As NYC celebrates Irish immigrants, Irish-American and NYC racial justice groups protest NYPD’s role in deporting immigrants of color

PRESS RELEASE

Despite “Sanctuary City”, groups charge that aggressive Broken Windows policing feeds immigrants to ICE – while NYPD avoids targeting white immigrants.

New York – Irish American and NYC racial justice groups protested today at the NYPD Emerald Society’s post-parade party. Protesters demanded that the NYPD stop helping federal ICE agents deport New York’s immigrants by aggressively making arrests for tiny, non-criminal infractions. Groups included Irish Queers, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Community Voices Heard, and SURJ NYC (Showing Up for Racial Justice).

“Broken Windows is a flawed policy that wrongly targets Blacks and Latinos. We call on this administration to end Broken Windows and make New York a true Sanctuary City,” said Claudia Perez, member-leader of Community Voices Heard.

As NYPD officers celebrated their Irish immigrant heritage, picketers carrying signs called them to stop victimizing current-day immigrants. NYPD union boss Ed Mullins (Seargent’s Benevolent Association) confirmed this month that NYPD officers personally want to “help ICE” by targeting immigrants for deportation, and that officers resent city policy that prevents them from performing immigration checks.

“Irish-American police officers shouldn’t forget from what and where they came.  People fleeing for a better life, fighting for their right to exist, and prevailing against tyranny is scratch-deep in their history. It’s the same struggle for immigrant and racial justice that we’re facing now,” said J.F. Mulligan of Irish Queers.

Protesters charged that, despite “Sanctuary City” rules, the NYPD is already driving the deportation of New Yorkers by arresting them for non-criminal Broken Windows offenses. New federal policy directs ICE to deport documented and undocumented immigrants who have been arrested, regardless of the outcome of the arrest.

NYPD arrests for low-level offenses overwhelmingly target communities of color. This biased policing makes immigrants of color particularly unsafe, while leaving white immigrants relatively untouched.

“Our Irish-American families mostly came to the US under desperate circumstances and were treated poorly here,” said Jennifer Hadlockof SURJ NYC.“I’m here to confront the hypocrisy of Irish-American police officers now enforcing the horrible treatment of people of color, including immigrants, through unnecessary arrests that lead to people being deported. It’s blatant white supremacy, we cannot let it go unchallenged.”

Broken Windows mandates arrests, not summonses, for littering, subwaysleeping, jaywalking, panhandling, unlicensed dogs, and other infractions.Thousands of such arrests are made weekly, but do not improve safety, according to a 2016 DOI report.

“We protested the St. Patrick's parade for decades because the Irish community is not the bigoted, hyper-religious cabal the parade portrayed. Neither is the Irish community represented by the racist NYPD, despite the historic connections,” said Mulligan. “Irish resistance against racist authority is the best of our history.”

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Date: March 17, 2017

Contact: (917) 517-3627, irishqueers@gmail.com

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3/17: Irish cops should GET immigrant rights. Protest NYPD criminalization of immigrants.

Friday March 17, 1-2:30pm

50th St/West Side Highway, at Pier 90
Protest outside NYPD Emerald Society's St. Patrick’s Day party. 

This St. Patrick's Day, tell the NYPD to celebrate ALL of New York's immigrants.

Stop targeting communities of color.

Stop helping ICE deport New Yorkers.

Please RSVP if possible, thanks!
https://www.facebook.com/events/681203075395042


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The NYPD officers’ union says they’re eager to help ICE deport immigrant New Yorkers.

NYPD officers celebrating Irish heritage on March 17 should recall that their Irish grandparents fled violence and hunger, and were persecuted because they weren’t considered white in the US. But NYPD union boss Ed Mullins says these cops want to help ICE deport Latinx & Muslim immigrants for Trump.

Broken Windows policies allow the NYPD to deliver New York's immigrants into ICE's hands. Aggressive policing of low-level offenses needlessly arrests hundreds of black and brown people every week, including immigrants. Arrests make people extremely vulnerable to deportation, regardless of whether they committed a crime. Mayor DeBlasio refuses to rein in these NYPD tactics.

