Queers Go on Trial for Protesting Gaza Genocide; and Queer Writers' Resistance to Trump

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Published: 20 May 2025

Out-FM aired on Tues., May 20, 2025

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Queers Face Kentucky Trial for Protesting Corporate Aid to Gaza Genocide

On February 2, 2024, in Louisville, KY, 14 activists were arrested for blocking the offices of munitions manufacturers Raytheon/RTX and BAE Systems due to their complicity in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The five remaining defendants -- three of them queer -- are taking the case to trial next month to challenge the criminalization of protest. They want to lift up the idea that "it is our responsibility to take action when our government is complicit in committing war crimes and genocide." Out-FM's Bob Lederer speaks with one of the protesters, Sonja Wilde-de Vries. This is part of Out-FM's ongoing "Queerly Defiant" series.

 

Sonja is a queer grassroots organizer, writer and filmmaker who grew up in a Dutch family that had resisted Nazi occupation. She co-founded Queers for Cuba in 1991 and made her first documentary film "Gay Cuba" in collaboration with a Cuban NGO, and "Out: The Making of a Revolutionary," about the life of lesbian political prisoner Laura Whitehorn. Wilde now lives in Kentucky where she is a public school educator, an organizer with Louisville Showing Up for Racial Justice, and a veteran of several direct actions that led to her arrest, including shutting down a bridge to protest the police murder of Black resident Brianna Taylor.

 

More information:

Instagram page on the Raytheon 5 case from Louisville Coalition for a Ceasefire, working for a permanent ceasefire, an end to military aid to Israel, and a free Palestine  and Lebanon.

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From Amnesty INTL. USA: TAKE ACTION FOR HUMAN RIGHTS -URGENT: RELEASE MAHMOUD KHALIL! Mahmoud is the Columbia grad student kidnapped and held since March in a Louisiana detention center by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

 

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Queer Writers' Resistance to Trump

Out-FM's John Riley attended and recorded several panels from this year’s Rainbow Book Fair. The Fair's theme, “Queer Resistance!,” provided an opportunity to think about how to deal with and fight back against the ongoing attacks on queer and especially trans and gender non-conforming people. Drawing on the knowledge of activists of different generations and struggles, this panel looked back on successful strategies for resistance and imagined how we build power for the future.

Samiya Bashir is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, and experienced from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome, and across the United States. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Her fourth collection, I Hope this Helps, is forthcoming soon from Nightboat Books.

Ariel Friedlander is a femme dyke artist living in Brooklyn, New York. As a community organizer, she has worked within ACT UP/NY, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Gender Liberation Movement to build intersectional movements through mass mobilization and arts engagement. She is also an arts educator, drag queen, and lover of the color pink. 

Panel moderator Lori Perkins has been a newspaper editor, literary agent, book editor, professor and author for four decades. She considers herself a “word-slinger” because words are the ammunition that we all have.  She encourages you all to use your power and fight the good fight. Perkins founded the L. Perkins Literary Agency in 1988, which she still runs, and Riverdale Avenue Books, an award-winning indie publisher 13 years ago.  She is also the author of 30 books (both fiction and nonfiction), including the just published THE BOOK OF EVERYDAY RESISTANCE, which is free to download.

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Queers Step Up for Palestine Solidarity; Katherine Franke on Columbia's Unethical Lawyers

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Published: 12 May 2025

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Out-FM aired on May 13, 2025 on WBAI / NY 

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Top - Kate Raphael at 2024 protest in Nablus, Occupied West Bank;

Bottom - Much earlier photo of Kate, Seattle-based queer novelist, journalist, anarcha-feminist & activist

Queers Step Up for Palestine Solidarity

Seattle Pride Issues Solidarity Statement with Palestine

Kate Raphael is a novelist, journalist, anarchafeminist and queer activist. She worked with the International Solidarity Movement in 2024 to help mobilize ​u.s. ​solidarity volunteers to Palestine. She spent six weeks in the West Bank during November and December 2024, after earlier solidarity trips twenty years ago. Kate was a cofounder of the San Francisco-based Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT). Her published work includes the two mysteries set in Palestine, Murder Under the Bridge and the Lambda-nominated Murder Under the Fig Tree, as well as The Midwife’s In Town, a story of underground abortion. She is a producer and host on Women’s Magazine and the Sunday Show at WBAI’s sibling Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley, California.

"There is no pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.” 
          - Marsha P Johnson, a mother of the trans and queer liberation movement

Resources:

Pride Victories in Raleigh and Seattle - Kate's 3/23/25 article in UltraViolet,the newsletter of LAGAI – Queer Insurrection

More on recent Seattle Divestment victories here. 

Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism! (QUIT)
QUIT's Instagram page

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Katherine Franke on Columbia's Unethical Lawyers

Former Columbia University School of Law professor Katherine Franke, an out lesbian, offers a new commentary on the way that universities have received very bad advice from their General Counsels about how to handle students' Palestine solidarity protests and ICE surveillance of students. She breaks down why and calls out some of the worst lawyers who have advised Columbia.

Resource: ACLU's Open Letter to University General Counsels on ICE's retaliatory crackdown against noncitizen students for their First Amendment-protected speech and advocacy.

Katherine is the founding Director of the School’s Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, an executive committee member of the Center for Palestine Studies and a board member of Palestine Legal. In January 2024, Professor Franke appeared on the Democracy Now! program to discuss an attack on Columbia’s campus targeting pro-Palestinian student activists with a foul-smelling liquid that led to multiple hospitalizations. Based on that appearance, two Columbia professors filed a complaint against her claiming she had created a hostile environment for Israelis at Columbia students; she also became a target by name for Republican lawmakers in Congress, including NY Representative Elise Stefanik. When Columbia’s then-president Minouche Shafik was called to testify in Congress last April about campus protests, Stefanik grilled Shafik about Prof. Franke and two other Columbia faculty members - all three are queer. In January of this year, Prof. Franke was effectively terminated from Columbia.

For context: The first Columbia attorney who Katherine discusses, Roberta Kaplan, is an out lesbian who is a former board chair of Gay Men's Health Crisis. According to the New York Times last year, "Ms. Kaplan and her wife are deeply connected to the Democratic Party and she has been a heroic figure to many liberal activists. In addition to litigating the Supreme Court case that laid the groundwork for the national legalization of gay marriage, she became a leader of the #MeToo movement. Most recently, she represented the writer E. Jean Carroll when she sued Mr. Trump for defamation, resulting in a landmark $83 million verdict against him."

Also, in 2021 Roberta Kaplan was forced to resign as co-chair of the anti-sexual-abuse Times Up! organization after a petition from 151 survivors noting that NY Attorney General Tish James found that Kaplan had weaponized her knowledge of survivors' experiences to help Gov. Andrea Cuomo retaliate against women who spoke out about his abuse of them.

How interesting that Katherine Franke also mentioned that another Columbia attorney, Theresa Trzaskoma -- the one who led the persecution of Katherine herself -- is now representing Andrew Cuomo in suing the women who exposed his sexual harassment of them.

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