ESPA goes out with a whimper not the bang of having passed GENDA
by Pauline Park

On Dec. 12, the Empire State Pride Agenda abruptly announced it would be shutting down the Pride Agenda — which so many people over the years have called ‘ESPA’ — and its Foundation, though its political action committee will apparently remain active.

The announcement was reported by media outlets from the New York Times (“Empire State Pride Agenda to Disband, Citing Fulfillment of Mission,” 12.12.15) to Gay City News to PlanetTransgender.com. This is big news for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, because ESPA is the only statewide LGBT advocacy organization in New York and widely viewed as its voice, especially by members of the state legislature. In its Dec. 12 press release, ESPA declared,

The Boards’ decision comes on the heels of securing the Pride Agenda’s top remaining policy priority — protecting transgender New Yorkers from discrimination in housing, employment, credit, education and public accommodations — in the form of new regulations announced in partnership with Governor Andrew M. Cuomo at the organization’s Fall Dinner on October 22…

Of course, an executive order and even a state Division of Human Rights regulation can be rescinded by any of Cuomo’s successors as governor, so it does not have the force of an enacted statute law, and many saw this as a George W. Bush ‘mission accomplished’ moment, in particular because the Pride Agenda is closing shop without having gotten the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) through the state Senate and signed into law.

But Norman C. Simon, chair of the Pride Agenda board and co-chair of the Foundation, responded to criticism of the decision and the announcement of it by telling Gay City News,

We did not and are not declaring mission accomplished on LGBT equality. What we are saying is that our top priorities have been completed, and that the remaining work that needs to be done we will transition to other organizations in the coming months in an orderly process (Paul Schindler, “ESPA Leadership Pushes Back on Charge They’ve Declared ‘Mission Accomplished’,” Gay City News, 12.13.15).

In his story for Gay City News, Paul Schindler wrote, “Matt Foreman focused his criticism both on the way the Pride Agenda reached its decision and on the message the announcement of that decision sent,” quoting the former executive director as saying,

There was zero consultation with folks who spent their lives building the Pride Agenda. If they are going to make a decision of that magnitude, there has to be a consultative function. They need to talk to the stakeholders, to the communities around the state… This is an abrogation of a fundamental obligation that an organization has to its constituency… And, it plays into the national narrative that the job is done.

But the same could be said of ESPA’s decision to endorse Cuomo’s executive order without any consultation even with the coalition attempting to advance GENDA in the state Senate. I have been involved with what originally was called the GENDA Coalition from the beginning, far longer than all of the current ESPA staff, and I represented the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) in that coalition from its formation, and at no time was there even a conference call to discuss the executive order, which will have the effect of undermining any remaining efforts to push GENDA through the Senate. Why would the Republican majority in the Senate feel pressured to pass GENDA when ESPA and the governor are both touting the executive order/regulation as providing sweeping protections for transgendered people in the state? And the lack of even the most rudimentary consultation on the decision to endorse the governor’s executive action is why it feels to me like a backroom deal cut between ESPA and the governor rather than a genuinely community-driven policy victory. Hence the decision to settle for an executive order rather than to demand that the governor use his power and influence to push GENDA through the Senate — in which Republicans maintain a majority in large part due to Cuomo’s efforts to keep the Senate in Republican hands — is not only substantively questionable but really represents a betrayal of the transgender community and the process through which the GENDA coalition was working to achieve a legislative remedy to the lack of protection from discrimination based on gender identity or expression in state law.

The most negative reactions to the news of the shutdown of the two most important parts of the Empire State Pride Agenda empire have focused on the organization’s abandonment of its transgender legislative agenda, Kelli Anne Busey writing,

Realizing the trans community’s worst fears, the New York Empire State Pride Agenda announced the shocking news Saturday that they are ceasing operations after 25 years of operations…  [executive director Nathan] Schaefer just said the job isn’t finished without saying transgender and every fucking person in the room knows that’s what he’s eluding to. (it’s their little secret) They’ll just walk. So gay New Yorkers will spend money on making sure the laws protecting them aren’t eroded but will throw the T under the bus. Nice. (Kelli Anne Busey, Empire State Pride Agenda Disbands, Screwing NY Transgender People,” Planet Transgender, 12.13.15)

On Twitter, a number of people ‘tweeted’ critical comments:

This is what superficial justice looks like: “Empire State Pride Agenda to Disband, Citing Fulfillment Mission” (Jen Jack Gieseking @jgieseking, 12.13.15)

“We got marriage equality our work is done.” “What about trans equality, we aren’t done?” “Well we are!” (Mia Marie Macy @Miamariemacy, 12.13.15)

The closure of NYC’s @prideagenda is a sad indictment of legal activism. Marriage equality does not heal all wounds. (Senthorun Raj @senthorun, 12.13.15)

I have worked with every executive director and deputy director of the Pride Agenda from 1998 onwards as well as every transgender community organizer and every coordinator of the New York State LGBT Health & Human Services Network, which Tim Sweeney founded when he was deputy director of the Pride Agenda and in which I represented Queens Pride House (the only LGBT community center in the borough of Queens), so I actually know ESPA’s history better than the current members of the board and staff. And . So my perspective is the long view, informed by my experience leading the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002, in partnership with Tim Sweeney and Matt Foreman and other ESPA staff; it is also informed by my participation in the steering committee of the coalition that led the campaign for the New York State Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), enacted in 2011.

And so what I would like to do is offer an assessment of the Pride Agenda’s record from 1998 to 2015 as informed by 17 years of working with the organization. That relationship goes back to the founding of NYAGRA in 1998 and our very first meeting with another organization; several co-founding members went to the Pride Agenda’s old office on Hudson Street. In the cramped office in the West Village, we met with Tim Sweeney, then deputy director, to seek ESPA’s support for inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) then pending in the Republican-controlled state Senate after having already passed the Democrat-controlled Assembly; we also sought Pride Agenda support for transgender inclusion in the hate crimes bill, which had also passed the Assembly and was also stalled in the Senate. Tim Sweeney told us that NYAGRA should join the state hate crimes bill coalition if we wanted to have gender identity and expression added to the hate crimes bill; he also told us that ESPA was not prepared to add gender identity and expression to SONDA but that the Pride Agenda would be willing to work with us on a local transgender rights bill. As a result of that collaboration, we launched the campaign for the bill that would eventually pass the City Council in April 2002 and be signed into law later that month.

It is important to recognize that the Empire State Pride Agenda was a self-defined ‘lesbian and gay’ organization when we met with ESPA staff in November 1998; transgender simply was not a part of the organization’s mission and there was no indication that they had even considered including transgendered people in their work. NYAGRA was the first transgender advocacy organization in the city or the state, and its formation and our pressing ESPA on transgender inclusion in pending state legislation is what prompted the Pride Agenda to move toward transgender inclusion in its work.

Any assessment of the Empire State Pride Agenda has to focus primarily on legislation, because that is where the organization has made its mark, along with the founding of the Network and the funding that it was able to garner for the over 60 LGBT-specific social service providers in the state. The major legislation that ESPA played a role in getting enacted since 2000 have included the state hate crimes law (2000), SONDA (2002), DASA (2011), and marriage equality. ESPA also helped with the campaign for the New York City Dignity in All Schools Act (NYC DASA), enacted by the City Council in 2004 over Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s veto, though the organization didn’t play the leading role with that legislative campaign as it did with the aforementioned state bills.

The first and best-known charge of transgender exclusion leveled against ESPA is also the most misunderstood; it is often thought that the Pride Agenda stripped gender identity and expression from SONDA so that it could be pushed through the Senate in December 2002; but in fact, transgender-specific terms were never in SONDA; the more mundane truth is that ESPA simply refused to bow to pressure from various parties to add gender and expression to the bill when it became viable in June 2001 when Gov. George Pataki first expressed openness to supporting it. As executive director of the Pride Agenda, Matt Foreman cut the deal that secured passage of SONDA: in exchange for ESPA’s endorsement of Pataki for a third term as governor, Senate majority leader Joe Bruno allowed a floor vote on SONDA in December, with the bill passing with a majority of Democrats and a minority of Republicans before being signed into law by Pataki.

GENDA was introduce the next year and has since passed the Assembly several times but never the Senate, where it was even defeated in a vote in committee in 2011. The bill that did finally pass the Senate in that year was the Dignity for All Students Act, the first and so far only explicitly transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by the state legislature and signed into law. But the history of DASA does not reflect unqualified support for transgender inclusion on ESPA’s part. When Moonhawk River Stone was co-chair of NYAGRA with me, we were twice approached by Alan Van Capelle, then executive director of the Pride Agenda, about a possible compromise that could satisfy the Republican Senate leadership sufficiently to allow the bill to come up for a vote in the Senate. The first was an overture from the Senate leadership that entailed stripping gender identity and expression from the bill altogether; the second a proposal by Kevin Jennings, then executive director of the Gay Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) to water down the language of the Dignity bill to remove the definition of gender, which included identity and expression, and instead put ‘identity and expression of’ in front of the list of characteristics in the bill; the dubious language had never been tested in any court or even enacted by any state language. Alan Van Capelle convened a small group of transgender activists, hoping I am quite certain that we would all go along with the dubious proposal; but Hawk Stone and I stood firm and refused to put NYAGRA’s imprimatur on it. After these two overtures were deflected, the coalition continued to work on the bill, even after the lead sponsor in the Senate, openly gay Sen. Thomas K. Duane, completely lost interest in his own bill; Dignity did eventually pass the Senate in June 2010, ironically enough as a kind of consolation prize to the LGBT community for the Senate’s rejection of the marriage equality bill that would eventually pass a year later, in June 2011.

As for the marriage equality legislation itself, on the one hand, it is certainly true that it ultimately redounded to the benefit of transgendered New Yorkers as well as non-transgendered gay and lesbian New Yorkers; but many felt that those who would be the most immediate beneficiaries of same-sex marriage recognition in New York would be the relatively more privileged members of the LGBT community, including wealthy gay white Manhattan professionals who — just as Andrew Cuomo no doubt calculated they would — opened up their checkbooks to make donations not only to ESPA but also to Cuomo for his 2014 re-election campaign. The most deleterious effect of the drive for marriage legislation by ESPA and Cuomo as well as marriage organizations such as Freedom to Marry and Marriage Equality-New York was that marriage came to dominate discussions of LGBT issues in the state legislature and coverage of the LGBT community in the media for most of the decade that preceded passage of the marriage equality bill, to the detriment of discussion of virtually anything else. I can remember one media interview in which I attempted to discuss GENDA and DASA with a reporter who seemed to insist that marriage was the most important issue facing the LGBT community and misquoted me to that effect in her write-up, despite my having said the opposite. Because of the enormous media attention on marriage, even Tom Duane, the lead sponsor of both GENDA and DASA, lost interest in those bills and let them languish. Nor did ESPA do anything effective to pressure the Democrats when they were briefly in control of the Senate from January through mid-June 2011 to bring GENDA to the floor for a vote, when it would almost certainly have passed.

