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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Heady days. Change ahead?

Is Irish Queers' long, cold winter about to warm up?

PSNI have just been disinvited from marching in the St. Patrick's Day parade by community outcry.

Heineken just pulled their sponsorship because of the parade's homophobia.

Sam Adams Brewery have similarly pulled their sponsorship from the Boston parade.

St. Patrick's Day parades are going off all over the world and making a big deal of their inclusiveness, their refusal of homophobia. As if to say Hellooooo New York?

The Taoiseach is in New York City and is getting no peace, as the calls for him to stand up for Irish LGBTQ people keep coming.

About a dozen LGBTQ and police accountability groups are set for the press conference and protest at the parade -- a show of solidarity and united purpose that we haven't seen in a good few years, because people get cyclically sick and tired of banging their heads against the unflinchingly bigoted parade committee.

No one who reads a newspaper in New York or Ireland could mistake the parade for an Irish celebration, in spite of some of the homophobes' efforts to recast their religious bigotry as "just not being all about gayness."

The calls for change are getting louder, and the evasions getting more and more pretzel-like. Could it be that the facades are falling altogether? That would be... such a relief.

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Bigots heart bigots: PSNI join the NYC St. Patrick's Day parade.

The notoriously bigoted Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) are traveling to march in the notoriously bigoted NYC St. Patrick's Day parade this year. (They're marching with the Gardaí! It's all very enlightened.) Apparently their love of militarism and their right-wing zealotry are enough to unite them across the once-bitter divide of religion and nation. Mazel tov, they deserve each other.

It's telling to watch the NY Irish community's outrage boil up now. Some people see this is just an extension of the bigotry that Irish queer groups have been trying (often without much help) to challenge. Some really, truly never saw it coming. As the poem goes: "First they came for the communists..."

Guardian: New York St Patrick's Day parade to include Northern Irish police
(http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/mar/13/new-york-st-patricks-day-parade-northern-irish-police)

First They Came...
Martin Niemoller
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.

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Film about Bobby Sands wins award at Cannes

Hunger, a film about Bobby Sands, received the Camera d'Or award at the closing ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival. For more information about the film, click here and here.




Bobby Sands died on May 5, 1981 after 66 days on hunger strike in the struggle for human rights and political status for all Irish Republican political prisoners incarcerated in Northern Ireland. He was only 27 years old. Bobby Sands was one of ten men to die in the Hunger Strike of '81. The demands of the prisoners included:

• The right not to wear a prisoner uniform (since they were not criminals)
• The right to free association amongst Republican political prisoners
• The right as political prisoners not to do prison work
• The right to organize their own educational and recreational facilities
• The right to one weekly visit, letter and parcel

For more information on the Hunger Strike of '81, click here.

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More on Prisoner of the Crown...

(Painting by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin)

The Irish ultimately replied that – straight or gay – Casement had died for Ireland, and they honored his sacrifice. When his coffin lay in state in Dublin’s Garrison Church of the Sacred Heart, 165,000 mourners filed past to pay their respects.

Click here for the full Irish Voice review of Prisoner of the Crown.

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Wanna go see Prisoner of the Crown at the Irish Rep?

Wanna join Irish Queers to see Prisoner of the Crown, a play about Roger Casement? Send us an e-mail and we'll let you know when we're thinking of going.

From the Irish Rep's website:

PRISONER OF THE CROWN, a broad and bitter indictment of judicial abuse, is the riveting story of the trial of Sir Roger Casement, an Irish patriot and one of the world's great humanitarians. A few short years after being knighted, Casement was sentenced to be hanged for treason in what was called, "The Trial of the Century." The sensational trial was tainted by the presence of the "Black Diaries," --an alleged explicit account of Casement's promiscuous homosexual lifestyle. Were the diaries real? Or, were they, as many believed, forged by the crown forces determined that he pay the ultimate price for his role in the Easter, 1916 uprising? The play, set in the jury room of the Old Bailey and in the minds of the jury, features 49 characters and paints a captivating picture of heroism, passion, and manipulative deception.

Roger Casement was born in Kingstown, now Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin, in 1864. In the 1890s Casement joined the British consular service, and in 1903 gained an international reputation for his humanitarian efforts in the Congo and later in Peru where he exposed atrocities to which natives were subjected by agents of rubber companies using forced labor. His reports created an international sensation for which resulted in his knighthood. He was one of the world’s first great humanitarians in the modern sense. He retired from the consular service in 1912 and was hanged for high treason August 3, 1916.

Click here for Irish Voice article Irish Rep Season Ends With a Bang.

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How ILGO & ACT UP went to Belfast

Belfast's queer community center, Queer Space turned 10 this year! So we were thinking back about its history... which starts in New York, in the tense, grubby meetings of ILGO and ACT UP. They asked for a birthday letter (although it was started as a collective, I was technically the mommy. Ten points for Irish Queers!) so here are snippets from it. You can read the rest on mishmoshkeleh.

Queer Space is ... a direct offshoot of the truly revolutionary direct action organizing of [ILGO and] ACT UP – the movement built on the lesson of AIDS ... that we had to stand up and demand some space in the world, and stop worrying about being polite and safe, or we would die. ... Queer Space has transformed Belfast just by existing. It’s just a crazy example of how taking the risk of breaking silence, saying things out loud that are maybe considered irrelevant or obnoxious (like “Hey, I’m queer!”), can change everything.

-snip-
[In 1995] I went along to an ILGO meeting and told them about the plan to make a new queer space in Belfast, and asked if they’d help fund it. I thought I was very bold going there, and I also remember that the meeting was intimidating as hell. It was nothing like Belfast... These were Irish immigrants who were talking about challenging the Cardinal’s homophobia, which seemed unbelievably brazen. Their analysis ... was based on big ideas about democracy, anti-imperialism that included Irish republicanism, and breaking old chains like the one that says people should behave like good little boys and girls even as they’re marginalized... When I asked about money for a queer library in Belfast, they looked a bit blank, said they had no funding themselves – and got right back to the subject of how to change New York.

I stayed anyway. I never asked about money again...[but by] the time I ... was ready to go back [to Belfast], ILGO and ACT UP had completely changed my sense of what was possible.

-snip-
The plan was ...to run an organization without bosses... to politicize queer identity, to explicitly refuse to hide the existence and nature of this queer place. And to sit down with each other to make deliberate decisions about what a Belfast queer community should look like aside from a pub crew or a population targeted for health outreach.

-snip-
[1997] We took Belfast by storm, hanging flyers for events and sometimes just flyers about the fact that queers existed; we posted the word “queer” all over the city. We got lots of media attention, sent out press releases, maintained e-mail lists, made connections with queer groups in other places. We formed a little direct action cell called Queer Action Belfast which had a particularly great logo, and made t-shirts, and protested Newt Gingrich and posted signs asking “Do you love the lesbians in your life?” To me, it was like the sun coming up.

(More: "Queer Space, you old dog!" on mishmoshkeleh.com)

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