FEATURE

Gay rights are human rights

Socialist Worker’s Amelia Murphy-Beaudoin spoke to activist and member of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Tim McCaskell about the state of the movement today to defend Queer rights and free speech

Last year, Pride Toronto attempted to censor the term “Israeli Apartheid.” How did this advance the fight to defend free speech and Queer rights?
The move to ban us from Pride set off a firestorm of protest in the community. The move to ban political speech in Pride was so outrageous that many people who knew very little about Israel/Palestine or even those who disagreed with our message came out in support for our right to be in the parade. I think it charged up a whole group of younger activists and recharged a generation of older ones.

I think it was also an important educational moment for many people in the community because they learned about the Israeli lobby’s attacks on free speech outside the queer communities—the banning of former UK MP George Galloway, the defunding of KAIROS and the Canadian Arab Federation, the attempts to suppress Israeli Apartheid Week on university campuses, etc.

Why did Queers Against Israeli Apartheid withdraw from the parade this year?
Last year the city asked the City Manager for an opinion whether the presence of our group in Pride and the name Queers Against Israeli Apartheid constituted a breach of city anti-discrimination policy. In April this year, the City Manager came out with his report that the term Israeli Apartheid was not hate speech, that it wasn’t in contravention of the Criminal Code or the Ontario Human Rights Code and that it did not violate any city policy.

He went on to say that our presence in the parade should not be a factor in council’s decision to fund Pride or not. With that, we won the battle about our right to march.

But that didn’t stop Mayor Ford from cobbling together a coalition of Councillors who either supported the Israel lobby, or were afraid of them, plus fiscal conservatives that don’t want to fund any cultural events at all, plus homophobes. That coalition could have been strong enough to defund Pride.

Since we had been completely vindicated by the City Manager’s report, we decided that it would be a hollow victory to win our right to participate in a march that didn’t happen. We therefore voluntarily announced that we would not be marching. That deprived the mayor of his pretext to defund Pride. He’s going to have a much harder time now rounding up the votes he needs.

I think that we also realized that, thanks to the attacks by the Israeli lobby and its homophobic allies, the words Israeli Apartheid have become household words in the queer communities. We needed to focus our energies on building on that victory, explaining to people in more detail what we meant and why we hold that position, explaining about boycott, divestment and sanctions as a way that they can participate in the fight for social justice and ending the occupation.

How is Israel using Queer rights to excuse apartheid in Palestine?
In 2005, Israel announced a new “branding” campaign to shift attention away from its human rights violations and apartheid policies. Branding campaigns work on the theory that it is more effective to sell your product by associating it with nice, cute things rather than actually talking about the product itself. Look at how cell phones are sold with the images of cute animals these days.

The campaign aims at presenting Israel as a tolerant, democratic state despite the occupation, the human rights violations, the apartheid wall, etc. It wants people not to associate Israel with war and conflict. The hard won rights of queer communities in Israel are being used as a symbol of how progressive Israel is, and contrasted to how homophobic the surrounding Arab countries supposedly are.

We call that Pinkwashing. There is homophobia everywhere. In some places we have been more successful in combating it than others. But to use our struggles to justify and distract attention from other human rights violations is unacceptable. It actually impedes the struggle for queer rights in the surrounding Arab countries.

What is the landscape currently of the movements for Queer rights here and internationally?
As usual: contradictory. On the one hand we see queer rights struggles emerging across the globe, in countries where previously such movements would have been unheard of. On the other we see serious repression against these new movements.

In the parts of the world where queer rights are better established, the economic and social crises produced by neoliberalism are leading to more authoritarian governments which base themselves on very conservative and homophobic sectors of the population. As we can see in Toronto this is not good news for established queer institutions.

How has the community responded to the banning of Gay-Straight Alliances in Catholic high schools? What was the response of Ontario Premier McGuinty, whose government oversees education?
The community is rightly outraged that such homophobia can be condoned in a publicly funded school system. McGuinty’s response had been ambiguous. He says on the one hand that all schools need to obey equity policies but on the other he does nothing to ensure those policies are enforced.

What are the highlights of the grassroots Community Action Panel’s recommendations to Pride Toronto?
Probably the most useful things they did were to challenge the “bigger is always better” philosophy that had infected the Pride board and was making it more and more about selling our community to advertisers. They called for Pride to return to its community roots and rebuild trust with groups they had alienated over the past years.

Given the current climate, what are our challenges?
I would say: figuring out how to maintain a cross class movement such as the queer community in a period of increasing class disparities that generate very different political approaches in different sectors of the community.

How are communities fighting back?
In Toronto, the fight seems to be about preserving funding for queer related organizations in a time of neoliberal cutbacks. That seems to be something that most people in the community can unite on.

Why is it important to connect our fight for free speech and queer rights to international struggles?
The fight for free speech engages much broader hegemonic values and can therefore produce wider alliances. Those alliances allow us to introduce the content of different international struggles to people who otherwise would not be aware of them.

What are the gains from the last year?
We have established a new core of militancy and mobilization in the community that we have not seen in years. That core will stand us in good stead in the struggles that are coming down the tubes.

Tim McCaskell is a Toronto gay activist, educator and writer. He was also a collective member of The Body Politic, Canada’s first national magazine for Lesbian and Gay Liberation from 1974 to 1986; chair of the Public Action Committee of the Right to Privacy Committee, which fought back against police raids on gay baths in the early 1980s; and a founding member of AIDS ACTION NOW! He is currently a member of the Toronto District School Board’s Equity Policy Advisory Committee and the Community Council for the Triangle Program, Canada’s only public school program for
LGBTQ youth, and is an active member of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid.