People Against Prisons Aotearoa

Which side are you on?

The queer community in Aotearoa is at a turning point. It is fundamentally divided. Some of us are happy with the status quo and some of us demand more. On the one side, there are those who are complacent with the astounding rates of incarceration of Māori, with the violence of police officers and with the rape of incarcerated trans women. On the other side, there are those who stand in solidarity with all the queer and trans people who have been left behind by a community more concerned with rainbow-coloured flags at Pride parades than the suffering of their people.

Pride started with a moment of rupture, where our predecessors stepped out of the shadows and rioted against police brutality. At its emergence, Pride was nothing if not political. Those proud rioters demanded an end to violently policed norms of gender and sexuality. They fought in the street against anyone who thought they had the right to tell them not to.

Shamefully, Pride has become something else. It has become a corporatised pinkwashed event where institutions like the police and corrections, which do untold violence to the most vulnerable members of the queer community, can show themselves off as so-called beacons of gay rights. Organisations like ANZ and the University of Auckland, both of which impose unfair pay and conditions on their workers, appropriate pride in a lolly scramble for pink dollars. Theirs is a hollow beacon of progress built from the co-option of our struggle.

There are some comfortable queers who say “things have really changed” and that police and prisons are better now, that the police is not the same institution that used to round up suspected homosexuals in nightclubs and throw them in jail. Unfortunately, the police and prisons are still racist, homophobic, transphobic and misogynistic institutions. According to their own 2015 report, which is likely to under-report rates of violence, New Zealand Police used force against Māori at a rate nearly eight times that of Pākehā. The New Zealand Police also used tasers against Māori and Pasifika at a rate higher than it used tasers against Pākehā.

In the last four months alone, No Pride in Prisons has been in touch with two of our incarcerated trans sisters who have been raped in custody. Corrections hasn’t done a thing to end this sexual violence. It continues to place two people in a single cell overnight, putting those incarcerated people at extraordinary risk of sexual and other violence. In fact, it plans on exposing more prisoners to violence by expanding this practice of double-bunking. Why should we pretend that Corrections is anything but a racist and rape-facilitating arm of the state? We see through the pinkwashing, we acknowledge the suffering these institutions cause - do you?

Queers in Aotearoa have a legacy of insurgency. It is our responsibility to continue this struggle and perpetuate it - to destroy those things which are destroying the lives of the most marginalised members of our community. In Aotearoa, in 2016, the prison system is destructive. Police are destructive. We bear responsibilities, as those who carry on the work begun by those radical queers who came before us and who are with us still, not to be fooled. Violence wrapped in a rainbow flag is still violence. Racism covered in glitter is still racism.

Some say that Pride is just a celebration, that it’s supposed to celebrate how far ‘we’ have come. We ask, who is this ‘we’? When we celebrate, who are we leaving behind? When we invite these institutions to the party, we are siding with the forces who have wanted us in the closet, in a cell, or dead. How ever far we may have come, it has been in spite of police and prisons. These institutions always have been and always will be the enemies of queer liberation and universal liberation.

We look around and see soaring rates of homelessness and unemployment among young trans and queer people. We see daily acts of discrimination and violence against those who do not fit into a colonial gender model. We hear of rape and other violence done to incarcerated queer and non-queer people. This is not a time to celebrate. This is a time to demand action.

Our argument is simple: you can choose to side with corrections and the police or with the marginalised; with the oppressors or the oppressed; with the status quo or with change; with the institutions that hurt people or with the people they are hurting. The Auckland Pride Board has chosen its side, so what about you?

Written by T Lamusse, S Vella and E Rākete