White people -- including white immigrants -- are mostly left out of Broken Windows arrests, at the NYPD's discretion.

It's racist, anti-immigrant, and dangerous.

For immigrants' safety, and for our communities: Stop Broken Windows policing.

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Join Irish Queers, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Community Voices Heard, SURJ NYC and others (list in formation.)Protest discriminatory policing that helps ICE deport New Yorkers.

For more information, 917-517-3627

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#NoShamrocks: Petition to Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Irish American Members of Congress 



Irishmen, Irishwomen, and Fellow Americans: The enduring symbol of the United States of America is not the barbed wire fence, it is the Statue of Liberty. So please, "in the name of God and of the dead generations from which Ireland receives her old tradition of nationhood," boycott Trump's St. Patrick's Day gathering at the White House on Thursday, March 16. The #NoShamrocks petition will be delivered to all Irish American Members of Congress and the Irish Embassy in Washington. No shamrocks please for the immigrant-hating Mr. Trump. No tri-color flag pins for White supremacists with Irish surnames such as Stephen Bannon. Let's show Trump how many Irish Americans and fellow Americans oppose his policies. Make your Irish ancestors smile. We are not a deportation nation that breaks up immigrant families and separates parents from their children. As John F. Kennedy said, "We are a nation of immigrants." Our diversity is our greatest strength. Share this #NoShamrocks petition with your friends, family, neighbors. Take a stand for the true character of the United States of America -- a free and generous country, a Republic with liberty and justice for all. Petition closes at noon EST on Wednesday, March 15.

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Sorry not sorry! (Join us this St. Patrick's Day!)

This year on St. Patrick’s Day, we’ll be repping Irish America at a protest for immigrants’ rights, rather than at the NYC parade. Please join us! We’ll post details here, or you can email us for an update.

Irish Queers marched last year in the 2016 NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade. We were thrilled that, after 25 years of protest, we broke the ban on LGBTQ Irish groups.

Still, it was much the same parade as before. Simply adding queers to the staid litany of religious, military, and backroom political marching groups — without accountability for the parade bosses' past bigotry and  and without changing their power which dictated "who belongs" in Irish community — was a sad experience that we don’t want to repeat.

In the new era of Trump, the politics of a community that knows both immigrant hardship and white privilege matter more than ever.

Irish resistance in the face of brutal power is the heritage that Irish Queers celebrate!

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Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York

Join us this Thursday October 6th for the opening reception of The Museum of the City of New York's new exhibition highlighting NYC's radical queer underground art community past and present.  IQ has a few free tickets, so email:IrishQueers@gmail.com if you want to join us. There will be a panel discussion with Sarah Schulman and others beginning at 6:00 PM
http://www.mcny.org/exhibition/gay-gotham

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Press release: Happy St. Patrick's Day, making history!

Date: March 17, 2016

Happy St. Patrick's Day from Irish Queers, making history together at the NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade!

Irish Queers are delighted to be on this side of the barricades for once! We may be more at home with the circumstance than the pomp in this parade, but in this contingent we're surrounded by the NYC Irish LGBTQ community in celebration mode, which is a rare pleasure. It's also a sweet reunion of sorts, although many of us are missing: moved home to a much-changed Ireland, lost to AIDS and homophobia, or driven away by the sadness of too long a struggle. For those of us who have spent every St. Patrick's Day for the last quarter century in battle on Fifth Avenue, the bitterness is not swept away by a single day in the sun -- but today a very cold shadow lifts, and our future St. Patrick's Days are returned to us for celebration rather than protest.

Our marching is a celebration for the whole Irish community. We're joined here by supporters from the the Irish community, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising together -- a rebellion whose gift to Irish culture is a constant reference point for organizing ourselves in the face of powerful injustice, taking principled risks rather than playing it safe and wrong, setting our own terms, and refusing half-measures.

