I saw Phelim McDermott’s production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera “Così Fan Tutte” at the Metropolitan Opera with friends on 3 October 2026; it was an early birthday celebration as well and I couldn’t think of any happier way to celebrate it~!

Natalie & me at the fountain in Lincoln Center plaza before “Così Fan Tutte” at the Met

Sherrel & me at “Così Fan Tutte” during the intermission

“Così Fan Tutte” sign

Patricia & me at “Così Fan Tutte” during the intermission

“Così Fan Tutte” at the Met: house lights on at intermission

Michael & me at intermission

“Così Fan Tutte” curtain call with the six principals

“Così Fan Tutte” curtain call

“Così Fan Tutte”: the gang at intermission

“Così Fan Tutte”: in the lobby at intermission

“Così Fan Tutte” curtain call

“Così Fan Tutte” poster & the gang

“Così Fan Tutte” curtain call

Patrick, me & Sherrel with the “Così Fan Tutte” poster

“Così Fan Tutte” is one of my favorite operas of all time

The post Phelim McDermott’s “Così Fan Tutte” at the Met (10.3.26) appeared first on Pauline Park.

Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse is an obscure but fascinating figure whose claim to fame is a book he wrote that was the centerpiece of the conspiracy to overthrow the tottering Qing dynasty.

Backhouse was born into a Quaker family in Darlington on 20 October 1873, the son of Sir Jonathan Backhouse, a director of Barclays Bank; the eldest son, Edmund would eventually inherit the baronetcy and become the second baronet in the family line; but he was the black sheep of the family on account the homosexuality his father despised and — no doubt, given the accounts of Edmund’s long history of playing fast and loose with the facts — which would get him into trouble on numerous occasions over the course of his long life.

In “Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China,” Sterling Seagrave wrote of Backhouse, “There was no way that Lim Boon-keng or anyone else could compete with the eloquent Backhouse when it came to poisoning the dowager’s reputation and slyly filling in the pornographic details. What nobody knew was that Edmund was the product of a bizarre and miserable childhood that would have made fascinating study for a Freudian psychiatrist. He complained bitterly that ‘my childish years were ideally unhappy; for I was born of wealthy parents who had everything they wanted and were miserable… I heard not a kind word nor received a grudging dole of sympathybut hate and hate alone throughout the live long days, the while [my mother] mocked my childish tears.’ ‘Her rages,’ he said, ‘were veritable cataclysms.’ His father once thrashed him, and his younger brother Roger ‘was always very rude to me.’ They all hated him because not only was Edmund a liar, a cheat, and a thief, but at the same time ostentatiously homosexual, a combination that seems to have been a bit more than his parents could handle. None of these attributes was unusual among his contemporaries, singly or in combination, but Edmund had the additional disadvantage of being functionally insane. H was brilliant but highly unstable, a true exotic with an extraordinary fantasy world and long bouts of psychotic depression” (Sterling Seagrave, “Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China,” Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1992, p. 282).

The young Edmund went to Oxford but did not finish his degree and the debts he accumulated forced his father to bail him out discreetly so as to avoid a scandal that could have tainted the family reputation. Edmund abruptly left Oxford in 1898 without a degree and that lack of the most basic academic credential would later impede him in his ambition to secure the chair in Chinese studies at the university.

Despite the lack of academic credentials, Backhouse would write or co-author five important books (bibliography via Wikipedia):

• Backhouse, Edmund; Bland, J. O. P. (1910). China Under the Empress Dowager: Being the History of the Life and Times of Tzŭ Hsi. Retrieved 1 April2013. China under the empress dowager
• Backhouse, Edmund; Bland, John Otway Percy (1914). Annals & memoirs of the court of Peking: (from the 16th to the 20th century) (PDF). London: Heinemann. Archived from the original on 28 June 2014. Retrieved 1 April2013.
• Backhouse, Sir Edmund; Bland, J. O. P. (1913). “Secret Annals of the Manchu Court 1. The Story of the Precious Pearl”. The Atlantic, Volume 112. Atlantic Monthly Co. p. 629. Retrieved 1 September 2014.
• Backhouse, Sir Edmund (2011). Décadence Mandchoue. Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books. ISBN 978-9881944511.
• Backhouse, Edmund Trelawny (2022) [1945]. Hoeppli, Reinhard (ed.). The Dead Past. Sydney: Alchemie Books. ISBN 978-0645852714.

In fact, these books would profoundly influence British and European views of Cixi, the empress dowager who effectively ruled China for most of the last half century of the Qing dynasty.

Alexander Boyd of China Books Review spoke with Jeremiah Jenne about the extraordinary claim that Backhouse made that he had a long affair with the empress dowager Cixi (“‘Décadence Mandchoue: the wild (and almost certainly fictional) affair between Sir Edmund Backhouse and Empress Dowager Cixi“).

Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote a biography of Backhouse that goes into great detail in examining the authenticity of the documents Backhouse used in writing his books and the claims he made, the noted historian concluding that Backhouse was “a confidence man with few equals” (Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse,” Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1977).

The origin of Trevor-Roper’s book is itself a key part of the drama of the life of Sir Edmund Backhouse. Switzerland appointed Dr. Reinhard Hoeppli honorary consul general in Beijing in January 1942 when the Swiss government took over consular services for American, British and Dutch nationals in Japanese-occupied territories — which by that point included virtually all of the east coast of China.

The Swiss physician who specialized in parasitology described Backhouse as someone who “still harboured a strong sexuality and who, after some external inhibitions had been overcome, revealed with lascivious pleasure the erotic part of his personality. In such moments, he presented occasionally the very picture of an old satyr enjoying happy memories” (Trevor-Roper, p. 228). Conversations with Hoeppli inspired Backhouse to write his two-volume memoir, “Décadence Mandchoue” but “they were grossly, obsessively obscene,” writes Trevor-Roper and Hoeppli realized the memoirs could not be published in 1943; in January 1973 — 40 years after Backhouse had completed his memoirs and a month before Hoeppli’s death — the Swiss physician passed the enormously long texts to the director of the Swiss medical institute of which he was a member with the intention that they be housed in a library. Trevor-Roper read the entire manuscript and decided to attempt to determine the veracity of the claims made in it.

Trevor-Roper notes with apparent disgust that “Décadence Mandchoue” “opens in a high-class homosexual brothel,” declaring, “it is a subject of which the reader will have more than enough long before the end of the book” (ibid., p. 249).

Most importantly, Trevor-Roper concludes regarding the diary of Ching-shan — the crucial element in Backhouse’s entire narrative about the court of the empress dowager Cixi: “When a man, to prove the authenticity of a disputed document, fabricates imaginary corroboration, we can take it, first, that the disputed document is a forgery, and secondly, that he knows it to be a forgery: in effect, that he forged it. The imaginary conversations with Jung-u, the imaginary diaries of Li Lien-ying, are circumstantial but sufficient proof not only that the diary of Ching-shan is a forgery but also that Backhouse himself forged it” (ibid., p. 273). “Alas, it must be admitted, Backhouse’s ‘memoirs’ are not an edifying work. They are a pornographic novelette” — but he was “coherent and sane” when he wrote them, Trevor-Roper concludes with evident disgust (p. 274), adding, “He lived in a world of imagination” (p. 275), adds Trevor-Roper, attributing to Backhouse “cunning and sang-froid.” Trevor-Roper accuses Backhouse of intellectual ‘snobisme’ and “essentially empty elitism” (p. 280). But “Backhouse’s frauds were not inspired by need or greed” (p. 290); instead, Trevor-Roper concludes, Backhouse was driven by “Love of fame… even notoriety… a desire to smooth his way into a coveted chair… a compulsive extravagance…” (p. 291). “I have described him as an aesthete who repudiated the materialism, the philistinism, of Victorian England, and took refuge, mentally at least, in the spiritually and intellectually empty elitism, the social and sexual non-confirmity, of the 1890s. This trivial aestheticism, this sense of superiority, this hatred of Western materialism, continued to be the central threat of his life in Peking. As the outer world became more and more distateseful to him, he retreated ever further into personal seclusion, an inner citadel” (p. 294).

Trevor-Roper even goes so far as to claim that Backhouse eventually became a “spiritual fascist” and transferred his admiration to Nazi Germany, according to Hoeppli’s recollections of conversations with Backhouse and passages edited out of “Décadence Mandchoue” by the Swiss doctor (p. 295).

