Opinions
Creating Change protests not anti-Semitic
Allegation stifles debate, gives cover to Israel
Protesters on Jan. 23, 2016, gather outside reception at the National LGBTQ Task Force’s annual Creating Change Conference in Chicago that was to have featured two LGBT rights advocates from Israel. (Photo courtesy of Andy Thayer/Gay Liberation Network)
Last week, the National LGBTQ Task Force held its annual Creating Change conference in Chicago. The Task Force, established in 1973, set out to build a future where everyone is free to be themselves in every aspect of their lives,” across a variety of issues including employment, healthcare, and basic human rights.
According to the conference program, Rea Carey, executive director of the Task Force, welcomed participants with these words: “That’s why we are here this week: to tear down ALL the barriers we face between us and true liberation — and to support and lift-up one another in spirit, camaraderie and love.” (Emphasis their own).
However, one particular event on Jan. 22 put these noble words to the test. A session with A Wider Bridge, a pro-Israeli LGBT organization, was challenged by protesters and cancelled over the organization’s cooperation with the Israeli government whose policies violate the human rights of Palestinians living under occupation. The cancellation of the event raised eyebrows, prompting a barrage of angry reactions and accusations of anti-Semitism against the protesters and conference organizers. For instance, Slate Magazine’s LGBTQ blogger ran the headline “The LGBTQ Left Has an Anti-Semitism Problem,” an OUT magazine headline notes that the protests were “pure anti-Semitism,” and 90 LGBTQ activists signed a statement to Carey describing the protests as “anti-Semitic” and “dangerous,” posing the following question: “where do we as a progressive social movement go from here?” A cursory search of news surrounding the event brings up 80+ articles of similar views. For her part, Carey released a “crystal clear” statement: “the National LGBTQ Task Force wholeheartedly condemns anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic statements made at any Task Force event including our Creating Change Conference,” promising a review of the event and improvements to cope with “the challenges of a growing attendance.”
The Blade’s own Mr. Kevin Naff shared his opinion in an account of his own experience with A Wider Bridge, Israel, and Palestine. Yet, despite his coolheaded appeal to ensure that all voices should be heard, including critical ones, Mr. Naff reaches a similar conclusion: the protests were offensive and anti-Semitic.
Were they?
I do not believe so. Instead, I believe the repeated deployment of anti-Semitism against those who criticize Israel and the wide arm of organizations it works with is both unsophisticated and demeaning. In fact, the charge of anti-Semitism is merely an iteration of a larger force that has dominated the Israeli-Palestinian conversation in the U.S. It’s the kind of force that unleashes itself almost by default at any hint of strongly grounded criticism of Israel. It’s called civility. As Steven Salaita puts it in his work, Uncivil Rites, civility is a regime that always has difficulty accommodating systematic critiques, let alone expression of those critiques in unfashionable manners. Of course, the protestors were disruptive, uncomfortable perhaps, and so is every bit of the goals the Task Force seeks to accomplish, or any “progressive” civil rights movement for that matter. Change, at least the effective kind, does not come with comfort. If that were case, then the history we know about many civil rights movements in this country and around the world would be a lie.
Perhaps one particular chant at the protests drove such strong disapproval, to the tune of challenging a deeply rooted and accomplished organization: “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.” A superficial reading would invariably cause anyone who hears it to believe it means the destruction of Israel. Yet, most of the reactions fail to understand that the chant is equally applicable to an increasingly embraced idea: the one State solution, where freedom should indeed reign from the river to the see. Alternatively, as U.S. Ambassador to Israel put it, we are left with a single state with two standards of adherence to the rule of law, one favorable to Israelis and one unfavorable to Palestinians.
Not only is the charge of anti-Semitism unsophisticated and incapable of grappling with the realities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, it also does far greater harm than good. Nearly all the opinions assumed their views with the understanding that the session with A Wider Bridge should have been permitted to take place. I do too. But, unlike those opinions, mine is a view that does not find it necessary or appropriate to say that silencing the session is anti-Semitic. Rather, permitting it to take place would only be a commitment to the principles and ideals of the Task Force and Creating Change – something that is neither Semitic nor anti-Semitic.
