I was initially recruited for Homintern to be one of the magazine’s agony aunts. Marguerite had the rather ambitious idea for a kind of psychoanalytic advice column. It would have two “aunts” – myself and Mike Crumplar – each giving different perspectives on various suffering readers’ problems. Marguerite is the type to collect different characters and put them together to see how they counteract each other. This, I suppose, was one of her little experiments. She also wanted to give us little prompts to respond to various weird internet cultural relics. “Mpreg” manga and the like.
Enid Witkiowski was to be a sort of trashy drag persona of sorts – I think I was in a sort of nameless they/them stretch of my twisted road to transitioning at the time and I didn’t want to use my given name. I threw around some aunt-like names with my friend we landed on Enid. “Witkiowski” was Marguerite’s misspelling of “Witkowski,” a name I chose after reading an essay by the art historian Michael Camille (“Dr. Witkowski’s Anus: French Doctors, German Homosexuals and the Obscene in Medieval Church Art”). G.J.A. Witkowski was a gynaecologist and an amateur art historian at the turn of the century who wrote a book on obscene medieval church art. His motivation for writing about this topic was a desire to both “expose the hypocrisy” of the Church and also indulge in some rather crude medical history. I liked the way Camille characterized Dr. Witkowski’s understanding of history: as “a vast stone clinic where he was able to diagnose a thousand years of bodily function and dysfunction in the forms of overblown phalluses, trumpeting anuses and squirting breasts.” “He’s just like me!” I thought.
Mike’s attention drifted off to other projects and Marguerite had enough on her plate as EIC so I wound up just doing the advice column solo as Aunt Enid. We only ended up publishing two columns but I remember having one or two others on my old computer that we never got around to publishing before Homintern crumbled apart. Whatever. I enjoyed writing the column, though it was a bit stressful at times. I mean, really, who am I to give anyone advice? And some of the ways people described their problems were really much too vague and hand-wavy for me to have anything useful to say in response anyway. I wound up writing these verbose riffs on gender and depression that seem pretty silly to me now, but that’s okay. I still agree with most of it, though I cringe when I read myself advising some people to go to therapy. At the time I was in psychotherapy myself and I suppose I was still convinced there might be something to it.
I’d do it again, I suppose, though I don’t really like advice columns. I think giving people advice is pretty presumptuous. I still hand it out sometimes though. We all have a little fascist in us. I think the purpose of an advice column should be to offer as little advice as possible, and I suppose I’d say I was more or less successful by that measure.
I wasn’t officially part of the Homintern editorial board until after the iconic first “issue” had already come out and I don’t feel like my contributions to the magazine were on the whole particularly constructive. I wrote the advice column, pestered some people to submit things and made it clear when I thought a submission’s reading of Marx was unforgivable. I guess this made me an honorary “editor,” but I was really just the magazine’s weird aunt. There were a couple pieces I gave feedback on that the writers subsequently gave up on and there were some others that simply ended up in editorial purgatory in the chaotic early months of the pandemic. One of the pieces that didn’t make it through that period was by my friend Juliana Gleeson, which I think she’s since published elsewhere. To be honest, I’d been assuming we were dead in the water for a while before it was officially announced. It was also 2020. I was busy teaching, going to protests, getting tear gassed and bruised up by the pigs, and working on my doctoral dissertation.
Other than that, I spent most of my time as an editor rejecting things. I think I probably gave more “reject” votes than any of the other editors. Sorry. I remember wanting to read more Marxist submissions that weren’t just written by undergraduate humanities majors who had never read Capital. It also hadn’t occurred to me that we would end up publishing so much poetry. I was a bit of a bitch about it. I think I convinced all the other editors that I simply hated poetry, despite the fact that my academic training more or less revolved around it. It was mostly a bit. Saskia and Jesi were able to get some really incredible stuff out there, a good amount of which Saskia was translating herself. I’m still so impressed by that.
I remember when I attended the Historical Materialism conference in London in 2019, everyone in the queer feminist corner I was lurking around in was talking about all the “gay communist” magazines that were popping up at the time. Homintern felt rather out of place among these. Part of its charm was that it wasn’t really part of that scene. It wasn’t academic. It didn’t affect any revolutionary ambitions. None of us had published in magazines like Endnotes or Salvage, and our opening editorial statement joked about suicide bombing the Verso loft. It wasn’t a “good magazine.” It wasn’t even particularly invested in being either “gay” or “communist.” It was just Homintern; it had a kind of ineffable swag. I’m pleased to have played a modest role in it.