Laszlo Montgomery has a three-part exploration of Backhouse’s life and career in “The China History Podcast” series; in it, Montgomery concludes that Backhouse was a fabulist and a con man but he also notes that Hugh Trevor-Roper was a notorious homophobe and was clearly revolted by Backhouse’s homosexuality. Montgomery also notes that Trevor-Roper was in a sense hoist on his own pétard: the Hitler diaries that the historian declared authentic were determined to be a forgery.

As for Backhouse’s imaginary relationship with the empress dowager, “My intercourse with Tzu Hi started in 1902 and continued until hear death. I had kept an unusually close record of my secret association with the empress and others, possessing notes and messages writte to me by Her Majesty, but had the misfortune to lose all these manuscripts and papers,” Sterling Seagrave quotes Backhouse as writing. “The extravagance of this wanton sexual burlesque with the dowager and the grotesque details of their encounters made it painfully apparent that they are the inflamed sexual fantasy of a mind completely unhinged. What began many decades earlier as ingenious, mischievous satire — disguised as history — now degenerated into lunatic graffiti” (ibid., p. 286).

Kang Yuwei (‘Wild Fox Kang’), George Morrison, J.O.P. Bland and the Times of London all joined Backhouse in a conspiracy to blacken the empress dowager’s name and create the false impression that Cixi was primarily or even solely responsible for the violent cataclysm of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900; Sterling Seagrave and Jung Chang have both effectively exploded that myth (Jung Chang,”Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China,” Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013). The

So what can we conclude of the author of “Décadence Mandchoue”…?

Backhouse was clearly a con man even if an admittedly charming con artist; and yet, he was also an accomplished linguist and at least some of what he donated to the Bodleian Library was of inestimable value despite the donation of forged documents along with the treasures. Trevor-Roper’s description of Backhouse as a “spiritual fascist” seems to be part of an attempt by the homophobic historian to turn Backhouse into something of a Nazi which prompts some skepticism on my part; but Backhouse undoubtedly engaged in repeated behavior which was profoundly dishonest even if not primarily driven by greed.

What is most ambiguous is the role that Backhouse played in relation to the British imperialist incursions in China; it is true that he worked for the arch imperialist George Morrison but Backhouse repeatedly tried to escape Morrison’s control. In the end, Backhouse strikes me as an exceptionally talented linguist and an exceptionally neurotic fabulist who could have produced much more of value had he been able to direct his talents into more positive channels; but he is without doubt one of the most colorful characters produced by the British encounter with Qing China.

Pauline Park received her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her M.Sc. in European studies from the London School of Economics & Political Science; she earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The post Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse & the conspiracy to overthrow the Qing appeared first on Pauline Park.

Dolly Parton was our fairy godmother
by Pauline Park

Dolly Parton died of cancer on 25 August 2026. I was actually in a group meeting at my local senior center that Tuesday and I remember the moment when the woman facilitating the group session announced it,  with “Jolene” playing in the background.

I’ve never been particularly interested in country music but I love Dolly Parton. Dolly not only transcended the ‘country & western’ musical genre, she was the rare figure who appealed to Americans across all political divisions. Donald Trump responded to the news of her death (announced by her nephew) by ordering flags flown at half mast from federal government buildings. Newspapers across the country and around the world put Dolly on their front pages. Celebrites who knew her and had worked with her posted condolences as did those who didn’t know her personally.

Dolly’s death made front pages of newspapers across the country and around the world.

The day after Dolly’s death, the Wilderness Society posted (8.26.26):

“Dolly Parton’s deep connection to the Great Smoky Mountains inspired a lifelong appreciation for nature, community and giving back. In a National Geographic interview, Dolly urged people to take better care of the natural world, saying, “We should pay more attention. We’re just mistreating Mother Nature — that’s like being ugly to your mama. We need to take better care of the things that God gave us freely. And that we’re so freely messing up.”
As we remember Dolly’s extraordinary life, we’re also reminded why protecting the places that inspire us matters, so wildlife can thrive, future generations can make memories of their own and everyone can experience the freedom of the outdoors. 💚 Rest in peace, Dolly.

Even the billionaire J.K. Rowling posted a tribute to Dolly. The irony of Rowling’s post was not lost on members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community, given her relentless attacks on the transgender community. I posted about Rowling’s tribute to Parton on my Facebook page and something extraordinary happened: the post went ‘viral,’ garnering more than 3,700 views — rare for me, especially since Facebook began shadow banning me over my Palestine posts.

In stark contrast to the billionaire “Harry Potter” creator’s vicious transphobia, Dolly Parton was a stalwart supporter of the entire LGBTQ community — including the ‘T’ in ‘LGBTQ.’ In fact, Dolly’s long-term chauffeur was a transman.

As Thought Catalog reported after Dolly’s death, “Jason Pirro drove for and assisted Dolly Parton for more than 30 years, a working relationship that outlasted the 1990 tabloid story that tried to expose him. That July, the supermarket tabloid Star ran a “sex change shocker” about a trans man in Dolly’s limo, using the deadnaming, exploitative language of the era. Pirro’s own words in the piece were unbothered: “Dolly has been good to me… Dolly knows all about me.” Trans community publications quickly reclaimed the story. The XX Club, a Hartford support group, ran it in the August 1990 issue of its newsletter Twenty Minutes, and Lou Sullivan’s pioneering FTM Newsletter preserved similar material as rare proof of a major star’s acceptance at a time of almost no trans visibility. Sullivan died of AIDS-related complications in 1991. Parton kept Pirro close long after. She thanked him by name in the liner notes of her 2016 album “Pure & Simple” and credited him in her 2023 book “Behind the Seams.” In her 1994 memoir she wrote that if she hadn’t been a woman she’d have been a drag queen, and that everything she knew “about sex-change operations” she learned from her good friend Jason. Parton died Tuesday, Aug. 25, at 80. In the days since, queer and trans fans have circulated Pirro’s story again as one more piece of a legacy she spent decades living out loud.”

But Dolly wasn’t without her critics; two days after her death, on August 27, the Vocal Politics Facebook page posted this critique:

Crónicas Mexicanas posted on Facebook, “In 1980, at the height of her fame, Dolly Parton recorded a song about 28 Mexican farmworkers whose names nobody had bothered to write down. This is their story. On January 28, 1948, a chartered DC-3 took off from Oakland, California, carrying Mexican farmworkers back toward the border. Some had crossed without papers. Others were braceros whose work contracts had simply run out — part of the program that brought hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers north to work American fields. The plane went down in Los Gatos Canyon — not the Silicon Valley town most people picture, but a remote stretch of Fresno County, west of Coalinga. Thirty-two people lost their lives that day: the pilot, the co-pilot, the stewardess, an immigration guard, and 28 Mexican farmworkers. The next morning, the New York Times printed the names of the four Americans.

The other 28 were listed only as ‘deportees.’ In New York, a folk singer named Woody Guthrie read that report and could not let it go. He sat down and wrote a poem for the men and women whose names his country had not bothered to learn. Years later, a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman set those words to music. Pete Seeger carried the song around the world. And in 1980, Dolly Parton put it on ‘9 to 5 and Odd Jobs’ — the same album as her signature hit, on a record filled with songs about working people. But here is the part almost nobody knows. For 65 years, those 28 souls lay in a mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, beneath one small, blank headstone. No names. Nothing.

Then a Fresno writer named Tim Z. Hernandez — himself the son of farmworkers — went looking. He spent years in dusty archives, old newspaper rooms, and small Mexican villages, tracking down every single name and finding the families they left behind. On September 2, 2013, a granite memorial was unveiled at that grave. Every name carved into the stone. A border of 32 leaves — one for each person on board. Some 600 people came to stand there. Woody Guthrie’s song ended by saying they would never have a name. Sixty-five years later, they do. And in 2024, a second marker was placed at the canyon itself, so that anyone passing through would know exactly who fell there.

Say their names.

“While she wasn’t reading Karl Marx, she was a card-carrying member of multiple artists’ unions for nearly sixty years. Dave Pomeroy, president of American Federation of Musicians (AFM) of the United States and Canada Local 257 in Nashville, saluted her commitment to her fellow musicians,” noted Amber A’Lee Frost quoting Pomeroy as saying, “Dolly and her team consistently filed AFM union contracts for gigs, sessions, and tours, ensuring that the bands, singers, and studio musicians working alongside her received the benefits of union membership” (Amber A’Lee Frost, “The People’s Dolly,” Jacobin, 31 August 2026).

