I am delighted to facilitate a workshop as part of the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Association’s Asian American pre-conference institute at Creating Change 2026 on the topic of Palestine. Allow me to suggest at least seven compelling reasons why Palestine is a queer issue and in fact a queer Asian/Pacific Islander (API) issue and why LGBTQ people in the United States and around the world should be supporting the cause of Palestinian liberation.

1) Americans live on unceded indigenous land that was home to Native Americans for millennia before the coming of the white man.

The parallel with the dispossession of indigenous Palestinians is unmistakeable and the tragic irony is that the United States is now funding that dispossession with $3.8 billion a year in US taxes + more than 7 billion in new funding; all Republicans and most Democrats in Congress support the violent ethnic cleansing of illegally occupied Palestine and Apartheid Israel’s pursuit of genocide in Gaza.

The origin of the current ‘conflict’ (as it is rather inaccurately characterized) lies in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (1.3.1916) between the British and French in which they carved up the Ottoman Empire like a turkey, the British taking Ottoman Palestine by force and then having the League of Nations award a ‘mandate’ that legitimized the British Mandate Authority in Palestine. The French got Lebanon and Syria in exchange for British control of Palestine and Iraq; the consequences of this shabby deal have been a century of war, conflict, death and destruction. 

2) APIs should understand connections between ethnostate imperialism, colonization and fascism in Asia and the US  and that in illegally occupied Palestine; think of the parallels with China, Korea, etc.; in fact, the United States participated in the carving up of Qing China along with the European powers and Japan.

And that leads to an important point: imperialism is not the preserve of European powers or the United States: Russia and China are imperial powers and fascist Japan subjected Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, much of China and virtually all of Southeast Asia to a brutal regime of colonization in the 1930s and 1940s.

There is an enormous irony that while Korea was ruthlessly exploited by fascist imperial Japan in one of the most brutal foreign military occupations of modern times, many contemporary South Koreans support Apartheid Israel over occupied Palestine because around 40% of South Koreans are Christians and most of those are right-wing Christian fundamentalists; in fact, they form the backbone of the homophobic and transphobic political elements blocking adoption of LGBT rights legislation in the Republic of Korea.

3) And that leads to a crucially important point: the US is the biggest supporter of Apartheid Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and the Zionist machine is the key element in maintaining US support for the occupation; a majority of Zionists are Christians and many if not most Christian Zionists are Christian fundamentalists who are the biggest support for anti-LGBTQ legislation across all of the 50 states; the enemies of the LGBTQ community in the US are the enemies of Palestinians in the occupied territories. While Democrats on the whole are better on LGBT issues than Republicans, those centrist Democrats who are triangulating around transgender issues (Gavin Newsom, Seth Moulton, Tom Suozzi) are also among the biggest Zionist supporters of Apartheid Israel.

4) The Zionist machine has used ‘pinkwashing’ to try to generate support within and outside the LGBTQ community for Apartheid Israel: an attempt to use Israel’s record on LGBT rights to attempt to justify its illegal occupation of Palestine; it’s a non sequitur of course because a good record on LGBT rights does not legally or morally justify a state to occupy foreign territory or subject its indigenous population to violent ethnic cleansing, dispossession or genocide. Zionist pinkwashing is a strategy to generate queer support for Apartheid Israel but it is based on entirely false notions. Palestinians are almost never given asylum in Israel based on sexual orientation or gender identity; in fact they are surveilled and blackmailed in illegally occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel’s record on LGBT issues may be better than that of neighboring Arab countries but is inferior to that of the Western European countries with which Zionists like to compare Israel (‘the villa in the jungle’); but even if Israel’s record on LGBT issues were better, it could not possibly justify the illegal occupation, apartheid regime and genocide. Israel’s record on LGBT issues may compare favorably to that of neighboring dictatorships (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, non-Arab Iran) but is mediocre at best in comparison with the Western European countries Zionists like to classify Israel with (Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, etc.); Israel even participates in the Eurovision Song Contest even though Israel isn’t located on the European continent.

Pauline Park with Abu Rabiyah in Dheishe refugee camp in Bethlehem (1.10.12)

5) A significant proportion of Palestinians living under illegal occupation are LGBTQ and they get no special ‘pink card. While there is homophobia and transphobia in Palestinian society, there is homophobia and transphobia in American society but no American would accept that as justification for foreign occupation of the US; in fact, when the Israeli authorities discover LGBTQ people in the illegally occupied West Bank, they blackmail them into becoming agents for the Israel state, putting them in real danger if they are discovered. It is likely that a significant proportion of Palestinians killed in the Gaza genocide have doubtless been LGBTQ whether or not they were able to openly identify as such. And to the extent that Palestinians see LGBTQ support for BDS, that increases acceptance of LGBTQ Palestinians in Palestinian society. 

Pauline Park with Abu Nidal in Mas-ha (1.10.12)

6) LGBTQ people should be supporting the oppressed (Palestinians) rather than the oppressor (Apartheid Israel) on principle. As MLK would say, an injury to one is an injury to all; liberation of the human spirit must necessarily include Palestinian liberation; LGBT rights should not be separated from human rights for all; true liberation is found through global thinking informed by progressive feminist intersectional analysis. Sarah Schulman provided an example of that progressive feminist intersectional analysis when she joined me at a forum on Israel/Palestine at Queens Pride House (6.4.13); co-sponsored by New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA), the forum remains (to my knowledge) the only public forum about Israeli occupation and apartheid both hosted and sponsored by an LGBT community center anywhere in the United States and the furious Zionist response to the event is a lesson in itself about both the power of the Zionist machine and the commitment to Palestinian liberation that those who stand in solidarity need to exhibit in order to make that solidarity real (Pauline Park, “Queens Pride history: the 2013 Israel/Palestine forum,” 21 July 2013). Schulman organized the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine and invited me to join; the historic venture took place in January and we spent an entire week touring the West Bank; we meet with queer and non-LGBTQ Palestinians from Hebron to Nablus to Nabi Saleh and stayed two nights in Dheishe refugee camp in Bethlehem (the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank); at the end of the tour, we met with the founder of Zochrot, the Israeli organization attempting to educate Israeli Jews about the violent ethnic cleansing of the Nakba that was the basis for the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 (Pauline Park, “Palestine: the first US LGBTQ delegation tour in pictures,” 4 April 2012).

Pauline Park & Sarah Schulman at Queens Pride House (6.4.13)

7) Those who wish to advance a progressive agenda for social justice and social change cannot accept the Zionist ‘Palestine exception’: as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would say, an injury to one is an injury to all. LGBT organizations that have attempted to square the circle or straddled the fence have only risked discrediting their own claims to be involved in the pursuit of social justice. It is actually the National LGBTQ Task Force that provides one of the best examples of this equivocation: at the Creating Change 2016 conference in Chicago, A Wider Bridge organized a reception for Jerusalem Open House. A Wider Bridge’s mission was to ‘pinkwash’ the occupation and generate support for Israel within the LGBT community in the United States; it was not in any real sense a genuine LGBT community-based organization but rather a front organization for the right-wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby that supports it. AWB deliberately tried to mislead the community and the public about the nature of the event that the National LGBTQ Task Force initially cancelled and then uncancelled, insinuating that those opposed to the reception were targeting the shabbat service that is scheduled to precede it and Jerusalem Open House, which is a co-sponsor of the event. 

Cancel Pinkwashing protesters at Creating Change in Chicago

In fact, activists who spoke with Sue Hyde, the director of Creating Change, made clear to her that they were not objecting either to the shabbat service or to the participation of JOH, but rather to the reception and AWB’s use of it to promote the Israeli government and its illegal occupation of Palestine. Despite, this, AWB dishonestly portrayed the #cancelpinkwashing initiative as ‘anti-Semitic,’ even though several of the activists involved with it were Jewish. AWB board member Dana Beyer even went so far as to write a blog post on HuffingtonPost.com entitled, “National LGBTQ Task Force Censors the Jews” (1.17.16), in which she called the Task Force’s initial decision to cancel the AWB event “an act of bigotry against Jewish LGBTQ persons as mean-spirited as any other,” ignoring the fact that  Sue Hyde, who made that decision, is herself Jewish.

Pauline Park & Nakba survivor Abu Hassam in the ruins of Lajun (1.11.12)

In the statement issued by the Task Force on Jan. 18 announcing a reversal of its earlier decision, executive director Rea Carey wrote, “It is our belief that when faced with choices, we should move towards our core value of inclusion and opportunities for constructive dialogue and canceling the reception was a mistake,” adding, “We are aware that our original decision made it appear we were taking sides in a complex and long-standing conflict.” But in fact, by reversing its original decision and re-scheduling the pinkwashing event, the Task Force was taking sides, providing a platform for Zionists to use the conference to promote LGBT support for the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, risking making the Task Force indirectly complicit in the occupation as well (Pauline Park, “Creating Change or pink washing Israeli apartheid? A Wider Bridge to Zionist propagandizing,” 17 January 2017).

And the reference to ‘inclusion’ rings false when LGBT Palestinians living under the occupation are not included, given that Palestinians need special permission from the Israeli authorities to leave the West Bank, rarely granted. A Wider Bridge went out of business at the end of 2025 after falling into deficit and following a scandal in which its executive director was accused of sexual misconduct. An organization cannot insist that it is on the cutting edge of the pursuit of progressive social and political change when its annual conference promotes the pinkwashing of Israeli occupation and apartheid; it is this year’s conference and this workshop in particular that confirm the Task Force’s rather belated decision to ‘allow’ for discussion of Apartheid Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and pursuit of genocide in Gaza.

Pauline Park at the apartheid wall in Al-Wallejeh (1.9.12)

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), which she co-founded in 1998. Park led the campaign for passage of the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines — adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 — for implementation of the new statute. In March 2011, Park co-founded New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) and in January 2012, she participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation to Palestine, a seven-day tour of the West Bank and Israel that included meetings with LGBT- and non-LGBT Palestinians and Israelis. Park did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Pauline Park with New York State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani in Manhattan (7.20.23)

The post Queering the Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid: Creating Change 2026 appeared first on Pauline Park.

Zionists use false charges of anti-Semitism to silence people of color in the Palestine solidarity movement
by Pauline Park

I have been thinking about how to respond to Rafaella Gunz and her personal attack on me and my Palestine solidarity activism (Rafaella Gunz, “This transgender Jew is tired of the anti-Semitism in the LGBTI community,” Gay Star News, 16 July 2017) or whether to respond at all. There is a good argument for simply ignoring this hit piece, as it is entirely devoid of substantive argumentation or evidentiary support of any kind and it has had zero impact on my standing as an activist in general or as a Palestine solidarity activist in particular. But because the knowingly false charges that Gunz hurls at me are part of a larger campaign of harassment and intimidation directed against critics of Israeli occupation and apartheid, I will respond to those charges and take them more seriously than they deserve to be taken.

Gunz writes, ” Many LGBTI advocates, like the organizers of the Chicago Dyke March, are vehemently anti-Israel, claiming the country is participating in an ‘genocide’ of the Palestinian people. One such activist is Pauline Park, a transgender woman associated with the group NYC Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, who often posts publicly about her pro-Palestinian activism, using buzzwords like ‘genocide,’ ‘apartheid,’ and ‘occupation’.” Gunz goes onto quote Dana Beyer’s Zionist hit piece on me in which she writes, “That Pauline has no clue as to what genocide actually is, or what apartheid actually means, is obvious, but it is just as clear that she understands that such terms are trigger words for many whom she claims she is trying to persuade.” Gunz concludes by quoting Ariel Lipson at length, declaring, “If you want to be more inclusive to the Jewish LGBTQ+ community, start by listening. Like any other minority that you do not belong to, you do not get to dictate what is, or is not anti-Semitic. You do not get to tell us what our oppression is, or is not. That is for Jews, and only Jews, to decide. Your job is to stop talking, listen, learn, and act upon what you have learned to make your spaces safer for Jews. You do not get to interrogate every person with a Magen David Necklace or a Kippah. You do not get to stop listening to a Jewish person because they are a Zionist. That is not how activism works.” Gunz, Beyer and Lipson heap absurdity upon absurdity in their frantic attempts to label my critique of Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide ‘anti-Semitic.’ But let’s take these false charges of anti-Semitism seriously just for the sake of argument and examine them in some detail.

It strikes me as highly revealing that Gunz starts her attack piece by focusing on my use of the terms ‘occupation,’ ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ and calling them ‘buzzwords,’ entirely sidestepping the question as to whether they are in fact accurate descriptions of the situation in Israel/Palestine as they so clearly are; and it seems to me that that is the question, not whether or not some people (Jewish or otherwise) are offended by my use of those terms. In fact, all three terms are actually defined in international law, something Gunz seems entirely ignorant of.  “Belligerent occupation is governed by the Hague Regulations of 1907, as well as by the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949,” writes Prof. Francis Boyle, noting that United Nations Security Council Resolution 1322 of 2000 is a legally binding mandate on the Israeli government to end its illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip (Francis Boyle, “The International Laws of Belligerent Occupation“). A professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Boyle points out that Israel is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel’s occupation of the occupied territories is illegal because Israel has no legal or legitimate claim to them; simply having seized the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in war does not give Israel any title to them, regardless of who started that war (and there’s a very good argument that Israel provoked the 1967 War, contrary to Zionist propaganda); the notion that ‘occupation’ is simply a ‘buzzword’ would be laughed out of the courtroom in the Hague or in any classroom at any reputable school of law.

The same is true for both ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide,’ which are also clearly defined in international law, in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 1976 and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1951. Zionist propagandists falsely assert that even the slightest differences between Israel and South Africa invalidates application of the term ‘apartheid’ to Israel’s illegal occupation regime in Palestine, but  It is important to note here that use of the term ‘apartheid’ in international law is not restricted to a direct comparison with the former apartheid regime in South Africa; and even the most casual perusal of the apartheid convention shows that Israel is clearly contravening every one of the provisions of that convention. Article II of the convention on genocide defines it as involving any or all of five different actions, three of which (a, b and c) Israel is clearly guilty of in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and even more so in the Gaza Strip; note here that a state does not have to have committed all five in order to be guilty of the crime of genocide. Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip in 2014 clearly constituted genocide and Israel’s most distinguished historian, Ilan Pappe, refers to Israel’s policy in Gaza as ‘incremental genocide’ (Ilan Pappe, “Israel’s incremental genocide in the Gaza ghetto,” Electronic Intifada, 13 July 2014). Rafaella Gunz, Ariel Lipson and Dana Beyer seem to be entirely ignorant of international law and of these international conventions, which are fully binding on the Israeli government and to which it is a signatory.

Also striking is the fact that Gunz, Lipson and Beyer conflate Judaism with Zionism, even as Lipson accuses me of doing so by labeling a critique of Zionism as an ideology as inherently anti-Semitic; in fact, a majority of Zionists are non-Jewish, including a large number of Christian fundamentalists as well as non-Jewish politicians in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, such as Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau, Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron. It is also extremely odd that Lipson accuses me of “leaving Jews out of their speeches, out of their activism.” In fact, I regularly including Jews in my activism and in my Palestine work, most importantly by working with them, including colleagues in Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews Say No as well as Jewish colleagues in New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA), a majority of the core members of which are Jewish.

Gunz ends her screed with a long quote from Lipson, quoting him as saying, “Like any other minority that you do not belong to, you do not get to dictate what is, or is not anti-Semitic. You do not get to tell us what our oppression is, or is not. That is for Jews, and only Jews, to decide. Your job is to stop talking, listen, learn, and act upon what you have learned to make your spaces safer for Jews.” It is hard to take this absurd statement seriously, but for the sake of argument, let us do so in order to understand its true meaning and intent. First of all, pointing out the falsity of false allegations of anti-Semitism is not ‘dictating’ anything to anyone; it is simply stating the truth about such false accusations. Second, the false allegations of anti-Semitism that I was referring to in the Facebook post that prompted Gunz and Lipson to start their smear campaign against me and my Palestine activism referred to the accusations leveled against the Chicago Dyke March collective, which Gunz refers to only in passing at the beginning of her hit piece; significantly, Gunz is either ignorant of the fact that the collective includes Jewish members or else deliberately and conveniently excludes mention of that fact; one of those collective members, Stephanie Skora, is a Jewish transwoman, and it is illogical and frankly bizarre of Gunz and Lipson to call me ‘anti-Semitic’ for defending a Jewish transwoman, but that is the ‘logic’ of their superficial and ultimately toxic identity politics in which no one has the right to talk about Palestine but Jewish Zionists. One could argue that it is Gunz and Lipson (and Beyer as well) who are the anti-Semites by smearing Jews like Stephanie Skora as ‘anti-Semites’ who are engaged in the vital work of challenging Zionist propaganda defending Israel’s illegal and brutal apartheid regime and non-Jewish Palestine activists working with Jewish colleagues in doing so.

There is probably not a single Palestine solidarity activist in the United States, in Israel or anywhere else who has not be smeared with false accusations of anti-Semitism, which is why not a single Palestine solidarity activist (Jewish or non-Jewish) who has regarded Gunz’s screed and Lipson’s false accustions of anti-Semitism as having any credibility whatsoever. It is ironic that both Gunz and Lipson have denied being Zionist because what they have done in attempting to smear a Palestine solidarity activist with false accusations of anti-Semitism is exactly what Zionists do. Zionists call non-Jewish anti-apartheid activists ‘anti-Semites’ and call Jewish anti-apartheid activists ‘self-hating Jews’ or ‘Jewish kapos’; it is in fact such a commonplace that it has become something of a joke among anti-occupation activists. And since it simply is not possible to do Palestine solidarity work without facing false allegations of anti-Semitism, Gunz and Lipson’s assertion that it is illegitimate for non-Jews to question false accusations of anti-Semitism is in effect a prohibition on doing such work; it is significant in this regard that neither Gunz nor Lipson have done even an hour’s work to end the illegal occupation of Palestine, as far as I am aware; and Beyer is on the board of directors of A Wider Bridge, an organization specifically established to ‘pinkwash’ the occupation.

A perfect example of the failure of the logic of the Gunz/Lipson attack on me to meet even the most minimal standard of credibility and coherence is the fact that their assertion that non-Jews do not have the right to contest false accusations of anti-Semitism is the case of Rabab Abdulhadi, a professor at San Francisco State University (SFSU) who has been subjected to a campaign of vilification and intimidation by the AMCHA Initiative, Canary Mission and Campus Watch, Zionist organizations that target Palestinian academics and faculty, staff and students who are critical of Israeli apartheid (Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, “‘AMCHA aims to suppress scholarship honestly discussing Israel’s violation of Palestinian rights’: Prof. Rabab Abdulhadi respons to Israel lobby smear campaign,” Mondoweiss, 23 June 2014). Gunz and Lipson insist that a non-Jewish person has no right to respond to false charges of anti-Semitism; by that logic, a Palestinian woman like Abdulhadi would have no right to respond to false allegations of anti-Semitism by Zionist organizations even though it is clear that they are engaged in a smear campaign that is part of an attempt to shut down any discussion of Israeli apartheid or Islamophobia in an academic context such as the Arab Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) program at SFSU (General Union of Palestine Students at San Francisco State University, “GUPS Statement of Support for SF State’s MOU with Al-Najah Uniersity in Palestine, the AMED program, and Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi,” Medium, 21 September 2016). In denying a woman of color the right to respond to her accusers and challenge false accusations of anti-Semitism that are part of a campaign to shut down study of Arab and Muslim communities simply because she is not Jewish, Gunz and Lipson are in effect asserting a right to silence any and all criticism of Israeli government policy, including criticism of Israeli apartheid by Palestinians who are forced to live under the illegal occupation. If a Palestinian such as Rabab Abdulhadi does not have the right to question let alone challenge her own oppression as a Palestinian by Israeli occupation and apartheid, for Gunz and Lipson, neither do non-Jews have the right to stand in solidarity with Jewish Americans such as Stephanie Skora and other members of the Chicago Dyke March collective as well as Israeli Jews under attack from Zionists over their criticism of Israeli government policy.

It is also striking to me that the whole thrust of the Gunz screed and Lipson’s comments are so entirely referential; virtually every reference is to their own Jewish identity, without any acknowledgement of the brutality of the illegal occupation of Palestine; in effect, Gunz and Lipson (and Beyer as well) are saying that their identity as Jews is based on excluding non-Jews from participation in any discussion of Palestine, including Palestinians who are forced to live under apartheid and who are being subjected to what Pappe calls ‘incremental genocide’ in the Gaza Strip, and any reference to or criticism of Israeli government policy is somehow a challenge to their own Jewish identity. Lipson would ‘instruct’ me on “How to Criticize Israel Without Being Anti-Semitic” via a Tumblr post by Peter Vidani, but he like Gunz and Lipson simply falsifies the reality of what’s going on in Israel/Palestine by asserting that “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a real minefield in that it’s a clash between oppressed people of color and an ethnoreligious group that is dominant in Israel but marginalized and brutalized elsewhere” without even acknowleding the fact that the government elected by the ‘ethnoreligious group that is dominant in Israel’ (as he refers to Israeli Jews) is maintaining an illegal occupation under which Palestinians have no ability to exercise their human rights much less any say in how the apartheid regime is run.

If the object to my using the legally defined terms of ‘occupation,’ ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ is that using such terms offends Zionists, then it is not much of an objection; as I see it, the sensibilities of Zionists defending Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide are far outweighed by the compelling need to end the occupation and apartheid under which Palestinians have been forced to live for half a century and the incremental genocide to which they are being subjected in the Gaza Strip. And in truth, there is simply no way to refer to what is going on in illegally occupied Palestine without using such terms.

But unlike Gunz, Lipson and Beyer, Vidani at the very least acknowledges the fact that Palestinians (like me) are people of color; Gun, Lipson and Beyer seem blithely unaware of the enormous white skin privilege they enjoy in this white-dominant society and in attempting to silence a transgendered woman of color challenging Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide, they show themselves to be the very embodiment of white privilege; and in the end, their campaign of harassment and intimidation against this transgendered woman of color for advocating human rights for all in Israel/Palestine will only reinforce her commitment to challenging the Israeli apartheid regime that they think no person of color has the right to challenge.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002. Park participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012. She did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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LGBT rights & progressive politics in the age of Trump
Pauline Park
at
Kingsborough Community College
29 March 17

I’m honored by the invitation to speak to you today at this ‘Dinner & Dialogue’ event. I’d like to begin by thanking Lauren Ferguson for helping to arrange my visit here, my second time at Kingsborough Community College. And in keeping with the theme of ‘dinner & dialogue,’ I’d like to allow more than enough time for questions and comments, as I find the interaction with an audience is often as interesting to audience members as any formal presentation. So in keeping with the spirit of the evening, I’ll try to limit myself to speaking to leave lots of time for Q&A.

What I’d like to do is to think analytically and strategically about where we are right now both in terms of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues and the broader pursuit of progressive political change in the age of Trump.

It’s hard to believe it’s less than ten weeks since Donald Trump took office; it feels more like ten years~! So far, it’s been like a rolling stinky cheese of disaster; but I also see hopeful signs, especially in the broad resistance movement that has arisen since his election. Let me start with the new administration’s actions on LGBT issues and work outwards from there.

For well over a decade, the fight for marriage equality consumed the time and energy and resources of the LGBT movement, culminating in the Windsor and Obergefell rulings striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in part and then in whole, the latter decision in 2015 recognizing same-sex marriage nationally. The more perceptive leaders in the religious right realize that they’ve lost that fight and I think the chances of the Supreme Court reversing itself on marriage are slim to none. And so the forces of ignorance and bigotry have since June 2015 been consumed with another issue, transgender rights, focusing their energies on creating a ‘bathroom panic,’ asserting without a shred of evidence that transgendered women pose some sort of existential threat to our society simply by using the public restroom associated with the gender with which they identify. There may be some who actually believe that, but I think that most of those pushing this bathroom panic are doing so cynically, knowing that it’s nothing but fear-mongering.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas has gone so far as to say that the bathroom issue “is the biggest issue facing families and schools in America since prayer was taken out of public schools” (Caitlin Emma, “Obama transgender edict incites the right,” Politico, 5.13.16). “As a voter turnout tool for conservatives, this could be the new gay marriage,” writes Kevin Drum (Kevin Drum, “Transgender Bathrooms Might be the New Gay Marriage for Conservatives” (Mother Jones, 5.13.16). And isn’t that the point? Following the US Supreme Court rulings striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in part and then in whole, the only obvious ‘family values’ wedge issue to latch onto is transgender inclusion, given the increasing acceptance of non-transgendered lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people in American society.

North Carolina’s enactment of House Bill 2 is a case in point: HB2 not only required transgendered people to use public restrooms consistent with their legal sex designation (the ‘gender marker’ on their birth certificates), the legislation eliminated non-discrimination statutes at the local level across the state, making it impossible to pursue legal redress for discrimination through local law not only on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation, but race, ethnicity, religion and disability as well. And so the ‘bathroom panic’ has been a façade behind which right-wing Republicans and the religious right have been pushing a rollback across the country of civil rights and human rights for women and people of color as well as LGBT people and people living with disabilities.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the first thing that Donald Trump did after coming into office on Jan. 20 was to sign a flurry of executive orders on immigration as well as transgender rights. But significantly, courts blocked the first and the second executive orders on immigration, which the administration insisted were not an attempt to impose a ‘Muslim ban,’ even thought that’s exactly what Trump called the proposed action during the campaign. And the really hopeful sign was that the executive orders sparked a nationwide resistance, with protestors rushing out to JFK and other airports across the country to support and defend immigrants and refugees caught up in Trump’s dragnet.

Trump’s executive order rescinding Barack Obama’s guidelines on transgender inclusion in public schools also got national attention, if not quite to the extent of the travel ban(s); but what got less attention was the details of the executive order and the Obama guidelines he rescinded. And here it is important to note the political context in which the guidelines were issued in the twilight of the Obama presidency, with an outgoing president anxious to create some sort of historic legacy. The real opportunity to do so came in Obama’s first term, when he had a Democratic Senate and House of Representatives to work with until he handed both houses of Congress to the Republicans in the mid-term elections in 2010. What LGBT activists cheering Obama’s recent executive actions either have forgotten or conveniently failed to mention is the fact that he refused even to lift a finger to push the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) through Congress, instead apparently taking the advice of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in focusing on repealing the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy of discrimination signed into law by Bill Clinton, who also signed DOMA into law. Still better than ENDA, Obama could have pushed through an amendment to the 1974 Civil Rights Act or similar legislation that would have prohibited discrimination based on gender identity and expression in employment, housing, public accommodations, health care, education and credit. For whatever reason, Obama refused to consider any non-discrimination legislation once he signed the DADT repeal bill into law, which only ended discrimination based on sexual orientation, not gender identity or expression.

With less than eight months left in office, and as the lamest of lame ducks and facing a hostile Congress controlled by Republicans, Obama’s options were limited to executive action, since no LGBT rights legislation would have had any chance of passage last year. LGBT advocacy organizations praised the president for what they characterized or at least wanted to believe were bold and courageous actions (National Center for Transgender Equality, “Department of Education affirms critical protections for trans students,” 5.13.16), but the time for bold action was in 2009 and 2010 when LGBT rights legislation had a decent chance of passage in Congress (Sam Levin, “Obama orders public schools to allow transgender students access to restrooms,” Guardian, 5.12.16). Here are a few important points to keep in mind when thinking about this whole brouhaha:

o The new guidelines (Ann Whalen and David Esquith, “Examples of Policies and Emerging Practices for Supporting Transgender Students“) were introduced with a cover letter from Catherine E. Lhamon of the US Department of Education and Vanita Gupta of the US Department of Justice  (“Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students,” 5.13.16). The Obama guidelines focused on compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and reference similar guidelines adopted by states and localities, including those adopted by the State of New York Department of Education (NYSED) guidelines for implementation of the Dignity for All Students Act of 2011; these salient points must be made:

o While they might be helpful in advising schools on transgender inclusion, the guidelines had no binding legal force; the only way to enforce these guidelines would have been by withholding or threatening to withhold federal funds to school districts, localities and/or states to refuse or fail to abide by them.