It's a celebration for the whole queer community, which is so widely familiar with bigoted figureheads collaborating with the religious right, courts, and public officials. We're especially proud to be joined here by friends from the Ugandan queer community (Freedom and Roam Uganda, the first lesbian empowerment organization in Uganda) recognizing the importance of this victory over cultural erasure; and by supporters from the many NYC LGBTQ communities who have turned out on Fifth Avenue with Irish Queers over the years.

To queer communities in Ireland, we shout a long-distance "go raibh mile maith agat" (not least for putting religious homophobia to a referendum, that was clever!) A special shout- out to our family in Queer Space Belfast, we adore you. Hope to see you all soon!

xoxox
Irish Queers NYC
http://irishqueers.blogspot.com 
@IrishQueers 

Contact: Emmaia (917) 517-3627, JF (212) 289-1101, or Gaby (718) 909-3956

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What they wore: IQ's Gaby Cryan on "Closet Case!"

Seamstress and fashion plate Gaby Cryan takes to the airwaves on "Closet Case!"
http://thebuzzmag.ca/2016/03/irish-queers-green-with-pride/

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Why we fought (This year we march! - Gay City News 3/16/17)

"This Thursday, Irish Queers will break with 25 years of protest against the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade and march up Fifth Avenue in the actual parade. Believe that we are overjoyed that we don’t have to protest anymore. As per the rules of the parade, we’ll be in “business casual attire” and will be stripped of any message besides “we’re Irish, homosexual, and finally in this @#$%^ parade.”

"...Plenty of queers have asked why we fought so long to get into a parade that 1) clearly doesn’t want us; 2) is without a doubt the dullest parade in the city; and 3) is packed full of cops and army dudes, not in a sexy uniform kind of way.

"Here’s why it mattered enough to push on for 25 years..."

 Read more: http://gaycitynews.nyc/year-march/

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Updated: On the march! Joining in the Irish LGBTQ contingent in 2016 NYC St. Patrick's Day parade.

This March 17th, the first Irish LGBTQ contingent will march in the 2016 NYC St.Patrick’s Day parade. Members of Irish Queers and the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization will join the Lavender and Green Alliance contingent, along with many of the tireless activists who have struggled against exclusion over the past twenty five years, worked toward the day when the parade celebrates the depth and breadth of Irish community.

The Lavender and Green Alliance will march with its banner, "Lavender and Green Alliance / Muintir Aerach na hÉireann: Celebrating Irish Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Culture and Identity."

The Irish LGBTQ contingent will also carry a second banner reading "England Get Out of Ireland." This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, in which Irish insurrectionists battled to end British colonial rule. The LGBTQ contingent will march in honor of the vision, hope, and commitment of Irish people’s struggles against empire and repression. This year’s parade is a continuation of this work as we strive to create a world that make's good on the promise of the Irish Proclamation to "cherish all the children of the nation equally."
(Original post 3/3/16)

For more information about marching please email irishqueers@gmail.com.

UPDATE (3/16/17)

Originally Lavender & Green Alliance, in agreement with Irish Queers, had planned to have a second banner in the LGBT contingent. Aside from the lead banner "Lavender & Green Alliance/Muintir Aerach na hÉireann: Celebrating Irish Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Culture and Identity" it was also planned to have an "England, Get Out of Ireland" banner, as allowed within the Parade's rules and in recognition that the Irish LGBTQ group is marching to celebrate the centenary of the Rising and in support of the aspirations of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, whose ideals remain unfulfilled.

After the decision was announced, there were concerns raised internally by some members and allies of LGA that the second banner (i) would not be reflective of the diversity of political views among those who plan to march in the contingent, and, (ii) that it could become a distraction in the media from the central issue of LGBT inclusion in the Parade.  In response to these concerns the LGA parade committee voted unanimously not to have a second banner, at least for this year.

Some of us strongly disagree with that decision, because it dilutes the politics of the contingent and silences a political message that is central to the Irish LGBT community.  Although we are not all in agreement with the decision to remove the second banner, we still plan to march together and to celebrate this hard-fought victory over bigotry and homophobia.

