St. Patrick's Parade Organizer Compares Gay Group To Nazis, Klan

NEW YORK - The City Council's first openly gay leader, who refused to participate in the nation's largest St. Patrick's Day Parade on Friday, blasted its chairman for remarks that compared gay Irish-American activists to neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and prostitutes.
"I don't even think they dignify a response," Council Speaker Christine Quinn said Thursday of chairman John Dunleavy's comments to The Irish Times.
Quinn said she already had decided not to join the 150,000 marchers on Fifth Avenue after organizers rejected her compromise attempts and barred an Irish gay and lesbian group for a 16th straight year.
"I can't deny who I am on any given day," said Quinn, who was arrested in 1999 for protesting at an exclusionary parade in the Bronx.
In the Irish Times interview, Dunleavy said, "If an Israeli group wants to march in New York, do you allow Neo-Nazis into their parade? If African Americans are marching in Harlem, do they have to let the Ku Klux Klan into their parade?"
Referring to the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, Dunleavy said, "People have rights. If we let the ILGO in, is it the Irish Prostitute Association next?"
Quinn told reporters that Dunleavy's comments "in no way reflect the opinion of Irish New Yorkers; I don't even believe they reflect opinions of most of the members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians."
Quinn said the city's Irish gays had long hoped to march with their own banner, like other groups, but were willing to walk with the City Council as a unified group. "There were moments where I was hopeful that we could have come to some agreement. But that didn't happen."
Dunleavy told The New York Times in Friday's editions that Quinn "is more than welcome to march as the leader of the City Council, but no buttons or decorations in any shape or form."
The decision came as no surprise to gay activist Brendan Fay, who has spent 16 years in the thick of the fight to march.
"You know the song: 'When Irish eyes are smiling, all the world seems bright and gay,"' Fay said. "Well, not on Fifth Avenue."
Efforts to let Irish gays march under their own banner date to 1991, when parade organizers first rejected an ILGO application. Instead, 35 ILGO members were sprayed with beer and insults as they marched with a Manhattan division of the Hibernians and then-Mayor David Dinkins. It was the group's last appearance in the parade, which draws up to 2 million spectators.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was marching Friday, had urged the Hibernians to change their stance. "I've always believed this is a city where all the parades should be open to everybody, and orientation, gender ... should not be the deciding thing," he said.
The mayor marched earlier this month in an inclusive St. Patrick's parade in Queens.
Besides the Irish gays, the organizers barred the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, which lobbies on behalf of undocumented immigrants.
Fay said the seemingly endless battle for inclusion gets exasperating. "I sometimes joke there will be a peace brokered on the streets of Belfast faster than between the Irish on Fifth Avenue."
But Quinn said she was optimistic for the 2007 parade. "I've only been speaker for 10 weeks," she said, "so now we have 12 months to try to figure this out."
from Newsday