Queens Deserves Better! Boycott Queens Pride 2024 NYC
Tibetan Equality Project will be boycotting Queens Pride this year. We invite other anti-Zionist Queens queers to lovingly educate and agitate our community and allies on the Zionist-led LGBT Network and discuss how we can reclaim Queens Pride to better reflect our values, which are rooted in community not genocide. To achieve queer liberation and freedom for all colonized peoples, we uplift Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) and reject Israel’s brutal military occupation of Palestine. We make the following demands:
Oppose the Zionist-led LGBT Network, Zionist and racist organizers of Queens Pride
Condemn the settler-colonial apartheid regime of Israel and its genocide of Palestinians
Keep Cops and Corporations out of Queens Pride
The following statement was posted on our instagram on May 21, 2024. Queens Pride is scheduled to take place on Sunday, June 2, 2024.
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The LGBT Network recently became the producer of Queens Pride. It describes itself as a voice for “LGBT people…in Long Island and Queens”.
The LGBT Network and its president/founder David Kilmnick have demonstrated support of Israel’s violent displacement and genocide in Gaza. They should not be profiting off Queens Pride while undoing decades of work by local organizers of multiple marginalized identities (Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled, and more) to keep our communities safe.
In an official LGBT Network email to mailing list subscribers in November 2023, Kilmnick wrote that despite civilian loss of life, “it is critical to stand with Israel in its right to defend itself, and our LGBT communities.”
In November 2023, the LGBT Network held a “LGBT Community Stands with Israel and Against Antisemitism'' rally in Long Island, which they described as the first rally in support of Israel by an LGBT group in the United States. The event repeated Kilmnick’s messaging and justified the ethnic cleansing and deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. It also falsely equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
As a collective of queer Indigenous Tibetans who consider Jackson Heights our home in exile, we no longer want to participate in a Queens Pride overseen by pro-NYPD organizations that platform Zionism while Palestinians, queer and otherwise, are under siege.
During last year’s Queens Pride, mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD were allowed to march front and center. The NYPD endangers our communities and has a long history of violence towards LGBTQIA+ folks, particularly Black and Indigenous trans and gender non-conforming people.
In endorsing Israel and the NYPD, LGBT Network joins many corporate-sponsored LGBTQIA+ organizations that have chosen silence in the face of genocide. These organizations ignore decades of queer solidarity with Palestine, particularly from Black and Jewish writers and activists.
Who profits from this silence?
Under LGBT Network’s influence, Queens Pride has become a profit-driven event that further marginalizes predominantly immigrant and working-class communities in Queen. Increasing vendor fees are pushing out local businesses and bringing in banks and corporations.
Queens has a long history of anti-imperialist community organizing. Queens Pride must reflect these traditions to honor Julio Rivera, a gay Puerto Rican who was brutally attacked by three white supremacists in Jackson Heights in 1990, a painful incident that led to the eventual formation of Queens Pride.
We must not forget that Pride is a community-led movement against police brutality and violence, not a place for Zionists, cops, elected officials, and corporations to wash away their complicity in profiting off of Israel committing genocide in Gaza.
We call on LGBTQIA+ community members and groups in Queens to answer the demands of queer and trans Palestinian organizers. End the Zionist sponsorship of Queens Pride! Free Palestine!