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Bittersweet: what's been won, and what has not

Irish Queers are delighted that the parade's ban is ended, and look forward to joining the Irish LGBTQ contingent on Fifth Avenue. We've always held that our struggle is against bigotry, though, and all the celebrating and political fist-bumping is turning that on its head.

The mayor stood yesterday surrounded by Irish Americans and announced that New York City is a beacon of inclusion. It is better now for Irish queers. But in New York City, racist police killings are still the subject of constant protest. Homeless people are being swept off of streets in gentrifying neighborhoods by police cars draped in pink "breast cancer awareness" ribbons, no less. Gentrification is causing deaths and destroying communities literally every minute.

So yes, we successfully pushed the Parade Committee into ending a policy that was embarrassing them. But to paint the city "inclusive" with that small brush is to conveniently forget what's really happening here, and to use Irish LGBTQ people as your tool.

The mayor's press conference showed just how much can be papered over with a victory.

Some claimed the victory was won by putting the kettle on. Decades of protest and pressure didn't do it, just queers and bigots talking lovingly to each other.

A Parade Committee member lauded the end of the ban with deluded, Islamophobic nonsense about how "our Judeo-Christian beliefs" are what ended the ban, and "the West is about inclusion!" No one on the mayor's stage uttered a word of objection. (Update: we've been asked to note that attendees on that stage who objected felt unable to interrupt the Mayor's press conference to say so. The Mayor did not object.)

Nor are we allowed any accounting for the still-sitting members of the parade committee who enthusiastically supported the parade throughout its ban on Irish LGBTQ groups, and dismissed and degraded the protests. But we're supposed to stay grateful and quiet in case we upset the new "unity."

We fought 25 years for this victory. We don't want it misused. The NYC Irish community still has its progressives and it still has its bigots. NYC has its moments of inclusion, and its deep traditions of violent exclusion. We gladly celebrate the end of the parade's ban on Irish LGBTQ marchers. We don't agree to forget what hasn't ended.

(Originally posted 3/4/16)

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Reflections on the long march to marching (Washington Blade 3/9/16)

(Photo: wnyc.org)

Read JF Mulligan's reflections on the (often inconvenient) history preceding this year's queer contingent in the St Patrick's Day parade:
http://www.washingtonblade.com/2016/03/09/st-pats-inclusion-at-last/

"There are many answers to why this change has come. In reality it is probably a combination of things. But let’s talk about it, hear people take responsibility and not back away or silence these narratives..."

"...Some of the many Irish values I cherish are to be contrary, to stand up for what is right, and to not be afraid when everyone else is walking down the road to stop and walk the other way."

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Resolutions 2016: Refusing white supremacy

Some of us may be wizened old queers with crusted-over hearts, but even we can find promise in the New Year. 2015 has been a tough year for hope. But -- mercifully -- white privilege has been made so stark that it has completely undone the idea of bystanders. We're all in the soup, and it's how we swim around in it that makes the difference.

Here are some ideas for pledges to white people to avoid supporting white supremacy, where we have the power to do it. Also some links that are related, but that definitely don't contain all the answers. It's just a starting point for thinking about how 2016 can be different because we make it so.

I WILL NOT...

• patronize restaurants or other venues where the front staff are all white, and the kitchen/rear staff are all people of color.
  Ethical eating app (ROC NYC)

• call or involve police as a substitute for attempting to resolve problems with strangers or take care of another person.
  ChiCopWatch

• send my kids to a segregated school or a school where tracking (like Gifted & Talented programs) effectively separates kids by income or race.
  Gentrification doesn't fix schools (Nikole Hanna-Jones/Grist)

• rent an apartment from which another person has been evicted -- and I will ask why an apartment is vacant before renting it.
  Rent Responsibly App

• move into a neighborhood or space where people of color are being displaced.
  Before It's Gone//Take It Back

• profit from black (or indigenous, or other subjugated people's) culture, whether financially or socially.
  Black Art Is Not A Free-For-All (Nadijah Robinson/Black Girl Dangerous)

I WILL...

• choose local/small vendors over chains, particularly small businesses owned by people of color -- even if it means buying something different (a drip coffee instead of a latte?) from what I might have planned.
  A Year of Shopping Only At Black Businesses (Mother Jones) 
  5 Way To Support Black-Owned Businesses (Mashable)

• seek out local and non-mainstream cultural performance by people of color and indigenous people.
  We Want the Airwaves 
  Nuyorican Poets Cafe

• make a practice of greeting the people I see regularly on the street in my neighborhood, as a way of refusing the separation that supports racism, fear, and predatory policing (and also other violence.)
  Safe Outside the System (SOS) 
  To Reduce Gun Violence, Know Thy Neighbor (Andrew Giambrone/The Atlantic)

• cop-watch as a matter of habit: I will openly observe police on the street when they are questioning or arresting someone, and ask the person under police control if they are okay or need help.
  Color Of Change on CopwatchNYC

• participate in at least two public protests or actions each year that have been organized by people of color contesting white supremacy -- in person, not online.
  NYC Shut It Down

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Writing ourselves into history.

Thanks to Maggie Lally and Lisa Fane for the photo!

Here's a photo from our best-ever evening out: a warm and friendly toast at the end of a long, bitter road. Hooray for constant friends!

Incredible as it may seem, we now have to write ourselves into history. (We will, it's all good!) There are always the deniers. New Yorks' Irish and Irish American influential homophobes spent many years denying the actual existence of Irish LGBT people, and many more years denying our role in Irish home and diaspora communities. Some might have been happy enough to admit Irish gay people existed, but Irish queers and political radicals had to be cast as outside agitators: never really Irish.

For those who never liked Irish queers, it's easiest now to pretend that the parade committee just had a change of heart. Easiest to pretend the change has nothing to do with a quarter century of protest against the smallness of imagination represented by the parade committee and its politically-wired supporters. The work of pretending away Irish queers, activism, and the gains of civil disobedience has already begun in some of the reporting on the end of the parade ban.

That's a silly pretense, but it's effective. Wherever that story sticks, it makes protest seem wrong-headed. Instead, it routes all conversations about injustice through the boardrooms and backrooms that have created the injustice in the first place. There we become people who wait for change, know our place, never question the set up, nor the foot that kicks us, as the song says.

So our work isn't done until we secure the history, and claim the victory for refusing to shut up when told, and working outside the channels of power.

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Thanks and goodbye to Brian Friel

Brian Friel, by Colin Davidson

"For the late playwright the past and our images of it were slippery and treacherous. Truth lay not in public facts but in private fictions."

Read Fintan O'Toole: The Truth According to Brian Friel (10/2/15)

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Step out for a victory celebration! This Saturday.

Hey everyone! WE WON!!! The victory in the St. Patrick's Day parade belongs to everyone who supported the protests and organizing over the last 25 years. Stop by for a toast with Irish Queers!

Saturday, Oct. 3

5-7pm

Stonewall Inn, 53 Christopher St. NYC

A toast to never accepting crumbs instead of justice. And to communities sticking together in our many battles against police bigotry, the religious right, and big money politics.

YES WE #$%^& DID!

http://irishqueers.blogspot.com

@IrishQueers

IrishQueers@gmail.com

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WE WON!

OMG!!!! We seriously won.

We are happy and relieved to announce that, after 25 years of struggle, we have won! The NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade has dropped its bigoted ban: an Irish LGBTQ contingent will finally march with its own banner in the parade next March 17th.

From the beginning, our demand has been for an Irish LGBTQ contingent to march behind their own banner saying who they are, like all other contingents. Today’s decision to invite the Lavender and Green Alliance does just that!

This is a victory for the grassroots organizing, civil disobedience, and street protest of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization and its successor, Irish Queers. Protests held the line year after year where politics constantly failed. It’s also a victory for our beautiful queer and Irish community of support, stretching from New York City to Ireland and beyond.

The parade issue has never just been about LGBTQ people. Irish people’s struggles are part of our identity: challenges to religious bigotry, demands for women’s rights, Irish republicanism, and struggles against racism in New York and Ireland are irreducible parts of the Irish experience. Irish queers have often been at the forefront of those struggles. We are proud of the complexity of our lives and histories.

