Originally published on Whole Community News.
Kamryn Stringfield, National Chair of the Peoples LGBT+ United Society (PLUS), was interviewed prior to the Rally Against Pinkwashing which PLUS organized in Eugene Oregon on June 15, 2024.
“Pinkwashing” refers to a propaganda tactic where imperialist countries use the claimed advancement of LGBT+ rights as a justification for imperialism.
The audio recording is given below, as well as a transcription of the interview.
Kamryn Stringfield: One of the participants in Stonewall, Marsha P. Johnson, recognized, ‘You don’t get your rights until everybody has their rights.’ And so we firmly believe that both Palestinian liberation and LGBT+ liberation—as well as Black liberation, women’s liberation—they all exist within the liberation of imperialism.
Todd Boyle: Today we’re lucky to be attended by Kamryn Stringfield. And the reason I wanted to talk to you is because the pinkwashing demonstration is going to be Saturday from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Kamryn Stringfield: Yeah. So I’ll just go ahead and briefly I’ll introduce myself. Kamryn Stringfield, she, her pronouns. I live here in Eugene. I moved here in 2022 from Coos Bay and I moved to Oregon from Ohio in 2017. Been pretty much involved in all kinds of activism throughout Oregon since at least 2018.
[00:00:31] But this last year, it’s really been the Palestine activism and standing in defense of Gaza, the West Bank, etc. So with this encampment that came up, that was really the big event for the last month. And as it ended and we went into summer and the Pride month, there was kind of a lack of things happening. A lot of these Pride events that happen are corporate-led, police-escorted festivals. They really don’t have much political essence to them other than who’s able to afford to get a booth.
[00:01:04] And there was another radical Pride event towards the end of the month, but it was also a festival in and of itself and carried a different message.
[00:01:12] So I wanted to go ahead and organize a Pride rally against pinkwashing through an national organization I run, called People’s LGBT+ United Society, or PLUS for short, to really, really show the connection between LGBT+ liberation and Palestinian liberation.
And specifically to expose pinkwashing, which is something that the Israeli government really uses as a weapon against Palestine to go, ‘Oh, they hate the gays. They hate all of you. They throw you off of roofs,’ etc., when it doesn’t fully represent what life is like in Palestine for LGBT+ people at all.
[00:01:55] And Israel isn’t as much of a haven as people would lead you to believe it is. But that’s a whole subject that we’ll be going into in the event when I make my speech. But yeah, that’s going to be this Saturday at 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., Wayne Morse Free Speech Plaza.
[00:02:13] Todd Boyle: There’s an important theme here that you were riffing on very well, recognizing the common purpose of the progressive movements. I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on that.
[00:02:23] Kamryn Stringfield: Yeah, well, you know, I think one of the things that one of the participants in Stonewall back in 1969, Marsha P. Johnson, recognized, and she had a quote about, was that: ‘You don’t get your rights until everybody has their rights.’
[00:02:39] And so we firmly believe at PLUS, and I imagine a lot of the supporting organizations—there’s like 13 supporting organizations for this event, by the way—I think we really believe that both Palestinian liberation and LGBT+ liberation, as well as Black liberation, women’s liberation, etc,, they all exist within the liberation of imperialism.
[00:03:02] That is the thing that connects it all together, is the system of imperialism. And that is really, I think, the message that we’re wanting to carry here. Because a lot of people will just say, ‘Oh, they’re connected,’ but then they don’t really show what branch connects them. And it’s well, the root cause of all these problems is the imperialist system that we live under, and so we have to use all avenues to organize against it.
[00:03:30] Todd Boyle: That’s a good explanation. Imperialism includes everything from the global financial system to global militarism, and the most egregious cases right now on top of the front burner is the colonial settlement project in Israel.
[00:03:48] Kamryn Stringfield: And I would say as well that, right now, the genocide in Palestine has really brought a lot of people into having the interest in anti-imperialist organizing.
