All about Pride

[eumelia]

I'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.

Comments

[silveradept]

It does seem to be a bit of a speck-plank problem there. If you're going to be fighting for rights as a minority, it makes sense to include the minorities of your minority, doesn't it?

I'm wondering whether the bigger organization doesn't feel all that secure in its protected position, and so wants to put up the front of being a patriotic organization so as not to earn the ire of the government for being the Seditious Minority.

[eumelia]

No doubt.

[silveradept]

Have they then taken the next logical step and asked what that really means about what government thinks of them that they have to put up the nationalist front to avoid being cracked down on?

[eumelia]

No. Israel is good for the gays. Just look at our neighbours, we're way better than them. Etc, etc.

It's really bloody irritating.

[silveradept]

Yeah, I agree. Comparing yourself to the neighbors says nothing about who you are.

[ajnabieh]

I'm very, very ambivalent about Office Pride Parade Things. I mean, the NYC one has been pretty much taken over by the liquor companies. And yet, it's really amazing to march in it, to just be with all those other queers and friends, and see the whole city out to party with you. I suppose it's like gay marriage activism: I'm not going to put all my time and energy into it, but I'll show up when it happens. I've been away, so haven't been able to go the past couple years. Maybe this year we'll try again.

I wish we had a radical left queer parade. That would be fun. I think the radical queers are 'over' parades round these parts, though.

I hope y'all don't get too much backlash. At both the regular, and the left parade. And pictures would be grat!

[eumelia]

There have been threats to beat up the queers coming to the municipal parade from the radical one.

I believe it.

So fucking depressing.