June Gloom
The return of Vienna Pride has animated Austria's far-right, which is seeking to disrupt proceedings and intimidate the LGBTQ community
Servus!
Employees of the public library in Vienna’s sixth district arrived at work on Friday morning to find that its entranceway had been barricaded. The Austrian branch of Europe’s far-right identitarian movement—which rose to prominence in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis—later claimed responsibility for having erected a concrete wall in front of the building overnight. The wall was painted in the red-white-red colors of the Austrian flag and branded with the slogan “#NoPrideMonth.” In the vicinity, reporter Markus Sulzbacher found leaflets warning that the far-right would “never accept the indoctrination of children with sexual propaganda.”
The wall was a clear attempt by the far-right to disrupt a Drag Queen Story Hour featuring the local drag queen Candy Licious, which the library on Gumpendorfer Strasse was due to host on June 3 as part of Vienna Pride. The event did go ahead in the end, though only after the concrete had been cleared away and heavy police protection called in. Vienna’s LGBTQ community in conjunction with particular antifascist groups gathered outside the library on Friday afternoon in anticipation of further attempts by identitarians to disturb the Story Hour. Clashes between supporters and opponents of the event led to one person being taken into custody.
After its cancellation in 2020 and reconfiguration in 2021, Vienna’s annual Regenbogenparade (Rainbow Parade) will take place in its full form on Saturday for the first time in three years. The return of Vienna Pride has mobilized Austria’s far-right—the Drag Queen Story Hour at the library on Gumpendorfer Strasse was practically the only topic of conversation in far-right Telegram chats in the days prior to the event, Sulzbacher reports. Having directed their ire at immigrants and asylum seekers with talk of the Great Replacement and latched onto the anti-vaxx movement, Austria’s identitarians have found a new enemy—or perhaps rediscovered an old one—in the guise of the country’s LGBTQ community.
Austria’s identitarians constitute a small movement with few followers. The day after the Drag Queen Story Hour, identitarians sought to rally in the center of Vienna, though only managed to gather about 20 supporters. Their behavior was sometimes aggressive, but they were outnumbered both by police officers and antifascist opponents and their event fizzled out. But the identitarians constitute part of a far-right nexus in Austria which was strengthened by the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-skeptic protest movement in Germany and Austria brought identitarians out on the streets with neo-Nazis, Reichsbürger, and assorted left-wing kooks. Now, the LGBTQ rights movement finds them in alignment with, among others, Austrian Catholic fundamentalists.
As Fabian Schmid noted in the Standard, when it comes to LGBTQ rights, the identitarians are also in alignment with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). Even in the way identitarians and FPÖ politicians talk about Pride, there is an alarming convergence of language largely borrowed from the English-speaking alt-right. FPÖ city councilor Leo Kohlbauer condemned the Drag Queen Story Hour on Friday, stating he “firmly rejected” this “form of sexualization propaganda for small children.” It is unacceptable, he continued, “that children are being indoctrinated with a publicly-financed ‘globohomo’ ideology.” Kohlbauer’s statement and the leaflets found outside the public library on Friday morning were near-indistinguishable.
Not only in Austria but across Europe and North America, the LGBTQ community—and in particular the trans community—is the enemy of the far-right. In Florida, governor Ron Desantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill now means “public school teachers in Florida are banned from holding classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity.” Last year, the Orbán regime in Hungary introduced a ban on the “portrayal and the promotion of gender identity different from sex at birth, the change of sex, and homosexuality” for people under the age of 18. In 2020, dozens of towns across Poland declared themselves “LGBT-free zones.” One can only imagine what might happen here if the far-right had their way.
Bis bald!
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