EXCLUSIVE
At Austin’s Pride Parade in August, while rainbow-painted police horses stood guard and brightly decorated floats passed by, officers tackled two men, using kicks and pressure points to pin their bodies to the ground. They were taken to jail on charges of ignoring law enforcement commands and resisting arrest.
They were the first arrests at an Austin Pride event in years — perhaps more than a decade, according to one of the event’s longtime organizers. And it left many who watched it unfold, including journalists like myself, with one unshakeable thought: That didn’t need to happen.
I’ve spent the weeks since reporting on why it did.
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Austin’s LGBTQ+ community was still feeling the rippling of a bomb threat that disrupted a popular drag brunch in June as preparations for Pride events got underway. For the unaware: While LGBTQ+ Pride activities are typically timed to the June anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, Austin’s official Pride occurs in August, just after the students at the University of Texas return from summer break.
Many in the community were still on edge and worried about their safety. And for good reason, since weeks earlier, the city’s Human Rights Commission requested additional police presence at the parade as “members of the LGBTQIA+ community continue to be targets of hate incidents, violent threats, and extremist legislation,” according to a memo obtained by The Barbed Wire. As we previously reported, the rise in hate incidents — from bomb threats to assaults and murder — has correlated with an increase in legislation hostile to the community.
But in the days leading up to the annual Austin Pride march, attention shifted to a new, internal issue: The local queer community was in open conflict over Palestine. A leaked slide, from an internal presentation by the non-profit that hosts the parade, called Austin Pride Foundation, equated symbols of Palestinian liberation — such as flags, keffiyeh, and slogans like “From the River to the Sea’ — to hate speech, indicating they would be banned at the parade. The slide went viral after it was reposted on Instagram by Brigitte Bandit, one of the city’s most prominent drag queens.
As the news of the slide spread, some queer supporters of Palestine made plans to protest the parade, while others threatened to stay home entirely. The Austin for Palestine Coalition, which represents various local advocacy groups calling for a permanent ceasefire in Palestine, issued an open letter to Pride’s board of directors, demanding they reverse the ban.
Tessa Mitterhoff, one of the authors of the open letter and a participant with Jewish Voice for Peace, told The Barbed Wire she felt it was important to speak out for all oppressed groups, including both displaced Palestinians and trans people facing dangerous, restrictive state laws.
“When you are queer or part of a marginalized group,” Mitterhoff said, “you are questioning the status quo.”
Jewish Voice for Peace is one of 23 organizations that make up the Austin for Palestine Coalition, formed last year in the wake of the intensifying yearlong conflict between Israel and Hamas. In the months since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, the bloody blowback and starvation from its defense forces has been so devastating on civilians in Gaza that the circumstances fit the legal definition of a genocide, in both act and “requisite intent,” according to the United Nations. More than 16,000 Palestinian children have been killed in the conflict to-date.
The mission of the coalition includes pressuring American companies, the City of Austin and the University of Texas to drop ties with Israel. This spring, the coalition worked with artists to force SXSW to stop accepting sponsorships from the U.S. Army and weapons manufacturers. After a successful campaign of protests and boycotts in March, the conference said it would drop those sponsors in 2025. But, after the flag ban, their strategy needed to shift from dealing with the multi-million dollar corporation like SXSW to managing relationships with the organizers of Austin Pride. A different approach was needed here, according to an organizer with the coalition. (The Barbed Wire has agreed to withhold their identity over fears of doxxing and vicious targeting from organizations that have weaponized pro-Palestinian free speech to the effect of real-world professional consequences.)
“We have queer Palestinians, we have queer Jews, we have a lot of diverse LGBTQ+ people involved with us,” they told The Barbed Wire. Banning Palestinian symbols was “unacceptable,” they said, but they also stressed that “we weren’t trying to get Pride canceled.”
At the very last minute, the two sides sat down at the negotiating table, thanks in part to the intercession of Muneeb “Meebs” Aslam, a local organizer who serves as a human rights commissioner for the City of Austin. Aslam, who stressed he was acting on his own and not in his official capacity for the city, is both a member of the LGBTQ community and a person of Middle Eastern descent, which made him eager to see a resolution between the groups.
“I was horrified when I saw what the slides contained, and I immediately reached out to Micah Andress (the president of Austin Pride),” Aslam told The Barbed Wire. “It was truly a very divided community, and many people didn’t feel safe to go to Austin Pride,” himself included.
Representatives of the coalition met with members of the board of Austin Pride less than 48 hours before the parade. Austin Pride issued an apology via Instagram, and welcomed Palestinians, and their symbols, at all Pride festivities. Pride also agreed to follow the principles of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement when selecting sponsors at future years’ events.
“That’s the promise we hope to hold them accountable for in the future,” he told us. “That was one of the biggest wins that we had with Austin Pride.”
At the parade itself, Aslam appeared on a prominent float, wearing a keffiyeh, among several others who wore the patterned scarves that symbolize the Palestinian cause.
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Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end.