The Empire State Pride Agenda Foundation honored Christine Quinn and Louis Bradbury at its annual fall dinner in October 2012, which was a disgraceful political act intended to ingratiate the organization with the Council Speaker when she was preparing to run for mayor; the press release announcing the honorees declared, as Council Speaker, “she was at the helm of some of our community’s most historic victories, including ensuring dignity and protections against bullying for all students, and New York’s momentous marriage victory in 2011.”  Chris Quinn had little if anything to do with the marriage bill passing — the Speaker of the New York City Council has no authority in the state Senate — and she did nothing but sign her name to the New York City Dignity in All Schools (NYC DASA) bill as a co-sponsor; I was on the NYC DASA Coalition steering committee and Chris Quinn didn’t lift a finger to help us get the bill passed, which actually passed during Gifford Miller’s speakership, not Quinn’s; in fact, after NYC DASA was enacted, she conspired with Mayor Bloomberg to block its implementation by the NYC Department of Education (NYC DoE); so to give her credit for NYC DASA’s enactment is doubly false. The same ESPA release asserted of Bradbury, “As Chair of the Board of the Empire State Pride Agenda, which under his leadership helped to secure passage of The Dignity for All Students Act.” I was on the steering committee of the New York State DASA Coalition and Louis Bradbury had zero involvement with that effort; the bill finally passed the New York State Senate when he was chair of the ESPA board, but enactment had nothing to do with him, and it was clear to me that he was just using his position as chair for yet further self-aggrandizement after he fired Ross Levi — ESPA’s best executive director, in my view — back in March 2012 in a sordid power struggle initiated by Bradbury that significantly undermined the organization’s credibility. Truth does not come from falsity and honoring the dishonorable only dishonors the LGBT community that the Pride Agenda claimed to represent; honoring Chris Quinn and Louis Bradbury by making false claims about their achievements was a disgraceful act.

The manner of one’s passing says a great deal about an individual and I think the same is true of an organization. Organizations die just like individuals, and the rather abrupt, almost hasty manner of ESPA’s passing is telling. Just as the Pride Agenda consulted with no one — not even the coalition working to advance GENDA — when it cut a deal with Gov. Cuomo to endorse his executive order on transgender discrimination and give him a platform at its annual fall dinner in October 2015, so the boards of the Pride Agenda and its Foundation consulted with no one, not even former board and staff members, on the decision to close their doors. Norman Simon’s talk about an ‘orderly process’ of winding down and collaboration with other organizations to try to parcel out its current work seems to mask something quite disorderly. Because of the secretive nature of ESPA deliberations, it would likely be impossible to get confirmation of my suspicions, but I suspect that the board voted to shut down operations for the very mundane reason that ESPA and even its Foundation were no longer financially viable operations. As Gay City News reported,

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) and served as executive director of Queens Pride House from 2012-15; she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and served on the steering committee of the coalition that led the campaign for the New York State Dignity for All Students Act that was enacted in 2011.

The post ESPA goes out with a whimper without having passed GENDA 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.

TRANSGENDER
Tragic Trans? Nope!

The American series “Transparent” makes the subject gender identity now also popular in Germany. In America, the debate is far more. A visit to the transgender center in Queens, New York.
By Claudia Steinberg
Die Zeit
9 April 2015

A rainbow flag between Isabel’s Hair Salon and the mini supermarket shows the way to Pride House: the center for queers and transsexuals on 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. There sits on voluminous sofas and office chairs a group of transsexuals, lesbians and bisexuals. The atmosphere is relaxed. Until a woman of indeterminate age dressed in black with a glamorous Chinese shawl draped around her shoulders, takes her place. Pauline Park is the founder and director of Pride House. The group discussion includes dramatic tales of family disputes and unease with their assigned gender identity that feels wrong.

Everyone has known for a long time about Laura’s attempted suicide. Gene reported on the visit of his beloved grandmother from China and how she did not understand the transformation of her granddaughter into a boy and the difficulty she was having accepting his new gender identity. Dylan is computer programmer and longs for acceptance from his ex-wife and his children as he contemplates his transition. June wants to find a new job as a woman, but her doctorate and all her excellent work experience is under her male name.

Since the debates of the 1970s, gays have been able to integrate into the mainstream, leaving transgendered  individuals as an exotic community of outsiders. Their stories of redemption still have entertainment value in a way that the story of a gay couple with a dog and a house in the suburbs has lost. Meanwhile transgender has become the new hot topic, even among the general public, as a civil rights issue, as glamor factor, as a television series. In universities, transgender is challenging gender boundaries under the flag of queer studies. In October of last year, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called for the ability to change one’s gender on birth certificates without sex reassignment surgery. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has demanded that health insurance companies pay for sex change operations. The New York City jail, Rikers Island, one of the largest prisons in the world, set up a special department for transsexual inmates because prisons are dangerous places where they often have to endure violence and sexual attacks. Ten years ago a film like “TransAmerica” – in which heroine Bree transitions from man to woman – was still exceptional. Beginning this week, you can go to Amazon.com to find a German-language version of the series “Transparent” (as in, a parent who is transsexual); it has already won a Golden Globe award and has a good chance of attaining cult status.

The writer and director of “Transparent,” Jill Soloway, was inspired by the gender metamorphosis of her own father to create a funny and empathetic call for gender freedom: As Mort’s three daughters are grown up, he risks his coming-out and suddenly comes through the door as a woman with a long hair, in high heels and in a pretty dress. The astonishment is great, especially since Papa Mort surprises his daughter in an intimate embrace with her girlfriend. The series celebrates not just “the birth of a new mother from the female I of the Father,” but also “boygirl, girlboy, macho princess and officer slutty sweet bear,” encouraging them to affirm the identity of their choice. With this anti-dualistic conception, Soloway has wiped away the stereotype of the tragic tranny, the audience of millions demonstrating the possibilities of bold self-determination.

Pauline Park has situated her Pride House in one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world: In the school kitty corner, 84 languages are spoken. At Pride House, there are clients from Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines. Each year, the site provides approximately 6,000 interactions with residents from throughout Queens, New York’s second largest borough in population. Pride House has a database of lawyers and doctors accumulated over the course of two decades from whom transsexuals can hope for respectful behavior, working with psychotherapists or psychiatrists together. Immigration and health care are the most important issues. Pride House provides HIV tests, distributes 50,000 condoms a month, and helps homeless clients to find accommodation. “Transsexual teens often end up on the street,” says Park.

Pauline Park’s compassion for people like Laura or Gene is based on her own complicated biography. In 1960, American adoptive parents took two malnourished twins from Seoul. The boys were only eight months old and were the only non-white children in their elementary school. They found themselves in a Christian fundamentalist Republican family. In the first semester of her philosophy degree at the University of Wisconsin, to Park came out as gay. But that was only half the story. The other half came to light when Park took a scholarship to London and there increasingly appeared as a woman. She calls it the most liberating experience of her lives: “For the first time, I presented myself as I saw myself.” Finally, there was her reading of Michel Foucault, through which Park freed herself from the burden of supposedly inauthentic Korean identity and the sex/gender binary, unmasked as a social construct. “I started to accept me as” a male-bodied woman “and as Korean adoptee.”

At home in the sexual and cultural ambiguity, Pauline Park makes a radical theorist and activist who is at loggerheads with the “transgender establishment” in America and the “classic transsexual transition narrative.”

Page 2/2: The gender identity disorder still has the status of a mental illness

After conducting hundreds of training sessions and workshops at universities, hospitals, government agencies and companies Pauline Park is very familiar with all the prejudices that circulate about transsexuals. “Most participants expect me to tell them something about hormones and surgery. But while I begin by talking about that, I focus on trying to explain how many barriers a transsexual must overcome in a hospital visit.” Since 9/11, almost every public building has required showing an identity card. If one’s ID is in a male name, but the person appears as a woman, she will not be able to get beyond the guards. The next hurdle is the form on which you have to check ‘male’ or ‘female.’ If the patient Joanna is sitting in the waiting room, but the name John is called, it can expose her to astonished glances.

The linear transformation from male to female and vice versa is presented to the public on countless talk shows, from Oprah Winfrey to Barbara Walters – with guests who talk about being trapped in the wrong body and want to corrected that state of affairs through hormones and surgery. A change in legal sex designation can actually reinforce the sex/gender binary if it is based on the disease model of transsexuality. In 1974, homosexuality was removed from the diagnostic manual of mental disorders, which instantly ‘cured’ millions of gays. At the same time, the American Psychiatric Association introduced the diagnosis of gender identity disorder, which was recently changed to gender dysphoria, but which retains its status as a mental illness. Consequently, all transgendered individuals are still considered mentally ill.

Park conceded that the dissonance between the assigned gender identity and internal feeling, especially coupled with transgenderphobia, can lead to depression. But that would implicate a diseased society rather than the individual. She wants more than a few crumbs from the table at the Department of Health and isn’t willing to accept them at the cost of pathologizing the community. She regards transgender identity rather like left-handedness, with transsexualism as a natural variant of the dominant gender identity, not a form of deviance. Whoever would like sex reassignment surgery should have the opportunity to get it, says Park. But in contrast to the traditional transgender discourse only a tiny minority would undergo these serious interventions. The majority is situated on some point in the wide spectrum between masculine and feminine. A subversive concept that can result in open conflict in the choice of a public toilet in New York as elsewhere.

NB: This article appeared in the 9 April 2015 issue of Die Zeit under the title, “Tragische Transe? Nö!.” The original German text is below. The above English translation is mine. ~Pauline Park

TRANSGENDER
Tragische Transe? Nö!

Die amerikanische Serie “Transparent” macht das Thema Geschlechtsidentität jetzt auch in Deutschland populär. In Amerika ist die Diskussion längst weiter. Ein Besuch im Transgender-Zentrum in Queens, New York.

Von Claudia Steinberg
Die Zeit
9 April 2015

Eine Regenbogenflagge zwischen Isabels Haarsalon und dem Minisupermarkt zeigt den Weg nach Pride House: ins Zentrum für Queers und Transsexuelle auf der 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. Dort sitzt auf voluminösen Sofas und Bürostühlen eine Gruppe von Transsexuellen, Lesben und Bisexuellen. Die Atmosphäre ist ausgelassen. Bis eine schwarz gekleidete Dame unbestimmten Alters, glamourös einen chinesischen Schal um die Schultern drapiert, Platz nimmt. Pauline Park ist die Gründerin und Direktorin von Pride House. Sie weiß, gleich wird die Stimmung abstürzen, mit dramatischen Erzählungen von Familienstreit, dem Aufflammen von Unbehagen an der zugewiesenen Geschlechtsidentität, die sich falsch anfühlt.

