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Commie Pinko Fag

The Red Scare, The Pink Scare and the Homosexual Agenda

Corporate Pride

Bradley Manning is off limits at SF Gay Pride parade, but corporate sleaze is embraced

Glenn Greenwald | Guardian | April 27, 2013

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While some of the nation’s most corrupt corporations are welcome to fly their flag over the parade, consider what Manning - for whom “even a hint of support will not be tolerated” - actually did. His leak revealed all sorts of corruption, deceit and illegality on the part of the world’s most powerful corporations. They led to numerous journalism awards for WikiLeaks. Even Bill Keller, the former Executive Editor of the New York Times who is a harsh WikiLeaks critic, credited those leaks with helping to spark the Arab Spring, the greatest democratic revolution the world has seen in decades. Multiple media accounts describe how the cables documenting atrocities committed by US troops in Iraq prevented the Malaki government from allowing US troops to stay beyond the agreed-to deadline: i.e., helped end the Iraq war by thwarting Obama’s attempts to prolong it. For all of that, Manning was selected by Guardian readers as the 2012 Person of the Year, while former Army Lt. (and 2009 SF Parade Marshal) Dan Choi said yesterday:

As we move forward as a country, we need truth in order to gain justice, you can’t have justice without the whole truth … So what [Manning] did as a gay American, as a gay soldier, he stood for integrity, I am proud of him.”

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Even the SF Gay Pride Parade is now owned by and beholden to the nation’s largest corporations, subject to their dictates. Those who run the event are functionaries of, loyalists to, the nation’s most powerful political officials. That’s how this parade was so seamlessly transformed from orthodoxy-challenging, individualistic and creative cultural icon into yet another pile of obedient apparatchiks that spout banal slogans doled out by the state while viciously scorning those who challenge them. 

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kidbijou:

thespiritwas:

Sylvia Rivera kicking ass on stage after some radfems & transphobes tried to refuse her the right to speak at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally.  Said radfems then had their own march in part protesting trans participation in Pride.  A precursor to today’s Dyke March.  

40 years later in the very same park trans women are still fighting for space within Pride as this year’s Dyke March fiasco demonstrated.  I’m feeling challenged and troubled by the narrative that trans women’s response to transphobia must take the “form of serious, calm, point by point analyses of why radfems are wrong” as Stephen Ira pointed out.

What strikes me about this video is that she isn’t trying to be calm and collected after being attacked.  She’s not internalizing the notion that fighting transphobia has to take on the oppressive notion of “respectability.”

These conversations have left me wondering: has the non profit industrial complex and professionalized activism gentrified our political activity?

So within all of that, I say: nothing but love and power to trans women creating space for ourselves in queer community! Special shout out to Voz who inspired this post!

yes yes yes amazing!!!

also here’s an mp3 recording of Reina’s presentation (titled Y’all Better Quiet Down! Disruptive Discourses in Movements for Gender Self-Determination) which included this video, from the We Who Feel Differently symposium in May.

(via communalperversion)