Filed under: Action, Anarchist Movement, Anti-fascist, Queer, Southwest, Trans
We have allowed our community to be co-opted.
Is this the place where we make our voices heard and fight back: a permitted parade sponsored by corporations invested in gentrification, war, and unpaid prison labor? Do you feel safe at an event protected by the same police who murder people of color and torture us all in prison?
Does our presence here do anything besides make a shitload of money for said corporations as they use us as their PR campaigns? Or can we renounce permits and sponsors and build real movements of resistance, in our neighborhoods and in our streets?
gayhem takes the #TransMarch pic.twitter.com/ozi1zB4vyR
— Project Gayhem (@ProjectGayhem) June 24, 2017
Corporate-backed Pride parades are not our movement.
While SF’s oldest communities are being uprooted by rampant gentrification and institutional racism, and while white supremacists take power in the streets and the government, we attend a street party organized by the companies invested in those things.
gayhem inconveniences SF after the #TransMarch 1/3 pic.twitter.com/CyXydjQjfC
— Project Gayhem (@ProjectGayhem) June 24, 2017
the real meaning of pride was the trouble we made along the way pic.twitter.com/utshajuyDT
— Project Gayhem (@ProjectGayhem) June 21, 2017
Pride means solidarity, and this is not what solidarity looks like.
If you care about fighting back against queerphobia, white supremacy, police violence, and gentrification, SF Pride ain’t the place. Capitalist assimilation will never set us free, and cops will never protect us.
We’ll be free when the last prison is shuttered. We’ll be free when the last cop is disarmed. We’ll be free when our loved ones aren’t restricted by borders. We’ll be free when trans women of color can walk fearlessly through our streets. We’ll be free when the last rainbow capitalist advertising campaign is but a distant memory.
There’s more to resistance than parties and permits. We welcome you to the front lines.
dear berkeley: pride means riot pic.twitter.com/SSO72UkDuw
— Project Gayhem (@ProjectGayhem) June 25, 2017
Project Gayhem are a glob of queer and trans anarchists and antifascists stuck to the bottom of the East Bay’s shoe.