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. 

The post ‘Cocks Not Glocks’ at 10 appeared first on The Texas Observer.

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.

The post An Ode to Austin’s Unsung Proletariat appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In 2021, tired of what she said was years of persecution in Latin American countries after being forced out of her home country of Cuba, Maria Luisa Arango Presibal and her husband Nilo Gibert Arencibia decided to come to Florida. They passed through Central America and Mexico, then crossed the border near Del Rio, where they surrendered to Border Patrol agents and requested asylum. They were released and made their way to Miami.

Arango said she was forced to flee Cuba because she marched with las Damas de Blanco, a protest group started by the loved ones of dissidents who have been detained or disappeared by that country’s authoritarian government. The organization is widely known even beyond the island nation; in 2020, a group of U.S. senators, including the Cuban Americans Ted Cruz and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, introduced a resolution honoring the group and its opposition to Cuba’s communist government.

“For nearly two decades, ‘las Damas de Blanco’ have bravely marched through the streets of Cuba wearing all white to protest the injustices their loved ones have endured,” Cruz said at the time. “In the face of oppression, these women are a beacon of light for freedom-loving Cubans.”

Meanwhile, Cuba’s communist government has become a target of the second Trump administration’s regime change campaign. President Trump himself has publicly mulled invading the island and has imposed harsh sanctions, contributing to the country’s current economic and social crisis. Earlier this year, his Justice Department charged Raul Castro, Cuba’s former president and brother of longtime U.S. bogeyman Fidel Castro, in the shooting down of an exile group’s airplane. The indictment against Castro makes note of how “Cubans fled to the United States through the Florida Straits, risking their lives, and many times resulting in the death of those migrants in those waters on their journey to freedom,” as a result of government oppression. Meanwhile, the asylum denial rate for Cubans so far in fiscal year 2026—the first full fiscal year under Trump—is 78 percent, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Today, Arango is back in Texas, a prisoner at the El Valle Detention Facility in Raymondville. In October, when she and Gibert showed up to a mandatory check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Syracuse, New York, where they’d moved after Florida, they were detained.

Cubans once received special treatment from U.S. immigration officials, but Arango is fighting for protection at a time when her compatriots have seen their privileges steadily erode under successive presidents and Trump has all but cut off access to asylum across the board.

“What we have now is an administration that is giving deportation orders to a lot of people that could face persecution in Cuba,” said María José Espinosa, the executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas. “All of them are at risk of being returned to harm.”

Despite fleeing an ideological enemy of the Trump administration and being a member of a group praised by at least two of the president’s allies, Arango was ordered deported by an immigration judge earlier this year. The judge never assessed whether Arango would face persecution in Cuba; he simply ruled that she had not provided a sufficient accounting of the time she spent in other countries before she reached the United States and hadn’t paid a recently implemented annual fee for asylum-seekers. She’s appealing.

“If we return, we’ll be in danger,” Arango said in Spanish during a phone interview from the Raymondville detention center. “We’ll be a target.”

Arango said she joined protest movements in 2013, advocating for the release of political prisoners. Though she doesn’t currently have a family member who’s a political prisoner, Arango’s attorney identified her as a member of Las Damas de Blanco, which translates to the Ladies in White, because of the garb they wear at demonstrations. Arango’s attorney provided the Observer pictures of her in the all-white uniform marching and being detained at a demonstration. The following year, she was severely injured during a knife attack at a gathering for an opposition political figure. The incident received international media attention. In 2015, according to newsclippings, her husband was beaten by police at a demonstration. Beatings and arrests were common, Arango said. One year, she said, she spent eight months in detention after she and other dissidents handed out toys to children on Three Kings Day.

Arango in white in Cuba (Courtesy/attorney)

One day, she said, an officer from the state security forces showed up at their house. “He told my husband that this order comes from above: “He has to leave the country, because if he doesn’t he’ll face the consequences,” Arango said.

