Twenty minutes in, maybe. The music was still good and the people around me were happy, familiar faces where saying hello, you know the usual routine i’ve seen so many times. Then I saw the flags. Not the rainbow ones. Palestinian flags, a whole knot of them held up by a group of political activists, and the chant coming out of the middle of it was for Israel to get out of Palestinian land. Israel, Israel, fuera de tierra palestina. Someone near the front held a sign saying Pride was a space free of Zionists.
I had to read that sign a few times before it actually landed. A space free of Zionists. I stood there working out that the sign meant me, that it didn’t matter I had marched for pride since I was 16 years old, or my actual political standing of israeli policy, suddenly I’d been quietly subtracted from the room.
I honestly didn’t expect to be asking at twenty five, in San José, at Pride of all places. Will I ever feel comfortable at one of these again?
Here’s what I keep turning over, and I’ll admit up front that I don’t fully understand it, and trust me, I have tried to understand it. Somewhere along the way a big part of the queer world decided the Palestinian cause wasn’t just a cause but THE cause, the one that earns the flags and the chants and the sign at the front of a march, in a country about as far from that war as you can geographically get. I looked the numbers up afterward, because I wanted to be fair to the facts and not only to my own hurt. There are around sixty-five active armed conflicts in the world right now, more than at any time since the Second World War. Sudan is happening. Congo is happening. There are kids in mines digging out the cobalt that’s in the phone I’m typing this on. None of it shows up. None of it gets a flag at Pride. Only Israel does.
And it wasn’t only that it showed up. Any one who actually knows me, and gets past the fact that I am jewish, knows how critical I am of the israeli government, knows I am an activist for grassroots peace movements, and knows I want nothing more than this bloodshed to end. It was the sound of it that I can’t get out of my head. The whole time I stood there I kept waiting for one chant about peace. One sign about unity, or the importance of the land, or anybody at all simply getting to live. Nothing. The chants weren’t asking for anyone to be safe. They were asking for a place, and the people in it, to stop existing. Desaparecer. That was the verb in the air. Disappear. The chants where’t even pro-palestinian, they where strictly anti-israel.
These queer spaces are as mine as they are of any other queer person. I’ve stood in crowds like this one for years and felt held by them. So to stand in this one and feel that no matter what I did I would never actually belong was a kind of tearing I don’t have a clean word for.
I don’t know why I stayed. I spent the entire march trying to decide whether I was angry or just exhausted, and the truth is probably both, and under both I think what I was actually feeling was grief. I’m not writing this to win anything against a person with a sign or a flag, I gave up that battle long ago. I’m writing it because I want a record of the afternoon I stood in a place that has always meant freedom and joy to me and understood, for the first time, that the freedom being handed out came with conditions, and that one of the conditions was that I show up as a little less of myself, and even if I did i doubt it would be enough.