The desire to march and the protests against exclusion began as part of Irish queer people’s work to stem the homophobia-fueled tide of AIDS deaths, to push back on the power of the church in Ireland, and to end the pretense that Irish queers are not a central part of Irish culture and politics. Even as other battles were won, the parade’s ironclad combination of bigotry, religion, money, and city politics made it a long holdout against justice. We are tired but happy to see the end of it.

Our thanks: we’re thankful to the many ordinary New Yorkers who supported us over the last 25 years, as well as the many elected official who refused to march in the parade while we were left out. We’re thankful for David Dinkins and others who made real, tangible tries at giving Irish queer people their rightful place in the parade. And we’re grateful to and proud of the original members of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization – who were also part of ACT UP, the Lesbian Avengers, and other important queer activist forces – who laid the groundwork for this victory.

We look forward to marching up Fifth Avenue with our community!

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Irish Queers statement on John Dunleavy’s ouster

After John Dunleavy’s 25 years of being the standard-bearer for religious homophobia, Irish Queers are of course glad to see him go. Dunleavy’s contributions to the Irish community include likening Irish LGBT people to the KKK, and claiming that being openly gay is a political statement (while insisting with a straight face that the NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade is not a political event.) His positions finally became untenable; it’s only incredible that it has taken so long.

The reasons behind Dunleavy’s ouster are something to celebrate. In the referendum on May 22, Ireland roundly rejected homophobia and the authority of the Catholic church to dictate Irish culture. Irish Queers and its predecessor, the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, have staged the same battle at the parade. We have posed the legacy of Irishness as a powerfully diverse set of experiences – and a history of throwing off chains – against the religious vision of Irishness as a closed, provincial identity that erases so many people’s real lives. The question of whether queers can take our place in Irish history and culture is now settled.

But the NYC St. Patrick’s Parade Committee is not led by the Irish or Irish American community. The parade is still exclusively held by the same men who enforced anti-gay bigotry over the past two decades. Their version of “inclusion” last year amounted to adding OUT@NBCUniversal instead of an Irish LGBT group. (OUT@NBC were so tightly controlled that, when asked by reporters how it felt to march, gay marchers they said they weren’t allowed to discuss it.) Who knows what exciting version of inclusion they’ll offer us this year with the addition of one more handpicked, battened-down group?

Some voices in Irish New York politics have called for parade organizers to end to the ban on “good” gays – those who have not protested, but instead participated in the fundraiser-and-mass circuit where the parade’s homophobes are welcomed. Taking that advice would be in keeping with the Parade Committee’s history of making the smallest change possible without actually opening the parade to Irish LGBT communities. But we were never in this to reform the men of the Parade Committee.

In breaking other chains, Ireland has represented itself brilliantly – from the referendum, to the rise of antiracist movements, to insisting that water is a human right. If the parade can’t catch on, it will find itself like John Dunleavy: out of time.

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Watching Ireland's gay marriage referendum from queer NYC

Photo: mashable.com

Along with the rest of the world, we're watching Ireland today for the marriage referendum. We're not big on marriage… gay marriage in the US has been used as a way to take apart the queer movement that sees gender, race, class, health care, housing, policing, and corporate power as all part of the same web.

But...

Ireland is another place.

• In Ireland, the campaigning around the referendum has turned up some really intense homophobia, and we hope today's vote shows a victory over that.
• Conservative religion and church power in Ireland have been challenged so importantly and beautifully in the past decade or so -- today's vote is another huge challenge, and that's unquestionably fabulous.
• The NO campaign has tried to portray African and other migrants in Ireland as religious, conservative, and homophobic in an ugly racist fashion that mirrors how Western churches have been pushing homophobic laws in African states. Migrants have spoken out against the NO campaign's racism, and against homophobia. Today's YES vote will turn that racism on its head, we hope.
• The YES campaign has been extremely white (not to mention full of images of queers as just regular folks, which is different in Ireland than here, but not so different...) We hope today's YES vote will make space for queers to be queer again, rather than normal.

