New threats and silencing from the LGBT Center

Below is a reportback from December 1st at the Center, when QAIA was invited to speak briefly at the screening of the Starlite film (which looks really great, by the way.)

The upshot is that the Center is still actively silencing and coercing queers who try to use Center space to discuss queer stuff that the Center finds "controversial." The Center is also still apparently content to silence communities of color without concern for the particularly disturbing implications of that. And the ban on queer discussion of Palestine apparently now extends even to the mention of a ban.

Action planned, please stay tuned. As queers occupy HRC to challenge the corporate/right-wing takeover of queer communities, it's time to build a bigger challenge to the Center as an emblem of the exact same issues. The interconnections between anti-Arab/anti-Muslim hatemongering in the name of queers and moneyed gays' effort to gentrify the queer community get clearer every time QAIA shows up at the Center.

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Reportback (from Emmaia):

QAIA was invited to speak briefly at the screening of the Starlite Lounge film at the Center, because the filmmakers didn't want to hold an event at the Center without acknowledging the ban.

The plan was to put QAIA flyers on chairs, and then at the end of the night make a quick announcement/update. We also had little cards that people could sign and leave at the reception desk for the Center's board president Mario Palumbo and executive director Glennda Testone to object to the ban.

As we started to put the flyers on chairs, a Center staff person literally panicked. He ran in repeating "There's a moratorium!  There's a moratorium! You can't do that here!" and snatched up the flyers already distributed. He told me that he was "happy to have me there" (in my own community space!) but not to flyer. He told the filmmakers "I don't know, this is all from before I even came to the Center!" -- in other words, he had no idea what was going on, but was committed to his job as an enforcement-bot. After that, Robert Woodworth came to the room and stayed till the end.

The filmmakers and I talked about how to proceed without taking the focus away from from Starlite, and from the members of the Starlite community who were there to speak out. We settled on having the filmmakers just hold up a flyer at the end of the screening, announce that they'd invited QAIA because of the ban, and people would hear an update from QAIA at the end of the panel discussion.

I'm not sure what conversation took place between them and Center staff, but they came back to say they couldn't make the announcement after all, because Center staff had said they'd be kicked out. They were angry about being silenced, but they didn't want to risk derailing the message about Starlite. They were also worried that Starlite folks would not be allowed back at the Center to continue to raise awareness, funds, etc. The Center had successfully leveraged its control of community space to shut people up. Insert your own analysis of strong-arming an initiative of queers of color in particular.

Instead, at the end of the night, the organizers called on me as an audience member. I thanked them for questioning whether to hold their event at the Center. I said that the Center was community space that had been created, like Starlite, by queers who were carving out their own space when nothing else existed; that it had since become a big-money organization that's lost to the queer community that founded it and is now banning "controversial" queers; that from one community struggling to hold onto valuable space to another, we appreciated that the organizers had tried to include QAIA; and that the Center had stopped us from telling them about the issue.

People in the room got it, and virtually everyone came by on their way out to take a flyer.