FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 2, 2024
ACT UP NY PROTESTS FIRE ISLAND’S TRAILBLAZERS PARK PRIDE MEMORIAL TO HONOR ICON CECILIA GENTILI AND SHOW SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE While Fire Island chose to honor Zionist Rep. Ritchie Torres, we replaced his image with a flag for Cecilia and hung a banner for Gaza.
Fire Island Pines, New York June 2, 2024 – In the early hours of Sunday morning, June 2nd, members of ACT UP NY went to Fire Island’s Trailblazers Park, a place where Queer and Trans heroes are meant to be honored, and raised two flags: one for Cecilia Gentili, a heroic activist that the community tragically lost in February, and another for Queer Palestinians. To give Cecilia a rightful space, we took down a flag designed for Rep. Ritchie Torres that had been unveiled the day before, and put her image up in his place.
We mounted these two flags to rehabilitate the integrity of Trailblazers Park. We protest the Fire Island Pines Property Owners’ Association (FIPPOA) President Henry Robin’s decision to honor Rep. Torres – who is anything but a trailblazer – instead of Cecilia Gentili, despite widespread support for Cecilia on the FIPPOA board and in the broader community. And while ACT UP NY was not contacted about being honored at this ceremony, we have decided to take part, putting up our own flag to honor Queer Palestinians. By leaving the old flag up, we choose to honor our history as an organization, but we reject the notion that our movement and the AIDS crisis are relegated to the past. We hung a watermelon SILENCE EQUALS DEATH banner in front, the flag we march under today.
Cecilia Gentili helped reimagine what trans affirming healthcare could look like throughout her lifetime. While leading policy at GMHC, she advocated for those living with HIV and championed new policies such as the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA). She co-founded DecrimNY and led efforts in the repeal of the “Walking While Trans Ban.” She was also one of many arrested during the October 2023 Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) protest at Grand Central Terminal calling for a permanent and lasting ceasefire in Gaza. Although this is our first Pride without Cecilia, her commitment to justice and community will live on and we dedicate this action to her lasting legacy.
“As a lifelong artist and advocate, Cecilia was proud to continually join forces with ACT UP NY in her organizing, and she fought for a free Palestine right up until her passing,” said her daughter Rio Sofia. “Her radical love and ethical framework is in many ways the opposite of Ritchie’s.”
“As the unequivocal matriarch of last year’s inaugural Doll Invasion, her legacy belongs on the island and will continue to live on,” Sofia said.
“Pride will be a hard one for so many of us this year, as many of us are still envisioning a world without our revolutionary sister,” said Cecilia’s sister, LaLa Zannell. “Let us never forget that this month will always be about the historical time when our ancestors put their body on the line for all of us. As Cecilia rests with all those ancestor’s now, we raise this flag to honor that history and ask that her spirit live on within all of us and the tools she gave us.”
“We are committed to her life’s work and we will leave no oppressed person behind,” Zannell said. “We will always hold those who want to keep feeding the systems of oppressive power, over the people, accountable.”
ACT UP NY stands with Bronx residents who have been victimized by police violence and betrayed by Rep. Torres cutting a backroom deal with the NYPD after the Black Lives Matter protests to weaken police oversight while he was a member of City Council. Allowing the NYPD to rewrite parts of the “The Right to Know Act” turned a bill meant to strengthen protections against surveillance and brutality by law enforcement into legislation that targets the Black and Brown communities he has claimed to represent and exempts officers from showing their ID in a vast majority of encounters. The NYPD has a long history of targeting the LGBTQ+ community, and now thanks to Torres, they are able to abuse their power unchecked. When his constituents were trying to recover from historic levels of police brutality, Rep. Torres said that the “defund police movement is dead in New York City, and good riddance,” showing his clear disdain for the widespread demand by millions of Americans for budget reforms that would prioritize people’s needs over policing marginalized communities.
Rep. Torres represents one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, but instead of focusing on meeting the needs and concerns of the Bronx, Rep. Torres spends most of his time in Washington, DC soliciting lobbyists and sending US tax dollars to support the catastrophic genocide in Gaza. Rep. Torres has been described as Israel’s “number one” supporter in Congress, and has helped pass $17 billion dollars in military aid this year alone to bankroll Israel’s defense industry – including $4.5 billion for advanced weapons systems – which would be enough to pay every resident of Rep. Torres’ congressional district over $19,000 each.
