LGBTQ activists are honing in on U.S. queer and trans organizations for their silence as Israeli militant attacks continue to target Gaza.

A coalition of activists are demanding that major American LGBTQ organizations break their silence on Israeli actions in Gaza, arguing that LGBTQ liberation and Palestinian liberation are inseparable, as both fight for self-determination and dismantling systems of oppression. The callout targets influential groups like GLAAD and HRC, claiming their deafening silence is complicity.

The callout was circulated on Saturday through a collaborative Instagram post by Queer Muslims 4 Palestine andRand, a queer Palestinian TikToker who famously goes by @fakegyllenhalal.

“We all aim for self-determination, dignity and the dismantling of all systems of oppression,” they wrote in the post. “Our pride can only thrive through genuine liberation for all, fostering a world where everyone can live freely and authentically.”

Other nonprofit giants under fire for not having spoken up in support of Palestine or condemning Israel’s actions includeGay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Parents, Family & Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) and The Trevor Project. Reckon has reached out to all five for a comment on the letter, in which none have responded by the time of publication.

Yaffa A.S., executive director of Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD)—one of the queer Muslim organizations that has also been publicly critical of the silence from the nonprofit giants, says that the response from individuals engaging with the callout post has been “really, really positive.”

“[The post] has been a space for individuals’ [concerns and values] to really feel validated,” said Yaffa, who is queer, trans and Palestinian.

Since Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7 that killed 1,400 people in Israel, the Israeli military’s violent retaliation has now killed over 22,000 Palestinians at the time of publication—a majority of whom are women and children.

On Dec. 29, an Instagram page named Queers for Liberation also spearheaded a petition on Change.org to call for national LGBTQ organizations to demand for a ceasefire in Gaza. At the time of publication, the campaign has over 7,200 out of its goal of 7,500 signatures. Queers for Liberation’s Instagram page claims that “there is also no pride in settler-colonialism.”

Now, nearly 90 days of bombings and raids in Gaza and the West Bank, queer, trans and nonbinary people in the U.S. are pushing for the organizations that advocate for their communities to speak out.

LGBTQ organizations have a track record of speaking out on international relations during the Russian invasion on Ukraine in March of 2022. On Mar. 7 of that year, GLAAD released a story on ways to help queer, trans and nonbinary Ukrainians—as far as sharing links to fundraisers. Later, on Mar. 24, HRC published a resource page breaking down Ukraine’s situation, why people should care and links to actionable pages as well.

What, then, is so different this time around?

Rand took it to her TikTok page where she has nearly 90,000 followers and has accrued over 9.4 million likes across all her videos to speculate on why LGBTQ organizations might be silent. In a video she posted on Saturday, she points out that one of HRC’s corporate sponsors is Northrop Grumman, a worldwide military company that manufactures weapons and missiles that are sent to Israel on behalf of American tax dollars, given that they themselves are funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.

“How can [HRC] be an organization that claims to represent and serve the LGBTQ+ people while it is accepting weapon funding and not standing up for the rights and freedom of not just LGBTQ+ Palestinians, but all Palestinians?” Rand says in the video. “We’re smarter than that, and we don’t accept this.”

Even outside of LGBTQ-centered demonstrations, several groups have gathered outside of Northrop Grumman’s offices in San Diego, Calif., protesting the company’s role in supplying Israel with weapons that are used against Palestinians.

“[HRC is] receiving money from individuals who are actively making money off of these different genocides,” says Yaffa A.S., the executive director of Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD), one of the queer Muslim organizations that has also been publicly critical of the silence from the nonprofit giants. Yaffa, who is queer, trans and Palestinian, expresses a minor concern over the callout, explaining that critiquing mainstream LGBTQ organizations from within the community can have consequences.

“There’s always a hesitancy to engage with a culture of critique [especially towards] the larger LGBTQ community, because that’s where the resources are, that’s where the money is,” she said. “That’s what potentially sets the agenda for all the queer and trans work that happens across this country.”