The irony is that opinions rallying around anti-Semitism practically commit the same mistake: silencing and discrediting the protestors. In doing so, the harm is twofold. The other side is almost instantly excluded from the conversation, marked as undesirable or uninvited, and therefore it also stifles the conversation. For instance, in an exchange on Facebook, one friend commented on Mr. Naff’s opinion, “I stopped [reading] at the description of the protest as anti-Semitic and of “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” as a “genocidal chant [that] is an overt call for the destruction of Israel.”
Finally, one illegal Israeli settler recently shared his thoughts on the matter, “there’s still anti-Semitism in America,” speaking about country clubs and neighborhoods in Chicago that exclude Jews. Yet, one rarely hears about this sort of anti-Semitism. It seems as though nowadays anti-Semitism only dominates the headlines in the Israeli-Palestinian context, especially when Israeli policies are criticized.
As the progressive movement works to recover from this episode, it would be wise to understand that scapegoating a tremendously painful past, one where anti-Semitism wreaked havoc and unspeakable horrors, would only reinforce the idea that all voices should be heard as long as they conform to the rules of civility. The issue is not about the Task Force’s ability to handle growing attendance; rather it’s about what it, and the progressive movement at large, will do when challenged by an increasingly knowledgeable audience about Israel’s human rights violations. After all, nearly a quarter-century of peace negotiations grounded in civility has nothing to show but stagnation or regressive change at best, surely not a change genuinely committed to the human rights of all.
Opinions
Pride in a new world order
White House has dismantled global U.S. LGBTQ rights infrastructure
It can be tempting to feel somber this Pride. In 2025 and 2026, the United States dismantled much of the LGBTQ+ rights infrastructure it had spent decades building — eliminating the Global Equality Fund, defunding local LGBTQ+ organizations, and banning the rainbow flag from federal buildings and embassies. India unexpectedly rolled back transgender rights in March, stripping away the hard-won right to self-identify. Senegal passed an abhorrent anti-LGBTQ+ law in April, and a similar one just cleared parliament in Ghana.
But this is only part of the story. 2026 is also the year Rob Jetten — a proud gay man — became prime minister of the Netherlands, the youngest in the country’s history. It is the year Thailand celebrated the first anniversary of legalizing same-sex marriage, a historic first for Southeast Asia that is already influencing debates across the region. It is also the year “Heated Rivalry” became one of the most-watched shows on HBO, a global phenomenon.
In fact, LGBTQ+ people have never been more numerous, more visible, or more politically consequential than we are today. The question is not whether we have power. The question is whether we are using it to adapt to the emerging new world order.
Three geopolitical forces are redrawing the terrain. Borders and sovereignty are under renewed strain — this year showed us that the rules-based international order can no longer be taken for granted. Power politics is back at the center of global affairs, and when nations turn inward and militarize, those at the margins often pay the price first. And the institutions our movement has relied on most — governments, multilateral bodies, and multinational corporations — are proving unreliable allies.
The conclusion is that LGBTQ+ people cannot tie their future solely to the fortunes of liberal democracies. We need to come into our own power, and this turbulent moment may offer an opportunity to do so.
This requires a change in strategy. The LGBTQ+ movement has largely understood itself as a national movement in the business of changing hearts and minds one country at a time: win the courts, shift public opinion, and trust that progress would spread from north to south. That model delivered real victories on decriminalization, anti-discrimination protections, military service, and marriage equality. But it is showing diminishing returns. Today, political movements, financial flows, cultural narratives, and AI models increasingly operate globally outside of normative frameworks. Our movement has not kept pace.
LGBTQ+ people globally constitute a population larger than that of the United States. Our collective economic power approaches $4 trillion. We shape culture disproportionately in film, fashion, technology, and the arts. We are no longer a niche constituency petitioning for tolerance. We are a global community with growing economic, cultural, and political influence.
Realizing that potential requires three things. The first is unity — not uniformity, but the strategic coherence that allows a dispersed global community to act with shared purpose. The second is infrastructure: organizations and networks capable of operating across borders, pooling resources, and articulating a vision people want to be a part of. The third is abandoning a Western-centric mindset: building deeper roots in emerging economies will be essential.