Dolly was once asked how should would like to be remembered and she replied, “I’d like to be thought of as a decent human being, just a regular person. When you think of me when I’m gone, I’d like you to smile, to think, Oh, she was funny, or, Oh, she had a good sense of humor, you know, when she was sad, she’d make a joke about it. I always say I’m a workhorse that looks like a show horse. I just hope I leave something good behind for other people to enjoy and to draw from.”

The post Dolly Parton was our fairy godmother appeared first on Pauline Park.

Sheela Lambert (1956 – 2024) was a native New Yorker and a bisexual activist and writer. I first met Sheela not too long after I moved to New York in 1995; I can’t remember the exact date that we first met, but it was after I had co-founded Queens Pride House in 1997 and the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) in 1998 and after we had launched the campaign for the transgender rights bill in 2000 that was ultimately enacted by the New York City Council in 2002.

So it was sometime in 2000 that Sheela approached me to launched a campaign that we would call the Coalition for Unity & Inclusion (CUI) whose aim was to get all of the leading community organizations and institutions in New York City to change their names from ‘gay and lesbian’ or ‘lesbian and gay’ to the more inclusive ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.’

Sheela Lambert at a meeting of the NYC Bi Book Club in Manhattan following a discussion of “Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution” by Shiri Eisner (8.14.13)

Sheela had already established herself as a prominent bisexual activist with activism and community organizing that she described in an interview with Patrick Dunn of the New Haven Pride Center (“Bi+ Talk: Sheela Lambert,” 9 November 2021), including her work creating the Bisexual Book Awards event.

When Sheela approached me in 2000, she expressed her frustration with the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center in particular, telling me that before she died, she wanted to walk into the Center under a sign that had the word ‘bisexual’ in it. Sheela was refreshingly frank it acknowledging that it was clear to her that it was unlikely that bisexuals alone would be able to get the Center to change its name without bringing transgender into the challenge to the Center’s administration. I told her that I had heard that there were conversations being had internally between the Center’s executive leadership and the Gender Identity Project (GIP) about an organizational name change but that to date those talks had gone nowhere.

Pauline Park & Sheela Lambert at a meeting of the Bi Book Club NYC in Manhattan (8.14.13)

At the time, I was really preoccupied with leading the campaign for the transgender rights bill, but it occurred to me that the campaign Sheela proposed could easily dovetail with the legislative campaign that I was running. Sheela felt strongly about the Center, the New York City Gay & Lesbian Pride March (run by Heritage of Pride) and the New York Lesbian & Gay Film Festival; we also decided that the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project (AVP) was another important community organization.

BiRequest co-sponsored the Celebrate Bisexuality Day event at Queens Pride House (9.21.13)

We were successful in getting the Center to change its name to ‘LGBT Community Center’ in 2001 but the Center has failed to credit us with having played a central role in bringing about the name change. The film festival leadership did not need much persuasion to change its name to ‘New York LGBT Film Festival.’ The executive staff of the Anti-Violence Project was not opposed to a name change but there was apparently some resistance from some board members so AVP ultimately decided to drop ‘Lesbian & Gay’ and simply call itself the ‘New York City Anti-Violence Project.’

Sheela Lambert & Pauline Park at dinner after a meeting of the NYC Bi Book Club in Manhattan (11.6.13)

Heritage of Pride took some work to persuade but ultimately changed the name of the largest pride parade in the world from ‘New York City Gay & Lesbian Pride March’ to ‘New York City LGBT Pride March’; the irony is that I would become the first openly transgendered grand marshal of the Pride March in 2005 and I was delighted to be the grand marshal of the ‘LGBT’ Pride March.

The New York Lesbian & Gay Film Festival did not require much persuasion to change its name to ‘New York LGBT Film Festival.’ The New York City Anti-Violence Project’s senior staff did not object to a name change but told us there was some resistance at the board of directors level and the board ultimately decided simply to jettison ‘Lesbian & Gay’ and call the organization ‘New York City Anti-Violence Project.’

Sheela Lambert chez elle (3.6.14)

Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York decided simply to eliminate the full name of the organization and call itself ‘GAPIMNY.’ I had actually served on the steering committee in 1999 and 2000 and had persuaded my colleagues to make the organization’s mission transgender-inclusive, so the decision to jettison the group’s full name was consistent with that broadening of its mission.

Some organizations changed their names without our directly contacting them as the national momentum for more inclusive nomenclature gained speed.

GLAAD did what GAPIMNY had done and dropped the original full name ‘Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’ and simply go by the acronym GLAAD; Parents & Friends of Lesbians & Gays did the same and now goes by the acronym ‘PFLAG’ alone.

Sheela Lambert organized Queer Fiction Night at Word Up in Washington Heights in Manhattan at which she read from her contribution to “Best Bi Short Stories: Bisexual Fiction” (a book she edited) (9.27.14)

Nomenclature of course is only an outward indication of inclusion and renaming an organization is no guarantee of full bisexual and transgender inclusion in the organization’s work; but it is nonetheless and important step in making an organization or institution fully inclusive.

The story of the successful Coalition for Unity & Inclusion campaign is a small chapter in the long history of the LGBT community and movement in New York and beyond but a significant one nonetheless and it is a tribute to our work that no community organization in New York or probably anywhere in the United States would consider using the non-inclusive ‘gay and lesbian’ or ‘lesbian and gay’ nomenclature. I am not aware of who in other cities and states did similar work but I am quite certain that there were other activists like us who pursued similar campaigns to persuade organizations and institutions in our community to make their organizational names inclusive. I will always remember the work I did with Sheela Lambert and I know she felt that it was some of the most important work she did as a bisexual activist; it is ultimately the story of how two activists with extremely limited resources could bringing about significant change simply by using their voices and their persuasive power to help bring about that change.

Sheela Lambert organized Queer Fiction Night at Word Up in Washington Heights in Manhattan at which she read from her contribution to “Best Bi Short Stories: Bisexual Fiction” (a book she edited) (9.27.14)

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

The post Sheela Lambert and the Coalition for Unity & Inclusion appeared first on Pauline Park.

Lindsey Graham’s death in July 2026 prompted a flood of unctuous claptrap from both his right-wing confederates and the corporate media as well as expressions of celebration from many progressives and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community which he explicitly disavowed despite rumors that he was a closeted homosexual. One could say that the responses to the South Carolina Republican’s death were as polarized as he himself was polarizing.

Yet it is also important to point out that the policeman Michael Fanone who was seriously injured in the January 6th insurrection provoked by Donald Trump in 2021 was neither partisan nor ideological but pointedly about accountability:

South Carolina’s senior senator did not start out as a fan of the orange fascist; in fact, Graham famously called Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic bigot” (Glenn Thrush, Jo Becker & Danny Hakim, “Tap Dancing With Trump: Lindsey Graham’s Quest for Relevance,” New York Times, 14 August 2021): an assessment that has been amply evidenced by Trump’s presidency.

“Raised just this side of poverty and left parentless early, Mr. Graham, 66, has from his school days chosen to ally himself with protective figures he calls “alpha dogs,” men more powerful than himself — disparate, even antagonistic, figures like Mr. Trump and Mr. McCain, the onetime prisoner of war so famously disparaged by Mr. Trump. Indeed, toward the end of his life, Mr. McCain privately remarked that his friend was drawn to the president for the affirmation,” Thrush, Becker and Hakim wrote in 2021; one does not have to imagine that there was a physical attraction between Graham and Trump to consider the possibility of a ‘homoerotic’ relationship in the larger sense of the Greek word ‘eros.’

Unlike Trump, Graham did not come from money and after he lost both parents, he adopted his younger sister in order to raise her like a daughter; but Graham is proof positive that neither coming from humble origins nor showing a personal generosity to family members is any guarantee of generosity of spirit in public policy; in fact, with the sole possible exception of his championing of a besieged Ukraine defending itself against Russian aggression, Graham’s entire career has been one of siding with the oppressor against the oppressed.

Indeed, Graham’s one consistent commitment throughout his time in Congress has been his unconditional support for Apartheid Israel and upon his death, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him a close personal friend as well as one of the best friends Israel had in Congress. As Apartheid Israel launched its response to the Hamas attack, Graham exclaimed, “Do in Gaza what we did in Tokyo and Berlin; level the place!” and the South Carolina Republican repeatedly called for the most extreme measures to be taken by the United States and Israel; he reportedly even coached Netanyahu on how to approach Trump to persuade him to launch an illegal and unconstitutional war against Iran.