Alle wissen längst um Lauras Selbstmordabsichten. Gene berichtet vom Besuch seiner geliebten Oma aus China, die über die Verwandlung ihrer Enkelin in einen Jungen so verzweifelt war wie er über ihre Unfähigkeit, seine neue Identität zu akzeptieren. Dylan ist Computerprogrammiererin und sehnt sich nach einer “Rückwärtskompatibilität” mit der Ehefrau und den Kindern aus ihrem früheren Leben als Mann. Ihre Kollegin June sollte sich bei der Suche nach einem neuen Job einfach als Frau vorstellen, findet Dylan – doch Junes Doktortitel und ihre ganze exzellente Berufserfahrung laufen unter ihrem Männernamen.

Seit sich die Schwulen nach den Debatten der siebziger Jahre in den Mainstream eingliedern konnten, sind Transgender-Individuen als exotischer Rest der Außenseitergemeinde übrig geblieben. Ihre Erlösungsgeschichten besitzen noch immer jenen Unterhaltungsfaktor, den ein schwules Paar mit Hund und Haus in der Vorstadt längst verloren hat. Inzwischen ist Transgender das neue heiße Thema, es ist sogar in der breiten Öffentlichkeit angekommen, als Bürgerrechtsproblematik, als Glamour-Faktor, als Fernsehserie. An den Universitäten rüttelt es unter der Flagge von Queer Studies an den Geschlechtergrenzen. Im Oktober des vergangenen Jahres plädierte der New Yorker Bürgermeister Bill de Blasio für die Möglichkeit, das Geschlecht auf Geburtsurkunden ohne operative Umwandlung ändern zu können. Der New Yorker Gouverneur Andrew Cuomo hat verlangt, dass Krankenversicherungen für Geschlechtsumwandlungen aufkommen. Das New Yorker Gefängnis Rikers Island, eine der größten Strafanstalten der Welt, richtet eine Sonderabteilung für transsexuelle Häftlinge ein, weil Gefängnisse für sie zu den gefährlichsten Orten zählen, wo sie oft Gewalttätigkeit und sexuelle Attacken erdulden müssen. Vor zehn Jahren war ein Film wie Transamerika mit seiner vom Mann zur Frau transformierten Heldin Bree noch eine Ausnahme. Von dieser Woche an kann man über Amazon auch auf Deutsch die Serie Transparent sehen (parent wie Eltern und trans wie transsexuell), sie ist schon ausgezeichnet mit dem Golden Globe und hat beste Aussichten auf einen Kultstatus.

Die Autorin und Regisseurin von Transparent, Jill Soloway, hat sich von der Gendermetamorphose ihres eigenen Vaters zu einem witzigen und empathischen Aufruf für die Geschlechterfreiheit inspirieren lassen: Als Morts drei Töchter erwachsen sind, wagt er sein Coming-out und kommt plötzlich als Frau mit langer Haarmähne, auf Stöckelschuhen und im hübschen Kleid durch die Tür. Das Erstaunen ist groß, zumal Papa Mort dabei seine Tochter in inniger Umarmung mit ihrer Freundin überrascht. Die Serie soll nicht nur “die Geburt einer neuen Mutter aus dem weiblichen Ich des Vaters” feiern, sondern auch “boygirl, girlboy, macho princess and officer sweet slutty bear” zur Identität ihrer Wahl ermutigen. Mit dieser antidualistischen Auffassung hat Soloway das Klischee der tragischen Transe mit Schwung hinweggewischt und einem Millionenpublikum die Möglichkeiten kühner Selbstbestimmung vorgeführt.

Dieser Artikel stammt aus der ZEIT Nr. 15 vom 9.4.2015.

Dieser Artikel stammt aus der ZEIT Nr. 15 vom 9.4.2015.  |  Die aktuelle ZEIT können Sie am Kiosk oder hier erwerben.

Pauline Park hat ihr Pride House an einem der ethnisch vielfältigsten Orte der Welt angesiedelt: In der Schule schräg gegenüber werden 84 Sprachen gesprochen. Im Pride House erscheinen Klienten aus Kolumbien, Ecuador, Mexiko, China, Indien, Pakistan, Bangladesch oder von den Philippinen. Die Einrichtung verzeichnet jedes Jahr rund 6000 Interaktionen mit Bewohnern aus ganz Queens, New Yorks zweitgrößtem Stadtteil. Pride House hat in zwei Jahrzehnten einen Katalog von Rechtsanwälten und Medizinern angesammelt, bei denen Transsexuelle auf respektvollen Umgang hoffen können, man arbeitet mit Psychotherapeuten oder Psychiatern zusammen. Immigration und medizinische Versorgung sind die wichtigsten Themen. Pride House vermittelt HIV-Tests, verteilt pro Monat 50.000 Kondome oder hilft obdachlosen Klienten, eine Unterkunft zu finden. “Gerade transsexuelle Teenager enden oft auf der Straße”, sagt Park.

Pauline Parks Mitgefühl für Menschen wie Laura oder Gene ist in ihrer eigenen komplizierten Biografie begründet. Im Jahr 1960 nahmen amerikanische Adoptiveltern zwei unterernährte Zwillingsbrüder aus Seoul in Empfang. Die Jungen waren erst acht Monate alt und wuchsen nun auf als die einzigen nicht weißen Kinder der Umgebung. Sie waren in einer christlich fundamentalistischen, republikanischen Familie gelandet. Im ersten Semester ihres Philosophiestudiums an der University of Wisconsin offenbarte sich Park als schwul. Doch das war nur die halbe Wahrheit. Die andere Hälfte kam zum Vorschein, als Park mit einem Stipendium nach London zog und dort immer häufiger als Frau auftrat. Sie nennt es die befreiendste Erfahrung ihres Lebens: “Zum ersten Mal präsentierte ich mich so, wie ich mich sah.” Schließlich war es die Lektüre von Michel Foucault, die Park von dem vermeintlichen Fluch einer inauthentischen koreanischen Identität befreite und die binäre Geschlechtsbestimmung als gesellschaftliches Konstrukt entlarvte. “Ich begann, mich als ›körperlich männliche Frau‹ und als koreanisches Adoptivkind zu akzeptieren.”

Dass sie sich in der geschlechtlichen und kulturellen Ambiguität so beheimatet fühlt, macht Pauline Park zu einer radikalen Theoretikerin und Aktivistin, die mit dem “Transgender-Establishment” Amerikas und seiner “klassischen Version der Geschlechtsumwandlung” auf Kriegsfuß steht.

Seite 2/2: Die Geschlechtsidentitätsstörung hat immer noch den Status einer Geisteskrankheit

Nach Hunderten von Schulungen und Workshops an Universitäten, in Kliniken, Regierungsstellen und Unternehmen ist Pauline Park bestens mit allen Vorurteilen vertraut, die über Transsexuelle kursieren. “Die meisten Teilnehmer erwarten, dass ich ihnen etwas über Hormone und Operationen erzähle. Aber das Thema berühre ich kaum. Ich versuche zu erklären, wie viele Barrieren ein Transsexueller etwa bei einem Krankenhausbesuch überwinden muss”. Seit dem 11. September verlangt nahezu jedes öffentliche Gebäude das Vorzeigen eines Ausweises. Wenn der auf einen männlichen Namen lautet, die Person jedoch als Frau erscheint, wird sie möglicherweise nicht über den Wachtposten hinauskommen. Die nächste Hürde ist das Formular, auf dem man “männlich” oder “weiblich” ankreuzen muss. Wenn die Patientin Joanna im Warteraum sitzt, aber als John aufgerufen wird, ist sie verwunderten Blicken ausgesetzt.

Die lineare Transformation vom Mann zur Frau und umgekehrt wurde der Öffentlichkeit in zahllosen Talkshows von Oprah Winfrey bis Barbara Walters nahegebracht – mit Gästen, die sich im falschen Körper eingesperrt fühlten und diesen Missstand mit Hormonen und Operationen behoben. Mit der Umkehrung der genitalen Vorzeichen bleibt aber nicht nur die Weltordnung der polaren Geschlechtsidentität erhalten, sondern die Transsexualität weiterhin dem Krankheitsmodell verhaftet. 1974 wurde die Homosexualität aus dem diagnostischen Handbuch psychischer Störungen gestrichen, das führte mit einem Streich zur “Heilung” von Millionen von Schwulen. Gleichzeitig definierte aber die American Psychiatric Association eine gender identity disorder, Geschlechtsidentitätsstörung, die zur gender dysphoria abgemildert wurde, ohne jedoch ihren Status als Geisteskrankheit zu verlieren. Demzufolge wären alle Transgender-Individuen geisteskrank.

Park konzediert, dass die Dissonanz zwischen der zugewiesenen Geschlechtsidentität und der eigenen Empfindung, vor allem aber Transgender-Phobie zu Depressionen führen kann. Das wäre allerdings eher eine Krankheit der Gesellschaft als eine des Individuums. Sie will mehr als ein paar Brotkrumen vom Bankett des Gesundheitsministeriums um den Preis der Pathologisierung eines Zustands, den sie als so natürlich betrachtet wie Linkshändigkeit. Transsexualität ist für sie eine Varianz der dominanten Geschlechtsidentität, keine Devianz. Wer eine operative Geschlechtsumwandlung wünsche, sollte die Gelegenheit dazu haben, meint Park. Doch im Unterschied zum klassischen Transgender-Diskurs wolle sich nur eine winzige Minorität diesen gravierenden Eingriffen unterziehen. Die Mehrheit siedele sich einfach an irgendeinem Punkt auf dem breiten Spektrum zwischen maskulin und feminin an. Ein subversives Konzept, das bekanntlich schon bei der Wahl einer öffentlichen Toilette Konflikte eröffnen kann, in New York wie überall.

In der Serie “Transparent” wählen “MaPa” (Jeffrey Tambor” und seine Töchter die Damentoilette.

The post Tragic Trans? Nope! (Die Zeit, 4.11.15) appeared first on Pauline Park.

Jackson Heights is the most diverse neighborhood in Queens, the most diverse county in the United States. But what precisely does ‘diversity’ really mean and how does it actually play out in this neighborhood that I’ve called home for nearly two decades now? In this photo essay, I hope to answer those questions.

I’d like to begin with this photo, which I took just outside the entrance to Queens Pride House on 37th Ave. during the World Cup finals this summer:

According to the last US Census, Jackson Heights is about half Latino, with immigrants coming from every country in Latin America; but the largest populations are from Ecuador and Colombia in South America. When the World Cup frenzy reached fever pitch, someone mounted these flags from various Latin American countries, which made a colorful addition to 37th Ave. This is the conventional notion of diversity: local color with a hint of the exotic; but the notion of a ‘melting pot’ is problematic because it is based on a discourse of assimilationism into a white US-born majority. Even ‘multiculturalism’ is a problematic model, with its advocates often using the metaphor of a salad bowl full of ingredients from different countries, because it is a relatively superficial and static notion that does not get at the dynamics of diversity and the difficult tensions that diversity can pose.

The next photos raise an important issue that needs to be addressed in any discussion of diversity in Jackson Heights, and that is class.