0 The letter was clearly an interpretation of the provisions of Title IX and did not have the force of statute law.

0 There is no significant federal case law on the interpretation of ‘sex’ in Title IX to include gender identity and expression in the expansive manner in which the March 13 letter speaks; the risk of being overturned in court is not insignificant, given that courts general hew closely to legislative intent and it would be difficult to argue that there was transgender-specific legislative intent in the drafting of Title IX.

o Women’s safety is an important issue but has nothing to do directly with gendered restroom usage; it’s probably the case that most sexual predators are conventionally gendered (‘cisgendered’) heterosexual men; opponents of transgender rights are simply using the legitimate issue of women’s safety to undermine the safety of transgendered women & men.

o Opponents of transgender rights use the specter of sexual predators in women’s restrooms and changing rooms, but there is not a single case I know of of a conventionally gendered (‘cisgendered’) heterosexual man crossdressing to gain entrance to women’s spaces. And a sexual predator can simply walk into a women’s restroom or changing room if he wants to.

o There are already laws in every state and locality in the United  States prohibiting assault and sexual assault; no transgender-inclusive statute, regulation, rule or guideline would do anything to undermine such laws.

o HB2 is based on restricting public restrooms to assigned birth sex and gender, but there is actually no way to determine conclusively what that might be in every case; the reference to birth certificates is particularly curious, because many states and localities now allow transgendered people to change the legal sex designation on their birth certificates. HB2 and similar laws are unenforceable, as they would require police and/or specially designated and authorized security guards posted at every public restroom door in the state, which would be completely unaffordable even if most states were not currently suffering significant budget deficits. Nor could policy or security guards actually demand production of a birth certificate, given Americans do not regularly carry their birth certificates with them wherever they go. Obviously, a genital check would be invasive and non-transgendered people would certainly object to being subjected to it.

o The reality is that transgendered people who ‘pass’ in the gender they identify with will rarely have problems with public restrooms while those who do not ‘pass’ will have problems even if they are post-operative and have changed the legal sex designation on their birth certificate and other government-issued identity documents.

o Public restrooms should not be an issue at all, since the only legal question of any significance here is what is referred to as ‘unavoidable nudity in sex-segregated facilities,’ which can involve public gyms, pools, showers and locker rooms but simply does not involve restrooms.

o Public restrooms are actually not regulated by statute law in most states and localities; North Carolina’s HB2, far from being ‘traditional,’ is in fact a radical break in this regard.

o The ‘bathroom panic’ here is entirely irrational because it is focused almost entirely on women’s restrooms, which have stalls but not urinals; ordinarily, there is no public nudity at all.

o Gyms, pools and other facilities with locker rooms and showers more often these days have private individual showers. Where there are open showers and changing areas, reasonable accommodation can be made; where there’s a will, there’s a way, as the saying goes. Just as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires public facilities to provide reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities (including in wheelchairs), so all public restrooms, gyms, pools and other such facilities can provide reasonable accommodation for transgendered people, and such accommodation does not require them to be viewed as having a disability based on their gender identity.

o There are more and more single-user restrooms and ‘family’ restrooms in the US, especially in airports, which are leading the way in this regard.

Significantly, Trump’s recission of Obama’s guidelines for transgender inclusion in public schools has not yet been followed up by any other initiatives, even while the new president has appointed leading figures from the religious right hostile to the LGBT community, such as Jeff Sessions as attorney general and Tom Price as secretary of health and human services.One such case in point is the executive order that Obama issued in his last year eliminating discrimination in the military based on gender identity; in his very first year in office, Obama had signed a bill into law that rescinded the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ bill that Bill Clinton had signed into law; but since DADT was focused on sexual orientation and did not include gender identity and expression, rescinding DADT did nothing to eliminate discrimination against transgendered people in the military.

But whatever the new administration does will have an impact on LGBT people, perhaps nowhere more significantly than in health care. And here, the whole debacle over the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ‘repeal and replace’ bill is a case in point. While it’s true that Health & Human Services (HHS) issued guidelines and regulations interpreting the ACA as including LGBT people and prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity, it is of signal importance that neither Obama nor the Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of Obama’s first term ever even considered including a provision in the bill that would have prohibited discrimination in the provision of health care based on sexual orientation or gender identity; had they done so, LGBT people would now have protection from discrimination in health care that could not be eliminated by an executive order issued by Donald Trump or a directive or regulation issued by Tom Price, a notorious homophobe. But the débacle that ensued when the right-wing Freedom Caucus torpedoed the ‘repeal and replace’ bill (called ‘TrumpCare’ by some and ‘RyanCare’ by others) also shows that the new administration faces far more serious impediments in some policy arenas from Republicans in Congress than from Democrats.

There is now talk of a Democratic filibuster of Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, who has a dismal record on LGBT issues. But even if Gorsuch were confirmed, he would only replace Antonin Scalia and therefore not shift the balance of power on the court; it is only when Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer or Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaves the court that the real battle royal will commence. But even if Trump were successful in getting two right-wing justices confirmed, I seriously doubt that the Supreme Court will overturn Windsor or Obergefell; and it is worth pointing out that a Republican justice wrote the majority opinions in both cases, a Reagan appointee in fact.

But from the panicked posts I’ve seen on Facebook since Nov. 8, some LGBT people seemed to be wondering if they would immediately be stripped of all rights once Trump took office. The simple fact is, Congress has never enacted a single LGBT rights law other than repealing DADT, and other than the Supreme Court’s recognition of same-sex marriage rights and the DADT repeal law’s recognition of the right of LGB people to serve in the military, we have no statutory rights at the federal level; what we do have is a patchwork quilt of federal case law, some good, some bad, some mixed. When Obama took office in Jan. 2009, he pursued no LGBT rights legislation, even though Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress; the candidate who promised to be a fierce advocate for LGBT rights was anything but; aside from a handful of executive orders and guidelines with extremely limited impact, the Obama administration did almost nothing for the LGBT community, and what little Obama did for us, he had to be pushed into doing reluctantly; in fact, Obama resolutely defended DOMA until nearly the end of his first term, reasserting explicitly homophobic attacks on the LGBT community in defending the Bush administration’s position on marriage.

Given that there is little chance for progress on LGBT issues at the federal level with Trump in the White House and right-wing Republicans in control of Congress, it is more important than ever to try to push a legislative and policy agenda at the state and local level. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws explicitly prohibiting discrimination based both on sexual orientation and gender identity, while three more states have enacted sexual orientation-only non-discrimination laws.

The bad news is that New York (along with Wisconsin and New Hampshire) is one of those states that have yet to enact statutes to protect transgendered people from discrimination. The Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) remains stalled in the Republican-controlled state Senate, but lest anyone think that the new TransPAC strategy to get GENDA passed by electing a Democratic majority in the Senate, I would simply point out that Democrats actually won a majority in the Senate in 2008, but when the Democrats controlled that body for six months from January to June 2009, they failed to bring GENDA to the floor for a vote, despite having the votes to pass the bill; I would also point out that Democrats have a majority in the Senate today, but the breakaway Democrats of the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) continue to keep Republicans in control of the Senate, with the tacit support of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. While the governor’s executive order in October 2015 added ‘gender identity and gender expression’ to the State Division of Human Rights list of protected categories (“ESPA goes out with a whimper without having passed GENDA“), like Obama’s guidelines on transgender inclusion in public schools, Cuomo’s directives on transgender discrimination could potentially be reversed by a successor; and his executive order and guidelines have undermined the already slim chances for passage of GENDA in the Senate. The good news is that here in New York City, the transgender rights law enacted by the City Council in 2002 cannot be rescinded by any president or governor and we are continuing to make progress in its implementation, which is an ongoing process.

Whatever we have already achieved at the state and local level, we must continue to pursue policy change at the federal level, and it is important to point out that the impact of any president or administration on the LGBT community actually goes well beyond the arena narrowly conceived of as ‘LGBT rights.’ In this regard, it has to be noted that globally, Obama’s impact on the LGBT community around the world has been a net negative; whatever small and largely symbolic measures Obama took in favor of LGBT rights, on the whole, the policies of his administration undermined LGBT people, women and people of color in countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Obama actually deported more undocumented immigrants than any US president in history, earning his designation ‘Deporter-in-Chief’ from La Raza; many of these deportees may have been LGBT and the majority were women and children, many of them knowingly sent to violent deaths in Central America. Note that Hillary Clinton enthusiastically supported these deportations. Obama also killed more innocent civilians with drone strikes – all enthusiastically supported by Hillary Clinton – than all previous presidents combined, virtually all of them people of color and many of them women and children.

As president and secretary of state, Obama and Hillary Clinton supported the 2009 coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras that brought a brutal military dictatorship to power and supported the junta despite its persecution of feminists, artists, LGBT people, indigenous people, environmental activists and political dissidents; Hillary persuaded Obama to resume US aid to Honduras despite the fact that it was a violation of US and international law. In March 2016, Berta Cáceres was assassinated almost certainly on the orders of the junta (“Remembering Berta Cáceres, Assassinated Honduras Indigenous & Environmental Leader,” Democracy Now, 5.4.16). A leading environmental and indigenous rights activist, Cáceres held Hillary personally responsible for the violence and repression under the junta (“Before Her Assassination, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Backing Honduran Coup,” Democracy Now, 5.11.16).

Obama and Hillary also supported the coup d’état that has plunged Egypt into an abyss of corruption, brutal repression and despair (Yahia Hamed, ”Egypt’s coup has plunged the country into catastrophe,” Guardian, 3.16.14), with LGBT people being rounded up, imprisoned and tortured by the regime that the Obama administration enthusiastically supported. As in Honduras, Obama resumed US aid to Egypt in direct contravention of US law, which prohibits continuing aid to a military junta brought to power in a coup. And the Obama administration authorized the brutal crackdown on the popular uprising in 2011 by the despotic Bahraini regime which even arrested, imprisoned, tortured and murdered doctors and nurses who tended to wounded pro-democracy activists who participated in the uprising. Obama also encouraged Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen in a war that continues to this day with the support of the Trump administration, with Saudi fighter jets dropping bombs on hospitals, schools and apartment buildings (“As Saudis Continue Deadly Bombing of Yemen, Is Obama Trading Munitions for Riyadh’s Loyalty?,” Democracy Now, 4.21.16); how many of these Yemenis are LGBT? That we don’t know, but we do know that the majority of the victims of Saudi war crimes in Yemen are women and children and all are people of color.

Perhaps most disturbing was Obama’s support for Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, which a report by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA) has declared an apartheid regime. And in 2014, the Israeli military deliberately targeted civilians in the Gaza Strip , killing over 2,500 Palestinians, a majority of them women and over 500 of them children; under international law, Israel’s actions in 2014 constitute genocide, and Obama and Hillary publicly supported and defended the genocide; in fact, Obama rewarded Netanyahu for it by increasing US military aid to Israel, handing Netanyahu a $38 billion check on his way out of office. Note here that there are many LGBT people living under the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, and that LGBT/queer Palestinian organizations all support Palestinian civil society’s call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel. Note also that Donald Trump’s new administration has been as enthusiastic in supporting Israeli apartheid as Obama’s was, with perhaps fewer constrains in its discursive practices. David Friedman, the new US ambassador to Israel, has referred to Jewish Americans who oppose the illegal occupation as ‘kapos’ and has openly scorned the two-state solution that has been official US policy for decades.

As truly horrendous as the new administration has proven to be, Donald Trump has made one very commendable decision, which is to withdraw the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the worst trade deal in history; for all that some still harbor illusions about Obama being a progressive, he worked assiduously with Republicans in Congress to push this anti-labor trade deal that would have a devastating impact on workers as well as the environment. What is not entirely clear is whether Trump will abjure the destructive neoliberal economic policy that every president from Carter through Obama has pushed. Unfortunately, if the Obama administration was an abject failure, in foreign policy even more so than in domestic policy, the Trump administration may prove to be worse. But the very bright silver lining in the dark cloud of Trumpery is the resistance movement that the election of Herr Drumpf has sparked. If Hillary Clinton’s election would have put the country into a slumber of passive acceptance of neoliberal economic policy, neocon foreign policy and creeping Israeli annexation of the West Bank as well as incremental genocide in Gaza, Trump’s election has at the very least woken quite a lot of people up to the dangers of the new administration.

What is needed now is a broadly conceived, LGBT-inclusive and strategically and tactically savvy movement for progressive policy change; and as the Mahatma Gandhi said, we must be the change we want to see in the world; as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice. Thank you.

Pauline Park, Ph.D., is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002; she also participated in the working group convened by the New York City Commission on Human Rights that drafted guidelines for implementation of the statute.  Park was a member of the steering committee that led the campaign for enactment of the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) and negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in that legislation, the first transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by the New York state legislation when it was signed into law in 2011.

The post LGBT rights & progressive politics in the age of Trump (Kingsborough Community College, 3.29.17) appeared first on Pauline Park.

Creating Change or pinkwashing Israeli apartheid: A Wider Bridge to Zionist propagandizing
by Pauline Park

I have attended 13 Creating Change conferences, but the 28th Creating Change in Chicago in January 2016, which I did not attend, will be remembered as perhaps the most controversial of them all (Matt Simonette and Gretchen Hammond, “Creating Change conference marked by controversies,” Windy City Times, 1.25.16). Creating Change is the largest annual general purpose conference of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists in the United States, the flagship event of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, which in 2016 changed its name to ‘National LGBTQ Task Force.’ If the 2016 Creating Change conference is remembered for anything, it will be remembered for the enormous controversies swirling around the invitation to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the reception held by A Wider Bridge on Jan. 22.

In a statement issued on Jan. 12, the Task Force announced that it had rescinded the invitation to ICE to facilitate a session at Creating Change 2016 after a wave of outrage from LGBT activists, especially people of color (statement from the National LGBTQ Task Force regarding Creating Change and ICE), executive director Rea Carey and deputy director Russell Roybal writing,

We know the decision to accept a proposal from ICE for a session at our Creating Change Conference was the wrong decision and that it has caused hurt and pain to communities and individuals we deeply care about. The decision also could have created a situation where the conference would not have felt like a safe space — a vitally important component of what makes the conference special — for undocumented immigrants, immigration activists and allies. Our commitment to immigrant rights and reform has never wavered, but we know community trust in our commitment has been damaged. We made a mistake and we deeply regret it and with our whole hearts apologize…

Sue Hyde, the director of Creating Change, issued a companion statement also apologizing for the decision and providing some background on the invitation to ICE. But if Task Force staff thought they had dodged a bullet, the outrage over ICE was just the prelude to the much bigger explosion over their invitation to A Wider Bridge.

On its website, A Wider Bridge describes itself as “the pro-Israel organization that builds bridges between Israelis and LGBTQ North Americans and allies,” but this is disingenuous at best if not downright misleading. AWB ‘pinkwashes’ the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine by creating an image of Israel as a gay paradise as a justification for the increasingly brutal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem that Palestinians have endured since 1967. As Jimmy Pasch, the west regional organizer for Jewish Voice for Peace, wrote on JVP’s website (“Don’t Pinkwash Apartheid: a Tochecha for the National LGBTQ Task Force“),

A Wider Bridge has a long history of ignoring and covering up Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians by touting Israel’s ‘gay-friendly’ reputation Upon learning of their participation at Creating Change, a diverse coalition of groups, with LGBTQ Palestinian organizations and leaders at the center, came together to oppose it. the coalition effectively made the case for how support of Israel’s military occupation, ethnic cleansing, racism, and colonialism [is[ incompatible with queer liberation and with fundamental human rights.’ Their organizing led to the initial cancellation of the event, but the backlash from institutional players was swift, leading to a barrage of misleading op-eds and the uncertain National LGBT Task Force, which runs the conference, reversing their decision.

The Task Force reversed its initial decision under enormous pressure from Zionists, both within and outside the LGBT community (“Group reverses decision to cancel reception with Israeli activists,” by Michael K. Lavers, Washington Blade, 1.19.16). If anything, the Task Force’s pusillanimous indecision, far from pleasing everyone, just managed to alienate both Zionists and anti-Zionists as well as make the organization’s leadership look weak and indecisive.

Jimmy Johnson reported on Black Lives Matter Chicago’s statement for the Electronic Intifada, writing, “Shortly after that statement was released, the Chicago organization Brown People for Black Power cancelled its scheduled workshop at Creating Change, adding, “Kristian Davis Bailey, co-organizer of the ongoing Black for Palestine effort, told me by email that the Black Lives Matter Chicago statement builds on the joint struggle between segments of Black and Palestinian liberation movements” (“Activists pull out of Chicago LGBTQ conference over Israel pinkwashing,” Jimmy Johnson, Electronic Intifada, 1.22.16)

The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD) issued a statement denouncing the Task Force (MASGD Statement on Pinkwashing Session at Creating Change 2016) on Jan. 22, on the morning of the AWB reception, declaring,

The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD) rejects the Task Force’s latest attempt to address current tensions at Creating Change 2016 with regard to Zionism and the military occupation of Palestine by Israel. The past two weeks have included a series of attempts to manipulate, undermine, divide, and co-opt our communities, absent any intersectional analysis of the broader oppressive dynamics at play. MASGD stands with all LGBTQ activists who reject oppressive forces at Creating Change, whether they be ICE or Zionism… this ‘dialogue’ is a naked attempt to co-opt our criticisms of the structural violence of Zionism, by making this issue one of emotions and ‘hurt feelings’ rather than one of the politics of oppression, occupation, and racism. Such attempts at window-dressing can never address structures of power, and therefore cannot serve as a fix for the decisions made by the Task Force at Creating Change 2016 that support systems of oppression. The Task Force pays a lot of lip service to being concerned about social justice, and to understanding the ways in which oppressions intersect with one another; however, their actions this year have demonstrated a clear hypocrisy and betrayal of what queer liberation truly means… By siding with the forces of oppression and occupation, the Task Force is clearly on the wrong side of history.

The Chicago-based Gay Liberation Network issued this statement on ‪#‎cancelpinkwashing‬ @ ‪#‎CC16‬, entitled, “Why We Oppose Pro-Israel Organizations at Creating Change”:

For several years the Israeli government has attempted to use propaganda about the freedoms some LGBTQs in that country have as a cover for their increasingly brutal rule over Palestinians — a process known as ‘pink-washing.’ Because of the brutal racism of the country, mimicking South Africa under apartheid – one set of laws for Jews, another for Palestinians – most Palestinian LGBTQs don’t enjoy those freedoms. Instead, they endure the anti-Palestinian racism meted out on a daily basis to gay and non-gay alike. Israel’s racist rule features widespread imprisonment of Palestinians without charges or trials, systemic torture documented by numerous human rights organizations, and the intentional, extreme impoverishment of Palestinians thru the purposeful destruction of their economic activity in Gaza and the West Bank. Nothing more succinctly encapsulates the racist nature of the Israeli state than its infamous apartheid wall, facilitating the increasing theft of land from Palestinians even as they approach a majority of people in all the areas controlled by Israel. As progressives rightly criticize the racist wall that Donald Trump proposes to build on the U.S.-Mexico border, why can’t some of them see the profoundly racist nature of the wall that Israel has already built? By allowing a pro-Israel group space at its Creating Change conference, the National LGBTQ Task Force has turned its back on its ostensible mission to oppose racism in all of its forms. We will not keep silent as the LGBTQ movement is used as a cover for this anti-Palestinian racism.

In fact, none of the protestors objected to the presence of Jerusalem Open House; the criticisms were aimed solely at AWB; and none of the protestors blocked anyone from entering the ballroom; in fact, it was AWB people who tried to block the demonstrators from entering the room, directly contrary to Creating Change policy, which makes public events such as this AWB reception open to all Creating Change attendees. And the only ‘fire storm of hate’ was that being directed by Slepian and AWB against the peaceful protestors both during and after the event, with incendiary language mischaracterizing the demonstration as anti-Jewish (despite the participation of many Jews in it). Unfortunately, editorials such as that written by Kevin Naff seriously confused the issues at stake; in his editorial for the Washington Blade (Kevin Naff, “Creating Shame: Anti-Israel protest misguided, offensive,” Washington Blade, 1.25.16), Naff repeated the nonsense that Arthur Slepian was spreading about the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” writing,

It’s not clear whether they understood the context of what they were chanting or if they were merely caught up in the moment. That genocidal chant is an overt call for the destruction of Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

No one I know thinks that chant means anything of the sort; rather, it is an expression of the wish that Palestinians may one day live in freedom, liberated from the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine; far from ‘genocidal,’ it is actually the opposite: it is an expression of opposition to genocide. LGBT activist Faisal Alam wrote on his Facebook page on Jan. 23,

90% of what you’re reading about what happened or didn’t happen at Creating Change is being written by people who weren’t here. People who were here AND were involved with on-the-ground organizing are either traveling back right now or are exhausted as fuck from the insanity of the weekend! There is no way to describe what happened here and the impact that its had on those that were on the front lines. But here are three things that are facts. 1) there were 2 shabbat services held at Creating Change; neither were disrupted or canceled. 2) A Wider Bridge’s reception started without disruption. 3) The Hilton Chicago called the Chicago Police Department and the Hilton security shut down the reception. It seems that Windy city times is the only newspaper that  has any semblance of ‘balance’ in its articles right now. Every other article has extensive quotes from A Wider Bridge and absolutely zero comments by organizers of the protest.

And as Jimmy Pasch of JVP put it,

The exclusion of A Wider Bridge from Creating Change is not about excluding Jews, as some have falsely charged, but rather to make clear that our struggles for liberation are all interconnected, and that support for occupation, colonialism, and discrimination has no place in our community.

A Wider Bridge is nothing more than a front for the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and AWB’s only role is to pinkwash the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine.  The invocation of the opportunity for ‘dialogue’ from both the National LGBTQ Task Force and AWB is disingenuous at best, because LGBT Palestinians living under the occupation cannot participate in it even if they wanted to. By inviting A Wider Bridge to use Creating Change as a platform to pinkwash the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, the Task Force implicitly endorsed the occupation and the apartheid regime used to enforce it, thus betraying LGBT/queer Palestinians as well as the organization’s own nominal commitment to progressive social and political change.  If the Task Force were really committed to social justice as its leadership claims, the organization would endorse the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), which all of the queer Palestinian organizations have asked the LGBT community in the United States and throughout the world to support.

On Jan. 25, the Task Force issued a statement ‘condemning anti-Semitism’ (“National LGBTQ Task Force Condemns Anti-Semitism,” 1.25.16), though precisely what ‘anti-Semitism’ it was condemning was not at all clear from the statement, which documented nothing of the sort; instead, the Task Force seemed to be parroting Arthur Slepian’s false and almost absurdly desperate accusation of anti-Semitism to slander the progressive activists — many of them Jewish and many people of color — challenging the pinkwashing of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In its Jan. 25 statement, the Task Force seems to turn its back on people of color, youth, progressive activists and the pursuit of social justice altogether; it is difficult to read the statement in any other way, since there is not even an acknowledgement of the justice of the anti-apartheid cause or even of the right to freedom of speech and expression for those who oppose Israeli apartheid. The Task Force’s behavior in this whole episode has really shattered its pretension to being the lead organization of ‘the movement.’ An organization that would bow to money and power as the Task Force so obviously did in caving into the Zionist machine has abdicated any legitimate claim even to be progressive, let alone the lead organization of the LGBT movement.

The Task Force leadership should have realized that its craven capitulation would not appease Zionists and did not. Melanie Nathan, whose specialty seems to be vicious personal attacks on human rights activists, seemed to want to publicly ‘shame’ those who participated in the #cancelpinkwashing demonstration by naming as many participants as she could identify (Melanie Nathan, “Naming Participants in the Creating Change 2016 LGBTQ Jew Bash Fest,” 1.30.16).

Even A Wider Bridge rejected the overtures of the notorious Islamophobe Michael Lucas, who apparently proposed that the organization bring suit against the Task Force, according to a report in Ha’aretz  (Allison Kaplan Sommer, “Gay Porn Star Comes Out Against anti-Israel LGBTQ Protest,” Ha’aretz, 2.2.16). In his op-ed in Out Magazine, Michael Lucas wrote,

The 200 thugs who showed up Friday at a Jewish reception were not interested in dialogue. They comprised an enraged gang filled with Jew-hatred, bent on intimidating and silencing LGBT Jews who have any connection to the state of Israel. And the sponsor of the creating Change Conference, the National LGBTQ Task Force, knew full well the potential for violence, and did absolutely nothing to safeguard the lives of more than 100 participants at the reception (Michael Lucas, “The Creating Change Protest Was Pure Anti-Semitism,” Out.com, 1.27.16).

Lucas himself was not at Creating Change and his account of the incident is fictional. Of course, this description is as far from reality, but it is hardly surprising coming from Lucas, a notorious Islamophobic bigot whose hysterical rants even the Zionist machine finds a tad embarrassing. A far more respected figure, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, the rabbi of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York (the largest LGBT synagogue in the world), unfortunately engaged in statements just as misleading if less hysterical in tone, writing,

What Kleinbaum refers to as a chant ‘calling for the eradication of Israel’ was the chant, ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.’ But as Wendy Elisheva Somerson noted,

references the Jewish historical trauma of forced displacement and genocide in Europe in order to position Israeli Jews as victims of Palestinians. In fact, it is Palestinians who were driven from their homes in 1948 during the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in order to clear the way for the state of Israel [and] says nothing about Israel… The chant itself simply promotes a vision of a liberated Palestine. Pro-occupation advocates who equate Palestinian freedom with Israeli annihilation reveal their view of the relationship between Israel and Palestine as a zero-sum game in which only one group of people, Israeli Jews, deserves liberation. But can we call it liberation if Israeli freedom comes at the cost of Palestinian freedom? Or if a handful of LGBTQ people gain individual rights, while others languish in poverty, prisons and detention centers? (Wendy Elisheva Somerson, “Widening the Frame: The connections Between Queer and Palestinian Liberation,” Truthout.org, 2.2.16)

One other claim that Kleinbaum made in her Ha’aretz op-ed requires examination:

Anyone who knows me—or Googles me—will know that I fight Israel’s military occupation of Palestine. In 2012 I participated in a national LGBT leadership trip to Palestine, and connected strongly with activists there. I have always taken a stand for freedom of speech.

I actually participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine, and as the other 15 delegates and the two tour directors as well as the camera crew can attest, Kleinbaum actually abandoned the tour halfway through the week-long itinerary and did so without explanation or even notice to the tour directors and her delegate colleagues. When the deputy tour director asked Kleinbaum why she left the tour, she told him that the tour was not what she had thought it would be, mumbling something about having expected ‘dialogue’ between Israelis and Palestinians; but this explanation is no explanation at all, because Kleinbaum like all of the delegates had been given a clear explanation of the tour in advance. One can speculate why she abruptly left the tour halfway through it, but the common consensus among the other delegates was that Kleinbaum could not bring herself to face the reality of the occupation; and in fact, at every stop along the way, she aggressively questioned our local Palestinian tour guides (we had a different one in every city, town and village) as to the veracity of their description of the apartheid regime in each such municipality or locale, implying skepticism about the extent of the oppression and repression by the Israeli authorities that they were describing.  And I am not aware of any real work that Kleinbaum has ever done to challenge the occupation; in fact, her public pronouncements have almost uniformly been harshly critical of those criticizing the occupation, especially those advocating boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) targeting apartheid Israel, calling into question her self-description in the Ha’aretz op-ed (“I fight Israel’s military occupation of Palestine”). It seems to me that someone less intent on criticizing the occupation than on criticizing those criticizing the occupation is not really ‘fighting’ the occupation.

In any case, despite its knowingly false and absurdly histrionic account of the events at Creating Change 2016 in Chicago, A Wider Bridge did not host a reception or any programming at Creating Change 2017 in Philadelphia, explaining that absence on its website:

Following the anti-semitic, anti-Israel incident at A Wider Bridge reception during Creating Change Conference last year, there’s a demand to know what we are planning to do with regard to participating in the upcoming Creating Change Conference, set for January 18 – 22 in Philadelphia. In brief, we are sending two of our staff leaders, Tye Gregory and Quentin Hill to participate in the conference, and to represent A Wider Bridge in the discussions, especially those that might focus on issues related to Israel and anti-Semitism. While we are not presenting a program or hosting a reception at the Conference itself, we are hosting a private Lunch and Learn event in Philadelphia on January 20, that will be an opportunity for both conference attendees and others in the Philadelphia area to learn about and discuss our work. On Wednesday, A Wider Bridge will be returning to the Creating Change Conference, this year in Philadelphia, to continue engaging LGBTQ leaders and activists with the shared advancement of LGBTQ rights in the United States and Israel. (“Creating Change 2017 and A Wider Bridge,” AWiderBridge.org, 1.16.17)

It is not clear from A Wider Bridge’s statement whether the organization submitted programming proposals to the Task Force and/or a request for space for a reception and was turned down or whether AWB decided not to attempt any such direct participation altogether; and unfortunately, the Task Force is not transparent in its decision-making and has not and likely will not respond to any requests for information about AWB and Creating Change 2017.