Right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer has said publicly that Trump White House staff told her that it was well known in the Trump White House that Graham was a homosexual; the fact that Trump, Republicans and the religious right would support Graham despite knowing of his homosexuality is less puzzling than it might seem on first glance: in some ways, a closet queen willing to advance the Republican right’s homophobic and transphobic agenda is potentially more useful than an ordinary heteronormative politician supporting their anti-LGBTQ agenda.

Note that Graham did support the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) after it was launched by George W. Bush in 2003 and has supported HIV/AIDS funding since then; but this is the only exception to Graham’s support for the right-wing anti-LGBTQ agenda. Graham’s relationship with Trump has been closer than that of any other member of the US Senate and one is reminded of US Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror at the height of the Red Scare.

indeed, the Wisconsin Republican’s right-hand man was the notorious Roy Cohn — another notorious closet queen who collaborated with right-wing Republicans in the persecution of LGBTQ people; most significantly, Cohn would later become Donald Trump’s mentor and the aggressive tactics that Trump has used throughout his political career come directly from Cohn.

In thinking of Graham like Cohn as a classic ‘self-hating homosexual,’ another notorious closet queen comes to mind: the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover — who kept a young lover (Clyde Tolson) while surveilling and persecuting (other) LGBTQ people and even prancing around in private as ‘Mary’ in a curly black wig; in this context, reports that Graham liked to don red lingerie in bedroom romps with sex workers come to mind.

Hence Graham’s close collaboration with Trump is not in the least inexplicable — it is part of a history in which Graham is situated that goes back at least as far as the Germany of the Weimarer Republik when the openly gay Ernst Röhm (1887-1934) used his Sturmabteiling (SA) to help Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to power — only to be liquidated along with thousands of SA members in the Nacht Der Landen Messer (Night of the Long Knives) in 1934.

In this context, Graham’s sexuality is not only not extraneous to his record in the Senate, I would argue that Graham’s closeted homosexuality is as crucial to understanding him as Clarence Thomas’s blackness is to understanding the Supreme Court justice’s betrayal of the African American community of which he is at least nominally a member.

Following Graham’s death, Them published a report by Quispe López that is worth quoting in full (Quispe López, “In Viral Post, Author Jesse James Rose Opens Up About Anti-LGBTQ+ Senator Lindsey Graham Allegedly Hiring Her for Sex Work,” Them, 13 July 2026); it could well be the epitaph to Graham’s entire political career as well as his life:

The picture of Lindsey Graham that emerges from the report by Quispe López is not a flattering one and one could say that Graham emerges as a tragic figure who was never able to present his authentic self to the world; and yet, in a deeper sense, the hypocritical double-dealing abusive power hungry closet queen may well have been the authentic Lindsey Graham.

It is a well known fact that however bright it may appear in the sky, the moon only reflects the light of the sun and generates none of its own; Lindsey Graham was like the moon in that sense: he appeared to be enormously powerful yet exercised power only by doing the bidding of others — whether Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the religious right, the military/industrial complex or Apartheid Israel and the Zionist machine. Lindsey Graham had no ability to generate positive light of his own and that is his tragedy — all the more so insofar as he reveled in emitting the negative energy of the aforementioned power centers in American and global politics. Graham’s colleague in the Senate, the African American Republican US Senator from South Carolina Tim Scott declared upon Graham’s death that he was irreplaceable; but the truth is that Graham is eminently replaceable: anyone willing to do the bidding of Trump, the military/industrial complex, the Zionist machine and the banks, corporations and wealthy donors who funded Graham’s campaigns will easily slip into his role and his seat; power hungry politicians like Graham are a dime a dozen — even if few closet queens like Graham reach the pinnacle of power; how ironically apropos that New Jersey’s Democratic US Senator Cory Booker paid unctuous homage to Graham upon news of his death!

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

The post Lindsey Graham: death of a Zionist warmonger appeared first on Pauline Park.

Ask someone to picture a castle and the one that will come first to mind for many if not most people is Neuschwanstein; perhaps they might think of the castle in the middle of Disneyland in Anaheim (California), but that castle was in fact modeled after Neuschwanstein. Some will know that Neuschwanstein was built by Ludwig II of Bavaria and most of those who have heard of Bavaria’s fourth king of will have heard him referred to as ‘Mad King Ludwig.’ But was he really mad…? Therein hangs a tale…

The Bavaria that we know today as a Bundesland (federal state) of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany) is the product of more than a millennium of development and expansion; in the 10th century, the Herzogtum Bayern included much of what is now Austria, but on 17 September 1156, the Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa issued the Privilegium Minus decree that elevated the Bavarian frontier march of Austria (Ostarrîchi) to a duchy, establishing its independence from Bavaria; the duchy eventually passed from the House of Babenberg to the House of  Habsburg, which used the archduchy as the basis for the creation of its vast Central European empire.

The separation of the kernel of modern Austria from the duchy of Bavaria sent those two principalities on different paths even if Bavaria and Austria are culturally extremely similar: both are profoundly Catholic and primarily rural and the Bavarian and Austrian dialects of German are considered by many linguists to be part of the same Bavaro-Austrian German dialect that is the basis for Austrian standard German (so different from BRD Hochdeutsch).

As Bavaria expanded slowly over the course of the centuries, its status was upgraded from a duchy to that of an electorate and eventually to that of a kingdom; the Königreich Bayern only lasted a little over a century: 1806–1918; when World War I destroyed the Second German Reich, it also ended the nominal independence of the kingdom of Bavaria.

Throughout the history of Bavaria as duchy, electorate and kingdom, the Wittelsbach dynasty reigned supreme; and there is no doubt that Ludwig II  (8.25.1845-6.13.1886) is by far the most famous and most memorable of the Wittelsbachs just as Friedrich II (Frederick the Great) is by far the most famous and most memorable of the Hohenzollerns.

But there is one of Ludwig’s predecessors who rivals his notoriety: his grandfather Ludwig I after whom he was named (at his grandfather’s insistence). Ludwig I (1686-1868) reigned from 1825 until 1848; encouraging Bavaria’s industrialization, he built the kingdom’s first railways; initially liberal, he became increasingly repressive. A great patron of the arts, Ludwig I also was susceptible to the feminine charms of Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, the Irish dancer and actress who became (in)famous as the ‘Spanish’ dancer Lola Montez. The scandal of the king’s relationship with the notorious courtesan only intensified when he named her Gräfin von Landsfeld and granted her a large annual annuity; but the countess went far beyond the role of royal mistress to meddle in government affairs, pushing a liberal, anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit agenda in the most profoundly Catholic of the South German states.

When the the Revolution of 1848 swept Bavaria, the rising wave of resentment of Lola Montez and her royal paramour provoked his abdication in favor of his son, who became Maximilian II. Lola fled Bavaria and the greatest threat to the Bavarian monarchy dissipated; but the scandal created a precedent for the overthrow of a Bavarian king that would profoundly influence the reign of his grandson and namesake.

Whatever his failings as king, Ludwig I showed an affection to his grandson that Maximilian and his wife were uninterested or incapable of showing the sensitive young boy; quite the contrary: Maximilian subjected his elder son and heir to physical brutality in the form of corporal punishment as well as a punishing tutelage by tutors who became exasperated with the dreamy boy’s inattention to the subjects his father thought were most important for a future king to master.

The future Märchenkönig (fairytale king) took only one thing from his father other than his crown: the royal family’s summer residence at Hohenschwangau was decorated with murals depicting medieval knights and their chivalry — including the story of Lohengrin — with whom the young boy developed an intense identification.

Ludwig’s parents were either uninterested in a real relationship with their sons Ludwig and Otto or incapable of showing true affection; as a result, the young crown prince retreated into a fantasy world of medieval knights that anticipated his castle-building as king. When Ludwig attended a performance of “Lohengrin,” it captivated the young king  (Fantastic History, “Ludwig II of Bavaria: The Tragic Love and Mysterious Death of Bavaria’s Last Dreamer“).

When Maximilian I died unexpectedly in 1845, Ludwig II had the opportunity to turn his medieval fantasies into reality; the new king immediately deputized one of his officials to search for Richard Wagner and invite the composer to come to Munich as Ludwig’s court composer. Wagner was found in a dingy flophouse hotel in Stuttgart hiding out from his army of creditors and the king’s invitation changed both of their lives as well as the course of Bavarian history and that of opera and indeed the cultural trajectory of the 19th century (Wilfrid Blunt, “Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria, New York: the Viking Press, 1970). and prompted him to invite Richard Wagner to come to Munich with extraordinary consequences for both the king and the composer.