These are photos of two of my favorite buildings in Jackson Heights. Both are in the historic district, the Italian Renaissance building on the north side of 37th Ave. and the French Renaissance building with the Mansard roof on the south side of 37th Ave. While I don’t know what the price of an apartment in either of these buildings would be, it couldn’t be cheap, whether a studio, one-bedroom, two-bedroom or larger. And so the issue of affordable housing is a crucial one for maintaining the diversity of the neighborhood, both racial and ethnic as well as in terms of class, income and wealth. These buildings, like so many in the historic district are a wonderful part of our architectural heritage, but we can’t refrain from engaging in a searching analysis of the problematic class issues that the cost of housing raises.

One particular aspect of Jackson Heights is worth mentioning: its role as the origin of the cooperative housing movement in the United States. Co-ops have a different ownership structure than condominium apartments, and in many ways, co-ops are ideal in that they are owned by their residents; but they also have the legal right to deny entry to anyone for any reason except those explicitly prohibited by the human rights law of the City of New York — including, e.g., race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation and gender, defined to include gender identity and gender expression. Given the closed-door nature of many of the deliberations of co-op boards, there is always the possibility that  something can be used as a proxy for prohibited discrimination to deny rental or ownership of a co-op apartment. And as noted above, the rising cost of apartments and houses — especially in the historic district — can act as a barrier to many who would otherwise like to live in the nicest areas of Jackson Heights.

Not far from the leafy gardens of the historic district are the main shopping streets of Jackson Heights, which together form a rectangle: 74th St. on the west, 82nd St. on the east, 37th Ave. on the north and Roosevelt Ave. on the south. Below is the store owned and operated by a Korean greengrocer on 37th Ave. Like so many Korean-owned shops in the city, this is a family-owned and family-run market, with the husband, wife and daughters working what appear to be long hours. Class, race and immigration come together in the peculiar economy of such operations, which are not without problematic aspects.

The cheerful neon sign at New Peking on 37th Ave. between 77th and 78th Streets beckons passersby to enjoy cheap Chinese, with most of its business being take-out. One problematic aspect of such take-out restaurants is the proliferation of their menus in apartment buildings in the neighborhood, causing litter and often even the danger of accidents caused by residents slipping on the menus that are often dumped in the lobbies and vestibules of buildings in Jackson Heights.

But a potentially far more serious problem is the way in which some immigrant families, in order to provide for future generations, often rely on family labor that can enormously stress parents as well as children. And the expectations of such parents, especially East Asian and South Asian parents, can sometimes push Asian immigrant youth to the breaking point.

Another aspect of ‘diversity’ that requires interrogation is the question of food sources and the treatment of those animals that we consume (at least those who aren’t vegetarian).

I love the diversity of offerings at the Pacific Supermarket on 75th St. between Roosevelt Ave. and Broadway, which is pan-Asian but seems to cater to a primarily Chinese immigrant customer base, but I’m somewhat troubled by the way the management keep the fish and the lobsters especially, crowded into overcrowded small tanks. I took an acquaintance into the supermarket not too long ago, and while she was delighted by the many choices and their Asian origins, she was shocked by the way in which the management kept frogs in an extremely overcrowded tank, lying one on top of the other. I’m happy to say that I haven’t seen any frogs in the store when I’ve gone in recently, so perhaps someone spoke to the management about that horrendous treatment of those poor amphibians.

Jackson Heights also has its choice of street food, and food trucks are now beginning to proliferate just as they are in Manhattan and the other boroughs.

This late-night taco stand is often parked on the northeast corner of 75th St. and Roosevelt Ave., kitty corner from the subway station. One serious concern that I have is about the hygiene of such operations, the lack of which has been reported on in the media in recent years.

Jackson Heights is a wonderful neighborhood, but like every neighborhood in this city, it has its share of problems, many related to crime, many of which in turn relate to substance abuse. And that leads me to the next photo, which may be the most shocking I’ve included here to illustrate life in the neighborhood. I suppose I should put up a ‘trigger alert’ here, because some will find disturbing; but the purpose of this photographic essay is to talk about diversity in the neighborhood, and there’s a dark underbelly to that diversity that I think needs to be discussed and addressed.

The year before last, I was on a #7 train coming back from Manhattan. Around midnight, the train stopped at the 69th St. station, and when the doors to the train cars opened, a young man came running through the train car I was in, acting very erratic, either chasing or being chased by another man. This young man appeared to be Latino and was speaking in Spanish in a very strange fashion. After a few minutes an announcement over the loudspeaker informed us that the train was being stopped temporarily because of police activity, and very shortly, a couple of police officers arrived on the scene, apparently in pursuit of this young man.

The incident ended bizarrely and tragically when the young man leapt to his death, and I saw his body on the ground when I descended to the street level to walk home down Roosevelt Ave. I had only recently read about the ‘bath salts’ craze sweeping the country and I had to wonder if either substance abuse and/or mental illness had anything to do with this young man’s erratic and ultimately fatal behavior. The point to be made here is that substance abuse, mental illness, poverty and crime are issues that have to be raised in a discussion of Jackson Heights or just about any neighborhood in this city; and those phenomena intersect with oppression based on race, ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, class, income, wealth and disability as well as sexuality and gender. Even in a neighborhood as wonderful as Jackson Heights, there are many who live lives of quiet desperation.

And speaking of issues of class, income and wealth, in a slightly different context than the one raised above by the reference to the high cost of co-op apartments in the historic district, is the issue of the high cost of commercial real estate in the neighborhood. This is an issue that affects non-profit organizations such as Queens Pride House. While rents in Jackson Heights are nowhere near as high as those in Manhattan or in the most expensive parts of Brooklyn, they have nonetheless been rising here year after year, making it difficult for both commercial enterprises and non-profits located in the neighborhood.

There is also a shortage of non-residential rental space in Jackson Heights, with the Bruson Building on 37th Ave. between 74th and 75th Streets one of the few buildings offering commercial space in the neighborhood. But on April 20, a huge five-alarm fire destroyed much of the Bruson Building and it is not clear if the building will be rebuilt or not. Regardless, the incident points to the danger of fire that a densely populated neighborhood like Jackson Heights is vulnerable to.

When there’s a fire, the people to call are obviously the Fire Department (FDNY). But what if you’re the victim of a crime? One would hope that the New York Police Department would be the agency of city government that all New Yorkers could turn to, but unfortunately, the NYPD has a long and sordid history of police harassment and brutality, directed especially towards people of color and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people. And in fact, we held a forum on the NYPD’s notorious ‘stop-and-frisk’ policy on September 11 of last year, with representatives from various community-based organizations to discuss police-community relations.

Everyone on the panel agreed that people of color and LGBT/queer people had legitimate reasons to mistrust and even fear the police, especially transgendered women of color who have been subjected to a campaign of harassment and brutality for a very long time now. Transgendered Latinas in particular are assumed to be engaging in prostitution regardless of whether they’re actually sex workers. And of course, there have been a host of high-profile police brutality cases in other areas of the city over the years, involving Abner Louima, Anthony Baez, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and most recently, Eric Garner on Staten Island only in April.

New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio defeated New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and a number of other challengers in the Democratic mayoral primary in good part because he was able to make stop-and-frisk and police reform a signature issue of his campaign. We will now see whether Mayor de Blasio can bring about meaningful reform that will enhance the quality of life for residents of Jackson Heights, including its transgendered residents, Muslims, and others who are all too often victims of overly aggressive policing and even harassment and brutality.

It is important in any discussion of diversity in this neighborhood to raise the issue of the unconstitutional NYPD surveillance of Muslims in this city, given the burgeoning Muslim population in Jackson Heights.

On the corner of 74th St. and 37th Ave. at the head of ‘Little India’ (which stretches two blocks south to Roosevelt Ave.), you will find vendors selling religious items to fellow Muslims. In this neighborhood, the Muslim population is predominantly South Asian — mostly Pakistani and Bangladeshi. The NYPD’s unconstitutional surveillance of the city’s Muslim community directed by Commissioner Raymond Kelly at the behest of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of policing in this city, and there has yet to be any accountability for it. I have been informed by police watch groups that the NYPD have used traffic stops on Roosevelt Ave. to attempt to track down law-abiding Muslims and blackmail them into collaborating in illegal surveillance on other members of the Muslim community.

It is in such circumstances that the NYPD’s superficial appeals to ‘diversity’ make a mockery of the concept, and of all our city agencies, it is the NYPD whose use or misuse of the concept of diversity that is most ripe for interrogation.

Speaking of both religion and Little India, I have to mention my love of the delights of 74th St. On a hot summer afternoon, walking down 74th St. between 37th Ave. and Roosevelt Ave., one can imagine that one is walking down a street in Delhi, Bombay (Mumbai), Calcutta (Kolkata) or Madras (Chennai), with restaurants serving tandoori chicken and lamb vindaloo and shops full of glittering jewelry and saris.

Ganesha is the happiest of the Hindu gods, representing good luck, and sits contentedly here in a window on 74th St., surrounded by gold jewelry that is worn primarily at weddings. But there is a darker reality behind the colorful façade of sari shops on 74th St., and that is the persistence of poverty, labor abuses, domestic violence, and other ills that plague immigrant communities as well as mainstream society in Jackson Heights. Last year, we held a forum on the human trafficking of Asian women in Queens, which experts on our panel informed us in this borough was actually primarily labor trafficking rather than the more sensational but somewhat less common phenomenon of sex trafficking.

One particularly problematic aspect of the thriving Indian community in Queens is the persistence of caste distinctions, which becomes readily apparent when one reads any of the classifieds in any of the ethnic press in the South Asian community here, where such personal ads focus almost obsessively on caste origins in determining the suitability of marriage matches — this, despite the fact that the newly independent India abolished caste in 1947 after the end of the British Raj.

One aspect of ‘diversity’ that doesn’t get enough attention in the focus on race, ethnicity, religion and to a lesser extent, sexual orientation, is that of access for people with disabilities. The renovation of the Roosevelt Ave. subway station that was completed back in 2005 cost $87 million and was long overdue. As part of the renovation, elevators were installed in the station, but oddly, enough, the elevator from the #7 train platform of the 74th St./Broadway station descends to a mezzanine, and anyone then wishing to go down to the platform on the lower level to catch the E, F, M or R train must cross an often busy mezzanine to a separate elevator to make that leg of the trip. And of course, even if this station is (just barely) wheelchair-accessible many other stations in Queens are not, which limits the mobility of wheelchair-bound passengers and their ability to use the subway system in the borough.

And of course, wheelchair accessibility is only one issue when discussing access for people with disabilities, given that there are innumerable disabilities of various kinds. At Queens Pride House, we are limited by extreme budget constraints from addressing many issues that we would like to address, wheelchair access being one; it is simply beyond our current budget to consider elevator installation in this building.

But for the able-bodied at least, Jackson Heights is a convenient location for access to the New York City subway system, and those who live near the Roosevelt Ave. subway station enjoy perhaps the best location in Queens for access to public transit.

