In recent years, a country’s stance on LGBTQ rights has become something of a shorthand for its overall progressive values. While I understand its utility, I find it a rather odd classification metric, particularly if we step back to take a broader, historical view. Up until very recently, there simply weren’t any nation states that respected LGBTQ rights to any significant degree. From a grab bag full of examples, I always remind people that until 2003, homosexuality was criminalized in my home state of Michigan—along with 19 others. As recently as 2008, states including California were voting decisively against gay marriage. So, why the chest-thumping? We shouldn’t dwell in the past, but perhaps a bit more humility is in order. 

Second, LGBTQ rights is a narrow lens to judge the complexity of a nation’s values. A country’s views on LGBTQ rights don’t necessarily reflect a host of other issues—racial, economic, religious, etc.

Or, like a people’s right to exist. Case in point: Palestine. 

Like so many others, I’ve been feeling despondent and helpless as the genocide of the Palestinian people is broadcast live for the world to watch. It’s impossible to just set it aside and carry on with my life. My stomach hurts, my brain aches, my heart thumps so fast I feel it pounding my chest. 

I don’t use the word genocide in an act of provocation. I use the word genocide in keeping with what we are witnessing: starved Palestinians shot down as they rush for food, hospitals bombed, not a university left standing, families wiped out, more children dead in Gaza in four months than in four years of global conflict. A report from the Costs of War suggests that “more journalists [have been] killed in Gaza than in both world wars, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan combined.”

I could go on, but I don’t want to. My heart can’t bear it.  

Further, I use the word genocide in keeping with the UN special committee that found “the policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period are consistent with the characteristics of genocide.” I use the term in alignment with Amnesty International’s findings and the Center for Constitutional Rights and South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. 

I understand that it’s easier to look away. There’s no healthy way to process or cope with this level of destruction. 

As small and fumbling as it is, I want to do my part to speak out for peace, to speak out for an end to the destruction. I’m not an expert. I might get something wrong. But I would rather dig down for the courage to speak out than allow myself to be silenced by fear. 

Today, I’d like to address the question of why I support Palestine as a queer person. 

Maybe you’ve seen the memes. Queers for Palestine is like chickens for KFC. Tel Aviv Pride is next month, when’s Pride in Gaza? 

Musician Regina Spektor put it a little more cogently: “How do students who care about safe spaces, micro-aggressions, social justice, women’s and LGBTQ rights align shoulder to shoulder with Hamas- a terrorist organization that calls for genocide of the Jewish people, has honor killings of women and NO human rights for ANY people.” 

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s get started. 

First, and most obviously, to speak clearly for myself, I don’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Hamas. I wish I didn’t even have to say that. This is a slanderous and hypocritical tactic that’s used to silence people who speak out on behalf of Palestine. If you sling accusations of anti-semitism or terrorist sympathies, you’ll inevitably frighten a lot of people into silence. 

Ironically, the propaganda-churning social media handle Jewbelong makes the point in reverse: “You can dislike Netanyahu without hating Jews. Half of Israel does.” 

Fair—and I absolutely agree! Shouldn’t it also hold that you can dislike, or even abhor, Hamas without thinking that Gaza should be carpet bombed and starved into extinction? 

Second, let’s get into the “NO human rights for ANY people” comment. 

This argument exposes the blindspots of Western paternalism, and connects directly with a centuries-old idea that we in the West alone are arbiters of human rights. We’re the infallible good guys—the cowboys fighting the wretched natives while forsaking our treaties, slaughtering the buffalo, kidnapping Indigenous children, and killing their parents with smallpox. 

How much more evolved on human rights can we claim to be as we bomb an entire generation into oblivion? 

And yet, I can already hear the indignant retort: Well, would you rather live in a country like the United States or Israel where you can get married and have civil rights, or a Muslim country where gay people have the death penalty? 

First, I would say that it’s funny how often this point gets brought up by people who only seem to have become proponents of gay rights as a way of white-washing their Islamophobia. 

Further, the argument flat out isn’t true. Gay marriage isn’t legal in Israel, gay people don’t get the death penalty in Gaza—and, moreover, Gaza’s laws prohibiting same-sex activity between men were instituted not by Shariah law, but by the British in 1936. But if you want to talk about ISIS and its heinous attacks on the LGBTQ community: Israeli opposition leaders have alleged that Benjamin Netanyahu is arming ISIS-related gangs in Gaza to sow further chaos and add to the destruction.

So much for principles. 

I don’t happen to think that if a country doesn’t support gay rights they somehow deserve to get bombed into oblivion. That’s just not a value I have. For example, even though Idaho is trying to repeal gay marriage, I don’t want the US military to bomb their capital or impose a blockade on food. 

A friend of mine who graciously read a draft of this article shared words that ought to be passed on: “Sometimes all we can do is try to let light in so we can see things more clearly, and to constantly remind ourselves and one another that compassion is maybe our highest duty.”

Things aren’t good for the LGBTQ community in Gaza, but Israel has made them unimaginably worse. As a queer person, I don’t side with the IDF soldier waving “the first ever pride flag raised in Gaza.” My liberation as a queer person is not tied to tanks and guns and drones or a neo-colonial agenda. My liberation is tied to understanding, to free discourse—to being seen as human in the same way that the people of Gaza deserve to be seen as precious human beings.

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