[00:04:01] I mean, we’ve seen the Springfield Eugene Anti-Imperialist Coalition (SEAIC) sort of birthed out of this initial want to see more happening. Because, you know, radical groups do an event, but then if they take three or four months to do another one, it just, it’s like, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ So I think that a lot of people are talking right now about fascism or colonialism or settlers or bombardment, economic consequences.
[00:04:27] These are all things of imperialism. These are all ways in which imperialism is manifested nowadays. And I really think, too, that it being an election year as well, it allows us to show that, there’s not a little reform for the LGBT+ community or for Palestinians that’s going to solve these problems.
[00:04:47] Neither Trump nor Biden really presents us with any fundamental change. At least not any good fundamental change. And so I think that, it is definitely a moment to bring out the anti-imperialist organizing and connect it with all sectors, with labor, which is something I think Palestinian groups have not connected themselves enough with, or at least they think they have, but I don’t think they’ve really put in the weight for the labor struggle.
[00:05:13] But nonetheless, another thing, too, that I wanted to say is while Palestine has brought a lot of this into the forefront, Palestine isn’t the only place where pinkwashing happens. They use pinkwashing right now in the current conflict in Europe with NATO. NATO is one of these alliances that always pushes itself— just like Israel does— as a haven for LGBT+ people, as this sort of vanguard for queer people around the world.
[00:05:41] And historically they haven’t been. Historically, most of these countries were just as bigoted as the countries that they demonize at the time on this issue. And some of them currently, like Poland, Italy Tukey, these NATO member states, are not pro-LGBT+ in the least. So it’s a glaring hypocrisy.
[00:06:03] And then, it’s—I don’t want to get too much into the conflict in Ukraine, but it gets used there too, where just like in the United States military with all this, like, diversity propaganda about how it’s more safer for LGBT+ people now, or it’s more there’s more people of color in it, or whatever.
They use the same thing when it comes to NATO troops and Ukrainian troops, saying that, ‘Oh, they’re more accepting. They’re more diverse. They’re more LGBT+.’ And it’s just, it really is just a propaganda tool. And the laws in both Ukraine and Russia are pretty similar when it comes to LGBT+ discrimination, actually. There’s only a couple of key differences.
[00:06:47] But these aren’t places where we have the power to make a change versus we have the power for the countries under Western imperialism, especially our own, to make changes. And I think that I have no reason to believe that these progressive shifts in society won’t happen in those countries as well.
[00:07:05] You look at countries where it has happened, like Cuba and Vietnam, where they’re starting to make strides when it comes to LGBT+ rights and education and acceptance. Pinkwashing ignores that, it goes, ‘Oh, the socialist countries or third world countries, they’re all backwards, they don’t like gays, they’re homophobic. These Western capitalist countries, they love you. They’re going to stand up for you.’ And it’s just glaringly false when you actually look at somewhere like Cuba or Vietnam.
[00:07:36] Todd Boyle: And not everyone is intellectually or politically educated enough to protect themselves against being exploited, you know, for different causes. So now we’re at risk of losing that unity and common intention and the will, common will that was forged for themselves.
[00:07:52] Kamryn Stringfield: Yeah. Well, what I can say when it comes to the LGBT+ community is, nobody’s immune from propaganda. We’re all inundated with it in this country and in a lot of different ways, with a lot of different propaganda. I think the levels of consciousness, that’s a term I like to use a lot, is raised among a lot of, especially the youth when it comes to this. I see Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine and all these organizations speaking out against pinkwashing and against Corporate Pride now in a way that I hadn’t before.
[00:08:27] But I think that they are still susceptible. And sometimes it’s in ways that they don’t realize. There’s the ruling class propaganda that comes from both of the bourgeois parties. One of them scapegoats and then one of them tries to sell themselves as, like, this ‘I’ve got your back, Jack,’ sort of vanguard for their rights.
[00:08:45] But you’ve also got, I think, an unspoken danger in the more ultra-left factions within the LGBT+ community and other communities that kind of have this naive view that if you just rage or you just, if you just try to push your limits everywhere all at one time, that you’re going to get your rights. And they go out with all these half-baked philosophical theories that have come out of the New Left.
