By Admin on March 15, 2011 in Islamophobia, London, Pride

In the last two and a half years, Hackney and Shoreditch, two gentrifying areas in the traditionally working-class and immigrant East End of London, have been the target of a moral panic over Muslim and South Asian youth who, we are told, are always on the look out for the next gay person to attack. As so often, several factors came together to produce this panic:

• A particularly brutal attack on a white student which, unlike many acts of violence against sexually and gender non-conforming people, including those who are Muslim, racialised or working-class, became newsworthy as a result of how the racial and class backgrounds of attacked and attacker were pitted against each other. While the former emerged as a victim worthy of protection, the other was immediately racialised as Muslim and, therefore, prone to an unthinking, unfeeling violence and hate.
• A gay and wider media that had long begun to turn sexual oppression from a straight problem into a Muslim problem. A broadened equalities remit for the council and the police who, in the wake of new hate crimes legislation, are stepping up their ‘partnership’ and ‘community engagement’ with LGBT groups, individuals, and businesses. The George and Dragon, a Shoreditch gay bar, has been especially vocal in encouraging LGBT people living or partying in the area to work closely with the police and report any homophobia and transphobia, especially it seems where the ‘phobic’ person is non-white or migrant.

With the recent appearance of religious-looking homophobic stickers in the area, the panic has again been fuelled, ushering in another round of racist media reports and local actions. The most visible and offensive of these is the East End Pride march planned for 2 April, which the gay press are promoting through headlines such as ‘London residents defy phobic Islamist message by planning East End Pride’. The organisers are calling on gay people to march through the area with pink Union Jacks and rainbow flags, to the dress-up theme ‘Pearly Kings and Queens’, and ‘clearly announce that there is a strong and active homosexual presence in the east end of London.

In addition to this show of gay nationalism, nativism and nostalgia, the organising committee are rumoured to have close personal links with the far-right English Defence League, who have called for a march in Blackburn in the North of England on the same day. There are also suggestions, even in official circles, that the stickers, which were immediately attributed to the usual suspects (‘Islamist extremists’), were themselves planted by the EDL- though an ‘Asian’ perpetrator was found just in time to tip the debate back to its rightful place. This would enable the EDL, who have begun to let gay people into their ranks, to march through Tower Hamlets, after already marching on Luton and other Muslim areas, which were left alone to fend off the racists.

Despite negotiations with the local council by a few determined individuals, the Pride march will likely go ahead. The far right have thus been given the pink light to a neighbourhood which has already been deeply traumatised. Besides successive fascist and neo-fascist attempts to march through the East End, the area has long been a hub of police racism, and has one of the highest rates of stop and search. Then there is the staggering number of racist attacks, which according to police statistics are almost five times as high as the number of homophobic hate crimes. Located in the poorest borough in Britain, whose neglect and systematic impoverishment is promising to assume new extremes under the Cameron anti-welfare regime, the area has more recently become a site of aggressive gentrification.

Radicalised and working-class people long confined in the area are now subject to increasingly unabashed attempts to drive them out through brutal benefit cuts compounded by rising rents. Shoreditch, home to the George and Dragon, and set to become the social centre of the Olympics 2012, is a prime example. The current mobilisations in East London thus also serve to queer a neoliberal revanchist agenda under the flags of diversity and vitality, where poor people become waste to be cleared for the arrival of big capital and investment.

Yet the story does not begin or end in East London. It is part of a globalising Islamophobia script that is rapidly traded across a new Europe which, as we were recently reminded by Cameron’s multiculturalism speech in Germany, is coming together against a shared ‘Muslim’ Other across starkly different local and national histories of colonialism, slavery, genocide, and post-war migration. New ‘traditions’ of gay-friendliness, measured through proliferating instruments such as citizenship tests, hate crime statistics and psychological attitudinal tests, are key to this fantasy of a white Europe, where racism, both in its respectable faces of criminalisation, militarism, economic disentitlement and border control, and in its neo-fascist face of far-right marches, is an increasingly transnational phenomenon.

