An obituary for the twentysomething anarchist sex-worker and writer Anarqxista Goldman described a hero’s death.
“Last night our beautiful, fiery associate, Anarqxista, got involved in an argument between a young woman and her violently abusive boyfriend,” read the January obit, apparently written by residents of Goldman’s anarchist commune, The Nude House. “Anarqxista confronted him in defense of the girl and was stabbed three times in the process. She died shortly afterwards from her injuries.”
Some members of the anarchist community offered condolences. Others raised concerns: Anarqxista Goldman? The same online personality who’d been scorned in anarchist circles last year for appearing to excuse child sex abuse?
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Then they made a more alarming discovery. Anarqxista Goldman never existed. The attractive young woman was actually the avatar for a fiftysomething British man who’d previously written about posing as young women online, particularly for “sexual gratification,” and who’d been run off Twitter for a similar stunt three years earlier.
“Anarqxista Goldman” and an evolving set of usernames including “Anarchagrrl” and “Dionysia Exarchopoulos” are pseudonyms for Andrew Peter Lloyd, 54. The accounts used pictures of women in lingerie to promote Lloyd’s obscure music projects and writings, even rebranding Lloyd’s autobiography as a female-written “novel.”
Rather than live in “the Nude House” in southern Europe, Lloyd lives in Nottingham, England. And Goldman’s profile picture appears to have been lifted from an adult site, according to screenshots shared with The Daily Beast. The image on the adult site is larger than Goldman’s Twitter avatar, suggesting it is the original image.
Reached via email, Lloyd confirmed that he had operated the Goldman, Exarchopoulos, and Anarchagrrl accounts, but said he’d created them in order to write books.
“I did not create these names ‘to initiate sexual interactions’ nor were the names created for sexual purposes,” he wrote in a statement. “[I cannot deny such activity took place on my accounts, however. It was far from just me who initiated it though.] ‘Anarqxista Goldman’, for example, had a Twitter account I was very ineptly attempting to delete and end this past week so that ‘she’ could be forgotten. The account began as simply a name to use [with no thought out ideas about where to take it] in September 2020 but it developed beyond anything I could ever have imagined at that time. In short, it got out of hand. I concede that if I had known then where it would end up now I would not have continued with it.”
“Anarqxista Goldman,” the most recent of Lloyd’s personas, had amassed thousands of Twitter followers and published thousands of pages on the open-source Anarchist Library by the end of 2022. Posting racy images and claiming to live in “The Nude House,” Goldman posited herself as a voice on sexuality and anarchy. But Anarqxista Goldman became persona non grata in some anarchist Twitter circles last May when, during an argument about consent, she tweeted that the anarchist activists Becky Edelsohn and Alexander Berkman had had sex around 1907, when Edelsohn was 15 and Berkman was 37.
When Goldman’s anarchist interlocutor objected “omfg no a 15 year old can’t consent to sex with a 37 year old,” Goldman retorted “have you ever been a 15 year old girl? Because I have. And it would piss me off a lot to know that tits on the Internet have decided that an entire class of people have been denied agency.”
The exchange sparked so much backlash that Goldman temporarily abandoned Twitter for a “radical leftist anti-authoritarian server” on the social media site Mastodon. The server’s moderators banned her that same day. She came back to Twitter.
Anarqxista Goldman’s return was not the first time Lloyd had slunk back online amid accusations that he’d behaved improperly while posting as a young, female anarchist. Until September 2020, he had operated a similar account called “Anarchagrrl,” which went offline after online sleuths accused the account of posing as a woman while “soliciting women for sex via DMs.” The anonymous sleuths’ report contained screenshots of those alleged direct messages, in which Anarchagrrl appears to have offered to connect a woman with sex work clients, if the woman would pay her and give her oral sex. (The woman declined.)
Reached for comment about the screenshots, Lloyd told The Daily Beast that “I confirm that I may have authored these messages. But they are not what they seem. As you will no doubt have gathered, I have an overactive imagination. In my online chats I frankly just make up stories and this relates to one of them. In that same conversation I said I lived in London. I never have. This conversation in fact led to the deletion of that account as the person receiving them was understandably concerned but, I say again, it was all just made up. I don’t even have a bank account and zero credit to my name.”
Even in 2020, Anarchagrrl’s final tweets appeared to confess to the allegations. “Earlier today after thorough investigation this account was seized by a small group of left wing accounts,” the Anarchagrrl account posted. “It transpired that the owner of this account was in fact a 51 year old male pretending to be a young female and in some cases asking for money to solicit sexual interactions. After revealing sensitive information to this male he agreed to hand over login details to us.”
Screenshots of Anarchagrrl’s old tweets, reviewed by The Daily Beast, reveal that they previously redirected to multiple accounts for Lloyd’s various music projects. Some of Lloyd’s old tweets promoting those music projects also remained on his Anarchagrrl account, including tweets in which he referred to himself by name.
“Only the idea of you is appealing to them, more so when you’re dead,” one of Lloyd’s Twitter followers observed to him in 2014, when Lloyd was working under the names “13LFO” and “Geeky Disco.”
“That’s an interesting point,” Lloyd responded. “They want the idea of Geeky Disco not the reality of Andrew Lloyd.”