Unfortunately, for all its talk of ‘intersectional analysis’ of multiple oppressions, the Task Force ended up excoriating progressive activists for challenging Israeli apartheid and apologizing to Zionists for allowing their pinkwashing event to be disrupted, a betrayal of the organization’s ostensible commitment to the pursuit of social justice and the empowerment of those working for its attainment. Quite the contrary: the Task Force’s statements about the incident at Creating Change 2016 and its refusal to take a principled stand against Israeli apartheid and genocide represent a capitulation to the wealthy donor class to which the organization apparently now owes its primary loyalty rather than to the social justice activists who are its ostensible constituency, the opposite of what a progressive organization would do when confronted with a conflict between such activists and the propaganda machine of the illegal occupation of Palestine.

If the name of the Creating Change conference is to have any meaning, it must be as the name of a conference at which activists either create change or are empowered to do so by programming, networking and interactions there; if however the purpose of the conference is to fill the coffers of one of our largest LGBT organizations while at the same time excluding any discussion of such gross injustices as Israel’s illegal occupation much less real action to challenge it, then perhaps the conference should be renamed ‘Stifling Creating Change in Order to Satisfy Wealthy Zionist Donors.’ Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said that “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” And so one would hope the arc of Palestinian history would. But the arc of the history of the Creating Change conference seems to be from that of a grassroots gathering of activists to an enormous and highly profitable mainstream LGBT conference to a conference that excludes discussion of one of the great issues of our time, and one with enormous implications not only for LGBT/queer Palestinians but for the LGBT community in the United States and worldwide.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012.

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Palestine & the pinkwashing of the Israeli occupation: the case for BDS (Hunter College, 11.30.16)
a presentation by Pauline Park
at
“BDS: A Striving for Palestinian Liberation”
at Hunter College
City University of New York
30 November 2016

I would like to begin by thanking Rani Allan and Rania Hattab of the Palestine Solidarity Alliance for organizing this forum and inviting me to participate in it; I am honored to do so and would like to use the opportunity to explaining the phenomenon of  ‘pinkwashing’ and the role in which the LGBT community is being cast in pinkwashing the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

To begin with the term ‘pinkwashing,’ I would cite Sarah Schulman’s definition of the term from her article, “A documentary guide to ‘Brand Israel’ and the art of pinkwashing” (Mondoweiss.net, 11.30.11): “Pinkwashing is an explicit strategy taken up in recent years by the government of Israel to portray Israel as a leader in gay rights and a gay tourism destination to improve its human rights image while deflecting attention away from the extreme violence of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Through a campaign called ‘Brand Israel,’ Israel has tried to change its public image, promoting itself as a ‘modern democracy’ – and projecting an ‘LGBT-friendly’ image is just one part of this.” Pinkwashers make a number of absurd assertions; these are five of the most important claims:

1) Palestinian society is monolithically homophobic and transphobic. Pinkwashers never provide any evidence for this and in fact make false claims such as the assertion that homosexuality is illegal in the West Bank and prosecuted by the Palestinian Authority. In fact, Palestinian society, like American society and every other society on earth, is dynamic and complex. Part of the implicit assumption underlying the characterization of Palestinian society by Zionists and pinkwashers is the notion that Islam itself is inherently and monolithically homophobic and transphobic. Clearly, generalization about a religious community of 1.6 billion people spread across five or six continents and dozens of countries is risky to say the least. And it is absurdly reductive and misleading to generalize from the most extreme forms of Islamic fundamentalism such as Wahabi Islam in Saudi Arabia. It is also hypocritical for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do so, given the tactically alliance he has forged with the despotic Saudi regime. In fact, like the Christian world and the Jewish world, the world of Islam is a highly complex and variegated one, with attitudes towards homosexuality and transgender ranging from harsh condemnation to complete acceptance.  Homophobia and transphobia are a serious problem in many if not most countries around the world, whether or not they have a Muslim majority population; singling out Palestinian society for condemnation on this point is absurd.

the Umayyad caliphate (661-750) at its greatest extent, compared with the United States and Asia

2) Israel is a gay paradise. Maybe for wealthy Jewish gay men in Tel Aviv, but Jewish lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered people and Mizrahi (Sephardi Jews of Arab origin) have very different experiences even in Tel Aviv; trans people in particular often face police harassment and brutality in Tel Aviv and elsewhere. Outside of Tel Aviv and Haifa, attitudes towards LGBT people are often far from fully accepting. Israel also does not recognize same-sex marriage. What is particularly ironic and indeed hypocritical of Zionists pinkwashing the occupation is the way in which they ignore the deep homophobia and transphobia of much of Israeli society, especially in the ultra-Orthodox haredi community. In fact, the man who stabbed six people at the Jerusalem Pride Parade last July 30 was Yishai Schlissel, an Orthodox Jew who carried out a similar attack in 2005; one of his victims, 16-year-old Shira Banki, died from her wounds. Jerusalem is not regarded by anyone I know as being an LGBT-friendly city, dominated as it is by ultra-Orthodox haredi. And smaller cities and town in Israel are also not known to be particularly queer-friendly, either. So to base Israel’s reputation as a ‘gay paradise’ on only one city — and even more so, just certain areas of North Tel Aviv — is extremely misleading at best; certainly no Zionist would accept the notion that one should judge Palestinian society by the relatively LGBT-friendly climate of Ramallah, the one city in the West Bank that has an emerging gay ‘scene.’ Why, then, should Israel be promoted as a ‘gay paradise’ based only on the experiences of just a segment of the LGBT community living in North Tel Aviv?

3) Palestinians find refuge from persecution in Israel. Zionist pinkwashers promote the image of queer Palestinians fleeing the West Bank to find refuge in gay bars in Tel Aviv, but in fact, Israel does not recognize or accept non-Jewish asylum seekers for political asylum, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity; in fact, the Israeli authorities often blackmail queer Palestinians into becoming collaborators, which creates a very dangerous and impossible situation for them. If LGBT people outside of Palestine actually want to help queer Palestinians, they can best do so by supporting LGBT Palestinian organizations including al-Qaws, Aswat (the Palestinian lesbian and bisexual women’s and trans organization based in Haifa) and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (PQBDS).

passing through the notorious Qalandiya checkpoint on the first US delegation tour to Palestine in Jan. 2012

4) Comparing Israel’s record on LGBT rights to Palestinian society helps queer Palestinians. When everyone from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to A Wider Bridge harps on Israel’s supposedly sterling record on LGBT issues actually makes things worse for queer Palestinians by pitting LGBT rights against Palestinian rights. What actually helps Palestinians is LGBT support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which is the best way queer people can show support for queer Palestinians, along with direct support for their organizations. When LGBT individuals and organizations join Palestinian society’s call for BDS, they show that many LGBT people are committed to human rights for Palestinians and help shift Palestinian attitudes on LGBT issues; rather than being viewed as Zionist or apologists for the occupation, LGBT people who participate in the anti-apartheid movement can show themselves to be allies and valuable allies at that; this is especially true in the United States, which is the power behind Netanyahu’s apartheid throne, which is precisely why the Zionist machine has geared up to do battle on American soil, with A Wider Bridge specifically founded to pinkwash the occupation and generate support for Israeli apartheid.

5) Israel’s record on LGBT rights justifies the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Many non-Muslim, non-Arab countries in the world have terrible records on LGBT rights, including Russia, Hungary, Nigeria, Jamaica; no one suggests that they deserve to be subjected to foreign military occupation. Would anyone support or even propose a German invasion and occupation of Russia simply because Germany has a much better record on LGBT rights than Russia? No amount of progress of LGBT rights in Israel can possibly justify the illegal and increasingly brutal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem or the incremental genocide being pursued against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip all of which the United States subsidizes with more than $3 billion in US aid to the Israeli government a year. LGBT organizations based in Israel, Europe and especially the United States play a crucial role in advancing the discourse of pinkwashing, often directly coordinating with the Israeli government and sometimes funded directly by the Israeli government.

members of the first US LGBTQ delegation to Palestine standing in the ruins of Lajjun, a Palestinian village ethnically cleansed in the Nakba, with a Palestinian from Lajjun

Unfortunately, Barack Obama’s parting gift to Netanyahu was to present him with a check for $38 billion for a 10-year US aid package, the largest foreign aid package ever offered by the United States to any country and possibly the largest foreign aid package in history; most of this will go to the Israeli military to maintain the illegal occupation. Can you imagine what an extraordinary boost to the LGBT community in occupied Palestine if even just one-tenth of one percent of this were to go to al-Qaws and other LGBT Palestinian organizations?

It might be useful to conclude with this question: if BDS is completely ineffective, as some Zionists are trying to claim, why is it that the Israeli government and Zionist organizations have committed millions of dollars to disparaging the movement? The very attempt to discredit BDS suggests to me that it is what the Netanyahu government and the Zionist machine most fear. And LGBT community members in the United States, Canada, Europe and elsewhere can contribute most to the liberation of the Palestinian people by participating in the BDS movement. It took 35 years for BDS to bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa, but in the end, it did. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said so famously, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice; we who identify as LGBT should contribute in speeding that bend.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002. Park participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012. She did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Pauline Park, Rania Hatab, Rani al-Hindi (who organized the event) & Yousef Munayyer at Hunter College (CUNY)

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I want a president…
by Pauline Park
17 October 2016

I want a president who reflects my values, not the values of the Wall Street oligarchy as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump do.

I want a president who stands up to Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry instead of fanning the flames of prejudice and hatred as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do.

I want a president who will curb the military/industrial complex instead of enabling its excesses with bloated budgets as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton would do.

I want a president who isn’t an enormously wealthy embodiment of class privilege as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are, multi-milllionaires who represent the interests of the oligarchy.

I want a president who doesn’t pander to voters or condescend as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do but who addresses the real issues in a serious and policy-oriented manner.

I want a president who is willing to do something about global warming and climate change, unlike Donald Trump, a global warming denialist, and Hillary Clinton, whose agenda is to promote fracking, the new energy technology that’s contributing more to global warming than any other.

I want a president who really thinks #BlackLivesMatter instead of denigrating the BLM movement like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do.

I want a president who actually understands the corporate culture of police violence in this country like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and is willing to address this serious problem affecting LGBT people and people of color, especially LGBT people of color.

I want a president who tells the truth and isn’t a pathological liar like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I want a president who will challenge and downsize the National Security agency and end its illegal surveillance of US citizens and others instead of enabling the NSA like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I want a president who will end support for and subsidies to brutal dictatorships in Honduras, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and elsewhere instead of supporting and enabling them like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I want a president who will challenge and downsize the military/industrial complex, unlike Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who would further enable its excesses.

I want a president who will take the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people seriously, unlike Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I want a president who will stop subsidizing the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do but who instead will end US subsidies to Israel’s brutal apartheid regime in illegally occupied Palestine.

I want a president who will challenge Israel’s illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip instead of supporting its policy of incremental genocide in Gaza instead as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do.

I want a president who knows where Aleppo is, unlike Gary Johnson.

I want a president like Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential nominee, who reflects my progressive feminist values instead of embodying anti-progressive, anti-feminist politics as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do.

I want a president like Jill Stein, the only feminist and the only progressive in the race~!

I want all Americans to vote for Jill Stein as president and say #NeverHillaryOrTrump; #JillNotHill~!

This is a statement read by Pauline Park (without any of the candidate references) on the High Line in Manhattan on 17 October 2016 as part of a project referencing Zoe Leonard’s poem, “I Want a President.”

Pauline Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012; Park did her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics & Political Science and her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Hillary Clinton’s anti-feminist & anti-progressive agenda will never have my support
by Pauline Park

Hillary Clinton’s supporters depict her as a courageous feminist trying to advance a daringly progressive agenda in the face of Republican opposition; the truth is actually quite the opposite: Hillary is an anti-feminist who has always pursued an anti-progressive agenda from her earliest days as a ‘Goldwater girl.’

To begin at the beginning: Hillary grew up in the lily-white upper middle class Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. It is important to point out that Barry Goldwater was not only the Republican nominee in 1964, he was the most right-wing Republican nominee of his day, part of a conservative movement that used his candidacy to take over the party and transform it into the GOP we know today, so far right-wing that Northeastern liberals like Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javitz and Claiborne Pell could not win nomination to run for any statewide office today, even in New York or New England. In 1964, while Bernie Sanders was on the front lines of the civil rights movement, Hillary Clinton was supporting the Republican presidential nominee who was ridiculing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and calling him a ‘communist.’

Of course, the question is not where Hillary Clinton started out but where she has ended up and where she has been along the way, and her role as First Lady of Arkansas and the United States needs to be taken into account in a comprehensive assessment of her record. Hillary supporters lash out at those who would examine that record as ‘sexist,’ but as First Lady, Hillary was not a purely decorative element in her husband’s administration in Little Rock and later in Washington, D.C.; she was a very public figure and cast herself as an active policy-maker in both administrations; and in fact, the whole rationale for her campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2000 was that she had been a key decision-maker in the Clinton administration; and so what Hillary did in Little Rock and later in Washington in her husband’s administrations are very relevant.

I would just point to her crucial role in advocating for the 1994 crime law that helped accelerate the mass incarceration of people of color — especially African American and Latino men — as well as her public advocacy for the welfare reform legislation that further impoverished millions of poor women and children, disproportionately people of color. As Michelle Alexander has pointed out, the Clinton administration

capitulated entirely to the right-wing backlash against the civil-rights movement and embraced former president Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime, welfare, and taxes—ultimately doing more harm to black communities than Reagan ever did… Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history… He supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, which produced staggering racial injustice in sentencing and boosted funding for drug-law enforcement. Some might argue that it’s unfair to judge Hillary Clinton for the policies her husband championed years ago. But Hillary… not only campaigned for Bill; she also wielded power and significant influence once he was elected, lobbying for legislation and other measures… In her support for the 1994 crime bill, for example, she used racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals… Bill Clinton championed discriminatory laws against formerly incarcerated people that have kept millions of Americans locked in a cycle of poverty and desperation. If you listen closely here, you’ll notice that Hillary Clinton is still singing the same old tune in a slightly different key. I am inclined to believe that it would be easier to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself. (Michelle Alexander, “Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote,” the Nation, 2.10.16)

The support that many people of color have offered Hillary Clinton in the course of the 2016 presidential campaign is all the more curious when one considers her use of language that some would call racist, as Marc Charles wrote in April 2016,

Hillary Clinton is using terms like ‘off the reservation,’ and reassuring people that ‘We don’t need to make America great again. America never stopped being great.’ This type of behavior demonstrates she does not understand the systemic racism and blatant oppression that has been endured by people of color throughout the entire history of this nation,” writes Mark Charles, adding, “Unfortunately, the dialogue that is taking place this election cycle is not about broad-based equality or ending racism. The conversation we are having today is about the type of racism we want to settle for” (Mark Charles, “A Native Response to Hillary Clinton’s ‘Off the Reservation’ Comment,” Native News On-Line, 4.30.16)

Is it sheer ignorance of the history of race and ethnicity in the United States? Or was the ‘off the reservation’ comment a racist ‘dog whistle’ as when Hillary asserted that she had a broader base of support than then-Sen. Barack Obama, citing an Associated Press article

that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again,  and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There’s a pattern emerging here (Richard Prince, “Hard Working… White Americans,” Maynard Institute, 5.8.08)

The pattern that many people of color saw was that of a privileged white woman casting herself as the champion of white Democrats unwilling to vote for an African American. “Was Hillary channeling George Wallace? Hillary’s reckless exploitation of racial division could split the Democratic Party over race  — a tragic legacy for the  Clintons,” wrote Joe Conason (ibid).  Hillary also aggressively pushed the Republican ‘welfare reform’ bill that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996 that plunged hundreds of thousands of families  — disproportionately African American women and children — from poverty into even deeper poverty as part of a cynical attempt to out maneuver Bob Dole and the Republicans in the lead up to the 1996 election, which Clinton won handily and most likely would have easily won even if Clinton had not signed the crime bill and welfare reform bill into law.

If Hillary supporters rail at those who criticize her policy-making role in the Clinton White House, they refuse to acknowledge the fact that she would never have been considered a credible candidate for the Senate seat of the retiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan had she not claimed to have been a key policy-maker in the Clinton administration. Neither Clinton had ever lived in New York before, and so Hillary was rightly called a ‘carpet bagger’ for moving to Chappaqua just to be eligible to run for the Senate in 2000 with the blessing of Pat Moynihan. Whether former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani could have beaten Hillary we will never know, because he withdrew from the race after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, leaving the feckless U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio from Long Island to go down to defeat in November of that year.

My own interaction with Hillary came in the form of a request that I and a group of transgender activists made to meet with her before the election and then again after she won in November; her staff refused both requests, even declining to offer a low-level staff member to meet with us to discuss transgender discrimination issues; the second time around, of course, we were not just voters, but constituents of the newly elected Senator, whose refusal to meet with us or even explain her refusal to meet with us alienated not just me but the mostly African American transwomen who were part of our group as well. The fact that Housing Works, one of New York City’s largest social service providers to people living with HIV and AIDS, was part of the group requesting the meeting, seemed to have no impact whatsoever on the willingness of Hillary’s staff to meet with us.

Just as important in creating a lasting impression with me were Hillary Clinton’s responses to questions posed by Lesbian & Gay New York (‘LGNY,’ since renamed ‘Gay City News’) to her in an interview in 2000. Paul Schindler, the newspaper’s editor, asked me if I could suggest a transgender-specific question to pose to the Senate candidate; I suggested that he ask her if she would commit to supporting full transgender inclusion in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and the federal hate crimes bill. Taking my suggestion, in an interview on Oct. 4, Schindler (Paul Schindler, “Hillary Clinton Talks to Paul Schindler, 2000“) asked the Senate candidate,

“Do you think the goal of broadening the language for ENDA or broadening language in the hate crimes protection act to include gender expression and gender identity, do you think that’s a practical goal at this point politically?”

To which Hillary responds, “I think we need to try to move ENDA forward. I think ENDA is such an important legislative goal. I think it’s within reach and I think it’s a vehicle for widening the circle of rights and freedoms and responsibilities and I would really focus on trying to get that passed.”

“In other words, no effort at this point at amending?”

“I don’t see at this point that that would be in the best interest of moving the agenda forward.”

After another go around on this question, Schindler then asks, “One of the things that the transgender community points to is that, for example, on hate crimes in New York State, the entire coalition for hate crimes held out to have gays and lesbians included in it. We would have had a hate crimes bill in New York long ago if it had only been for religion and so forth. But everyone hung tough on that. But what the transgender community is saying now is, ‘Wouldn’t that approach be appropriate for them as well?’ in other words, don’t do it piecemeal, include everybody and then move forward.”

“Well no one who’s a leader in the gay and lesbian community has asked me to do that. I think there’s an understood recognition of the political reality. So for me it’s a priority to try to get ENDA passed, which is what I will work on.”

Transgendered people suffer pervasive discrimination, transgendered people of color in particular, and it was shocking to me to see Hillary dismiss transgender discrimination altogether in her comments in her October 2000 interview with LGNY; what was especially appalling was her response to the question about supporting inclusion of gender identity and expression in ENDA and the hate crimes bill: “no one who’s a leader in the gay and lesbian community has asked me to do that.” Well, it should not be up to gay and lesbian gatekeepers to decide whether transgendered people should be protected from discrimination and all the more so given that the gay and lesbian ‘leaders’ Hillary talks to are wealthy and powerful members of the gay political establishment, many of them millionaires and almost all of them white and at least upper middle class.

Even when she caught onto the increasingly common and more inclusive usage of ‘LGBT’ community, as senator and later as secretary of state, Hillary almost never addressed transgender discrimination as a stand-alone issue apart from the broader LGBT umbrella.

It is worth pointing out that Hillary not only supported the discriminatory bill that became known as ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1993 but also the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that Clinton signed into law in 1996 — the only legislation specifically institutionalizing discrimination against LGBT people ever signed into law by any president in US history. And Hillary not only supported that legislation but aggressively defended it for years with language that far exceeded what was necessary to justify DOMA purely in terms of political expediency.

Hillary only came out for same-sex marriage when she began her second campaign for president and after Obama himself had come out in favor of marriage equality, and he only did some when it became clear that he would have a hard time raising money in the LGBT community for his 2012 election campaign if his administration was still supporting DOMA.

And as late as May 2016, when Hillary was almost assured of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, she refused to respond to a questionnaire from a transgender advocacy organization; as Kevin Gosztola reported on May 24,

Trans United Fund received a call from a Clinton campaign representative a full two weeks after the campaign had committed to complete the survey, explaining that the survey was ‘too long’ and the campaign did not have the appropriate resources to complete it in a timely manner. The Sanders campaign completed the questionnaire completely and on time (Kevin Gosztola, “Transgender Group ‘Perplexed’ At Why Clinton Won’t Fill OutQuestionnaire,” Shadowproof, 5.24.16).

As Gosztola put it so trenchantly, “For a ‘frontrunner’ Democratic presidential candidate, who has cast herself as the inevitable nominee, it’s hard to comprehend how the campaign could not have found time to answer some questions important to trans people.” Hillary has been at best a follower, not a leader, when it comes to LGBT rights, and for most of her career, an opponent of LGBT rights.

Of course, there are those who not only insist upon but demand that women support Hillary simply because she’s a woman, though it is difficult to see why simply being female alone should compel anyone’s support; after all, Carly Fiorina ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 but got no support from Gloria Steinem, Madeleine Albright, Joan Walsh or the legion of pseudo-feminists moving in lockstep behind the Clinton machine. The truth is that most women who come to power not only in the United States but in other countries around the world do so through a masculinist discourse of power, Margaret Thatcher being a case in point; Ronald Reagan famously called her ‘the best man in England.’ I lived in London for two years during a crucial period in Thatcher’s career; I was there when she declared war on Argentina over the Falkland Islands (‘las Malvinas’), with profound consequences for the United Kingdom as well as for Argentina, and the prime minister was compared by the British and world media to Boadicea (Boudicca) and other warrior queens of yore. But Thatcher’s direction of the war was far from heroic; in fact, her order to sink the General Belgrano was arguably a war crime. Thatcher also branded Nelson Mandela a ‘terrorist,’ despite his heroic efforts to challenge South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime.

One could mention many other women who have risen to the highest office in the land, including the first female prime ministers of Israel and India; Golda Meir denied the very existence of Palestinians, including Palestinian women, and Indira Gandhi forcibly sterilized poor men and women, hardly orthodox feminism.  There is an ironic parallel between Hilary and Park Geun-hye, who served as acting First Lady of the Republic from 1974-79 when her father was president, the dictator Park Chung-hee, who was assassinated in 1979, later going on to become the first woman elected president of the Republic of Korea in 2012. A contemporary of Hillary’s, Park alienated large sections of the Korean public with her war on labor and her authoritarian style of rule, proving through her behavior and her policies that the first woman elected president of a democracy can be both anti-feminist and profoundly anti-progressive (Hankyoreh editorial, “Democracy sorely missing from Park’s inaugural address,” 2.26.13).

Closer to home, Carly Fiorina withdrew from the Republican contest after failing to et even one percent in the New Hampshire primary in January; but before her withdrawal, neither Gloria Steinem nor any other Hillary supporter suggested that women should support Fiorina’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination despite the fact that she is just as much a woman as Hillary Clinton; Steinem’s lack of support for Fiorina speaks as much to the inconsistency and contradiction of the ‘feminists’ supporting Hillary as to the rigor of their feminism. In fact, Gloria Steinem was rebuked by feminists across the country for declaring (with no evidence whatsoever) that the only reason young women were supporting Bernie Sanders in droves was because they were looking for dates with young ‘Bernie Bros’; if Donald Trump had said that, he would have been rightly excoriating for such a deeply misogynist assertion.

The first woman elected governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin is anything but a feminist, and she became something of a national laughingstock for her bizarre pronouncements as John McCain’s Republican running mate in 2008. But Palin is a woman, and at no time has Steinem ever proposed support for Palin’s election either as vice-president or as president; it is difficult to see how either Carly Fiorina’s election as the first woman president or Sarah Palin’s would be any less ‘historic’ than Hillary Clinton’s. Nonetheless, Madeleine Albright went so far as to say that “there is a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women,” condemning women who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries to everlasting hellfire and damnation, a curious theology to affirm; but Albright did not support Sarah Palin for vice-president in 2008 or Carly Fiorina for president in 2016, so it is difficult to see how Albright could escape eternal torment in the flames of hell any more than any other woman who supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton’s record on women’s issues is appalling by any standard. Hillary she supported Barack Obama’s mass deportations of Latino immigrants, deportations so enormous that La Raza dubbed him the ‘Deporter in Chief.’ Obama deported more than twice as many undocumented immigrants as George W. Bush and by some counts, more than all previous presidents combined. Hillary did not begin to distance herself from these deportations until she began her campaign for president (Betsey Woodruff, “Hillary Clinton’s Child-Deportation Flip-Flop,” Politico, 3.11.16). In a March 10 Democratic presidential debate, Hillary declared that as president she would not deport children,  prompting Betsey Woodruff to write,

Clinton struggled mightly to communicate last night that deporting children is bad… Just two months ago… Clinton defended the practice of deporting children… and less than two years before that, Clinton argued passionately that undocumented children in the United States be subject to deportation… she told Christian Amanpour that children fleeing from violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala shouldn’t be able to stay in the U.S. (Betsey Woodruff, “Hillary Clinton’s Child-Deportation Flip-Flop,” Politico, 3.11.16).

Speaking of Honduras, as secretary of state, Hillary supported the 2009 coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. The coup that Hillary supported brought a brutal military dictatorship to power and has made Honduras one of the most violent countries on earth, and as secretary of state, Hillary continued to support the junta despite its persecution of women, feminists, artists, LGBT people, indigenous people, environmental activists and political dissidents of all kinds, and she persuaded Barack Obama to resume US aid to Honduras despite the fact that the resumption of such aid was a violation of US law as well as a breach of international law.  In March 2016, Berta Cáceres was assassinated almost certainly on the orders of the junta (“Remembering Berta Cáceres , Assassinated Honduras Indigenous & Environmental Leader,” Democracy Now, 5.4.16). A leading environmental and indigenous rights activist, Cáceres held Hillary personally responsible for the violence and repression under the junta (“Before Her Assassination, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Backing Honduran Coup,” Democracy Now, 5.11.16).

But the coup in Honduras was not the only one that Hillary supported as secretary of state; she also supported the coup d’état in Egypt, which has proved to be a disaster for the country (Yahia Hamed, “Egypt’s coup has plunged the country into catastrophe,” Guardian, 3.16.14), plunging it into a miasma of corruption, brutal repression and despair. As in Honduras, Obama and Hillary resumed US aid to Egypt in direct contravention of US law, which prohibits continuing aid to a military junta brought to power in a coup.

It was in neighboring Libya that Hillary had her biggest impact as secretary of state, but it is not a legacy that she is eager to talk about. While Republican members of Congress have focused obsessively on Benghazi, which was so obviously a disaster for which Hillary was fully responsible as secretary of state, they have missed the forest for the trees. It was the Libya intervention as a whole that was the real catastrophe, and one which Hillary is primarily responsible, pushing Obama into the ill-fated war against his better judgment. The Gaddafi regime’s attacks on innocent civilians in eastern Libya certainly provided a rationale for a no-fly zone of some sort, but Hillary’s US/NATO intervention repeated the folly of Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq (which she aggressively supported), decapitating the regime and leaving a power vacuum which al-Qaeda and ISIS (‘Da’esh’) have filled.

Other than turning Libya into a failed state, it was in Bahrain that Hillary had perhaps the biggest impact. As secretary of state, Hillary approved the brutal crackdown on the popular uprising against the despotic Bahraini regime in 2011 in which the dictatorship even arrest, imprisoned, tortured and murdered doctors and nurses who tended to the wounded pro-democracy activists who participated in the uprising.

