumental in steering me in a new direction. The way so many leftists handle stuff like this is not okay, and I began to learn that I don’t align with that way of handling conflict. Pushing people out of community and using shame as a weapon is not acceptable or helpful at all. I’m sorry that you had to deal with being cancelled and having lies spread about you.
I appreciate you and really value the thoughts you choose to share with us
inadvertently falling in line with cult-think is like waking up stuck in a junji ito human hole when you thought you were on a hike, and learning to speak for yourself again can feel like carving away rock with our bare hands. i can’t think too hard yet about the time i’ve lost to being scared of being deemed a bad person by people i do not admire in the slightest, people who are only waiting for me to sin. it makes me so fucking angry. my memories of my “community” are paralytic.
thank you for excavating some wiggle room. looking forward to more bad thoughts.
Thank you for sharing parts of yourself with the world online again. I want to acknowledge how vulnerable that is and deep gratitude for that vulnerability. This essay makes me feel my own anxiety on this topiv. I have lived most of my time in online "leftist" space as a voyeur and have been both successfully persuaded into unnuanced and violent ideas about what justice looks like as well as repelled by what versions of that "justice" look like in practice. I am profoundly affected by the word "cult" and the descriptions you provided. It makes me feel like I can't tell where I stand. Do I successfully avoid toxic cultist behavior by never posting or commenting on Instagram boards or do I support it by following your cancelation, disagreeing, and yet not doing anything about it? What can I do in the face of online harassment campaigns of people whose work I admire but I don't know personally on either sides of the conflict? Where does the online left end and the offline left? How do we even define a cult of ideology that doesn't seem to have a centralized origin other than a way of talking and behaving online which then bleeds into other forms of organizing? Is the culture being identified a type of leftist ideology or is it the consequences of trying to organize leftist movements in a society dominated in all spheres by white supremacy? These are just some of the questions that your words and those of other survivors of cancelation bring to my mind. I hope they are helpful questions or that exploring them can change the cycles of harm.
definitely struggling with this as someone who has, over time, realized that past interactions i've had with people were uncomfortable, non-consensual, even assault. and as someone who has experienced this harm from people who might have been unconscious of what they were doing wrong. but i also believe that people should not be defined by the worst things they have done, and that this is not what i want to do to the people who have hurt me. the idea that these things can exist at the same time is difficult, but something i think we need to explore if we're serious about transformative justice and accountability and healing.
i assaulted my ex fiance and don't remember it. i was on a sleeping medication that made me highly intoxicated. i told both my therapist and psychiatrist about the side effects and they both told me to keep taking it. we didn't talk about what happened until months later when they proposed and then called it off after a few days, citing the assault as the reason. i wasn't drunk, i wasn't sober, i was just medication compliant. i can't seem to get them out of my head after two years, i think because things ended on such a strange, terrible note. i went through similar feelings- was i a monster? did i have bad consent practices? why would i do something so terrible to someone i love? did i subconsciously believe i had a right to their body and that's why i acted out while intoxicated? ultimately i have no answers. but i know i'm not a rapist.
i'm sorry you had to go through this experience, and grateful you're sharing your voice again. 2020 was portal, an outrageous time. People were desperately hungry for freedom and looking for guides to lead them to it, while simultaneously ripping these freshly-painted golden calves off of their altars with fury. Leaders were dropping like flies, statements were written and shared--so many statements. Were you really there if you hadn't drafted a statement? Accounts erased. Voices silenced. Were the accusations true? Was it counter-insurgency, like my movement elders warned? Or were we all damaged people looking to be freed by other damaged people? My money is mostly on the latter though it was likely a mix of all three but either way, i felt like the writing was written on the wall and that wall was 2014, when oppressed people with slightly more privilege cannabalized other oppressed people with less privilege with impunity during an era of movement that still hasn't received its due share of retrospection and scrutiny. Maybe one day i'll stop complaining and share my own analysis, and it's work like yours that inspires me to make one day a real day.
Earlier in 2020, I watched Kobe's funeral on-mute at a bar with a friend during an early birthday celebration. I shook my fist at a celebration for an abuser who, at the time, i was told should be scorned for the rest of eternity, and my friend, a black woman a few years older than me, shook her head, and offered him compassion, empathy and forgiveness. "Do you think that all those boys know what they're doing? Fo you think anyone ever taught them better, when all they ever hear about sex is how it's suppose to make them men? What are we suppose to do with all our brothers and cousins who fuck up? They all fuck up, that doesn't mean they stay fucked up." Things along these lines. Whether her questions should be applied to every case is a separate conversation, but I realized in that moment, despite the Henny slushies, that the woke mob/space was not giving me the tools I wanted as an abolitionist, tools that help me take care of my community and help us to create our own understandings of safety and accountability, reconciliation and repair. Tools that help us be free and also human, hurt, be hurt, yet still find and create care. And it was so uncomfortable to feel this gap between that moment and who I was before it; it was messy, dangerous even, to wade into the waters of time and wonder about processes and conversations and becomings that may or may not have occurred, that I/the public had no access to either way, and about whether anger and hatred and violence are like giant rocks that stand unmoved by that water, or floating objects, like glass, that eventually become transformed by the current. Booing a dead man didn't help me understand life. It didn't even make me feel good, it just promised that it would: it was an illusion. I appreciate you for poking holes in the illusion that keeps us more invested in its propagation than our own evolution.
I've been following your healing since you started posting again, it's so joyful to see you speaking your truth, re-finding your voice, and learning how to redeem yourself after an event where everyone told you that you were unredeemable. I was one of the ones who unfortunately didn't have much of a voice to be in defense of you during your canceling, but even if I did I'm sure they would've found some way to quell mine as well. These spaces become so alluring; spaces where black and queer voices are exalted; where black people can speak their truth; where we all feel a little bit closer to being free. But cases like this really show that we are simply a reflection of the things we hate in some ways. How do we scream abolition and hand out whatever punishment we have the power to? How can we ever advance from carceral thinking when breaking the social code will ever result in our heads on a stake? There is no real transformative justice here; we talk so highly of something that we don't even make a practice for ourselves and in our own communities.
Hope you are doing well. Love your writing. "equal parts journal entry, research paper, propaganda machine and satirical essay" - Fantastic!
This comment is bigger than this platform, but you crossed my mind the other day and I saw that you are back on TT and Insta. I hope that you and your partner have been well. I am appreciating reading your thoughts and reflections in this space that feel more real, more raw and more reflective. If you need to chat or catch up, I hope that you still have my contact info.