In fact, most people did not appear interested in the idea of his music project. “Last year I had 907 downloads of my albums and 2405 listens to my tracks (of which only 344 were listens to a whole track),” he wrote on his personal blog in 2016. To remedy the situation, he wrote, he “borrowed” photographs he found of a “25 year old female electronic musician from Berlin” and made a Facebook account promoting his music under pictures of the “good looking young woman with a bubbly personality.”
He appears to have continued periodically working under female alter-egos, which evolved and overlapped, eventually reaching his Anarqxista Goldman persona. One prolific pseudonym linking Lloyd’s accounts is “Dionysia Exarchopoulos” (sometimes “Dionysia” or “Dionysia Ex” on the Anarchagrrl account or on his blog).
As Exarchopoulos, Lloyd self-published several novels, which were swiftly deleted from their online homes after anarchists on Mastodon linked Lloyd with Anarqxista Goldman. (The Daily Beast has reviewed archived versions.) Before their deletion, Lloyd tried selling the books’ film rights via a London literary agency, which lists one book in its Autumn 2019 rights catalog.
A blurb describes the book as “part moral philosophy primer, part incel manifesto,” featuring a main character who “spends most of his time online, either pretending to be a woman for sexual gratification, or grooming young women on Tumblr in an effort to wheedle his way into their real-life space.”
Angel Belsey, Exarchopoulos’s former literary agent, told The Daily Beast that she’d long suspected Exarchopoulos was a pen name for a man. Belsey, who now runs an independent publishing house, hasn’t represented Exarchopoulos since 2020, and said she found the new allegations against Lloyd disturbing.
“I always knew Dionysia was almost certainly a man who was cosplaying as a woman, but that didn't bother me; she wrote a really compelling—occasionally shocking and disturbing—narrative in her Diogenes work, and to me the blurry lines between what was real and what was fantasy were what made me want to represent it,” Belsey told The Daily Beast via email. “I did say to [the literary agency’s founder] at the time that if I were to meet up with Dionysia, I would only do so in a public place!”
The meeting never happened, and Belsey said she lost her contacts with Exarchopoulos after leaving the literary agency. She still has direct messages from one of Exarchopoulos’s old Twitter accounts. The messages, she noted, suggest an author much older than their early twenties.
In one message Exarchopoulos noted a preference for Linux computers and noted that “Microsoft is not my thing since about 2005.” Anarqxista Goldman would have been 10 years old in 2005.
Exarchopoulos also wrote that “I had imagined most of those reviewing manuscripts were young, educated women but it won;t affect what or how I write. If I can;t get past the gatekeepers I will keep doing what I do regardless.”
Other, more obvious evidence links Exarchopoulos to Lloyd—namely that some of Exarchopoulos’s self-published works (updated with suggestive covers) were previously published online under Lloyd’s own name. One work, uploaded later under the Exarchopoulos pen name, is literally Lloyd’s autobiography.
And in one of Exarchopoulos’s publications, the supposedly female author acknowledges that “I am a white, middle-aged male from the UK.”
One of Belsey’s friends said she thought Exarchopoulos’s account previously represented its author to be a man.
“I think he was previously some odd but pleasant man who now seems to be pretending to be a woman,” the friend wrote to Belsey in June 2019, according to direct messages Belsey shared. “I am not sure what is going on to be honest.” (By the time of the message, Exarchopoulos’s account posed as a woman sharing racy images, but its biography linked to one of Lloyd’s music project.)
Anarqxista Goldman repeatedly tweeted that she was Dionysia Exarchopoulos, linking to Exarchopoulos’s ebook as “my book” on multiple occasions, and referencing Lloyd’s autobiography as one of her own “novels.” But by 2022, she was insistent that she was a young woman. She wrote in one of her books that she had been led to anarchy after a man tricked her into posing for pornographic photos. She tweeted that people (including “dirty old men”) message her for sex advice, which she would give. She even used her gender as a cudgel against anarchists who objected to her age-of-consent views. Those conflicts appear to have followed the fictional writer to the grave.
On Jan 11., her supposed comrades in “the Nude House” announced Goldman’s death from her own Twitter account. The Nude House followed with a longer obituary that contained Goldman’s “last writings” and described her death at the hands of a knife-wielding domestic abuser.
The obituary was unconventional. “Anarqxista Goldman is dead and no one will ever see her happy, smiling, painted face again or embrace her warm, welcoming body that was so willing to embrace. We are, of course, heartbroken about this here at The Nude House, the southern European anarchist house where she made her home with us in March 2022,” it began.
The memorial went on to relitigate Goldman’s recent online arguments. After claiming that Goldman had saved a stranger from suicide on a beach, the obituary continued that “It was unfortunate, then, that there were some people online who simply misunderstood her and misdescribed her. This was particularly the case with regard to her views about youth sexuality, views she simply thought consistent both with an anarchy that believes in neither law nor government — so how can there be ages of consent?” (This is not consistent with most anarchist thinking, which condemns sexual exploitation regardless of its legality.)
The Daily Beast was unable to find any references to a collective called “The Nude House,” besides those that directly referenced Goldman and her social media. The Anarchist Library, which did not return a request for comment, removed The Nude House’s obituary for Goldman and, soon thereafter, all of Goldman’s work from the site.
“Anarqxista will be laid to rest on Friday which is also her birthday,” her supposed Nude House comrades announced via her Twitter account. The date is also Lloyd’s birthday.
