You Cannot Eliminate LGBTI+ People, You Cannot Suppress Their Struggle!
Long Live Our Pride Resistance!
We are welcoming Pride Week at a time when the Turkish ruling classes and their representative AKP government are raising racism, sexism, patriarchy, heterosexism, homo/trans/bi-phobia to the extreme.
The AKP-MHP government, like its predecessors and those who play the role of bourgeois “opposition” against them today, but more heavily and intensely than them, makes politics by putting Kurdish, Alevi, refugee, women and LGBTI+ hostility in the centre. Because it sees this policy as the most “useful” way to prevent the anger of the working class and labouring masses against hunger, poverty, worries about the future, oppression and oppression from flowing into “other routes” and to divide the people. The government, which declares Kurds as terrorists, Alevis as irreligious, refugees as perpetrators of all crimes, women who defend their rights as sluts, LGBTI+s as perverts and enemies of the family, wants to create a great horror with its media and social media army and to condemn us to be slaves of this horror. Ultimately, when the survival of the ruling classes is at issue, all labouring masses of people are divided into a thousand pieces and managed through policies of hostility.
This process took place before and after the parliamentary-presidential elections we left behind. AKP and its alliances resorted to all kinds of lies, slander, false promises, etc. in order not to lose their power, but it built its most functional discourse on LGBTI+ hostility. Because there was no “opposition” segment that would stand in front of this hatred. So much so that even revolutionary and democratic sections did not take a consistent and clear stand against this hate discourse. Thus, oppressed sexual orientations were turned into the sauce of election fights. For the sake of not confronting homophobia in society, they became a part of LGBTI+ hostility.
54 years ago, on 28 June 1969, a transgender activist threw a bottle at the police who raided the Stonewall Inn in New York State, USA, not only at the police, who routinely subjected them to violence and harassment, but also at homophobia, transphobia & biphobia in all its forms. And the target was hit at the bull’s eye! The sound of the rebellion that started after that bottle was thrown and that would last for days became the signal flare of Pride Week and the actions of today.
Today, especially in many imperialist/capitalist countries, although events and marches such as rainbow-coloured billboards of multinational companies are held, Pride Week and March are still one of the most important areas for LGBTI+s to obtain rights and more importantly, to rebel and resist against the heterosexual patriarchal system. In order for this field of resistance to reach a world of classless, exploitation-free, unlimited equality and the goal of real freedom and liberation, we call on all oppressed LGBTI+s, who are tried to be condemned to invisibility, whose very existence is criminalised, who are the targets of hate crimes/murders, to struggle in the ranks of communism.
All the chains that bind us to the system are also interconnected, none of us will be liberated unless we shatter these chains!
TKP-ML Communist Women’s Union
June 2023
TKP-ML KKB: LGBTİ+ları Yok Edemezsiniz, Mücadelesini Bastıramazsınız! Yaşasın Onur Direnişimiz!
