Out today, a story months in the making…
In August, Austin Police Department violently arrested two pro-Palestine activists at the city’s annual Pride march. For The Barbed Wire, I investigated what led to the first arrests at Pride in over a decade:
At Austin’s Pride Parade in August, while rainbow-painted police horses stood guard and brightly decorated floats passed by, officers tackled two men, using kicks and pressure points to pin their bodies to the ground. They were taken to jail on charges of ignoring law enforcement commands and resisting arrest.
They were the first arrests at an Austin Pride event in years — perhaps more than a decade, according to one of the event’s longtime organizers. And it left many who watched it unfold, including journalists like myself, with one unshakeable thought: That didn’t need to happen.
I’ve spent the weeks since reporting on why it did.
Austin’s LGBTQ+ community was still feeling the rippling of a bomb threat that disrupted a popular drag brunch in June as preparations for Pride events got underway. For the unaware: While LGBTQ+ Pride activities are typically timed to the June anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, Austin’s official Pride occurs in August, just after the students at the University of Texas return from summer break.Many in the community were still on edge and worried about their safety. And for good reason, since weeks earlier, the city’s Human Rights Commission requested additional police presence at the parade as “members of the LGBTQIA+ community continue to be targets of hate incidents, violent threats, and extremist legislation,” according to a memo obtained by The Barbed Wire. As we previously reported, the rise in hate incidents — from bomb threats to assaults and murder — has correlated with an increase in legislation hostile to the community.
But in the days leading up to the annual Austin Pride march, attention shifted to a new, internal issue: The local queer community was in open conflict over Palestine. A leaked slide, from an internal presentation by the non-profit that hosts the parade, called Austin Pride Foundation, equated symbols of Palestinian liberation — such as flags, keffiyeh, and slogans like “From the River to the Sea’ — to hate speech, indicating they would be banned at the parade. The slide went viral after it was reposted on Instagram by Brigitte Bandit, one of the city’s most prominent drag queens.
This is a story with a few twists and turns. Even though Pride itself ultimately welcomed symbols of Palestinian liberation, police who were deployed to “protect” the LGBTQIA+ community from violent threats ended up attacking us instead.
