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All about Pride
Jun. 9th, 2010 09:55 amI'll be doing a lot of marching this Friday, as it the annual Tel Aviv Pride Parade.
However, it's a little different this year.
The Gay Youth Club attack kind of put the community through the ringer and a whole lot of splits occurred and, well, there are two marches happening at the same time this year.
The annual one, dubbed the Municipal March because it's funded by the Tel-Aviv Municipality and is sponsored by the bigger, mainstream LGBT organisations.
At the same time, from a different location, the one dubbed the Community March (Officially called "Marching For Change") is marching as contrapuntal to the Municipal one, protesting the commercialisation and homogenisation of the march and all that.
I will, however, be marching in the first explicitly Radical Left Queer march. Which is actually happening before either of those marches and is getting more heat than either of the marches.
Because see, the Community March is about the murder and the fact that not enough was done after the attack and that the LGBT community in a way retreated and licked its wounds. These are things I agree with, but I don't agree that there should have been a split.
After the Radical March, I'll be joining up with the Municipal March and doing the regular route.
Why? Because I don't think a split in over-all community politics is the way to go.
The Radical March is deliberately separate because we want to talk about our marginalised position in the LGBT community.
The position that looks at Queer identity in Solidarity with other oppressed minorities in Israel.
This is something that has caused problems with the higher ups, Yaniv Weisman, who is a member of the Tel-Aviv Municipal Council and runs the Tel-Aviv LGBT Community Center has verbally attacked the existence of the Radical March, saying that we're using our Sexual Identities to promote a skewed version of the Community, that not everyone is "like them" (as in... like me).
I have to say. This is not what I was expecting.
In Israel, "Queer" doesn't have the pejorative history like in Anglophone countries, which is nice, and makes it easier to use as a word. But it is a word so intertwined with the Radical Left here, that it feels as though I have no safe space in the margins. I need to be even more marginal in order to be viewed as someone whose thoughts and feelings deserve to be expressed like a human being.
I'm quite ashamed to see groups pop up against our march calling themselves "Stop The Occupation of the March... by the Left".
The irony, it is physically painful for me. It angers me. It shows me that the LGBT community are fine with resting on their laurels while human rights are trampled elsewhere... so long as I'm "safe" everything is all right.
I'm not sure how people don't realise that the attack last year (fuck it's been 11 months!) was a symptom of the direction our society is going. No tolerance for the other, especially if they're visible.
That my own community be willing to silence voices in the name of National Unity, WTFF!!??, is something I don't want to contemplate too deeply.
However, it's a little different this year.
The Gay Youth Club attack kind of put the community through the ringer and a whole lot of splits occurred and, well, there are two marches happening at the same time this year.
The annual one, dubbed the Municipal March because it's funded by the Tel-Aviv Municipality and is sponsored by the bigger, mainstream LGBT organisations.
At the same time, from a different location, the one dubbed the Community March (Officially called "Marching For Change") is marching as contrapuntal to the Municipal one, protesting the commercialisation and homogenisation of the march and all that.
I will, however, be marching in the first explicitly Radical Left Queer march. Which is actually happening before either of those marches and is getting more heat than either of the marches.
Because see, the Community March is about the murder and the fact that not enough was done after the attack and that the LGBT community in a way retreated and licked its wounds. These are things I agree with, but I don't agree that there should have been a split.
After the Radical March, I'll be joining up with the Municipal March and doing the regular route.
Why? Because I don't think a split in over-all community politics is the way to go.
The Radical March is deliberately separate because we want to talk about our marginalised position in the LGBT community.
The position that looks at Queer identity in Solidarity with other oppressed minorities in Israel.
This is something that has caused problems with the higher ups, Yaniv Weisman, who is a member of the Tel-Aviv Municipal Council and runs the Tel-Aviv LGBT Community Center has verbally attacked the existence of the Radical March, saying that we're using our Sexual Identities to promote a skewed version of the Community, that not everyone is "like them" (as in... like me).
I have to say. This is not what I was expecting.
In Israel, "Queer" doesn't have the pejorative history like in Anglophone countries, which is nice, and makes it easier to use as a word. But it is a word so intertwined with the Radical Left here, that it feels as though I have no safe space in the margins. I need to be even more marginal in order to be viewed as someone whose thoughts and feelings deserve to be expressed like a human being.
I'm quite ashamed to see groups pop up against our march calling themselves "Stop The Occupation of the March... by the Left".
The irony, it is physically painful for me. It angers me. It shows me that the LGBT community are fine with resting on their laurels while human rights are trampled elsewhere... so long as I'm "safe" everything is all right.
I'm not sure how people don't realise that the attack last year (fuck it's been 11 months!) was a symptom of the direction our society is going. No tolerance for the other, especially if they're visible.
That my own community be willing to silence voices in the name of National Unity, WTFF!!??, is something I don't want to contemplate too deeply.
