When I first heard the term ‘squatting,’ I was a 16 or 17 year old suburban teen, listening to Green Day on the school bus, doodling the Trans Anarchist symbol in my notebook margins, and wearing way too much eyeliner. I hadn’t read any real political theory, and most of the time I couldn’t fully grasp what I was reading from leftists online. What I did know was that I hated the government, and I knew I was hungry for radical change, whatever that may have meant to me at the time. As I searched for answers and information to fill in the gaps of my knowledge, I did so in the way most teens from my generation would. With the World Wide Web at my fingertips, I turned to Google and social media posts for my overview of the past couple centuries of political counter-cultural history.
Of course, learning from strangers online has its downsides, primarily unfathomable bias and misrepresentation of the truth. The internet is a forum, and all opinions are welcome.
One contested topic online, especially within alternative political and music-based subcultures, is always who is and is not a poser. One topic in particular, crust pants, seems to be consistently surrounded with this particular brand of scrutiny. Can anyone make crust pants? Are they only crust pants if you don’t wash them? If you hand wash them are you a poser, or only if you machine wash them? Is it or is it not stupid that crust punks don’t bathe? Are crust punks performative? Do you have to squat to be a crust punk? Is squatting performative? And toughest of all, who gets to decide?
It was through these kinds of online conversations that I discovered squatting. For those unfamiliar, a Squat, as defined by Brian Heagney’s ABC’s of Anarchy, an excerpt of which is included in today’s zine, is “an empty, vacant, or neglected structure that someone has decided to turn into a living space.”
I heard all kinds of things – squatting is fun, squatting is legal in some states, squatting is dirty, squatters share needles, squatters have unsafe sex and spread STIs, squatters are all performative, squatters are pretending to be homeless, squatting is resistance against owned property, and so on and so forth.
I didn’t really know what to think. Even as a teen, I think I knew I was missing too much of the picture to know what a squat really was. I do remember thinking, though, that it didn’t really matter if squats were great or not, because they weren’t for me. I had some understanding that if I, as a transgender person, were to launch myself into that scene, I would face othering, or even danger, and so, squatting would never have anything to do with me. I can’t tell you where I picked that up – but I felt it.
While I’ve learned and read some here and there about the reality of squatting since, my general perception of the straight-ness of squatting has gone generally unchallenged until I happened upon today’s zine in the archive. Queers, Family, and the Squat Community is a 24 page zine by an individual named Kathleen about their experience and knowledge gained while researching the squat community in Amsterdam, or “the ‘Dam,” as they call it.
Reading this zine, my initial overwhelm at the widely varying descriptions of squat culture makes total sense. Kathleen mentions the varying perspectives they heard, being told that there was no queer presence in squats, that queer squats had existed in the past, but no longer do, and that there were plenty for them to find, and where to look, and who to talk to. They detail attempts at interviewing a woman who lived in a squat, and who was a queer activist org member – but refused to take the interview, as she neither identified as a squatter, nor as queer!
I think part of this wide variance in definition and experience is accounted for by the fact that queers and punks are historically groups of people that reject categorization. No squat is going to function the same, no queer person has the same definition of queerness and what it means to them, and that doesn’t mean one person is right and one is wrong. The beauty of these expansive labels or political identities is their fluidity. Kathleen includes statements from queer and squat-dwelling individuals in their zine, and while people’s definitions of queer and statements about queer squatting echo each other, no one’s definition is the same.
On that note, this zine makes a point not to define a “queer squat” as one, definitive thing. In fact, Kathleen is concerned with quite the opposite, focusing on the fluidity of these terms, and furthermore, the stretchiness of the term “queer.” Kathleen gets into the term queer as a broader theoretical term, not strictly as one person’s gender or sexual identity, but as a broader umbrella for a way of existing outside of the bounds of the heteronormative culture, yes, but also the capitalist, racially oppressive, class divided, sexist, ableist, and all-the-other-ists superstructure we live within.
“Squatting—as a counterculture—has created a counterpublic, a network of people and places that operate outside of the dominant public sphere. Even if squats are not inhabited by people who identify with the word queer, they are queering space itself, by redefining how spaces can be used.”