There is no question that Ludwig II’s patronage of Richard Wagner not only saved his career, it may well have saved his life; and it was the generosity of the king of Bavaria that funded all of Wagner’s greatest works, including “Tristan und Isolde,” “Der Ring des Nibelungen” and “Parsifal.” The enormous Ring cycle was the largest operatic work ever created and Ludwig built the Bayreuth Festspiele to stage it; but it was “Tristan” that changed the course of musical history: the prelude signaled the beginning of Late Romanticism and the dissolution of the diatonic harmonic structure embodied in the Classical music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven presaged modernism in music; in that sense, Ludwig’s patronage of Wagner was even more influential in music, opera and theater than the legendary castle building that immortalized the king.

Wagner was a vicious anti-Semite and a sociopathic manipulator and took advantage of Ludwig’s generosity and infatuation with him but there is no indication that their relationship was ever physical; in fact, Wagner was a notorious womanizer and scandalized the Bavarians with his affair with Cosima von Bülow even as the cuckolded conductor Hans von Bülow was conducting premieres of Wagner’s operas. Unknown at the time, Wagner was a closet crossdresser, as the Guardian revealed some years ago, but a heterosexual crossdresser with absolutely no interest in other male bodies. The resentment of Wagner’s insidious influence on Ludwig spread to the newspapers and the general public and the king’s ministers gave him an ultimatum: either Ludwig dismiss Wagner or the cabinet would resign en masse.

So Ludwig tearfully dismissed his beloved composer and the sent him packing, plunging the king into a deep depression and provoking the greatest building project in Bavarian history. With the departure of Richard Wagner, Ludwig retreated into a fantasy world from which he would never emerge. One of the most damaging aspects of Ludwig’s retreat from reality was his breaking off of his engagement with his cousin Sophie; after the joyous public celebration of the engagement, the disappointment in the press as well as the cabinet and among the public was palpable; the reality was that Ludwig would never marry and would never produce an heir, and tragically, his younger brother Otto would succumb to the mental illness that was a recurring theme in the history of the House of Wittelsbach and would eventually be institutionalized.

Ludwig’s beloved cousin Elisabeth who married Kaiser Franz Josef and became empress of Austria was perhaps also touched by the mental illness that apparently ran in the family and their son and heir Rudolf may also have been touched by it, with tragic consequences for the House of Habsburg and indirectly for all of Europe. ‘Sisi’ was closer to Ludwig than anyone and perhaps she alone understood him fully.

Much as both Ludwig and his cousin Sisi wanted to retreat from the world, events intruded. Otto von Bismarck’s ambition to unify Germany under Prussian leadership would have profound consequences for Ludwig’s Bavaria. Prussia’s Eisenkanzler enlisted Austria in the two Schleswig Wars against Denmark that gave Prussia control of Schleswig-Holstein in 1865; the Iron Chancellor then turned Prussian guns on its erstwhile ally Austria in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 that destroyed Austria’s nominal leadership of the German states and enabled Bismarck to pursue the ‘Kleindeutsche Lösung’ (Small German Solution) of German unification under Prussian leadership excluding Austria entirely. The result of the intra-German fratricide was to force Bavaria into a secret treaty that would put Bavarian troops under Prussian command in the event of another war; that war was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 that forced the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria into the new Second German Reich despite their cultural affinity with Austria as largely rural Catholic principalities.

From the Reichsgründung (founding of the Second Empire) onwards, Bavaria ceased to be an independent kingdom even if was nominally an autonomous entity within the new German Empire; to that extent, the tragic fate of Ludwig II was less politically consequential than it might otherwise have been had Bavaria remained an independent kingdom.

Nonetheless, by 1885, Ludwig’s extravagant expenditures were threatening to bankrupt the Bavarian state treasury, his debts amounting to 14 million Marks before his overthrow (the equivalent of 350 million Euros in today’s money), scandalizing his prime minister Johann von Lutz and the entire cabinet (History Channel, “King Ludwig’s Mysterious Death“); far from responding positively to the government’s concerns, Ludwig considered dismissing the cabinet (Ludwig II, Wikipedia) and it was that threat that may have prompted his ministers to act.

Had Ludwig stopped with Neuschwanstein, perhaps he might have avoided disaster; but he continued with Linderhof and the Herrerchiemsee (his copy of the chateau de Versailles); and his ministers saw no end in sight with the king’s unprecedented building spree; and so a plot was hatched. Ludwig’s prime minister reached out to the king’s uncle Luitpold to take over as regent and Johann von Lutz authorized Graf Maximilian von Holnstein to draft a report declaring Ludwig insane and therefore subject to removal; they hired Dr. Bernhard von Gudden, chief of the Munich asylum, to make the assessment. The government ministers even reached out to Otto von Bismarck, but the Eisenkanzler (now the effective ruler of all of Germany) neither encouraged nor discouraged the conspirators from taking action.

And so on 4 a.m. on 10 June 1886, Honstein and Gudden arrived at Neuschwanstein to deliver the document of deposition to Ludwig and take the king into custody; but peasants and villagers rallied to the king and so it took a military regiment on June 12 to take Ludwig into custody. On the afternoon of June 13, Gudden took Ludwig on a walk through the grounds of Schloß Berg; around 6 p.m., Gudden took Ludwig on another walk but the two were found floating in the Starnberger See several hours later on June 13.

The government issued a report calling Ludwig’s death suicide by drowning but few Bavarians believed it; many believed the king was murdered and the fact that no water was found in Ludwig’s lungs means that he was dead by the time he was submerged in the lake; the fact that his watch stopped at 6:54 p.m. suggests that that was the actual time of his death.

Gräfin Josephine von Wrbna-Kaunitz would later show visitors a Loden coat with two bullet holes in the back, suggesting murder. Another theory is that Ludwig tried to kill Gudden and then killed himself; still another theory is that there was some accident that claimed both men’s lives. Perhaps the unsolved mystery of Ludwig’s death has only enhanced the mystique of the most famous Wittelsbach kings of Bavaria.

Ludwig II’s cousin (and the son of Prince Luitpold and grandson of Ludwig I) Ludwig III reigned as the last king of Bavaria from 1913 until revolution broke out in 1918 and the Reichstag abolished the Bavarian and German monarchies, bringing 738 years of Wittelsbach rule in Bayern to an end; he died in exile in Hungary in 1921.

In truth, Ludwig II’s record as a ruler was a mixed one to say the least and by conventional standards of rulership, his reign cannot be considered a success; and yet, his building of Neuschwanstein and his other Schlößer has generated billions (whether enumerated in dollars, Deutschemarks or Euros) for Bavaria’s economy and state government. Neuschwanstein has become the iconic image not only of Bavaria but of Germany as a whole and has inspired many other building projects, most notably the fairytale castle at the center of Disneyland in Anaheim (California).

And in saving Richard Wagner from financial ruin (and possibly even an early death), Ludwig helped fund arguably the most influential European cultural figure of the second half of the 19th century.

Ludwig’s story has inspired numerous documentaries and feature films, including Luchino Visconti’s 1973 film “Ludwig” which dramatizes the king’s life, starring Helmut Berger and using Wagner’s music as part of the soundtrack to the movie.

“Ein ewiges Rätsel will ich bleiben mir und anderen” (I will remain a riddle to myself and to others), Ludwig wrote in a letter to the actress Marie Dahn-Haussman  (25 April 1876) and this self-description may well be the most apt epitaph for the Märchenkönig whose building of Neuschwanstein has ensured his immortality.

Pauline Park earned her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; during six weeks in the summer of 1991, she lived in the Golden Tower (Der Goldener Turm) in Regensburg deep in the heart of Bavaria.

The post Ludwig II: Bavaria’s Mad Castle King Was Also a Mad Opera Queen appeared first on Pauline Park.

LGBTQ activists make history marching for Palestine in the Queens Pride Parade (6.7.26)
By Pauline Park

One could not tell from media coverage of the 2026 Queens Pride Parade — even in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) media — but the real news was that this Queens Pride Parade to included the largest officially recognized Palestine solidarity contingent in the event’s history.