 Good luck to Ireland from NYC Irish Queers.

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Irish Queers gives it back to OUT@NBC (video)

Today, the day before the annual NYC St. Patrick's Day parade [protest], we thought we should swing by OUT@NBCUniversal's Facebook page. We're already completely appalled by OUT@NBC, the corporate gay/straight/marketing alliance that's marching in the antigay parade to the exclusion of the actual Irish queer groups who have been shoved aside for the last quarter century. But the video we found on their Facebook wall surpassed our expectations of badness.

NBC had made a sort of fake news piece where a gay NBC anchor Thomas Roberts (of Sochi boycott-violating fame) was interviewing the main OUT@NBC guy about how terrific it was that they were marching in the parade. In the video, they pretend to take on the concerns of the LGBT community about how OUT@NBC is undermining us. But they end up assuring everyone who has panned them for undermining the Irish struggle for inclusion (okay, so that's everyone, then) that they're actually doing it for us. Between the smarminess and the squirming, it would be a somewhat satisfying train wreck to watch if it weren't so totally deplorable.

OUT@NBC's video frankly exceeds the capabilities of an outraged press release in response. And OUT@NBC refuses to return our calls, so our options for reply are limited. But we're not the silent types! So you can watch the NBC puff piece here -- or you can watch Irish Queers' version below, in which we rage-eat cookies and finally get to talk smack to the stuffed shirts of OUT@NBC. Are we mad? Yeah, we are. In the American sense of the word.

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Press release: At Tues. parade protest, plans to celebrate Irish LGBTQ icons, Bronx cheer for corporate sponsors

PRESS RELEASE – for immediate release

Date: March 15, 2015

Contact: Emmaia Gelman on 917-517-3627

Irish LGBTQ Protest of Exclusion Continues at 2015 NYC St. Patrick's Day Parade

Irish Queers welcome support from NYC officials & Ireland; condemn corporate sponsors.

Press Conference: Tues. March 17, 10:45am at Fifth Ave below W. 57^th St.

Protest: Tues. March 17, 11am-1pm, same location.

Irish Queers and allies will protest the exclusion of Irish LGBTQ groups from the St. Patrick's Day Parade this Tuesday, March 17 at 11am. This year’s protest will feature images of cherished figures whose Irish or Irish-American and LGBTQ identities are inseparable – all of whom would be closeted or banned by the parade organizers.

Irish Queers is proud to count on the support of Mayor de Blasio and the City Council, who have again withdrawn their participation from this year’s parade, because the parade continues to marginalize and shame Irish LGBTQ people. We’re also proud of the ongoing support for inclusion coming from Ireland – gay and straight – where New York’s bigoted parade is widely regarded as an embarrassment. 

The parade committee's admission this year of the gay/straight alliance of their corporate sponsor, NBC, is not inclusion of Irish LGBTQ groups, but more exclusion. The demand has always been for Irish LGBTQ groups to march under banners that say who we are without shame – not corporate groups, marching behind an “OUT” banner that avoids mentioning “lesbian”, “gay”, “bisexual”, or “transgender.”

“There is no logic to letting OUT@NBC march except as another way to keep Irish LGBTQ groups out,” said Gaby Cryan of Irish Queers. “The parade organizers have claimed a right to discriminate against us because they’re running it as a Catholic procession. But even the Cardinal calls it ‘a celebration of all things Irish.’”

Guinness and Heineken have joined NBC in supporting the discriminatory parade while also claiming that they oppose discrimination.

“Guinness and Heineken, after dropping their sponsorship of the antigay parade for just one year, have used NBC’s trick as an excuse to resume sponsoring it. It’s totally perverse that Heineken has offered to put money into the inclusive Queens parade as well as the antigay parade. Playing both sides harms the LGBTQ community, and adds insult to injury,” said Eustacia Smith of Irish Queers.

Irish LGBTQ groups have been fighting to take our place in our community’s parade for 25 years. We hope that next year’s parade will finally see the end of discrimination – and that corporations and others who say they support inclusion will work with the Irish LGBTQ community, rather than through back room deals.

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