They quote Jack Halberstam’s definition of queer space from his 2003 essay, What’s That Smell?: Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives: “the new understanding of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics.” While I haven’t personally read the work that Kathleen is referencing, the topic of squatting, repurposing architecture for political reasons, and living outside the norm has me thinking a lot about a different piece written by Halberstam, written in 2018, 7 years after the creation of Kathleen’s zine.
In Unbuilding Gender – Trans* Anarchitectures In and Beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, Halberstam analyses anarchitecture in connection with transness and the process of transition, and furthermore, discusses the queerness of the anarchitectural works of Gordon Matta-Clark, an artist who, as Halberstam acknowledges, is not queer himself. However, through the inherent connection between anarchy – a rejection of the political superstructure – and trans*ness – a rejection of the superstructure’s imposition on the body, and a way of living outside of the rigidity of what is societally expected – the work can absolutely, unquestionably be called queer. “We might take up the challenge offered by Matta-Clark’s anarchitectural projects in order to spin contemporary conversations about queer and trans* politics away from notions of respectability and inclusion,” Halberstam explains, “and towards the anti-political project of unmaking a world that casts queers and trans people (and homeless people and immigrants, among others) as problems for the neoliberal state.”
Following this line of thought, something like squatting, which may not be formally defined by connection to the lgbtq+ community, can absolutely be analyzed as a queer way of living. As Kathleen discusses, squatting breaks down barriers – not only larger barriers, like who should be able to live where, but also what a space can be. Kathleen shares that several of the people she interviewed talked about the importance of making art, which was supported by squats with free music studios and dance rooms, and became a place for parties to happen and communities to be built. The borders between living space and creative space, between private and public property, are blurred – a space for all, fluid, without rules. Sounds pretty queer to me! Additionally, people who may not be able to afford or access these kinds of spaces in a traditional capitalist society now have access to it for free. In this setting, connecting with fellow humans no longer has to take place in a paid to enter space.
On top of this, squatting dissolves the imposed standard of a nuclear family, and who should, or can, share a living space. In the section “what’s a family?”, Kathleen delves into the fragility of the ‘traditional’ (western) construct of family, and the importance of expanded understanding of the term.
“Family is a social institution that is most commonly understood to be comprised of people joined by blood or marriage. This definition of family, however, excludes thousands of relations that are just as valuable but do not look traditional.”
The folks Kathleen interviewed about family had varying definitions unique to their own feelings and experiences, similarly to their definitions of Queerness and of squatting, but all individuals stressed the importance of unconditional love (in the sense that the people you love unconditionally are your family, not that unconditionality is owed to relatives.)
So, while not every squat is labeled a ‘queer squat,’ or even has queer members, the action and disruption of the status quo that squatting is can be an incredibly queer thing, and lends itself, in many cases, to building queer community structures.
Of course, These are all things that a squat can be. While I would love every squat in the whole wide world to be a paradise for all marginalized people, one key aspect of a squat is that a squat can be anything. Squats aren’t all queer friendly, far from it. Plenty of squats are built up off members with hostile and even dangerous prejudices against marginalized people. Additionally, people raised in oppressive systems often carry unchecked or unnoticed oppressive behaviors with us – and the subtler or more normalized they are, the harder they are to unlearn.
In a section titled “the good, the bad, & the manarchists”, Kathleen addresses the prevalence of misogyny in the squat community. As they put it, “there may be no masters and no gods, but at the end of the day, who’s doing the dishes?”
Kathleen points out commonly overlooked ways that normalized misogyny and hierarchy can sneak their way past someone who isn’t on the lookout for it. In addition to these ways to spot a power imbalance, Kathleen provides readers with interviewee’s takes on what makes a squat a good squat, and an advice segment on successfully organizing a collective. Additionally, the last few pages are packed with resources, including detailed information about specific squats in Amsterdam and where to find them, and a further reading list.
Oh – and of course, no anarchist zine is complete without a delicious recipe! As Kathleen puts it, “if there is no soup, I don’t want to be part of your revolution!” – and I couldn’t agree more. While I haven’t had the chance to test it personally, Kathleen’s (vegan!) pumpkin and sweet potato soup certainly sounds delicious, and I hope to try my hand at making it soon.
Rowan (He/it/they) is an intern at QZAP in spring of 2026, focusing on Zine of the Gay posts specifically. He is completing his final semester at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and is a sculptor, zinester, and library lover. In their free time, Rowan likes to read, play puzzles and word games, and care for his concerning number of houseplants.