Next door, Hillary encouraged Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen in a war that continues to this day with the full support of the Obama administration, with Saudi fighter jets dropping bombs on hospitals, schools and houses and apartment buildings in Sana and elsewhere in Yemen (“As Saudis Continue Deadly Bombing of Yemen, Is Obama Trading Munitions for Riyadh’s Loyalty?,” Democracy Now, 4.21.16). An International Business Times investigation  revealed an astonishing conflict of interest on Hillary’s part:

Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IB Times analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure… represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term. The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143% increase in complete sales to those nations over the same time  frame during the Bush administration (David Sirota and Andrew Perez, “Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department,” International Business Times, 5.26.15).

Not insignificant is the fact that these regimes are all undemocratic to say the least, including Saudi Arabia, one of the most despotic regimes on earth, whose record on human rights is appalling; Saudi women cannot vote in national elections and are not even allowed to drive; and LGBT people have been executed by the regime for same-sex relations and crossdressing, according to human rights organizations. One need also note that Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights not only did not improve during Hillary’s tenure of secretary of state but actually worsened.

Hillary Clinton’s supporters claim she is the most qualified person ever to run for president, but her support for Israeli apartheid and genocide disqualifies her entirely in my view. In a letter to fellow Methodists considering support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, Hillary denounced BDS as ‘anti-Semitic’ and declared, “We must never tire in defending Israel’s legitimacy” (Maggie Habermas, “Hillary Clinton Criticizes Group Advocating Boycott Against Israel,” New York Times, 5.10.16). Michelle Goldberg aptly called Hillary’s speech at the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convention on March 21 ‘a symphony of craven, delusional pandering’ (Michelle Goldberg, “Hillary Clinton’s AIPAC Speech Was a Symphony of Craven, Delusional Pandering,” Slate, 3.21.16), in which Hillary declared, “We have to be united in fighting back against BDS,” equating BDS with ‘anti-Semitism’ (Ryan Teague Beckwith, “Read Hillary Clinton’s Speech to AIPAC,” Time, 3.21.16), this, despite the fact that the governments of Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands have officially recognized BDS as legitimate and constitutionally protected speech (Kevin Squires, “Ireland latest EU state to defend BDS,” Electronic Intifada, 5.28.16).

While Donald Trump and Ted Cruz spoke at AIPAC and mouthed the usual Zionist machine talking points as Hillary, she alone among all the presidential candidates speaking at AIPAC specifically named the BDS movement as the enemy, and a candidate who specifically and explicitly slanders the movement for justice and human rights for all in Israel/Palestine with false allegations of anti-Semitism has fully disqualified herself as a candidate for any public office, let alone that of president of the United States (Steven Klein, “America Must Tell Israel: Annexing the West Bank Is Our Red Line” (Ha’aretz, 5.8.16). While Bernie Sanders’ pronouncements on Israel fall far short of what they could and should be, it is worth noting that he is the first major party presidential candidate to publicly criticize Israel at all in the course of a presidential contest (Jason Horowitz and Maggie Haberman, “A Split Over Israel Threatens the Democrats’ Hopes for Unity,” New York Times, 5.25.16); contrast that with Hillary’s shilling for apartheid Israel, her open support for the Israeli war of genocide in Gaa in 2014 and her declaration that destroying the BDS movement as a priority of her presidency, and there is simply no rational argument for any progressive to support Hillary over Bernie.

Even beyond Hillary Clinton’s colossal failure as secretary of state and her outrageous support for Israeli apartheid and genocide is the issue of her character, and her willingness to subvert the law and lie repeatedly about her many violations of it should be troubling to anyone who thinks that the character as well as the judgment of a president matters. Hillary is the only secretary of state ever to have set up a private server secretly in the basement of her house in order to evade clear State Department rules and then attempt to mislead the public about the subterfuge. On May 25, the Inspector General of the State Department issued a report, declaring,

At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act (Julian Hattem, “Watchdog: Clinton, top aides did not comply on records policy,” The Hill, 5.25.16)

Destroying government documents is a serious crime and repeatedly lying about such behavior is an indictment of Hillary Clinton’s character, even if it were the case that every single one of the 32,000 e-mail messages that she destroyed was about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding planning, which is of course a completely implausible assertion.

(A.J. Vicens, “State Department Inspector General Finds Hillary Clinton Violated Recordkeeping Rules,” Mother Jones, 5.25.16).

As Amy Chozick put it so trenchantly in her May 25 news report for the New York Times, “Voters just don’t trust her,” noting that

After months of Mrs. Clinton’s saying she used a private email for convenience, and that she was willing to cooperate fully with investigations into her handling of official business at the State Department, the report, delivered to Congress on Wednesday, undermined both claims (Amy Chozick, “Emails Add to Hillary Clinton’s Central Problem: Voters Just Don’t Trust Her,” New York Times, 5.25.16)

Far from being a partisan Republican ‘witch hunt,’ the report was issued by the inspector general of the State Department, an Obama appointee and one-time subordinate to Hillary Clinton, reporting to Congress that Hillary refused to meet with him and the State Department staff conducting the review; her campaign’s statement issued after the report was widely reported on in the media was that she was waiting to be interviewed by the FBI; but that is of course absurd on its face because the FBI has never precluded her from meeting with the inspector general’s office and one would imagine would strongly support the former secretary cooperating with it.

Hillary is now viewed rightly by an overwhelming majority of Americans as dishonest and untrustworthy (Jeff Jacoby, “In Clinton, Americans Don’t Trust,” Boston Globe, 5.31.16). Part of that perception may be because of her corruption. Since leaving office as president and secretary of state, Bill and Hillary Clinton have cashed in on public office in a way absolutely unprecedented in American history. Hillary alone has received more than $22 million in speaking fees, while Bill Clinton “has earned more than $132 million in speaking fees, in addition to book royalties and other income. The Clintons’ most recent financial-disclosure forms show that he earned nearly $2.7 million in fees for speaking to audiences that included financial-industry firms, after she announced her candidacy,” writes Amy Davidson (Amy Davidson, “Bill Problems: As Donald Trump attacks both Clintons, it’s like 1992 all over again,” New Yorker, 6.6.16). Can you imagine George Washington or Abraham Lincoln raking in $132 million in speaking fees after leaving office? Or Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson?

One of the most disturbing facts about Hillary is that she is bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry. As Charlie Cray wrote in a report for Greenpeace,

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign (‘Hillary for America’) has received $147,840 in direct contributions from 65 fossil fuel lobbyists and $2,502,740 in bundled contributions by fossil fuel lobbyists. Combined, the total direct and bundled contributions from 65 oil/coal/gas lobbyists to Clinton’s campaign is at least $2,650,580 (Charlie Cray, Fossil Fuel Lobbyists’ Contributions to the Clinton Campaign, Greenpeace.org, 4.22.16).

Despite the overwhelming evidence of Hillary’s dishonesty and corruption as well as anti-progressive politics and sheer incompetence, her supporters insist that we all have an obligation to support her for the Democratic nomination and if she wins that, vote for her in the general election. And this is one of the most curious aspects of the Hillary Clinton campaign: is the binary opposition being constructed by her supporters as well as those of Donald Trump, both of whom use the other as a bogeyman with which to frighten wavering voters. But the fact is, we do not have a national election for president but rather fifty state elections (plus the District of Columbia, etc.) in which voters elect representatives to the electoral college. Of all the states, New York is one of the ‘bluest,’ reliably Democratic in every election since the Reagan landslide of 1984; so the argument in favor of Hillary, already weak, looks even weaker when one looks at the bluest and reddest of the states. While it is true that Trump’s unusual if not to say bizarre candidacy may well scramble the red/blue picture that we have been used to for the last few decades, the fact is that no one thinks that 2016 will be a 49-state blow-out like 1984 or 1972. In such circumstances, the demand by Democratic partisans that progressives support an anti-progressive candidate such as Hillary Clinton becomes even less persuasive for those living and voting in the ‘safest’ Democratic and Republican states.

Polls show Hillary beating Trump by margins of 80%-20% or even greater, so the notion that my vote for Jill Stein on the Green Party line would throw the election to Trump is simply absurd. One could point out the illogic of that logic by arguing that a vote for Jill Stein is not only not a vote for Donald Trump but is in fact a vote against Donald Trump as well as Hillary Clinton. I intend to vote for Jill Stein in November not merely as a ‘protest’ vote but as an expression of my values, and the principles of progressive politics that are at the heart of my own activism and life’s work. A vote for Hillary Clinton would be nothing less than a betrayal of progressive principles and the social justice that I have been pursuing for over twenty years now.

Pauline Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012; she keynoted the Queer Korea Festival preceding the Seoul Pride Parade in 2015, the largest event in the history of the LGBT community in Korea. Park did her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics & Political Science and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The post Hillary Clinton’s anti-feminist & anti-progressive agenda will never have my support appeared first on Pauline Park.

“Pinkwashing is an explicit strategy taken up in recent years by the government of Israel to portray Israel as a leader in gay rights and a gay tourism destination to improve its human rights image while deflecting attention away from the extreme violence of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Through a campaign called ‘Brand Israel,’ Israel has tried to change its public image, promoting itself as a ‘modern democracy’ – and projecting a ‘LGBT-friendly’ image is just one part of this,” wrote Sarah Schulman in 2011 (“A documentary guide to ‘Brand Israel’ and the art of pinkwashing “Mondoweiss.net, 11.30.11). Pinkwashers make a number of absurd assertions; these are among the the key claims:

1) Palestinian society is monolithically homophobic and transphobic. Pinkwashers never provide any evidence for this and in fact make false claims such as the assertion that homosexuality is illegal in the West Bank and prosecuted by the Palestinian Authority.

2) Israel is a gay paradise. Maybe for wealthy Jewish gay men in Tel Aviv, but Jewish lesbians, bisexuals, trans people and Mizrahi (Sephardi Jews of Arab origin) have very different experiences even in Tel Aviv; trans people in particular often face police harassment and brutality in Tel Aviv and elsewhere. Outside of Tel Aviv and Haifa, attitudes towards LGBT people are often far from fully accepting. Israel also does not recognize same-sex marriage.

3) Palestinians find refuge from persecution in Israel. Zionist pinkwashers promote the image of queer Palestinians fleeing the West Bank to find refuge in gay bars in Tel Aviv, but in fact, Israel does not recognize or accept non-Jewish asylum seekers for political asylum, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity; in fact, the Israeli authorities often blackmail queer Palestinians into becoming collaborators, which creates a very dangerous and impossible situation for them. If LGBT people outside of Palestine actually want to help queer Palestinians, they can best do so by supporting LGBT Palestinian organizations including al-Qaws, Aswat (the Palestinian lesbian and bisexual women’s and trans organization based in Haifa) and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (PQBDS).

4) Comparing Israel’s record on LGBT rights to Palestinian society helps queer Palestinians. When everyone from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to A Wider Bridge harps on Israel’s supposedly sterling record on LGBT issues actually makes things worse for queer Palestinians by pitting LGBT rights against Palestinian rights. What actually helps Palestinians is LGBT support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which is the best way queer people can show support for queer Palestinians, along with direct support for their organizations.

5) Israel’s record on LGBT rights justifies the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Many non-Muslim, non-Arab countries in the world have terrible records on LGBT rights, including Russia, Hungary, Nigeria, Jamaica; no one suggests that they deserve to be subjected to foreign military occupation. Would anyone support or even propose a German invasion and occupation of Russia simply because Germany has a much better record on LGBT rights than Russia? No amount of progress of LGBT rights in Israel can possibly justify the illegal and increasingly brutal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem or the incremental genocide being pursued against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip all of which the United States subsidizes with more than $3 billion in US aid to the Israeli government a year. LGBT organizations based in Israel, Europe and especially the United States play a crucial role in advancing the discourse of pinkwashing, often directly coordinating with the Israeli government and sometimes funded directly by the Israeli government.

The post Israeli occupation, Palestine & the LGBT community: pinkwashing 101 appeared first on Pauline Park.

Israel & the LGBT Community Center ban on Palestine organizing 2011-13
by Pauline Park

Americans tend to think of Israel/Palestine as a foreign policy issue, an intractable conflict removed from us by 7,000 miles or more; and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community generally do not regard the ongoing illegal Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem as being an LGBT issue at all, let alone one of direct relevance to the LGBT rights work that US-based activists do in the United States. But the conflict over Palestine solidarity organizing at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center of New York City from February 2011 to February 2013 vividly demonstrated how the Israeli occupation of Palestine is in fact an LGBT issue and one of direct relevance in the largest city in the country as well as throughout the US. In fact, the story of how the Center became drawn into the  conflict, despite the desire of its board and staff to avoid such entanglement — or perhaps because of it — is a cautionary tale for LGBT community centers and LGBT organizations and queer politics more generally — both in New York and beyond.

So how did this ‘controversy’ begin? It began with that most controversial of characters in the ensuing drama, Michael Lucas, a right-wing pornography mogul. Lucas was furious to discover that the Center had rented a room to the Siege Busters Working Group, which is calling for an end to the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.  The group had contracted with the Center to rent space for ‘a party to end Israeli apartheid,’ a term that raised the hackles of the porn king. Lucas then threatened the Center with a boycott of donors if it did not cancel the Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) fundraiser scheduled for March 5. That set of facts is the full extent of what all parties agree to; from that point onwards, there is no agreement even on the facts of the matter, let alone the interpretation of them.

“Lucas Entertainment founder and president Michael Lucas was born in Moscow, Russia, on March 10, 1972,” the website of Lucas Entertainment states. “He was raised in Moscow and attended college there, graduating with a degree in law. In 1995, Michael Lucas moved to Germany, then to France, where he began modeling and appearing on several European television programs and covers of many European magazines. In 1998, Lucas opened his own production company, Lucas Entertainment, in New York City,” the site adds. The biography on LucasEntertainment.com also notes that he was naturalized as a United States citizen in 2004 and even goes on to describe him as 6 feet tall and weighing 180 pounds.

Does the devil make him do it…?

“Michael Lucas is the most mainstreamed, provocative, and controversial figure in gay adult entertainment,” declares the right-wing porn king on his blog site. “With his unparalleled character, activism, and distinction, Michael Lucas is at the forefront of his industry and beyond,” he modestly asserts. Among the adjectives that Lucas describes himself, ‘provocative’ and ‘controversial’ are the only two that his critics as well as his supporters are likely to agree with.

‘The Zionist porn star impresario,’ as the Huffington Post described him, “intimidated New York’s LGBT Center into canceling its hosting of another group’s Israeli Apartheid Week event scheduled for next month,” declared HuffPo on February 27. “And it took him only a few hours of emails and phone calls, plus a little more than $1,000, to do so,” added the popular website, linking to the full-length news story in the Village Voice.

The self-described ‘top’ with a (self-reported) penis size of ten inches (a claim for which I could find no independent verification) plunged into the world of public policy and queer politics with a letter to the Center that threatened a boycott of major donors if the Center did not expel the Siege Busters Working Group; sadly, the Center capitulated to the blackmail, and in doing so, betrayed its mission to be an open and safe space for all members of the LGBT community.

It is precisely because of the sensitivity of  the issue that I feel compelled to make clear that this analysis and any opinions expressed here are solely mine, speaking in an individual capacity, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organizations with which I am or have been associated. That all being said, of course, in speaking and writing about this issue, I draw on over 17 years of experience in activism and advocacy work across a wide variety of organizations, including the one I currently chair, the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); I also draw on my experience as executive director of Queens Pride House (2012-15) and president of the board of directors (2010-16); and my views are also informed by my experience with the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) (as a member of the board of directors from 2008-12), the Out People of Color Political Action Club (OutPOCPAC) (which I served as co-president), the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY) (which I served as a member of the steering committee), Iban/Queer Koreans of New York (which I served as coordinator from 1997-99), Q-Wave (the organization for LBT API women, of which I am currently a member, though not in a leadership position), the National Queer Asian/Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) (of which I am a founding member but which I have not served in any leadership capacity), Gay Asians & Pacific Islanders of Chicago (GAPIC) (of which I was the founding chair), and the Guillermo Vasquez Independent Democratic Club of Queens (GVIDCQ) (which I served as vice-president).

While GAPIC, GVIDCQ, OutPOCPAC and Iban/QKNY are now sadly defunct, all of the other organizations are active and all but NQAPIA are based in New York City. I mention this long list of organizations simply because one point that the Center insisted on is that the process which led to the decision in question involved ‘wide consultation’ with many different organizations and constituencies; and yet, none of the above mentioned organizations was consulted in any way before, during, or after the decision that was made; of that I have certain knowledge.

In any case, the Center’s executive director, Glennda Testone, rebuffed attempts by Siege Busters members to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement before the controversy widened. As Brad Taylor told Steven Thrasher of the Village Voice, Testone was evasive and controlling in responding to questions from Siege Busters members in a meeting following the Center’s cancellation of their March 5 fundraiser, telling them “that our event had generated too much controversy from both sides, and it wasn’t ‘queer enough'” (“‘Party to End Israeli Apartheid!’ Still On at Gay Center, Activists Vow, But With Picketing, Not Dancing,” Steven Thrasher, Village Voice, 4 March 2011).

Ironically enough, in cancelling the March 5 event, Testone and the Center leadership brought far more attention to the Siege Busters and their cause than simply allowing the event to go forward (as the Center was contractually obligated to) ever would have. And the outrage over the Center’s decision to embrace censorship as well as to implicitly endorse the illegal Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories was hardly limited to a small number of queer activists in New York: over 1,600 individuals signed the petition on iPetitions.com, which declared:

We, the undersigned, are LGBT people and allies who condemn the stifling of free speech at New York’s LGBT Center due to pressure from wealthy supporters of Israel’s anti-Palestinian policies. A slanderous press release followed by a threatening call-in campaign led to the cancellation of an Israeli Apartheid Week event scheduled for March 5, 2011, and the right of peaceful pro-Palestine activists in the Siegebusters group to meet at the Center. New York’s LGBT Community Center has a 28-year history of accommodating the needs of oppressed and marginalized groups and allowing controversial opinions to be aired. It is a sanctuary for those seeking a democratic organizing space.

The recent press release by Michael Lucas, a wealthy gay porn entrepreneur, threatened a boycott and defunding campaign if the Center didn’t cancel the event, which it tragically agreed to do. If activists allow this decision to stand, the Center will go from being a liberated space of democracy and free speech to yet another occupied, homogenized venue where wealthy and powerful voices can squelch all the rest. Lucas’s accusation that the March 5 event and groups organizing to build it are ‘anti-Semitic’ is not simply an odious lie, it is an attempt to manipulate hatred of anti-Semitism to draw attention away from the ongoing Israeli crimes of dispossession, systematic racism, collective punishment and wholesale warfare on a population guilty of nothing other than their own existence. An international campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel has global support, including diverse voices from queer theory icon Judith Butler and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Auschwitz survivor and International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network spokesman Hajo Mayer. The LGBT Center must return to its mission as a space for the oppressed and marginalized and reverse its decision on the March 5 event and reinstate the right of Siegebusters activists to meet there. Please email or call the Executive Director of the Center, Glennda Testone at glennda@gaycenter.org or 212-620-7310.

In solidarity and struggle,
Siegebusters Working Group,
Existence is Resistance,
Sherry Wolf, author, Sexuality and Socialism; International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
Cleve Jones, AIDS and LGBT rights activist
Judith Butler, author, Gender Trouble; Professor, University of California-Berkeley
Sarah Schulman, Writer. Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, City University of New York.

The petition was entitled, “Save New York’s LGBT Center! Don’t Let Wealthy Bigots Shut Down Free Speech,” and I signed the petition, posting this comment:

I have been attending events & meetings at the Center ever since I moved to New York City in 1995 and have always supported the organization, but I find I cannot continue to support the Center in good conscience after it has engaged in censorship and — by banning Siege Busters and canceling the March 5 event — implicitly endorsed the illegal Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Center must acknowledge the violation of its own process as well as the betrayal of the LGBT community that this decision constitutes, and it must reverse the decision itself; and the Center’s leadership must show that it is the LGBT community as a whole and not merely a few privileged gay white millionaires who determine policy at the Center.

Mine was the 1,646th signature. Many of the signatories left thoughtful comments, such as Eric Mills, who posted his on March 13:

If Pride Toronto could (after some struggle) uphold its dignity and independence by welcoming Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) to its parade last year, surely New York’s LGBT Center could at least host a meeting to oppose racist oppression in Palestine. What happened to the Stonewall spirit?

William Lee, signing the petition on February 23, wrote,

It is outrageous that the Center should buckle under to pressure like this, particularly in this case where the denial of rights to a people living under a harsh military occupation for more than 40 years was to have been highlighted. Shame on the Center for caving in to spurious charges and big-money pressure.

Signing the petition on April 2, Ray Sutton put it even more succinctly:

I strongly disagree with your caving in to monied Islamophobes.

Bob Lederer, self-described ‘queer producer, WBAI Radio’ and ‘former ACT UP organizer,’ wrote on March 23,

Thank you for standing up against censorship and affirming the right to keep the LGBT Center as a space for the entire community.

A prominent activist, Lederer was by no means the only Jewish member of the community to sign the petition. On February 23, Otto Coca wrote,

As a Jew and an American, I know the sensitivity of this issue, but the priority is freedom and the right to free speech. Allowing an unpopular group to meet is a decision of tolerance and acceptance of diverging views: capitulating to the will of a wealthy group intent on stifling discussion is COWARDICE. THE LGBT community fought too hard to be co-opted by Porn Star activists hiding behind two flags. Michael Lucas is NOT a voice of the LGBT community.

On February 23, Gary Lapon wrote,

Support for the Palestinian people is NOT the same as anti-Semitism. Not only are Lucas’s claims a smear against a legitimate liberation struggle, they are particularly offensive to Jews such as myself who object to false claims of discrimination against us being used to justify the oppression of others. Rarely have I felt more comfortable than among my brothers and sisters in the Palestinian solidarity movement.

On February 23, Ellen Davidson wrote,

As a Jew, I am offended by the equation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. This serves to stifle dissent and shut down any reasoned discussion of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

Writing on February 23, Hannah Mermelstein addressed her comments directly to the Center management:

You claim that the Center should be a safe space for LGBTQ people. It is no longer a safe space for me, based on my political views, and it is no longer a safe space for my queer Arab and Muslim friends, due to their ethnic and religious identities. Please reconsider your decision.

Not only did many Jewish Americans sign the petition, but even Israelis signed on, Daphne Tier writing on February 23,

I am an Israeli anti-Zionist, anti-Zionism is NOT antisemitism ! When you expel hundreds of thousands of people, massacre them, put the rest in camps, steal their lands, and deny their history, you are doing something wrong. When you blockade access to roads, demolish homes, destroy water wells, build walls down the middle of orchards and villages and kill hundreds of unarmed civilians every year, you are doing something wrong. Regardless of your religion. People have the right to oppose U.S imperialism, and Israel is a colony propped up by U.S imperialist interests!

Former members of the Center staff also weighed in on the controversy. On February 23, Sabelo Narasimhan signed the petition, writing,

As a former employee and always a visitor at the center — I plead for you to keep it a space for ALL KINDS of oppressed and marginalized people locally and globally.

Organizations of color also sent letters to the Center. The Audre Lorde Project, FIERCE, Queers for Economic Justice and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project issued a joint statement on March 4:

Open Letter to the NYC LGBT Community Center from The Audre Lorde Project, FIERCE, Queers for Economic Justice and Sylvia Rivera Law Project:

The Audre Lorde Project (ALP), FIERCE, Queers for Economic Justice, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project write to express our extreme disappointment and concern with the NYC LGBT Center’s decision to cancel the Israeli Apartheid Week’s event and to disallow Siege Busters from continuing to meet at the Center. Our four organizations recently hosted an event as part of the Palestinian Queer Activist Tour on February 18th. Co-sponsored by the South Asian Lesbian Gay Association (SALGA), Q-Wave, and the Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY), the event featured alQwas for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society and ASWAT Palestinian Gay Women. Reflective of the history of ALP’s dialogue with Palestinian queer activists over the last decade, the panel drew over a hundred LGBTQ folks of color and allies and resulted in a rich, fruitful discussion about the intersections of sexuality, culture, race, class, nationalism, and colonial occupation. This event made clear to us that our constituencies are eagerly interested in and in need of community spaces where they can be educated about the relevant issues and debates regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and where community members can openly discuss the ways in which these issues have impacted them on a personal level. We are aware that you have received many statements and letters detailing the many ways that the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is a LGBTSTGNCQ issue. As organizations also working in service of NYC’s LGBTSTGNCQ community and movements, we believe that the LGBT Center should be a space where all experiences of oppression and struggles for liberation are valued. Since its establishment, the Center has been a space that our communities and movements have sought to access for support against isolation, safety from homophobia and transphobia, and access to resources that we need to survive. By canceling the IAW event, you risk alienating many members who frequent your Center by sending a strong message to our communities and allies that the issues with which we struggle such as racial justice, anti-imperialism, immigration, economic justice, disability justice and militarization are not genuinely welcome to be discussed at the NYC LGBT Community Center. We hope you will reconsider your decision in light of the polarization that it creates amongst our diverse community. We invite you to be in conversation with our organizations as you think through this issue. Furthermore, we hope you will engage your funders who oppose the IAW event with courage and accountability in support of the concerns voiced by the very individuals and communities who use the Center.

SALGA, Q-Wave and GAPIMNY — the three queer API organizations in New York City — also sent an ‘open letter’ to the Center:

We, the undersigned Queer Asian Pacific Islander groups, are very concerned with the LGBT Community Center’s decision on canceling the scheduled March 5th “Party to End Apartheid” event. The Center has a long history in providing a space, for many LGBTQ and other vulnerable groups, to hold dialogue and give voices to explore conflicts, issues and resolutions. The Siegebusters Working Group, while not identified a LGBTQ group, it is a minority voice seeking to address oppression and deserves a safe space. In cancelling this event and disallowing Siegebusters Working Group from meeting at the Center, the center comes across as supporting censorship. The LGBTQ movement has always had many voices, and suppressing these voices does not serve to make the center a “safe haven for LGBT groups and individuals.” Social justice and open dialogue has always been a central part of LGBTQ organizing. Many of us in the QAPI Community believe that queer rights are human rights, and therefor human rights issues in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict are inexorably linked to our struggle for queer rights. We are pleased to know that there will be an open forum to help clarify and possibly amend this decision, and we believe that the outcome will be supported with full consideration of justice. LGBTQ minorities have always found a safe space at the center, and we hope that this space continues to exist for us. Thank you very much.

The Center’s response to the furor was to host a community forum on March 13, which was billed as ‘a chance to talk, listen and be heard.’ “Recent events have led us to build on our process for providing space at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center,” declared the Center’s leadership on the Center’s website. “As we do, we invite members of the LGBT community to join us for an open forum to share their perspectives and provide us with feedback,” the announcement on gaycenter.org added.

The air was tense when I arrived at the Center on March 13, and the big hall on the third floor was packed, with every chair taken and even standing room filling up. Oddly enough, for a room that can hold 250-300 people and that was filled to capacity, Gay City News reporter Duncan Osborne reported a crowd of only 100 people.

Of 23 members of the Center’s board of directors, only two actually attended the forum — Mario Palumbo, Jr., the board president, and Tom Kirdahy, the at-large member of the board’s executive committee. Of the few senior staff, only the Center’s executive director Glennda Testone spoke for the Center. (Robert Woodworth, the long-serving director of meeting & conference services & capital projects, was present for the entire meeting and did respond to one informational question from Testone.) Neither of the two board co-chairs (H. Gwen Marcus and Paul Gruber) were in attendance. Nor did I see Richard Winger — the immediate past board president and (reportedly) the partner of Michael Lucas — at the forum.

The fact that only two members of a 19-member board of directors were present for a meeting of such signal importance was taken by many in the audience as an indication of a lack of interest on the part of the board in the event and as yet one more indication that the Center was not serious about dialogue with Siegebusters or with other critics of the Center’s decision to cancel that group’s IAW event.