One aspect of diversity that is of particular importance for our discussion is the role that our educational system plays in accommodating diversity and ideally fostering an appreciation of it. There are a number of public as well as private schools in the neighborhood, with PS 69 being an elementary school on the southeast corner of 76th St. and 37th Ave.

PS 69 is said to have the most diverse student body of any public school in the city and possibly in the country, with one estimate counting 84 different native languages spoken at home by the students at the school. But while we ought to celebrate this diversity, we also need to address issues that it may raise. To what extent is bullying and bias-based harassment in our schools a problem? The New York City Department of Education won’t tell us and may not know themselves, given that they do not keep adequate statistics on bullying and bias-based harassment; nor do they have any real accountability system for holding those guilty of bullying and bias-based harassment accountable for the actions — whether students, faculty or non-teaching staff. Fortress Tweed will not tell us the extent of the problem, nor do the powers that be at NYC DoE have any systematic program for sensitivity training, with their current sensitivity training program ineffective at best and at worst, a mechanism for channeling tax dollars to fund problematic organizations which themselves are guilty of gross bias, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in particular.

One aspect of diversity that is of course central to the mission of Queens Pride House is the inclusion of LGBT people in the life of the neighborhood and the borough. We have hosted events for LGBT parents and their children, including Claudia Narvaez-Meza, Krystal Banzon and their son, Malaya.

Claudia and Krystal were hoping to join us, but Krystal’s pregnancy and impending delivery made that impossible. But they are one of a growing number of same-sex couples who are raising children such as Malaya in Jackson Heights, and like all LGBT people, they have legitimate concerns about discrimination and harassment, something that, as I have already noted, the NYC DoE was simply not interested in addressing under the Bloomberg administration; we shall see whether there is any change under Mayor de Blasio and his new chancellor, Carmen Fariña.

Public schools are actually polling sites in our elections, as this sign indicates. The sign is in Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Bengali as well as in English, but some advocacy organizations have deplored the lack of Asian-language speakers at polling places in the neighborhood and the borough. While Queens now has two openly gay Council members, a Latino Assembly member and a Latino member of the state Senate, as well as its third woman in a row serving as borough president, the mere inclusion of members of historically underrepresented communities does not necessarily result in the automatic empowerment of those communities, despite the symbolic victory of their election, and it is important not to be taken in by a superficial discourse of identity politics; it is the impact on the real lives of real people that must be the measure of the efficacy elected officials as well as of the political empowerment of the communities that they claim to represent.

We at Queens Pride House take seriously our mission to serve the LGBT community of Queens, not only through our participation in the Queens Pride Parade every first Sunday in June, but every day of the year.

Located on 37th Ave. in Jackson Heights, Queens Pride House is the only LGBT community center in the borough and we serve an exceptionally diverse group of members and clients. I might add parenthetically that I am the only openly transgendered executive director of an LGBT community center in the city or the state and one of the only two in the country; I am also the only Asian American executive director of an LGBT community center in the city or the state and one of the only two in the country; and perhaps not surprisingly, I’m the only openly transgendered Asian American executive director of an LGBT community center in the country.

* * * * *

This was the text of the presentation that Pauline Park gave at “Beyond ‘Diversity'” at Queens Pride House on 25 October 2014.

Pauline Park, Ph.D., is president and acting executive director of Queens Pride House as well as a long-time resident of Jackson Heights.

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Bill de Blasio’s appointment of Bill Bratton as police commissioner as one of the new mayor’s first acts provoked expressions of concern among progressive activists and advocacy organizations in New York; despite de Blasio’s decision to absent himself from the St. Patrick’s Day parade on March 17, the mayor did authorize the New York Police Department (NYPD) and Fire Department (FDNY) to march in uniform, despite the continued exclusion of self-identified LGBT individuals and groups from the parade — in direct contravention of the New York City human rights law.

Asked to explain his decision to march in the parade, Bratton said he was marching “to celebrate the great traditions of the Irish and the NYPD” (“Bratton Says He Marched to Honor NYPD Tradition, Not Against Gay Groups,” WNYC, 17 March 2014).

Bratton’s response to a letter from Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer also cited this ‘Irish heritage’ defense (see below for the full texts of both letters), demonstrating that the police commissioner either is unaware that the parade is no longer about Irish pride but instead an explicit expression of Roman Catholic faith or else that Bratton was completely disingenuous in citing Irish and police traditions in attempting to justify his endorsement of homophobic discrimination.

While Bratton’s attempts to excuse the inexcusable are themselves inexcusable, it is de Blasio who as mayor bears ultimate responsibility for this travesty; when he ran for mayor, he successfully drew more LGBT community support than openly lesbian City Council Speaker Christine Quinn which helped de Blasio defeat Quinn handily in the Democratic mayoral primary in September 2013. The new mayor’s decision to authorize NYPD & FDNY officers to march in a discriminatory parade in contravention of city human rights law calls into question the depth and sincerity of that commitment.

. . . . .

Honorable Gale A. Brewer
Manhattan Borough President
I Centre Street, 19h Floor
New York, New York 10007

Dear Borough President Brewer:

I am writing in response to your correspondence expressing concem about uniformed Police Department personnel participating in the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The Police Commissioner’s Offrce is responsible for determining whether or not to grant authorization for Police Department personnel to wear their uniform while participating in parades and other types of organized events. While I understand your viewpoint regarding this matter in light of the policy of parade organizers to exclude organized participation by gay and lesbian groups, Police Department personnel have long been allowed to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade as a way to celebrate Irish heritage. I believe this decision is fair and appropriate. Permission is similarly granted for members of the Police Department to participate in the wide array of other parades and celebrations that occur throughout New York City during the course of the year. Thank you for providing your concems regarding this matter. I appreciate your continued support of the New York City Police Department.

All the best,
William J. Bratton
Police Commissioner
1 Police Plaza, New York, NY 10038
546-610-5410
Website: http://nyc.gov/nypd
Fax:646-610-5865

. . . . .

February 25, 2014
William J. Bratton
Commissioner, NYPD
One Police Plaza
New York, NY 10038

Dear Commissioner Bratton,

As lam sure you are aware, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Fifth Avenue has been a source of contention for some time. A L993 court case allowed parade organizers to prevent the lrish Lesbian and Gay Organization from marching and the exclusion of LGBTQgroups has been standard practice
ever since. Many of us in leadership roles in New York City have long boycotted the parade because of this discriminatory anr.l offensive practice. However many civil servants who march in the parade wear their official City uniform, thus representing City government. I know that there are already clear rules about when your employees are and are not allowed to wear
their city uniform. For example, my understanding is that they may not wear official uniforms in paid advertisements and must obtain permission before wearing uniforms in parades such as St. Patrick’s and the Pride Parades. I would appreciate any clarity you can give me as to your policy on when
uniforms can and cannot be worn by your employees.
While lsupport everyone’s right to participate in a parade, I question whether individuals should be allowed to represent the City of New York in a clearly partisan and divisive event. ln addition, I am deeply concerned about the message we are sending to the LGBTQ community when the very people
who are paid to protect all New Yorkers are participating in an event that purposely excludes so many New Yorkers. I ask that you clarify your existing position on this, and consider prohibiting your employees from
wearing uniforms if they choose to participate in this parade.
Sincerely,
Gale A. Brewer
Manhattan Borough President

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Transgender Identity, Community & Empowerment
Pauline Park, Ph.D.
Chair
New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)

Social Sciences Open House
Marymount Manhattan College
17 October 2013

I would like to begin by thanking Prof. Manolo Guzmán for being instrumental in bringing me here to speak at the Social Sciences Open House today. This is my very first visit to Marymount Manhattan College and I’m absolutely delighted to be here and to have the opportunity to talk about transgender identity, community and empowerment with you today. And in fact, I’ve entitled my talk “Transgender Identity, Community & Empowerment” because it seems to me that those are three of the crucial elements in our task as we seek to make the social sciences fully inclusive of transgender as a topic and transgendered and gender variant people as faculty, staff and students.

My perspective is informed by work in the academy both in faculty and staff positions and of course as a student as well as work in the community, most intensively with Queens Pride House, which I co-founded in 1997, and the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), which I co-founded in 1998. Queens Pride House is the only LGBT community center in the borough of Queens, and we offer support groups — including a transgender support group — free mental health counseling for members of the community, and other services; we are just completing our first funded advocacy program which focused on advocating for members of the community — especially transgendered women of color — who are victims of police harassment and brutality.

In 2009, NYAGRA published the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers in the New York metropolitican area; and while directories of this kind have been posted on-line for cities such as Los Angeles, Boston, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, the NYAGRA directory was the first such directory in the United States ever published in a print edition; we are updating it continuously as we identify more transgender-sensitive providers in the area and it is now available on-line as well at nyagra.com.

NYAGRA is a co-founding member of the coalition seeking enactment of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), the transgender rights bill currently pending in the New York state legislature, and I represent NYAGRA in that coalition, as I did in the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) in 2011. The Dignity Act came into effect this July and prohibits discrimination and bias-based harassment in public schools throughout the state of New York. I mention safe schools legislation in the context of this discussion because the New York State Dignity legislation includes a comprehensive list of ‘protected categories,’ including race, religion, ethnicity, and disability as well as sexual orientation and gender, defined to include gender identity and gender expression. Safe schools legislation such as DASA can help move us out of a purely ‘identitarian’ conceptual framework, which can be limiting.

It should be obvious — but may not be to everyone — that making higher education more LGBT-inclusive must also mean tackling the problem of bullying and bias-based harassment in elementary and secondary schools, since so many LGBT students drop out of school because of such bullying and never make it to college; that is especially true of transgendered students, I would essay, based on anecdotal evidence (in the absence of any comprehensive study of the problem).

In addition to the work I do on behalf of NYAGRA in the legislative arena, one other important component of my work is transgender sensitivity training; I’ve conducted sessions for a wide range of social service providers and community-based organizations, ranging from one-hour workshops to full-day trainings. A small part of my training work has been with academic institutions, focused on issues related to transgender inclusion — including, for example, gender-neutral housing, which has become a major issue on many campuses.

One of the biggest issues for transgendered people both on campus and off is access to health care, which is why I co-founded the Transgender Health Initiative of New York back in 2004. THINY (as we call it) and its members have worked tirelessly to try to open up health care to members of our community in New York, who face significant impediments to accessing quality health care, just as they do throughout the country.

In 2006, I co-facilitated a series of trainings for St. Vincent’s Hospital, which was one of the largest hospitals in New York City, and a hospital with one of the largest transgender patient populations. Sadly enough, St. Vincent’s went bankrupt last year and closed after failing to resolve a situation in which the hospital had accumulated over a billion dollars in debt. Sad, too, because these were the first transgender sensitivity trainings for any major hospital in the city and they were as much of an eye opener for us as they were for the nurses, techs, and other health care professionals we trained. Participants ranged from hostile to indifferent to open-minded to genuinely supportive  in short, a microcosm of society and its attitudes towards the transgendered. Only a few of the nurses were openly hostile and even (in at least two cases) somewhat disruptive. But most of the nurses and other providers we did trainings for at the very least listened politely.

The real problem was the lack of both knowledge of the challenges facing transgendered people as they try to access health care as well as the lack of sensitivity on the part of some of these providers. With regard to the former — lack of knowledge — one of the big problems facing our community is that among those who think about transgender access to health care —and there are far too few who think about this issue at all — most imagine that the main challenge we face is accessing hormones and surgery. While that is a challenge, the biggest challenge for transgendered people really is accessing healthcare for all of those medical issues unrelated to gender transition.

And that leads me to an important theme of my talk today. The ‘gateway’ diagnosis required to access to hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and sex reassignment surgery (SRS) since 1974 has been gender identity disorder (GID), introduced into the fourth edition of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV), published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). While GID is usually thought of as the diagnosis by which adult transsexual and transgendered people gain access to HRT and SRS, the true significance of GID is much larger. First, a change of legal sex designation — the ‘gender marker’ on identification documents that assigns us to either male or female sex — in most jurisdictions requires at the very least documentation of an intent to go for SRS, if not actually proof of completion of surgery (as is the case in New York City).

While there is no necessary connection between a change of legal sex designation and a change of legal name, in many if not most cases, transitioning transsexuals pursue these two changes simultaneously. The truth is that most transgendered people frequently or even consistently present in a gender that does not match their ID, which causes problems in a multitude of situations. Since 911, most large buildings in New York City require photo ID even to enter the building. And so the apparent discrepancy between ID and either ‘gender marker’ and/or gendered name and/or gender presentation in a photo can constitute a barrier to employment, housing, and public accommodations as well as to accessing health care and social services.

But if the apparent ’solution’ is to go for a change of legal sex designation as well as name, and if the former change – and in some cases, effectively, the latter – requires the diagnosis of GID; then in effect, the ability to access health care as well as employment, housing, and public accommodations requires a diagnosis of GID as well. I personally find it outrageous that transgendered people in the United States and elsewhere have to have themselves declared mentally ill in order to access health care or to get or to keep a job. We must commit to finding means by which transgendered people can access forms of medical intervention such as HRT and SRS without having to subject themselves to the degradation of being declared mentally ill simply by virtue of their gender identity. As I like to say, I do not have a gender identity disorder; it is society that has a gender identity disorder.

One small step forward was taken when the APA revised the GID diagnosis and renamed it ‘gender dysphoria’ in the DSM-V published earlier this year. But while the language of the diagnosis has been softened, the diagnosis still pathologizes gender variance as a mental disorder that needs to be corrected, and that diagnosis not only undergirds the Standards of Care (SOC) published by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) (formerly the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association) and the protocols for gender transition in this society, this diagnosis – what I call the GID ‘regime’ – constitutes the very basis for American society’s understanding of transgender. Even in relatively more sympathetic portrayals of transgendered characters such as those in “TransAmerica” and on “All My Children” and “Ugly Betty,” the discourse through which those characters are understood is a medical model of transsexuality that is fundamentally model that constructs gender dysphoria as deviance from a norm rather than recognizing transgender and gender-transgressive identity and expression as simply being a natural variance in a gender identity that is no more ‘disordered’ than conventional gender identity and expression. My own work as a transgender activist is informed by a feminist conception of gender and a commitment to challenging and dismantling the sex/gender binary that is at the root of our oppressionas women and as men as well as transgendered men and women. Our goal as a movement must therefore be nothing less than the transformation of society’s understanding of gender. And if we are committed to that goal, we must also be committed to dismantling the ‘GID regime’ that undergirds this system of gender regulation and control.

The influence of GID also extends into the sphere of public policy as well, impeding the fight for transgender rights. We have made enormous progress as a community and as a movement over the course of the last two decades, but while over 150 jurisdictions — including 17 states and the District of Columbia – now have enacted legislation explicitly prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity or expression, it is a sad fact that 33 states have no such protection in their state laws. However, every state has included disability in its human rights law, and it is that rubric that litigators are using to obtain legal redress for transgendered plaintiffs across the country, and they often win on that basis. But the argument that such litigators proffer usually follows along these lines: my client is mentally ill by virtue of his/her gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria and therefore is protected under state disability law. I should make clear that I have nothing but admiration for the hard-working lawyers who represent transgendered clients – often pro bono – with limited time and resources. And in those 33 states without explicit inclusion of gender identity and expression in state human rights law, appeal to disability by way of GID may well be the only practical way of obtaining legal redress for discrimination against a transgendered client. But I think we need to recognize how sharp the horns of that dilemma may be.

As a non-lawyer who works on legislation, I can tell you that the genuine happiness that I feel for the transgendered client who wins such a case is diminished by the realization that the victory for that individual undercuts the very arguments that we need to make in the legislative arena. Because it is precisely GID that gives the religious right and other opponents of transgender rights legislation their most powerful ammunition. So I would argue that we need to move from a ‘deviance’ model to a ‘variance’ model and from a construction of transgender identity as a mental pathology to a concept of ‘wellness’ in which transgendered and gender-variant people are viewed not as vectors of mental illness and disease but rather are recognized as contributors to society, including potential contributors to a transformation of society’s understanding of gender.

* * * * *

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Transgender Health Care: What Hospital-Based Providers Need to Know
Pauline Park, Ph.D.
Chair, New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)

St. Barnabas Hospital
Embrace Healthcare Equality: Introducing Our LGBTQ Initiative
11 October 2013

I’m honored by the invitation to speak here at St. Barnabas Hospital and I’m especially honored to keynote the Embrace Healthcare Equality: Introducing Our LGBTQ Initiative event today. I would like to thank the LGBT diversity subcommittee for the invitation and I would especially like to thank Dr. Rory Sweeny McGovern, who was instrumental in introducing me to this hospital. Rory and I worked together as part of a transgender health care task force at St. Vincent’s Hospital for several years and I think we and our colleagues did great things together, including organizing the first transgender sensitivity training sessions for any major hospital in this city.

Let me begin by commending you for your commitment to ensuring full access to health care here at St. Barnabas for all members of our community. But let me also add that doing so will require a very significant commitment of resources — both time and financial — to attain that objective. Since founding Queens Pride House — the only LGBT community center in the borough of Queens in 1997 and the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) in 1998, I have been involved with work on access to health care for members of the LGBT community in a variety of capacities; one of the most important of these has been the Transgender Health Initiative of New York, a community organizing project established to ensure that transgendered and gender non-conforming people can access health care in a safe, respectful and non-discriminatory manner.

The transgender sensitivity trainings that we did at St. Vincent’s was an important expression of that commitment, and they helped create a model for what can be done at any hospital in this city or this country. Another important part of that work was the creation and publication in July 2009 of the NYAGRA transgender health care provider directory, the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers in the New York City metropolitan area and the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers published in print format anywhere in the United States. I continue to update that directory on nyagra.com.

Transgendered and gender-variant people face pervasive discrimination in attempting to access health care in the United States. Some of the impediments to accessing quality health care are obvious and some are not. In order to understand those impediments and how to address them, it is first necessary to understand the community that we are discussing — hence the NYAGRA ‘circles diagram’ that I created way back in 1999 when we began the campaign for the the transgender rights law bill that was ultimately enacted into law by the New York City Council in 2002. I have used this diagram to illustrate in as simple a way as possible a diverse and complex community.

Briefly, the three circles include transsexuals — those who seek or have obtained sex reassignment surgery (SRS); those whom I will call ‘the transgendered’ — those who present fully in a gender not associated with their sex assigned at birth at least part of the time; and the gender-variant — including relatively feminine males who may still identify as men and boys and relatively masculine females who may still identify as women and girls. It is important to note here that this is a map of the gender universe and does not directly refer to sexual orientation; there are those in each of these circles who may identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual as well as those who may identify as heterosexual. In contrast to those in these three circles, the majority in any society are conventionally gendered — a majority of whom are undoubtedly heterosexual, but a significant minority of whom may be lesbian, gay or bisexual.

While addressing the conflation of sexual orientation with gender identity and gender expression is an important and indeed crucial part of the process of educating health care providers and the general public on transgender issues, it is also true that addressing discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression will go a long way towards addressing discrimination against LGB people because so much of that is based on the gender expression of gender-variant LGB people.

So how can we ensure full access to health care access for all members of the LGBT community here at St. Barnabas? Based on my own experience as an activist, advocate and consumer of health care, here are ten simple rules that I would like to suggest that we consider:

Rule #1: Effective health care provision requires the construction of a relationship of trust and confidence between the provider and the patient/client/’consumer.’ It is the responsibility of providers to educate themselves on issues of gender identity and gender expression in order to serve their patients, clients, and consumers sensitively and effectively. Conversely, it is also the responsibility of transgendered and gender-variant people to do what they can to educate and empower themselves and work with health care providers in order to obtain the best health care that they can.

Rule #2: Effective health care provision requires that providers take into account the diversity of the transgender community, which is extraordinarily diverse — in terms of gender identity and expression as well as race, ethnicity, religion, dis/ability, and sexual orientation. There are as many ways of being transgendered as there are transgendered people.

Rule #3: Health care providers need to understand that sex reassignment surgery (SRS) is not the end point for most gender transitions.  Most transgendered people do not want SRS and most who do never get it. There are as many ways of transitioning as there are transgendered people.

Rule #4: Transgendered and gender-variant people are denied care in many areas not directly or even indirectly related to their gender identity; any attempt to address health care provision for members of the community must address those areas not related to gender transition as well as those areas that are transition-related. Some transgendered people are denied coverage for treatments or procedures that relate to their anatomical or biological sex assigned at birth, such as prostate cancer for transgendered women or cervical or ovarian cancer for transmen. Only in a relationship of mutual trust and respect can physicians and other health care providers be sensitive and informed enough to provide effective care in such areas.

Rule #5: The impediments to health care access are both medical and non-medical and effective health care provision requires that providers take into account and address both sets of impediments. Transgender sensitivity training should focus primarily on the psychosocial aspects of the interaction between providers and consumers, and that training should extend to physicians and nurses as well as everyone in a health care facility.

Rule #6: Health care providers need to avoid pathologizing transgendered people through the false diagnosis of gender identity disorder (GID) while at the same time understanding that such diagnoses are used by some transgendered people to access hormone replacement therapy (HRT), sex reassignment surgery (SRS) and other desired medical interventions.

