Since August 1, 2016—50 years to the day after the UT Tower shooting—it’s been legal to carry concealed firearms into most public university spaces in Texas, including classrooms. 

When the law went into effect despite opposition from students, administrators, and faculty, University of Texas at Austin students reacted by brandishing dildos in a performance-art-style, nonviolent protest that earned national media attention. After the idea spread in a half-joking social media post, student protesters wore T-shirts, held signs and banners, and strapped dildos donated by local shops to their backpacks, all to mock masculine gun culture and the Texas laws that regulate sex toys more heavily than firearms on campus. 

“Texas has decided it is not at all obnoxious or illegal to allow deadly concealed weapons on campus. But walking around with a dildo could land you in trouble,” protest organizer Jessica Jin said at the time. “We’re protesting absurdity with absurdity.” The viral protest was one of the largest gun-control rallies the state had yet seen.

Today, “campus carry” is still in effect, and the obscenity statute regulating sex toys is technically on the books, too, despite a U.S. district judge calling it “facially unconstitutional” and “unenforceable” in 2008. Since then, the Legislature has doubled down, and in February, a federal appeals court ruled that Texas can enforce its latest obscenity law, which targets drag shows and prohibits “sexually oriented performance,” including the exhibition of sex toys and “accessories or prosthetics that exaggerate male or female sexual characteristics.” Meanwhile, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that, while policies allowing guns on campus don’t reduce mass shootings, gun access “substantially increases” the risk of suicide among young adults.

Dildos were a means to an end in the gun-control-focused “Cocks Not Glocks” protest, but they were, and remain, a complex protest symbol.

August 2016 (Sandy Carson/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News)

Some of the Cocks Not Glocks protest’s most intentionally provocative imagery was also its most Texas-specific. The protesters inverted the Battle of Gonzales slogan, “Come and Take It” (already reused by the Tea Party and a Texas gun activist group), to read, “Take It and Come,” and designed a modified version of the famous cannon and star flag, replacing the cannon with a dildo.

Despite the protest’s specificity to Texas, international interest in unraveling the layers of the sophisticated joke at the core of Cocks Not Glocks continues. In a 2024 academic article, Lotta Kähkönen, a scholar based in Finland, used a close reading of online backlash to the protest and interviews conducted at the University of Texas by a Finnish team in the spring semesters of 2018 and 2019 to trace the ways reactions to the dildos were steeped in the objects’ cultural valences, “driving discussions about obscenity, feminism, phallic symbols and sexuality.” Kähkönen points out that “In the United States, themes of protectionism and opposition to ‘immoral’ sexual behavior and pornography have been highlighted in the right-wing agenda after 1977, when strategists discovered that they had a mass appeal.” 

In opposition, dildos as protest symbols were (and are) associated with “sex positivity.” Bringing a sex-positive symbol to oppose gun violence, the student activists of Cocks Not Glocks revived the spirit of the “Make Love not War” movement of the 1960s, which linked sex positivism to nonviolence. “Love-ins” against the Vietnam War and political violence occurred on UT’s campus in 1968. 

The playfully subversive atmosphere of the Cocks Not Glocks protest meant the students could not be dismissed as angry feminists. Yet they did receive sexist backlash and other criticism. The protest organizers also confronted historical associations that complicated the use of this imagery. After an image of a large black dildo displayed at the protest went viral, the protest organizers apologized for unintentionally perpetuating a racist caricature of Black bodies and painted the dildo burnt orange, UT’s school color. 

Engaging in frequent interviews with media outlets, student organizers largely managed to navigate their chosen symbol’s complexity. Framing campus carry as a law that would chill free speech, they argued that if a classroom disagreement could potentially escalate into a firefight, it was unlikely anyone would feel safe enough to challenge a fellow student to a debate. Through this framing, the protesters situated themselves as more comfortable with free speech and the exchange of ideas than the uptight Legislature. The associations they tapped—connecting freedom of speech and sex positivity—go back to at least 1873, when Comstock laws criminalized mailing material related to contraception and family planning by labeling it obscene.

