As the principal writer and theoretician of the Back Room collective, Gunderson became the unofficial spokesman for the entire anarchist milieu, penning dozens of articles for The Utne Reader, Artpaper, and Northern Sun News. When the mainstream media came calling, Gunderson was always ready with a quote.(36)
Though the Back Room Anarchist Center served as an important gathering place for counter-cultural youth, Gunderson wasn’t satisfied. He had bigger things in mind. From 1984-1986, he and Barry Mauer collaborated on a theoretical journal called Gray Zone. Gray Zone was eventually supplanted by The RABL Rouser.
Gordon Edgar is a 20-year veteran of the North American anarchist movement, and a former zine reviewer for Maximumrocknroll.
Gordon Edgar:
I was in a workshop with [Gunderson] at some point in those 80’s anarchist gatherings. He was very persuasive, and very sure of his opinions –I remember that.
I remember being young, and he was older, and feeling like he knew a lot more than me. I knew right away that he could out-argue me if I got into a discussion with him.
Vi (né Michael Haldeman) was a member of the Twin Cities Anarchist Federation (TCAF) and the Radical Faeries (a neo-pagan spiritual community that grew out of the Gay Liberation movement of the 1970’s).
Vi:
I wasn’t involved with RABL—the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League—but I knew those guys. I used to visit the space on Nicollet. But that was before I was really anarcho-identified or doing any kind of real organizing with anarchists. Chris Gunderson and that whole crew were a few years younger than me, and a lot more schooled. Most of them were college, or post-college.
Chris later moved to New York City. We grew up together and we were playmates when we were kids. His dad and my mom were both writers and friends. He was a friend of Larry-bob [publisher of Holy Titclamps and Queer Zine Explosion]. Larry-bob got him to come to a “Radical Faeries Terrorist Shopping Spree” downtown. Thirteen of us dressed up in drag and did a die-in on the Nicollet mall, and threw our hats up in the air like Mary Tyler Moore.
We took over the University of Minnesota Alumni Association’s Fall Fashion Show. Minutes before the models were supposed to come down the ramp we came down the escalator and took the ramp and did a fashion show for the crowd until the Fashion Show organizer called the cops. So Chris was there in drag. He was a cute girl.
Whitney Clark:
There were a lot of other people [at the Back Room] who provided some of the charisma and the color. ‘Cause Chris was always… soft spoken is not the right word… he was reasonable. It was many other people like Kevin Andress and Barry Mauer.Kevin Andress was the person who did all of the tremendous banners.
One of the things that the anarchists were known for were these awesome banners, different banners for every occasion. They were beautiful works of art. I don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it, not having taken Art History. But they were very stark. They were stenciled—the paint didn’t get full coverage—but they had sort of a modeled, three-dimensional aspect as well. It was kind of an airbrush effect. That was all Kevin Andress’ work.
Kevin was also the one who painted “Your taxes pay for murder in Central America” on the Franklin Avenue Bridge facing I-94, where millions saw it every day. There was a postcard that was made out of it.
He’s changed his name. He’s not an anarchist anymore. He’s a visual artist.
Joe Hart:
I would say that there was a little bit of a dynamic at the anarchist center where there were the leaders, and then there were the followers. And the leaders were people like Chris and Kevin Andress. And the followers were all of us grubby punk rockers. And some people would get resentful, and complain about it.
Mostly, I’d say that the punk rockers were fairly easy-going about the whole thing. We were like: “Whatever.”
There was one War Chest Tour where we got into trouble. I got arrested at that one. I got beat up by the police. A lot of people got arrested that day; they really took the brunt of the police response. And a lot of people were complaining afterward: “Where was Chris?! Where was Kevin? Where were all these people who are leading us until the action really comes?”
I don’t know if that was really fair or not. I know that both of those guys did their share of being foot soldiers. But I also know that that dynamic was part of the deal.
Whitney Clark:
At that same time, there were several other things happening –the PSO [Progressive Student Organization] was quite a coherent force, with strong leadership. There was a sense of momentum on campus. That got a lot of attention in those same years, and it was some of the same people. Because some of the anarchists (like me) were also students at the University of Minnesota.
Joe Hart:
Whitney and I were at the University together. I was in the PSO. I was in both of those scenes at different times –the punk scene and the activist scene. There wasn’t a ton of overlap. I was one of the only punk rockers in the campus political scene, because most of us weren’t going to school.
Whitney Clark:
Joe Hart was very active in the PSO. He was a punk rocker; he sort of had a foot in both worlds. He was also part of the collective at the Seward Café. Joe was at least culturally an anarchist. I don’t know how much he gravitated toward the hard, theoretical anarchism. He had a mohawk and tattoos, he was part of that scene.
Carla Vogel was not a student. She had already graduated from Lawrence University in Kansas. She was an anarchist who lived at Kwatcha with us, who was part of the Back Room crowd, but also very involved in performance. She did a one-woman show [in the year 2000] called “I Moved to Minneapolis and Fell in Love With an Anarchist.”
Joe Hart:
Everyone knew everybody else. We attended each other’s demonstrations.
Whitney Clark:
So you had all these different strands. All the other Leftist sects—the Maoists, the SWP [Socialist Workers Party], the Trots—we all sort of coalesced...
And for the big demonstrations there’d be an organizing meeting, and all the various strands would be there: Women Against Military Madness (sort of white, middle class anti-war peacenik women); the campus radicals; the anarchists; the various Red factions would all be there, and more or less working together amicably to pull together some of the major demos.
But the Back Room gave the anarchists a place to organize, have sort of a home base. We would do everything there. We’d have parties there, organizing meetings, we’d have study groups there, we’d do prep for demonstrations, we’d make our signs, we’d plan everything there. And that was sort of the beginning of RABL.
According to RABL’s Barry Mauer, the name was chosen, in part, because: “bowling appeals to the working class and revolution does not, but should.”(37)
