Latest at Pride Toronto – I’m not marching anymore
Our flagship Canadian Jewish newspaper the Canadian Jewish News has just dutifully informed us that the Pride Toronto organization has defeated a motion urging Pride Toronto to adopt a pro-Palestinian BDS policy in evaluating sponsorships to the annual LGBTQ Pride Festival and Parade.
https://thecjn.ca/news/pride-toronto-defeats-motion-to-adopt-bds-aligned-sponsorship-policy/
While it is the prerogative of those who wish to continue to follow the controversies and dysfunctional soap opera that is Pride Toronto and its volatile members, most of the educated LGBTQ folks including Jews don’t go there anymore. Our lives are multifaceted. We are not merely PR flaks for Israel and Jewish interests or interested in marching with obnoxious straight allies who like bad houseguests get in our way while playing ‘gay for a day’.
One does get tired of the controversy chasing media and naive boosterism of largely depoliticized LGBTQ Jews who enjoy the rights that people like me helped to win for them and their synagogues and families and clergy, despite being harassed by anti-Israel activists at Pride Toronto and in the wider LGBTQ community, sometimes violently. Hint: these are not our friends. Do not try your ‘positive engagement’ with them.
We didn’t see these nice upwardly mobile folks at the Supreme Court or Parliament or fighting our battles in media, and to be honest I will never attend a ghetto Pride Shabbat or most of their well intentioned programs seeking to ‘outreach’ me and others to shore up their declining institutional memberships.
I marched in my share of protest marches and parades in my youth. There is little to entice me to do it again. I would likely be marching away from most of these privileged and obtuse uptown folks today.
One wonders sometimes if they believe in the tooth fairy. They seem to believe that political citizenship means participating deferentially in processes likely to be dangerous or oppressive. I have no confidence in Pride Toronto or other Pride festivals that have too often been shut down by volatile anti-Israel or anti-racism politics.
We are certainly cognizant of the volatility of the main anti-Israel players, and I regard it as a colossal abdication of legal responsibility for uptown Jews and their organizations and synagogues to recommend that Jews march at Pride. It would be far better for our Jewish organizations to admit these risks and suggest that Jewish LGBTQ folks stay away from Pride as Jewish contingents, and celebrate their pride festivals either as independent secular activists or in separate and secure Jewish settings, such as hosted Oneg Shabbat programs.
Those of us who fought the hard battles and did the heavy lifting still carry the scars of the struggles we fought. I almost lost my hearing in my right ear while marching with Kulanu Toronto at Toronto Pride 2013.
As a prominent pro-Israel LGBTQ activist, I was shot in the ear precisely from a distance and behind with a high pressure water gun by a parade spectator. I deliberately ran ahead of my contingent while still in shock to attract any further fire away from the group. I had to leave the parade route early through a police checkpoint to seek urgent medical attention.
We later learned in the Toronto VIA Rail Terror Trial that Islamist terrorists were targeting Zionists in the Pride parade. The 2013 Toronto Pride parade took place a few months after the Boston Marathon bombing. That year there were also published terrorist threats against our former LGBTQ Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. This was before the unprecedented security risks we are now facing.
Our self seeking and self promoting Jewish leaders failed to protect us then and will probably fail to protect us now in their naive and dangerous beliefs in the authority and protection of Toronto Police and their community security networks.
While it was painful at first to walk away from this dysfunctional and abusive LGBTQ community, I will be staying away. Why do some Jews feel it necessary to participate there? Cute as they are in their rainbow t-shirts? They don’t really ‘belong’ there, and these anti-Israel groups don’t really ‘belong’ with us. Why are we expected to be a tourism spectacle anyway? Are they that vain?
I fail to understand why many Jews seem to feel that Jewish courage and resilience means putting oneself and others at risk unnecessarily. Cue the lawsuits! I will refer anyone harmed by the negligence of our uptown Jewish organizations to a qualified litigator for their protection. Seriously. Really.
Our rights and freedoms remain well protected in law, and we are free to affiliate or not inside or outside the Jewish community as we like. That’s what religious freedom and equality rights and freedom of association really mean. the correlative right to freedom of association is the freedom to dissociate from those likely to put us at risk or cause us harm.
We are many faceted as diverse LGBTQ Jewish people – I find it abhorrent and symptomatic of the difficulties we face in our families, congregations, and communities that our gender expression and sexual preferences seem to be so much a focus.
It is even worse when privileged straight uptown Jews and pro Israel advocates attempt to ‘outreach us’ to shore up their declining membership rolls or when major straight uptown pro-Israel donors try to exploit our sexuality and goodwill to promote themselves and Israel at our risk and expense.
The same is true in Israel – while I support LGBTQ equality in Israel, and related charities, I will not be attending wild dance parties at Tel Aviv Pride, or marching under the protection of thousands of police officers at Jerusalem Pride. Real pride in ourselves does not require us to put ourselves or others at risk, or to be exploited by anyone for questionable political purposes.
If LGBTQ Jews in Jerusalem need the protection of thousands of police from Haredi male assaults and murderers, then Israel is not the pro-gay LGBTQ paradise it likes to market itself as being. And our straight pro-Israel campus advocates should stop exploiting gay activists and this argument for Israel’s human rights. It has long been discounted as ‘pinkwashing’ by our opponents.
We as LGBTQ Jews no longer need to dance ‘stepinfetchit’ for anyone with Jewish and rainbow flags, inside or outside the Jewish community and Israel. Jewish women are at particular risk in Toronto right now, and the assurances of our ‘security networks’ are far from reassuring. Why is no one noticing this?
In the immortal words of my Jewish queer literary hero Gertrude Stein, from her story Miss Furr and Miss Skeene, “They were gay everyday there.” I am gay everyday here, plan to continue doing so, and will be keeping my distance from anyone seeking to exploit me or others or put us at risk.
Pride Day is EVERY Day. Pass it on.