LGBT rights marches, too, are travelling across European borders. Besides East London, which last summer saw its first queer ‘march on Hackney’, marches have been organised in several inner-city migrant neighbourhoods across West Europe, including in Oslo, Berlin and Brussels – all entirely new sites for queer marching. Not all of these marches are right-wing, some in fact identify as anti-racist. They come from various political places, including conservative and left-wing, gay identitarian, radical queer, and genderqueer. Clearly, these mobilisations cannot be equated and reduced to a far-right agenda. What nevertheless unites them is their shared setting, in an inner city which is cast as Muslim, recognised through a growing archive of deficiency (including hate, sexism, homophobia and criminality), and thereby prepared for intervention and control.

What further unites these settings is that the first gentrifiers often include gay, queer and trans people with race and class privileges, who in some contexts of urban planning are greeted, in settler colonial manner, as ‘pioneers’ who will ‘break in’ these hitherto ‘ungentrifiable’ areas. In the East London homophobia debate, too, gay, queer and trans people with race and class privileges, including those who recently arrived from other parts of Europe, North America, and all over the Global North, are addressed as ‘residents’ whose interests must be protected by the police and the wider community. While (some) gay, queer and trans people are, for the first time, treated as colourful symbols of life, love and revitalisation, those who have been there much longer, and who have few other places to go, become recast as sources of death whose lives do not matter, and who are ultimately disposable.

As transnational activists and intellectuals, we call on gay, queer and trans people with race and class privileges, which also include some of us, to refuse our/their role in politically correcting racist agendas of policing and gentrification. To think about what our/their presence means for those who have been there, often longer, sometimes for generations, including radicalised and working-class families who cannot afford rents which rise with the arrival of young upwardly mobile people. To think about what it means to move into an area marked for population exchange, and paint it as a dangerous territory of terror and insecurity which requires greater policing.

We support the Safra Project in asking how these mobilisations will impact queer and trans people from Muslim and other criminalised communities, who beyond periodical references to ‘my LGBT Muslim friends’ have been completely sidelined: What are the effects of revanchist gentrification on racialised and working-class people, including and especially those whose gender and sexual expressions invite police harassment rather than protection, and who need affordable housing in areas that are both sexually and racially diverse? What would an anti-violence activism look like that does not lend force to these deadly processes, but fights violence in its many faces, interpersonal and institutional, spectacular and banal, including where ‘the perpetrator’ is the market or the state? If you are going to claim an area as ‘your neighbourhood’, how can you, at the very least, start contributing to it, rather than taking away from it?

You can become a signatory by writing to info@decolonizequeer.org

1. UK Commentators

2. East London Homophobia Facebook Group, [Last accessed 15/3/2011]

3. Pink Paper [8/3/2011]

4. See the incisive analysis of the Bent Bars Collective

The East London Gay Pride website has been changed since the beginning of the critical debate

5. Latte Labour “East End Gay Pride Update, Latte Labour “There’s More”, Imaan Press Release – 15/3/2011

6. Pink News “ Stickers Declare Gay Free Zone in East London”

7. Guardian “To be gay and racist is no anomaly”

8. Facebook – “An open letter to East End Gay Pride by Onni

9. In Tower Hamlets, this is particularly the case for Asians: Guardian “Reducing stop-and-search paperwork undermines fairness”

10. Metropolitan Police Crime Figures

11. Guardian “Councils plan for exodus of poor families from London”

12. Hate crimes and other racialised homophobia statistics are often accused of being manipulated and politically motivated. For example: “Islamophobia Watch” Queer

13. Tongson, Karen (2007), ‘The Light That Never Goes Out,’ in George E. Haggerty, Molly McGarry (eds), A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, Oxford: Blackwell

14. Please see and support Safra statement