Of the board members, I know only three: Tom Kirdahy, Ana Oliveira, Stephanie Battaglino; I have also known Glendda Testone for many years — back from when she was on staff at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) — and I like all four of them and respect the work they have done for the community over the years. By way of full disclosure, I should mention that Stephanie Battaglino has just joined the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF), one whose board I serve as vice-president (I was in fact the first and original member of that board). Of these four individuals, my only conversation about the current controversy was a very brief one with Stephanie following a TLDEF board meeting as we descended in an elevator at the end of that meeting; other than that minute-long conversation on the day that the story broke in Gay City News, I had no interaction with the board or staff of the Center about this controversy before the March 13 forum.

That forum drew many prominent activists, including Jon Winkleman, Melissa Sklarz, Bill Dobbs, Andy Humm, Urvashi Vaid, Sarah Schulman, Lisa Duggan, Jasbir Puar, Terry Boggis, and Geleni Fontaine, as well as the union leader Stuart Applebaum and Michael Lucas himself. One transman, Tom Léger, did live blogging at the March 13 forum, in order to provide a detailed account of it to those who could not attend. Glennda Testone asked Ann Northrop to facilitate the discussion, and she moderated the frequently heated debate as well and as even handedly as one possibly could in the difficult circumstances.

On a table at the door, I found a pink sheet signed by Bill Dobbs, Brad Taylor, Emmaia Gelman, Naomi Brussel, Sammer Aboelela, Sarena Melcher that was addressed ‘to participants at the LGBT Community Center public forum – March 13, 2011’:

Greetings to All,
We don’t know how this meeting will go. We are (separately) members of Siegebusters, members of groups who wrote to the Center to object to the treatment of Siegebusters and queer political activists in general, organizers of the last week’s protest against the Center’s censorship, Palestinian and Jewish queers, and active participants in queer community. The Center hasn’t included any of us as “stakeholders” in planning this meeting. However, we’d like to offset some of the chaos by offering a few starting ideas. Some bottom-line issues:

1. The Center dealt badly with Siegebusters. An apology is due, and the Center should immediately restore Siegebusters’ access to meeting space until it can provide a transparent process for deciding otherwise. The reasons given by Center staff for cancelling the March 5 event and Siegebusters ongoing meetings in scattered e-mails and announcements (that Siegebusters is somehow not queer enough, or that queer activism on Palestine makes queer space “unsafe”) have been broadly refuted in public comment from many corners of the queer community.

2. This controversy reveals a much bigger problem at the Center – lack of transparent decision-making. Center Executive Director Glennda Testone and the Center’s Board of Directors have made major decisions about our space and community with no real community engagement.

No one from Siegebusters was consulted before the cancellation. No organizers of the ensuing protest against the Center were contacted before the Center decided to hire private goons to police our community center against us. No public response has been made to the queers – particularly queers of color and Palestinian queers – who told the Center that this decision has marginalized them and made them unsafe. The forum today has been organized without input from affected groups. The Center must have a transparent process for making (and that allows for challenges of) decisions about who can use the Center. The Center also must open its board meetings to the public and take public comment. The board should be accountable, and it isn’t. Its operations aren’t public, its members don’t represent our communities, and it doesn’t provide the Center’s constituency with any lines of communication – although it’s clearly making decisions about us. What this meeting shouldn’t be about:

The Center shouldn’t be blessing or disapproving queer political work, nor should this meeting. The Center shouldn’t be making political calls about the Middle East, nor should this meeting. It’s not a ‘neutral position’ to shut down queer organizing or anti-occupation work because it’s “too controversial.” But having gotten itself into this mess, the Center now has the responsibility to transparently and neutrally bring folks back to the table. This meeting doesn’t satisfy that responsibility. Here’s hoping for a productive discussion.

In Steven Thrasher’s March 15 news report for the Village Voice, he called the controversy ‘the Gay Battle of Zion‘ and  he wrote that

“At the heart of the debate was the right to free speech for anyone renting space in the Center versus the right of donors to have their say about who gets to use the space. That argument is far from settled…”

Thrasher paraphrased the comments I made at the forum, writing, “As transgender activist Pauline Park pointed out, the Center’s decision to cancel Siege Busters’ event was already a way of choosing sides.”

In a response to the March 13 forum, Lisa Duggan wrote a letter to Glennda Testone on March 16:

Here is a link to VV coverage of the Center foum, if you haven’t seen it yet: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/03/more_sniping_in.php#more I was very disturbed by a number of things said by the (only 2!) Center board members present at the forum.  Mario made it quite clear, repeatedly, that there is a ban on the word ‘apartheid’ applied to Israel at the Center – he called it quite simply ‘offensive.’  When questioned, he was clear that even an ‘LGBT focused’ group would not be permitted to use that term for events, etc.  Though he said this was ‘just’ his opinion, he also made it clear that it was the basis for his vote on this matter.  This is an effective ban based on point of view.  Tom voiced the belief that organizing critical of the state of Israel creates an ‘unsafe’ environment for vulnerable people at the Center.  But the feeling of ‘safety ‘s also based on point of view.  The feelings of ‘safety’ of queers of color, and not only anti-Zionist queer groups, are not included as important in assessing the overall sense of ‘safety’ in this context (I use scare quotes here because I don’t think ‘safety’ is an appropriate goal with regard to political disputes).  The result is the exodus of queer of color groups from the Center, as was noted by 2 speakers from ALP.  And, as Bill Dobbs noted, using ‘controversy’ as a rationale for excluding groups and events echoes the rationale used by the National Portrait Gallery for censoring the David Wojnarowicz video on exhibit there.

The range of rationales provided by you and Center board members at the meeting were largely contradictory and clearly ad hoc.  I think the underlying forces at work have been shaped by the recent successes of the Palestinian BDS movement on campuses and in the LGBT communities across the U.S.  There has been a backlash mobilization, featuring efforts to frame critiques of Israeli policy as anti-Semitic, and responsible for creating a ‘hostile environment’ for Jewish students/Center users, etc.  Since the Israeli government has quite deliberately created a ‘branding’ campaign designed to whitewash apartheid policies by focusing on progressive policies with regard to LGBT populations, it is no surprise that this contest is being played out within the LGBT community.  The recent highly successful US tour of Palestinian queer activists, with two events in NYC (standing room only at both), has (I believe) specifically motivated the timing for this ruckus at the NYC gay community center. Here is an article on how this is playing out on college campuses: http://chronicle.com/article/Education-Dept-Investigates/126742/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

It doesn’t seem to me that Center staff and board are aware of the wider context for this conflict.  Both the wider conflict over Middle Eastern politics that has been focused on LGBT populations, or the widening split among LGBT groups over the definition of what is a ‘gay’ issue.  You and your board repeatedly stated that the Siege Busters are not an LGBT focused group, as if that were just a fact.  But the reframing of queer politics as properly and centrally concerned with the forces that oppress and constrain queer people all over the world–lack of health care, the violence of occupations–has been going on for nearly a decade now.  There is no agreement about what is properly a ‘gay’ issue, and it is primarily prosperous white gay men who see ‘gay specific/only’ as the right frame.  Many activists, especially lesbians, queers of color, and social justice activists generally, now use an intersectional frame for their queer activism, and do not isolate sexual identity in the way that seems ‘natural’ to many monied white gay men.  So the Center is taking a political position on this question, without seeming to understand that this position is precisely the point that has been debated for years, and that now frames an increasingly wide gulf within LGBT communities, splitting Pride events worldwide in the past couple of years (google Pride Toronto or Pride Berlin Civil Courage Award 2010, or Pride East London 2011). It’s quite true as you eventually acknowledged that the decision the Center made reflected a very flawed process.  And the process from here on out will be an anti-democratic, corporate style decision–with the board of trustees making final decisions that are neither transparent nor accountable.  And as you no doubt know, boards of directors are all about funding.

There is no structural mechanism to give community ‘feedback,’ as you call it, any teeth.  The board will do what it wants, when it wants, for whatever reasons it wants.  There are two steps that might be taken immediately to democratize the Center:  Establish clear guidelines (not the current power to ban any group at any time for any reason) with an appeals/complaint process included, and open the board meetings to the public, or at least to Center members.  A clear timetable for this series of decisions also seems necessary as a sign of minimal responsiveness to community ‘feedback.’ You might have noted the wide gap at the forum between the activists/orgs that opposed your decision–mostly (but not only) lesbian leaders, and queer of color organizations, and the mostly (certainly not entirely) white gay men who support the decision.  I think the split is over class and race, as well as right/left perspectives, and not primarily about gender.  Nonetheless it was striking.  That room was full of the heaviest hitters in NYC lesbian and social justice activism:  Urvashi Vaid, Leslie Cagan, Sarah Schulman, Alisa Solomon, Jasbir Puar, and many more….  All on the same “side” of this debate.  And then so many more who called or wrote:  Sue Hyde, Kate Clinton, Judith Butler.   I’m not sure you realize the weight of this consensus among so many lesbian leaders? (If you don’t know who these folks are, you should google them.)  Plus Andy Humm, Bill Dobbs, Brad Taylor, transgender activist Pauline Park and others present, of course, as well.  And I’m not meaning to invoke celebrity here, but rather the decades of experience in LGBT organizing in New York City.  So much collected in that room at the forum it was kind of mind boggling.  In that context, the relative ignorance of the Center representatives and their supporters (as well as the absence of most board members, and the presence of that clown Michael Lucas) was quite stark. I’m sorry you all seemed to be digging in around your decision, even if willing to consider some process and guidelines changes.  As the weeks roll by, the LGBT Community Center is going to become whiter, richer, more male and more politically conservative–as the progressives and queers of color leave for more welcoming pastures at the ALP, QEJ building and elsewhere.  You might consider renaming it the LGBT Clubhouse, to reflect the private governance and restricted viewpoints permitted there.

Lisa DugganProfessor, American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

On March 21, Bill Dobbs e-mailed Glennda Testone, Tom Kirdahy, and Mario Palumbo a message from 11 activists (including Dobbs himself) who were present at the event — the others being Naomi Brussel, Brad Taylor, Leslie Cagan, Pauline Park, Emmaia Gelman, Lisa Duggan, Steve Ault, Jasbir Puar, Andy Humm, and Ann Northrop:

Dear Glennda, Mario and Tom,

We’re writing to stay in touch about the issues raised in the community forum and to get an update. There were several issues on the table when we ended the forum–particularly the questions of whether the Center would invite Siegebusters to resume meeting there, and whether the Center Board of Directors would open its own meetings to the community. We are members of an ad hoc group meeting tonight to talk about all this and we would appreciate knowing whether the Center has made any decisions about any of the above. Thank you,

Bill Dobbs
Ann Northrop
Naomi Brussel
Brad Taylor
Leslie Cagan
Pauline Park
Emmaia Gelman
Lisa Duggan
Steve Ault
Jasbir Puar
Andy Humm

Later on March 21, Glennda Testone responded,

Hi Bill and everyone,

Thank you for checking in with us.  We are continuing to carefully review the community feedback from the forum and the input coming in through the online suggestion box.  This issue is a priority for us and we will keep you apprised.  One of the things we heard loud and clear at the forum was that people wanted more avenues to communicate input and concerns to the Center, so in addition to the initial community forum and the online suggestion box, we have decided to offer other community forums as well.  We also plan to share the details of our process for analyzing and revising our room rental policies in a public memo as soon as possible. Thanks again, Glennda

Meanwhile, between the March 13 and March 24, when a monthly meeting of the Gay & Lesbian Yeshiva Day School Alumni Association (GLYDSDA) was scheduled, a controversy arose over the group’s invitation to Michael Lucas to speak at that March 24 event, which was advertised to members thusly:

Monthly GLYDSA meeting with special guest Michael Lucas [boldface GLYDSA’s]. We will be discussing the recent events of the past few weeks that have pitted anti-Israel organizers against the Center, as well as other topics of interest to our community, followed by socializing. Michael Lucas is a well-known columnist, activist, film maker and strong supporter of gay rights and Israel. Please join us, on time, at the Center 208 W.13 St, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. As a follow up to the open community meeting that was poorly attended by the pro-Israel side, The Center is receiving a lot of pressure to re-allow Siegebusters and other anti-Israel groups to rejoin the center.  The Center wants to do the right thing but needs our support. Please take a moment to go to the below link and send in your thoughts — this comment box was created just for thoughts about space rental…

After Bill Dobbs alerted Sarah Schulman and other activists about the GLYDSA event and the promotional message sent to members highlighting Lucas, Schulman then wrote to Glennda Testone on March 15,

Dear Glennda,

Clearly the elements of the pro-Seige of Gaza gay community who favor censorship, and we who favor open debate both have the same perception of your actions – namely that the Center is now officially partisan on the question of The Occupation. What are you going to do about this?

Testone responded later that day by e-mail,

Hi Sarah,

We did not know about this and are looking into it as we process everything that was shared and conveyed at the community forum. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Scott Long, a visiting fellow in the human rights program at Harvard Law School and one-time LGBT research director at Human Rights Watch, e-mailed NYU’s Gender & Sexuality Studies list this response:

Earlier this month, as most of us know, the New York LGBT Community Center decided to draw a line around what it considered its community by banning a an event for “Israeli Apartheid Week” from its premises.  In doing so, it acceded to the demands of Michael Lucas, an adult entertainment star whose loathing for Muslims is notorious. And it acceded as well to Lucas’s contention that criticism of Israeli policy is prima facie anti-Semitism. At a community meeting last weekend–which I couldn’t attend because I’m working in the Balkans this week–one board member of the Center reportedly stated that the word “apartheid” would be banned at the Center if applied to Israel; he called it ‘offensive.’ (Presumably Jimmy Carter will not be speaking at the Center anytime soon.)  Another board member reportedly said that organizing critical of the state of Israel creates an “unsafe” environment.  (I owe this information to Lisa Duggan.)  According to a New York newspaper (sometimes, I have to note, inaccurate in its coverage of the gay community) the Center’s Director, Glennda Testone told the meeting that the Center could not afford to host ‘an incredibly controversial and contentious event.’ I am therefore especially shocked to find that the Center is hosting Michael Lucas himself to speak on March 24 from 8:00 – 10:00 PM… One can only conclude the Center doesn’t find *him* controversial. There’s no secret about Lucas’ racism.  Last year, he informed a waiting world that “I hate Muslims, absolutely. It’s a horrible, horrible religion. It’s a plague … they’re stuck in a horrible lie, brainwashed from birth to death. And now they have been stuck in time since the 7th century. They have not contributed to civilization in any way, in any field — political thought, science, music, architecture, nothing for century after century. What do they produce? Carpets. That’s how they should travel because that’s the only way they travel without killing people.” (http://www.queerty.com/michael-lucas-muslims-have-not-contributed-to-civilization-in-any-way-for-centuries-20100714/#ixzz1GxTNbfWz) I don’t support banning Lucas. Let him talk; let the rest of us, who believe in the Center’s professed values of acceptance and inclusion, respond–preferably loudly.  But the inconsistency in the Center’s policy, and its increasingly explicit decision to align itself with Lucas’s overt racism, is not just an assault on tolerance–it’s intolerable. Insult has been piled on injury. I don’t know whether protests against Lucas and the Center’s cowardice are planned that night–I’m still in Serbia–but if so, please let me know. If not, we need one.

On March 24, the date on which the GLYDSA meeting was scheduled, Steven Thrasher reported that “at the last minute, the Orthodox Jewish gays decided to call off their own meeting at the center and hold it at another location.” (”Gay Center’s Feud Over Middle Eastern Politics Flares Up Again,” Village Voice, 24 March 2011). “The group decided not to do it at the Center. The reason is simple. The Gay Center told the Jewish group that they had received threats and at the same time cannot guarantee the safety of the members of GLYDSA who attend. So the group decided to meet at a different location and I am still speaking,” said Lucas, ‘the gay-porn impresario and ardent Zionist’ (as Thrasher described him). But GLYDSA flatly contradicted Lucas’s assertion. “We are a small private group with no interest in publicity,” a group spokesman told the Voice. “We received no threats, nor did the Center ask us to ‘un-invite’ Michael Lucas.”

But Lucas charged Testone with lying about the GLYDSA event. “From this email it is very clear that the Center is lying when saying that they did not interfere by pressing GLYDSA to disinvite me,” Lucas e-mailed Gay City News (“Michael Lucas Says LGBT Center Pressed Jewish Group to Move Meeting,” Gay City News, 31 March 2011). “Yes, we were pressured to cancel Mr. Lucas,” a GLYDSA spokesperson was quoted by GCN reporter Duncan Osborne as saying.

Once again, the credibility of the claim made by the Center’s executive director that the Center had nothing to do with GLYDSA’s withdrawal of its invitation to Lucas to speak and its decision to move its monthly meeting out of the Center — just like Testone’s assertion that the Center’s decision to cancel the Siege Busters’ March 5 fundraiser — was undermined by key actors in the drama, leaving no one satisfied. Having alienated not only Siege Busters but fair-minded members of the LGBT community as well, the Center’s leadership then ham-handedly managed to alienate Michael Lucas, the figure who was instrumental in pressuring the Center to cancel the Siege Busters event that was the original flashpoint in the controversy. By this point, even those sympathetic to the Center were beginning to question Testone’s competence as well as her honesty.

The fact that Testone had come to the Center from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) — supposedly the most media savvy of all the national LGBT organizations — made her apparent inability to handle media relations seem all the more ironic.  Having done corporate public relations in my first career, I was intimately familiar with the requirements of crisis management and damage control in such situations, and in that context, I was struck by the astonishing incompetence of the Center’s executive director and its board of directors. Even setting aside the merits of the Siege Busters event as well as the underlying issue of the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories, the Center’s handling of the controversy purely in terms of its own institutional self-interest was bumbling at best, dishonest and disastrous at worst. “The decision [to cancel the Siege Busters March 5 event] was made in good faith and it as not made in response to any one individual,” Testone told Gay City News (“Michael Lucas Says LGBT Center Pressed Jewish Group to Move Meeting,” Gay City News, 31 March 2011). But neither Michael Lucas and those who supported that decision nor the Siege Busters and those who were critical of it believed the party line coming out of the Center’s executive suite. By insisting on pushing a story line that no one believed, Testone and the Center’s board undermined their own credibility as well as their ability to speak as leaders of the city’s large and diverse LGBT community.

Meanwhile, on March 21, the ad hoc group of activists critical of the Center’s decision to cancel the Siege Busters fundraiser, gathered at the Audre Lorde Project in Manhattan and decided to call themselves ‘Queers for an Open LGBT Center.’ (I did not attend, as I was chairing a meeting of the board of directors of Queens Pride House that evening.) The new group followed up with a second meeting at ALP on March 31.

The controversy spread from New York to Israel itself, as Gil Shefler of the Jerusalem Post reported on the upcoming March 13 forum on March 8 (”NY activists to debate scrubbed gay center event”). Ben Weinthal’s March 27 news story for the Post (”Gay opposition rises against Israel Apartheid Week”) characterized Michael Lucas as ‘the game changer’ in the center’s decision to cancel the Siege Busters event, writing that “Lucas’s efforts garnered a rare victory in a battle arena where anti-Israel forces have gained traction over the years.”

Weinthal went on to quote Phyllis Chesler, a professor emerita of psychology and women’s studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) — whom Weinthal characterized as ‘a leading expert on contemporary anti-Semitism’ — saying that “over the years, the gay liberation movement, world-wide, has become increasingly Stalinized and ‘Palestinianized” and that “to retain their place in the larger Left, feminist and gay movement, they have identified Palestinians as the most victimized of all, and to retain their own value as outcasts and victims, they, too, especially lesbian feminists and lesbian Jewish feminists, must toe this politically correct party line.”

Chesler had the opportunity to peddle her bizarre ‘analysis’ in a rabid opinion piece (”Out for Israel: A New Answer to the Hate Speech of Queers for Palestine“) in Right Side News (’The Right News for America’) on March 26, in which she wrote of Siege Busters that “the Center trembles when they demand something.” Well, the Center did not seem to tremble much when they cancelled the Siege Busters fundraising event and banned Siege Busters from the site. And characterizing Siege Busters members as ‘Palestinianized lesbians’ not only ignores the non-lesbian members of the group (including quite a few gay men), it also raises the question as to what precisely a ‘Palestinianized lesbian’ might be — a lesbian who actually recognizes the common humanity that she shares with Palestinian people, perhaps?

Chesler concludes that “the Gay and Lesbian Center of NYC [sic] has joined [the] ranks… [of the] angry hecklers, silencers of anything that is pro-Israel or anti-Islam, intimidators, shriekers, haters, Nazi brownshirts (who view themselves as ligerationists and progressives and view the ‘other side’ as Islamophobic demons…” In one regard, Chesler has much in common with the ‘Nazi brownshirts’ she references — she seems drawn to telling the Big Lie in order to disparage those with whom she disagrees. It was not, after all, Michael Lucas who was banned by the Center, but rather the Siege Busters. But neither Chesler nor Lucas — whom she describes as ‘a heroic gay Jewish man’ — have much interest in the facts of the matter or in anything that might be described as ‘the truth’ in any sense of the word.

The truth, rather, seems to be that the leading institution in the LGBT community of New York City caved into a threat of blackmail by a right-wing Islamophobic bigot because of the fear of losing a few wealthy donors, and the Center’s executive director and board of directors then engaged in damage control that was not based on any version of truth that any of the parties — whether Michael Lucas or the Siege Busters — would recognize. Rather, the Center’s leadership insisted that Michael Lucas — the one person almost universally acknowledged by supporters and critics alike as having been instrumental in bringing about the initial decision to ban the Siege Busters — had absolutely nothing to do with that decision. In insisting again and again on an explanation that beggars credulity, the Center’s leadership has diminished if not completely undermined its own credibility within the LGBT community.

It is important to recognize that the issues involved in the controversy that the Center provoked by instituting its moratorium went well beyond any tempest in a teacup involving an outrageously bigoted gay porn mogul; they touched on the most fundamental issues of process and accountability, community and justice:

1) Process. It seems to me that the Center’s own admission of a faulty process in coming to the decision to ban the Siege Busters and cancel their event falls far short of any genuine acknowledgement of the full extent of that failure. A decision of signal importance was made by a craven and incompetent cabal who did not even bother to consult with the full board of directors. Even so, not even all the members of the executive committee of the Center’s board bothered to attend the Center’s ‘community forum’ on March 13, suggesting that the issue of the Center’s relationship with the community it ostensibly serves was really of little interest to the executive committee, let alone the full board. The Center leadership has not provided a shred of evidence that it ever bothered even to consider the ethical obligations of running a community center.

2) Accountability and community. By its actions, the Center has made clear that it sees its primary — perhaps exclusive — responsibility as being to its wealthy donors, with little or no sense of being part of, let alone accountable to, a larger LGBT community. The ‘extensive process of consultation’ that Glennda Testone engaged in seems to have consisted in a hurried conversation with one Siege Busters member which Testone apparently used simply to issue an ultimatum and then inaccurately reported to the participants in the March 13 community forum. By caving into a threat of blackmail from a right-wing bigot, the Center made clear that for its management team, the ‘bottom line’ was indeed the bottom line.

3) Censorship and freedom of assembly. Among the most shocking aspects of the affair has been the Center’s endorsement of censorship — its willingness (eagerness, one is tempted to say) to silence discussion of an issue of signal importance to the LGBT community, locally, nationally, and globally. The insistence that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is patently absurd: there are LGBT/queer-identified people in both Israel proper and in the Palestinian territories; and more to the point, the illegal and immoral Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories has had and continues to have a significant and deleterious impact on the lives of LGBT/queer Palestinians.

4) The underlying issue. At the March 13 forum, the executive director made a point of insisting that the Center wanted to avoid taking a position on the underlying issue of Israel/Palestine. One could argue that a community center committed to a vision of justice had an obligation to support those — including the Siege Busters — who were working to make that vision a reality. But if the Center were serious and sincere in wishing to remain neutral on the Israeli occupation of Palestine itself, the decision should have been to issue a statement that the Center would allow the Siege Busters event to take place, but that the Center itself took no position on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and did not endorse the Siege Busters event, the group’s views, or their use of the term ‘apartheid.’ By canceling the March 5 event and banning the Siege Busters group, the Center did in fact endorse the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories, though the Center’s leadership was never honest enough to acknowledge that fact.

By the end of March, the ad hoc group of activists critical of the Center’s decision to ban the Siege Busters adopted the name ‘Queers for An Open LGBT Center,’ and on April 5, they e-mailed Mario Palumbo, Jr., the Center board’s president:

Dear Mario–

It’s good to hear from Glennda Testone that the Center Board and Administration are engaged in a serious process of examining the Center’s room rental policies and community access to Board meetings.

As part of that process, we would appreciate the opportunity to meet with the full Board to provide some information and discuss these important issues. It was good to see you and Tom Kirdahy in attendance at the March 13 Community Forum but there’s an ongoing need for a conversation between us, as longtime users and supporters of the Center, and the full Board. Please email Steve Ault (you may recognize his name as a founding board member)…  and Ann Northrop…  to arrange a mutually agreeable meeting time.

We would like to hear back from you by Monday afternoon, April 11. Please share this memo with board members whose email addresses we don’t have. Thank you.

Bill Dobbs
Lisa Duggan
Leslie Cagan
Steve Ault
Pauline Park
John Francis Mulligan
Shawn Jain
Emmaia Gelman
Andy Humm
Bob Lederer
Ann Northrop
Scott Long
On behalf of Queers for An Open LGBT Center

On April 11, Palumbo responded with a message to the signatories, writing,

Dear Bill,

Thank you for your email.  We appreciate your recognition of the extensive amount of time and energy Center staff and board have invested in this process, including continuing to meet with community groups and members on this issue each day since the forum.  We look forward to sharing our process and timeline for the review of our space-use guidelines once completed. As Executive Director, Glennda represents the organization in meeting with groups on the issue of our space guidelines.  Glennda and relevant staff members would be happy to meet with your group.  We would love to hear your input.  While the board has been kept apprised of Glennda’s and the staff’s activities and meetings, the board has not held meetings with individual groups. We are designing a process that will provide ample opportunity for community input into the revised policies, which the board will ultimately approve.  The board will not meet with individual groups outside this process.  Such a meeting could be seen as unfair by other stakeholders who may have different points of view and who will also want individual audiences with the board.

In addition to the avenues already in place for the community to provide feedback to the Center, we are exploring additional vehicles which will provide community members a regular opportunity to communicate concerns and meet with representatives of the Center in the future. We are taking this issue and process very seriously while at the same time maintaining our focus on serving the daily needs of the Center’s users.  We very much want to hear from you and all community members who care deeply about the Center and this issue. We look forward to doing so as part of this process and sooner, if you choose, in a meeting with Glennda and her staff. She is copied on this email. Please feel free to contact her to schedule a mutually convenient time. Thank you,

Mario

In the meanwhile, as president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House, I welcomed the Siege Busters to the only LGBT community center in the borough of Queens on May 7 for a screening of the moving documentary, “Arna’s Children,” about the work of Juliano Mer-Khamis, a social justice activist and actor murdered in March 2011. Following the screening, attendees engaged in a discussion of the issues raised in the film, including the ways in which the continued Israeli military occupation of the West Bank have produced the very conditions for armed struggle and resistance that the Israeli government and its supporters deplore.

The film screening at Queens Pride House was the very first time that an LGBT community center in New York City had hosted an event sponsored by the Siege Busters since their expulsion from the Center in Manhattan in early March. While the decision to invite the Siege Busters to Pride House prompted some discussion among members of QPH groups, no members left Pride House because of it and the organization lost no donors.

What the May 7 event demonstrated quite clearly was that an LGBT community center could host a Palestine-related event without incident, without safety or security issues, and without any fall-off of support for the organization. Above all, I and my Queens Pride House colleagues felt it was important to underscore the principle of inclusion and the need for every LGBT community center to be a safe space for discussion of issues of importance to the community — serving, as queer theorists would have it, as a ‘site of contestation’ for debate over precisely those issues that are most controversial within the community.

More than a month after the April 11 letter to the Center from Dobbs et al., there was still no word from Testone or anyone at the Center about any follow-up meeting and there was absolutely no indication that the Center had any intention of lifting the ban on the Siege Busters. Hence, the formation of Queers for an Open LGBT Center (QFOLC) as well as Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA).

