We answer the calls of queer and trans Palestinians and SHOW SOLIDARITY FOR PALESTINE. Our strategic direct actions and presence will demonstrate the queer community’s firm stance in support of Palestine and center the queer and trans Arab/SWANA experience as one that is critical to our liberation.

Particularly for Arab and SWANA queers. As we commit to sustaining the work of liberation, we will offer ways to help us endure, grieve, revive, and continue our struggle. We will uplift each other with the queer tools and queer tactics we have, imagining and building the world we want to live in. Art, meditation, somatic and herbal remedies, food, song, poetry, dance: all the ways we will pour energy into each other. We will offer space for those who wish to have their queerness and solidarity more visible, meeting fear with love and connection. We will offer a space for like-hearted folks to find each other, to find other SWANA queers to share knowledge, skills, and stories. We will use care as our main tactic in building this community.

We will not allow genocide to happen in our name. A settler colonial genocidal state cannot offer safety or protection for anyone, let alone the queer/trans community. We understand that our collective liberation as queers is tied to the liberation of Palestine and vice versa.

We’re calling on National LGBTQ+ organizations and politicians who have so far remained silent in the face of genocide. We demand that they immediately boycott, divest and sanction the systems and entities that enable genocide. If these organizations and figureheads cannot heed the call of liberation, we must do it for ourselves.

Specifically, we demand that they:

- Publicly denounce the use of pinkwashing to justify the occupation and genocide of Palestinians; 

- Immediately BOYCOTT, DIVEST, AND SANCTION the systems and entities that enable the genocide, including severing ties with weapon manufacturers and donors profiteering off genocide; 

- Call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, to lift the siege and for all food, clean water, supplies, and medical support be allowed into Gaza; 

- Publicly denounce the increased surveillance the Israeli Occupation Forces use against Palestinian queers; 

- Call for the release of all political prisoners being held by the Israeli occupation; 

- Use their platforms to call for an end to all imperialism and occupation, from the river to the sea, from Turtle Island to Palestine. 

We invite y’all to show up and take action in your respective cities. In DC, we are in the belly of the beast and hold a unique position to highlight the human heart of this city rooted in queerness, Blackness, activism, punk, and gogo in defiance of an imperialist government. We call upon DC’s own legacy of queer and trans resistance to show up for Palestinians, and we are building the blueprint for other cities to do the same.