Why we took action against Stonewall and their Genocide “Champions”

Yesterday evening, whilst Stonewall congratulated itself at its annual Equality Dinner, we rallied outside as a coalition of queer and trans groups to call on Stonewall to drop weapons companies from its ‘Diversity Champions’ programme and to stop pinkwashing genocide.

Stonewall’s ‘Diversity Champions’ programme makes no secret of being a grotesque exercise in rainbow capitalism. The programme offers guidance and support to its member companies to improve “financial success” and “employee productivity” by making LGBTQ+ people feel “safe and encouraged in the workplace”. In one swift move, queer liberation is redefined as workplace inclusion. This barely veiled commodification of queerness serves one purpose: to boost the profits of bosses and corporations. 

But it doesn’t end there. Stonewall’s scheme blatantly promotes ‘diversity’ in Britain, to mask the death and destruction they sponsor abroad. 

Stonewall’s Genocide “Champions”

This year’s Stonewall Workplace Equality Index features BAE systems in their Top 100 Employers for LGBTQ+ inclusion. BAE systems is the largest military contractor in Europe with a long history of providing arms to the Zionist entity for its genocidal violence in Palestine. BAE makes the M109, an artillery weapon that the IOF has used to fire white phosphorus, as well as parts for the F-35 fighter jet that the IOF uses to bomb Gaza and Lebanon. With strong relationships with the UAE, BAE could also well be implicated in the horrors unfolding in Sudan perpetrated by the RSF. 

Stonewall’s other “champions” include weapons manufacturers Raytheon/RTX, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris. These are some of the world’s largest arms companies, and they are all directly profiting from the genocide in Palestine. 

RTX (formerly Raytheon) supplies the Zionist occupation with a range of weapons, including the 2,000 pound, jovially named, “bunker buster” which has reduced homes in Gaza and Lebanon to rubble. One of its subsidiaries also produces the engines for F-15 and F-16 jets which the IOF uses to bomb people, homes, hospitals and schools. 

Northrop Grumman plays a key role in the production of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jets and the Longbow radar system that guides the ‘Hellfire missiles’ used extensively in Gaza. It is also a major giant in the border security business, having signed a 10-year contract with the US border regime in 2020, worth nearly $900 million, to service their Lockheed Martin P-3 aircrafts. 

L3Harris supplies the occupation with, amongst other things, the bomb release mechanisms for F-35 fighter jets, which its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, brags is “the most lethal” jet in the world.  

Weapons manufacturing is a multi-billion pound business, and the share prices of the above companies soared during the last year due to projected increased ‘demand’ for their deadly products for imperial wars in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran—and for militarised border regimes around the world.

Queer people in Britain and beyond have long resisted attempts by these weapons companies to disguise their business in pink and glitter in an attempt to distract from their deadly profiteering.

Stonewall workers’ campaign

According to former Stonewall staff we spoke to (who wish to remain anonymous), Stonewall has for years silenced its own workers calling for an end to pinkwashing. The issue is positioned internally as an uncomfortable necessity, not disclosed to workers who don’t work on the business side of the charity and taboo. 

Campaigning internally within the organisation has been met with platitudes and excuses. We have heard about how numerous Stonewall employees have demanded that the organisation stop working with arms dealers, since 2017. Each time, the board or senior management has exploited a culture of ‘good faith’ to continually breadcrumb a review of its partnerships that never comes, frustrating staff mobilisation and isolating those who have spoken up about it. 

The board and senior management continually offer one-sided meetings, without any transparency around decision-making, leading many workers to quit over the years. Former workers we spoke to at the charity describe feeling “let down, unheard and unvalued” and being treated as “troublemakers” and “as if [their] concerns were “hysterical”. Instead of honouring its roots and listening to its own workers, Stonewall chooses to keep renewing its commitment to militarism and genocide in the name of ’empowering’ queer workers in the imperial core. 

When ‘diversity’ becomes destruction 

When queer organisations with huge global platforms, like Stonewall, legitimise and promote arms companies, they manufacture consent in Britain for imperialist wars, genocide and ecocide against racialised communities. 

They normalise arms manufacturing companies as ‘just another workplace’ employing queer people who deserve an inclusive working environment. But by rewarding and celebrating these companies as champions of ‘diversity’, Stonewall undermines real queer solidarity and freedom, in favour of neoliberal ideas around workplace ‘inclusion’ and assimilation. 