QFOLC was the formalization of the ad hoc group that formed to protest the ban on the Siege Busters, and QAIA was a new group formed out of the memberships of both QFOLC and Siege Busters to mount an LGBT-specific challenge to Israeli apartheid. QFOLC members agreed that continuing media coverage of the Center/Siege Busters controversy was necessary to keep up the pressure on the  Center, but momentum seemed to be slowing after the initial flurry of activity, and the Center’s administration seemed determined to ‘stonewall’ QFOLC on the issue of opening up the Center and ensuring inclusion there. In mid-May, an opportunity afforded itself when Steven Thrasher, a blogger for the Village Voice, contacted me, requesting an interview in order to update Voice readers on the status of the controversy.

My initial impression was that Thrasher would be interviewing me in order to extract a few quotes for a blog post on the controversy, but Thrasher decided to post a blog post consisting almost entirely of the interview itself (edited down for length), prefaced by a brief introduction which cited the Center’s declaration that it would no longer talk about the controversy; the (unnamed) Center spokesperson told Thrasher that “At this time, we are not doing any further interviews on the topic.” I actually did not know about that statement when I did the interview, but my comments were not only unusually blunt but deemed newsworthy enough that the transcript of the interview itself became the blog post, entitled, “Pauline Park Q&A: LGBT Center ‘Gives the Community the Finger’ in ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ Dispute” (VillageVoice.com, 5.12.11).

Thrasher referred to me as ‘veteran transgender activist Pauline Park — responsible for addiing the ‘T’ to Manhattan’s LGBT Center,’ and quoted me as president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House as saying that

We [at Queens Pride House] believe that community centers, and LGBT community centers above all, should be places for those excluded by society… Controversy, far from being the reason for banning groups, should be viewed as an opportunity to engage the LGBT community around debate. Centers should be open to discussion and debate of the important issues of the day…

Perhaps most controversial were my criticisms of the Center’s action in banning the Siege Busters. Thrasher quoted me as labeling the Center’s rationale for the ban — the allegation that the Siege Busters March 5 event was ‘controversial’ as ‘baloney’:

They caved in and they capitulated to blackmail. As the president of Queens Pride House, I would never capitulate to blackmail…

The interview with Steven Thrasher was the only occasion on which anyone publicly pointed out the fact that Michael Lucas was the boyfriend or partner of Richard Winger, the immediate past president of the Center’s board but that neither Lucas himself nor the Center board openly acknowledged that relationship, despite the fact that it gave Lucas access to Center board members and major donors that ordinary Center users or ‘consumers’ simply would not have.

In an indication of the intensity of opinion on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the Village Voice blog post prompted 58 comments, including many attacking the Siege Busters and inaccurately labeling the group as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘anti-Israel’ as well as a collaborator in terrorist activities undertaken by Hamas. But Samer Abuela, a Palestinian member of Siege Busters, responded to those comments by writing,

It is wonderful to see so many comments on this piece, especially the desperately pro-Israel ones.  Anyone whose mind has yet to be made up will surely notice that just about all of the pro-Israel posts rely on islamophobia and/or anti-Arab racism to make their point while the pro-Palestinian posts make no comparable racist attacks on the Jewish population.  It’s hard to blame zionists for using these tactics as they have worked for decades, but change is in the air and everyone concerned with the occupation knows it. Anyone with a memory of this issue spanning more than a few years understands how much the ground has shifted and why stories such as this one are important.  Israel’s brutality has been on open display thanks, in part, to the proliferation of independent media.  The racist language that has for so long worked to sway Americans in support of the occupation, now only underlines the brutal inhumanity with which the state treats it’s Palestinian citizens, prisoners, and occupied populations.  The comments to this story are a remarkably typical soup of racial and religious hatred, character assassination, and false accusations.  What I find exciting is that this is what every racist regime and mindset looks like in it’s waning moments… a totem of bigotry teetering on it’s own rotting foundation.  Justice for Palestine is on the way… it’s in the air and even zionists know it.

Brad Taylor, another member of Siege Busters, wrote,

The Center has been represented by its “leader”ship in this embroglio as a non-transparent, anti-liberationist shell of its prior embodiment as a progressive community stronghold.  If this is “dynamic and effective”, the direction of the dynamism must be the complete undermining of the credibility of the Center.  The community leadership on display here equates taking a “neutral” position on Palestine/Israel with censoring the discussion and banning the queer/allied organization that brings it up.  Unless they bring it up from the right side.  Center leadership has shown either indefensible bias or complete non-familiarity with the issues at play.  And no respect for dialogue whatsoever.  I don’t think it benefits Glennda to compare her to the authentic and politically knowledgeable Pauline Park.

I joined Brad Taylor, along with John Francis Mulligan, Emmaia Gelman, Leslie Cagan, Marla Erlien, Naomi Brussel and several other activists in founding New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) in May in order to bring to the LGBT community in New York City the issue of Israeli apartheid. QAIA members began our work by submitting a request for space rental at the Center, which had justified its exclusion of Siege Busters in part because Siege Busters was not an LGBT-specific group, even though a majority of Siege Busters members were in fact openly LGBT-identified.

Ordinarily, such space rental requests are answered in two-t0-three days, and the only consideration in most cases is whether there is a room available on the date requested. In this case, however, the Center staff interrogated QAIA about the rental request in detail, posing questions that would have been asked of no other group submitting a space rental request, and the decision on that request ultimately went up to the executive director and the board of directors — not surprising, given the political sensitivity of the issue.

In the face of obfuscation on the part of the Center, QAIA and QFOLC members were gearing up for an action on May 26, the day that QAIA members had requested a room. Just the day before, on May 25, the Center released a public statement on its decision:

STATEMENT ON DECISION TO ALLOW SPACE USE BY OUTSIDE QUEER IDENTIFIED GROUP
MAY 25, 2011

The Center recently received a request for space rental by a group called “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” for the purposes of holding recurring meetings to plan for local Pride events. This afternoon we informed the group that the Center would allow access for these meetings.

The decision is consistent with our current guidelines. Under the guidelines we provide space to community groups for a fee on a case-by-case basis, asking that they abide by the Center’s Space Use Agreement, Payment Terms, Code of Conduct and Good Neighbor Policy. Earlier this year we denied space to a group with a similar profile because among other reasons, it was not LGBT focused. In addition, the Center has a longstanding practice of allowing non-LGBT groups to meet so long as it doesn’t distract us from our primary purpose of serving the LGBT community; the circumstances surrounding the group in question diverted us from our core mission and we therefore asked it to move an event and all future meetings.

LGBT New Yorkers are facing urgent issues including: youth homelessness, violence, bullying, substance abuse, health disparities and the other myriad of challenges our community members encounter each and every day. The Center is here to help address these issues 365 days a year. Six thousand people pass through our doors every week. We have a responsibility to meet the vast and diverse needs of this community, and our number one priority is delivering critical services to the people we directly serve.

The Center also provides space for a variety of LGBT voices in our community to engage in conversations on a range of topics. The Center does not have a position on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, nor does it endorse the viewpoints of this group or any others that use rooms here. This is a complex issue, and there is a tremendous diversity of viewpoints within the LGBT community.

We are currently undergoing a review of our space-use guidelines to ensure we have the most robust standards moving forward. As an interim step we are asking all new and existing groups to sign a Space Use Pledge of Non-Discrimination as part of their rental agreements. The group we approved today has signed this pledge.

Most recently we have also engaged the firm Ritchie Tye Consulting, Inc. to help facilitate a thorough review of the Center’s current standards and procedures for determining space use by outside groups, with the ultimate goal of strengthening our guidelines. Ritchie Tye Consulting, Inc. is a New York-based organizational development consulting firm with a long tenure of work with the LGBT and HIV/AIDS communities.

The firm has already been working closely with Center leadership on a process that includes opportunities for input from a diverse cross-section of Center and community stakeholders through interviews and small groups, and will deliver recommendations to the full Board of Directors later this year. At the conclusion of this process, we will apply the newly adopted guidelines to all existing, recurring and new space-for-fee requests.

The Center continues to welcome community input and feedback on this topic through our online suggestion box.

Extraordinarily, the Center did not send the statement to members of QAIA and QFOLC, merely e-mailing QAIA a document confirming the approval of the room rental request. On that Thursday, QAIA and QFOLC members held a joint meeting in Room 412 (the room rented to QAIA for the meeting), and then split into the two groups to consider matters pertinent to each.

On May 25, in response to the Center’s statement, Michael Lucas posted a message leveling a new threat against the organization:

“Dear friends, I have a very unfortunate update. The group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid was just granted the ability to have their meetings in the LGBT Center. As I always believed, the LGBT Center of NY is an anti-Israeli nest and we did not put enough pressure on them to stop their efforts to harm the Jewish state. But we have the power to stop them. The LGBT Center receives city, federal, foundation, and private funding. We have to work on reaching the government officials and ask them to cut that funding unless the Center changes its decision. We should also reach out to different organizations and individuals and collect money to take a full page ad in the New York Times Magazine. I know this is not cheap and I myself will generously contribute. I also believe that their support of political activity may jeopardize their ability to maintain tax-free status. I would appreciate hearing your thoughts, input, and suggestions. I do need your help.”

The hyperbolic language and the hysterical tone were typical of Lucas’s communication style, but despite making some absurd claims, the threat was based on a concrete reality: the Center has become dependent on funding from the City of New York, which has become an increasingly large part of the Center’s budget since Council Speaker Peter Vallone, Sr. gave the Center its first multi-million-dollar grant in 2001 as part of his campaign for the Democratic mayoral nomination.

It may nonetheless be useful to point out the absurdity of three distinct claims that Lucas made in this message to his supporters:

1) The claim that “the LGBT Center of NY is an anti-Israeli nest” is an extraordinary one, since Jewish groups — including the Gay & Lesbian Yeshiva Day School Alumni (GLYDSA) — meet regularly at the Center, while the Siege Busters remain banned from the Center; if that’s an ‘anti-Israeli nest,’ it’s a rather strangely ineffective one.

2) The claim that the Center is engaged in ‘efforts to harm the Jewish state’ is also an extraordinary and absurd one; all the Center did on May 25 was to concede the right of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) to meet at the Center; and QAIA, in turn, simply used that meeting space to begin planning for marching in pride parades in Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan; so there have been no ‘efforts to harm the Jewish state’ on anyone’s part going on at the Center.

3) The claim that the Center’s “support of political activity may jeopardize their ability to maintain tax-free status” is perhaps the most absurd of all. There are no implications for the Center’s federal tax status for simply renting rooms to a political organization. The Center regularly rents space to the Stonewall Democrats of New York City (SDNYC), a political club explicitly focused on party politics and electioneering, and has done so for years; no one has ever claimed that renting space to SDNYC and other political clubs has any consequences for the Center’s 501(c)(3) status; in such cases, the Center is simply renting space to a political organization, and is not in any way implicated in its activities.

QFOLC, in turn, responded to Michael Lucas’s statement, declaring:

“…Terrifyingly, it proposes that the Center is not allowed to host any political group meetings, and that the Center is itself an ‘anti-Israel nest.’ (What does a pro-Israel nest look like, then?!) If ever there were a time to shore up the Center’s principles of openness and commitment to queers’ long history of political organizing, it’s now.” (QFOLC, “Michael Lucas kicks up again,” openthecenter.blogspot.com, 5.26.11).

And that scourge of progressive inclusion, Phyllis Chesler, again reared her ugly head, screeching hysterically in a blog post misleadingly entitled, “NYC Queers for Jihad,”

The LGBT ‘queers’ [sic] had threatened to storm or ‘surge’ into the Center if they did not receive official approval for their group meeting. ‘Surging’ and ‘storming,’ Arab street mob behavior, is a vision and a tactic that… reminds me of Nazi Brownshirt behavior. Think Kristallnacht. Civilians and men in uniform breaking Jewish shop windows, breaking Jewish bones, burning Jewish books, eventually burning millions of living Jews… (“NYC Queers for Jihad,” Front Page Mag, 5.30.11).

Aside from ignoring the fact that a majority of members of Siege Busters and QAIA are in fact Jewish, Chesler’s bizarre rant mischaracterized the action that was planned: had QAIA been denied the space to meet, QAIA and QFOLC members were planning simply to find an empty room at the Center, and if none were available, to hold the meeting in the lobby of the Center  — to do a ‘sit-in,’ as it were, and nothing like ‘surging’ or ‘storming.’

And of course, the larger point is that neither QAIA nor Siege Busters nor QFOLC are in any sense anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic; rather, QAIA is committed to challenging the apartheid regime that governs and controls the lives of Palestinians under the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories, the Siege Busters are working to break the cruel and illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip, and QFOLC is committed to ensuring an open and inclusive LGBT Community Center.

But the outrageous falsehoods and the hysterical tone of both Chesler and Lucas may be taken as indicating the effectiveness of all three groups in challenging the Center’s illegitimate ban of the Siege Busters and the Center leadership’s betrayal of the values and principles upon which the Center was founded.

It is also worth noting that the Center, through its actions, put itself in an untenable position. The Center maintained a ban on the Siege Busters, because they used the phrase ‘Israeli apartheid in the name of the event that they planned for March 5; yet on March 25, the  Center leadership issued a statement explicitly recognizing the right of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to meet at the Center even though QAIA includes the phrase ‘Israeli Apartheid’ in its very name — one of the reasons cited by Mario Palumbo, Jr. (the Center board’s president) for banning Siege Busters in the first place. Given the May 25 policy statement, the only conceivable rationale for maintaining the ban on Siege Busters would have been that the group is non-LGBT specific; but since many non-LGBT specific groups continue to meet at the Center (including a host of 12-step groups), that ‘policy’ clearly was not being enforced by the Center administration.

If the rationale for maintaining the ban was that Siege Busters was both a non-LGBT-specific group and once used the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ in the name of an event it was planning, the Center never said so. It was clear to me that the Center leadership painted themselves into a corner, defending a non-policy that was not only indefensible but that was not even coherent.

The inability of the Center’s leadership to respond coherently to the challenge from QFOLC and QAIA was made all the more evident in the news story on the QAIA meeting and the change of Center policy filed by Duncan Osborne for Gay City News on June 1 (“LGBT Center ‘Apartheid,’ Access Controversies Reignited“). Rather than a comment from the executive director or the board president, the Center provided the reporter only with an e-mail message from Cindi Creager, the director of communications and marketing who at one time was a colleague of Glennda Testone’s at GLAAD:

“We held a community forum on March 13th,” Creager wrote to Osborne in response to his request for an interview. “Ann Northrop moderated and board members were present. And our board meetings are not open to the public, but input from the community is welcome and encouraged,” Creager added, neatly evading the most pertinent questions and avoiding any comment at all on the renewed threat of a boycott from Michael Lucas. But Lucas himself had no hesitation in commenting for the record. “This group has had their first and last meeting in the Center,” Lucas e-mailed Osborne in response to a query from the GCN reporter. “If someone fucks with Israel, I fuck them back. And I usually win,” Lucas added in typically crude and adversarial language.

The Jerusalem Post, ever a sentinel of right-wing opinion in Israel, reported on the latest developments in the controversy as well (Benjamin Weinthal, “NY LGBT Center slammed as center of anti-Israel activity,” Jerusalem Post, 6.1.11).

On June 2, in response to the renewed threat of a boycott by Michael Lucas — this time, ominously focusing on pressuring elected officials to cut funding to the Center from the City of New York — the Center again capitulated to blackmail, reversing course yet again and issuing a statement banning Queers Against Israeli Apartheid just as it had banned the Siege Busters three months previously:

Significantly, the Center did not send this statement directly to either QAIA or QFOLC or the Siege Busters Working Group, and even more significantly, the Center’s media contact (Cindi Creager) refused to answer any questions about the new ‘policy’ when asked by Duncan Osborne. The Gay City News reporter told me that Creager merely referred him to her press release, as if the release itself would answer any question he might have about the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions in the statement itself.

To my mind, one of the most important questions in examining the reasons for the reversal of the May 25 policy statement by the Center on June 2 was whether calls from elected officials to the Center prompted that abrupt reversal. In his June 2 report for Gay City News, Duncan Osborne asked that question of Cindi Creager (the Center’s director of communications and marketing), Stuart Applebaum, and Michael Lucas (“Swift, Stinging Criticism of LGBT Center ‘Moratorium’,” Duncan Osborne, Gay City News, 6.3.11). I was struck by the fact that the three of them gave three different answers to that crucial question. Osborne quoted Lucas as saying, “I don’t know, you should ask them.” Speaking on behalf of the Center, Creager e-mailed Osborne to tell her that the Center had not been contacted by any ‘elected officials.’ But Applebaum “said he had spoken with many people, including elected officials or their staff,” Osborne reported. “I’m aware of offices of elected officials reaching out to try to save the Center from itself,” Applebaum was quoted by Osborne as saying. “I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what calls were made, but people at every level said they were going to call to find out what was going on,” Applebaum told Osborne, directly contradicting the official party line coming out of the Center, as voiced by Creager.

The question as to whether elected officials pressured the Center to reverse its May 25 policy statement and expel QAIA just as the organization’s leadership had the Siege Busters in early March is far from a purely academic one: rather, the lack of transparency on the part of the Center board and staff here was replicated by a lack of transparency on the part of elected officials who — Applebaum clearly indicated — were involved in working behind the scenes to get the Center to abruptly reverse course and ban QAIA as well as the Siege Busters.

Indeed, it is quite possible that it was the city’s highest-ranking openly LGBT elected official — New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn — who was behind the abrupt reversal of policy. The Council Speaker is universally recognized as the second most powerful person in New York City government, and Quinn is an undeclared but active candidate for the Democratic nomination for mayor in 2013. If Applebaum, as president of the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union — one of the largest in the city — used that position to pressure the Council Speaker to pressure the Center, there would be not only the problematic misuse of power by the Center’s board and executive director, but by a major labor union and by a leading (openly lesbian) elected official as well.

New York State Senator Thomas K. Duane (D-Manhattan), in whose Senate district the LGBT Community Center is located, was asked at the Queens Pride Parade on June 5 what his response was to the participation of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in that event as well as the controversy surrounding the Center’s expulsion of QAIA and Siege Busters. “I know about the difficult discussions around the Center’s policies for meetings, and we have spoken with both sides,” Duane told Gay City News (Winnie McCroy, “The World, Again, Comes to Queens,” Gay City News, 6.8.11).  “It’s a very, very tough issue, and one that I think will eventually be resolved… But, they are a group that is in solidarity, that share a point of view represented by a tremendous number of peopled,” added Duane, the first openly gay person elected to the New York State Senate. “But with all of that said, there are people who simply disagree with them. It’s unfortunate, yet appropriate that it be played out with the Center being in the middle of it.”

Another elected official who was equally evasive and non-committal when asked directly about the Center’s ban on QAIA and Siege Busters was Daniel Dromm, who in November 2009 was elected to represent the 25th district in the New York City Council. “I don’t know exactly what their stand is,” Dromm said of QAIA,” although I have heard some of the press around it,” he told Gay City News  (Winnie McCroy, “The World, Again, Comes to Queens,” Gay City News, 6.8.11). “I know that the [Queens] Pride Committee, when they discussed the participation of that group here, felt that, look, they’re gay, they should be allowed to march and to express their viewpoint. We all agreed on that,” added Dromm, who along with Jimmy Van Bramer became the first openly gay person elected to public office in Queens (Van Bramer was elected to represent the 26th Council district in November 2009). Significantly, Dromm did not respond to the Gay City News reporter’s question about the Center’s newly announced policy banning QAIA and the Siege Busters as well as discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The fact that Dromm, Van Bramer, and especially Duane are all personal friends and political allies of Speaker Quinn — who has made a very public show of her continued support for the Center while at the same time refusing to comment on the Center’s ban on QAIA and Siege Busters — suggests that the openly gay and lesbian elected officials in New York are unwilling to take any stand on the issue that could potentially alienate voters and/or donors to their own campaigns.

In any case, the refusal of the Center’s board president and executive director to speak directly — or even honestly — even to LGBT media outlets such as Gay City News underlined the rejection of any concept of accountability to the LGBT community which the LGBT Community Center ostensibly serves.

As Duncan Osborne quoted me for his Gay City News report, “The Center was intended to be a location for the open and free discussion of controversial issues; it was never intended to be solely a social services provider. This was a cowardly act of betrayl of the Center’s mission by its executive director and its board of directors… They are no longer a community center.”

Significantly, Michael Lucas was widely perceived by those who supported the Center’s decision to ban QAIA — just like the decision to ban the Siege Busters — as having been instrumental in prompting that decision. “According to observers of the dispute, Lucas played a crucial role in waging the campaign against the center furnishing anti-Israel groups, including Siege Busters and QAIA, with space to organize activities, Benjamin Weinthal wrote in his report for the right-wing Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal, “New York LGBT Center ejects Queers Against Israel Apartheid,” Jerusalem Post, 6.5.11); and this, despite the Center’s own refusal to recognize Lucas’s role in the reversal of its May 25 decision to allow QAIA to meet at the Center. Typically, the Jerusalem Post reporter did not even bother to seek comment from QAIA members, contenting himself with quoting Michael Lucas and Stuart Applebaum as the only sources that he contacted for comment; Weinthal simply and lazily took a comment from the QFOLC website as well as two excerpts from the Center’s press release and dropped them into a ‘report’ obviously designed to defend the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories at all cost.

On June 7, Naomi Brussel and Brad Taylor of Out-FM — the LGBT program on WBAI Radio in New York City — interviewed three organizational representatives, who discussed the ongoing controversy. Sherry Wolf represented the Siege Busters Working Group, John Francis Mulligan represented Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, and I represented Queers for an Open LGBT Community Center. (A podcast of the Out-FM interview is available on Out-FM.org.)

In response to the Center’s ban on QAIA, members decided to hold a meeting in the lobby of the Center on the very date that their second meeting was scheduled to be held there; and so at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, June 8, members of QAIA, supported by QFOLC, the Siege Busters Working Group and LGBT community members, gathered in the lobby of the Center to hold the meeting that the Center had a contractual obligation to host. More than 50 individuals — at times approaching 60 people — crowded into the Center’s lobby to plan for the upcoming Brooklyn Pride Parade and New York City Pride March as well as to consider a possible action at the Center Garden Party on June 20. Duncan Osborne reported on the action for Gay City News (“Critics of Israeli Occupation Occupy Center Lobby,” Gay City News, 6.8.11).

The next step in the campaign for an open center was the QFOLC action at the Center Garden Party on June 20, the Center’s biggest fundraising event of the year. The Garden Party began in the Center’s tiny garden years ago but then moved to a playground/ basketball court a few blocks down the street; in that location, community organizations staffed tables with literature about their activities. But the Center eventually moved the Garden Party to the Chelsea Piers, where it has since become a corporate food fest, with restaurants providing food a different booths to the thousand or so attendees who now pay $100 or more for tickets.

I attended the Center Garden Party in June 2010, and while a pleasant experience with good food and an opportunity to catch up with friends and acquaintances. A few elected officials made brief references to the need for legal and political equality, while the speech by Glennda Testone simply thanked attendees for their support and reminded them of the need for more money to keep the Center running. Most of the attendees were middle class to upper middle class gay and lesbian white professionals. Other than the drag queens who were the ‘talent,’ there were only a handful of transgendered people, including Stephanie Battaglino, who had at that point recently joined the Center board. Most of the attendees were not activists, which was perhaps not surprising, given how nearly entirely denuded of political content the event had become.

And the 2011 Garden Party would have been just as denuded of political content had it not been for Queers for an Open LGBT Center and our vocal and colorful protest. Dozens of us positioned ourselves on the long corridor along the West Side Highway leading to the entrance to the pier on which the Garden Party was being held. We handed out more than 500 leaflets informing Garden Party-goers of the issues at hand; our leaflet reiterated our demand that  the Center:

1) lift the ban on the Siege Busters and Queers Against Anti-Israeli Apartheid,
2) hold open board meetings, and
3) reinstate free speech at the Center.

The full QFOLC statement, which was drafted by Steve  Ault — a co-founder and member of the original Center board — and other members of QFOLC, was printed on the back fo the flyer, and read as follows:

New York’s LGBT Community Center has served as an indispensable resource since its founding in 1983. But now, something has gone very, very wrong at the Center. Its Board has turned the simple matter of renting space to queer groups for organizing into a giant mess. Groups have been told they can meet and then are banned. Suddenly there’s a cloud of censorship on 13th Street. Claiming it “has been forced to divert significant resources from its primary purpose of providing programming and services to instead navigating between opposing positions involving the Middle East conflict,” the Center announced “a moratorium, effective immediately, on renting space to groups that organize around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Summarily canceled were scheduled meetings of the group, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA), which the Center had approved only eight days earlier. One such meeting took place without incident. Previously, the Center banned the group, Siege Busters, from further meetings because of its organizing around Israeli Apartheid Week. Center Executive Director, Glennda Testone, stated that Siege Busters was expelled because it was both non-LGBT and controversial, with neither factor alone being grounds for refusing meeting space. Obviously, QAIA met this announced criteria. Also obvious ― now ― is that the banning of Siege Busters and the criteria were a smokescreen for something else. By banning queer political organizing groups in response to “controversy,” the Center is moving into a dangerous world of policing the queer community on behalf of outside forces ― forces that are openly trying to silence anyone with a position different from their own. Making matters worse, by banning discussion of the Middle East conflict, the Center is, indeed, taking a side: implicitly endorsing Israel’s policy on Palestine as well as the dangerous idea that anyone who objects to this policy is “anti-Semitic.” Only groups opposing that occupation had been meeting there, so the ban affects them only. Despite the extreme controversy surrounding this issue, these groups have affirmed the right of those supporting the opposite position to meet at the Center as well.

“The Center’s “primary purpose” as described in its release is historically inaccurate. The Center was founded in 1983 to provide meeting and office space to community groups for the purposes of organizing, developing programs and rendering services. That the Center now itself performs some of these functions is great, but this role should never be used as an excuse to negate its founding purpose by limiting access to community groups. Contrary to the Center’s claim, there is nothing around which to “navigate.” Republicans, Democrats, socialists and anarchists have met at the Center; so have Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and atheists. Before this latest statement from the Center leadership, no one―including the Center itself ― had ever suggested that the provision of rental space implied an endorsement of the groups renting rooms or of their political perspectives. Siege Busters was banned under pressure from anti-free speech, Islamophobe Michael Lucas who threatened to organize a donor boycott of the Center. When QAIA was briefly allowed to meet,  he threatened to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times against the Center, calling it an “anti-Israeli nest.” Thugs like Lucas are the last people the Center should be listening to when developing policy. Clearly, secret conversations are taking place behind the closed doors of the Center’s boardroom.  But if the word “Community” in the Center’s name has any meaning, we all have every right to know what’s going on. Instead of responding positively to requests from community activists to meet on this matter, the Center board hired a consulting firm to formulate a space utilization policy at exorbitant cost that is a complete waste of community resources. Calls for open board meetings have been heard before. Now, with the latest flip-flop and ever lengthening trail of obfuscation, the need for the Center to heed this call is more urgent than ever.

In a rare moment of contact with the Center board of directors, Andy Humm and a few other QFOLC members confronted Mario J. Palumbo, Jr. about the board’s refusal to meet with QFOLC. When asked directly by Humm if Palumbo would raise the QFOLC request for a meeting with the Center’s board, the board president initially seemed to indicate that he would raise it; but when Humm asked Palumbo if he would advocate for such a meeting, he said that he would not. Palumbo then started to say something about ‘our Center,’ but Humm reminded him that the Center belonged to the entire community. At that point, Palumbo stormed off, leaving QFOLC members present with yet one more confirmation of the current Center leadership’s disdain for the LGBT community and refusal to be accountable to it.

I reported on the confrontation with Mario Palumbo at the second meeting/sit-in of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid at the Center, which took place on July 5.

As on June 8, the Center management did nothing to try to expel QAIA members who occupied the Center’s lobby from 6-8 p.m. on July 5. “The Center, which declined to comment on this latest QAIA move, took no action against the two unapproved QAIA meetings and appeared to be content to let the group meet,” Duncan Osborne reported for Gay City News (Duncan Osborne, “Queer Critics of Israel to Test LGBT Center Ban,” Gay City News, 7 July 2011).

Comic relief came in the form of a gay man who held up a banner proudly declaring himself one of the “American Friends of Likud,” complete with the Star of David superimposed on the American flag; attached to his Likud-friend banner was a string of three Israeli flags, which he anchored to the lubricant container of the Center’s front desk. Precisely what the man thought he was accomplishing was unclear, but QAIA members found his presence a source of considerable amusement.

