Cosy Radical Storytelling;
queer speculative fiction writing session

The stories we tell are constantly shaping our reality as we shape them. These stories move through us, metabolically nestled inside the body, until they are ready to diffuse back out into the world, maybe as new stories. Our storytelling muscles are essential for weaving the worlds we desire and need some training! Come along on the 22nd for a collective writing circle, where will spend time with your imaginations and hopefully write together stories of queer worlds of resistance and regeneration.

No prior writing experience is needed, but if you have an existing idea for a story please bring it along. Or perhaps you have an excerpt of an existing story or favourite speculative fiction book that you can to share with the group? Or an object that prompts imagination? We will propose some short writing exercises to get us started, otherwise we will work with the material you bring and the space will be open for whatever the collective mood invites.

See you for a cosy evening for queer imagination and storytelling.

Hosted by @queeredfutures___lab

Send us an email for the location.

Accessibility information: the event is on the ground floor. There is a (steep) ramp for wheel chair accessibility. The opstand library and books are upstairs and only accessible via stairs.
We encourage everyone to wear a face mask, do a self test if you have cold-like symptoms and stay home if you have Covid. Face masks and self tests are available

We are kicking off a new round of book discussions with: Popular resistance in Palestine.

Send us a DM over instagram or an email for the location.

The main space is wheelchair accessible but to access the shelves with books you need to walk up one flight of stairs. We also provide face masks and keep the space well ventilated during opening hours.

Join us 24 September @opstand for this film screening!

Green Border (Original title: Zielona Granica, 2023, directed by Agnieszka Holland). Language: Polish, Arabic, English, French. English subtitles

A family of refugees from Syria, an English teacher from Afghanistan and a border guard all meet on the Polish-Belarusian border during the most recent humanitarian crisis in Belarus. A refugee drama between hope and despair, cynicism and humanity. It’s not a documentary, but a lot of the things that happened in the movie took place in real life.

** Trigger warnings: violence, bodily harm, children’s death, vomit **

Doors open 19.00, movie starts at 19.15 and is 2 ½ hours. After the screening we will have a short discussion. DM or email us for the location

Accessibility information: the event is on the ground floor. There is a (steep) ramp for wheel chair accessibility. The opstand library and books are upstairs and only accessible with stairs.
We encourage everyone to wear a face mask, do a self test if you have cold-like symptoms and stay home if you have Covid. Face masks and self tests are available

A note on radical accessibility for future Opstand events. We recently moved the Opstand to the upstairs of the space, which makes consulting the books and zines less accessible. Although, the events still happen at the lower floor. At the same time, we have slowly moved towards ignoring Covid. There is not much we can do about the first but there is something that can be done about the second.

We will also keep the space ventilated and we encourage everybody to:
• Do a self test if you can (we also have some in the space)
• Wear a mask if you can
• Do not come in you have symptoms

This might come as surprise for some but the pandemic is not over. To give a few numbers, 10% of infected people develop long term symptoms and Japan had the highest death rate since the pandemic began at the start of last year. This post is about promoting mutual aid and taking care of each other. Including also the people that cannot mask. As anarchists, we pride ourselves in making our own decisions instead of just listening to politicians. Yet, in this topic, we seem to just blindly follow the state policy.

For a deeper discussion on the topic, this zine is a good start https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/zines/pandemic-praxis and here is the reference for the 10% of long covid https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-023-00904-7

Are you interested in helping organize events, taking a shift, or attending a meeting? We operate under principles of free association, allowing you to get involved as much or as little as you like. You can choose the tasks that interest you and take breaks or step back whenever you need to.

We are looking to add just one or two more people to our collective. If this sounds appealing to you, please get in touch with us via direct email.

Send us an email for the address.

Knowledge sharing about linux, android updates with lineageOS, security and privacy.

As Pride The Hague 2024 approaches, we want to shed light on ongoing discussions De Opstand and fellow collectives have had with the organizing pride team.

This year, cops are official partners of the pride week, and although we have extensively voiced our disappointment and worries about this, our concerns have not been meaningfully listened to.

We hope this open letter brings transparency to the issue, and we, once again, urge the organizing team to take our concerns seriously and reflect on their choices.

A different Pride is possible, and we will keep dreaming of it.

Pride Open Letter

We do not want police at pride

After extensive discussions with COC Haaglanden, regarding the presence of cops at Pride, we still don’t feel heard and our community needs are not respected.

Our position is clear, we do not want police at our pride. Police presence at queer demonstrations have only stood to further instigate violence against us, rather than protect us from it. This has been the case both historically and within the recent past. To our greatest disappointment, the police force will be present at pride walk and at the opening party at Pride The Hague 2024.

Recently, in canal pride Leiden, we have witnessed violence against our community during pride. History keeps repeating itself. We do not want that to happen here at Pride The Hague.

The police and the system of border controls are well documented to be institutionally racist and perpetuate hatred toward queer people of color and queer migrants. Queer and trans people of color and migrants in our community do not feel safe around the police.

It’s possible to not have police force at pride: New York, London have done it!

There is international precedent for ending police presence at Pride: following the spread of the second wave of Black Lives Matter actions in summer 2020, New York City’s Pride, Vancouver Pride, and Toronto Pride ended police presence at the 2021 parade. The same is also true for Trans Pride in London. We urge Pride Den Haag to follow similar principled steps.

We have high hopes for what a Pride march and activities for queer liberation would include. We hope that Pride The Hague’s organizers will move closer to what a shared vision of pride and queer liberation would look like.

This open later is co-signed by QLU (Queer Leiden University) https://www.instagram.com/p/C64R6slIrYt