World Premiere!

Free! No tickets required

Sunday May 3, 7:30 pm

Eaton Lecture Theatre RCC 204

Rogers Communication Centre

80 Gould Street, Toronto

Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!

Dean Spade, 2015, 60 min., USA

"Pinkwashing" is a term activists use when countries engaged in human rights violations try to improve their public image by promoting themselves as "gay friendly." Israel is the country most notorious for this strategy, initiated as part of a rebranding campaign in 2005. In 2012, queer Palestine solidarity activists in the Pacific Northwestern region of the US exposed Rainbow Generations, an Israeli Consulate-funded propaganda tour of Israeli gay and lesbian activists. As a result, the centerpiece event hosted by the City of Seattle's LGBT Commission and other parts of the program were cancelled. A significant backlash ensued involving the Seattle City Council and Seattle's leading LGBT and HIV/AIDS organizations. Pinkwashing Exposed explores how pinkwashing works and what local activists are doing to fight back.

Selma Al-Aswad is a Palestinian-American activist who focuses on the interconnected struggles for queer liberation and that of Palestine, while exploring the role of queer complicity in Israeli apartheid. Based in Seattle, she co-founded the local chapter of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in 2013 and is co-director and producer of the short film Put a Rainbow on It.

Dean Spade is a professor, writer and activist. In 2002, he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project SRLP, a collective that provides free legal advice to trans and gender non-conforming people and works to build trans resistance rooted in racial and economic justice. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Voices, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law.

Co-sponsored by: The Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought, Ryerson University, Toronto Palestine Film Festival