March 16, 2016

Read at Gay City News

Excerpt:

… When the St. Patrick’s Day Parade protests started at the height of AIDS organizing, the parade immediately became a stage displaying the lethal violence done to queers by homophobia. The fact that the conflict was situated in the Irish American community –– which in New York City means people with deep links in machine politics and political money, the NYPD, and the Catholic archdiocese –– exposed how community-level homophobia translated to iron-fisted homophobia that tainted the whole city. Fighting the parade has in large part been a fight against the homophobia of the city administration, the NYPD, the Church. (For the same reason, we’ve always challenged the racism around the parade –– especially its enforced adulation of the NYPD as a largely white brotherhood, and of the US military, at the heights of their brutality.) The St. Patrick’s Day Parade protests also started at a time when Irish communities were seriously breaking with the past…