So

one thing I'll say is that I have really struggled with whether addiction is the right framework for the issues I'm talking about.

that we might be talking about right now through the lens of work addiction or sex and love addiction or codependency.

I have utilized a lot of tools that use addiction as the framework.

And I also noticed that the like hot stuff in our society, the stuff that people turn to because they have a feeling that it'll make them permanently happy and it doesn't.

drugs, sex, food, work, et cetera, technology is kind of disordered for most people.

It's just hot stuff in our society.

So I'm just curious how like what you found to be insufficient in the literature that you were studying and why you decided to write Love in a Fucked Up World.

Mm-hmm.

All these things, because everyone's talking behind my back, and now I heard about it, you know.

So that kind of confidentiality feels really, really important.

And the other thing is, like, you know, a lot of times we need to process something with someone, with a friend, like, "Okay, this thing's happening with my friend, sit with Jessica.

Can I talk to you about it? I'm trying to figure out should I say something to Jessica about this or not?" Like, I might need a friend to talk to me about that to help me sort out what do I wanna share with Jessica about the thing I'm struggling with, you know? And, like, can someone hold that confidentially, and so that I have a safe place to, like, process that.

When I've brought this up, a lot of people give me pushback of, like, you know, we need to tell each other things to keep each other safe.

That's, like, a really common one.

Do you have, like, starting thoughts?

And so I want to ask, like, what does that realization open up in terms of possibilities for collective survival, autonomy, and even thriving collectively?

Yeah, I mean, that common kind of movement slogan is, we're all we've got, we're all we need, is this really intense invitation to shift our faith from faith in institutions to faith in ourselves and each other and our goodness.

And it's so hard to do that because, of course, we see people act terribly in our communities all the time, including ourselves, right? But we just don't have another choice because there is not a, like...

caring government on the horizon.

That is not what it's for.

I love that you brought up the New Deal.

I thought you were going to bring up the Obama era because there's so much nostalgia for that.

How do you keep yourself hopeful? And also, what kinds of advice are you giving to other people involved in this work to help sustain them in the fight for the long haul?

How was that? Better than now?

The cool thing about now is that so many more people have come out as trans and non-binary.

So many more people have been able to learn about us from each other because we have the internet now in a way that we didn't then.

There's lots we can be happy about, about our communities resourcing each other and learning about each other, and just, like, so many more people, you know? So beautiful.

And there's been a lot of really bad things about this kind of mainstreaming, right? Like, so whenever, whenever...

What I mean when I say mainstreaming is I mean a process by which a hated group becomes more visible and a set of narratives happen.

One set of narratives where a bunch of people say, "We don't hate them anymore," but actually nothing changes for them, and they, like, you know, pretend we're included, but actually a lot of things stay terrible for us.

So, like, what have you been seeing in the last year?

How would you describe the fight that you feel is ahead of you and the people that you work with right now?

Well, you know, to, to be honest, obviously conditions are already really dire in terms of the ecological crisis.

The, you know, the storms and fires and floods are, are not going to stop coming.

They're going to continue coming and faster, and we've seen how, um, little support people get in the face of that.

And we're already living with a, you know, giant criminal punishment system that harms our communities, a horrible border enforcement system, you know, US imperialism all over the world and supporting genocide in Palestine and, you know, so many other, um, awful-Uh, militarized fronts around the world.

So all that's been going on, and now we're getting the second Trump administration, which is far more geared up even than it was last time, and we're in worse conditions than we were last time he came into office, right? Like, m- rents are higher, more people are unhoused, like, more people are in crisis.

More people are about to lose their healthcare because, uh, you know, on, on many fronts, both specific healthcare that's under attack, like reproductive and trans healthcare, but also the possibility of the loss [clears throat] of the f- um, of, you know, sort of any kind of affordable c- uh, healthcare for lower income people.

Um, how do we sit with that? How do we process that, having been unable, with all of these efforts and all of this risk-taking, to stop a genocide that we're funding?

[laughs]

I, uh, I'm Dean.

I have...

My life is about the question of, like, what makes transformative change happen, and I've been in social movement spaces for almost 30 years doing work around, like, abolition and queer and trans liberation and poverty and borders and wars.

And, um, my work has been a combination of, like, recognizing the limits of trying to work within legal systems or trying to get legal recognition.

A lot of, a lot of stuff around that and a lot of stuff kind of redirecting and saying that, like, the real work we need to do is, like, community-based work to fight back locally and support and care for people in crisis.

And more and more my work has turned towards, like, supporting people toActually build groups that can, where people can do that together and build, like, interpersonal skills around working together with each other in groups, which inevitably involves conflict.

Yeah.

Can you elaborate on the point that you just made about there's a relationship between our kind of carceral approaches to things and our relationship to dealing with conflict? Because that's fascinating.

Yeah, I would say that one of the most common patterns I see in groups and in relationships of all kinds is people just don't give each other feedback.

I don't tell you that I'm frustrated about you not doing the dishes for two months and then I blow up and say you have to move out.

You mean just leaving them to pile up doesn't send the message? It doesn't.

All of the things that we do that involve being so afraid to give each other feedback that by the time we give it, it's a very elaborate.

I've created an elaborate story.

Maybe I've told all of our friends how bad you are.

How do we sit with that? How do we process that? Having been unable with all of these efforts and all of this risk-taking to stop a genocide that we're funding.

And all these, all these snakes have slithered out of the ground now, once again, that we have to, that we have to deal with.

And, and we're living through a pretty extreme backlash that, of course, is not just because of the mainstream, it's also because of the rise of the right wing and fascism in the United States, and in particular, one of the things it's got its hold on is, which is not surprising, is gender and sexual politics.

That's something fascism likes to, you know, care about, and it's using queer and trans people's lives, and particularly trans people's lives, and also reproductive, um, health issues as a way to recruit people into a politics that's actually, like, really terrible for them, unfortunately.

He suggests the way the gay community came to prioritize gay marriage reflects a broader shift in politics by all types of formerly radical political movements.

In the Stonewall period and in the general 60s and 70s social movements, there were a lot of questions being asked about what oppression is and how to solve it.

People were thinking about ways that policing in general impacts black communities in the U.S. and ways that militarism is part of a project of U.S. imperialism abroad and how that reflected in the domestic arena.

And then you can see what happens, especially in the LGBT context, as movements professionalize and as upper class people sort of take the reins and set the agenda and the shift that happens towards an individual rights framework.

And instead we get this thin, narrow individual rights framework that doesn't deal with people being able to access what they need broadly and what kinds of major structural changes would have to happen to make it so that people have what they need.

So if people of color disproportionately don't get health care through their employer, then people of color are disproportionately not going to benefit from the right to health care through a spouse's employer.

And, you know, this is part of this theory that what the law says is what matters rather than whether or not people have what they need to survive.

If we were really concerned about the survival and basic needs of queer and trans people in California, our top priority would have been dealing with the immigration issues.

So we have to keep ourselves in check to make sure we're doing it in a way that doesn't avoid the other things we have to face in our lives and to process

it.

I mean, what you're saying, it's so rich.

There's so many pieces to that.

One piece is that there is so much we can't control that's terrifying and heartbreaking right now.

So we all are seeing every day the headlines out of Gaza, the headlines about the ecological crisis, the fear of what the next Trump presidency will bring.

And we've been living this way for a long, long time, far before the recent election.

And then I can look after the