Michael Lucas blasted the Center for refusing to bodily expel QAIA members. “It is up to the Center how they want to approach intruders and hooligans that are trying to illegally occupy its premises,” Lucas told the Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal, “Support for gays, Hamas at NY’s LGBT Center sparks fury,” Jerusalem Post, 7.10.11).  “I think the center, by allowing this, is setting a bad precedent,” Lucas added. Despite the Center’s previous declaration that it would not comment any further on the Siege Busters/QAIA controversy, its communications and marketing director did in fact respond to a request from the Jerusalem Post for a comment. “The QAIA had a sit-in at the center this past week in violation of center policy,” Cindi Creager told the Post’s Weinthal. “It was very small. We are not permitting them to meet and the moratirum remains in place,” added Creager.

But the Jerusalem Post story on the July 5 QAIA sit-in could hardly be called reporting in any meaningful sense; Weinthal did not contact QAIA (or Siege Busters, or QFOLC, for that matter) for comment, instead relying only on one quote from Emmaia Gelman that he extracted from Duncan Osborne’s report for Gay City News. And the false impression created by the headline and the story that QAIA supported Hamas was unsubstantiated by the reporter; indeed, since QAIA does not support Hamas, Weinthal’s decision not to contact QAIA for comment must have been deliberate, as any QAIA member would have told him that QAIA had no connection with Hamas. But such is the climate of fear and intimidation created by the bullying behavior of ultra-Zionist pro-Israel propagandists that the Jerusalem Post story would be regarded in certain circles as objective journalism.

In the meanwhile, Michael Lucas and his partner, Richard Winger, continued to be active in the community, participating in a Lambda Legal fundraiser on Fire Island on July 9. The listing of Lucas as a sponsor of the July 9 Pines event prompted QFOLC to write to Kevin Cathcart, Lambda Legal’s executive director:

Dear Kevin,

Lambda Legal is one of the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) organizations in the country, and it is because of our recognition of the prominence and importance of your organization that we are writing to you to express our concern about the inclusion of Michael Lucas in the list of sponsors of your 33rd annual Fire Island event on July 9.

We fully recognize the need for any 501(c)(3) organization to raise funds to support its work, especially in an economic downturn such as we are now experiencing. However, we feel compelled to bring to your attention the involvement of Mr. Lucas in the operations of the LGBT Community Center — in particular, his pernicious influence in persuading the Center to expel and ban the Siege Busters Working Group in March of this year and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) in May.

It was the ban on the Siege Busters and the silencing of free speech at the Center that prompted us to form Queers for an Open LGBT Center (QFOLC). Unfortunately, the ban on both of those organizations remains in effect to this day, and represents an unprecedented as well as entirely unjustified exclusion of individuals and groups working on behalf of the liberation of the Palestinian people — including LGBT Palestinians — who currently struggle to survive under an illegal and oppressive Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Michael Lucas has consciously and deliberately mischaracterized both groups as being ‘anti-Israel hate groups’ and its members as anti-Semitic — despite the fact that many members of both groups are Jewish — while he himself has made outrageously bigoted statements about Arabs and Muslims.  Lucas has been quoted as saying, “I hate Muslims, absolutely. It’s a horrible, horrible religion. It’s a plague.” Lucas has also said of Muslims, “They have not contributed to civilization in any way, in any field — political thought, science, music, architecture, nothing for century after century. What do they produce? Carpets. That’s how they should travel because that’s the only way they travel without killing people.” And Lucas has slandered the proposed Islamic cultural center on Park Place in Manhattan as a “monument to Muslim terrorism.”

We have to assume that Lambda Legal as an organization does not endorse Michael Lucas’s virulently Islamophobic and anti-Arab/anti-Palestinian bigotry or his efforts to exclude QAIA and the Siege Busters from the Center and repress queer political speech — in particular, his campaign to marginalize Arab and Muslim LGBT people and to silence community members who speak out against racism and bigotry. However, we would have to ask whether Lambda Legal would want to be seen as legitimizing the position as an LGBT community leader that Lucas so obviously wants to claim for himself.

Sincerely,

Naomi Brussel
Leslie Cagan
Bill Dobbs
Emmaia Gelman
Andy Humm
John Francis Mulligan
Pauline Park
Brad Taylor
for
Queers for an Open LGBT Center (QFOLC)

On July 11, Cathcart responded,

Dear Pauline, and all –

Thanks for your letter regarding Lambda Legal and sponsors of our Fire Island event.   You are right in assuming that Lambda Legal does not endorse any donor’s political views; we have tens of thousands of donors every year and they cover a wide spectrum of opinions on LGBT issues and beyond.  In some cases, I think that all they share in common is a desire to support Lambda Legal’s work.  Any listings we have show names of people who support Lambda Legal; not the reverse. It would be impossible for us to police the views of all of these donors, and any attempt to do so would take time and energy away from the work we exist to do and would, I believe, not serve the interests of our community.

Lambda Legal has been successful for nearly four decades by sticking to our mission statement and working to achieve full recognition of the civil rights of LGBT people and those with HIV through impact litigation, education, and public policy work, and I think that our work, accomplishments, and positions are clear to all who follow LGBT and HIV-related civil rights. I appreciate your taking the time to write with your concerns.

Kevin

At the same time that QFOLC was writing to Lambda Legal to express concern about Lucas’ prominent role in the Lambda event in the Pines, Lucas himself was writing an angry letter to the Center denouncing the executive director and the board president for allowing QAIA to continue to meet there despite the official ‘moratorium’:

Glennda Testone
Executive Director of the LGBT Center
212-620-7310
glennda@gaycenter.org
Mario Palumbo
President of the Center board
212-875-4900
mpalumbo@millenniumptrs.com

Glennda and Mario-

This is an open letter to you and I am copying it to others. It came to my attention that you, yet again, allowed a group of anti-Semites to meet on your premises, in the lobby of your Center. http://www.chelseanow.com/articles/2011/07/07/gay_city_news/news/doc4e15ce498112c075992096.txt This time, the size of the group was larger and consisted of several anti-Israeli groups. As I said before, the Center has become a magnet for anti-Semitism. The difference between previous meetings and the meetings that took place on June 8th and July 5th is that these times the meetings were more visible, instead of meetings and anti-Israeli fundraising campaigns behind closed doors. Meetings have now moved into a public space in the Center’s lobby for everyone to see. Again, you have publicly lied by saying that you would put a moratorium on these meetings, since the keep happening on larger scales. I, as others have, made up my mind long ago that you are vigorously anti-Semitic. Let me state that nobody cares if you have Jews on board, if there are self-loathing Jews taking part in anti-Semitic meetings that you host, or if there are self-hating Jews supporting you. If you think that you bought insurance by having a handful of Jews on your side, then you are mistaken. Don’t think you are fooling anyone. The American Jewish body overwhelmingly opposes your actions and is disgusted by them. As you know, there is a new meeting scheduled in your lobby for August 10th. If this meeting goes on, then I do hope that you will be forced to resign, since the Center deserves better leadership. I am including your contact information for anyone who would like to contact you.

Michael Lucas

What response, if any, the Center gave to Lucas, was not made public.

On 22 November 2011, Steve Ault provided an update on the Center controversy regarding his own personal attempt to meet with the  Center’s executive director:

As most of you probably know, I was on the founding board of the Center. I served from 1983-87 when I resigned upon having been elected co-chair of the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights II. So, given my unique position as both a former board member of the Center and now an activist with QAIA and QFOLC, I decided to take the initiative of contacting former Center board members of a like persuasion on the issue of the ban to see if there may be something of substance we could accomplish given our relationship to the Center. First, I contacted Chris Collins, also a founding board member, who then told me he was opposed to the ban. Next, I contacted Michael Seltzer, a former board president, who had written to Gay City News in opposition to the ban and against those pressuring the Center with threats of withholding funding. We both agreed that a meeting with Center leadership, including board members, was the correct way to proceed, with Michael making the contacts and coordinating arrangements. Further, he suggested contacting Janet Weinberg, also a former board president. Michael reported that Executive Director Glennda Testone and Board President Mario Palumbo agreed to meet with the four of us. Initial contact was made in July but a mutually convenient date for the meeting couldn’t be found until early October. As the meeting date was approaching, Michael suggested that I write a memo on strategy so that we would all be on the same page. As I was putting the finishing touches on the memo Michael called to inform me that as a consequence of my participation in the meetings/sit-ins in the Center lobby, all involved were requesting that I withdraw from the meeting. Of course, I protested in no uncertain terms and said among other things that my participation in these meetings was hardly a secret. In closing I said the request was completely unacceptable. Michael promised to get back to me again before the meeting. He never did. Soon after our conversation I called Chris Collins who said he was in a meeting and would get back to me soon. He never did. I left a message with Janet Weinberg. She returned my call some days later but at the time I was at the edge of cell phone reception and in a few seconds the call dropped. Upon returning home I left another message with her. She never called back. It appears that Michael had a number of conversations with Glennda prior to the scheduled meeting, and I believe she managed to talk him into supporting the ban. He maintained to me that the Center’s continuing ability to provide services to those in need is essential and is, in essence, a ‘class issue.’ I believe Michael then masterminded my exclusions with numerous conversations to which I was not privy. I learned a number of things along the way that were never revealed to me as confidential information, but I assume there was an implicit understanding that they were so. However, given current circumstances, the hell with it.

* The Center has been viciously attacked, put under pressure, and threatened by the Zionist side. Two people particularly named (one assumes there are more) are Stuart Appelbaum (no surprise) and Jerrold Nadler. Some of these attacks/threats have been personal in nature (but not necessarily made by the aforementioned).
* The Center lost a considerable amount of government funding (was it $300,000?) for reasons that are not clear
* Glennda was particularly interested in the circumstances around the banning of NAMBLA.
* The Center is completely freaked out by this entire matter and has developed a bunker mentality.
* Michael Lucas is essentially a gadfly and has not been influential in determining policy.

By March 2012, a full year had gone by, and the Center had failed to fulfill its promise to produce a room rental policy, nor had it acted to lift the ban on Siege Busters and QAIA, and so QAIA members decided to mount a teach-in/demonstration on March 3. QAIA issued a media advisory announcing its teach-in/demonstration on March 3:

Occupy the Center!
Protest censorship by New York’s LGBT Community Center
WHO: Queers Against Israeli Apartheid and other groups (list below)

WHEN: Saturday, March 3, 2012 from 4-6 PM
WHERE: LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St. between 7th and 8th Avenues
WHY: One year ago, amidst great controversy, the LGBT Center banned groups opposing Israeli apartheid. Protesters will confront the Center’s censorship policy and its secret closed-door board of directors meetings.

It’s been a year since NY’s LGBT Community Center banned Siegebusters, the anti-occupation organizers, from using space at the Center. Since that time NYC Queers Against Israeli Apartheid has also been banned from the Center—and a ‘moratorium’ has been imposed on ANY discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (meaning “discussion” of support for Palestinian rights). The Center’s board promised, but never delivered, a policy revision clarifying their rental/access/programming guidelines. On Saturday, March 3, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week, protesters will enact an end to the ban on Palestinian-related organizing at the Center, and re-institute the Center’s original access policy of full inclusion for all queers who organize for liberation. The ‘moratorium’ is over! The wealthy and powerful 1% should not be allowed to silence the voices of the 99%. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid will defy the ban on March 3 — Occupy the Center!

DEMANDS:
1. End the ban on Palestine solidarity organizing at the Center
2. Open the Center to all who respect its stated mission.

The editorial was not only thoroughly misguided but misleading on a number of points, including the suggestion that Israel was a welcoming haven to LGBT Palestinian organizations; in fact, while Aswat (the transgender-inclusive queer women’s organization) is based in Haifa and gets no funding or any other form of support from the Israeli government, alQaws and PQBDS are based in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. And Israel does not ‘welcome’ Palestinian refugees from the West Bank or Gaza; in fact, Israeli authorities blackmail those queer Palestinians they identify as LGBT and put their lives in danger by turning them into informants; to date, not a single LGBT Palestinian from the occupied territories has been granted political asylum in Israel, to my knowledge.

But the larger point about the editorial is how it highlights Zionist control of US-based news media outlets even at the local level and how it underlines the fact that even sponsoring discussion of Israeli occupation and apartheid is a very risky business indeed. It is hardly a surprise then that the Queens Pride House forum is the only such event ever mounted by an LGBT community center in the United States.

The last shoe to drop in this little drama was a contretemps involving Mark Weidler, Charles J. Ober (then treasurer and chief financial officer of Queens Pride House) and me. I had ‘friended’ Weidler on Facebook after a meeting that charlie and I had had with him, Peter Mastrosimone and a reporter at the Chronicle office in 2012, without knowing how strident a Zionist he was. From that moment until September 2013, we had had no interaction via Facebook: he never ‘liked’ or commented on any of my posts until September 11 of that year, when I posted a link to a news report in the Guardian about the National Security Agency’s sharing information gathered from surveillance on US citizens with the Israeli authorities, with a comment about how outrageous it was for the NSA to be sharing information on US citizens with any foreign government and especially that of apartheid Israel, writing on my ‘timeline,’

So here’s my question to Barack Obama: why are you spying on me & sharing my personal info. with a foreign government — and one that is engaged in daily massive human rights violations as part of an illegal occupation? Why are you sharing my data with an apartheid regime…? That is illegal, unconstitutional & completely unacceptable to me~!

To which Mark Weidler responded,

Pauline — I am going to unfriend you on FB now. Do not want to read your anti-semitic rants ever again. Please never contact my newspaper.

Oddly enough, Mark Weidler had not ‘de-friended’ me even after our June 4 forum, but for some reason, he did so after I posted this link three whole months later. Not only was my comment not directed at Weidler personally, by that point in time, I had completely forgotten that we were even ‘friends’ on Facebook. But what struck me was that he was using his organizational position as publisher of the Chronicle to punish my organization for an expression of a personal opinion on my Facebook page — not that of Queens Pride House, which I never used to promote my own views. After I discussed Weidler’s comments with Charlie Ober, he e-mailed Weidler, who responded to him,

The post Israel & the LGBT Community Center ban on Palestine organizing 2011-13 appeared first on Pauline Park.

Coming Full Circle: The Journey of a Transgendered Korean Adoptee
By Pauline Park
Queens College
7 November 15

I was born in Korea in 1960 and returned earlier this year – in June/July 2015 – my first time in the land of my birth since I left at the age of seven months old and the most momentous since the trip that took me from Korea to the United States 54 years before. When I was born there, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world and had only begun its recovery from the devastation of the Korean War that ended in 1953; but the country I returned to more than half a century later was the eleventh largest economy in the world, with large parts of its capital unrecognizable to those who knew it before the startling industrialization that transformed the southern half of the peninsula in the 1970s and 1980s.

The circumstances of my birth and adoption were as mysterious as the political backdrop to my birth and adoption were dramatic. My adoptive parents were told that my birth mother died giving birth to my twin brother and me and that our birth father died before I was born. It was not until 1994, when I was reading a history of Korea, that the thought occurred to me that my birth father might have been among the thousands who died in a massive popular uprising in April 1960 that ousted Syngman Rhee, the dictator/president-for-life installed by the US CIA, from power and ushered in the short-lived Second Republic, which ended when Park Chung-hee came to power in a military coup in May 1961. Of course, as an infant in an orphanage in Seoul, I was completely unaware of the tumultuous political drama that was the backdrop for my birth in October 1960 and adoption in June 1961, only a few weeks after Park Chung-hee’s coup d’état. So perhaps I was born to make revolution…

There is little that I know about the adoption and my trip back in June/July 2015 only brought to light two facts that I did not know before this year. First, I discovered I was in fact adopted through an adoption agency, or at the very least, that an adoption agency helped facilitate that adoption. I had correspondence to my adoptive parents from the Children’s Welfare Service that my mother had left in her papers when she died in 1984 and on one document, there was an address, which I had thought was the address of the orphanage I was adopted from; when I was in Seoul in June 2015, I met with the executive director of Social Welfare Services (SWS), which inherited the files of the Children’s Welfare Service; when the director showed me my file, I discovered that there was no information in it that was useful for a birth search, and she informed me that the address on my adoption papers was not the orphanage from which I was adopted but rather the old office address for CWS. And so what became clear to me was that I had come 7,000 miles only to have reached a dead end. While I gave DNA to a special unit of the Namdaemun police, I concluded by the end of my month in Korea that there was no realistic prospect of ever finding birth family. But then again, I had not gone back to Korea to pursue a birth search; the main objective was simply to see the country of my birth, and that I accomplished.

And so the story of my adoption begins, from what my adoptive mother told me and my twin brother, with the death of our birth mother in childbirth. Our adoptive mother and father sought to adopt only one child but were told they could adopt twins, which they chose to do. And so I was adopted along with my twin brother at the age of seven and-a-half months old. Northwest Orient Airlines brought us from Seoul to Tokyo and from there to Anchorage and onto Chicago. Our new parents – the only parents I would ever know – picked us up at O’Hare Airport. In a photo taken at the airport the very moment when our adoptive parents first held us in their arms, the shock of seeing two seriously underweight babies registered on their faces. Our adoptive parents took us back with them to the house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with white aluminum siding that would be my home for the next seventeen years.

My father was Norwegian American and my mother was German American. I knew very little about their background and neither had any particular interest in genealogy, something I would become interested in only many years later. In genealogical research that I did in 2011-14, I discovered that my father’s parents had emigrated from Norway in 1883 and 1887 and that my mother’s four grandparents had all emigrated from Prussia in the 19th century – from parts of Prussia that are now in Poland. Through my genealogical research, I would learn far more about my parents’ Norwegian and European ancestors than they ever knew; ironically, I would come to know far more about my parents’ ancestors to whom I had no connection by blood or genes while remaining completely in the dark about the Korean ancestors from whom I am directly descended.

I grew up with my mother’s extended family, and above all, my maternal grandmother, who lived in the house until my senior year in high school. My grandmother was born in 1888 and had grown up working the family farm in northern Wisconsin with her father after her mother’s untimely death. Grandma’s first language was German, and she would sometimes read to me from her German Bible as I tried to make sense of the elaborate traditional Gothic script.

The piano was at the center of our family life, and the making of live music – including the frequent playing of Lutheran hymns – defined my childhood as much as anything else. Despite a modest family income, our parents paid for our private piano lessons. A few years later, my brother and I began violin lessons at our public school, and I would eventually begin organ lessons with our private piano teacher and later with a local organist at another church in the neighborhood.

While I honored my mother’s German heritage and my father’s Norwegian background, I felt compelled to try to connect to the land of my birth, the ‘homeland’ that I never knew. I had a small flexible looseleaf binder in a deep burgundy color that I would write in, and on the cover, I remember writing my birth name on it, frustrated that I could write my Korean name only in the Roman alphabet because I did not know hangul (the Korean alphabet). Without any opportunity to learn Korean and with none of the infrastructure of Korean culture camps like those currently available to young Korean adoptees, I had no direct way of connecting to my birth culture. Instead, I connected with Korean culture through books. In our local branch library, there was one book that resonated with me called “The Land and People of Korea.” I also scoured the three sets of encyclopedias at home for references to Korea. But in none of these books did I find an obvious answer to the elusive question: where was my real homeland?

I had known no ‘homeland’ other than the United States, but to strangers, I was a foreigner because I was Asian. Though I had never learned to speak Korean and had never lived in Korea since my adoption at the age of eight months, my Asian features defined my status as the ‘other,’ the foreigner, the outsider. It was because others challenged my ‘American-ness’ that I came to doubt my belonging to the great American family, and it was through this process of ‘othering’ that I came to be alienated from America, the only homeland I had ever known.

When we went out in public, the striking physical differences between my adoptive parents and my brother and me made it impossible for others not to notice. As we accompanied our parents – a tall, balding, skinny Scandinavian and a rotund German Hausfrau, our parents were constantly asked, “Whose children are they?” But that was life in an all-white neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee in the 1960s and 1970s. Before the court-ordered desegregation of our local public school system, my brother and I were the only non-white children in our elementary school.

Every December 7, my brother and I were verbally harassed by the white kids at school. This happened more than twenty years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. ‘Chink’ and ‘Jap’ were hurled at us, and it made me feel ambivalent about my adoptive country. Because of this, I had a hard time thinking of myself as American.

Because of that harassment, my parents’ house became my childhood security. But when my father died just before I turned twelve, our household became insecure. My grandmother’s departure in our senior year in high school left only my mother, my brother, me, and our Scottish Terrier.

I had never known any other home, but when I was just turning eighteen, I left that house, never again to live there, despite frequent short visits while in college. Including the orphanage in Seoul from which I was adopted and the old house in Milwaukee, I have lived in 25 different places in thirteen different cities (Seoul, Milwaukee, Madison, London, Chicago, Champaign-Urbana, Berlin, Regensburg, Brussels, Paris, Lake Forest, New York) in six different countries (Korea, United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, France) on three different continents (Asia, North America, Europe). With each move came a subtle shift in my understanding of home and homeland.

Milwaukee, my childhood home, was a white working-class a city of beer and bratwurst with the feel of a small town, despite its one and-a-half million people. For the first three years of my adulthood, Madison would be home. Madison, the ‘Berkeley of the Midwest’ and the center of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era, had a small but growing gay community when I first arrived in 1978. The Gay Center in the basement of a church on campus would be the site of my first coming out, as a gay male in my very first semester at the University of Wisconsin.

London represented the next shift in venue and identity. Living there for two years, I fell hopelessly in love with London and I was determined to stay. While there, I learned that I had been accepted into a master’s degree program in European studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

It was while living with my lover in London that I first went out publicly dressed as a woman, though without any encouragement from him. It was clear to me at that point that my gay male identity did not and could not adequately address my lifelong identification with women. I began to go out regularly dressed as a woman, and it was the most liberating experience of my life. For the first time in my life, I was presenting myself as I saw myself to be. Despite my nervousness and to my surprise, I encountered few problems, perhaps because of my youth and my natural femininity as well as my Asian features.

At the same time that I was exploring my gender identity in public for the first time, my two years in London provided the opportunity to reconsider my national identity.

Because I could not speak Korean, it was impossible to fulfill expectations of what ‘Korean’ meant; and because of the incidents of racial insensitivity and harassment that I had experienced in childhood and youth, it was difficult to identify unambivalently as American.

I returned to the United States in October 1983 and experienced reverse culture shock. Ironically enough, it had been the experience of living in Europe that had made me realize how American I was. Now that I was back in the country of my youth, I had to reconstruct my identity once again. If Madison had been my first experience of living away from home and had provided the opportunity for my first coming out, London had offered an opportunity to explore questions of national identity – as well as gender identity. In Chicago, I entered a career in public relations, but helping large corporations enhance their public image did not give me a sense of fulfillment, and so I decided to go back to graduate school to pursue a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a poor grad student, the days of wine and roses gave way to the years of rice and beans.

Chicago had been my home for five years, and I had ceased to think of London and England as ‘home.’ When my grandmother died in a nursing home just a year before moving down to Champaign-Urbana, I felt that I had lost my last deep connection with Milwaukee, my first real home. Although Milwaukee was not far away, the psychic distance from my new academic life in Champaign-Urbana was considerable.

I spent six years pursuing my Ph.D. In so many ways, those six years would prove pivotal in redefining my identity in all its facets. It was not so much my Ph.D. program in political science, but my year living in Europe doing dissertation research that enabled me to reconsider my national identity as well as my gender identity.

When I finished my dissertation in December 1993, I discovered Foucault while taking a graduate seminar in political theory. Reading the work of this radical gay French theorist helped me re-think my lifelong identity complex. I had labored for years under the feeling that I was a ‘fake Korean,’ unable to live up to the expectations of others. In light of my reading of Foucault and other theorists, I came to understand that the pursuit of – or flight from – ‘Korean-ness’ was doomed to failure from the start, since there was no ‘essence’ of ‘Korean-ness’ to pursue. I now came to see myself as having a distinct identity as a Korean adoptee, neither ethnically Korean in the way that Koreans or recent Korean immigrants were nor even Korean American in the way that US-born, English-speaking Korean Americans were.

The most frequent question I am asked as a Korean adoptee is whether I have ever gone ‘back’ to Korea. ‘Back’ always struck me as such an odd word, given that I had left at the age of seven and-a-half months old and had no memories of the country of my birth Until my return in June/July 2015, I usually responded by saying that I hoped to visit Korea one day, but that I had not yet had the opportunity. As a Korean adoptee that never learned the Korean language, I cannot have anything but a complex relationship with the country of my birth. While I am proud of my Korean birth, I cannot claim that ‘heritage’ easily or without lengthy explanation. The question of where I am from has provoked different responses over the years. I usually respond with, “I was born in Korea but adopted by European American parents, and I grew up in Milwaukee.” But I could just as easily answer the question with either ‘Wisconsin,’ or ‘the United States,’ or even ‘New York,’ depending on the context.

Other Korean adoptees have asked me, “Have you done a birth search?” On my trip to Korea in June/July 2015, I saw my adoption file and now know that there is no practical way to identify the orphanage from which I was adopted, which almost certainly no longer exists. I am occasionally haunted by the possibility that one or both of my birth parents may still be alive and may actually be looking for me and my brother; but if so, they would be at least in their 70s. Even if I were to find my birth family, as a non-Korean speaking, openly transgendered Korean adoptee and activist, I would probably find it difficult to relate to them – and they to me. But I have every reason to believe that the story that my adoptive parents were told was true and that my birth parents are dead; and I am now persuaded that there is no real possibility of finding out anything about them, and I have come to terms with the disappointing finality of the end of my birth search.

Whatever the circumstances of my adoption and upbringing, I have come to understand that I am not a ‘fake Korean,’ I am a real Korean adoptee; above all, I am the real ‘me.’ And I no longer feel any need to apologize for my history, any more than to apologize for a lack of Korean language proficiency. I can now locate ‘homeland’ in a way that does not diminish my own sense of wholeness or authenticity.

Becoming involved with the growing community of adult Korean adoptees has also been tremendously helpful in coming to terms with my identity as an intercountry adoptee. Not long after moving to New York City, I joined Also-Known-As, a group for Korean and other intercountry adoptees here that is playing an active role in the construction of that community. In September 2001, I went to Washington, D.C. for the first international gathering of the first generation of Korean adoptees. Being at a conference with over 2,000 adult Korean adoptees was an extraordinary experience. While a few of the attendees were initially shocked by my presence – most had never met an openly transgendered person before – they soon realized that my life story as a Korean adoptee was one that they could relate to, and my gender identity has never been an issue at any of the adoptee gatherings that I have attended.

I have recently begun formally studying the Korean language in a class specifically for Korean adoptees, and while I doubt that I will ever become fluent, it is a good experience for me to learn more of the language of my ancestors.

Just as I came to reject the self-imposed label of ‘fake Korean’ in favor of an accepting myself as Korean adoptee, I also came to understand transgender as distinct form of gender identity that challenged the false constructs of ‘man/woman.’ I would eventually come to call myself a ‘male-bodied woman,’ a concept radical even within the transgender community, because I reject the assumption that the presence or absence of the penis determined my status as a man or as a woman.

My move to Queens, New York in 1997 corresponded with the end of my academic career and the beginning of my activism and advocacy work in New York as well as my coming out as an openly transgendered woman. In January 1997, I worked with other Queens activists to co-found Queens Pride House, a small lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community center in the borough. In February 1997, I joined with other queer Koreans to co-found Iban/Queer Koreans of New York. And in June 1998, I worked with other transgender activists to co-found the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA).

I now see myself as a transgendered Asian American woman with a distinct identity as a Korean adoptee. And I now feel comfortable calling the United States my home, comfortable, in fact, with the ambivalence about my adoptive homeland engendered by my personal experience of harassment and by a study of the often problematic politics of the American republic.

Korean adoptees share much in common and yet there is an enormous variation in terms of the circumstances of our adoption and upbringing each of us has a unique story to tell. My story is unusual in a number of respects, and while there are quite a few LGBT-identified Korean adoptees, few are openly transgendered and few are LGBT activists.

I have gone from having grown up in an all-white neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee and ending up in Jackson Heights, which one demographer determined is the most demographically diverse spot on earth.

