
Forward of the grand opening of the Stonewall Nationwide Monument Customer Heart, activists with ACT UP and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) dropped two banners on the New York Metropolis AIDS Memorial in Greenwich Village, calling on President Biden to cease funding Israel’s ongoing assaults on Gaza.
The motion passed off early this morning, June 28, prematurely of Biden’s go to to the Decrease Manhattan neighborhood, the place he and different public officers will attend the inauguration of the brand new customer middle. A collaboration between Pleasure Stay and the Nationwide Park Service (NPS), the middle has been within the works for six years following President Obama’s 2016 designation of a nationwide monument on the web site of the 1969 Stonewall Insurrection. Beforehand an empty storefront, the brand new customer middle at 51 Christopher Avenue would be the first LGBTQIA+ customer middle within the Nationwide Park System.
Earlier than the president’s arrival, activists hung two white banners from the triangular AIDS Memorial located at St. Vincent’s Triangle round 5am. The material indicators displayed black, crimson, and pink textual content studying “Queers to Biden: Cease Arming Israel” and “From NYC to Gaza / Stonewall was an Intifada,” referring to the Arabic phrase for “shaking off” that has traditionally been used to explain Palestinian uprisings towards Israeli occupation. The latter signal was accompanied by a graphic of manicured fingers pulling again a brick in a slingshot — a reference to the legendary first brick that was hurled at cops outdoors of the Stonewall Inn throughout the historic rebellion.
“Fifty-five years in the past right now, our LGBTQ ancestors made historical past by throwing the primary bricks within the rebellion that may kick off the homosexual liberation motion on the Stonewall Inn,” JVP and ACT UP mentioned in a collective textual content posted on Instagram.
“Whereas President Biden’s speech right now erases this radical historical past, protestors sought to reclaim Stonewall’s legacy as a rebel towards the state violence and police brutality that LGBTQ+ people had been dealing with.”


Along with the banners, activists wheat-pasted posters with pink watermelon triangles impressed by Gran Fury’s signature SILENCE = DEATH signage and bricks encased in the identical fisherman’s netting sample featured on keffiyehs, alluding to the overlap between the Palestinian liberation motion and LGBTQ+ rights motion. There have been additionally new variations of Gran Fury’s “AIDSGATE” (1987) poster that changed Ronald Reagan’s picture with Biden’s, calling on the president to take motion on Israel’s destruction of Gaza by ceasing shipments of American weapons.
Hyperallergic has reached out to the NYC AIDS Memorial and the Stonewall Nationwide Monument for remark.
Decrying Israeli “pinkwashing,” a time period describing Israel’s alleged use of LGBTQ+ rights to distract from its navy’s human rights violations, longtime ACT UP member BC Craig, who can be an activist with JVP, mentioned in an announcement that she refuses to permit her id as a queer, Jewish individual be “weaponized to justify the genocide.”
“Our LGBTQ+ siblings in Gaza don’t have any extra refuge from Israeli bombs than every other Palestinians,” Craig mentioned.


Since Hamas’s October assault, Israel’s barrage of airstrikes and multi-tiered siege on Gaza have killed upwards of 37,396 Palestinians and injured over 85,523, in line with the most recent United Nations report. Tens of hundreds extra are lacking, anticipated to be buried beneath rubble from collapsed infrastructure.
“Stonewall was about kicking the cops out of our lives,” mentioned Miss Main, a veteran trans activist who participated within the 1969 Stonewall riots, in a public assertion, criticizing the president’s assist of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza.
“The women and guys will carry on preventing, chanting, marching til each rattling individual is free, together with Palestinians.”