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For the writer and illustrator Vic Liu,“be gay, do crime” is not simply a slogan for Instagram or a colorful backpack pin. The phrase reflects a central theme of their work.
“The difference between crime and harm is something that’s often discussed in abolitionist spaces,” says Liu, the co-author and illustrator of The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration, a three-part examination of the economic and political conditions that created mass incarceration. “Crime is the breaking of a rule that the government has decided — parking in the wrong place, for example. Harm is when you deeply hurt someone.”
For most of U.S. history — and arguably into the present day — being gay was doing crime. Until the 1970s, the punishment for sodomy across the United States could be life in prison. In the 1950s and 1960s, “three piece clothing laws” required women to wear a dress, bra, and underwear, or risk arrest during raids of queer bars. Today, the criminalization of queerness and transness takes the form of bans on gender-affirming care and drag performance. And so for Liu, “crimes” are often constructs governments use to limit our possibilities for pleasure, discovery, and bodily autonomy. Be gay, defy unjust laws. Be gay, resist the norm. Be gay, become yourself.
Out now from PM Press, The Warehouse contains hundreds of illustrations from Liu and incarcerated artists, each designed to help people on the outside understand a system predicated on disappearance. Co-authored with abolitionist James Kilgore, the text also offers strategies to imagine new forms of justice and care, detailing how accessible housing, free education, and improved health care could reduce harm in our societies. Liu notes that these interventions would be especially critical for LGBTQ+ people, who are incarcerated at three times the rate of the general population. According to The Vera Institute of Justice, more than 85% of incarcerated trans people have spent time in solitary confinement, and over half of those people spent more than a year there. Additionally, 20% of youth in the juvenile legal system are queer, and 85% of those are queer youth of color.
In addition to The Warehouse, Vic Liu is the creator of Bang! Masturbation for People of All Genders, an inclusive and revelatory visual guide to masturbation that has sold almost 50,000 copies. The 28-year-old is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, where they focus on projects that convey complicated topics with a focus on empathy and accessibility. Below, we discuss how mass incarceration exists as a function of mass invisibilization, portraying the ongoing debates between abolition and reform, and how we can each participate in the work to reverse the inhumanities of our criminal justice system.
Where did the idea for this book come from?
I’ll start by saying that I firmly believe that text is elitist. Twenty percent of Americans are illiterate. We exclude so many people when we exclusively encase information in text. Some of this is grounded in my own lineage. My grandmother did not learn how to read until much later in life, and she’s one of the smartest people I know. I think it is completely unjust for us to take all the information about how the world works and hide it from people, so I pivoted towards making information visible through things like color, design, and art.
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That led to BANG, my first book about masturbation for all genders and abilities, which is race, ability, and trans-inclusive. It was crucial to me that the anatomy diagrams were race-diverse, which is something that is not always available. It was also a visual primer, so it’s very much designed to make it accessible without words. At that time, I was reading about mass incarceration and read James’s book Understanding Mass Incarceration, but the graphic design was horrible. I cold emailed him and said, “I want to make a visual book with you.” This man — a 76-year-old white man who uses he/him pronouns in his signature — answered, “I have no idea what that means. But let’s talk.” And then we had a book four years later.
What is the relationship between BANG and The Warehouse?
From the outside, books about mass incarceration and masturbation are not very related. But the intersection is bodily autonomy, and the fact that the state wants to make us afraid of our own bodies. “Uses of the Erotic,” an essay by Audre Lorde, is incredibly important to me. She talks about how the oppressor derives power by separating you from the inherent power you possess in your body. She says that it is crucial politically to access that power because it teaches you that you can survive without the state. It teaches you that you deserve to have joy. It teaches you to not allow yourself to settle for powerlessness or despair.
Visual illustration feels especially important because mass incarceration functions through invisibilization. In what ways did that come up as you were working on this project?
As you said, a lot of how we treat incarceration in the States is that we disappear people. The point is not to maintain connections. The average person who’s incarcerated lives over 100 miles away from their home. I’ve been volunteering for the past year with the Parole Prep Project. The person I’m working with to file for parole is located in Dannemora, New York, which is a five-hour drive from New York City, even though he was arrested in Queens. Similarly, a lot of what allows mass incarceration to survive is the way it disappears prisons from the public view, which means we cannot hold them accountable. That is completely counter to the “Freedom of Information” Act and other laws.
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People don’t always have accurate views into life inside because photographers tend to be institutionally approved. That’s something we really wanted to do with the book: Put you inside of what it’s like to live in a prison and to experience the carceral system. For example, Nutraloaf, meat loaf’s worst reincarnation. It’s everything that the cafeteria has left over, blended, put into a loaf form, and fed to people. That’s not something that a lot of people would think to photograph, but to me, it is so important to talk about. That is what we’re doing to a human being. That is what their dinner looks like. That is very different from hearing the statistics all over again.
How did you seek to approach the debate between reform and abolition in the book?
The reformist-versus-abolitionist conflict is the defining tension between people who think prisons are bad. I’m an abolitionist. James is an abolitionist. But in the book, we don’t necessarily platform abolition over reform. We depict both of them. I’m sure that reform people might say they can see certain biases. We obviously do not want more prisons, but I am trying to be more understanding of some reformism because I think purity culture is decimating the left. Another important thing James has talked about is that you can’t abolish a whole prison while your loved one is still in it, right? If you are someone who is trying to advocate for your loved one to have access to say a wheelchair-friendly yard, for example, that is technically reformist. But I think that’s completely understandable.
How can people on the outside support folks who are incarcerated and get plugged into organizing in their communities?
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I think everyone gets a little bit freaked out when I talk about actually doing shit about incarceration because it’s so intimidating. You’re like, How do I take down a prison? I derive hope from the fact that people are already doing it. You will be joining a fight that has existed for as long as prisons. There are incredible people, especially formerly incarcerated people, who are at the forefront. For me, the most important thing is to build community through bars. The LGBTQ+ abolitionist organization Black and Pink has a great pen pal program. Or, if you can, visit a prison because those visits sustain people. That’s where it begins: Developing a personal connection and making sure people aren’t forgotten.
Mariame Kaba famously wrote, “Hope is a discipline.” What does that discipline look like for you?
This is very intense work. I’ve been trying to be very open about the toll it takes on my mental health. I used to think that people who did this work were superheroes, and I think being honest about the sacrifice it takes opens the door for people. To me, one of the opposite feelings of mass incarceration is care: doing things with care, taking care of people. We need to practice that politic even in how we act against the system.
How can queerness help us imagine a world beyond the carceral state?
Being queer, at its heart, is about resistance. It exists in a way that’s outside of the cisgender, hetero rules that have been laid down by the government and religion. Queer people will continue to be at the forefront of abolishing mass incarceration. Queer people tend to be at the forefront of most activism, whether that’s free Palestine or masking for COVID. A lot of it has to do with the ability to resist believing what the government says and to seek for a truth that we believe is real without necessarily knowing what it is.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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