On the night of Aug. 10, I joined about 50 members of the coalition at Austin City Hall. What had been planned as a protest now felt cautiously celebratory. Together, they set off for Pride, intending to watch the parade, chant through bullhorns, and cheer with Palestinian flags in hand.
But as we approached the end of 4th Street, where the parade marched past Congress Avenue, the Austin Police Department stopped us, using both bicycles and wooden barricades to block our path. Even as the police stood in the way, holding pepper spray and pellet guns between the coalition and the parade, other people continued to pass through. The police seemed to be playing favorites, picking and choosing who to let in.
“They were telling people, ‘The organizers don’t want you let in,” the coalition’s representative recalled.
According to police reports obtained through an open records request filed by The Barbed Wire, officers responded to the group as though they were intending to block or otherwise counterprotest the parade. Some of the police who responded to the group were from the Special Response Team — which is trained for terrorism and other serious violent threats — and they were deployed at the request of the city’s Human Rights Commission. Despite what the coalition group was told, nothing in the police report suggests the police ever consulted with the Austin Pride organizers before making arrests. According to a representative of Austin Pride, they only heard about the incident after the parade ended.
“I’ve been involved with Austin Pride for 13 years, and I don’t know that we’ve ever had an arrest around the parade route,” a representative of the nonprofit told The Barbed Wire via direct message on Instagram.
“I’ve been told by multiple sources that APD was acting on their own and thought that the Palestinian participants who were coming from the City Council vigil were counter protesters,” Aslam confirmed.
Cops had apparently made a judgment call about who were and weren’t “counter protesters” based on the flags and keffiyehs.
Tension mounted as police began to surround the group from two sides. Then, officers arrested two men, pinning them to the ground as parade-goers filmed on their cellphones. According to police records, they were arrested simply for passing the barricade — like many other parade attendees were doing. Then for resisting arrest. Though police violently subdued them both, searches of the two men arrested revealed no weapons or contraband. Andrew Joseph Alemao, one of the men arrested, agreed to speak with The Barbed Wire. The other declined. The Barbed Wire is not publishing his name.
According to the police report, officers thought Alemao had crossed their line, then tried to flee. But after officers later reviewed body camera footage, evidence showed Alemao hadn’t forced his way past the barricades. The charges against him were dropped.
“I just simply walked up behind the police line and waved my flag in an officer’s face just to kind of taunt him. ‘Hey, look idiot. I’m over here now.’ And at that point, they did arrest me and pin me down on my stomach, and my shoes started to come off. And so I stiffened up a little bit trying to get my foot back into my shoe. And they were like, ‘Stop resisting.’ And I was like, ‘my shoe’s coming off.’ They’re like, ‘We don’t care.’ I was like, ‘Okay, but it’s my shoe, so I care.’”
Alemao said he had been willing to risk arrest because it was clearly a violation of his right to protest and speak freely in public. Still, he’s upset those rights were violated by police — and particularly through the use of violence.
“Carrying a Palestinian flag does not nullify your free speech rights. I mean, it was pretty obvious that they were letting anyone else through,” he told The Barbed Wire.
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In an effort to better understand how arrests occurred despite the friendly understanding between the coalition and Austin Pride, The Barbed Wire requested records of communications between Austin Pride and the police department about Palestine. As of this publishing, The Barbed Wire has yet to receive the records but did get a statement saying the request could take up to two months to fulfill. Austin Pride initially agreed to an interview for our report in order to clarify what happened that night but have since stopped responding to messages. Austin Police also ignored requests for comment from The Barbed Wire.
Before Pride, the city’s human rights commission voted to request additional police officers at the event, in response to recent threats from anti-LGBTQ+ extremists. In our conversation, Aslam acknowledged that the additional police presence may have contributed to their overreaction to the pro-Palestine group.
“Attacks against LGBTQ people have gone up double digits in the last three years within Texas,” Aslam said. “In light of that, we asked for additional security in case there was a terrorist event.”
In many cities, queer activists have protested the presence of police at Pride, pointing out that the original Stonewall Riots occurred when cops raided a gay bar in New York. But cities also only seem to have one response to threats against marginalized groups — and that’s beefing up police presence. Those officers, unfortunately, don’t always leave queer people feeling safer. For all of American history until 2003, queerness was criminalized in a lot of states. And even when those laws changed, and police have gradually changed their relationship with queer communities, there has been disappointment, anger and distrust at their response to crimes against LGBTQ+ people. In the aftermath of this summer’s drag brunch bomb threat, that response landed somewhere between negligence and apathy, according to the victims. At Pride, I watched the very officers Austin deployed to protect its LGBTQ+ community from terrorists threaten members of that same community.
But for now, that’s a problem without clear solutions.
“I don’t think police really belong at Pride,” Alemao said. “Maybe there are some Pride attendees who feel safer with them there. I don’t want to speak for anyone else. But it’s hard to imagine that anyone who has any idea where and how Pride originated would be thrilled about the idea of the police being there.”