Petty Yet Liberating Incivilities in “Be Gay, Do Crime”

Petty Yet Liberating Incivilities in “Be Gay, Do Crime” https://ift.tt/VUby9rH

I’ll be honest: I’m too lethargic to be a criminal. And yet, as I look at the news and the current state of the world, I find myself aching to cast aside my lazy, law-abiding attitude for a bit of anarchy and (maybe illegal) catharsis. Reading Be Gay, Do Crime, Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley’s messy anthology of queer chaos, absolutely scratched that itch for me. 

“Be Gay, Do Crime” has become one of those phrases painted on a sign at Pride or a No Kings protest. You’ll see it on t-shirts and bumper stickers as a tongue-in-cheek joke, a call for action, a meme, or rage-bait for culture-war conservatives like Jordan Peterson (recently set off by the slogan in a law professor’s TikTok).   

At its essence, ‘Be Gay, Do Crime’ is an anti-capitalistic, anti-authoritarian statement, suggesting that defying norms with crime and “incivility” can be a necessary tactic in the fight for equal rights, especially in places where homosexuality is still criminalized. Although the characters within Llewellyn and Buckley’s anthology are often incivil and act in incredibly petty (yet liberating) ways, Be Gay, Do Crime is more emotionally indulgent than renegade. Within the sixteen short stories, you’ll find characters fully committing to the passion triggered by any type of offense — seeking justice for everything from a bad breakup to a rash developed at a laser hair removal clinic. Everything and anything can be important and a worthwhile excuse to be a bit naughty. It’s satisfying to read, and I often found myself looking at the characters with a bit of envy. 

My favorite story in the anthology, for example, was “Operation Hyacinth” by Sam Cohen. In it, a group of aging, Latinx queers in LA are about to lose their communal home and become displaced by gentrification. They decide to try to purchase the complex themselves, and embark on a bank-robbing road trip, staging holdups in small towns — dressed in high femme drag and joking through their dysphoria. The story was joyful. The characters eat fried green tomatoes in Chattanooga and pray against transphobia in Murfreesboro. They run into the ocean in Myrtle Beach and let their bodies become “tentacular and mammalian,” beyond gender, beyond fear. I loved their freedom and the way the characters lived with a clarity about what matters and the guts to take action.

“It was like someone had flicked our power on and now we were all coursing light. We had felt so low-power forever, we realized, so take-what-we-can-get but now we were taking what we were due.”

Not all of the stories in this anthology were as easy and as pleasurable of a read. Many genuinely had me setting the book aside to take a breath to separate myself from truly chaotic situations. In Temim Fruchter’s Redistribution, the protagonist breaks into the home of a famous writer, smashes some of her things, takes a bath, and finally masturbates in the stranger’s bed where she falls asleep naked. The story ends as she’s startled awake by the sound of a key in the door and “a terrified Hello?” In Two Hundred Channels of Conflict by Mac Crane, the main character sneaks into her lesbian neighbors’ garden every night to eat popcorn and watch TV through their front window, wiping her buttered fingers on the plants until she’s caught in the act.      

Then there are the stories where the crimes are not so serious and the stakes are low. Another one of my favorites, Emily Austin’s Grand Beaver Cabin, centers around an adult lesbian who enters children’s coloring contests and wins a vacation to a beaver-themed waterpark. She brings her girlfriend along, a photographer who takes stylized portraits in “dead women’s clothes”. Underneath the quirkiness, there is something tender: conversations about love and grief, a grown woman trying to soothe a childhood wound, the ache of longing to be seen and to be told you did a good job. 

Even the most petty of crimes in these stories allowed me to vicariously participate in a freer, more selfish life (S. J. Sindu’s Wild Ale ends in a queer couple pelting MAGA protestors with rotten beer hops). It weirdly reminded me of Mary Oliver’s line, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” For these characters, the soft animal of their bodies love to break the rules, and they completely indulge in it.   

This anthology wasn’t exactly what I was expecting when I picked it up. It was less gritty, missing grand, political gestures and thrilling crimes. What I found instead, though, were stories that were sometimes funny, many times filled with yearning and pain, but always intimately personal and completely raw. The creator of a viral ‘Be Gay, Do Crime’ meme is quoted saying, “‘Crime’ is the word used to describe the survival tactics many marginalized people must use to survive under capitalism, one reason queers are among those most likely to be locked up… So what else should we do besides thumb our nose at the very idea of law?” Be Gay, Do Crime does exactly that. 

FICTION 
Be Gay, Do Crime
Edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley 
Dzanc Books
Published June 03, 2025