ABSTRACT
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) justice has been conceptualised and pursued with two major pathways at the outset: the decriminalisation of sodomy and the institution of hate crimes that acknowledge the increased threat of violence that people of diverse sexualities and genders face. These two campaigns found success in the United States in the first decade of the 2000s, with the federal overturn of sodomy legislation occurring in 2003 and the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Act of 2009. Mainstream LGBT organisations uphold these simultaneous projects of decriminalisation and criminalisation as equally important achievements, despite the continued prevalence of racialised and anti-queer violence enacted by police and prisons. Queer justice, alternatively, need not support this paradigm. Organisations such as the Audre Lorde Project resist the retributive logic of criminalising hate violence and create movements to advance safety with penal abolitionist praxis. This chapter explores a community-based organising model that resists hate violence and police violence simultaneously, by grounding practice in the knowledge that both legitimised and vigilante violence represent the same impulse toward punitive and correctional control.