Dashiell Allen’s report on the Queens Pride Parade for Gay City News (Dashiell Allen, “Queens Pride takes over Jackson Heights with ‘unstoppable Pride’,” Gay City News, 7 June 2026) did not mention the participation of the first official Palestine solidarity contingent in the history of the parade but did surprisingly include these two paragraphs:

As [police commissioner Jessica] Tisch and the weapons-bearing officers marched, a group of protesters, holding signs stood by the side reading “No Pride in Genocide,” “Zionism = Terrorism,” and “Silence = Death.”

“I love Queens Pride; it’s one of the most diverse, oldest prides, very inspiring space, very community-oriented,” Ray, 32, one of the protestors, told Gay City News. “And as a person who supports Palestine, it’s very important for me to be here, because there are queer people in Gaza who are being bombed who don’t get to benefit from this, and people often don’t think about this.”

Surprising because Gay City News was acquired by the Zionist mother and son Victoria Schneps and Josh Schneps whose Schneps Media strongly supported Apartheid Israel’s Gaza genocide from its inception after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023; Schneps & Schneps were controversially cozy with Zionist Eric Adams and he even credited them with helping him win election as mayor in 2021 (see the Schneps Media entry in Wikipedia).

The story of the first Palestine solidarity contingent in the Queens Pride Parade is inextricably linked with the history of the parade itself as I have recounted before (Pauline Park, “New Queens Pride’s collaboration with the Zionist machine in support of Apartheid Israel’s Gaza genocide,” 15 June 2024).

(photo by Melissa Cox)

Contrary to the impression that Daniel F. Dromm has created, he did not in fact singlehandedly found the Queens Pride Committee; he was one among several Queens activists but he eliminated anyone on the Pride Committee he thought might be in the least bit independent of him and he successfully used the Queens Pride Parade and Winter Pride (the annual dinner dance fundraiser) as a platform for his political career; retiring from the New York City Council after three terms, Danny Dromm turned the Queens Pride Parade over to David Kilmnick, the president/CEO of the LGBT Network of Long Island.

It is important to note that Kilmnick’s ‘New Queens Pride’ has continued Dromm’s Queens Pride Committee’s tradition of inclusion of armed members of the New York Police Department (NYPD) marching in uniform — a practice recently rejected by Heritage of Pride (HOP), which runs the New York City Pride March — the largest LGBT pride parade in the world; the Brooklyn Pride Parade also does not allow armed police in uniform to march in its event. Given the long and continuing history of NYPD harassment of LGBT people, New Queens Pride’s continued inclusion of armed cops should raise serious questions about the organization’s nominal commitment to progressive principles. Also important to note is New Queens Pride’s continuation of the Queens Pride Committee’s acceptance of corporate sponsorships. HOP’s ‘rainbow capitalism’ spurred the creation of the Queer Liberation March by the Reclaim Pride Coalition.

(6.2.24)

It is against this backdrop that the Tibetan Equality Project had decided to boycott the 2024 Queens Pride Parade in response to Zionist David Kilmnick’s takeover of the event but the other QAPI groups felt the need to make a statement by fielding a contingent complete with banners, placards and flags. The 2025 Queens Pride Parade did not include a Palestine contingent but in 2024, the queer Asian and Pacific Islander (API) groups came together to form a de facto unofficial Palestine solidarity contingent in response to the takeover of the event by ‘New Queens Pride’ — led by the Zionist David Kilmnick (Pauline Park, “New Queens Pride’s collaboration with the Zionist machine in support of Apartheid Israel’s Gaza genocide,” 15 June 2024).

(6.2.24)

A group of activists marched as a Palestine solidarity contingent in the 2025 Queens Pride Parade though I am told that those who participated do not recall if the group was officially registered as a Palestine contingent per se.

(@nycstreets4gaza, 6.1.25)

In any case, the small but enthusiastic group of activists got no attention from GCN or the LGBT media — much less the corporate media — unsurprisingly, given the Zionist bias of both. But the 2025 contingent made an important statement about Apartheid Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine — and the genocide that Apartheid Israel was pursuing and continues to pursue with $3.8 billion a year in US taxes + more than $50 billion in new funding.

(@nycstreets4gaza, 6.1.25)

Far from denouncing Apartheid Israel’s genocide in Gaza and violent ethnic cleansing of the illegally occupied West Bank, David Kilmnick — who now runs ‘New Queens Pride’ and continues to run four community centers on Long Island and one in Astoria through the LGBT Network — actually sponsored, hosted and facilitated an event in support of Apartheid Israel in the midst of its pursuit of genocide in Gaza.

(@nycstreets4gaza)

In doing, so, Kilmnick made the LGBT Network complicit in the genocide that he personally supports (David Caplan, “LGBT Rally for Israel on LI Tonight,” Newsbreak, 16 November 2023).

(@nycstreets4gaza)

On 12 November 2023, the LGBT Network (@NYLGBTNetwork) tweeted, “Join together and hear from leading LGBT Jewish voices to denounce and Stand Against Antisemitism at a Town Hall and Rally on November 16th from 7-8:30pm at the LGBT Network’s Hauppauge Center.” Kilmnick went so far as to pen an op-ed published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) (David Kilmnick, “The abandonment of Israel by LGBT groups is hypocritical and cruel,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 25 October, 2023). Kilmnick quoted the late Elie Wiesel declaring that “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” What Kilmnick failed to acknowledge in his oped was the fact that Wiesel — who took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times explicitly supporting Apartheid Israel’s pursuit of genocide in Gaza and was denounced by Jewish Holocaust survivors for his endorsement of genocide (“Holocaust survivors print ad in New York Times denouncing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza,” Middle East Eye, 25 August 2014). Wiesel was of course right to say that silence means complicity but entirely wrong about who the oppressor and who the victim are in Gaza; and in any case, it is noteworthy that Kilmnick has not followed up his profoundly dishonest pinkwashing op-ed with any more public Zionist screeds as public opinion — including LGBTQ community sentiment and Jewish American opinion — turn decisively against Apartheid Israel and its ongoing Gaza genocide.

In May 2026, a friend and fellow Queens activist contacted me to ask if I knew if anyone was organizing something for the 2026 parade; together, we decided to organize the first confirmed official Palestine solidarity contingent; we had wondered if the Zionist who controlled the parade would reject the registration of an explicitly Palestine-specific group marching in the parade; perhaps the power(s) that be considered rejecting the registration but realized that doing so would draw attention to the contingent and generate unwanted media attention.

(6.7.26; photo by Melissa Cox)

Just as with the queer API groups marching as an unofficial de facto Palestine contingent met with only a few negative comments (I noted two, both from white men on the sidelines), the official Palestine contingent met with just two negative responses that I was aware of; one (white) man on the sidelines standing with a woman (I don’t know if the were a heteronormative couple but they appeared to be one), shook his head vigorously as we passed by, though I couldn’t be certain it was in response to our signifying banners, placards and signs; and one of my comrades told me of another man on the sidelines who had mad negative comment within earshot of her.

Some in the crowd observed our contingent with bewilderment or indifference, but many on the sidelines cheered us on, some with enormous enthusiasm. The most meaningful moment for me was when Candy Samples — the mistress of ceremonies who this year also happened to be one of the grand marshals — announced our continent as we passed by the reviewing stand; she read the full description of the group that we provided the parade; I then waved to her and she waved back and I mouthed ‘congratulations’ to her on her designation as grand marshal and he touched her heart with her hand to signal her appreciation.

A few minutes later, it was all over and we disbanded, eight of us going to a nearby restaurant in Little India for lunch; but it was not lost on any of us that we had made history by marching in the largest contingent officially registered as a Palestine solidarity group in a Queens Pride Parade to that date and the first confirmed official Palestine solidarity contingent in the history of the Queens Pride Parade.

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

The post LGBTQ activists make history marching for Palestine in the Queens Pride Parade (6.7.26) appeared first on Pauline Park.

CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy June 4 Lavender Graduation
commencement speech
Pauline Park
City University of New York
4 June 2026

I am honored to be invited to address Lavender Graduation here at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy. And I would like to thank the associate dean of student affairs Dr. Lynn Roberts for the invitation. I would also like to thank my friend and colleague Bob Lederer for suggesting me to Dean Roberts for this Lavender Graduation; Bob and I work together as part of the collective that produces Out-FM, the LGBT show that airs on WBAI-FM at 8 p.m. every Tuesday. You can find all of our segments on OutFM.org.

