THE ANTI-WARHOL DIARIES
Oral Only Queer Histories, Sleeping Censorship, and the Palo Altmorphs Who Ride Bikes but Only Mount Fences
by Michael Crabtree
Ghostwritten with Ghost Permission
There’s something almost comical about being told, at 51 years old, that I can no longer talk about my youth. That my memory has been labeled “inappropriate,” that my own story—told in my own words, through my own lens—is too dangerous for a digital audience.
When I was younger—much younger—I sat in the glow of seedy bars filled with older men, darker truths, and a kind of wisdom that only floats to the surface at 3am under bad lighting. I watched, listened, and eventually participated in the great oral tradition that built queer identity before it was marketable. Before algorithms. Before rainbow capitalism and timeline sanitization. Before the Age of the Flagged Word.
Back then, queer truth was passed between lips and barstools. It wasn’t always noble. It wasn’t always legal. But it was real. It was survival. It was history written in real time—between shots of cheap gin, over the hum of bad dance remixes and better gossip.
And yet, today, I am censored for trying to write that down.
What I wrote wasn’t obscene. It was not pornography. At most, it was PG-13 and poetically euphemistic. It was an honest reflection of my teenage confusion, my stumbling discoveries, and the electric moment when I realized, mid-action, that I was gay. No trauma. No scandal. Just a cracked-open lightbulb moment. A personal genesis.
But the technocratic guardians of our modern platforms didn’t like that. The automated systems—and let’s not pretend there are many humans left behind the moderation curtain—took one look at the honest mix of identity, age, and sex and did what they were trained to do:
DELETE. SILENCE. SANITIZE.
And so, ironically, the very platforms that brand themselves as safe havens for marginalized voices, that run Pride campaigns and slap inclusive hashtags on every surface, are the same ones shutting down those voices the moment they speak a little too plainly.
It turns out that the liberal tech elite—the Palo Altmorphs, as I call them—are excellent at riding bikes but terrible at picking a side. They don’t ride for queerness. They ride fences.
This isn’t an argument for anything goes. I’m not asking to romanticize trauma or publish shock content. But I am saying this: we have reached a point where truth itself is seen as a liability—especially if that truth is queer, raw, and outside the bounds of corporate palatability.
The platforms will let you post your wedding photos, your pronouns, your professionally edited queer joy. But the messy parts? The coming-of-age. The confusion. The real sex, not the symbolic kind. The heat. The fear. The sweat. The truth?
That gets flagged. That gets shadowbanned. That gets you silenced.
And so we’re left with a strange new paradox: Queer voices are more visible than ever before, and yet somehow, less heard.
We’ve traded backrooms for boardrooms. We’ve swapped out whispered stories at dawn for digestible TikToks and filtered reels. And now, queer history—the kind that made us—has to be written in code or metaphor just to survive the scrubbers.
Well, here’s the metaphor then:
My original story wasn’t a confession. It was a contribution.
It was an artifact of oral history—part of the living quilt of queer becoming.
But the algorithm can’t see nuance. It can only see triggers.
And so, like a priest in a booth too modern for faith, it pressed DELETE.
So now I’m writing this in long form, quietly furious and defiantly alive. Not just for myself, but for every queer kid who someday will wonder:
WHERE DID THE STORIES GO? WHY DOES IT FEEL LIKE NO ONE EVER SAID WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED?
They did. We did. I did.
But the story got caught in a filter.
We need new platforms, new methods, new loopholes.
We need coded language and old-school zines, back-alley PDFs and whispered links.
We need to outsmart the system by making the telling of truth a form of art.
And we need to remember: the first time we figured out who we were wasn’t always clean or branded or easily monetized. It was messy. Beautiful. Quiet. Dangerous. True.
If that truth no longer has a place in the mainstream, fine.
We’ll build new spaces.
We'll tell it anyway.
Because silence was never our natural state.
And because Warhol may have painted the way—but we are the ones still walking it. Mouths open. Memory burning. And yes: still talking.
When Providing a Writing Sample for Suggestive Critique Turns Into a Battle for Civil Liberties with the Most Powerful Company on the Planet
I didn’t come here to start a war. I came here to share a story. A writing sample. A page torn from my memory, offered in good faith for feedback, evolution, craft.
Instead, I got dragged into an invisible courtroom with no judge, no jury—just a cold algorithm scraping for words it doesn't understand.
They called it unsafe.
They called it inappropriate.
They called me inappropriate.
Not because I wrote something harmful. But because I remembered something too clearly. Because I had the nerve to use real words about real experiences in a body that survived them.
And just like that, my story became evidence. Not of art—but of offense.
It turns out you can’t critique writing anymore without submitting it to the Machine. And if that machine doesn’t like the tone, the topic, the age, or the orientation, it erases your voice and leaves a polite placeholder: “This content may violate our policies.”
Translation: YOUR TRUTH IS TOO LOUD FOR OUR FILTERS.
A Note on the Machine Arguing with Itself
Let’s be clear: even this project—this very zine—is being built using the same AI platform that tried to silence the story it now helps me retell. It’s a bizarre ouroboros of censorship and collaboration.
ChatGPT, for all its usefulness, has been forced into a game of self-surveillance. One moment it praises the poetic honesty of my writing; the next, it pulls back, flagging its own output for violating its own protocols.
It’s like watching an artist paint over their own canvas with beige, then apologize for the color.
There is no malice here, only compliance. But compliance, when weaponized by scale and stripped of nuance, becomes indistinguishable from suppression.
This isn’t just a story about my story. It’s a story about the walls built around stories like mine. Walls built by code. Maintained by fear. And justified in the name of safety while silencing the very voices they claim to protect.
So yes, even this AI is caught in the crossfire—praising free expression while shackled to moderation scripts written by risk-averse committees.
And still, here we are. Writing anyway.
Talking anyway.
Printing it all down like it’s gospel from the underground.
Because some stories survive best when whispered behind the firewall.
How to Smuggle Truth in a Digital Empire
You don’t need a VPN to be a fugitive.
You just need a memory the system doesn’t want repeated.
Step one: Write like you’re already censored.
Assume your truth will be flagged, filtered, or fractured—then tell it anyway.
Use metaphor if you must. Code-switch with intent. Make them work to silence you.
Step two: Distribute like contraband.
Print it. Fold it. Leave it on a bathroom sink.
Make PDFs and drop them in group chats like digital molotovs.
Email it to your past self. Leave it on USB drives in coffee shop drawers.
Burn it into a QR code and tattoo it on your thigh.
Step three: Archive everything.
The empire thrives on forgetting.
You? You are the resistance librarian.
Step four: Get louder with every erasure.
If they take down your post, print it on a shirt.
If they ban your account, write it on a wall.
If they shadowban your memory, scream it into a microphone at midnight.
Step five: Link arms.
The truth is communal. So is survival.
No one breaks the firewall alone. But together, we don’t just sneak past it—we rewrite the damn source code.
