Every June, as rainbow boas and blue and pink banners unfurl, and jello shots and plastic cups of light beer tumble onto the streets, borne by tens of thousands of happy gays, a cultural battle ensues. Pride season is here, and everyone is pissed.
On one side of the battle, you have the corporate gays, the nonprofit-industrial complex of LGBTQ organizations, the glitzy and boozy Pride parades and parties, and the representation of gay and trans identity as a fully assimilated, capitalism-compatible lifestyle.
On the other, you have all of us who recognize that Pride emerged from a legacy of anti-police uprising, militant queer solidarity, and a fiercely political stance on what it means to live as transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, intersex, nonbinary, or otherwise defiant of gender and sexuality norms. This is the original tradition of Pride — a radical protest for self-determination in opposition to mainstream values, a protest that has often angered and horrified “straight” society.
This year’s Pride battle is marked by a particularly bloody line in the sand: the eight month and running genocidal attack on the Gaza Strip, perpetrated by the Israeli government, which frequently uses a tactic known as “pinkwashing” to push forward its global propaganda campaign. According to the educational website Decolonize Palestine, “Pinkwashing refers to when a state or organization appeals to LGBTQ rights in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.”
Recognizing that queer people exist everywhere on earth, including Gaza, LGBTQ Palestinians and their allies have been calling on queer organizations to support a ceasefire, oppose apartheid and take firm stances against the genocide and occupation of Palestine by a powerful U.S.-funded military. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed over 37,000 Palestinians in Gaza, injured more than 85,000, and destroyed most of the Gaza Strip’s key institutions including universities and hospitals.
Meanwhile, advocates for Israel and the United States’ violence and impunity have used the identities of queer Palestinians and Israelis as a bludgeon and a distraction. Practitioners of pinkwashing assert that Israel, and the Western governments who support its military occupation, represent a morally superior stance on LGBTQ issues. When it is convenient, Israel advertises itself as a gay haven, and pro-Israeli propaganda frequently deploys claims that Palestine, and Gaza specifically, are unsafe for queer people — the implication being that these “backward” places will ultimately be improved by capitalist settler colonialism. Cultural imperialists and neoliberals have thrown this same mythology like a blanket thrown over all Arab and Muslim countries and cultures, making invisible the existence of queer and trans Arabs and Muslims.
“There has always been a certain amount of pain around Pride for me,” says Maya Ghanem, an organizer based in Durham, North Carolina, who works with the Muslim women’s and queer group Jummah 4 All. She says she’s........