3/17 IRISH QUEERS fight homophobia with culture!

international | rights, freedoms and repression | news report Tuesday March 09, 2004 19:23 by JF Mulligan - Irish Queers (NYC) irishqueers at hotmail dot com

Stop the Irish government from sending an official representative to the bigoted parade.

S*U*P*P*O*R*T Y*O*U*R I*R*I*S*H Q*U*E*E*R*S*!

Irish queers have the same problem as queers in most immigrant communities --
while our community scrambles to assimilate into mainstream conservative U.S.
culture, our insistence on being both Irish AND queer challenges the American
Hetero Dream, which is very nervous-making to our immigrant communities.

So the big local muckety-mucks do the usual thing: first they denounce us, then
they try everything to pretend we don't exist. They put their normalness on
public display in the form of parades featuring -- instead of the rich culture
they came from -- military contingents, cop contingents, religious
contingents... (The weirdest part is that in Ireland, queers are singled out for
government *support*, and have never been excluded from a parade.) The erasure
of queers, and the homogenizing of our national cultures, does violence to us.
We protest!

Join Irish Queers in protesting our exclusion from the (admittedly very dull)
NYC St. Patrick's parade, this year with a big, fabulous performance which will
show parade-goers the difference between lame moralistic, militaristic
grandstanding and *actual* Irish culture!

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dramatic reading by ~* MALACHY McCOURT! *~
music by ~* THE UNITED 32s! *~
art by ~* CONOR McGRADY *~ & ~* KEVIN NOBLE! *~
and lots more...

Wednesday, March 17, 10:30am-1pm
E.58th St./5th Ave. (at FAO Schwarz)
call (917) 517-3627 if you have trouble finding us or getting in.

Also see "10 things you can do"...
www.irishqueers.org
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Why do we care about the parade?

The NYC parade is the biggest, most public celebration of Irishness in the U.S.
It's broadcast on national television by NBC, gets more than $1m of City funds,
and is a photo-op for many politicians who claim (out of the other side of their
mouths) to be friends of queers. It has nothing to do with celebrating Irishness
anymore -- the organizers now call it "a triumph of traditional Catholic values
over homosexuality." The parade has excluded many different "undesirables" over
its history, including women, people of color, people in wheelchairs and Irish
independence activists. The parade is an icon of right-wing religious attempts
to cleanse Irish identity of queerness, Irish republicanism, feminism and other
diversities. It's our community's parade, and we belong in it.