Letter of support from Blockorama Toronto

Dear Judith Butler,


I am one of the organizers of Toronto’s BLOCKORAMA stage, put on by a volunteer group called Blackness Yes!. Since 1998 Blockorama has been a place at Pride Toronto where black queer and trans folks, their allies, supporters and people who love them came together to say no to homophobia in black communities and no to racism in LGBTQ communities. To say Blackness Yes at Pride – loud and proud. Pride Toronto’s inability to lead on racism in the LGBTQ communities and homophobia in black communities sends a strong signal to black queer and trans communities and their allies everywhere.

We have built Blockorama out of love, through sweat and toiling. For 12 years, we have claimed space, resisted erasure, found community, shared memories, built bridges, embraced sexuality, and found home. Blockorama is not just a party or a stage at Pride. It is a meeting place for black queer and trans people across North America- Blockorama is the largest space of its kind at any Pride festival on the continent.

Black queer and trans communities have been central to the diversity of Pride. At the same time Pride Toronto as an organization has continually marginalized those communities. It is indeed those communities that enable Pride to be the celebration of sexual life and freedoms that we all cherish. Pride Toronto’s inability to recognize its own constituencies is not only sad and disappointing it is indeed politically naïve and damaging to the still necessary struggles around sexual freedom in our city, province and country. We have been fighting a battle here in Toronto; one that insists that Black queer and trans people be represented and reflected in the programming at Pride, and in the infrastructure of the Pride Toronto organization. More and more, we are realizing that this may not be possible within Pride Toronto. We remain steadfast in our struggle, and will continue to create space to celebrate Black queer and trans people; resist systemic racism within larger LGBTTIQQ organizing, and resist homo and transphobia within Black and African Diasporic communities- but in future perhaps outside of the official Pride organization and festival.

Pride Toronto has come under a lot of fire this year- and several community activists and leaders have chosen to decline the awards or honours given to them by Pride Toronto in protest of its actions towards Queers Against Israeli Apartheid and its continued marginalization of racialized people. We were recently contacted about similar problems happening at Berlin Pride. We are concerned about the connection between homonationalism, systemic racism, and migrant-phobia that seems deeply inherent in Berlin’s Pride organization.

It seems that many Pride organizations around the world have distanced themselves from so many of the communities that helped build the LGBTTI2QQ activist movements. In North America, racialized queer and trans people, many of whom were street-involved, working class and poor started both the Stonewall and Compton Cafeteria riots that kick-started the “gay liberation movement”. It is on the backs of racialized and working class queer and trans people that mainstream queer organizations like Pride Toronto have been built. Around the world, working class racialized people have often been at the heart of the activism that ushered in more “mainstream” queer organization- yet it is exactly this history that is omitted from Pride celebrations around the world. It is very concerning that in Berlin, these same people have been openly mocked by Pride through slogans, media and left out of programming and organizing.

We are writing to encourage you, and all other honourees at this year’s Berlin Pride to consider pulling your support for an organization that is so openly disrespectful of migrant people and racialized people.

Blackness Yes is committed to creating a space by and for Black/African Diasporic queer and trans people and all of their allies and supporters at Pride. Blockorama will always remain a political space for resistance and celebration, and we stand in solidarity with so many other groups that have been left out or forcibly excluded from Pride organizations here and around the globe.

Thank you,

Syrus Marcus Ware,

For
Blackness Yes!
Blockorama Coordinating Committee

Solidarity from Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, Toronto

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (Toronto) commends the organizers of ‘No Homonationalism,’ and Judith Butler for refusing The Berlin Pride Civil Courage Prize, 2010. This refusal marks an important intervention into the neoliberal narratives of individual exceptionalism and the elision of communities of struggle and subjugation in not only Germany, but internationally as well. Butler and the No Homonationalism organizers have sent a clear message to the international community – that queers will not be divided in their struggle against all forms of oppression; that you cannot celebrate an individual while you silence a movement; and that the honouring of a celebrated figure does not exempt a community from its role in perpetuating and supporting racism and nationalist forms of violence (i.e. war, police brutality, apartheid, and the enforcement of state borders).

In Toronto we have witnessed the increasing neoliberal and corporate shifts of annual Pride celebrations. The recent banning of the words “Israeli Apartheid”; the undermining of racialized community participation through the moving of the only stage dedicated to local Black performers (without proper consultation with the stage organizers); and, attempts to “clean up” the Pride parade of things deemed ‘offensive’ or ‘uncomfortable’ to conservative forces, are all examples of homonationalist logics and the moralities they breed. Neoliberal discourses often re-script struggles against oppression as individualized identity politics. When queer freedoms are celebrated as the definitive emancipation of sexuality, the continued and pervasive ways that racism, sexism, homophobia, state-nationalisms, patriarchy and heteronormativity (among others) shape the daily lives of queer subjects, are elided.

Like many states, Canada, the U.S., and Israel all make claims to be the protectors and providers of rights to queer subjects; however, we know that these claims are only partial truths. We know that any protections secured for queer subjects have come about through years of struggle and activism – not out of the generosity or compassion of the state. We know that the rights secured for some are not rights secured for all. We know that states use these rights to justify their own violation of the rights of others (as in the cases of Canada’s war in Afghanistan; the U.S.’ war in Iraq and Israel’s apartheid state and occupation of Palestine). Increasingly, queer movements and communities around the world are taking a stand against the appropriation of our struggles and the identities they have fostered: Our struggles and identities must not be used to justify war or occupation or racism. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid and other queers in Toronto and internationally are coming together to condemn homonationalism and remind us that Pride is not simply a celebration of sexuality, but a celebration of our past, present and future struggles for freedom from all forms of oppression.