Aside from a permanent ceasefire and an end to Northrop Grumman funding HRC, for Yaffa, “it would be wonderful for [mainstream LGBTQ organizations] to do a better job in terms of making sure that their services are actually able to be what global majority queer trans people need them to be.”

Pinkwashing, the practice of presenting Israel as an LGBTQ-friendly haven to distract from its policies towards Palestinians, plays a complex role in the callout of major U.S. LGBTQ organizations.

Pinkwashing, according to Sa’ed Atshan—an associate professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology at Swarthmore College and author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique—is “a form of propaganda marshaled by supporters of the right-wing Israeli state to draw attention to the state’s purported advanced LGBTQ rights record” to detract from its history of violence towards Palestinians, he writes in an op-ed at Truthout last November.

The flip side of the coin of pinkwashing is that it implies Palestine is therefore anti-LGBTQ—a racist tactic used against Muslims. In an interview with them—also from last November—Atshan says that “by pathologizing Palestinians as uniquely bigoted on a collective level, it makes it easier to stigmatize them and to undermine empathy with Palestinians who face devastating levels of death and destruction.”

Sarah Schulman, a Jewish writer, historian and activist most well-known for her role in the gay rights movement with ACT UP in the late 1980s to 1990s is not surprised by the recent callout posts. In her extensive history with activism, she was once arrested when ACT UP occupied Grand Central Station protesting the First Gulf War, a protest Jewish Voice for Peace—who she now serves on the board as an advisor—was heavily involved in as well.

She tells Reckon of The Laura Flanders Show, a cable show in which she and Omar Barghouti, who is the straight Palestinian leader of one of the boycott movements in Palestine, went on together in 2011. Schulman recalls Barghouti saying that his vision of Palestine calls for sexual and gender rights for women and for queer people.

“This dialogue and conversation [between LGBTQ activists and Palestinian activists] have been going on for a long time,” she said.

Schulman herself helped popularize Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah’s term “pinkwashing” through her op-ed at The New York Times from 2011. That same year, she put on a major U.S. tour and brought along queer Palestinian leaders from organizations like Aswat, Al Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions to introduce them to the American gay movement.

Schulman tells Reckon that the gay movement was established because no other movement wanted to include them—be it the communist party, the civil rights movement or the feminist movements—”most of which have not yet been historicized,” she said. For that reason, an autonomous gay and lesbian movement was formed. Now, openly LGBTQ people are integrated into progressive movements in the country, which for Schulman can be a double-edged sword.

“Radical queer politics now lives inside of the progressive movement, which is where it should be,” she explains. “But there remains this one rarefied arena of ‘gay life,’ which is these highly funded, bureaucratic, corporate-modeled organizations like the ones to whom this letter is addressed; nobody knows who they are, nobody knows what they do, [nobody] knows what they do with their funds.”

The great irony for Schulman, then, is the mere fact that “for as long as I’ve been involved, the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States has heavily had queer visibility,” she said, explaining how a great queer writer Jean Genet in the 1960s met with Palestinian president Yassar Arafat in Palestine and had his support welcomed by the people. “So these types of corporate single-focus organizations have been out of the loop for a very long time.”

Following the open letter, community members carry on the load to push mainstream LGBTQ organizations to act up.

Carolyn Collado, a nonbinary New Yorker and founder of substance recovery support group called Recovery For the Revolution, took it to their TikTok account last week to encourage people to “flood the comments of [LGBTQ] organizations’ social media pages, ask them ‘what’s up?’ and call for solidarity with a permanent ceasefire.” They reposted their TikTok video onto their Instagram page of over 11,000 followers. A commenter under the username @mike.his.story, based in Detroit, Mich. shared why even their local LGBTQ organization has not spoken up for Palestine.

“Their response [was]: not to upset their major donors,” he wrote.

On Rand and Queer Muslims 4 Palestine’s Instagram post from Saturday, a slew of commenters echo their sentiment, including user @heart.tree.poet who left a message: “Pride was a revolution […] There is no wellness in silencing genocide. There is no pride in genocide.”