Rule #7: Transgender sensitivity training needs to be mandatory for all staff in hospitals and health care-providing facilities, including technical people, security guards, and intake staff as well as medical and mental health professionals; physicians should undergo psychosocial sensitivity training, regardless of participation in ‘grand rounds’ and other cognate medical trainings and discussions. Transgender sensitivity trainings should be no less than two hours in duration and ideally should be four hours long. Real training involves an intensive interaction between the trainer and the trained. Webinars and handouts may be used to supplement such trainings but can be no substitute for trainings themselves. Trainings should be conducted by those who have specific expertise in transgender issues, not merely those who do general ‘diversity’ trainings or even those who do LGBT trainings but who lack expertise on transgender issues specifically. Given staff turnover, trainings must be conducted at regular intervals.

Rule #8: All health care providers and health care-providing facilities should adopt policies and protocols that specifically prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression in the provision of health care, and such policies and protocols should be regularly and effectively communicated to all relevant constituencies.

Rule #9: Health care providers should participate in larger efforts to achieve legal and public policy change in order to provide effective and universal health care for all, including all transgendered and gender-variant people; providers need to understand that the denial of health care to transgendered and gender-variant people is part of a larger denial of health care access to and insurance coverage and payment for health care to LGBT people, low-income people, poor people, and people with disabilities in the United States.

Rule #10: There are no rules, only ‘best practices’ — or at least, better practices and worse practices; and such practices must be informed by the lived experiences of transgendered and gender-variant people.

Now, every hospital is different and every set of health care providers is unique; but these ten rules, it would seem to me, can be applied anywhere, including here at St. Barnabas. By coming here to this auditorium, you have taken the first step in  helping make this real. But as I have said, it is training that is arguably the most important and indeed crucial element in making it real and attaining an objective that I believe we all share. I congratulate you all and I especially commend the LGBT diversity subcommittee for organizing the launch of the LGBTQ Initiative today and I look forward to working with you all in helping make St. Barnabas the fully welcoming and inclusive hospital that I know it can be. That goal is within our grasp and we simply need to seize the opportunity to make it real. Carpe diem. Thank you.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), which she co-founded in 1998, and president of the board of directors as well as acting executive director of Queens Pride House (the LGBT community center in the borough of Queens), which she co-founded in 1997. Dr. Park led the campaign for passage of the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002. She 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. Park negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Dignity for All Students Act, a safe schools law enacted by the New York state legislature in 2010, and the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by that body, and she is a member of the statewide task force created to implement the statute. She also served on the steering committee of the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act by the New York City Council in September 2004. In 2004, Dr. Park named and helped create the Transgender Health Initiative of New York, a community organizing project established to ensure that transgendered and gender non-conforming people can access health care in a safe, respectful and non-discriminatory manner. And as executive editor, she oversaw the creation and publication in July 2009 of the NYAGRA transgender health care provider directory, the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers in the New York City metropolitan area and the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers published in print format anywhere in the United States. Dr. 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. She has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of organizations, including the New York State Affirmative Action Advisory Council (AAAC), the Association of Vocational Rehabilitation in Alcoholism and Substance Abuse (AVRASA), the Latino Commission on AIDS, the Park Slope Safe Homes Project, and the Queer Health Task Force at Columbia University Medical School. In addition to presenting at the HIV Grand Rounds lecture series of the Bureau of HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Dr. Park co-facilitated the first transgender sensitivity training sessions for any major hospital in New York City at St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan. In 2005, Dr. Park became the first openly transgendered grand marshal of the New York City Pride March. She was the subject of “Envisioning Justice: The Journey of a Transgendered Woman,” a 32-minute documentary about her life and work by documentarian Larry Tung that premiered at the New York LGBT Film Festival (NewFest) in 2008. In 2009, Dr. Park was designated ‘a leading advocate for transgender rights in New York’ on Idealist.org’s ‘New York 40’ list. In October 2012, Dr. Park was one of 54 individuals named to a list of ‘The Most Influential LGBT Asian Icons’  by the Huffington Post. In November 2012, she was named to a list of ’50 Transgender Icons’ for the Transgender Day of Remembrance 2012.

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Anybody But Quinn
Pauline Park speaks at the rally
28 August 2013

I’m here to pose and answer just one question: who is the real Christine Quinn? This is a multiple choice question, and I’m going to ask you to tell me which of the following answers is the correct one:

a) A principled progressive, as she portrays herself of the public.
b) A committed champion of LGBT rights.
c) A woman warrior for equal rights who has worked as Speaker to improve the lives of all women, regardless of race, ethnicity or class.
d) A stalwart defender of St. Vincent’s Hospital.
e) None of the above.

You can see from where we’re standing that Chris Quinn was no stalwart defender of St. Vincent’s Hospital. The answer, as you’ve discerned, is (e): None of the above.

I’ve known Chris Quinn for 14 years now and I’ve observed a pattern of manipulation, deceit and betrayal. I led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002. Chris Quinn was one of the lead sponsors of the bill, but did she help us get it passed? Quite the contrary: she tried to seize control of the bill to use for her own selfish political purposes.

I was part of the steering committee that led the campaign for the Dignity in All Students Act enacted by the New York City Council in 2004, which the Council enacted over Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s veto. When Chris Quinn became Speaker in 2005, did she help us get the Department of Education to implement the law? Not at all; Quinn conspired with Bloomberg and with Chancellor Joel Klein to prevent DASA’s implementation, giving them political cover by working with them to create an anti-bullying program that was nothing but window dressing; and as a result, bullying and bias-based harassment have continued to be pervasive in our city schools.

Finally, let me mention the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy. In my neighborhood — Jackson Heights in Queens — the NYPD is using stop-and-frisk as part of a campaign of harassment and intimidation directed towards LGBT people of color and transgendered Latina women in particular. And who is the one candidate in the Democratic mayoral race who has promised to reappoint Raymond Kelly as police commissioner — the very person directing that campaign? Chris Quinn.

And that is why I say, anyone but Quinn~! Anyone but Quinn~! Anyone but Quinn~!

Thank you~!

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Queens Pride House history: the June 2013 Israel/Palestine forum

Queens Pride House  has hosted many public forums, quite a few of which I organized. By far the most controversial was “Israel/Palestine is an LGBT issue,” our first-ever forum on Israel and Palestine. Our June 2013 forum might never have come about had it not been for the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan and its expulsion and banning of the Siege Busters Working Group in February 2011.

When the Center banned the Siege Busters Working Group in February 2011, it provoked a storm of controversy and a two-year struggle over the right of Palestine solidarity activists to meet there; and it propelled me into Palestine solidarity activism, to my surprise and perhaps the surprise of my friends and colleagues.

Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY), Sarah Schulman teaches at the College of Staten Island (CSI) is one of the leading figures in the LGBT community, not only in New York but nationally. She has written scores of books and plays, most recently, “Israel/ Palestine and the Queer International” (Duke University Press). I had met Sarah before the controversy erupted, but it was through the struggle over the Center that we got to know each other. She appeared at the same March 13 community forum at the Center in 2011 and lambasted the Center’s decision to cave into the intensely bigoted Michael Lucas and ban ban the Siege Busters as well as any discussion of Israel/Palestine. Sarah helped organize the first US tour of a delegation of LGBTQ Palestinian activists in 2011, and she worked with them to help organize the first US LGBTQ delegation tour to Palestine in 2012. Sarah invited me to join the delegation and that tour was perhaps the most important trip I’d taken since coming to the United States from Korea at the age of eight months old.

It was indirectly as a result of my participation in that delegation tour that led to the June 4 forum, but the first Palestine-related event at Queens Pride House was actually when I hosted a Siege Busters Working Group screening of a documentary about Julian Mer-Khamis in May 2011 only a few months after the Siege Busters were expelled from the Center in Manhattan, and that event had caused not a ripple of controversy at Pride House. But of course, the June 2013 forum was different, because it was a Queens Pride House event not only hosted but sponsored by the organization; in fact, the June 4 forum was the very first forum in the history of the borough that featured LGBT speakers critical of Israeli occupation and apartheid, and in putting on the forum, we made history.

The Queens Chronicle covered the event (“Pride House forum slams Israeli policies,” by Mark Lord, 6.6.13), which noted that our forum drew over 30 people to Pride House, which is as many as we ever get  for a panel discussion on public policy issues. In response to our forum, the Chronicle ran a rather misguided editorial (“An attack on Israel, here in Queens“) that was full of inaccuracies and misconceptions that prompted a letter to the editor from Queens Pride House in response (“It’s about free speech“); our letter to the editor explained the purpose of the forum and the need for LGBT community centers to host and sponsor public forums on controversial issues, including Israel/Palestine, in order to foster open discussion of those issues and their implications for the LGBT community, which at least some members of the community clearly understand (“Israel is no democracy“).

Internally, the only real dissension manifest itself on the Facebook pages of Queens Pride House, where I posted notices about the June 4 forum (without any additional editorializing). There is a another Facebook page — Queer Support for Israel — and on that page, one of the group members posted a message informing the other members about the June 4 forum at Queens Pride House, encouraging them to post comments attacking the organization for putting on a forum that he characterized (falsely, of course) as an ‘anti-Israel hate fest.’ Queer Support for Israel members proceeding to ‘swarm’ our Facebook page, posting scores of hostile comments, to which I responded politely, inviting them to come to the forum to listen, learn and share their perspectives, though not a single one of them did attend the event.

I also posted a very simple notice on the Facebook page of the Queens Pride House English-speaking men’s group, which prompted furious responses from two members — one a regular attendee and another a member whose attendance has been quite irregular, from all reports. One of the members even accused me of a conflict of interest, though I made very clear to him that the organization was taking no position on the interest — a point I made to Mark Lord, the reporter who came to cover the forum, when he interviewed me about it the day after the event, as well as at the forum itself. I was struck by the fact that no one had accused me of a conflict of interest for having organized a forum on May 1 on the human trafficking of Asian women in Queens, even though I am myself an Asian American woman living in Queens.

And in response to the member of the Queens Pride House English-speaking men’s group who had accused me of a conflict of interest, I also pointed out that as a member of the board of directors (secretary at that time), I had organized a forum on the New York State Dignity for All Students Act when the DASA bill was still pending and when, as chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) and a member of the steering committee of the NYS DASA Coalition (which was leading the campaign for the bill). I was organizing a statewide  tour that included forums on DASA in other cities around the state; at no time did anyone accuse me of a conflict of interest in organizing a forum on Dignity and using that forum (which took place at our site on Woodside Ave.) as an opportunity advocating for that legislation, despite the fact that I was, in effect, wearing two different organizational hats while doing so.

While I am a founding member of the New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, I have never used my position as either president of the board of directors or acting executive director to serve the interests or agenda of QAIA. But as both president of the board of directors and acting executive director it is not only my right by my responsibility to organize public forums on topics of interest, concern and importance to the members of the LGBT community of Queens, and it would be difficult to argue that the issue of Israel/Palestine is not of any interest, concern or importance to them; indeed, the intensely personal and vituperative reaction of two members of the English-speaking men’s group would seem to attest to the interest, concern and importance of the issue to them. And the focus on ‘Israel/Palestine as an LGBT issue’ would seem to be inarguably geared to explaining Israel/ Palestine to the members of the LGBT community of Queens.