And now for a few thoughts that I humbly submit to you upon your graduation from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy. I greet you at a moment of great promise and great peril. First for the peril. Never before have we faced more ruthless attacks on public health from a secretary of health and human services than from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And never before has the transgender community faced more vicious attacks than from the administration of Donald Trump in which RFK, Jr. serves. A few of you might know that Trump’s grandfather was a draft dodger in the Second German Reich and so when he returned to his native Bavaria after some time in the United States, he was threatened with prison, so he returned to the US and anglicized his name Drumpf to Trump. His son became notorious for housing discrimination and his grandson has Trump-ed both his ne’er do well grandfather and racist father by becoming the worst president in our country’s history. I like to call the president ‘Reichskanzler Drumpf’ — using the title of ‘imperial chancellor’ that Adolf Hitler won in 1933 before he declared himself ‘Der Führer.’ And it is no exaggeration to say that the current descent into fascism threatens the very survival of American democracy — at least what’s left of it.

And it is shocking — if not entirely surprising that major hospitals in this city — including Mount Sinai and NYU Langone have capitulated to the diktat of the Reichskanzler Drumpf by eliminating the provision of gender-affirming care for trans youth; this anticipatory compliance must be challenged and I am quite certain that there are dedicated health care providers on the staffs of those hospitals who will be looking to public health professionals such as you  to fight the good fight even as their corporate overlords put profits over people. The truth is that all too many hospitals and health care providers are profit-driven corporations using their 501(c)(3) status as charities to garner individual and corporate donations and federal, state and local funding. The nominal commitment to LGBTQ people and the transgender community in particular turns out to have been more of a marketing strategy for the corporate masters of these institutions than a genuine commitment to LGBTQ health care.

At the same time, the role(s) you play in safeguarding and enhancing public health will be crucial in the genuine resistance to the Trumpian triumph of the will as well as this corporate backsliding in the commitment of major hospitals to trans health care. Despite the challenges we face, I would argue that it is precisely in this moment of maximum peril that you have the potential for maximum impact in the work that you will do in public health. Allow me to draw on 32 years of experience in activism and advocacy to offer a few thoughts on how you might have a real impact on public health. Here are three thoughts:

First, be steadfast in your commitment to fundamental principles; if you are committed to public health and to the empowerment of LGBTQ community members through that work, never compromise on such principles; but at the same time, be flexible with regard to strategy and tactics; no social movement has ever succeeded without a degree of strategic and tactical flexibility.

Second, eschew binary thinking in favor of a more sophisticated  analysis that takes into account the crucial distinction between structural factors and individual agency; this may seem abstract and requires some explanation. What I mean by this is that the successful activist, advocate and clinician all have one thing in common: all will recognize that there are structures of oppression — race, ethnicity, immigration status, class, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity to cite the most obvious. At the same time, we have to not only allow for individual agency but identify ways to empower individuals; indeed, to deny individual agency would be to render all action pointless. In philosophy (which was my undergraduate major), there is a debate going back centuries about free will and determinism; to put it as succinctly as possible, there is no such thing as absolute free will but we all have a degree of free will constrained to a different degree for each individual by existing structures of race, class, and the others I have already mentioned.

Third and finally, seek to engage in as objective analysis of any situation as possible while recognizing the fact that there is no absolute objectivity: there is no ‘Archimedean point,’ as the saying goes. I have known many activists and advocates fail precisely because of their inability to overcome their own subjectivity. Effective action requires effective thinking and that is as true in the field of public health as in any other realm. Consider RFK, Jr.’s absurd and dangerous attacks on vaccination despite the overwhelming evidence that vaccines save lives; resistance to the H&HS secretary’s dangerous nonsense requires an objective assessment of the situation and the most effective strategies and tactics for challenging it. At the same time, it is important to avoid a false scientism that constructs science as an infallible tool and replaces a belief in an omnipotent and omniscient God with science as a deity to be worshipped; Western science as we know it is an extremely important tool but one that must always be regarded with critical distance. Consider for example how the medical establishment has fought a decades long fight to exclude traditional Chinese and Asian medicine from being approved by the private insurance companies that control our broken health care system; in the last few decades, acupuncture has gained some acceptance but so many other possible traditional Asian approaches to health and wellness are still excluded from payment by the profit-driven corporations that control our system of health care — which is really a profit-driven system of health care denial.

In closing, I would like to quote the great Indian writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, who famously wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” May your lives of service working to improve public health in this benighted land bring you joy.

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

The post CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy Lavender Graduation (6.4.26) appeared first on Pauline Park.

Frederick II (1712-1786) has gone down in history as ‘Friedrich der Große’; but was he really so great? And if he was what made him so…?

If you ask a hundred Americans to name a single Prussian ruler, it’s likely the only one they would be able to name (if any) would be Frederick II, though it’s not likely they would know of the ‘2nd’ nomenclature; but three centuries after Der Alte Fritz’s legendary exploits, his name still rings a bell with Americans and Europeans even if few non-Germans would be familiar with his father the odious Friedrich Wilhelm or his illustrious grandfather, Friedrich ‘der Große Kurfüst’ (the Great Elector), who paved the way for Friedrich II’s astonishing reign.

To assess Frederick the Great’s legacy, it is first necessary to understand what Prussia was before he came to the throne. Friedrich II von Preußen was one of dozens of ruling princes from the House of Hohenzollern whose roots lay deep in medieval Germany. The ‘Prussia’ that Frederick inherited was in fact composed of two geographically separate and even culturally distinct principalities: the Markgravate of Brandenburg and the Duchy of Prussia. Mark Brandenburg was a small, marshy patch of land in what centuries later would be the center of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic), a.k.a., ‘East Germany.’

If one had to guess which German principality would become the dominant one and which would eventually unify all of the hundreds of big and small principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, it is safe to assume that no one in the 15th or 16th centuries would have put their money on Mark Brandenburg, a poor, swampy, obscure bit of Germany without a single real city: Berlin at the time was but a village.

But at the same time, no one would have considered Prussia a candidate for greatness either: this distant, obscure principality lay outside the boundaries of the Heiliges Römisches Reich and was originally not even German — the original ‘Prussians’ were a Baltic tribe who spoke Old Prussian — now an extinct member of the Balto-Slavic group of Indo-European languages. At one point ruled by the Teutonic Knights (Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem, a.k.a., Orden der Brüder vom Deutschen Haus der Heiligen Maria in Jerusalem or Ordo domus Sanctae Mariae Theutonicorum Hierosolymitanorum, Deutscher Orden, Deutscher Ritterorden), Prussia came into the House of Hohenzollern when Albrecht von Preußen of the Brandenburg-Ansbach branch of the House of Hohenzollern was invested with the duchy of Prussia in 1525; the 37th Grand Master of the Teutonic Order converted to Lutheranism & established a principality independent of the Teutonic Order and of Poland.

One cannot know how devout Albrecht was at heart, but he certainly seemed to have a taste for extravagantly large and stylish picture hats. But Prussia far from Brandenburg and separated from the Hohenzollern heartland by hundreds of miles of land controlled by Poland whose relationship with the Hohenzollern was rarely friendly.

The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) which laid waste to so much of Germany ironically gave the House of Hohenzollern the opportunity to raise Brandenburg to the status of a significant if still minor power. Georg Wilhelm (13 November 1595 – 1 December 1640) Markgraf (Margrave) and Kurfürst (Elector) of Brandenburg, vacillated between neutrality and support for the Protestant princes arrayed against the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II; his son, Friedrich Wilhelm I, succeeded to the throne in 1640 and allied Brandenburg with Sweden and the France of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu.

The Große Kurfüst’ (the Great Elector) used French subsidies from the Cardinal to rebuilt Brandenburg and his great-grandson would say of him, “He was praised by his enemies, blessed by his people; and posterity dates from that famous day the subsequent elevation of the house of Brandenburg.” Less admirably, Frederick William also granted a charter to the Brandenburg African Company, the first organized attempt by a German state to take part in the Atlantic slave trade, transporting 17,000 to 30,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas before the Brungenburger Gold Coast was sold to the Dutch in 1721.

Despite this appalling behavior, Friedrich Wilhelm I nonetheless must be credited with laying the groundwork for Brandenburg-Prussia’s future greatness.

Frederick William I’s son was the first to call himself a Prussian king— after paying a fortune for the title — but because of the odd and almost bizarre rules of the Holy Roman Empire, Friedrich I could only call himself ‘König *in* Preußen’; his grandson would be the first to call himself ‘König *von* Preußen.’