There is a broader point. LGBTQ+ people should not be reduced to merely enduring or surviving this moment. We are entering a turbulent period in which humanity faces serious challenges — armed conflict, climate disruption, and technologies advancing faster than governance. LGBTQ+ people have often had to imagine a different future before it existed — and build the communities to sustain it across borders, generations, and class lines. That experience gives us a comparative advantage in this global context.
Pride, at its best, has always been a declaration of existence and a demand for dignity. In 2026, it should become something more: a reckoning with how much power our community has accumulated — and how seriously we intend to wield it to shape what comes next.
Fabrice Houdart is a former World Bank and United Nations staff member. He has taught at Georgetown University and Columbia University, and chairs the Institute of Current World Affairs in D.C.
Opinions
A vice president marches by our side
New exhibit explores Pride in the 2020s and asks what’s to come
A photograph can change how we understand ourselves. In Rainbow History Project’s exhibit “Pickets, Protests, and Parades: The History of Gay Pride in Washington,” one pairing does exactly that: 10 Washingtonians in their Sunday best picketing the White House in 1965, and, a few panels later, Vice President Kamala Harris in a “Love is Love” Tshirt marching down Pennsylvania Avenue for Capital Pride in 2021. Between those two moments—anxious, buttonedup defiance on one side of the White House fence and a sitting vice president cheering among rainbow flags on the other—lies the story this exhibit tells.
Last year, we stretched that story along Freedom Plaza for WorldPride 2025, just three blocks from the White House. Over seven weeks, visitors from around the globe walked a timeline that showed how a small, risky White House picket helped ignite six decades of increasingly visible, intersectional Pride in the nation’s capital. They met organizers who insisted that gay history did not start at Stonewall, and that D.C. has been a laboratory for LGBTQ resistance since at least that first 1965 picket.
This June, as part of Dupont Underground’s “Matters of Pride” programming, we’re inviting you back underground to revisit what we showed the world last year—and to look harder at what it asks of us now. The tunnels below Dupont Circle will host the early eras of the exhibition: the White House picket; block parties at Lambda Rising bookstore, the first National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979 that brought more than 100,000 people onto the Mall; and the first D.C. Pride march that began at Howard University, led by BIPOC activists who carried every part of their identities into the streets.
Seen together, these moments make the theme “A Vice President Marches By Our Side” less about a single VIP participant and more about a changing relationship between our movements and the state. In 1965, picketers carefully followed dress codes to appear “employable” enough to be heard at all. By 1979, marchers filled the National Mall with banners that linked sexuality to feminism, racial justice, and antiwar activism. By the 2020s, a vice president could show up at Capital Pride, call for the Equality Act, and speak explicitly about protecting trans youth and communities of color. None of those shifts were guaranteed. All of them were built, step by step, by people who kept organizing whether or not anyone in power joined them.
The reinstall is also a chance to notice details you may have rushed past on a crowded WorldPride weekend: a handlettered sign demanding federal jobs in 1965; a quote from a 1970s organizer about the sheer relief of dancing in public; a photograph of local pioneers like SaVanna Wanzer, the founder of D.C. Trans Pride and Black Trans Pride, whose work helped make today’s Pride more fully trans inclusive even as Black trans folx remain under attack. These are not just artifacts; they are reminders of how much was risked so that we could take Pride for granted at all.
We are reinstalling this exhibit at a moment when very little about the future feels guaranteed. America’s 250th birthday is around the corner, and national debates over whose stories “belong” in the classroom, the public square, or in the archives, are already shaping policy. In that context, going back to the origins of D.C. Pride is more than nostalgia. It is a strategy lesson. The 1960s picketers, the 1979 marchers, the BIPOC activists leaving an intersectionality conference at Howard and marching to the Mall—all of them faced hostile climates, limited resources, and no certainty of success. Yet they showed up anyway, and in doing so, they expanded what was imaginable.
That is why, at the end of the reinstall, the exhibit turns back on you. The final section, “The Next 60 Years of Pride,” remains intentionally unwritten. Instead, you will find a simple question on the wall: “What will you do?” Visitors will have the chance to add their own commitments—large or small—to the story: what they will march for, organize for, or quietly sustain in the years ahead.
A vice president once marched by our side. This month at Dupont Underground, we are asking something both humbler and more radical: after everything we have learned from the past six decades of Pride in Washington, who will you be standing with, and what will you be brave enough to do next?