Clearly, the charges of conflict of interest had no merit and were simply a smokescreen for the real objection to the forum, which was that the two speakers on the panel were speaking from a perspective critical of Israeli government policy. And in that regard, it would be extraordinary if Queens Pride House as a community center were to announce and impose a policy banning criticism of any foreign government; that is, in effect, what the Center in Manhattan did from February 2011 until February 2013, the leadership of that organization learning that the price to be paid was the opprobrium of many in the community, who rightly saw that policy as contradicting the Center’s own stated mission. For any LGBT community center to prohibit speech — including banning criticism of human rights abuses of both LGBT and non-LGBT people — would run directly contrary to the very core mission of any community center that wishes to call itself a community center.

The intense hostility from the gay Zionists critical of the June 4 forum, in my view, has to be understood as part of a larger phenomenon — the organized campaign of harassment and intimidation that the Israel lobby directs against anyone critical of Israeli government policy, including Israeli occupation and apartheid. No other foreign government is exempt from criticism in the United States of its actions and policies except that of Israel, and it is difficult to imagine any of the critics of the June 4 forum at Queens Pride House supporting a ban at Pride House on criticism of the governments of the Russia, the People’s Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Uganda, or Jamaica — all of which have been guilty of gross violations of human rights — including those of LGBT people. But with Israel, there is a double standard, of course, and so a forum critical of its human rights abuses would come in for attack in a way that a forum critical of the human rights records of any of those other regimes would not only not be criticized but most likely applauded by those critical of our June 4 forum.

It is striking to me that none of those critical of our forum actually came to the event on June 4; could it be that they were afraid of hearing information that might compel them to re-evaluate their uncritical support for Israel? Rather than respond to their vituperation and threats, I chose to take the high road and invite those critics to come to the forum and ask questions of the speakers and share their perspective with the audience during Q&A; but none of them came.

At the forum, Sarah Schulman gave an eloquent presentation on the history of her involvement with the anti-Israeli apartheid movement and I gave a presentation about my participation in the first US LGBT delegation tour of Palestine in January 2012. In doing so, and in refusing to capitulate to the campaign of harassment and intimidation directed against me and the organization, we made history.

After the forum, NYC QAIA member wrote a letter to the editor of the Queens Chronicle:

“Israel is no democracy”
June 20, 2013

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Contact:
Pauline Park
paulinepark@earthlink.net
(718) 662-8893
or
Jen Richards
Co-Director, The Trans 100
jen@thetrans100.com

Pauline Park named to the first-ever ‘TRANS 100’ list

We Happy Trans, This is H.O.W., Chicago House and GLAAD Announce Inaugural List Focused on Positive Work Being Accomplished by Trans People Nationwide

April 9, 2013 – Today, Pauline Park was named to the inaugural Trans 100 list, an overview of the breadth and diversity of work being done in, by, and for the transgender community across the United States. The 2013 Trans 100 list, created by We Happy Trans, a website that celebrates the positive experiences of transgender people, and This is H.O.W., a Phoenix based nonprofit organization dedicated to the betterment of the lives of trans people, was presented at an event sponsored by Chicago House, GLAAD, the Pierce Family Foundation, Orbitz.com, and KOKUMOMEDIA. The first effort of its kind, the list intends to shift the coverage of trans issues by focusing on the positive work being accomplished, and providing visibility to those typically underrepresented.

Pauline Park (paulinepark.com) is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) (nyagra.com), which she co-founded in 1998, and president of the board of directors as well as acting executive director of Queens Pride House (queenspridehouse.org), which she co-founded in 1997. A resident of Jackson Heights in western Queens, Park also co-founded Iban/Queer Koreans of New York in 1997 and served as its coordinator from 1997 to 1999.

“I’m honored to be named to the inaugural Trans 100 list and delighted at the enhanced visibility that my presence on this list will bring to Queens Pride House and the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) as well as the other groups, organizations and projects that I’m involved with,” said Park, who led the campaign for passage of the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002. She 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. Park negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), a safe schools law enacted by the New York state legislature in 2010, and the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by that body.

The list began as an idea by This Is H.O.W. Executive Director Toni D’Orsay, and was then developed in partnership with Jen Richards of We Happy Trans. The project received over 500 nominations in December 2012, with over 360 individuals recommended for inclusion.

A launch event for the Trans 100 list took place at Mayne Stage in Chicago on International Transgender Day of Visibility, a day which aims to bring attention to the accomplishments of transgender people around the world.

“The only sustainable self-interest is that which extends the sense of self to include the whole,” said Jen Richards at the Trans 100 launch event. “Look around: women, men, people of color, genderqueer kids, crossdressers, showgirls, sex workers, academics, activists, artists, and allies. We are all one community.”

“The value of the work that is represented by the 100 people on this list is immeasurable,” said Executive Director of This Is H.O.W., Antonia D’orsay, about the Trans 100. “These people demonstrate the diversity, the determination, and the incredible triumph of spirit that informs all trans people, no matter where they are. This is just a glimpse of what trans people can accomplish.”

“The Trans 100 will bring much-needed visibility to the critical, grassroots work that trans people have been doing in communities across the country for years,” said GLAAD’s Wilson Cruz. “While media coverage so often misses the mark on accurate portrayals of trans people, the Trans 100 is changing the game by sharing the inspiring and diverse stories behind trans advocacy.”

KOKUMO, an artist, activist, and African American transgender woman, hosted the event. Two accomplished transgender musicians – folk-rock songwriter Namoli Brennet, and singer Joe Stevens of the West Coast-based Folk/Roots group Coyote Grace – gave live performances.

Jen Richards partnered with Chicago House and KOKUMOMEDIA to produce Chicago’s Trans 100 launch event. GLAAD served as Inaugural Sponsor, with additional support from the Pierce Family Foundation, Orbitz.com, Progress Printing, and Dr. Graphx. Both Chicago House’s TransLife Project and This is H.O.W. provide direct services to transgender people experiencing homelessness, unemployment, violence, health disparities, and HIV infection. KOKUMOMEDIA uses film, music, and literature to provide to create and generate realistic depictions of transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex (TGI) people of color.

For a full list of the 2013 Trans 100 visit www.WeHappyTrans.com, or www.facebook.com/Trans100.

###

About We Happy Trans: WeHappyTrans.com was launched in early in 2012 in response to the lack of positive depictions of trans people in the media, and the absence of an online space that focused on the positive aspects of the trans experience. For more information, please visit www.wehappytrans.com or connect with We Happy Trans on Facebook.

About This is H.O.W.: This Is H.O.W. Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the betterment of the lives of Trans (transsexual, transgender, and gender variant) persons experiencing crisis situations such as homelessness, substance abuse, familial abuse, and transition related difficulties. For more information, please visit www.thisishow.org or connect with This is H.O.W. on Facebook and Twitter.

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On behalf of the board of directors and staff of Queens Pride House, I would like to welcome you to the celebration of our 15th anniversary. Queens Pride House  is the only lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community center in the borough, and we do our best with limited resources to serve the community in its full diversity. Queens Pride House serves thousands of clients a year and conducts health support, education and referral programs, youth training, and cultural and social programming. We have a youth group and a transgender support group and we host a support group for translatinas; we have both an English-speaking and a Spanish-speaking men’s group, and the Grupo Espanol is here in force~! And we provide space for many outside groups to meet as well.

We decided to use our 15th anniversary as an opportunity to honor Selena Blake, Ross Levi, the Rev. Charles McCarron, Daniel Cano and Voces Latinas for their contributions to the LGBT community. Selena Blake is a documentarian who directed the film “Taboo Yardies,” about homophobia in Jamaica. As executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, Ross Levi led the organization’s successful campaigns for the Dignity for All Students Act and the state marriage equality law, and he has since joined Governor Andrew Cuomo’s team as vice-president for marketing initiatives in the business marketing division at Empire State Development (ESD), New York’s chief economic development agency. Rev. McCarron was the first executive director of Queens Pride House, serving as an unpaid volunteer in that capacity in 1997-98. Since 2004, he has been executive director of Episcopal Community Services of Long Island. Daniel Cano interned at Pride House and then stayed after his internship to conduct a series of workshops on positive psychology; he just finished his associate’s degree at La Guardia Community College and is now starting his first year at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Voces Latinas will be honored for their work with immigrant Latinas in Queens living with HIV/AIDS and those at high risk for HIV/AIDS.

And we’re delighted to have Raphael Miranda as the master of ceremonies for our anniversary benefit. An openly gay man who lives with his husband and two cats in New Jersey, Miranda is the weekend meteorologist and weather producer for NBC New York; he can also be seen on the digital channel New York Nonstop.

This event would not have been possible without the generous support of all of you as well as our sponsors and advertisers, including: the Ali Forney Center, APICHA community health center, Armondo’s Italian Restaurant, Connie Idavoy and Bum Bum Bar, the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, Chayya, Dignity-New York, the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, Harlem United, the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Latino Commission on AIDS, the New Immigrant Coalition for Empowerment (NICE), the Rev. Joseph Pae, Eddie Valentin, SAGE (Senior Aging in a GLBT Environment), Sullivan Street Press, the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF). And our individual donors, including: Mercedes Cano, Fernando Gomez, Winston Lin, Otton Nielsen, Lilian Nieves of PRIDE, Charles Ober, Bryan Pu-Folkes, Alfonso Quiroz & Jeff Simmons, Mark Sullivan Roy, Itala Rutter & Toni Olivera, and Richard Wandel. And I’d like to thank the Out Hotel for generously donating a gift certificate.

I would also like to thank our board and staff. Our board members include Audie Edwards (vice-president), Sara Gillen (secretary), Itala Rutter (chair of our development & fundraising committee), and Kleber Jalon (chair of our audit committee). And our hard-working staff, including Michelle Abdus-Shakur (our program coordinator & office manager), Carlos Cubas (our outreach coordinator), Juan Almonte (our fiscal assistant), Rene Vazquez del Valle (our director of clinical programs), and our four new social work interns.

A few people I would especially like to thank are our new fundraising assistant, Monica Lewis; our chief financial officer and board treasurer Charles Ober, who is the only member of the board in continuous service since our founding in 1997; and who, along with me, is the only original co-founding member of the organization still directly involved in its operations. And Jonathan Acevedo, our volunteer designer, who designed most of the ads in the program journal.

If you find it in your heart — and wallet — to offer an additional donation, please do so. You can also buy copies of my CD of piano music (“Barricades Mysterieuses) for $20 each; all proceeds go to supporting the work of Queens Pride House.

And if you haven’t already done so, please sign our mailing list so we can keep you abreast of our many activities. The next opportunity you’ll have to support our work will be our holiday party, which will be held at Queens Pride House on Dec. 6. Between now and then, we will have a Halloween party at the end of October (date to be determined). Please ‘like’ us on Facebook and ‘follow’ us on Twitter. Thank you all again for your support~!

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