If the circumstances of my adoption meant that I was torn from the country of my birth before living in it for even eight months, the trip ‘back’ to Korea in June/July 2015 brought me full circle. For the first time since leaving at the age of seven and-a-half months, I was back in the land of my birth, but even if I had had any memories of Seoul or Korea, I probably would not have recognized the country or its capital city, as completely transformed as they have been by the forced industrialization directed by Park Chung-hee. Ironically enough, half a century later, I returned to find his daughter, Park Geun-hye, in the Blue House once again, this time as the first woman elected president of the Republic of Korea.

But I returned as an adult in late middle age, as an openly transgendered 54-year-old LGBT activist. And while ten days in June were taken up with a tour for 22 Korean adoptees from the United States and one from Denmark, the second half of my stay was focused on activities related to my post-transition life in New York, including four speaking engagements. I spoke at a special meeting of Chokagbo, a new transgender advocacy project based in Seoul (and only the second ever in the history of Korea); at a meeting of Solidarity for LGBT Human Rights in Korea (Haeng Sung In); and I gave a presentation at a meeting of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea (팔레스타인평화연대) about my participation in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012. By far the biggest crowd I spoke to was at the Queer Korea Festival that preceded the Seoul Pride Parade on June 28 – a crowd that was estimated to be 35,000 strong. I had not sought out this speaking engagement, and it was an especially gratifying honor, given that I was an English-speaking Korean adoptee who had not lived in the country since leaving Korea in 1961. Afterwards, I participated in the Seoul Pride Parade, which – unlike so many pride parades in the US – was completely without corporate sponsorship, and was truly the most thrilling pride parade I have ever marched in. Rather than a corporate marketing event, which so many US pride parades have come to feel like, this one was as grassroots as they get, just members of a marginalized community marching for their rights. The fact that I as a non-Korean speaking adoptee could contribute in any significant way to the advancement of LGBT rights in the country of my birth made this the most important political moment of the entire trip and brought me full circle from the non-verbal infant I was upon my departure from the peninsula over a half century ago to the keynote speaker at the biggest event in the history of the LGBT community of Korea. What could possibly have been a more powerful indication of my having come full circle…?

Pauline Park (www.paulinepark.com) is the chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (www.transgenderrights.org).  She has written and spoken widely on issues of race and nationality, and gender identity and expression.

The post Coming Full Circle: The Journey of a Transgendered Korean Adoptee (11.7.15) appeared first on Pauline Park.

Korea 2015: return to the motherland
by Pauline Park

In June 2015, I returned to Korea for the first time since I left at the age of seven and-a-half months old; it was a momentous trip. 나는 한국에서 입양되었다 These are some photos from the month I spent in the Land of the Morning Calm. #입양 #입양인 #한국 #조선 #대한민국 #남한 #남조선 #한국말 #입양홍보

Sunday, June 14

On the eve of my flight to Korea, I visited my friend Mohammad in Brooklyn.

Mohammad made a splendid Palestinian dinner for me and for our mutual friend Ang and I played a little piano for them on the grand piano in Mohammad’s house.

Monday, June 15

I flew out of La Guardia the next morning to Dallas/Fort Worth.

I spent the night in a mini hotel at DFW — my first experience of a Japanese-style mini hotel; it was clean and comfortable and it was convenient, as I didn’t have to go out of the security perimeter of the airport; in the morning, I was ready for my flight to Korea.

Tuesday, June 16

An ill omen for the country — though fortunately not for my flight or my trip — was Donald Trump’s announcement of his presidential candidacy, which I watched on CNN while waiting for my flight to Incheon. But a good omen was something S-shaped that I will leave to the imagination of readers that I produced on the morning of my flight to Korea.

I flew out of DFW to Incheon, Korea’s largest airport; it was impossible for me to get more than just a few restless hours of sleep on the 13-hour flight, cramped as I was in coach; the saving grace was that — though I was up against the emergency exit — I didn’t have anyone in front of me on the flight.

At least I got a decent dinner on the AA flight from DFW; we were given a choice of an American-style dinner and a Korean one and I opted for the Korean.

Wednesday, June 17

Incheon’s new-ish airport impressed me with its cleanliness and efficiency.

I arrived at Incheon international airport, only to be confronted with bilingual posters in English and Korean warning of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) ‘epidemic,’ which turned out to be a hyped non-epidemic.

My first view of the city of my birth upon my return after 54 years from the patio outside Seoul Station. 서울

I took the AREX train into Seoul, arriving at Seoul Station around dusk.

I took a taxicab to the Ramada Hotel Namdaemun.

Thursday, June 18

I awoke the next morning to a spectacular panorama of Seoul as seen through the window of my room at the Ramada Hotel Namdaemun, with Seoul Station on the left.

The breakfast room at the hotel was large and airy and very woodsy.

I met two other participants in the Mosaic 2015 adult tour organized by Me & Korea which ran from June 17-28; we went out to lunch at Seoul Station and on the way back passed Namdaemun, the Great South Gate.

Namdaemun 남대문 has always held a special place in my heart: it is the only landmark in Seoul or Korea that I can distinctly remember from reading about the country of my birth in encyclopedias we had at home.

I was delighted to see Namdaemun for the first time.

I was delighted to meet Marie Frenette, a Canadian from Nova Scotia who had seen my post on Facebook about coming to Korea and was interested to meet me; after living in Korea for 9 years, she had become fluent in Korean — quite a feat for any North American with no familial connection with Korea. I remarked on the irony that I spoke the language of Marie’s ancestors (French) while she spoke that of mine…

Friday, June 19

I visited Soedaemun Prison Museum with my friend Kris; Korean nationalists were held here during the Japanese occupation and tortured and murdered. But the postwar Korean dictatorship continued to use Soedaemun to detain, torture and murder political dissidents for decades after the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945.

Saturday, June 20

Me & Korea’s Mosaic Tour began in earnest on Saturday.

After breakfast, we piled into a bus and drove to Gwanghwamun 광화문, the huge square in the center of Seoul that is where countless protests and demonstrations have taken place; there, we were greeted by an enormous statue of Sejong the Great 세종 대왕, the king who commissioned the creation of hangul 한글, the alphabet still in use today that is considered by many linguists to be among the most ingenious alphabets ever created.

I got to pretend that I was president of the Republic of Korea 대한민국 at the Cheongwadae Sarangchae 청와대사랑채 museum in Seoul 서울 한국 조선

I visited Gyeongbokgung 경복궁 — the largest of the five royal palaces in Seoul 서울 — at the beginning of my month in Korea.

It was raining so hard, the royal guard took cover under the great gate of Gwanghwamun 광화문 한국 조선 대한민국 남한 남조선

Gyeongbokgung houses a good part of the collection of the National Museum of Korea and I saw this magnificent dragon in the palace.

I saw many other fascinating works of art in the museum; perhaps the most unusual was a car once used by the royal family.

Sunday, June 21

On Sunday morning, Mosaic tour participants gathered in the lobby of the Ramadan Namdaemun.

We attended a service at the Jesus’ Love Church, featuring a rather extraordinary sermon by the Elder Pastor Kim, who told us that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as Korean adoptees but rather as warriors for Christ whose mission is to take over the United States so that it can convert the entire world to Christianity. I seriously doubt anyone in the group took the Elder Pastor Kim’s nonsense seriously either, but since the church was one of the co-sponsors of the tour, we all listened politely to his sermon. One of the two interpreters on the tour — a young progressive feminist who grew up in Korea but was by this point studying in the United States — was seriously offended by the sermon. But as for me, having been raised in a Christian fundamentalist household, I was in effect ‘inoculated’ against such nonsense and the sermon did not bother me; fortunately, the Elder Pastor Kim did not get into homophobic or transphobic discourse.

And thankfully,  the sermon was only half an hour long (even if it seemed much longer), and after the service, some of us were paired with ‘host families,’ others with ‘host buddies.’ I met my two host buddies, the wonderful Tae-kyung and Sinhae, and we saw much of Seoul together, including Changyecheon stream, one of the most delightful places in the city. The original plan for the members of the tour was to stay overnight with a host family from the church, but apparently after some internal discussion, the organizers quite prudently decided that pairing me with host buddies not associated with the fundamentalist Jesus Love church would make sense for the only openly transgendered or queer member of the motherland tour group.

Tae-kyung and Sinhae introduced me to the delights of Cheonggyecheon #청계천; the stream flows once again through the heart of Seoul as it did before being covered in concrete for 45 years; it’s a rare bit of nature in Korea’s capital 서울

We also visited Deoksugung Palace 덕수궁, one of the five royal palaces in Seoul 서울. I had been there the day before, but it was pouring rain on Saturday; on Sunday, it was gloriously sunny and the light brought out the wonderful yellow color on the side of the throne room building.

I was enchanted by the Joseon dynasty era architecture of the palace.

And it was sweet of Taekyung and Sinhae to be so patient with my touristy curiosity, Taekyung taking a number of shots of me in front of one of the pavilions.

Deoksugung 덕수궁 is the second largest of the five royal palaces but isn’t so much a single building as with most European palaces but rather a series of pavilions, this one being one of the largest and most prominent.

 

 

Monday, June 22

In the morning, I went with two other adoptees from the Mosaic tour and one of the interpreters to meet with staff at Social Welfare Services. Afterwards, we went out for lunch and I really loved the bibimbap that I had along with many other dishes I shared.

In the evening, participants in the Mosaic tour took a cruise on the Han River.

One part of a bridge on the river was spouting water from colored lights, which looked like the colors of the rainbow flag. It was a hot and humid evening, but the breeze on the river was wonderfully cooling.

And the nighttime views of Seoul were dazzling.

Tuesday, June 23

Around midday, Mosaic tour participants served lunch to elderly Koreans at a soup kitchen near Seoul station, which is the area where many of the city’s homeless congregate.

천 사 가 되 어 주 서ㅣ 요

Afterwards, we took a bus down to Gyeongju (Kyongju) in the southeast.

Cheomseongdae Observatory 첨성대 (瞻星臺) is one of the oldest surviving structures in Korea. Built in 647 during the reign of Queen Seondeok of the Silla kingdom, Cheomseongdae  was used as an astronomical observatory.

Gyeongju (Kyongju)경주 was the capital of the ancient Silla kingdom during the Three Kingdoms period and it was fascinating to visit.

Mosaic participants took a group shot at Cheomseongdae Observatory.

Dongung Palace 동궁과 & Anapji Pond 안압지.

Hanhwa Resort in Gyeongju was a nice place to stay overnight, but surprisingly lacked wi-fi in the rooms and non-Korean TV stations.

Wednesday, June 24

National Museum

The Mosaic tour wended its way to Pohang 포항 in North Gyeongsang 경상북도 where we dipped our feet into the waters of the East Sea (Dong Hae) — Koreans don’t call it the ‘Sea of Japan’~!

The waters off Pohang are so clear you can see the sea floor and all of the flora and fauna in the ocean.

I dipped my feet in the Donhae.

The pier at Pohang

Jukdo market in Pohang was huge and fascinating.

Jukdo market in Pohang had live octopus and fish of every kind.

Live octopus on display in Judo market made for a visual feast.

Thursday, June 25

In the morning, Mosaic tour participants visited the Gyeongju National Museum, which has an enormous collection of Korean art and artifacts.

The most impressive artifact was a crown from the Silla kingdom.

We then lunched at Choi’s Bobsang before visiting the Gyochon Traditional Village (경주 교촌마을) on the southern edge of Gyeongju.

Three ‘ajumma’ taught us traditional Korean tea service

The biggest challenge was actually sitting on the floor cross legged.

Mosaic tour participants were instructed in traditional tea service and taught how to sing “Arirang,” the most famous of all Korean folk songs — though I had already learned the song before going to Korea.

We had Korean archery lessons as well.

On the way back to Seoul, we stopped at a rest stop for dinner and I had ttangcho ramyeon, a wonderfully hot and spicy noodle dish.

Friday, June 26

On the morning of the last full day of the Mosaic tour, participants scaled Naksan fortress wall.

In the afternoon, I took the Seoul subway with Sina Lee and Jacob Bowman to Insadong, a popular shopping area that is known for offering more traditional items than Myeongdong.

Insadong is a popular shopping district in Seoul.

Mosaic tour dinner

Sunday, June 28

I had a small but perfectly serviceable room at the Itaewon Inn for 10 days and nights.

The Queer Korea Festival drew a crowd estimated at 35,000, making it the largest event in the history of the LGBT community of Korea.

Christian fundamentalists tried to block the event from going forward and then tried to drown it out with loud noise but abjectly failed in that goal.

This was the first Queer Korea festival in Seoul City Hall Plaza  in the heart of the city.

At the festival, a young man confronted a Christian fundamentalist — though they were speaking in Korean, so I couldn’t understand what they were saying; but I guessed that the young man was gay and was challenging the minister’s homophobia.

Christian fundamentalists had tried to stop the Queer Korea Festival, but organizers were successful in challenging them in court.

I was surprised and delighted to see a big banner declaring “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid — Free Palestine.” 

I was invited to keynote the Queer Korea Festival (퀴어문화축제 & 퍼레이드).

Chogakbo is a new transgender advocacy project and had a float in the Seoul Pride Parade.

Seoul Pride 2015 was the most exciting pride parade I’ve ever been in; there were no pandering politicians and no corporate sponsorship, just ordinary LGBT people marching for their rights.

The mayor of Seoul put 3,000 police officers on the ground to guard participants in the Queer Korea Festival and Seoul Pride Parade.

Seoul Pride drew thousands of LGBT Koreans and allies to march for LGBT rights.

Monday, June 29

On Monday, June 29, Larry Tung and I met with Bong Youngshik and Kim Jiyoon at the Asan Institute to discuss their report, “Over the Rainbow: Public Attitude Toward LGBT in South Korea,” on LGBT rights and discrimination in Korea. In the afternoon, we met with a Korean transgender activist.

I saw Pororo the Little Penguin 뽀롱뽀롱 뽀로로 & his friends in the Seoul 서울 subway; my favorite is Eddy 에디 the fox 여우

Tuesday, June 30

Larry Tung and I explored the popular shopping district of Myeongdong on June 30 and I commented on how very ‘metrosexual’ young Korean men were, especially in the promotional posters in Myeongdong, in which the young men are very boyish, some even quite girlish to an American eye.

Larry and I were amused by the cute products on the shelves in stores in  Myeongdong.

Myeongdong cut-outs of a Korean boy band with a K-Pop look, which seems to be a dominant influence among young Koreans in Seoul.

At Daeksugong palace, Larry and I watched the changing of the guard; I was absolutely enchanted by the bright yellow garb of some of the guardsmen, with the feathers on their Joseon (Choson) dynasty era style hats and their traditional Korean flute playing.

In the evening, we passed by Gwanghwamun, the great entrance gate to Gyeongbokkung, the main royal palace and the largest of the five royal palaces in Seoul.

King Sejong commissioned the creation of the Korean alphabet and is the most revered of all Korea’s kings.

July 1

I was invited to speak at a press conference at the Turkish consulate in Seoul protesting the Istanbul police violence against participants in the Istanbul Pride Parade.

July 3

In the morning, Larry Tung and I went to the Social Welfare Services office to film in front of the rock outside the SWS office. 입양인 입양인의 입양인이 입양정보 입양기록 입양기록을

In the afternoon, I went with Minyoung Kim to a local police precinct to register as an adoptee; though nothing came of it, I appreciated her going out of her way to make me accessible to any birth family who could be searching for me.

I had some noodles before my speaking engagement in the evening.

In the evening, I was invited to speak at a meeting of  Solidarity for LGBT Human Rights of Korea (Haeng Seong In) (행동하는성소수자인권연대) about my LGBT activism.

I talked about what might be helpful for queer activists in Korea as they advocate for equality for LGBT Koreans. I was delighted to speak to a full room of community members and I was told that a turnout of more than 50 people was a large turnout for the 행동하는성소수자인권연대는.

The organization had created a poster to announce my speaking engagement:

July 4

I spent the Fourth of July in the land of my birth, traveling from the city of my birth to Busan, the second largest city in Korea, with Larry Tung 부산

On the way, we passed through Namdaemun, the Great South Gate, which has always been for me the iconic image of the city of my birth.

In the arch of the great gate there’s a wonderful dragon painted on the wood frame of the inside of the arch (7.4.15) 남대문

Larry and I bought tickets for Busan at Seoul Station.

We visited Daegaksa 대각사 Temple (Nampo-dong) near Busan Tower.

The reclining Buddha was striking.

Larry and I went up Busan Tower and took in the spectacular view of the harbor and the city.

Afterwards, we went to Lotte Mall, where we saw everything on sale from pianos to Japanese-style toilet seats.

July 5

We visited the Haedong Yonggungsa Temple 해동 용궁사 outside of Busan 부산, one of the most famous Buddhist temples in Korea.

I found some lucky pigs on the grounds of the temple.

I love pigs and the fact that they are considered symbols of good fortune in traditional Korean mythology.

After touring the temple site, Larry and I visited Haeundae 해운대해수욕장 

Haeundae 해운대해수욕장 outside of Busan 부산, one of South Korea’s most famous beaches One of South Korea’s most famous beaches

After getting back into Busan, we visited Shinsegae, which claims to be the largest department store in the world.

Zooraji is a children’s playground on the top floor complete with a carousel and dinosaurs.

July 6

I joined friends in strolling through Naru Park in Songpa-gu 송파구 in Seoul 서울 on a hot and humid day.

And we

I walked through the neighborhood of Mapo-gu, parts of which looked like what Seoul was before Park Chung-hee’s crash industrialization.

July 7

I gave a presentation on the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine (Jan. 2012) at a meeting of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea 팔레스타인평화연대

After which they wrote:

오늘 폴린 박 토크 굉장했습니다. 팔레스타인연대운동과 성소수자 운동의 접점을 찾은 이 기분…! 앞으로 만들어나갈 연대가 기대됩니다. 오늘 후기와 녹화 영상도 곧 공유하겠습니다. 온오프로 함께 해 주신 분들 정말 고맙습니다! (7.6.15)The

The

The

The

July 7

I had breakfast with Sina in Itaewon.

It was wonderful to see Sina and to reflect on the Mosaic Tour that we’d participated in together.

July 8

I was delighted to have Marie’s companionship as we took the train to the end of the #1 line where we crossed a busy intersection in downtown Uijeongbu 의정부시 to get to the 무당 house 巫堂

Uijeongbu 의정부시 — like the rest of Gyeonggi Province 경기도 — is now part of the Seoul metropolitan area.

Uijeongbu 의정부시: the 신 altar in the 무당 house 巫堂

Uijeongbu 의정부시: inside the 무당 house 巫堂

Uijeongbu 의정부시: Marie and me outside the 무당 house 巫堂

Uijeongbu 의정부시

Uijeongbu 의정부시

July 9

I I had lunch with Hyong-Jin, Myunghwa & 나 양 in Itaewon #이태원 #서울

July 10

I visited Changdeokgung 창덕궁 with my friend Kris.

One of the five royal palaces in Seoul, Changdeokgung is a UNESCO World Heritage site and famous for its celebrated Biwon 비원 — the ‘Secret Garden’ that was intended for sole use of the king and the royal family.

Seoul: a small gate in the Piwon — the Secret Garden of the Changdeokgung (7.10.15)

July 11

Korean celadon 청자 in the National Museum of Korea 한국 조선 in Seoul 서울.

I came across this boddhisattva.

July 5

July 6

I met up with two Korean friends in Seoul and we strolled around Seokchon Lake Park 석촌호수공원 coming across a World Wildlife Fund promo with plastic pandas.

Strolling around Seokchon Lake Park 석촌호수공원 we came across this Korean flag made out of chrysanthemum flowers.

In the evening, I went to Mapo-gu Café for a meeting of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea 팔레스타인평화연대 where I gave a presentation on my participation in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in Jan. 2012 to members of the group.

Afterwards, I went out to dinner with members of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea 팔레스타인평화연대.

The poster for my presentation to members of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea 팔레스타인평화연대 on my participation in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine at their July 7 meeting (7.9.15)

July 8

I met up with Hyong-jin, Myunghwa & Kim Na-young in Itaewon for lunch.

I had had haemul pajeon (seafood scallion pancake) for dinner in Seoul.

I was amused by the fact that the Seoul Metro calls its subway currency ‘T money.’

I took 6,686 photos during 30 days in Korea — 2,658 with my iPad & 4,028 with my digital camera —  including 625 on the first memory card, 2,430 on the second card & 973 on the third. That compares with 1,996 photos that I took in 7 days in Paris in May, which averaged 287 photos per day, vs. 222.9 photos per day on average in Korea. So the Paris trip exceeded Korea for the most photos taken per day on average in any given trip, but the Korea trip topped the charts for the total number of photos taken on any trip until my five weeks in Europe in 2017, during which I took over 30,000 photos.

I arrived safely home after an uneventful three-hour flight from Dallas, following a more than 12-hour flight from Incheon, less than 12 hours short of 30 full days since leaving home on the biggest trip of my life (so far, at least). My month in Korea was the longest, most exhausting but most productive & most fun trip of my life and the most important since the trip that brought me to the land of my youth from the land of my birth so many years ago.

바울인 박
박 바울인

The post Korea 2015: return to the motherland appeared first on Pauline Park.

Queer Korea Festival speech & Seoul Pride Parade 2015 (6.28.15)
(퀴어문화축제 & 퍼레이드)

I’m Pauline Park and I’m honored to have been invited to speak to you today. I would like to thank the march organizers for the invitation and especially Kahye and Candy from the Queer Korea Festival and I would like to thank you all for giving me the opportunity to address you as the LGBT community in Korea marks an important milestone — not merely the celebration of LGBT pride but also the victory over those reactionary forces that tried to prevent this event from taking place at all.

But movements are like that: one step backward, two steps forward. I speak from personal experience, having been involved with LGBT activism for 21 years now. If I had had a child the year I first became involved with LGBT activism, he/she would be old enough to legally drink in New York state. And speaking of which, sadly, our campaign for a transgender rights law in New York state is still stalled in the New York State Senate 13 years after it was first introduced.

But the good news is that we have made tremendous progress in the United States since I first became involved with activism back in 1994, including enactment of the transgender rights law by the New York City Council in 2002 after a successful campaign that I led through the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA).

Our most spectacular victory came earlier this week, when the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality, guaranteeing same-sex marriage rights in all 50 states. It is my sincerest hope that the next time I return to Korea that all of my Korean brothers and sisters will enjoy the same right to marriage.

But of course, both here as well as in the US, there are so many other items on the community’s agenda that deserve just as much attention as marriage. Youth and elders, police and criminal justice system reform, bullying and bias-based harassment in school, health care access, immigration, etc., etc. There is so much more work to be done, but we’re making progress in the US just as here in Korea. And it thrills me to see the LGBT community come of age in the country of my birth. And what a truly great honor it is to address you on the occasion of my first return to Korea since I left here at the age of seven months.

Even if I had had an memories from back then, I would not be able to recognize the city of my birth after half a century of dramatic change. When I left here, it wasn’t long after the popular uprising that overthrew Rhee Syngman and it’s even possible that my birth father participated in that revolution. So perhaps I was born to make revolution.

Less than a month after I left Korea, Park Chung-hee came to power in a coup d’etat. I ronic that I return for the first time in 54 years only to find his daughter living in the Blue House. So maybe there’s another agenda item for change to consider. We need fewer princesses and more queens in power. We also need someone more willing to support the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people and less willing to be complicit in the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. And the LGBT movement — which is becoming more global by the day — needs to embrace a global agenda of social justice for all rather than confining itself to a limited agenda of legal rights for some.

And Koreans need to embrace their LGBT brothers and sisters to make Korea truly a national family and home for all. So my message to the people beating drums out there to protest this event is that they should be beating drums for freedom and not for oppression for acceptance and not prejudice. They worship a God I don’t recognize — a judgmental, homophobic and transgenderphobic God who is the opposite of the Gold of love I know. Their hate may be strong, but our love is stronger, and love will ultimately vanquish hate. I t is my hope that the next time I come to this event, the ajima in hanboks waving their Bibles at us and beating their drums will be joining us to celebrate LGBT pride. And it is my hope that on my next visit to Korea, the  Seould city government and the National Assembly will have enacted LGBT rights legislation protecting everyone from discrimination. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has said, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. Thank you. Kamsamnida.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA).

You can watch a video of this speech on YouTube as well as Cory May’s video of the speech and the festival and pride parade.

Korean translation by Joanne Lee:

콜린 박입니다.

이자리에 서게 되어 영광입니다 기획단 여러분께 감사인사를 드리며 특히 캔디와 가혜님께 감사드립니다

제가 여기서 발언하게되어서 기쁘고 이 축제는 한국의 LGBT 여러분에게 중요한 이정표입니다

LGBT 자부심 뿐만 아니라 반대하는 사람들에 대한 승리라고 봅니다

하지만 운동은 그렇습니다 한걸음 뒤로 가면 두발자국 앞으로 가는 것입니다

제 경험을 토대로 말씀드리면 LGBT운동에 21년간 몸담고 있습니다

제가 처음 LGBT 단체에 몸 담았을 때 아이가 있었다면 그 아이는 뉴욕주에서  합법적으로 술을 마실 수 있는 나이가 되었을 것입니다

하지만 슬프게도 뉴욕주의 트렌스젠더 인권법은 여전히 13년 전 트렌스젠더 인권법이 소개됐을 때부터 지금까지 제자리입니다. 하지만 좋은 소식은 제가 처음 활동에 몸담기 시작한 1993에 비해 엄청난 진전이 있다는 겁니다.

가장 놀라운 성과는 이번 주에 일어났죠. 바로 미국연방대법원이 동성결혼에 합헌이라는 역사적 결정을 내린 것입니다.

제가 다시 한국에 돌아오게 되면 꼭 한국의 모든 분들도 같은 권리를 누릴 수 있었으면 좋겠습니다.

하지만 동성결혼만큼 주목 받아야 할 사회적 이슈가 아직 많이 있습니다.

우리의 청소년들과 형사정의체제개혁, 학원폭력, 편견과 차별, 의료법 이민자 문제 등이 그 예입니다.

한국과 같이 미국도 앞으로 나아가고 있고 제가 태어난 이곳에서의 LGBT커뮤니티 진전을 보게 되어 기쁩니다.

제가 이곳을 떠났을 때는 이승만 정권이 끝났을 때였고, 아마 저의 친구도 이승만 정권에 저항하기 위해서 싸웠을 겁니다.

그래서 제게도 그런 저항의 피가 흐르고 있는지도 모릅니다.

그 후에 박정희 전 대통령이 쿠데타를 일으켜 정권을 장악하였고, 아이러니하게도 54년이 흐른 후 한국에 돌아왔더니 그의 딸 박근혜가 정권을 이끌고 있었습니다.

지금 이 사회는 공주님들보다 리더십 있는 여왕들이 더 필요합니다.

또한 팔레스타인 이슈에서 많은 관심이 필요합니다. 팔레스타인 땅에 이스라엘이 점령하고 있는 것에 더 많은 사람들의 비판의 목소리를 해야한다고 생각합니다

LGBT운동 또한 단순히 어떤 하나의  아젠데에 묶여있는 것이 아닌 동성혼 합법화와 같은 다양한 이슈에 집중할 필요가 있다고 생각합니다.

여기 계신 모든 분들도 다같이 앞장섰으면 좋겠습니다.

지금 저 멀리서 북을 두드리며 이 행사에 반대의 목소리를 내고 있는 사람들을 보십시오.

그들은 내가 알지 못하는 신을 추앙하며 포비아적이고 혐오로 가득 찬 메세지가 하나님의 메세지라고 외치고 있습니다.

저들의 메세지는 강렬하지만 저희의 사랑이 훨씬 위대하고 강력합니다

그리고 결국 저들의 혐오는 우리의 사랑으로 정복되고 말 것입니다.

제가 다음에 이 행사를 다시 찾게 되면 지금 한복을 입고 북을 두드리는 저분들이 LGBT를 응원하고 있으면 좋겠습니다.

한국 정부가 LGBT 인권을 보장한 법안을 발의했으면 좋겠습니다.

예전 마틴 루터 킹이 연설했듯이 역사는 길지 모르지만 그 혼은 정의의 방향으로 굽어있다고 했습니다.

감사합니다.

The post Queer Korea Festival speech & Seoul Pride 2015 (6.28.15) appeared first on Pauline Park.