Corporate powers rely on liberal organisations such as Stonewall to pinkwash their financial interests and complicity in murdering people and planet. Companies like BAE Systems, RTX, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris, in the same breath as celebrating queer employees, are making the very bombs which murder racialised people in the Global South, queer and straight alike. 

Pinkwashing and Palestine

As queers in Britain we are all too familiar with the repeated cooptation of queer and trans liberation movements by state and corporate powers to further the interests of capital, imperialism and colonialism. We have long seen this with “Israel”’s attempts to pinkwash its 100+ years of genocide and settler-colonial violence in Palestine. 

Queer and trans Palestinians have highlighted how “Brand Israel” is built on racist and Islamophobic tropes depicting the Zionist entity as a “champion” of LGBTQI+ rights, in contrast with “backwards” and “pathologically homophobic” Palestinian and Arab communities. 

This mythical image of Israel as a liberator and haven of western-style progressivism in a “barbaric” Middle East carries the torch of a long established white-supremacist imperial ideology that has for centuries justified the exploitation and oppression of people in the Global South in the name of “civilisation”.

This kind of Zionist myth-making manufactures consent within the imperial west for its colonial project by styling all Palestinian queers as in need of saving from their own communities, and erasing the existence of anti-colonial queer Palestinians. But Israeli pinkwashing is more than propaganda and brand-building; it is a tool of settler-colonial violence that seeks to rule Palestinians by dividing them on the grounds of gender and sexuality. As al-Qaws, a grassroots queer Palestinian organisation, has explained, Israeli pinkwashing forces upon queer Palestinians a fake and ultimately disempowering choice: we can either be queer and not accepted as Palestinian, or we can be Palestinian and not accepted as queer.

There is of course no liberation in occupation, nor any pride in genocide. Zionist bombs don’t discriminate between queer and straight, nor does the mass starvation Zionists have engineered in Gaza. 

Like any other form of colonial rule, the Zionist occupation of Palestine thrives on deepening contradictions in Palestinian society, not resolving them. This is why any meaningful solidarity from the imperial core must cut against the grain of this racist ideological apparatus and affirm the right of Palestinians to resist and be free from occupation.

Right now, Northern Gaza is under a total siege, pounded by ammunition produced by the same weapon manufacturers Stonewall celebrates as champions. As “Israel” drops bomb after bomb on Jabalia and uses starvation as a weapon of genocide, some of Stonewalls’ ‘top employers’ are making millions off the death of Palestinians.  

Arms companies like BAE, Northrop Grumman, RTX and L3Harris are pillars of this Zionist empire, in collusion with what is called the USA, Britain and the EU. Unfortunately, so are institutions like Stonewall that commodify our identities as a badge to be worn by weapons companies. 

The people’s movement for an arms embargo

One thing is clear: neither the genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, nor the ongoing occupation, could continue without the support of Western powers and their weapons manufacturers. We need an arms embargo now. 

We know that a full arms embargo on Israel can only be achieved if we collectively disrupt business as usual for these companies, the states that back them, and the liberal institutions that launder their image. We expose these companies for the profit-making killing machines that they are, thereby undermining the basis of social consent that they require to operate. 

The inheritors of the revolutionary tradition of the Stonewall riots of 1969 are the queer and trans folk organising and gathering in the streets for a free Palestine, and we will not allow the memory of our elders to be commodified and slapped on bombs and jets that murder our siblings and our people. 

This is why we are calling on Stonewall to drop BAE systems from their Top 100 Employers, drop any and all arms manufacturers from the ‘Diversity Champions’ scheme, and implement a transparent and public ethical partnership policy that prevents Stonewall from working with any weapons companies. Over 150 organisations and individuals have also joined us in these demands, by signing our open letter to Stonewall. 

Our call to Stonewall

Our action on the evening of 30th October made it loud and clear to Stonewall bosses that there is no queer liberation without Palestinian liberation. 

Weapons proliferation materially contributes to oppressive state regimes that exploit, harm, police and kill racialised, working class, and queer and trans people in the Global South as well as here, in Britain. By glorifying arms companies Stonewall stands in the way of our collective liberation. 

It is time for Stonewall to stop fuelling imperialist oppression, and live up to the legacy and radical roots behind its name. To stop making money from the deaths of black and brown people across the world, and support the people’s movement for an arms embargo. To stop bending to the corporate interests of arms companies, and meet us on the streets to take action for a free Palestine.  

It is time for Stonewall to join our collective struggle for a world where all oppressed people, including queers, are truly free.