[00:09:16] And I think they forget a lot of the times that it’s a working-class struggle that goes along with all the other struggles against imperialism. And I think that orgs like People’s LGBT+ United Society (PLUS) really have to take the forefront and giving people an actual guide to liberation.
[00:09:35] You know, Stonewall was a big event for us in our history, but at the end of the day Stonewall didn’t do a whole lot. It was an uprising and it was definitely a reflection of the sentiment at the time, and it definitely made its mark on history.
[00:09:51] But I think that we do have to guide people and not allow them to just be tricked into going down one wrong road or the other, if that makes sense.
[00:10:02] Todd Boyle: How did you achieve this really excellent understanding of history and what’s going on in the world today and the ability to articulate? This is quite an unusual—I could listen to an hour lecture of you up in in Straub Hall.
[00:10:15] Kamryn Stringfield: I’ve always been interested in politics and what was happening in the world. My parents were always great. They were pretty progressive. So we always talked about it throughout my childhood. And I supported Bernie Sanders twice, in 2016 and 2020, but after the last capitulation, I said, ‘I’m done with the Democratic Party. I’m absolutely done with this.’
[00:10:36] And I already had a good knowledge in U.S. imperialism. I remember watching the Oliver Stone documentary, Untold History of the U.S., gave me a really good outline of that period of U.S. history.
[00:10:53] And then I just would always just take in whatever information I could from all sources. I would watch Russia Today, I would watch C.G.T.N., the different channels from around the world to get all perspectives. And I think that has really helped me.
[00:11:10] And of course, I’m also—a lot of people should know by now—I’m a Marxist. I see things with dialectical materialism. I am in a Communist Party where we have collective political discussion about all these different kinds of things and I take it very seriously. I tell people all the time, ‘I don’t want to be right. I want to win.’ So I don’t want to be like these types of leftists that browbeat and just try to one-up on you and be the most revolutionary person in the room.
[00:11:37] I want to actually help to guide people in their struggles and understand how we actually achieve liberation, because it’s been 60 years since the ’60s. And what do we have to show for it, and that’s not to take away from a lot of the successes that they did make. But the New Left and radical ways of organizing, I just don’t think it worked.
[00:11:58] Todd Boyle: I’m basically very quite anti-authoritarian, and I can recognize oppression and bullying and so on, and I just wouldn’t put up with it. So that’s how I recognize my identity… At some point in your life, you came to understand your identity and your sexual preferences.
[00:12:13] Kamryn Stringfield: I think levels of consciousness in society when it came to LGBT+ helped out because throughout my childhood, I had always had different moments where I said that I felt more like a girl or that I looked more like a girl or that I wanted to be a girl and it wasn’t like a serious thought at the time, ‘Oh, when I grow up, this is my main goal.’ But it was just something that as I’ve looked back, I’ve noticed a lot was a trend.
[00:12:40] And every time that I tried to present more masculine, in an attempt to make more friends or get girlfriends or whatever, I was just miserable. I’d cut my hair off and then I’d miss it. And I would try to conform in all these ways. And it just, it wasn’t working for me. And I think seeing a lot of openly transgender people that were also explaining what it was like to question that, really helped me to find my identity and be able to come out.
[00:13:13] I first came out as gender-fluid. And then I decided, I think that fluid usually sits over at the feminine side. And so I came out as trans, but it also connected to my political activism because I came out as transgender right in the middle of really vocal, heavy anti-fascist organizing in Coos Bay.
[00:13:32] And this is in Coos, this isn’t even in Eugene where you’ve got people to back you up. This is in Coos Bay where somebody could come and grab you in the woods and throw you in the bay. And to some extent, that’s why I’m glad I don’t live there anymore. But yeah, it was a journey of finding my identity and I still find it every day.
[00:13:52] Todd Boyle: Pinkwashing demonstration is going to be Saturday.
[00:13:55] Kamryn Stringfield: Two to four at the Saturday Farmers Market, Park Blocks downtown, Free Speech Plaza. It’s right in front of the Lane County Courthouse.
[00:14:05] Todd Boyle: Kamryn Stringfield, thank you.