In recent months, dildos have again emerged as a protest prop, this time in opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In one demonstration, protesters stuck dildos into the chain-link fence surrounding the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. In another incident, a member of the “Dildo Distribution Delegation” threw a dildo at ICE agents outside the Minneapolis Graduate Hotel in an effort to “psychologically dismantle” the federal law enforcement agency. These dildo-based protests, unpegged from a critique of obscenity laws, are part of a recurring thread in protests against ICE’s disruptive presence in American cities, critiquing MAGA machismo. 

The shock factor of hundreds of dildos made the Cocks Not Glocks protest memorable, and the conversation that it launched at UT continued beyond the demonstration. UT anthropology professor Craig Campbell added a dildo in the color “gunmetal gray” to a department exhibition case in the UT Student Activity Center, where it was on view for two years. The protest event opened a door for a teachable moment about phallic symbols through an anthropological lens. Campus Carry, a book published by Harvard University Press in 2020, edited by UT professors Matt Valentine and Patricia Somers, includes reflection pieces from students, alumni, and faculty to illustrate the complexity and controversy of the campus-carry policy that sparked the protest. Ellen Spiro & PJ Raval created an award-winning 25-minute documentary about the protests titled Come and Take It. “Gun Free UT” posters continue to appear in campus windows.

Today, however, free speech on Texas public university campuses faces a chill that makes the environment far less hospitable to both student and faculty speech. Student-led demonstrations against the bombing of Gaza were met with forceful arrests by Texas state troopers in 2024. UT students who attempted to schedule a meeting with Provost William Inboden in November 2025, and staged a brief sit-in when the request was denied, were given suspensions. The UT Board of Regents directed faculty to limit classroom discussion of controversial subjects, in a policy that PEN America’s Campus Free Speech Program Director Kristen Shahverdian says “will harpoon any chance students have of a valuable college education at the University of Texas.” 

Administrators are cracking down especially hard on evocations of sexuality. The University of Texas System, Texas A&M, and other universities blocked drag shows in their zealous efforts to comply with a January 2025 executive order. Under a new policy, Texas A&M faculty have been forced to cancel or modify courses that touch on topics related to gender and sexuality, which has already resulted in the baffling removal of Plato readings related to gender from a philosophy course. UT-Austin announced it will consolidate the department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; American Studies; African and African Diaspora Studies; and Mexican American and Latino Studies into a single Social and Cultural Analysis department. Faculty are calling the step a culture-war move to destabilize departments. 

“There is zero trust in our administration to be fair or reasonable,” said Campbell. “It feels like we’re sitting on a powder keg.”

The recent series of policies and actions contrasts starkly with the official response to the Cocks Not Glocks protest, during which UT-Austin administrators said the students appeared to be engaging in protected political speech and did not attempt to intervene.

In 2026, student demands for gun control take a different form. On March 3, students gathered on UT’s South Mall to mourn the victims of the recent mass shooting on Austin’s Sixth Street. At the event, members of Students Demand Action called for common-sense gun laws, as the attendees held candles and flowers. 

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I made $7.25 an hour at my first job back in 2015, peddling candles and soaps and other good-smelling baubles at a French boutique near Rice University. It was a good job, as far as first jobs go; I was a junior in high school, and I did my homework behind the counter. I knew even then that $7.25 an hour wasn’t a dignified wage, one you could build a life on, a family. In the 11 years since, the minimum wage in Texas hasn’t budged.

In Jules Wernersbach’s new novel, Work to Do (out in April from University of Iowa Press), the entry-level workers at the Guadalupe Street Co-Op in Austin make $12 an hour. Though it’s more than minimum wage (as management loves to remind them), it’s one of many reasons why the staff is organizing a union. The book unfolds over one week in late August across three perspectives at the organic grocery store: Eleanor, the store’s founder, who’s never gotten over the ex she founded the store with; Roz, the senior floor manager desperate for Eleanor to give her some real power to modernize the co-op; and Randy, the middle-aged trans dairy manager leading the fight for a union. All three protagonists of Work to Do are starving for a sense of community and trying to find it through their work.

