In search of shock value, trendy Manhattan #AltRight boys unwittingly apt 50-year-old gay performance art prank.

From Electric Lit:

Bluestockings is a feminist bookstore, cafe, and activist center in New York City—basically, a gathering place for progressive ideals. So it’s probably no surprise that it would be targeted by alt-right types. Fortunately, the vandalism was more ideological than physical: attempting to sneak copies of a white supremacist memoir onto the shelves.

As usual for a group whose main tenet is “everyone’s fucking me over but me,” the intentions of this…protest?…are a little muddy. Were they trying to impugn Bluestockings? To help Yiannopoulos’ real book sales match his fantasy ones? Eh, who literally ever knows. But in any event, Bluestockings’ response, both in the moment and on Facebook, is a model for how businesses and organizations can commit to dealing with people who espouse white supremacy in the name of (their understanding of) free speech.

It could even work for individuals. “Uncle George, Thanksgiving is open to people who ascribe to a range of ideologies; however, there is no room for alt-right propaganda or the endorsement of white supremacists’ views in our space.” It has a nice ring, don’t you think?

Somehow, we doubt the #AltRighters- famous for their lack of a sense of history, even less of literature, would have been so keen on this idea had they known it had been done.

Before.

Like, 55 years.

By queers.

From Atlas Obscura:

Police came to the door of Joe Orton, the man who would one day be one of the most famous playwrights in the United Kingdom, and his partner Kenneth Halliwell’s one-bedroom apartment at 9 a.m. on 28 April, 1962. It was a Saturday, the cooling end of the first warm week of the year, and the men had been up for hours, customarily getting up with the sunrise.

“We are police officers,” one said, “and I have a warrant to search your flat as I have reason to believe you have a number of stolen library books.” Orton replied: “Oh dear.”

A search warrant might seem excessive for library book hoarding—but Halliwell and Orton were no ordinary library pilferers. For over two years, Orton and Halliwell had been smuggling books out of their local libraries, the magnificent Art Nouveau Islington Central Library on London’s Holloway Road and nearby red-brick Essex Road Library—and then returning them.

Orton hid books in a satchel; Halliwell, six-and-a-half years older, used a gas mask case. They would take them home, redo their covers and dust-jackets, and then slip them back onto the shelves.

Sometimes, these alterations were obscene: a reader scanning a relatively tame Dorothy Sayers whodunit would find themselves confronted with a mystery even before they opened the book. The blurb now described some missing knickers and a seven-inch phallus, and concluded: “READ THIS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS! And have a good s*** while you are reading!” Meanwhile, the collected plays of Emlyn Williams, a Welsh dramatist, suddenly included “Knickers Must Fall,” “Olivia Prude,” “Up The Front,” and “Up The Back.”

The collages on the covers were no less subdued, and often overtly queer. On the cover of a book of John Betjeman poetry, a middle-aged man glowers in scanty black briefs. His body is covered entirely in tattoos. A now mostly forgotten romance novel, Queen’s Favourite, was redone with two men wrestling, naked to their navels.

Years later, once he’d become a famous playwright, Orton recalled: “I used to stand in corners after I’d smuggled the doctored books back into the library and then watch people read them. It was very funny, very interesting.”

Orton and Halliwell got six months each in prison and a fine worth $12,000 today.