Friedrich I’s son would become known as the ‘Soldatenkönig’ and it was the dream of the Soldier King to build himself an army of giants; towards that end, Friedrich Wilhelm II pid agents to find the tallest young men in Germany and Europe, even going so far as to kidnap some. Frederick William I was a violent alcoholic who beat his son and though him effeminate for playing the flute and preferring to speak French rather than German.

Frederick the Great’s biographer Nancy Mitford believed that the evidence suggested that Friedrich Wilhelm II had porphyria —the same disease that his distant relative George III (who remained Elector of Hanover as well as king of England, Scotland and the United Kingdom) would suffer and lead to his confinement after bouts of apparent madness.

Friedrich Wilhelm was enraged by his son’s affairs with other young men, including the king’s page Peter Karl Christoph von Keith; but it was the crown prince’s plan to flee to England with his tutor Hans Hermann von Katte that drove the king to extreme measures: he had Lieutenant von Katte executed before Friedrich’s very eyes— though according to some accounts, young Fritz fainted before the sword struck von Katte’s head off; it was for good reason that young Friedrich feared for his life as long as his raging violent alcoholic father still lived; nonetheless, there were a few moments of tenderness and appreciation between father and son and Frederick later in life expressed genuine respect and admiration for his father’s rule.

But Friedrich II was no doubt extremely relieved when he came into his inheritance in 1740 — becoming the first ‘König *von* Preußen’ and according to many, its greatest. Frederick’s first act was his boldest and most daring, invading Silesia and forcing the young Maria Theresa to defend the richest province in the Habsburg empire; her father Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI had spent most of his reign seeking agreement to the ‘Pragmatic Sanction’ that would have European powers recognize his elder daughter as the rightful heir to the Habsburg Erblande (hereditary lands); but he should have spent those years trying to renovate the creaky old empire that he passed onto his daughter. Frederick’s invasion of Silesia would provoke Maria Theresia’s comprehensive reform of the ramshackle empire though she would never recover Schlesien; instead, the wealthiest province in her empire would provide the basis for Prussia’s greatness as Friedrich surmised; with its majority Protestant population and coal mines, Silesia was the most industrialized province in a largely agrarian Habsburg empire and though it took the First and Second Silesian Wars to secure it and the enormous loss of life as well as financial resources the wars entailed, the acquisition proved to be worth it in the long run in terms of state building.

Friedrich’s reputation for military prowess is ironic given his father’s doubts about his masculinity and commitment to the code of the warrior king; but of course Frederick had both successes and defeats. Rossbach was one of his greatest successes and helped gain him a Europe-wide reputation for military genius.

Nonetheless, the Seven Years’ War that Frederick’s ambitions set off nearly destroyed him and Prussia. Friedrich gained only one firm ally — the United Kingdom — while prompting Maria Theresa to form an alliance with the Habsburgs’ old enemy, France; this ‘renversement des alliances’ would make Louis XV the most important ally of the Holy Roman Empress — only ’empress’ of course because her husband was elected Holy Roman Emperor (women being barred from that office; perhaps even more dangerously, Frederick provoked the enmity of Elizaveta Petrovna; the daughter of Peter the Great had seized power in a coup d’état — wearing a guardsman’s military uniform no less — and had an almost irrational hatred of Friedrich; the empress sent an enormous Russian army against Frederick, surrounding Berlin and threatening his destruction and that of the Prussian kingdom; only the sudden and unexpected death of the tsarina in 1762 saved Friedrich as Elizabeth’s heir Peter III was not only German (duke of Holstein) but an enormous admirer of Frederick; Peter immediately called off the war, outraging the Russian élite and contributing to his eventual overthrow by his wife in her own coup détat.

The Seven Years’ War is accounted by some historians as the first world war, having been fought on three continents; Frederick was able to bring the Seven Years’ War to a successful conclusion in 1763 and Maria Theresa was forced to accept the permanent loss of Silesia. In 1772, Catherine and Frederick conspired in the First Partition of Poland — making no fans for either among Polish nationalists; after the second and third partition, Poland would be wiped off the map of Europe.

A few words need to be said about Peter III’s wife, Sophia von Anhalt-Zerbst who would overthrow him and declare herself Catherine II, going down in history as Catherine the Great. Catherine has frequently been linked with Frederick the Great as the other most famous example of Enlightened Despotism; but the truth is that Friedrich was far more enlightened while Catherine was far more despotic; she may have invited Denis Diderot (editor of the famous Encyclopédie) to St. Petersburg but they quarreled and she eventually sent him packing. While Catherine dabbled with liberal Enlightenment ideas, in the end, she deepened the oppression of the serfs in order to secure the support of the Boyars; in contrast, Frederick genuinely deserves the appelation ‘Great’ for instituting important reforms such as instituting freedom of speech and freedom of the press throughout his kingdom.

Like Catherine, though, Frederick was a great patron of the arts; he employed Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff (born in 1699) to design Sans Souci in Potsdam as well as its gardens.

Knobelsdorff apparently warned the king that the height of the palace needed to be greater than Frederick wanted it to be or it would not be sufficiently high to be seen easily above the gardens from the bottom of the cascade; Knobelsdorff was clearly right about that:

Nonetheless, the palace is clearly a masterpiece of Baroque architecture and Sans Souci’s gardens are a masterpiece of landscaping and a sheer delight to stroll through (as I did on my one and so far only visit to Potsdam).

And the interior is a masterpiece of Rococo interior design; this is the chamber in yellow is the room where Voltaire took up residence during his time at Frederick the Great’s court.

François-Marie Arouet left Potsdam in 1752 after quarreling with Frederick the Great. Friedrich der Große was a huge admirer of Voltaire from afar, but two years of the Frenchman’s residence at Sans Souci was enough to sour Frédéric le Grand on the acerbic Enlightenment wit.

Frederick is accounted “one of the most well documented homosexuals in history” (“Frederick the Great: Gay King of Europe“) in numerous YouTube videos and somewhat more discreetly in Nancy Mitford’s gossipy, fun but very well researched biography (Nancy Mitford, “Frederick the Great,” New York: Harper & Row, 1970). One might ask about the relevance of the king’s sexuality; I would argue that one cannot understand him without understanding his sexual orientation. Of course, the term ‘homosexual’ was not invented until the late 19th century and the term ‘gay’ (for male homosexual) did not come into common parlance until the 20th century, so Der Alte Fritz would not have identified with either of those terms; as a king, he could not afford to identify with the pejorative term ‘sodomite’ or any other term with negative connotations.

But the evidence from Frederick’s correspondence and poetry makes fairly clear that his primary sexual and romantic orientation was to other males and there is in fact no concrete evidence that he ever had sex with any woman — including his queen consort — who of course was opposed on him by his aggressively heteronormative father.

Der Alte Fritz had no son or daughter and so when he died in 1786, his hapless nincompoop nephew Friedrich Wilhelm inherited the crown, quickly proving that he was not even close to his uncle’s level of leadership.

Der Alte Fritz’s reputation suffered somewhat because of an association with the Nazi Third Reich that he no doubt would have utterly despised; one can’t blame Frederick for the fact that Adolf Hitler and other German fascists admired Friedrich for the role they ascribed to him as the leading German nationalist of his day; it isn’t even clear that he himself would have seen himself as such; he had his ambitions, but they were for Prussia, not for Germany which in his day was at best a ‘mere geographic expression’ — as Napoléon famously said of pre-Risorgimento Italy. One cannot necessarily admire Frederick’s unprovoked attack on Silesia but despite the appalling human cost of the two Silesian Wars, there is no question that his act of aggression helped build the kingdom and provide the basis for the Prussia of Otto von Bismarck that enabled the Eisenkanzler to unify Germany under Prussian leadership.

Like Frederick, Bismarck was both brilliant and ruthless; but also like Friedrich, the Iron Chancellor never made war for its own sake; it was a means to clearly conceived ends; the Haus Hohenzollern that both served so ably would collapse when Kaiser Wilhelm II blundered into World War I after dismissing Bismarck.

In the end, whatever one thinks of Friedrich, there is no question that he is one of the most important and most fascinating figure in German and indeed European history.

Pauline Park is an LGBT and Palestine solidarity activist and writer who lives in Queens; she received her Ph.D. political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1994; she spent two months in Berlin in 1990 and six weeks in Regensburg (in Bavaria) in 1991.

The post Friedrich der Große: What Made Prussia’s Frederick II So Great appeared first on Pauline Park.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cancel Pinkwashing protesters at Creating Change in Chicago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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