In conjunction with WorldPride 2025 the Rainbow History Project exhibited “Pickets, Protests, and Parades: The History of Gay Pride in Washington.” More than two years of planning resulted in seven weeks of outdoor education, centering the voices of Pride’s organizers. In the final of the 10 themes, we discuss “A Vice President Marches By Our Side,” about what Pride looked like in the 2020s and asking about Pride in the years to come.
Vincent Slatt volunteers as the senior curator at the Rainbow History Project.
Opinions
Leaving for a barge trip through canals of Burgundy
Nervous about European reactions to Americans given Trump’s war in Iran
As those who read my columns know, I love cruising, the kind you do on water. I have had many different cruise experiences, including sailing through the Galapagos and the Norwegian fjords. This time, I will be doing something a little different and am off on a new adventure. With 18 others, will be on a barge for six days, going from Lyon to Paris, through the canals of Burgundy. Each day will bring a new adventure. We will be embarking in Besancon, and traveling to Beaune, Arc-et-Senans, Dole, Saint-Jean-De-Losne, Seurre, Chalon-Sur-Saone, and then disembarking in Auxerre, en route to Paris. Of the 18 people, four are friends from D.C. and Rehoboth Beach. I look forward to meeting the other travelers.
I leave for Paris on June 8 and made arrangements for a car in Paris to take me to the Gare De Lyon, to board a fast train to Lyon. A quick two-hour trip. In Lyon I will head to the hotel for a welcome dinner, where I will meet our guide and other travelers. This is a Gate 1 adventure booked by my friends at My Lux Cruise. We will be spending two days in Lyon before boarding the MS Daniele, built in 2016. It is modern, with space for both indoor and outdoor dining, a small lounge, the requisite bar, and very simple staterooms. Mine will have two single beds. Can’t forget the hot tub on the bow. I will be writing a blog during my trip, which will be published in the Blade, likely after my return. I will post pictures during the trip on social media. After six days on the barge, we arrive in Paris, where I will spend a couple of days with good friends. One planned excursion is to see the rebuilt Notre Dame.
I will be away from D.C. on June 16, primary day. Since for the first time there will be ranked choice voting, it is possible we won’t know who wins until I get back on June 19. I hope everyone votes, and urge you to vote, as I already have, for Kenyan McDuffie for mayor. His main opponent, Janeese Lewis George, clearly doesn’t understand how D.C. government really works. She is trying to emulate NYC Mayor Mamdani with promises, but hers won’t happen. We don’t have a governor, and state legislature, to help. Our governor is in essence the felon in the White House, and our state legislature is the Congress. They won’t be helping. In addition, George has claimed the endorsement of an antisemitic organization, DSA, and is going to birthday parties for a guy who calls gay men like me ‘fags’ and says they shouldn’t be teaching his children in the public schools. The winners of the Democratic primary races will determine how D.C. moves forward. It really makes a difference.
The world is a different place today than it was just a short 18 months ago, when the felon began his second term. This is the first time I will be out of the country since he began this illegal war with Iran, plunging the world into chaos. I wonder what the reception for an American will be in Europe these days. I remember back when Ronald Reagan was first elected, which was the last time in my travels, before Trump, I felt compelled to apologize for my country. At that time people would actually come up to me and ask, what did America do, and why? Yet as bad as times seemed then, they were nowhere as bad as they are today. The felon in the White House has made life so much worse for people around the world. Europeans have seen him get on his knees to Putin, and screw Ukraine. Now with this illegal, and unnecessary, war in Iran, he is impacting their lives directly. Fuel prices are rising dramatically, and there is a drastic shortage of jet fuel, causing cuts in flights. They see him work hand-in-hand with the war criminal, Netanyahu, in Israel. They see how he simply wants to enrich himself with things like his ‘Board of Peace,’ and in the long run, screw the Palestinian people. It will be interesting to hear how Europeans feel about all this. I look forward to listening to them. All I can say in response is I didn’t vote for Trump and will continue to demonstrate, and write against him, as often as I can.
Putting politics aside, which is hard to do these days, I am excited about this new adventure, and look forward to sharing some of my experiences with you.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
Blade editor inducted into D.C. Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame
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