Rep. Torres has made a well-funded political career out of spurning progressives and dividing social movements, and this runs completely contrary to the values embodied in Trailblazers Park, which was birthed after the tragic murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and too many others. Rep. Torres pushes the smear that progressives support terrorism, in an eerie reenactment of War on Terror hysteria. Rep. Torres said that “human stupidity has no limits” because “nothing is more inexplicable to me than the organization Queers for Palestine,” pushing the racist myth that Palestinians and Queer people are enemies. ACT UP NY is continuing to fight for a permanent and lasting ceasefire to end the horror, carnage, and famine Israel is inflicting on the people of Gaza, and it is gross to honor such a person next to LGBTQ+ pioneers.
ACT UP NY is disappointed in FIPPOA for choosing to invoke the name of our organization without consulting or informing us. By not contacting us, they have confined our organization’s work to the past, using our name and image as a shorthand for Queer activism without sharing any of the radical values of present-day activists. We refuse to be memorialized, as the AIDS crisis is still very much in the present. ACT UP still meets every Monday night at 7PM in the historic LGBT Center in Manhattan. This flag is a dual call to action for our “FUND HEALTHCARE NOT WARFARE” movement as the US sends billions in aid to Israel while HIV healthcare is being actively defunded in our city by the millions.
We urge the Fire Island Pines Property Owners’ Association and all Queer community leaders of Fire Island to cut all ties with Rep. Ritchie Torres – who is running for re-election this year and looking for any honor to help bolster his image. Instead of continuing to honor Rep. Torres, we demand FIPPOA to honor Cecilia Gentili, a true trailblazer and mother of our movement. We urge the custodians of the park to preserve it as a non-partisan and sacred site for honoring actual Queer heroes and the principles of Queer liberation. We urge the historic community of Fire Island Pines to stand with Palestinians, straight and Queer, and defend their human rights, now, in their most trying hour.
Photos and Video of ACT UP members replacing flags by Alexa Wilkinson: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10DV8m7rYqsGpZUMbSgAs6mjloZ0U1ZM3?usp=drive_link
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About ACT UP
Founded in 1987, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis. ACT UP currently meets every Monday night at 7PM ET via Zoom. Notes: you will be asked to contribute your first & last name and email address to access online meetings, and KN-95 masks are required for ACT UP NY in person meetings/actions/gatherings. All individuals are welcome!
I used to be proud of Act Up. In the ‘80s I paid for AIDS medication for 2 people.
How did it come to ripping down flags and silencing opinion. Siding with Hamas, good luck living your life with that.
Very sad to have feelings and opinions patrolled on what used to be a loving, safe space.
It’s so much easier to scream than to do,
Sadly
D
You are so incredibly out of touch with this I don’t even know where to begin. Dishonoring one member of the LGBTQ+ community — because he’s not in lockstep with your warped groupthink regarding a complex, nuanced issue — to favor another whose viewpoint you CLAIM to know and to speak for (how utterly f-ing presumptuous of you) tells me all I need to know about your disingenuousness and hypocrisy. (Not to mention your antisemitism…. no, it’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, but that’s not really what you’re doing here, is it?)
I supported ACT UP in the late 80’s/early 90’s when you were at the forefront of the fight for marginalized communities suffering from AIDS. Now you’re just a mainstream, virtue-signaling sellout garbage organization, and I will never donate another cent of my money.
Poor Larry Kramer. He must be spinning in his grave.
yeah because supporting palestine is so mainstream, and there’s so much money backing the cause. just think about all those pro-palestine lobbying groups like APPAC and CUFP, and all those people who haven’t been fired or doxxed for supporting palestine, and all those protestors who weren’t beaten up or arrested for supporting palestine
i’m being sarcastic – just making it completely clear since you don’t seem to know how to read. “She [Gentili] was also one of many arrested during the October 2023 Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) protest at Grand Central Terminal calling for a permanent and lasting ceasefire in Gaza.” but yeah how dare they “claim” to know what she believed
don’t let the door hit you on the way out, we don’t need brainwashed genocide supporters in the community