Set in 2019, the novel pays homage to both pre-pandemic and pre-gentrification Austin and features haunts gone by like gay bar Dirty Sally’s and UT watering hole Spider House. I wouldn’t say the Austin of Work to Do feels particularly lived-in—these places are more akin to set dressing. But perhaps that’s exactly the point: to show the reader how work alienates us from our surroundings.

The novel unfolds during hurricane season, and it was the climate change angle that first attracted me to the book. The novel opens with a flood, and the storm prep (or lack thereof) lights the powder keg of the workers’ unionizing efforts. After repeated requests to close early, a staff member injures his arm trying to get the doors open after the power blinks out, and an unflattering video circulates of the manager forcing everyone back to work amid the chaos. 

Part of what keeps ownership from preparing adequately are Eleanor’s misguided comparisons to Austin’s real-life Memorial Day flood of ’81, and Wernersbach does an excellent job later in the narrative of jumping back in time to the owner’s lived experience of that flood and the larger-than-life role it plays in her sense of both herself and the business she runs. Climate change makes fools of us when we live in the past, when we don’t imagine that the world could be different than it once was. And though the weather is just peachy for the majority of the book, it comes back in a big way at the conclusion.

But, at the end of the day, this is a workplace drama. It’s an age-old genre in American letters, though one that changes through the years as much as the nature of work does. It’s full of the things that make workplace novels interesting: clandestine group chats, coworkers hearing secret conversations through a door, unsanctioned (and ill-advised) romance. 

I’ve heard it said that Americans don’t like didacticism in their art. If so, some may balk at the book’s decided point of view on precarity. Eleanor must face her own mortality, navigating life and legacy post-breast cancer diagnosis. Roz is burning through the inheritance (and the monthly allowance) left to her by her middle-class family, unclear what lies on the other side. At one point, Randy has only $18.41 in his bank account, and, facing eviction, he stares down the tent he lived in during his early days in Austin as a 20-something and wonders if he can do it again. 

Who has a safety net? the book asks. What is required to make our work dignified? For while it might be true, as the book notes, that “They all passed around what little they had when it was needed, their pooled resources shifting from person to person, a free-floating mutual aid GoFundMe,” we need structures that can sustainably hold us up. 

My one quibble with the book’s stance on labor is not what is said but what is shown. The predominantly white cast of characters, particularly those who get the bulk of the airtime to articulate their political positions at the group’s organizing meetings and around the store, don’t reflect the reality of who is doing frontline work in Texas—those who have the most to gain from a union like the one in the book. According to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, frontline workers in Texas are more likely to be people of color. There’s still a beautiful tapestry painted of what it means to be a worker and to organize together; it just feels as if there are a few colors missing. 

There is, though, a delicious array of gay mess in the book. The first girl who made you believe in a future, as a queer person; girls who are taken who you desperately wish weren’t—the kind who make you reckless; ex-girlfriends who have clearly moved on even when you haven’t; families who wish you were different, wish you’d just settle down, get a better job, a different way of life, a respectable one. 

Work to Do is an ode to the service jobs that keep a place like Austin running, the bartenders and grocery store workers and booksellers, the underloved proletariat that keeps those businesses going. When Randy’s roommates suggest that he might find a better-paying job, he puts it this way: “The co-op wasn’t a job for college kids. It was a job for people who didn’t fit in anywhere else. … To earn more you had to buy into the whole American package, you had to want a house and cars and marriage and family and center the comfort of the individual, which was a form of isolation.”

In an age of increasingly frequent disasters, natural and man-made, community is a precious thing indeed. Work to Do is a rousing portrayal of how we might go about the work of making that community together, and in so doing, make our lives a bit less precarious.

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