[Keynote] No Pride Party of the outlaws that Pride is ashamed of.

: You’re invited to the No Pride Party of queer exiles.

No Pride Party Team

Greetings, queer people from all walks of life, including non-citizens, migrant workers, homeless people, individuals with STDs, mentally ill individuals, disabled people, exhibitionists, drug users, transvestites, and sex addicts, whose very existence is illegal.

We are individuals with attributes that prevent queer people from gaining the affirmation and respect of normal society. We are the impoverished queers, the unattractive queers, the queers who can’t dance, the unintelligent queers, the unclean queers, the vulgar queers, the criminal queers, the sick queers, and the queers who spread disease.

We cannot and do not want to be proud members of a normal society. A society that envies whiteness and despises people of color, that thrives on detaining aliens, that denies mobility rights to people with disabilities, that ostracizes viruses and infected individuals from communities, that turns a blind eye to the living conditions of drug users, and that even progressive politics supports the criminalization of sex workers. In this society, we are shamed for our placement anywhere, and our very existence is at odds with the politics of Pride that simply affirms queer identities and promotes pride.

To say that this “diversity” of ours could one day become part of Pride is far from the reality we’ve lived through. We remember specific experiences where we were pushed to the fringes of the politics of Pride because we threatened the uplifted pride of “normal” queer people. Our issues, which are often dismissed as “only a few” and “not representative of all queers,” are frequently segregated as unrelated to the queer community and hidden from discussion both within and outside the queer community.

We are about to step outside the police wall because the police are not an organization that supports and protects us. We regularly experience police stops and live under the threat of police violence. Police forces deployed in the name of safety perpetrate police brutality and limit queer possibilities.

We are now striving to distance ourselves from the influence of corporations and embassies at Pride events because we are troubled by the power of capital and the state, which imprison and exploit marginalized queer people. We are outraged by the deceptive tactics employed by these powers that exploit queer people under the guise of Queer Pride. We see them as both a consequence and a cause of the racialized, sexualized, and class-based power dynamics that deepen inequality in this world.

We reject Pride that indulges in cutting expensive steaks under dazzling lights because those lights fail to illuminate our poverty. Some of us in the shadows are more closely aligned with the animal that is the steak than with the person who cuts the steak.

In doing so, we seek to expose the ways in which certain queer voices are silenced. We will be hosting the No Pride Party to critically examine the politics of Pride and to criticize the power that excludes queer people in the name of Pride.

We want to protest against detention centers, challenge the laws that criminalize our existence, and resist the dominance that criminalizes our lives.

Decriminalize sex work!

Decriminalize drug use!

No to institutionalization, no to incarceration!

The state should not crack down on drug users, sex workers, undocumented migrants, and people living with HIV!

Queer communities must support us, not police us, not hate us!

(translated by 정민우 Minwoo Jung)

Visit our webpage and meet other manifestos: linktr.ee/nopride2023