They fled to Trinidad and Tobago, another Caribbean nation. They lived there in the country for four years, but they never received asylum, she said. They faced discrimination because they were Cuban. They couldn’t work and feared for their safety because of Trinidad and Tobago’s unstable security situation. Twice, Gibert was accosted by women he believed worked for the Cuban government, Arango said. After four years, they took a boat to Venezuela, made the dangerous journey north through Central America, crossed into Mexico—where Arango said they were detained and robbed by security forces—and finally entered the United States. After making their asylum request to Border Patrol agents, they were released and ordered to check in regularly with ICE, a common practice under the Biden administration and prior. 

As the United States’ longest-standing foe in the Americas, and because anti-communist Cuban exiles have been a vocal voting bloc, Cuba’s citizens have long enjoyed privileges here. The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 gave a path to citizenship for Cubans admitted into the States under parole, a temporary status immigration officials have discretion to offer. Under former President Bill Clinton, the federal government began what became known as the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, returning to Cuba immigrants found at sea and granting parole to those who made it to United States shores or showed up at the border. 

In the final years of the Obama administration, South Texas saw a flood of Cuban immigrants trying to enter the country before the end of  the “wet-foot/dry-foot” policy in 2017, part of the administration’s last-minute efforts to normalize relations with Cuba. Since then, it has been no longer customary for Cubans to automatically receive parole when they show up in the United States. Former President Joe Biden launched a new parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, an effort to slow the post-COVID migration of people from destabilized Latin American countries by having them apply from abroad rather than show up at the border, but Trump halted that program shortly after returning to office, leaving about 100,000 Cubans in the States vulnerable to deportation, Espinosa said. 

Espinosa’s organization estimates there are more than 600,000 Cubans here who don’t have a viable pathway to citizenship. As the parole-to-citizenship pathway has largely closed, the number of Cubans instead seeking asylum has spiked—but court statistics show their chances of success are slim.

Arango and Gibert’s cases, begun in 2021, dragged on for years, so in October they were caught up in the Trump administration’s practice of detaining previously released asylum-seekers when they go to their check-ins. Arango said she was first taken to a detention center in Louisiana, then to Texas.

“For 13 days I couldn’t eat or sleep, because they locked me up in a prison with bars, and I had all those memories of Cuba when they tortured me, when they beat me,” she said.

Gibert was also sent to a detention center in Louisiana, then to Mississippi. In detention, their immigration court cases were sped up. On January 6, an immigration judge granted ICE’s request to dismiss Gibert’s asylum case and deport him to Ecuador, said Diana Albite, a Florida attorney representing Arango and Gibert. This is part of Trump’s practice of sending deportees to “third countries,” where they may have no connections whatsoever, sometimes without assessing their eligibility for asylum.

Two days later, another immigration judge granted ICE’s request to dismiss Arango’s case, Albite said. The judge ruled that Arango had failed to pay a $102 annual assessment and hadn’t listed the exact dates she’d spent in each country through which she passed on her way to the United States. “I have never heard this before in my life,” Albite told the Observer.

In a statement, ICE said Arango and Gibert will remain in custody until their appeals are resolved.

Gibert (front-left) and Arango (far back) (Courtesy/attorney)

Arango’s case was dismissed under a complicated attack on the asylum process: Last year, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) gave immigration judges wide latitude to dismiss asylum claims if they deem the initial application incomplete. Since that decision, some immigration judges have been dismissing asylum claims for omissions on their applications that in the past had been considered inconsequential, said Robin Nice, a Massachusetts attorney who sits on the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s asylum committee. Last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” permitted immigration courts to charge an annual fee for each year an asylum case is pending, but Nice said the courts have been inconsistent about how people are notified and how much time they have to pay. The administration is “signalling to the judges who want to screw over immigrants that it’s OK,” Nice said.

Though the Cuban Adjustment Act remains technically in place, immigrants who entered without visas are finding it almost impossible to get parole status. And since Trump banned Cubans from entering the U.S. on visas, their decades of privileged status are now a thing of the past. 

The United States is conducting deportation flights to Cuba, but the island’s government has refused to accept some deportees. If Cuba refuses to accept Arango, she could be sent to another country. Between January 2025 and March 2026, the federal government deported 13,000 people who are not citizens of Mexico to that country, including more than 4,000 Cubans—more than any other nationality—according to a recent report from Human Rights Watch. In Mexico, “the almost complete absence of government support means that many find themselves without access to shelter or food, and vulnerable to high levels of violence,” the report states.

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