BOYCOTT QUEENS PRIDE 2024! 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🇵🇸🌱
*Follow us on Instagram: @Flushing_ADA
We are the Flushing Anti-Displacement Alliance, a diverse group of people who live in Queens. Many of us are queer, and we all come from different backgrounds and religions.
FADA has withdrawn from our planned participation in the Queens Pride march in support of the Tibetan Equality Project’s call for a boycott in solidarity with Palestine. From Queens to Palestine, we must unite to fight for our homes, to reclaim our lands, and liberate ourselves and all oppressed peoples. We invite everyone to join us!
Queens Pride was started in 1993 by community organizers in Jackson Heights to unite us against anti-queer violence after the brutal murder of Julio Rivera by white supremacists. In 2021, Queens Pride was taken over by a nonprofit called LGBT Network. LGBT Network is a highly influential organization and lobbying group with a $6 million a year operation, running 4 community centers in Queens and on Long Island. They provide a wide array of services to the local queer community that neither the government nor the market provide us.
LGBT Network is also used by founder and CEO David Kilmnick as a pro-Israel mouthpiece. Last November, the group used its platform and community connections through its services to bring people to a rally to promote the message, “LGBT Community Stands With Israel and Against Antisemitism”. On November 8th, Kilmnick published an op-ed in the Daily News broadly accusing the queer community of anti-semitism for speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In the piece, he calls Palestinians murderers who torture gay people. Last year, LGBT Network invited virulently pro-police Mayor Eric Adams to walk together with the NYPD at the head of the march, despite the ongoing and well-known anti-trans violence the NYPD perpetrates in our community in Jackson Heights.
Well over 35,000 Palestinians have been murdered in Israel’s American-funded genocide in Gaza since last October. With the recent invasion of Rafah, almost all 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced, multiple times. Israel and the US are blockading almost all food from entering Gaza, pushing people to the brink of famine. Disease is rampant due to repeated displacement and unsanitary tent living conditions.
Notably, Queens Pride recently put up lamp post signs across Queens advertising their lead sponsor, “Metropolitan Park”. Metropolitan Park is the corporate euphemism for the CASINO Steve Cohen wants to build on 65 acres of our public parkland at Flushing-Meadows Corona Park, in Citi Field’s parking lot. The casino aims to exploit the surrounding immigrant neighborhoods, compounding existing gambling problems and economic inequality. If built, it will take $2 billion a year out of our neighborhood economies, leading to the closure of small businesses. It is being planned in conjunction with a wave of adjacent luxury development that will raise rents and property taxes, causing more displacement.
Steve Cohen is a hedge fund CEO and the owner of the New York Mets. He is a $17-billionaire and the 100th richest person in the world. His hedge fund states on its website that his company funds many “defense tech” start-ups. They openly admit to funding Shield AI, an American military contractor that builds drones that the IDF uses in Gaza. There have been many recorded incidents of Israeli small drones, armed with explosives or machine guns, attacking unarmed Palestinians. This includes one documented incident on January 11th, where Israeli drones opened fire on “Palestinians who had gathered to receive flour brought by United Nations trucks.” 50 were killed. On their website, Cohen’s hedge fund states their mission in investing in military contractors is to, “master these modern technologies to keep the geopolitical landscape stable and secure, now and in the decades to come.”
In Queens, we are subject to people like Steve Cohen and other developers and speculators who make their money off our increasing rents, forcing us to work round the clock for our sweat and blood wages, which they take from us and use to exploit people of the global south, make war overseas, and commit genocide against Palestinians. Our lives are also run by people like David Kilmnick who work with the government to provide us just enough crumbs for survival through nonprofits that use us to support a capitalist and Zionist political agenda.
This system tries to divide us — pitting queers against Muslims, Jews, and other religious communities, neighborhood against neighborhood, and global north against global south. But we know that a casino and our City’s racist displacement agenda uphold both the genocide in Palestine and the violence against us here in Queens.
In our American “democracy”, our elected leaders use their queer and POC identities to promote themselves while working with monopoly real estate developers to build luxury high-rises and other predatory developments, profiting off of the communities we built through projects of gentrification that cause displacement and necessitate the criminalization of poverty. We are tokenized through an empty politics of representation by politicians who then turn around and attack us by upholding and promoting violent capitalist development.
Since the introduction of gay marriage, liberal, progressive, and even “socialist” American politicians, like Jackson Heights State Sen. Jessica Ramos, have been using queer people just like corporate Zionists use Jews, celebrating our minor victories and nominal rights. Yet despite these supposed new rights, we still face the same anti-queer violence and displacement every day. Even celebrations of our pride are financially intertwined with the destruction and dispossession of our communities. How can we ever be safe in a society that operates at the whims of racist and genocidal Zionist capitalists like Steve Cohen, and is facilitated by “community leaders” like David Kilmnick who profit from our poverty?
While it is disappointing to us that our local beacon of pride has been corrupted so deeply, it is also an opportunity to bring our community together. We should all take leadership from the brave Palestinians who, in the face of genocide, are standing up and fighting back against Israel’s shameless violence, America’s imperialism, and displacement and racism across the globe! Let’s call out and boycott this pinkwashed, corporate Zionist-led, and displacement-and-genocide-funded shame of queer pride in Queens! We should unite across our divisions to fight our local Zionist capitalists and their handpicked community leaders who profit from our blood sweat money.
